What's the hardest game you ever played?

For me it's this old NES game, Cobra Triangle. That shit has this one level with rapidly rising icebergs in it that ruined my childhood.

What about you guys?

Battletoads. That game was freaking hard.

Impossible to tell cuz it must've been something when i was a kid. In the last 5 or so years, it might've been gow2018 on gmgow. The first DLC in Doom Eternal before they nerfed it, it was super brutal on nightmare as well. Can't think of anything that surpasses these two.

Nethack. All these years and I've never come close to beating it.

Megaman 1 is pretty hard.

It's also shit. Almost put me of playing 2.

Could probably list a number of NES games such as:

- Ninja Gaiden

- Castlevania

- Mega Man

- Gradius

- The Adventures of Bayou Billy

Only 1 game has bested me on the hardest difficulty and that game shall remain nameless. All I will say is that Lok can go die in a hole sonewhere lol.

Ninja Gaiden (on the NES). There are people who can actually beat it, but that is beyond me.

Idunno, one of the Dark Souls or Elden Ring type games?

I don't really enjoy difficult games, I'm a filthy casual.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World (Sega Master System)

Kid Icarus

Ghosts & Goblins

Gradius and other shumps

As far as complexity goes, the old Spectrum Holobyte flight sim games came with 300-500 page manuals.

Gunna be Elden Ring for me. I went into it with zero experience in those types of games, I just don’t think it’s my kind of game. Gave it a few good attempts and just wasn’t having fun with the difficulty.

I played dota 2 and csgo at a pro level, so I guess that.

Last I can remember, it was Bloodborne.

Pac Man, I can only get to level 4!

Pretty much a lot of NES games.

Never understood this mindset ever since i was a teenager. Easy games don't make you think. You're on autopilot from the beginning until the very end. Might as well watch the game being played instead of playing it by yourself.

Mario Maker 1 and 2 super expert kaizo levels... nothing else even gets relatively close (on some of the hardest levels). On some levels you could try 10,000 times and have about as good of a chance of beating that level as simultaneously getting struck by lighting while in the midst of solving perpetual motion and gaining true enlightenment upon solving the mystery of the meaning of life. Don't believe me? I'll give you a list of levels to beat. Post a video, I'd love to eat crow on this.. it always blows me away what some people can do on the game and I'm not half bad (still have a couple undefeated levels). Some people make me look like an absolute amateur though.. These levels make games like Dark Souls, Hardcore RTS games, and early NES/SNES/GEN games seem like a fun excursion.

The very vast majority of levels are player made (like Meet your maker). They don't pull punches like devs will to make a game fair and balanced. Good luck pulling off pixel perfect jumps, midairs, shell jumps, insane clear conditions, never touching the ground, never pressing left, collecting every coin, and everything from 10 second speed runs to 15 to 20 minute long epic adventures, etc.

The games have a low floor (entry level) but the sky is the limit from there and it never stops. Which is probably why I feel as though those 2 games and Rocket League are such great games. No matter how good you get someone will be better, and no matter hard you try it's one of the few games that you just need to hang up the gloves and accept defeat sometimes (at least for the time, being...)

Funny that of the thousands of games I've played I would put their skill ceiling at the very top. I'm not sure which is more weird, the fact that Nintendo has the hardest two games or the fact it's a Mario game.. lol

Even players like Pan

PangaeaPanga have been outdone recently.

I could put a lot of old arcade games on the list. How many of us have completed an arcade game WITHOUT using extra coins? I beat Street Fighter 2, but that is only because I practised the hell out of it on SNES.

Green Beret on C64 is absolutely ridiculously hard and unfair. I think I made it to level 3 once.

Ghost'n'Goblins on C64 only has 4 stages but no continues. Probably the hardest game which I have completed.

Hardest game I ever played is probably God of War on Give me God of War difficulty. I beat the story and 4/9 valkyries but I do not think I will ever be able to beat the last 5 valkyries. Those Muspelheim trials and that poisonous gas valkyrie doesn't seem relastic nor does beating Sigrun, arguably the hardest boss in modern gaming.

Then there's DMC5 on DMD/H&H, which are 6-7 difficulties down the road and if you consider you need S rank for platinum I would say that is harder than GOW on GMG, but you can technically buy yourself to victory in DMD and use super characters for H&H...

Cup head

@hardwenzen: I was like him from 1998 (Tekken 3 on PS1) down to November 2020.

I played every single game on easy or very easy. The only exceptions were DMC1, DMC5 MGS2, MGS3, MGS4 and a few select others that I beat 3+ times, obviously I worked myself up from easy to normal to hard to The Boss Extreme / Dante Must Die difficulties cause I beat them so many times anyways. but for every other game I only played once, I always picked easy

Then I played Demon's Souls in November 2020 and 7 souls games and 1000 hours between them later now I always pick hard lol.

Played some utterly broken shit that I'm not gonna list, because they're just shit.

