Why'd they have to make that level so hard?

This is easily the biggest bastard of a game I've ever played. It's mostly a side-scrolling beat-em-up. But every enemy you run across can absorb an absolutely unholy amount of punishment, and you can only take a few hits before you die. And yes, this being the NES, you had 3 lives to complete the game. If you managed to make it through a side scrolling level, the game would shift to a driving segment that was impossible. You had to make it to the end before time ran out, while dodging traffic, and avoiding the planes that would fly overhead dropping bombs on you. Good Luck, you're gonna need it. Then came the side-scrolling shooter segments. Also impossible. You had to do each of these segments several times throughout the game. I mean, nevermind the actual bosses, just the regular enemies in this game were bad enough. The one, SINGULAR saving grace is the fact that this game had some of the funkiest music to be found on the NES.

If you know anything about the Silver Surfer in comics, you know that he's a nigh-invincible being of absurd power. Whoever made this game must have missed that memo, because if you so much as bump into a flying lizard, you die. This game is also LOOOOONG. Endless levels of side-scrolling shooting, in the same vein as Gradius or R-Type.

I remember this game being fun. After having recently hooking up the NES and firing this badboy up, I cannot for the life of me remember why I liked this game. I think it was because I would play with other people, and we would just beat the crap out of each other. Yup, this game was a side-scrolling beat-em-up that had "friendly fire" enabled. This is a game where you can punt enemies off of the screen, and if your friend got in the way, it was bon voyage to them! Also, the racer segments were insanely difficult. There's no other way to describe it. The obstacles come at you with such speed and frequency that you need clarivoyance to make it through a level without expending all of your lives and continues to make it through ONE racer segment.

This is a game that I have spent HOURS trying to make it past level 1-1. There is, admittedly, a strange charm to be found in this game. It's mostly from the character design of enemies. It was brilliantly creative. But everything else about this game is just impossible. There were upgrades and powerups you could buy from stores, but they were so absurdly expensive that you would have to grind making money for hours and hours just to be able to buy the cheapest upgrade.

The infamous Konami code isn't optional for this game, it's mandatory. If you have the Konami code enabled, this game can be quite a bit of fun. If you don't, then it's going to be one short game.

This game ruthlessly enforces pattern memorization. If you don't memorize each and every single level, the endless enemies will overwhelm you, that or else you'll fail to meet the time limit for the level, and you'll die anyways.

The actual combat in this game isn't that hard. It does get harder later on, but there is definitely and acceptable difficulty curve as far as combat goes. This game is a bastard because at the end of each mission, you have to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier. I don't know anyone who can pull off this magical feat reliably. If you make it, it's purely by random, dumb luck. There really isn't anything to learn. You just have to use the Force, close your eyes, and hope for the best.

ElecMan's stage can eat shit and burn in hell for all of eternity. Seriously. Fuck that level. It's impossible. If you say you've beaten it, I'm calling you a damn liar.

The underwater stages are just insane. Time limits, oxygen limits, and having to navigate with perfect precision through continuous hazards. IF you happen to make it past all that, there a section later on in the game that you can actually make the game impossible to beat if you mess up.

This game is so ridiculously long that it blows my mind that they didn't have a save system or password system to save your progress. If you've beaten this game, you clearly have no life, and I feel sorry for your NES for having been left on for that long.

I've always said that I've beaten each and every Legend of Zelda game there is for every major console. This isn't exactly true for this game. I was only able to beat this game with the use of a Game Genie. Seriously. This is the first game I ever had, and I've never beaten it. I think it *is* legitimately beatable (and I've been meaning to play it again, just to see if I have the requisite patience & skill as an adult to beat it), but for an 8 year old? No way. No way in hell. The Dark Nuts in this game are insanely tough to beat. I just could never do it as a kid. Great music, though.

Oh man, this is a game that I've gotten SOOOO close to beating on the NES many, many times. It's a side-scrolling platformer, with an interesting twist. You can't jump. Ever. If you need to get over an obstacle, you need to use your bionic arm to grapple onto some overhead object and swing over it. Note, you cannot control your momentum, it's always fixed. So, there *IS* a certain level of proficiency required to get the hang of swinging (no pun intended) in this game. This is also the same kind of game where if you get hit once, you're dead. Period. You have to start the entire level over again. Though there is a lives system, and you *can* stockpile extra lives, if you're good enough. But man, the last level is so insanely long, and it requires absolute PERFECT timing with swinging and shooting... holy hell. I believe it when I hear that only 50 some people have beaten this game legitimately. I fully believe it's possible, it's just INSANELY difficult. This game also has a GREAT soundtrack.

Fuck this game. The learning curve for this game is pretty much just a straight vertical line. The first "boss" you face is your mentor who will hand you your ass in a heartbeat if you make the slightest mistake. The game only gets harder from there. The enemies will attack you continuously, cheap-shotting you in the back while you're fighting off hordes of their buddies. Yeah, there's some kind of story going on there, but it's so muddled and idiotic that your best off just ignoring it completely. This game is just all about killing you off as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and they are GOOOOD at it. So good that I just refuse to play any more Ninja Gaiden games.

This is brutally hard game that can kill you off with ridiculous speed. It's doable, but the amount of patience and memorization it would take is ridiculous. Oh, and even if you beat the entire game once, the game still isn't over. You have to beat the game TWICE to get the good ending. Fuck. That.

