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[NeoIkaruGAF]

Ikaruga? Please. I finished it with no continues. It’s doable. Gradius, Salamander, R-Type are much harder shooters. Good luck finishing them if you lose a life (and all your power-ups) in the later levels.
Abadox is another brutal NES shooter. Ridiculously hard, even with savestates I can’t get far in it.

Ghosts ‘n Goblins is a game I’ll never beat without savestates. The randomness of it, or rather, the deliberate cheapness of it that’s disguised as randomness is just my nemesis. I beat the SNES game and 100%ed Resurrection, but the original is unbelievably unforgiving. I’ve seen dozens of speedruns of it and a part of me still refuses to believe it’s possible.

 

[Krappadizzle]

Ikaruga? Please. I finished it with no continues. It’s doable.

 

[E-Cat]

Was in coming to say that.

Great game though.

Ikaruga is easy to beat, though. The challenge is not dying once and having a high score. I'm fairly good at the game, my record is around 26.5M on Normal mode.

F-Zero GX Story mode on Very Hard was quite challenging.

 

[Guileless]

Silver Surfer on the NES

I don't know if was hard or just really poorly designed. I do remember throwing my NES at the wall in pure anger. I think it's also my first memory of experiencing rage.

If there's some guy out there that has beaten Silver Surfer on NES, I would unironically vote for him for president.

 

[Krappadizzle]

If there's some guy out there that has beaten Silver Surfer on NES, I would unironically vote for him for president.

All those comic book based games were ridiculously hard. I must have rented that Spiderman/Sinister-Six game at least a dozen times and that Superman SNES one a handful as well.

 

[TheChadOfGaming]

final fantasy 11
brb getting killed by a rabbit

 

[kikii]

 

[Lasha]

Ikaruga, no question

Ikaruga made me a man. No difficulty seemed impossible after my first 1CC.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Toughest games I've beaten:
The Guardian Legend, Hollow Knight, SMT: Devil Survivor, Fire Emblem: Fates-Conquest.

 

[Metalman96]

Battletoads & Double Dragon on SNES was pretty fucking hard.

 

[Knightime_X]

Fuck this game. It's kinda fun but stupid hard.
I haven't bothered to try again in the last 30 years.

 

[Thief1987]

Best 2D platformer ever made

 

[kvltus lvlzvs]

Depends, puzzle wise I'd say Alundra.

 

[NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt]

Depends, puzzle wise I'd say Alundra.

 

[names are for friends]

Depends, puzzle wise I'd say Alundra.

Alundra is a very frustrating game

Realistically the hardest game I've played is the one I've gone at the hardest, Gunvolt 3 on hardest difficulty. The bosses are intense if you don't use the cheats the game gives you.

 

[PhillyPhreak11]

COD: World at War on veteran. The grenade spamming from the enemies almost made me stop playing. Shit was rage inducing.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Cuphead. Gave up at the sunflower boss. Lost patience. Probably got killed 20 times.

Adventures of Batman and Robin on Genesis. Rented the game over a weekend and got through around half the game. Insanely hard. It's basically a shooter on foot. I do give it credit for being hard with unpredictable enemy movement and shooting patterns. At that time a lot of shooters were super easy once you know the OP weapons and enemy patterns. Best graphics I'd seen on Genesis. Phenomenal what they could do at the end of the system's life.

Edit: SInce Philly above posted about WAW. I'll add:

COD4 on veteran. I forget how far into SP campaign it is, but the level where it looks like the Crossfire map I died from AI grenade spamming and gave up. There's a midway part of the map I kept dying and didn't know what to do. I'd try shooting and progressing, or bum rushing hoping to hit the checkpoint, but nothing worked.

 

[SeraphJan]

Gradius, Salamander, R-Type are much harder shooters. Good luck finishing them if you lose a life (and all your power-ups) in the later levels.
Abadox is another brutal NES shooter. Ridiculously hard, even with savestates I can’t get far in it.

Most shooter on NES or even SNES (especially horizontal ones, as many vertical shooters have items that give instant powerup such as the P from Raiden) are brutal, you either don't get hit at all, or you will continuous die non stop, the default peashooter cannot handle any mid to late game enemy waves

 

[Shifty1897]

Ikaruga taught me I'm not as good at video games as I thought.

I made it to level 2 and then it stole my girlfriend and killed my parents.

 

[Trogdor1123]

Ninja gaiden on the nes for me. Took me years to beat it. When I see people do zero hit runs it literally boggles my mind

 

[brettski2024]

The land of the dead or whatever it's called on Rayman Origins was super hard but I finally did it. The champions road in Wii U Mario 3d world I couldn't do.

 

[DeepEnigma]

The Souls of platform games before Souls was a thing. On an NES pad.

 

[Rhazkul]

Some Challenges in The Binding of Isaac are almost impossible to beat. One challenge is literally called "Ultra Hard" and it's really ultra hard. Regular runs can fuck you up too thanks to the incredible RNG and an engine that is programmed to troll players.

 

[Investor9872]

X-COM

 

[Mr Blobby]

Vagrant Story

brings back memories! Those one hit insta-kills if you didn't time it perfectly...

That son of a Bitch

oh yeah I remember trying to beat wizpig or whatever that fuck's name was and it took forever. That's probably one of the hardest for me too.

Dark Souls broke me as a gamer for a bit. After taking hours to defeat Ornstein and Smough, I had to reevaluate what I was doing with my life

Wonderboy is also up there:

 

[Northeastmonk]

The Rocketeer on SNES. You can’t name a single boss that’s harder than this stupid plane race.

