The 10 Most Irritatingly Impossible Old-School Video Games
In the old days, you didn't come back to a game again and again for anything as fancy as online multiplayer or user-created content. No, you came back because the games were freaking impossible. That was the only way game designers of the Nintendo Entertainment System and SNES days could extend the play time: through mindless, frustrating repetition.
These are the 10 games so infuriating, their very mention makes the hairs stand up on the back of our necks.
#10.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out
The premise:
A ludicrously undersized boxer makes his way through a swarm of opponents who use the unwise strategy of fighting with a distinctly repeating pattern. All of this is done for the chance to lose horribly to Mike Tyson.
Why it was worth playing:
The first-person boxing was unique in 1987 (actually, how often have you seen it since?), unless you count the arcade version of the same game. It was genuinely fun trying to crack the various exotic underlings that stood between you and the champ. And, after a tough day, there was something deeply satisfying about mercilessly pounding upon hapless Glass Joe, who always seemed to be in the ring against his will.
Look at him, it's like he thinks there's a guy out in the audience with a rifle on him.
Also, in an era when other sports games were occupied by generic placeholders (not even team logos were represented), Tyson's celebrity endorsement was pretty cool. Seeing that crazy bastard step into the ring as the final boss really meant something.
Why it was infuriating:
While the early opponents were sometimes challenging, you could still find their weakness (hmmm ... that inconspicuous 'X' on his stomach, perhaps), and after that it was just a matter of timing your punches.
But, when you finally made it to Tyson (or "Mr. Dream" if you bought the game after Tyson's title defeat to Buster Douglas), no amount of Rocky-inspired runs through the city were going to save you. Mac's punches have about as much effect on the champ as a stiff breeze, which doesn't stack up well against his ability to send your teeth flying with little more than a mean thought.
Basically you had to withstand a series of withering blows from Tyson, dodging each with perfect precision (if any of his punches landed, you were done) while waiting for a window of opportunity about a quarter-second long to strike back.
Saddest moment:
Watching Mac crash to the mat following a thunderous right hook by Tyson and knowing that it was time for him to "fuck you 'til you love it." Then, realizing that to get back there you have to box every fucking one of those guys again. No saves in this game, boys and girls.
#9.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
The premise:
That wacky Shredder is out to ruin everybody's day and cause some good ol' fashioned chaos again, and only a group of hideous, sewer-dwelling monstrosities are there to stop him.
Why it was worth playing:
In 1989, every young boy in America was legally obligated to spend at least two hours a day pretending to be one of the Turtles, and another two arguing with friends over which one was superior (Leonardo, in case you're wondering). It was the first chance to play as the gang in a video game and, at that age, it seemed pretty awesome. Also, the enemies appeared randomly each time, so no level played the same way twice (why doesn't every game do that?).
Why it was infuriating:
The game had some general weaknesses. The fun beat-'em-up platform was interrupted by annoying surface levels, and the ridiculously unequal weapon strengths made playing as anyone other than "I can kill from across the room" Donatello seem like a waste of time. You didn't get to choose, though, you just rotated through the Turtles as they died. All of this might have been overcome by the sheer Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-ness of it all, if not for one stage: The Dam.
The Dam level required you to try to beat the clock through a sprawling maze in order to defuse the bombs, which were prepared to unleash the fury of the Hudson River. See that pink seaweed shit? The stuff with an opening barely big enough for a mutated turtle to pass through? It killed you. It was ... electrified somehow. The science in the game wasn't all that accurate.
Setting aside the terrible example this set forth of telling kids the Hudson was safe to look at, let alone swim in, the failure to defuse the bombs resulted in an immediate game over, no matter how many Turtles were still alive. The margin for error was about one pixel wide and half a second long.
Saddest moment:
While it would be easy to pick on The Dam some more, we're going to have to go with the first time you make the mistake of running into one of the foot soldiers' rides while walking on the top level. You learn it doesn't just hurt you, it fucking flattens you.
Next Turtle, please.
#8.
