This is going to be going back in time to before a lot of you were born: A time before the internet, back when we rented VHS tapes and some people even rented the VCR because they were still unreasonably expensive. It was a time of going outside a lot more than we do now and if you wanted to meet someone you didn't have dating apps to help you do it. We memorized phone numbers and it would be years before caller-ID (if you even know what that means) would be available to anyone other than the police. It was a time of two-button gaming and while most of these 2 button games were extremely simplistic, there were a couple that were maddeningly difficult.
I was inspired to write this because someone recently asked me if I like and "Souls-like" games to which I responded with a resounding "no." There was a time though where if you got a game sometimes the decision to purchase it was based solely on the box art or the popularity of the characters involved. Two of these games stick out in my mind as being the most difficult games that I ever completed and while I did rage quit a few times, I eventually made it through both of them.
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My family was not wealthy when I was growing up so when I got the opportunity to get a new game it was normally my birthday or Christmas, or I saved up from doing a paper route as a child. I happened upon one of these games based almost entirely by the box art and this was not a time where you could try before you buy so we just had to f**k around and find out with most of our purchases. With this first one, had I known how much anguish it was going to cause me, I probably would have just left it alone.
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Even if you aren't old enough to have played this game when it was released you have probably at least heard of it as well as its magnificent difficulty level. They do NOT hold your hand with this one as the very first level is hard as hell. You play as a knight who must rescue a princess because that is a game plot that is almost never used. You can get hit once and lose your armor as you are reduced to a loincloth, then you can take one single hit more before you collapse into a pile of bones. Each level only had a few checkpoints through the level if I remember correctly, and sometimes they were maddeningly far apart.
These flying demons are probably the first thing where you are going to throw the controller at the TV and you encounter your first one about 40 seconds into the game. No matter what strategy you have against them, it probably isn't going to work. After you defeat the first one you are probably thinking to yourself "that was a pretty tough first boss" but nah! That is just an enemy that you are going to encounter on a regular basis about 47 times on a playthrough. A single one of these assholes is more than capable of dispatching you but later on in the game you will end up facing 2 and even 3 of them at a time.
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There is one cave level that features these guys almost exclusively and it is very difficult. However, that is nothing compared to one of the final stages that has these jerks sleeping off to the side combined with trolls of sorts that take a massive amounts of hits to kill. Throw one dagger too many and you will wake up the demons who are almost certainly going to take you out because they can fly through walls and floors but of course, you cannot.
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There's only 6 stages in the game so that is probably going to be pretty easy right? WRONG! Every one of these levels including the first one are an exercise in extreme patience and thank the lord that you get as many continues as you want to. This is a time in gaming when on-board saves were not a thing and this bastard of a game didn't even have codes to advance you to the last level you were on. If a power cut happened, or in my case if your mother walked by and tripped up on the controller cable and accidentally reset the NES, tears or throwing of controllers were all but guaranteed.
I don't know what it was in me those days that made me persevere but I eventually was able to complete this game and if you are a veteran you already know that getting through all 6 levels wasn't the end of the game. As you rejoice for finally defeating Satan or whatever the final boss is called, you get teleported back to the very start of the game and have to go all the way through the same levels a second time to properly defeat the game. One would think that on the 2nd playthrough that you would have mastered all that this game has to throw at you but trust me when I say that this is not the case at all.
We didn't have YouTube to help us through difficult parts so you just had to trod on. I don't know how long it actually took me to properly defeat this game but it was a long long time. After defeating it properly I don't think I ever played it again nor do I care to. Several remakes have been made of this game the most recent one being Ghosts and Goblins Resurrected. I have to admit that I have a morbid curiosity about this game but know that it would be a bad idea to get involved . I'll likely just watch some videos instead.
The second game is one that is so difficult based almost exclusively on one particular level
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The cartoons were very popular at the time so almost everyone bought this game. Wow did we ever get a surprise when we found out that this was not going to be a dominant experience for kids to jump in and play.
For one thing, you do get 4 characters that you switch between but once they are defeated, that's it. They never come back. So essentially you get 4 lives to make it all the way through the game. You can take more than a couple hits but this honestly isn't enough. You can regain health by finding pizza scattered throughout but more often than not these "health potions" are put in a place that if you go for it, it is certain death. That was a nasty trick to pull on us.
The most famous level is the one where you have to defuse bombs on a dam and this damn level was so difficult that it has been turned into artwork for all of us old-school nerds to have flashbacks because of it.
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Touch any of these plants and they shock you. Touch almost anything in fact and it is going to drain your health. To make matters even worse you were working against a time limit because the bombs had timers on them to go off and if that happens, the game is over. In a rather humorous article the co-creator of the game admitted that even he was unable to get through this level.