 

[RCU005]

Ninja Gaiden

100% Diddy Kong Racing

EDIT: It made me laugh that I typed DKR because it was the first that popped in my mind, without reading any other comment, but there were many more.

 

[small_law]

In the first Destiny game, the first week of the Crota's End raid hard mode was a nightmare. We grinded that thing every night until the wee hours of the morning because we wanted to get it in the first week. We did Tuesday morning with just a few hours to go until reset, 4:00 a.m. back then I think.

There were a number of design issues with it, the worst of which was Crota instantly slamming the sword bearer when he got up from his stunned state. There was no delay, so learning that particular timing was rough.

After we beat it once, we actually all stayed up and ran our other two characters through because we had the mechanics down and we knew what to do finally.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Probably Ninja Gaiden on original Xbox. Not counting bullshit difficulty of many 80s and 90s games.

 

[Kamina]

WHAT DID YOU TOUCH?

He meant FondleCoc

 

[TerribleAtThisGame]

A bit different maybe but...

Hunt: Showdown. I've got about 800 hours and the game still sometimes feels insurmountable to me. It's as incredibly good as it is incredibly frustrating. There's a certain element of chaos built in that can get you destroyed at any turn that's hard to swallow when you're on a losing streak.

 

[Lupin25]

Celeste is a recent one I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned much. Just precise, beautiful, brutal platforming in the later levels.

As far as all time I’ve played? Shit there’s too many…

Silver Surfer, Contra, The WITNESS, og Battletoads and a few others come to mind.

 

[Koenigssee]

Winnie The Pooh Homerun Derby.
Such bs difficulty for a simple flash game.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Wonderboy is also up there:

Now that you’ve mentioned WB, I was reminded of NES Adventure Island. My GOD what a hard game that is. It’s been years since I played it on emulation, but I still vividly remember that one cave level where you have to jump between falling platforms amidst bats swooping down on you. Literally no room for mistake: lose momentum, miss one bat, jump on the wrong pixel and it’s a guaranteed death. The time limit in some later levels is nuts, too.

 

[Edmund]

Sekiro. What an amazing game though. Game made my heart pound like crazy lol.

 

[crazyjah2003]

That I finished? I'll go with Dark Souls 2 then. That I havent finished? Sekiro is the top of my mind

OMG those two games as well... Except I noped out of DS2 after the chariot and the getting to the Forge... Noped out of Sekiro at the white Monkey.

DS 2 felt so unfair that I thought the game was running at a higher framerate than it was playable at. Super fast zombies at the forge... nope.. I'm out.... after I exterminated all of them from the face of the earth mind you... still, not interested in anything harder/ more unfair than that so I quit.

 

[Banjo64]

When I saw the platinum requirement for Super Meat Boy and realised how hard the first few levels were I just uninstalled that shit.

 

[BigDeadFreak]

Hard mode for the thread: Anything after the 360/PS3 generation and No Soulslikes.

Lol, very true. It's hard to think of anything these days apart from Souls.

Even with the Souls games they are hard but back in the 80s - early 90s that would just have been the default difficulty for most games. Plus, you can always just spend ages levelling up to make the game easier. You can't do that with Ninja Gaiden on the NES

 

[SeasonedInTheAbyss]

Ghouls n Ghosts on the Sega Genesis.

 

[unlurkified]

Probably the release version of DMC3 where if you died at the boss, you had to start the entire level over. The boss rush level near the end was just pain.

Also, really anything in the 8bit/16bit era was tough as nails, a lot of it because of jank. For example:

-Lost Levels
-Fester’s Quest
-X-Men on Genesis
-Ghouls and Ghosts

The list goes on.

 

[Nico_D]

Probably Kingdom Hearts 1 - the ending in particular. But I don't really play "hard" games, I'm unable to have fun playing them.

 

[TrueLegend]

I find Soulsborne games easy(not a cakewalk I do die) and from that perspective, I will say
DMCV DMD is the hardest fair difficulty ever
Rise of Nations on Toughest Settings gets a mention

The unfair ones
Ninja Gaiden black at master ninja
And DMC3 unpatched DMD
and ofc goddamn Battletoads

 

[CGNoire]

The Ps3 version of Ninja Gaiden Black.

Idk if its the bluetooth controller connection causing lag or what but shit is way harder than the OG Xbox version ever was.

 

[Caio]

Without any doubt, Killzone2 at Elite Difficulty and Uncharted Collection at Brutal difficulty. It was really challenging.

 

[Operations66]

Project-X
Superfrog
Shadow of the Beast
I can think of hundreds from the Commodore days.

Shadow of the Beast isn’t hard. It’s impossible.

 

[Bartski]

mortal journey boss rush mode in Sekiro

 

[BbMajor7th]

In recent years, I'd say Hollow Knight, but that game is less difficult and more just petty in its design.

 

[mrmustard]

There are many more, but i chosse theese 5: Battletoads, Gradius, Life Force, Silver Surfer, Ghosts n’ Goblins (all on NES)

 

[RAIDEN1]

Donkey Kong Country on the SNES....any of them in the trilogy....if you don't time your jumps right, precision is massive in those games....

 

[AV]

Played a ton of notoriously hard games. Hardest game I actually finished is probably still Sekiro. Did Zelda 2 but ended up savescumming a bit so not counting that.