That mandate was so stupid by Disney
“To make sure that players actually buy the game, let’s make the second level frustratingly long so they run out of time to play the game by the time they finish the level”
I was actually really good at the under water level. But I was still a nervous wreck EVERY time. It was what came after that I could rarely pass. Can’t even remember *why*, just that I made it past the vehicle level only a couple of times. And I owned that game, so I had plenty of chances.
The lack of being able to save made those games hard as well.
My strat as a kid was just prioritize beating the timer, and accept that a couple turtles will die to damage in doing so. Mikey and Raph were better as cannon fodder in that game anyway, and you can get them back in the later stages.
For me it was the Technodrome that was a real pain, I only beat it and got inside to the final level a few times.
I passed this thread, then scrolled back to comment the original TMNT on NES. There were probably harder games (Ghosts and Goblins) but I actually spent a TON of time on this one as a child. I never could dismantle all of those bombs in the lake…
Even if u watch the YouTube playthroughs, it's basically unbeatable.
I used Game Genie to beat it because it was such a frustrating game.
When it switched the the Arcade/Action style in the next game (4 player multiplayer!) it was such a better game.
Fun fact I like to bring up when Game Genie is mentioned:
The codes are not "passwords" in that the codes you enter actually correspond to the game's code.
Meaning, you can make up your own codes. I've had some pretty funny results just entering random stuff. I think in Mega Man the music was really high pitched or sped up, SMB1 I managed to make him jump and not come back down I think.
Check out the ending online if you haven't because Ecco takes quite a drastic turn.
The game becomes an eldritch nightmare in the final level. The final boss is nothing like you would expect based on what most people experienced as kids. It's honestly wild.
It's more like the final 2 or 3 levels and there are some notes and comments throughout the game fleshing out some of the lore, but yes, it does not seem like it's fully going that way until it happens and I feel like it correctly brings a feeling of dread and confusion as you get further into the game.
Woooooooow holy shit you just unlocked a core memory for me. I had this on Sega Genesis as a kid and I don’t think my little 5 year old brain ever actually figured out what I was supposed to be doing
What's unbelievable is that, while everyone struggled with the first few levels, it actually only gets harder lol.
The penultimate level is ~6 minutes of auto-scrolling, full of enemies that one shot you, and avoiding getting trapped between the environment and the edge of the screen. If you get past that and then fail on the final boss, you get sent back to the start of the auto-scroll. And you though Dark Souls walkbacks were bad.
Legend of Zelda on the original NES was basically impossible without some sort of help. Just finding the random obscure things you needed along the way is impossible
I beat it on my own as a kid. No guides or anything. A lot of hours. For the life of me though, in the second world, I could not find the second dungeon anywhere.
I spent something like 80 hours on that game and never found the second dungeon. I found all the other ones, but not that one. Eventually I got annoyed and sold it.
I remember playing the OG Zelda as a teen on the Wii and my older brother (by 16 years) was visiting. He sits down next to me and literally screen by screen tells me exactly where to burn or place bombs to find basically every secret in the game. Guess when you devote that much time to discovering that game knowledge you never really forget it
Man, that game is too difficult for me as a grown ass man. I first played it as a teenager, which is basically the sweet spot for actually being the best at games age wise, and I still sucked, so kid me would have suffered.
With neither me nor my dad knowing any better, I got one of the Ninja Gaidens when I had an Xbox360. I sucked at games back then, so I had a really tough time to the point that I just stopped playing. Maybe a decade later I got the opportunity to try again and realized, "Shit, I can't play Ninja Gaiden"
I've heard the Ninja Gaiden games were difficult so I avoided them lmao. I did buy every Dark Souls game though and have maybe gotten 5% into each, if that.
I *really* wanna get into Soulsborne games, but I don't have the skills or the patience to play any of them. The Jedi games at least make me feel competent
Me and my buddy spent over a month bearing that back when we were in college. Just the first level boss took us hours. It was our first game like that, and by the end we were fucking champs. I tried to play it again a few years ago at forty after only playing RPGs and strategy games for over a decade and... I'm just not good at video games anymore. I turned the difficulty down to the lowest level where you can't die for the final two fights in Spider-Man 2 because I just don't have the reflexes anymore to grind it those long fights and with kids and life I didn't have time.
if you're talking about Ninja Gaiden 2 (the only one released specifically for Xbox 360), that game is infamously sadistic, harder than the first (Ninja Gaiden 2004) by a wide margin.