One would think that such a monstrously difficult level would appear near the end of the game but nah, why do that? This almost impossible to defeat level was the 2nd stage of the game!
Even if you did have the patience to get past this you had to deal with the fact that the hit detection in this game was a joke. It was extremely bad. It was so bad that turtle Raphael, who has tiny sai swords as a weapon, was basically useless on offense.
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Raphael would have to get so friggin close to any potential enemy that it was more often than not going to result in damage because like most games at the time, simple contact with any enemy resulted in you taking damage and of course, none for the enemy in question.
I think most people used Raphael for the dam level and very little else. To balance things out I guess, Donatello had a long bo stick i think it is called and in most situations, including one of the bosses, you could "cheese" your way through it because he was able to strike through floors and walls with it.
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This game was so unimaginably difficult that if you were one of the fortunate few that actually made it to the main boss "Shredder" he seemed exceptionally easy to defeat compared to all of his minions.
Just like Ghosts and Goblins there is no way I would have anywhere near the level of patience and perseverance today that it took me to get past these games back in the 80's. I suppose there is one thing to be said to having a limited library of games like we did back then: You were either going to carry on trying or you were going to play nothing. Had it not been for this simple fact, I don't think anyone outside of a few dedicated streamers would stand a chance at these titles.
These days if I encounter a game even remotely as difficult as these two, I'll switch it off in less than an hour. I just don't have it in me to play stuff like this anymore, even if it does only use 2 buttons.
Do you have any super-difficult games that you defeated in the past? I'd like to hear about them if you do!
I completed Ghosts 'n' Goblins on my Commodore 64 but only with a cheat that gave me infinite lives...
The default setting on the NES was infinite lives but you still had to contend with the getting sent back to the start point every time you got killed. I don't know if it was originally intended to be that way because it was an arcade game before it was a console or home game
I can't imagine how unbelievably frustrating that must have been for anyone in the arcades back in the day.
I feel like I've pushed through tough as bolts games before- the one I can think of recently AND without savestates is Castlevania Dracula X.
That game was going to be the end of me in 4 different days until I finished it the last day when I was stuck against Death and Dracula in the last two stages. Before that and outside of other Castlevania games, maybe Contra for the NES? It was possible to learn fair and square but only after a good while.
Contra was extremely tough. I can still hear the sound that it would make when you would get killed and backflip in the process. I used to have a shirt on it that simply said "the code" on it. It wasn't this exact shirt but something like it
Anytime someone would recognize this code in public I knew that we would have a lot to talk about. Most people had no idea and it certainly wasn't a magnet for the ladies.
I'm unfamiliar with Dracula X but I am going to go have a look at those two battles on YouTube right now so I can get an understanding about your rage :)
ok, watched it. The YTers always make it look so friggin easy but I am sure that actually playing it is a very different experience.
If you mean on playthroughs, then of course they do. Popular playthroughs tend to show how a full run from start to end, so in that case it needs to be one where the player can go through everything succesfully...but it doesn't mean that they didn't need practice to do it.
I guess that's one thing that sometimes calls the attention of people to live plays with streamers or V-tubers: Aside from their personality, they also show any struggle or reactions from players going through stuff the very first time or after repeated attempts.
I haven't still ever got around to editing a little something for my repeated deaths against Dracula, but I definitely had done something to represent my long struggle against Death in Dracula X- except that even then, there only were like two or three snippets of my actual reactions I used in that [two for immediate rage over getting killed by cheap shots, the last one for when I yelled my lungs when I finally beat that thing] compared to the unreleased one hour of silent button mashing and many moments of rage.
...It is kind of an interesting topic now that I lay it out like that.
Might be interesting to figure out how to put in proper words in a post- had thought in writing before about why sometimes people are compelled more about watching people play games [or just watch games being played] rather than playing them, at least in the case of stuff that you likely could play well or already played before.
I recall many times in the past where a particular boss in a game gave me so much trouble for so long but once I worked at it and figured it out, it became easy to me. The most recent example of this would be many of the bosses in Hollow Knight including the very first one you face. These bosses are extremely unforgiving and there is no hand holding in this game at all. I eventually beat that game for one of the endings but wow was it tough when you have no idea what the attacks are going to be and especially the various stages that a boss goes through as the battle goes on.
The point being that something that seems impossible or almost downright cheating becomes easy once you figure it out. I was at a friend's house recently and he had just started playing Hollow Knight and was "stuck" on the first boss. I kind of belittled him for giving up to easily and that if this is how he games, he is going to seriously struggle later on in the game. Anyway, I beat that boss on my first try even though I haven't played it at all in years. You don't forget!