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Post by Drawesome(Dale) on Apr 25, 2006 13:48:18 GMT -5
Galaga great game but I can,t seem to beat it. Also the RoboCop games pretty hard as well as the Wolverine game.
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Post by shido on Apr 25, 2006 14:52:08 GMT -5
Zelda 2 is quite hard :X
But I guess Ghosts 'N Goblins is truly the most difficult NES game
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Post by Malroth on Apr 25, 2006 21:59:24 GMT -5
Oh yeah, just remembered another one: Deadly Towers. Although that falls under the "poorly designed with cheap deaths" moniker.
Actually, it's not so bad if you use an faq. Boggles my mind how somebody managed to complie one, though.
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Post by megamoronx on Apr 25, 2006 23:31:37 GMT -5
For some reason, GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor whoops my ass everytime I play it. Definitely not the most challenging though. The only one that sticks out to me as the most challenging is Battletoads.
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Post by jameseightbitstar on Apr 25, 2006 23:36:13 GMT -5
Destination Earthstar.
Probably not the most difficult, but I've never beaten it. The game starts out as a space combat simulator, then turns into a side-scrolling shooter, then back into a simulator, repeat. The sim stages aren't so bad, but the scroller stages are killer--particularly because moving foreward also causes you to move faster. Also, you get no continues.
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Post by Bloodreign on May 3, 2006 0:23:54 GMT -5
Arkanoid, 34 levels of pure hell, I've never finished it so I bought the NES version off Ebay, without the special controller, to one day put the beating it so deserves from me on it. ;D
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johnh
Junior Member
Posts: 52
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Post by johnh on May 5, 2006 3:29:17 GMT -5
Wow, so many games people are calling "hard" here I've completed.
I've never finished Battletoads though (although I only played it on a rental). Ditto Solstice. Cobra Triangle is an exceptionally difficult game even by Rare's standards at the time.
I *have* finished Deadly Towers though, and without a FAQ. I've also finished Golgo 13 (quite hard), Castlevania (without continuing), and a good many other games I wouldn't care to admit.
Then there are games that are hard but not interesting enough to bother with. Any game that follows an old-school arcade game design, where players aren't really supposed to be able to play indefinitely, for example. How "hard" do you call a game with no ending?
Then there are a few games, most of 'em early NES titles, that may have an ending, but no one could possibly be interested enough to find it. Ninja Kid is like that.
Periously riding the knife-edge between absurdly-difficult-yet-playable and so-bad-no-will-care is the NES port of Athena. I will admit, I have completed Athena for the NES. If you accept that game's absurd number of bugs as just part of the game, then it just might well be the hardest NES game in existance.
In the game's favor, it has a genuinely interesting powerup system (there's a HUGE number of items to discover, some of them quite cool), there's a two "plane" playfield that adds an element of exploration to the game, the bosses are challenging but not hard once you figure out a good trick to them, and there are an awe-inspiring number of secrets, including an item (a magic lamp) that can allow you to skip a level-end boss, and an entire secret world.
But for most people, the bad will more than outweigh the good.
1. Athena's jumping height is weirdly unstable. The first jump is short, then the next two will be very, very high. 2. It's very easy to get stuck in a no-escape situation. Enemy attacks will downgrade her armor and weaponry, and block-breaking ability is directly tied to that upgrade state. If this happens (and it happens often in the aforementioned secret world), the only real escape is to let the game's clock run out. 3. There are plenty of "booby blocks," joke not intended, blocks that contain powerdowns, outright bad items, and even unkillable foes in places. 4. There's no invulnerability period after taking a hit, meaning a single hit can be fatal at times. 5. There are lots of maddening, seemingly-impossible situations that no reasonable gamer will put up with. 6. If you're on the wrong "plane" when you reach the end of a level, but have a lamp, you get to go to the next level without fighting the boss... but if you don't have a lamp, then you start the whole level over. Argh! 7. The game's buggy as hell, with animation bugs that throw garbage up on the screen in several notable places, choppy movement and scrolling, and just a general air of unprofessionalism.
But the thing about the game that makes it *truly* difficult is the incredible rigamorole the player most go through to win. It seems the player must collect a lunchbox-like item from one of the levels (I have no idea what it's called), then when while carrying it, play the game until you find a rare Key item in a brick or from beating a boss. Once you have a key, once you finish the level you'll be sent to the "World of Labrynith," an infuriating area filled with breakable blocks, many of which merely hide *unbreakable* walls, making it difficult to figure out where you can go except by memory.
There is no boss to that world, but, if I remember correctly, you *must* have a lamp to escape. The World of Labrynith contains somewhere in it a huge picture of a goddess that, when found, gives up a harp. You need to carry that harp to the end of the game, because the final boss is invulnerable without it, it seems. The lunchbox item apparently lets you carry more items, so you can have it and other things at once. Of course, if you die, you lose it. AND, somewhere in the Labrynith is a FALSE harp that just takes away all your items if collected.
But yes, I did manage to win this game. Please believe me when I tell you that it was NOT. WORTH. IT.
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Post by Malroth on May 5, 2006 17:29:59 GMT -5
Wow, considering how much you wrote about Athena, you may as well do an article!
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johnh
Junior Member
Posts: 52
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Post by johnh on May 5, 2006 17:51:04 GMT -5
I've already written about Athena elsewhere (on Everything2), but I've played very little of the arcade game (which actually seems rather good, and isn't buggy in any case), and I have no knowledge whatsoever for any of the other games that have Athena in 'em -- which all seem to be utterly different kinds of games that I have no interest in, anyway.
I'll think about it.
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Post by Discoalucard on May 5, 2006 22:43:20 GMT -5
Play Psycho Soldier! It's...uh...pretty bad. Not Athena bad, but bad.
But it's got singing!
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Post by jameseightbitstar on May 7, 2006 9:32:09 GMT -5
After reading that, I'm glad I sold my copy of Athena.
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Post by Neo Rasa on May 8, 2006 11:19:06 GMT -5
Psycho Soldiers is pretty rad for it's time and what it tries to accomplish.
Only thing I hate about it is that instead of having power downs you can pick up by mistake, it has power up containers that, when opened, simply through a huge glut of enemies on you, usually meaning instant death.
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Post by megatronbison on May 8, 2006 19:13:20 GMT -5
Psycho Soldiers song is so painfully memorable: "Shes just a girl with magic power inside- shining bright You better hide if you are bad! - She'll get you!" Wasn't it sung by one of the head of Neo-geos daughters or something like that? It would explain a lot about the vocal quality I didn't think much of the game but regardless: "Athena- I will go!"
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