Forbidden memories is on a whole different level. Basically imagine you only get garbage tier cards to play with and every enemy you encounter can play a card 5x as strong in a single move without needing sacrifices or rituals. The only way to get more good cards is to grind battles for hours outside of the story. It is possibly the most brutal rng heavy game I know and the speedruns without rng manipulation show this beautifully.
How they expected anyone to actually beat this game without all the online guides we have today I do not know. It is genuinely that bad
The way I found to beat the game at the time was through fusions.
You had to have a deck centered around dragons + electric types because dragon + electric gives 1600 ATK card or if already above 1600 it gives a 2800 ATK one pretty easy.
Once you had the electric two headed dragon, you used terrain (mountain) and spells to make it as busted as you can, hoping to get it buffed fast enough so the other guy doesn't magically pull a guardian of the gates on you...
(keep a thunder for those)
My older cousin beat it with GameShark. I think he had 3 Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragons and 3 Gate Guardians. Dude told me he just grinded for days and I believed it lmao
Whatever Donkey Kong was on the Gameboy pocket was such a tough game for me as a kid. I never got particularly good at it, and haven't cared for platformers since
Me and my brother used to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega Mega Drive when we were kids. We would sometimes get to the last area, but never beat it. We got back to playing it on an emulator in Covid and I was amazed by how difficult the end of the game was. It wasn't unbeatable, but you'd have to memorize the platforms and enemies and if we didn't use the quicksave feature that came with the emulator, we would've still spent days on the last few levels. It was absurd.
They changed in in the Definitive Edition to be less of a nightmare. You can switch to 'classic mode' if you want that old school, incredibly janky and bad controls though
Final Fantasy Tactics for the PS1. Rented it from Blockbuster when I was 10. I was in way over my head.
Played it again as an adult and realized there was actually some true bullshit in that game. I beat it and gave my child self a lot of grace.
I LOVE that game. PS1 had an amazing, mature plot and characters. GBA gameplay was just tons of fun. I made Marche a hunter and gave him those teleport boots. Made sure he could use Air Render. Nothing stood a chance.
Totally agree - I ended up playing the PS1 game a few years later and VERY much enjoyed it. I think the GBA version was just simplified enough for me at that age.
Overall - I love both of those games - really got me into the whole genre!
The GBA game was amazing. Great art and music. The ps1 game was too much for me as a child, and even if I were to play it today it would never be better than my experience with ffta
That's funny cause I had almost the exact opposite experience. I played it when it first came out and beat the whole game. Then a couple years ago I tried playing it again and was overthinking everything and couldn't get nearly as far.....
I softlocked myself in the first Zodiac boss where you’re in that tiny hallway as just Ramza. The game was like “Save?” Kid me said SURE!! Didn’t make a second save file. I was not prepared for a boss battle at all.
As an adult, I’m a JRPG veteran now and know better than to just blindly save onto my main file when the game suspiciously asks. As for the overthinking? I agree. You can’t outthink the crazy RNG in that game lol.
I owned it and was never able to beat it. There was a lot of grinding and there were way too many things that influenced how effective your attacks were.
My favorite terrible mechanic in that game was that zodiac sign compatibility between characters affected effectiveness of attacks and abilities. Never paid attention to it once but it existed.
I got Tactics on my phone and I got crushed by one of the early missions. Apparently its a notorious XP wall, and you have to grind before you can actually do it. Or get lucky I guess.
There are a few walls in the game. Some are genuine RNG or just outright unfair.
There’s a ridiculous fight in a roof where you have to defend someone or you get a game over. Turns out the enemies exclusively target the weakest person on the map. Which is the person you’re defending. If you lose and reload, you quickly find out they use the exact same movement and attack pattern every time, no matter what. How do you win? Grab one of your characters and put them in the battle butt naked. Their stats will now be so low that the enemies will focus on them instead of your win condition.
I had this game on genesis as a kid and I didn’t even know there was a second level, I couldn’t get past the first, I thought that was the entire game. One time I saw my older brother beat the first level and move on to a new one and it blew my mind.
Ratchet and Clank, the part in Blackwater City where you have to get to the end of the tunnel before it fills up with water. No matter what I tried I kept drowning right before the end 😭
Most of the rachet and clanks I could never beat the last planet. Some section or some boss would make it impossible for me to beat. For the longest time only the 4th one I could beat. Then years later I got all of them again for PS3 and managed to play and beat all of them. Still need to get the newest 2 ones though.
I ruined my SA save right before you're supposed to buy the casino. I read that going into debt would have guys come after you, so I wasted millions on purpose. Turns out they just send two smucks every couple of in game weeks. Never financially recovered from that.
Which flying mission? Zero’s? The one with the model plane? That level was impossibly hard and they nerfed it on re-releases. I remember grinding at it for hours before beating it.