Mega Man
The premise:
Mega Man is a world-saving robot bent on destroying evildoers. Also, he consumes their souls so he can absorb their powers.
Why it was worth playing:
Mega Man is also one of the most popular video game characters ever created. It was one of the first games to include the method of "winning" new weapons and abilities as the game progressed. Nearly all of the game-play mechanics that would define the series were found here, in the original game.
Why it was infuriating:
We said "nearly" all of the game play was there. A whole lot of the features you saw in the sequels were put there to make the game easier, because the first one was nothing short of sadistic. Many of the cool upgrades were often borderline useless outside of one specific boss they were designed to be used against. Also, some of the jumping puzzles were downright evil.
And, as is unthinkable now but was common then, you couldn't save. Every time you turned on the machine, you were greeted with the same fucking levels, which made failure a hundred times more infuriating. Every misstep meant you were about to lose a couple more hours out of your life.
Saddest moment:
As aggravating as the game could be to play, there is no more embarrassing moment in a gamer's life than the time he has to put cold hard cash on the desk, point to this game box ...
... and say, "I want that. That is right up my alley."
#7.
Solomon's Key
The premise:
Demons have been accidentally let loose, and it's up to Dana to delve through a series of puzzle rooms to retrieve Solomon's Key in order to banish the demons back from whence they came, allowing the locals to return to their happy lives of magically floating blocks and goofy clothes.
Why it was worth playing:
At its heart, this is basically a puzzle game, where a lot of the challenge was in moving and creating colored blocks. That sounds boring as hell, but there was a real sense of reward for solving the puzzles. This made us feel smart and dulled the sense of inadequacy we felt on a day-to-day basis. There were also lots of secrets to uncover, including multiple endings. It was advanced stuff, for the time.
Why it was infuriating:
The makers of Solomon's Key were clearly Satanists. They seemed determined to make sure the key would remain safely away from Dana's clutches, and to ensure the demons would be left free to pillage and rain destruction upon the quivering, pixilated masses. Dana is far from the world's toughest gaming hero and always seemed moments away from death. Meanwhile, his opponents often enjoyed the luxury of unlimited re-spawning.
The levels (and there were more than 60 of the bastards) were often designed so that it was entirely possible to, through bad luck, get trapped in the level with no ability to progress. You were left to commit Hara-Kiri or wait for the final cruelty to take over when Dana's timer ran out. Just like the real world, kids!
Saddest moment:
Retrieving the key, only to be told you had failed to open up all 15 hidden levels, and as such, hadn't truly defeated the game. We're not sure how many million copies of the game were sold, but we're guessing about five people in the history of the world have seen the "real" ending.
#6.
(Super) Empire Strikes Back
The premise:
There were some sci-fi films made in the '70s and '80s called the Star Wars trilogy (Google it; they had the actor from Firewall in them). This game was based on the second, and best, of those films.
Why it was worth playing:
This came out on two systems at the same time in 1993, the NES and the Super NES. Both had multiple game-play styles and included settings from the films.
The SNES version (right) looked less like shit.
But, both versions were as hard as brass balls.
Why it was infuriating:
When sitting in the theaters for Empire, we can only assume the designers were intently ogling their tub of popcorn and not the screen, as they left the theaters with the impression that Luke Skywalker was incapable of functioning as a member of society, let alone as a universe-saving demi-God. The game presents you with awkward controls and requires you to find force powers. All this means it takes a massive effort just to get Luke to kill that stupid probe droid.
By 1993, gaming had advanced to the point where long-ass levels were the norm, but the whole concept of a "checkpoint" had eluded this game's creators. If you died--even at the boss--you had to drag your sorry ass all the way through entire level again.
In the end, though, the sheer impossibility of the game's design may have prevented substantial property damage by Star Wars fans. If they'd progressed, they'd have reached the part where (in the NES version) Luke rescues Han, kills Boba Fett, and, in an act of Star Wars blasphemy, defeats Darth Vader in a light saber duel. We aren't making that up.
They never brought out a Return of the Jedi game for the NES. Well, we're thinking that's why. The Empire game fucked up the storyline to the point that there was nothing for a Jedi to return from.
