Masochistic Tendencys. Proofing your skill. The satisfaction of overcoming hardships. All three things that could make you fond of videogames that are just harder than most other ones. Why do we even play them? Why using a bee hive for a punchingbag?
A higher difficulty ensures more frustration and will make you look like a complete jackass yelling at the liveless characters on your TV. Well the answer is simple.
And with simple i mean complex. Enjoying difficult games is a phenomenon that exists since the first humans started to exist on the face of planet earth.
Imagine a Neanderthaler leaving his cave for the hunt, only armed with spear made from wood and stone and wrapped in the skin of wild animals.
The howling snow hits on his skin like a whip. 2 hours of searching pass, he is already exhausted but the survival of his clan depends on him.
So he goes on. In a brief unfocused moment something leaps at him from behind a rock.
It's bigger than him, probably more deadlier and armed with a giant jaw.
A fight to the death starts. The saber-thoot cat injures him but eventually he kills it with the last of his power.
He drags the dead body of the cat back to his cave, knowing he will survive and his kin too.
It was a struggle with a lot to lose but in the end satisfaction is all he feels. Life 0/Neanderthaler 1.
So basically a bigger struggle parallels a bigger feel of accomplishment, wich is the basic formula of every hard game.
So there you go. Now i even gave you a reason to torture yourself with games like Super Ghouls and Ghosts or Ninja Gaiden.
If you need any more suggestions here is the list of MY PERSONAL TOP 5 HARDEST VIDEOGAMES.
It's a personal list so don't consider this as legit Top 5 hardest games or something.
Oh and if you find any typos, it was me trying to make reading more challenging. Now read the list, will ya?
5. Kung Fu for NES
"Everybody was Kung Fu fighting! Those kids were fast as lightning!"
Yeah, back in the day people were crazy about this game, Kung Fu for the NES. It was one of the first games for NES and also a very good one.
It has a simple formula, like classics as Pacman or Space-Invaders. You enter a tower to save your girlfriend or your dog or something and as in most videogames
you just massmurder you way to the top. At leasts that's the plan. What really happens is that you enter the first floor and instantly you are getting gang-raped by dwarfs and Bruce Lee look alikes.
Really, what is wrong with those people? What kind of messed up life are they living, waiting all day long in a old chinese tower to gang up on one innocent guy that only wants his cat back. Or plant or whatever.
Well as stated above this game relies on simplicity wich i absolutely approve of. You can kick straight or down, duck, block and thats it.
Sounds pretty easy, huh? Well it isn't. This game is all about perfecting your timing. You won't make it anywhere if you don't know where and when
to place your kicks. You have to find the blindspots and holes in your enemys defense. Learn his movements and then strike like lightning.
"Wax on. Wax off, Daniel-san!"
The NES games library contains countless of hard and annoying games, but to me Kung Fu takes the cake. I know there is just no way i will ever
beat this game. There is a higher chance of me becoming an astronaut or brushing me teeth on a daily basis.
4. Jurassic Park for Sega Megadrive
Oh Jurassic Park. Many fond memorys are coming to my mind when i think about this movie. And many angry ones when i think about the Megadrive game.
The level design? Desigend for people that have suicidal tendencys. The controls? Will leave you with the feel you are learning Mandarin.
Just imagine somebody sends you blindfolded in a maze filled with dinosaurs and bottomless pits.
You can choose between Grant or the Velociraptor but either way you are fucked. You are just picking your poison.
Simple things like hopping across platforms are so hard to pull off that you will throw your controller against your TV.
There are levels, like the one were you have to drive a hovercraft down a river, in wich you have to die because there is no way to tell
wich road you can take. This is learning by dying at its questionable peak.
Or the pipe level with the Velociraptor. You just blindley jump through that stage, hoping not to land in the water and die.
It is random and out of control. This game is digitalized anarchy.
3. Gunbird 2 for PS2 and Dreamcast
Bullett Hell Shoot Em Ups are one of my favorite game genres. The games are fast, short lived and overwhelming in a satsfiying way.
Everything is just out there to get you and i have to develope the reflexes of a tiger and the patience of a monk to get through them.
Gunbird 2 just hits you faster then any other of those games. There are Bosses that are near to impossible to beat even after the
30 attempt. I think i played this game for 5 years on and off before i finally could make it past the final boss.
It has a bunch of charming anime styled character to choose from, each with individual strenghts and weaknesses. Overall you just have
to play it, memorize the stages, know every enemys attack pattern and master the game mechanics. Wich is the succeeding forumla to many many games after all.
What makes this game hard as fuck in the end are the bosses. This game is made by Psykio and i have read that the stage 6 boss in this game is the hardest
part they ever programmed in any game. To live or to die is just a matter of nano-seconds on some parts in this game because the attack patterns
are never repeated, are always surprisingly fast and take a lot of imagination and creativity to maneuver through them.
I tip my hat for everyone who can beat this game of supreme difficulty.
Well, what do you get for completing it? One of the most disturbing endings in videogame history involving gay samurais and lots of other
unspeakable weird japanese shit. I won't go into detail because there are maybe some kids who will read this...
2. Dark Souls for PS3
Imagine you attended to get a driving license and it's your first day.
