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What is the hardest game you've ever played?

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Bayou Billy for NES was hard as hell. Never finished it. I think I got around 3/4 the way through. But watching YT videos it seems if you run around just doing jumping kicks, it works wonders. That still doesn't help the shooting and driving levels which were tough to do on a dpad.

Track % Field II on NES got to a point I think it was literally impossible to qualify for harder events. You could only hammer the buttons so fast. I dont think even the fastest button presser could get more than maybe 75-80% on the power bar so some expert events seemed impossible to do unless you had a turbo pad.
 
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Akuji

Member
Multiplayer, StarCraft Brood War, easily the highest skill ceiling in any video game ever. Not even semi close. What the best players do is incredble and one wants to "copy" that. So i spent thousends of hours from being 8 to being 25 just spamming StarCraft every now and then. Haven played in 6 years ... Maybe i should go back once again.

Singleplayer : puh, i dont know. Contra 3? Secret of Mana was incredibly hard since i played it without being able to read. Having such a big RPG without any information throughput other then visual and sound i spammed for hours to find where i needed to go.
Bloodborne DLC was pretty tough for a modern game. Catherine on hardest difficulty is a tough game. I remember switching difficulty down on Dante's Inferno because i wanted to be done with the game and at the end there were some fights that were kind hard.
 

Sub_Level

wants to fuck an Asian grill.
Battletoads

I dont understand how people can beat that without save states. Maybe if that was the only game you had as a kid I can see someone eventually master it. But in 2023? Who would do that to themselves?
 

ultrazilla

Member
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TARGET EARTH


AKA: ASSAULT SUIT LEYNOS

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This game made me humble. I believe I destroyed a couple controllers while doing a play through.
Amazing soundtrack!

SOUNDTRACK:


AT 2:26 the Main Theme kicks in. It GOES HARD!! Ahh that nostalgia



Solarstrike Solarstrike
 
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Funny. I don't have issues with any new games generally until new game plus or higher. I thought Demon's Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring were the three easiest fromsoft games. And in that order.
Did you play those later than the others? With the exception of Sekiro, playing modern From games gets easier the more you’ve played.

I personally feel like Dark Souls 1 is the easiest in the franchise and by a pretty wide margin.
 

skeebs

Member
Probably Demon's Souls, the game that taught me I ain't got no time for dat. Or maybe Zelda 2?
Demons souls is easy once you learn how to exploit the system. Then, it’s a masterpiece (to me)

I’ve attempted Zelda 2 many times in life. I suck. I was making some headway once and then got stuck and didn’t save or something. Haven’t tried since.

My vote is Simpsons Bart vs the space mutants but I don’t know where the line is between hard and awful game design.
 
Gradius III, the arcade version specifically. It was originally released in 1989, received a PS2 port in the early 2000s, and is by far the hardest horizontal shmup and game I've personally played.

The game is punishingly hard, even more than the first two games. So many enemies, so many bullets, tons of traps, and difficult bosses.
As is characteristic of the Gradius games, if you die once, you lose all your speedups and weapon powerups. With this game however, unless you're a master of recovering from set checkpoints, your run might as well be over right then and there.

I've never beaten it through normal means, and don't think I'm masochistic enough to want to learn to beat the game. I mean, look at one of the most infamous parts of the game here, the Cube Rush:
 

ssringo

Member
Dunno. I've looked at various lists of "hardest games" to get an idea but they all seem full of "popular" hard games.

So I'll go with one I've actually finished: Ninja Gaiden 1, 2 and 3 on the NES (or the single cart on SNES). Back in the day could beat them all consecutively in a single sitting.
 

Thief1987

Member
Dunno. I've looked at various lists of "hardest games" to get an idea but they all seem full of "popular" hard games.

So I'll go with one I've actually finished: Ninja Gaiden 1, 2 and 3 on the NES (or the single cart on SNES). Back in the day could beat them all consecutively in a single sitting.
Are NG on NES really considered as hard games? I just don't remember that I had problems with them. I especially loved NG 3, finished it dozens of time.
 

ssringo

Member
Are NG on NES really considered as hard games? I just don't remember that I had problems with them. I especially loved NG 3, finished it dozens of time.
I dunno. Quite a few games people consider "hard" I consider easy and vice versa.

Difficulty is relative.
 
Did you play those later than the others? With the exception of Sekiro, playing modern From games gets easier the more you’ve played.

I personally feel like Dark Souls 1 is the easiest in the franchise and by a pretty wide margin.
The first Fromsoft game I played was Bloodborne went back and beat them all after I played that one. Sekiro is the most difficult id say.
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Seeing a few shooters mentioned reminded me how I tried Chou Aniki on the PC Engine Mini and WTF. Either there’s some mechanics I didn’t get (no manuals for digital games, you know) or Christ, that game is just insane.