Saddest moment:
Discovering that crouching allows Luke to put a little extra into his jumps, and realizing that the once-menacing star pilot has been reduced to nothing better than a platform-hopping, overweight plumber.
Beat battletoads. Very proud of that.
ReplySaddest Moment: The two weeks of playing it took me to get the pattern down for all the levels.
Battletoads was only frustrating because you never get past the first level because you are having too much fun bashing your teammate's head in
ReplyBatman & Robin on Sega Mega Drive takes the cake for me. Despite owning the game for 17 years, I never beat it. In fact, I never even reached the final stage. Considering the fact that there is no seperate difficulty level for single-player and two-player mode, playing the game alone is virtually impossible. And even with two players you get eventually run over by the countless hordes of bad guys.
ReplyThe graphics are just beautifully though. Really shows what was actually possible with the Mega Drive in the late stage.
Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles was easy. The dam level was a bit irritating the first few times you did it, but then it was one of the easiest parts of the whole game.
ReplyOne "Angry Video Game Nerd" can tell you all you need to know about these games and more.
ReplyGhost's and Goblins was a nightmare. Top Gun & Milon's Secret Castle should have made the list though.
ReplyThe longest I'd ever get on Ghosts and Goblins was the absolute lowest level of the actual castle. After that.... I cried myself to sleep at the impossibleness of it and have yet to meet anyone who has gotten past it, let alone beat the game.
Marble Madness.
Replybattle toads, mega man, and contra are all games someone could beat without a code or help. There's much worse games. Maybe you can have mega man, maybe, but battle toads and contra were something I played as a kid and beat them without any codes or help. If you wanted to talk about battle toads, mention that 2 player mode was next to impossible because you could actually hurt the other player and there was still the same number of health and power ups. Contra though... that was never irritating. Sure it was hard, but it was both possible and fun.
ReplyWhy not say Ghost Busters? It was impossible as far as I'm concerned! You could buy the wrong item, you could run into problems where you couldn't catch ghosts without an item you couldn't afford, making you unable to get money, you needed money for everything, you needed to constantly run back and forth, and if you somehow made it to the last part, there was NO WAY you were making it up all the stairs in the "Zuul" or however it was spelled (the last hotel building). Impossible, crazy impossible....
Punch-Out!! used passwords. So you COULD fight Tyson again without dragging your ass through the entire game.
ReplyTrue, though the password to get directly to Tyson himself was actually a secret code and not one you'd be given in normal gameplay. Still, you never had to go all the way back to the beginning.
I hate when people who dedicated themselves to certain games for hours upon hours, mastering the timing and memorizing the levels until they could beat them without trying, tell other people that said games are easy because they've beaten them.
Reply... I dunno. It may be because I'm over confident but I think that BT level looked easy.
ReplyI don't think this article really did the difficulty of BattleToads justice. It only really described one or two levels out of thirteen. The later ones are a real bitch: you have Snake Pit, in which you must ride snakes like those moving block strings in Mario, and is pretty much impossible without getting a warp or using a glitch to move on; Intruder Excluder, in which you must move up an elevator shaft inexplicably riddled with zapping enemies that kill you in two hits (the second of which usually comes as you recover from the first), periodic instakill gas expulsions, and fans that lower down push you away but higher up suck you in and greet you with instant death; Terra Tubes, a partially underwater level in which you encounter self-destructing zappy robots, electric eels, immortal sharks, wheels that you must flee from in a pattern you're forced to memorize, and killer rubber ducks which may not look very menacing, but are also immortal (you can only stun them, and to do so you need literally perfect timing), and one hit from most of them is instant death or may as well be; Rat Race, where you have to outrun the titular rat to a bomb and destroy it, which is unbelievably difficult to do at times, since one split second of hesitation is all it takes for the rat to get ahead of you; and the infamous Clinger Winger, in which you must make sharp turns along a ridiculously long track in order to keep away from a really strange swirly-ball... thing the WHOLE TIME, and one slow turn kills you.
...Good music, though.
