Hardest video game you ever played!

[Narona]

Megaman 1 and Burai Fighter on NES (via emulator)

I remember when someone at school told me that the NES games were hard, and so he gave me some games and emulators. I expected some games to be hard, but not THAT hard O_o

[GuidoHunter_Toki]

Blaster Master - Every part of this game was hard and to top it off there were no save points or passwords.

Contra - Play this without the life code and you have one of the most frustrating games ever. I'm confident there is no one on earth who can possibly come close to beating the game without the code.

Ghost n Goblins - ridiculous amounts of strong enemies and the crapiest sword and armor to fight them with and you got yourself one difficult game.

Mega Man - Pretty selfexplanatory. Its just a hard game in general.

Gauntlet - THis game never ended and it just kept getting harder and harder. The game was really about how many levels you could survive for rather than completing it.

[RAVNEN]

Contra: Every Contra game is very difficult & make me angry.

Mega Man : I still does'nt understand why those goons create this game,I bet
the developer don't even finish the game.

Super Mario : Every Mario game is a pain in the ass.Period.

[Noe]

Star Ocean: Til the End of Time (played on the highest difficulty, I think it was called the '4th Dimension'?)

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by GuidoHunter_Toki

Contra - Play this without the life code and you have one of the most frustrating games ever. I'm confident there is no one on earth who can possibly come close to beating the game without the code.

I have personally beaten Contra on a real NES without the life code, back when I was around 9. I only managed it twice and spent literally a week practicing.

On the other hand, if me and my cousin played 2-player, we beat the game a couple of times without the life code that way (also by utilizing the ability for one player to give the other one of his lives strategically).

Original contra is not THAT bad at all if you have the stages memorized, and there are only 6 of them. Then again, once you loose the spread weapon things get really dicey until you can get it back.

[HayashiTakara]

I'd have to say the original Ninja Turtles game for NES.

[Sheep]

It's the case with most of the "old and ridiculously hard" games. Once you know how to do it, it's easy, but you don't tell anyone because it looks so damn impressive : >

[HayashiTakara]

Theres a lot of games in the past that were "hard" because of bad controls. I don't really consider them hard, just archaic.

[Sheep]

Originally Posted by HayashiTakara

Theres a lot of games in the past that were "hard" because of bad controls. I don't really consider them hard, just archaic.

Castlevania comes to mind. I tried it after hearing so many good things about it, but just couldn't get myself to play it further than the first or second boss because of the awkward jumps and slow character.

[Js2756]

Some of the games mentioned I've actually beaten.

A lot of people mentioned 7th Saga for SNES, but I beat that. The trick is to have a character that can cast buffs. If you don't you will not beat the game, period. The game sucked in that you had to let your enemies have a free turn to do anything resembling decent damage though (defend first, then attack, it greatly increases your damage on that attack). Beat the game with a priest / dwarf party.

Super Mario Bros. :the Lost Levels (aka Super Mario Bros. 2 in japan) - only beat the Lost levels version because you can save after each stage and go restock on lives in earlier stages. Some of the later stages (letter stages) are absolutely retarded. Blind jumps onto pipes with pirahna plants for example, you had to watch the timer and time the jumps so that the plant wouldn't be out to survive.

Bahamut Lagoon: the trick is, once you reach a certain point, your human characters do way more damage than your dragons, so you have to use them to kill bosses, but you need to use your dragons as tanks to absorb damage. Oh, and your main red dragon becomes invincible once it reaches its final form.

Some of Cave's shmups are borderline impossible on the hardest difficulty; looking at Mushihimesama Futari 1.5 on Ultra. Although I think that Cave has recently been pulling back a bit on the difficulty (see Death Smiles, I made it to the last stage on like my 5th try, and I'm not very good at shmups, especially horizontal ones).

[BigJimmy]

I wanna be the Guy! Sweet Jesus on a stick it's hard. Deliberatly so, since it's basically a homage to all those evil games of yesteryear.

[Telmah]

I found the Utawarerumono game to be really hard--once you play through the story once, wow did it get difficult. It was very tactical, where making one wrong move could force you to reset the level. Especially if they pinned down Eruuruu and she couldn't heal herself! Bleh!

[Narona]

Originally Posted by GuidoHunter_Toki

Contra - Play this without the life code and you have one of the most frustrating games ever. I'm confident there is no one on earth who can possibly come close to beating the game without the code.

Is Probotector a version of Contra? I did a search and Contra seems quite similar to a game I played on NES emulator (probotector), but with Robots as characters....

Originally Posted by HayashiTakara

I'd have to say the original Ninja Turtles game for NES.

I also tried to play to this game, and I never successed to pass the Level 3

Originally Posted by Sheep

Castlevania comes to mind. I tried it after hearing so many good things about it, but just couldn't get myself to play it further than the first or second boss because of the awkward jumps and slow character.

The Castlevania games on NES are TOO hard for me

[Urei]

I'd say Ikaruga. I've played it only a couple of times but it was extremely hard at some points. Other then Ikaruga I'd say that most Japanese shooters are challenging.

[Narona]

Originally Posted by Urei

I'd say Ikaruga. I've played it only a couple of times but it was extremely hard at some points. Other then Ikaruga I'd say that most Japanese shooters are challenging.

I have this game on Gamecube! Great game

[Urei]

Originally Posted by Narona

I have this game on Gamecube! Great game

It really is. Nice graphics and the fact you can play with your friend This doesn't make it easier though. Once you get in a tight spot your done for. No mercy

[Kaioshin Sama]

Well I define two kinds of hard. There's "broken hard" wherein it's completely the games own poor programming that makes it so hard and "actual hard" which is when the game is specifically designed to be challenging. Many games that people consider hard are actually among the former in my opinion.

Anyway, if we are talking broken hard then it's probably something like Transformers: Convoy no Nazo on the Famicom which only gives you one hit and three lives and then it's game over and back to stat. It also makes it nearly impossible for you to control or avoid anything so good luck getting anywhere in it.

For actual hard I'd say Fire Emblem V: Thracia 776, which throws just about every single aspect of the game in the enemy sides favour, but is still playable and beatable at that. Just really hard and actually requires you to use some strategy.

[Jaden]

Homeworld and it's sequels+expansion were probably the hardest I played...in a sensible way. As in it needed advanced tactics, micro- and macromanagement to beat.

In other game's single player campaigns like age of empires, red alert and warcraft games you could go far with just building, researching and training troops in the right order, and if there was a hard mission, you could get by with luck or exploiting the AI's failings. Homeworld is clearly a step up in difficulty from those games. Your fleet, research etc. would be saved from previous missions, so on the "easy" missions the game is min/maxing to perfection so your power will be saved for the hard missions. And the hard missions were desperate battles against overwhelming odds and usually against a timer.
For me I guess it was the optimal amount of challenge, I could barely beat the games before retry counts would go ungodly high and I'd get frustrated.

Yeah, difficulty often boils down to how much practice you need before you can get it right, and I think Homeworld had the highest ratio I could tolerate.

[Knowledge Seeker]

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne is the hardest game I've ever played. I loved playing it but I had to get used to getting my butt kicked after every boss battle. Ah well, I'll come back to that game someday.

[Saki_chan]

I found FF6 to be incredibly difficult, but I don't know that I'd call it the hardest game I've ever played. I think that older games are a lot harder than anyone realizes, like the Mario games on the NES.