Games With 'Unfair' Difficulty

[Deleted]

We've all played one or two of those games where the difficulty made us want to throw the controller and I have memories of some games where I found the difficulty outright unfair. From my childhood there was one game that was a crushing disappointment since I couldn't hope to progress through it, and that game is Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge. I was too young and innocent to suspect what was coming to me in this game as I'd picked it out for my birthday. All I wanted was to play as my favourite cartoon heroes I would watch on a Saturday morning. As it turns out developer Software Creations actually hated the X-Men and developed this super hero murder simulator in order to see them die over and over and over again. The title is apt since Arcade's revenge is unescapable. This game marred an otherwise perfectly happy childhood. 

One nice thing about the game was that each character got their own stages and differing gameplay. We start as Spider-Man as he tracks the captured mutants to Arcade's lair in a stage that was quite beatable and controlling Spider-Man is fairly decent, though a little stiff. Following that we're treated to a character selection screen as we can choose which hero will suffer first, being put through their own individual tests (formed of two levels each) from the maniacal villain. All this is on point and fits the theme really nicely, but then we start to play these stages.



Spider-Man's stages would require many awkward jumps along with flying projectiles and killer ceiling cables meaning evasion required pinpoint precision. I never made it past the first one.



Cyclops has the most generic levels and the first was fairly reasonable and I was able to get through his second also with practice.



Remember those Ninja Turtles levels everybody hated? Well Software Creations do; and they want to put their own special twist on them as they have Storm swimming through difficult to evade traps, whilst being awkwardly oversized and having limited air supply. I managed to get through the first of her stages a few times but in the second found myself getting bombarded with hits from all sides.



Gambit (how the heck did he get into the game?) is pursued by this oversized metal ball thing in his first stage. The jumps are incredibly difficult and he is given limited supply of his playing card ammunition which I ran out of every single time before getting crushed.



Wolverine also has a doable initial stage. The second one however where he is chased by an artificial replication of Juggernaut has him try to deplete his foes health by dropping weights on him. Perfection must be required, if the stage is beatable at all, because I was never able to do it. As you reach the end of the stage and Juggernaut is inevitably still standing you will be automatically killed.


So how about it? which games difficulty provided you with nothing but trauma? Or was there a specific segment that had you so frustrated in an otherwise reasonable game? Is there a Spider-Man and the X-Men beater out there?

[shelverton]

It’s funny how I had pretty much the exact same experience with that game. I think perhaps I wanna watch a walkthrough or speedrun of it now that you mention it, just to see how someone would actually beat some of these levels. Gambit was the absolute worst for me. Soundtrack is excellent though.

The game that comes to mind for me is The Adventures of Bayou Billy. If the sidescrolling brawler levels didn’t get me, the driving surely did. It’s the first video game I can remember that I just gave up on cause I never seemed to get any good at it. It was also very, very tedious.

[spanky]

Bayou Billy was one of those games that they cranked up the difficulty to unreasonable levels when they localized it for the west. This was fairly common throughout the era to dissuade rentals but the difficulty here is just nuts. I think the Captain N episode even references how tough the game is. The Japanese version is much more manageable and pretty fun. 

A lot of western developed games of the 8 and 16-bit era seem to have "unfair" difficulty. I'm playing Claymates on NSO right now and while it's actually pretty good - maybe even underrated, there are plenty of blind jumps that lead right into pits or obstacles that come out of nowhere that kill you. The game tries to compensate by throwing tons of extra lives at you but it is still very tough.

The original Battletoads is pretty unfair IMO... The latest Retronauts mentioned that the developers are RARE cut their teeth on incredibly difficult micro computer games so they were used to "unfair" challenge levels. Plus the game was playtested by the people who were designing the game rather than a more general audience. They would tweak the levels until they could beat them...then they would crank up the difficulty by a notch or two. So something that would be moderately challenging in their eyes would be downright impossible to an 8 year old.

[lurker]

The X-Men NES game where Nightcrawler can be killed by regular walls.

[Snake]

Transformers - Mystery of Convoy, Famicom.

Just brutal.  I really didn't get far in this game.  I'm usually dead by the first 2 or 3 Starscream look-a-like muthafuckas.  


Battletoads, NES.  It just seems to take forever to try to master and memorize the landspeeder levels, only to be faced with the extreme difficulty of jumping snakes, or racing a rat to the stupid bomb to smash disarm it.  Just evil, evil levels of difficulty.  

Gradius 2 Gofer no Yabou, PC-Engine.  The end end boss gauntlet just sucks.  One death, and it's a pat on the back and a goodluck with any subsequent lives left over.

[dsparil]

Try the Genesis version of Spider-Man and X-Men. I still wouldn't call it good, but it is much less of a disaster. There's a few tweaks here and there that make it more playable.

Earth Atlantis - This is an "open world" horizontal shooter, and the problem is that power ups are used up permanently. If you die, they don't come back significantly increasing the difficulty of subsequent attempts at bosses. I got to a point where I just couldn't go on because all the available power ups were gone. Just having power ups respawn would even things out significantly.

Jump King - Played it a little bit this weekend because it was on sale on the eShop and showed up in last month's quiz. It's literally five minutes of content spread over hours because you're constantly redoing the same jumps over and over again with everything seemingly designed to make you waste as much time as possible. It's truly a game for non-figurative masochists. Actually showing your jump trajectory would expose the hollowness at its core, but a simple power bar would go a long way.