Thing is, most of these games are hard because of bad game design rather than an actual fair challenge. Castlevania is a good example: the whip is unresponsive, anything that hits you makes you gravitate to the nearest bottomless pit, jumping is stiff, enemies spawn right on top of you, can't attack on the stairs, etc. etc.
Reply'Another World' was my personal demon. Watch the Friday the 13th video review by Angry Videogame Nerd on Youtube. It's classic.
ReplyI have been playing Battletoads for the better part of two decades. I have beaten the game with a Game Genie, and at one time I could make it through the hover bikes blindfolded just by listening to the music.
ReplyDespite all that, I STILL have never beaten level 11. Never figured out how to consistently take the corners with the regular controller.
it's basicly a memory trick you have to memorize the entire game start to finish. load up on free lives bouncing crows on level 2, warp half way through the speederbikes, warp to avoid the flying level memorize the rout on both the whell ride and the rat race. then the last level is just an attempt to shut off a part of your brain to get that micro second edge vs patterned attacks on the final stage. I broke both original controllers for my nes mastering the cornering and got to the point I would get a screen past the hover ball. Only once did I beat the game without warping through the tough levels. And this is from someone who played the game every day for 2 years.
I find the newer games way harder than those was. A couple of buttons and a D-pad controlled everything. Now you have to hold the x button for two seconds, while tapping the trigger, circling one of the analog sticks, holding the d-pad down and hitting the a and b buttons to get the sprite to walk.
ReplyNot to mention back then except for Zelda and similar battery backup games there was no save function. Which means that you had to go back through every level if you died anywhere. It was fun staying up all weekend beating them though. Those were the days.
I can't speak for the other nine games, but I beat Contra WITHOUT the thirty lives and without the stage select function. The Komani code wouldn't work on the damn copy that I bought, so I had to do this the hard way.
ReplyGOoD GOD MAN YOU NEED TO BE GIVEN A MEDAL
Ghosts & Goblins also fuct you double because to get the real ending, you had to beat it twice!
ReplyI could only beat Ninja Gaiden on an emu by cheating with save states, and even then it was hard!
Am I just crazy or are people saying the NES version of Mega Man was hard? We are talking about the first one, the one with Gutsman and Cutman, right? That was not a hard game.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesContra and Mike Tyson's Punch Out should never have made this list. Once you developed some skill at those games, it was just patterns.
Where is friggin' Master Blaster from SunSoft? Or that damn time sink The Goonies?
Agree about Tyson and Contra... even Gaiden was patterns if you could remember the enemies timing.
I assume you mean Blaster Master (Metroid in a tank) and The Goonies II (Metroid with a yo-yo), as the first Goonies never made it to the States.
The Goonies II wasn't all that difficult once you got the hang of the bizarre map system. There isn't even a final villain to get past.
Blaster Master was tougher, at least until you realize that the crab boss only moves side-to-side and can be mowed down with a level 7 or 8 gun. No way it should be ahead of anything on this list, though.
Yeah, Blaster Master is the game. But no password or save points meant you had to beat it in one sitting and conserve your lives. It was a game that required so much time, and if you ran out of lives, that's it. Contra was ridiculously easy once you got the hang of if, and could be beaten in like half an hour. The list of people that have beaten Contra is much longer than the list of people that have beaten Blaster Master. Contra should not even be this list. Everyone I knew as a kid beat Contra.
A final villain to beat for Goonies (or Goonies II, if that's what the only title released in the US was called) is inconsequential. There wasn't a final boss for the NES version of Ultima, but that was a really long tough game too. The labyrinth you were required to navigate in Goonies was pretty confusing. For a list of "Irritatingly Impossible Old-School video games", just finding your way in Goonies would qualify it.
I Think Ninja Gaiden is a no brainer for this list no one will argue there its f*****g hard and btw you actually can pick what turtle you are in TMNT on the NES all you had to do was pause the game, scroll down the list of which one you wanted to be, have them highlighted then unpause the game and thats it.
ReplyNever could beat that Finding Nemo game
Reply