Most post-apocalpytic games are actually kinda fun, and I'd like to inhabit those worlds. This is not one of those worlds. This game goes for the more realistic approach. There are MANY invisible pockets of radiation that will kill you within SECONDS if you walk into them. This radiation doesn't give you mutant superpowers or make you grow another head, or anything like that. This radiation attacks your DNA, and causes your organs to fail, with alarming rapidity. Oh yeah, that's just the passive environment, the actual ENEMIES in the game will kill you just as quickly. How well do you think you'd deal with being shot in real life? That's about how well you do in this game. If you get shot, you're basically crippled, and the next shot will finish you off. The enemies in this game can snipe you out from across the map with a handgun. This game's ONE saving grace is the fact that you can save at any time, and you'll need to be saving every few minutes just in case you wander into an invisible radiation pocket, and CERTAINLY before AND after each and EVERY gunfight you get into.

This is another game where you just have to get used to the fact that enemies can and will put windows in your skull from miles away. Add to this the fact that you can't rely on memorization, as the location of enemies get randomized every time you replay a level. Oh yeah, you'll frequently need to save a hostage, which means first making it TO the hostage alive, then neutralizing the terrorists holding the hostage, without them killing him or her, and the keeping the hostage alive long enough to extract. No saving here folks, if you mess up, you have to start the ENTIRE mission over again. This game is harder than most of the other Rainbow Six games because the levels here are absolutely HUGE!

Whoever made this game apparently thought that old school platforming games just weren't hard enough. I say to hell with that. This game takes old-school platforming levels and finds new and dickish ways to make them even more difficult. There is a strange charm to this game, but it's not enough to make me want to keep punishing myself by playing this game.

I add this game because the hardest difficulty level in this game is just impossible. It really makes you realize that it's going to be extremely hard to kill things that are already dead. Good luck, you're gonna need it. I'm convinced that's what it takes to make it through a single level of this game on the hardest difficulty. Pure, blind, stinking luck. The enemy AI Director is really doing everything it can to make sure that you will not survive. It is actively seeking your doom. Oh, for added impossibility, you can go ahead and play it in Realistic mode where you have even less help, like not being able to know where your teammates are on your HUD.

This is a game the relies on pattern memorization. Granted, you can always continue if you lose a fight, and there *IS* a password system, but if you lose the last fight against Mike Tyson, who can knock you out with ONE hit, It's game over man, you lose. You can't retry or continue.

Patience is the key here in this game. You have to carefully watch the enemy, learn their patterns. And when it's time to act, you must do so without hesitation. You can die in seconds if you're caught out in the open by an enemy. This game is definitely beatable, but it requires a whole lot of patience and precision.

An extremely long side-scrolling shooter of absolutely punishing difficulty. Not much else I can about this one. I've never even come close to beating it. It's just plain hard.

This game is like playing two scrolling shooters at once. It's a vertically scrolling shooter, like 1942. But unlike that game, this one has you switching between two polarities, white and black. When you're white, you absorb white shots harmlessly, and you can damage black enemies, when you're black, you absorb black shots and can damage white enemies. Switching between the two polarities is simple enough, just a single press of a button will do it. But you are going to need to be doing so with flawless precision, as a single shot will kill you. And when the white and black shots are coming at in endless waves, you'll be switching back and forth between polarities frantically, trying desperately not to die, much less trying to have the correct polarity to damage the enemy. This game is just hard, hard, hard and more hard.

I love Doom. It's one of my all-time favorite games. The difficulty levels in this game represent a nice spread. I'm Too Young To Die! is extremely easy, Hey Not Too Rough is still easy, but it's no cakewalk, Hurt Me Plenty is the default and is a good challenge, Ultraviolence! is a stern test of your abilities, and then the last and hardest difficulty: NIGHTMARE! It's appropriately named. The enemies deal insane amounts of damage, and will RESPAWN after you've killed them! I don't doubt that there are people who've beaten the game on Nightmare, but that's WAAAAY outside of my league. And also deserving of special mention is the first level (Hell Beneath) of the fourth episode (Thy Flesh Consumed). This is one of the hardest levels in a first person shooter, on ANY difficulty. Health pickups are scarce, and the BIGGEST problems is that ammo is even more scarce. You're going to need to make every single shot count.

Go ahead and move the difficulty slider all the way to the right. I DARE YOU. See how long you survive. Your attacks do piddly damage to your enemies absurdly long health bars, and they will hit you like a ton of bricks. Play on this difficulty when you feel like committing suicide.

See: Skyrim.

Bramble Scramble? Man, that level's HARD. Why'd they have to make that level so hard? That music is dope, though.

The aggressive enemy AI in this game deserves special mention. The enemy will aggressively try to flush you out of cover, flank you, and gun you down. This can be a very, very challenging game. Doable, but still very hard.

You've got about a dozen bullets and a hundred zombies between you and the next save point. Good luck. Oh yeah, and the zombies you kill? If you don't randomly make their heads explode with a headshot, and if you don't have enough gasoline and a lighter to burn their corpse, they WILL reanimate later and will become the insanely tough Crimson Zombies. You need to get very good an dodging and running around enemies in this game, or you WILL be overwhelmed and devoured.

The entire first level is pretty easy, that is until you come to the giant scorpion-thing. Man, that thing is a bastard. Then the difficulty of the game goes through the roof! Then you realize just how pathetic Dante's pistols are. The ammo he uses is just wads of tissue paper and peas, for all the good it'll do you.

This game isn't very difficult in and of itself, but Veteran difficulty deserves special mention. Being killed more quickly because you take more damage on higher difficulty levels is legit, and that's doable, I can deal with that, but where I get angry is the fact that there are infinitely spawning enemies. Falling back on that bullshit tactic to ramp up difficulty is bullshit. Plain and simple. I sat in one area, and I swear to god, I killed more people than cancer. They kept streaming out of a building I had to get past, and every time you'd try to get past it, more enemies would flood out and gun you down. That isn't challenging, that's just piss poor level design. Also, the friendly AI isn't worth a squirt of piss. They might as well not even be there.