• Little Nemo: The Dream Master (NES)
• Rush'n'Attack (NES)
• Lolo (NES)
• Zelda II (NES)
• Battletoads (NES)
• Snake Rattle 'n' Roll (NES)
• Gradius (NES)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
• Punch-Out!! (NES)
• Faxanadu (NES)
• Battle of Olympus (NES)
• Super Star Wars (SNES)
• Ikaruga (GC)

Those games don't **** around, and I played them all when I was a kid. Souls games are easy in comparison, which makes me believe anyone who thinks Souls games are too hard started gaming pretty late and definitely missed out on the NES.

What made you choose easy and EVEN very easy?

im going to discount all the late 80s early 90s arcade / console games or ports, most were notoriously difficult, particularly those with their 3 lives and youre done style. im going to say x3 reunion (space trading sim) on pc from the mid noughties, remember struggling like fck with it.

did you ever try following any of the advice people gave you in your elden ring thread a while back?

@hardwenzen: going to school/work (and both during college days) then going to the gym/sports activities, the one thing I want to do when I play games is almost lie down flat in the sofa, feet on the table headphones on and relax. I also really hate having to do something again. Back then when I died I would pretty much turn off the console cause no way was I going to go through a level I almost beat all over again. Tedious.

I only bothered doing that with the games I loved i.e. MGS4 doing Boss Extreme no death / perfect stealth runs etc.

for games like RDR2 I wanted to be half asleep and peacefully ride my horse as I immersive myself in the world.

Demon's Souls and FromSoft's games changed that.

Now if I can tank more than 2-3 hits in a game I get pissed lol. even after beating TLOU 1 remake on PS5 4 times and getting the platinum trophy I did a grounded run just for the challenge. when the original came out I *hated* playing on normal, hard, and couldn't imagine survivor, let alone Grounded. (even though I beat it 3-4 times on PS3 and 3-4 times on PS4)

I still hate games where enemies are tanky. Souls games aren't hard because of stupid bullet sponge enemies, they are hard because of complex move sets.

in The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2, 1 headshot kills pretty much every enemy even on grounded. What makes them hard are the lack of resources and advanced AI (best AI of anygame)

And i guess this is what i simply don't understand. Its as if everyone is in a hurry to be done with a game they just spent $60 on.

Donkey Kong Country 2&3 secret levels

But they are oh so much fun!!

Also Ikaruga, me and my mates could barely get past the third level.

Ghouls and Ghosts, I guess.

Ghosts and goblins, but that's mostly due to being so young back then,same with NES Ninja Gaiden

Some old game that I can't remember.😂

Marble Madness. Game drove me frickin nuts. Dam YOU Mark CERNY!!!!!! (Yes the lead architect on the PS4/5 made marble madness...grrr).

Fzero GX. The story mode was a tough old beast. 1 single mistake and you would fail basically.

Probably some indie game notorious for being difficult, can't remember which one.

@nod_calypse: Battletoads, Ghosts and Goblins, Ikari Warriors (if you didn't cheat), Contra (if you didn't cheat).

Sensible Soccer when playing a mate from college.

He was a genius at it on the old Amiga.

The Adventures of Bayou Billy NES

I beat mega man 1,2 and 3.... I had ever stage memorized and basically could beat the game with my eyes closed when I was a kid.... Gotta know what to use on each boss.... Then it's cake.

Perfect Dark on perfect agent was also difficult from what i remember. No checkpoints, shit controls on the N64, and a bunch of timed objectives. PDZ on Dark Agent was at least as difficult as well.

I think there was this exact same thread a week or 2 ago and I'll say the same thing I said there.

Total Recall on NES.

I hated that game as a kid and it was one of the first games I got for my NES when I was younger. I don't know why my parents bought it for me. Probably I loved the movie.

I find the souls games to be easier than a lot of NES games to be honest.

Yeah, it becomes ridiculously easy once you have the patterns memorized, as well as the right weapons to use. The fun was in figuring that out.

I think that's the point. They're meditative. I can turn off my brain and just build, make something from the creative part of my brain, maybe turn on a podcast if I want to educate myself while still having some fun. It's all about reaching that flowstate, looking up at the clock, and going "Woh where did the last two hours go?"

And I think there are different kinds of difficulty. There are things that are hard difficult (in my connation, these are games like Elden Ring) and there are challenging difficult (these are things like easy sandbox games where you have set certain challenges for yourself).

Building a giant world-spanning factory with transportation hubs and making sure everything is balanced and efficient isn't particularly hard, but it is challenging to accomplish.

Plus, it makes me feel special 😁 Not everyone has a logistics-based mindset and the creativity to start from a blank canvas and build a functional city that runs on 95% public transportation.

I choose to not play Elden Ring because I don't want to, not because I can't (says the filthy casual...😉) My time is better spent being [fake] productive in a sandbox game. I don't want to get into that loop of "frustration-effort/time-reward", I want to just....play a game.

In either case, I won't make excuses nor apologize: I don't like hard games 😋

Elden Ring recently,G&G in the arcade or console. I’m a casual gamer who doesn’t like really complex, complicated or difficult games. Been a gamer since the very early 80’s but never been a very skilled game player. I’m a better gamer now than I was decades before. Go figure?lol.

I didn't grow up with Megaman and didn't play it on a loop. But as a first time playthrough I thought it was bad just full of bullshit design. With a padded boss rush.

Megaman 2 I liked better. Big improvement.

I second Battletoads