You enter the building of the driving school and your driving teacher takes you to the car.
You are excited and can't wait to drive, so you get in and start the motor. The sound of the motor sounds familiar and you feel good and ready.
You turn the key and start driving for about 50 meters. Than you collide with another bigger car,
that you oversaw and therefore crashed full force into the side of your car. Both your legs break because of it.
They are not much more than shattered bone and you did barley survive.
They take you to the hospital and you go through a rehab were you learn to walk again.
You struggle through it and each day is dull and dark and life has never been more depressing.
Eventually after 2 months you are able walk again and you feel something has changed inside of you.
Like metal that becomes harder with each strikes of the hammer, you feel empowered after overcoming this hardships.
You go to the driving school again and without much hesitation you obtain your license.
That basically describes Dark Souls from the first screen to the credit roll. The first 5-10 hours of the game are relentlessly difficult.
Especially in the beginning, this game just grinds your bones, breaks your spirit and spits in your face as you beg for mercy.
It gets a little better after you adapted to the game mechanics and the importance of forging and upgrading weapons but it still keeps on fucking you up at any given chance. You have to try it to know what i mean. This game will leave you desperate and frustrated many many times but it is still a blast to play. Another major factor of what makes this game so hard is that this game is kryptic as hell.
I'm talking about Castlevania 2: Simons Quest kryptic. Nothing gets explained. If you don't look things up on the internet or have a friend that has already beaten this game you will miss out many things. Really, the programmers were just trying
to be as merciless as they could be. I won't go any further into detail because i would end up writing pages of things that will annoy and confuse you. But again, don't get me wrong, this game is worth the struggle and probably one of the best games for PS3.
1. Spiderman and X-Men: Arcade's Revenge for SNES
This game is not very popular among SNES gamers and guess why. Basically it's a Action-Platforming Game with multiple characters to choose from.
Doesn't sound to bad right? Well, it is. This game is literally bad. The basic controls suck. The level design is shitty.
The enemys act like in no other SNES game. Hell, like in no other game i have ever played!
They attack you while they are still out of the screen. Yeah, i'm not making this up. They laser blast your ass to the moon before you even see them.
They are always faster than you at shooting and moving and sometimes there are so many of them in one single room that you get the urge to just break the game cartridge to show the game whos boss.
The difficulity is so high, there should be poets writing medieval ballads about the people who actually have have seen the end credits of Arcades Revenge. I could only beat 2 stages from a total of about 15 stages. The first one, were you play as Spiderman and the second Spiderman stage.
After that it gets so brick hard, so ungodly unplayable that i can only assume this game was meant as a cruel joke.
The guys who programmed this must have some serious anger issues connected to people who play videogames... And all they wanted was to see them pay.
Oh and you have 3 lifes. No continues. No passwords. 3 Lifes. After that you go back to the beginning.
Really, James Rolfe should make his own AVGN-Sub-Series about this game. He could rant about it for all eternity.
"You are just overstating, aren't you?" is what you probably think now, but no. No, no, no. I encourage everyone to play this game and see it for himself that i'm honestly describing the gaming experience.
The controls suck so hard it feels like Spiderman and his superhero friends went fully retarded.
It doesn't matter wich you choose. The basic controls are broken and always hard to pull off. Getting used to the Spider-Web swing mechanics takes forever,
Gambit can never shoot in a straight line, his shots always fly in arch wich leads to missing enemys that are directly in front of you, Cyclops needs
to go into that akward "crouching-mode" to shoot enemys smaller than him, wich takes time and leaves you open to get hit and
you have to push select to make Wolverines claws appear wich is absolutely pointless because you can do it without collecting
any power-up and they are just stronger than his fists. Oh and Storms Stage is entirely underwater. What kind of people programmed this?
I really can't answer that but if they have a canary they probably put it into a fish bowl.
Oh good lord. And this is only the tip of the brown shitty iceberg.
There went much more wrong in this game.
The level design is random as can be. You never know where you have to go, so you trail and error you way through this unholy mess of a game.
And guess what the boss of the first Spiderman stage is? A giant winged Dinosaur that shoots Rubys that will HEAL YOU if you collect them. Uhm, yeah. That sure fits a Spiderman themed stage.
Anyways.
I think people who beat this game should get a gold medal or something.
Beating this beast is probably harder than winning against the fricking Chess World Master.
There you have it. Crushed dreams and desperate nights of throwing controllers against walls. In conclusion.
Play somethig nice. Like Tetris or Super Mario World.
Treat yourself better than i do. Im already an 40 year old alcoholic. And i'm only 25 years old.
No really, don't waste your time on such games. Take your mother to the cinema or help a stranger instead.
Do something valuable.
Then again value is something highly subjectiv, wich is created by cultural values, individual treatemet of the persons environment and the overall zeitgeist.
So what do i know.
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I actually wrote this for Retrodrome but Woodzy gave zero fucks after i did send it to him, so here we go. I did not look at it as worthy anyway to get official or whatever. It's not a perfect list and i kinda regret including Dark Souls because it's just a little too clichee but whatever. I tried to write something interesting, that was all.
Anyways. I hope you had fun reading it.
