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!