Wizardry - Specifically the first trilogy. I think it's a combination of the game constantly autosaving and disallowing loading coupled with its desire to quickly kill the entire party that makes it feel unfair. Stats potentially lowering on level up is just twisting the knife. You're technically not totally locked into playing it in an "ironman" mode, but having to keep around a backup party to drag the corpses of the main party back up to get resurrected is just too much. The SNES port lets you make backup saves with a special accessory which probably takes some of the edge off.

[ommadawnyawn2]

I vaguely remember not getting anywhere in that Spider-Man game, yeah. One of the earlier disappointments from licensed games.

The "vs. Kingpin" one for MD was also quite tough, particularly near the end with the code which I didn't understand as a kid, but mostly fun and with some cool ideas.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcRXgByRnss&t=13m5s
This Batman Returns game for MD was fine overall, not the best visuals and some cheap parts but the hookswinging and gadgets were fun and I liked some of the music. Batman moves pretty slowly while enemies are pretty agile, and the hit detection is kind of unforgiving IIRC. Around the cathedral there's some bullshit in a vertical platforming part with enemies that jump into you from above, but it's doable with some practice. This part I'm linking to though I just could not get past as a kid, so I've never played past that.

One of the most frustrating games I've played through is R-Type III: The Third Lightning, a real shame because the variety, audiovisuals and bosses are all really good. It's mainly a trial & error issue though it does also suffer from slowdown and sometimes sloppy hit detection, plus it's really hard to recover after death. 

[Deleted]

Didn't know what Bayou Billy was so looked it up and I can't get past the box art. The fellas head looks like it's independent from his body; It's as though the artist painted one thing, decided to change it and painted over it.

Aug 23, 2021 12:50:30 GMT -5 Snake said:

Gradius 2 Gofer no Yabou, PC-Engine.  The end end boss gauntlet just sucks.  One death, and it's a pat on the back and a goodluck with any subsequent lives left over.

I made it to level 4 once. I was proud of myself. I'm not good at shoot em ups but PC Engine Gradius 2 is really tough for me. If I recall correctly the PCE version of the original is incredibly easy so polar opposite experiences. 

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

Gradius is definitely a series in general with a very unfair difficulty simply because of the punishment for dying. It basically means that for certain sections in the harder games, once you die once, you might as well give up.

I'll have to rake my brain a bit for some good examples, but considering I usually have a lot to bitch and nitpick about games I'm sure I'll come up with something.

[dsparil]

I alluded to this in my three examples, but I do wonder about games that might only need little tweaks to be massively more fair. One that comes to mind that did get that tweak is Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade on NES which got ported to a few platforms as Cosmic Spacehead a year later. The tweak is that it moved from having a fixed distance jump to standard jump controls which took out all the frustration. The Genesis version is a real hidden gem on the platform although the music is a downgrade. I'm replaying the NES version for some reason, and it's actually not as bad as I remember it being at least at the beginning, but changing the controls was the right decision anyway.

Edit: Having just replayed both versions, I kinda take this back. The real positive change is in the move from Linus Spacehead to Cosmic Crusade as LS is way too slippery which LSCC fixes. Changing the jump in the Genesis port ends up making the platforming boring as it's actually pretty fair in the NES version. In a sense, the Genesis port puts graphics over gameplay as it's much better on NES than it came off when I originally tried it.

[magic89]

Kamen Rider Black: Taiketsu Shadow Moon (Famicon Disk System)

Kamen Rider Black in this game are disgrace to his TV counterpart why?
He move very slooow making him easy target from enemies, sure front roll move little bit faster but front roll make Kamen Rider Black
defenceless to enemy attacks. Oh and punches and kicks had weak hit detection just like Luke Skywalker lightsaber in Star Wars olso on same console.

In fact every time you get hit you are knocked back, and this is stupid if you encounter enemy what shoots some sh..t at you.
Because that type of enemy can easy corner you to death if you not beat him very fast.
at least some stages Kamen Rider black ride his motocycle Battle hopper and that stages are little forgiving but still you must punch some enemies because if you try run over you take damage.

[dr_st]

Well, now after like a hundred or more attempts of beating AirXonix on the Extreme difficulty, and failing, I want to sometimes scream it is unfair, but no - it isn't. It is just hard as it should be, and I am simply not good enough (yet).

I've beaten all other difficulties, and I could beat Extreme on slow speed, but on max speed - farthest I've got is level 19 out of 20.

With that said - some of my deaths have been due to unresponsive controls. Most of the time they are great, but sometimes it feels they lag a little bit, and fail to register turns. Which brings me to a question:

Would you say that a game has "unfair" difficulty if it is due to a bug / technical deficiency? Or does it have to be a conscious design decision?

[Deleted]

Aug 31, 2021 0:46:56 GMT -5 dr_st said:

Would you say that a game has "unfair" difficulty if it is due to a bug / technical deficiency? Or does it have to be a conscious design decision?

I think so. I don't think the developer intent changes the players experience of the game being 'unfair', although it could impact the way such difficulty presents itself.

[shelverton]

Not the hardest game ever but I think the boss battles in SNES Lagoon are incredibly unfair. Not only is your sword so short that you have to position yourself basically INSIDE the boss to do any sort of damage, you can’t use magic spells in boss battles either. The game never tells you why either, it’s just inactivated when you absolutely need it the most.

The first two bosses in Lagoon I beat purely by accident or luck, especially the one in Philip’s Castle.

[Kokoro]

Silver Surfer on the NES. The AVGN has covered that well. The touch of anything causing death is a complete joke, especially with someone as powerful as the Silver Surfer.