Really, people mentioning Ikaruga should expand their shmup knowledge a bit. You can even absorb bullets and not kill anything in Ikaruga and still beat the game. Try the average Cave shooter and then report back to me.
 

Solarstrike

Gold Member
Dark Souls
Ghosts N' Goblins NES
X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)


Of these I'm choosing XCOM. Played this each night years ago after work. I had the PS1 version. Took many days of saves from initial base build-up, to decking out characters with armor, research, field operations (missions), cities under attack, alien bases, taking down alien ships big and small, alien capture and interrogation(s), raids from aliens on home bases, experimenting with alien weaponry. I made quite a few Blaster Launcher Bomb trajectory mistakes not entirely my fault. It's hard to see at times with the smoke hiding something that'll cause the bomb to hit and explode. Game is brilliant though through and through. Anyway, yeah I went from meek recruits all the way to a squad of super soldiers. Countless hours building up ships and weaponry, grinding missions, manufacturing hover tanks and flying suits. Enough gear to invade the alien home planet of Mars. What a moment that was. So many mission though, the aliens would do "cheap shots" like throwing an alien grenade riiiight when you exit and begin placement of troops:

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The killer of squads, terror from behind the smoke, destroyer of morale. Behold, the Alien Grenade
 
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Mephisto40

Member


This game was insanely difficult without cheats

There are so many points where you can just completely fail the game just because you missed something that happened in a split second
 
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analog_future

Resident Crybaby
Playing competitive Counter-Strike 1.6 / Counter-Strike: Source CAL matches back in the day was quite the challenge. Tons of fun though.
 

IAmRei

Member
bucky o hare and ninja gaiden both are famicom, then megami tensei 3 and old MH in ps2-psp era, but beyond those era, sekiro. that's the last time i recall game is quite hard
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
Driver. Now I know this isn’t the hardest game ever, but they are basically asking you to master the game’s very intense physics and driving models as literally the first thing you do. It’s a great game but I would not be surprised if 75% of people who got the game didn’t get past it.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Driver. Now I know this isn’t the hardest game ever, but they are basically asking you to master the game’s very intense physics and driving models as literally the first thing you do. It’s a great game but I would not be surprised if 75% of people who got the game didn’t get past it.
I think I rented this on PS1. Pretty sure there were a number of these crazy stuntman kinds of racers. I faintly remember being bad at it.
 

Dr. Suchong

Member
Gradius V
I find it really hard to see some of the smaller enemies fire.
Those tiny grey/silver? ones that you have to squint to see, have taken me out and made me shout "What the fuck shot me?!"
 

K2D

Banned
Probably half of every nes generation games and games before that (unnecessary difficult games to pad game length).

Cave Story's best ending.

Second Sekiro. I'm heavily reliant on Souls games having rpg mechanics.

Second vagrant story. I think I've forever-dropped that game. Filtered hard.
 

Evil dead hail to the king ps1
I hate this unplayable piece of shit game
It's really impossible to finish this garbage game without GameShark codes
The game was very very hard and the controls sucked so much
The game was a cheap knockoff resident evil game
 
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The tutorial in Driver killed a lot of people back in the day on PSX. I loved it and thought it felt amazing at the time, but remember it getting flamed because you couldn't skip it. The original "git gud".



The "When the final boss is at the start of the game" comment lol
 
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Fools idol

Banned
Surprised no one has mentionned going for the platinum trophy on Super Meat Boy.


As you can see, very few people got it. I am in the top 100 first people to do so on PSN profiles, easily my most difficult plat, so frustrating that even the sound of the music gives me a sense of ugh.

Great game, but never again. Cotton Alley dark world without dying took me an entire week nearly of 8 hours a day of attempts before I got it.
 
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b0bbyJ03

Member
I don't usually play genres that are difficult but I though Ninja Gaiden on Xbox was pretty hard and Bloodborne is probably the most challenging game I've completed to date. Still have Elden Ring installed on my PC and plan to get to it at some point in the next few months.
 
Surprised no one has mentionned going for the platinum trophy on Super Meat Boy.
I would assume hardest is more labeled on stuff that has no easy mode at all, and you get soon stuck if you don't master its only high difficulty.

Without those extra challenges Meat Boy is at least doable for most and you have then seen practically everything. So omitting the hardest runs is not really robbing you of any content you paid for.

Every Trials after HD and the increasingly freaky extreme tracks are also way beyond the average person's skill or will to tackle them. Just finishing some is not possible for me, finishing them with zero faults appears insane to me, but incl hard tracks it is somewhat doable. So you are missing out on some few very vertical tracks.

Hardest might have been Cloudberry Kingdom for me. Progressed maybe halfway and I have given up.

Generally games where a lot is going on or I just have to perfectly make every input are not my strongest. I make it barely to the second chapter in Spelunker HD, while the completion rate suggests that it is not that super hard for other people. Or other ultra retro games, intentionally being coded like garbage from the 80s. But i would have to like them in the first place to even properly try those.
 
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