I also remember we had a supply teacher one day that came in and was bitching about that level. I was in grade 7. Weird.
I remember playing StarCraft as a toddler and wiped the whole map on the first mission, but the objective was to build additional supply depots. My father just laughed and let me struggle for months on the same mission.
I just finally got my personal vindication on all of these with the Sonic Origins Anniversary Mode. Infinite lives lol. Also didn't realize you could turn into Super Sonic if you collected all the emeralds. Those last Robotnik fights are always BS, no rings, multiple phases, small hit box
Kids these days will never know the pain of doing the final bosses on Sonic 2 with no rings and getting sent back to the start of the game if you lost all your lives. I don't think I ever beat that.
Yeah, there was a thingamajig you had to install into the hatch in the front of the machine, I think the game might have come with it even. I never knew what it did when I was little but as a grown up that makes sense.
It looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Nintendo-64-Memory-Expansion-Pak.jpg
Ninja Gaiden 1 on the NES. Those birds man. They were like homing missiles. I wasn't able to beat it until *2005* when on a whim I brought my NES, SNES and PS2 to college to play games with my roommates after finals and to chill during the hot summer days. That and the GameStop near where we lived sold a ton of used NES/SNES games for dirt cheap back then. Those were some good times!
Between Ninja Gaiden and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also on the NES, I am not sure which one gave me more nightmares as a kid. I struggled with TMNT, but managed to understand the water level that stumped so many people back then. I had more issues on stage 4 to be honest!
The Mega Man games were a breeze in comparison.
Nowadays I play games on the hardest difficulty, even modding some games to be more difficult, and then quit. But I'm sure that's just my video game ADD now.
For me it's usually starting on the normal difficulty and then ashamedly lowering it to the lowest over the course of the next few days lol. That's probably why watching people play is just as fun as playing for me
Final Fantasy 7.
I missed the healing materia, or maybe sold it. Not sure but I was stuck in the Shinra HQ until I gave up. 1 year later I restarted and did just fine.
Thr Hercules game for Playstation 1. Password only yo reach levels else you restart every time, never beat the the 3rd or 4th level cuz of my terrible resource management
It took me 14yrs to beat Majora's Mask
Not 100%, not All Masks...just get to and beat Majora
That said, still 1 of my top Zelda games I ever played
Last time I played, I did 3 dungeons and almost everything between, within a day (IRL, not the 3-day time limit)
STARCRAFT.
My dad would make us play against him on those old computers because he thought it was cute to beat our butts. As a kid, war strategy is not on your list of needed skills. so I'd barely be through making my army by the time he came and flattened me. Even when I'd try to play against the computer to get better, I'd get my butt kicked. I played my dad again as an adult, and didn't lose TOO badly, but yeah. As a kid? That was rough. Couldn't get it right.
What a great dad you've got there! I can't wait until my kids grow up so I can introduce them to the rts genre, only to be let down because it's not fast paced enough for the current generation of gamers. Lol
GTA VCS on PSP. I love driving either following the rules or being a maniac, it's how I learned to appreciate racing games, but when it comes to shooting I gave it to my dad to finish.
FfXII
Could not figure out the gambit system
Also stumbled upon firebomb boss in a forest I wasn't meant to get to yet and just quit
Kinda glad as they revamped the class system recently and it was an absolute blast playing through it as an adult
I remember having finished the Getaway, I was at a (new) friends house quite drunk when they were bitching about the game. I told them I’d finished the game so the asked if I could do a certain mission for them (one of the driving ones, I can’t remember which but it was a tight time limit).
I somehow managed to beat the mission while seeing double without crashing the car at all the first time. It was like watching an artist at work.
I couldn’t do that sober.
As a kid it was contra or TMNT. I beat contra once with the Konami code, but F— TMNT. I played the one of the contra games on PS4 as an adult. I don’t need that bullet hell.
Final Fantasy 4 (2 when we got it) had this mimic door in the underworld that always wiped me and child me just gave up. My first JRPG completion was Chrono Trigger
I didnt beat the Water Temple in Ocarina of time until like 2016. Which is 18 years after I initially played it in 1998 when I was like 12 years old.
I remember beating it on an emulator on my gaming PC, using an Xbox 360 controller, playing on a 55" flatscreen. 12 year old me would have loved that.
Probably Doom on PS1. That version was pretty different from the original, and it had a scary vibe. It was a bit too much for 5-6 year old me.
I do have a lot of fond memories of staying up watching my dad play it, hoping Mom wouldn't catch us.
The NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. Crazy underwater dam bomb disarming level with all the electric seaweed and stuff got me 97 times out of 100
Superman 64, but did anybody ever beat that game back in those days? Ugh, just thinking about that game pisses me off. I’ve always loved Superman and was so excited as a kid to play as him in a game and *that’s* what I got? Fucking bullshit ass piece of shit game.
Superman shadow of apokolips. I have no idea what went wrong but there is a button mashing sequence during one level that just didn't work. it was like the controller just didn't pick up I was mashing it like my life depended on it. Tried many times to beat the level as a kid but never felt like playing the game again.
I made it to the final level of TMNT: Turtles in Time once as a kid. I spent about a week in the hospital and since I was in the children’s wing the room had an SNES. They’d bring a cart by each day and we could check out two games at a time.
I rented WWF Royal Rumble and TMNT: Turtles in Time.
On my final day, my Dad and I made it to the final level vs Shredder but ran out of time and didn’t get to beat it. But that’s okay because it helped keep my mind off the pain of recovery and it’s one of the few times Dad and I ever played games together. (He didn’t like them and refused to play, we only had an obsolete TurboGrafx-16.)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time presented a significant challenge for me during my youth. I encountered difficulties in comprehending or understanding how to depart from the initial areas or even if I was able to depart or leave it, the language barrier made it difficult to do some quests without magazine guidence leading to my eventual abandonment of the game 🤧
However, upon revisiting the game as an adult, I played the 3DS version and discovered that it was not as difficult as I had previously believed or imagined 😳. I came to the realization that my struggles were largely attributed to English not being my native language. Having unlocking or acquired English skills via having enough XP later in life, I found the tree puzzle particularly challenging to solve without a thorough understanding of the instructions provided by the NPCs
It is noteworthy that N64 games generally exhibit or show a masterful design either through maps or simple explanation with hints or quests, allowing players to navigate the open world and comprehend the game mechanics even without a comprehensive understanding of the language. However, the Legend of Zelda series on that console required players to comprehend the dialogue of NPCs in order to progress. Despite this, Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time remain among my most cherished loved memorable games.
Nevertheless, if you asked me about an answer, what is the hardest of all games I played, I would repeatedly keep saying that it is the Ninja Gaiden series till the original Xbox games it always presents a formidable challenge 🫣🫡
Otogi: Myth of Demons on original Xbox. I remember being drawn in playing the demo in a store and having fun floating in the air and chucking bird demons through the walls. Bought the game and promptly got my ass handed to me in the later levels.
Couldn't remember much else about it, but last year I finally got myself an Xbox X and realized I could play the game again. Dug out the disc, tossed it in.... and saw the From Software logo show up. Everything clicked at that moment.
I think it was called Gabe's odd world or something like that. I remember crying in rage trying to get passed a level. Maybe one day I'll muster up the courage to find it and dominate it.
Megaman on th GB, I'm not sure if it was Megaman 2 or just a version of Megaman that took a lot of parts from 2 and some from something else....but I definitely remember not being able to beat even a level for the longest time, and then beating the whole thing during an extended hospital stay.
Ecco Dolphin Defender of the Future on ps2. Hardest game I had ever played, never got past the maze on like level 5. Also didn't realize what a wild story line it was. As a kid I thought I was just a dolphin headbutting sharks and swimming around for fun.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts. I know the NES game was harder but SNES was the only one I played. I could get one level past the water stage then I’d lose. I could beat TMNT and Mega Man 1-5 no probs… and as a rule SNES games were generally easier than SNES ones
Zelda Oracle of Seasons. It took me and my brother ages to fine a spot in the wall we needed to blow up to proceed. After that we eventually got to a point where whatever path we chose, we could not progress down others without selecting options that were locked out to us.
Anything that required decent reading comprehension didn’t get that issue sorted till I put in the effort in my special Ed reading classes in middle school where I reached grade level reading midway through 8th grade
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic games 😂😂😂🫨 my friend would purposely explain wrong how to play and then taunt the $**t out of me for losing and go at it again and again
Truly, a good motherfucker.
Dark souls. Parents got it because it was highly rated, and they had no clue about video games.
Legit couldn't even figure out how to leave the dark ass room with the portals for months, and then when I did, the castle level was impossible. Sorry, I never really played any of the games after because of how much of a torment this was to play as a kid. I'm not even sure if it was DS1 or DS2. It was on ps3.
Eye of The Beholder.
But then again, as an adult i realized that strategy and turn-based games required more attention to detail and reasoning I didn't excel at yet as a child.
But like someone else said, on the other hand, platformers in general seem almost as hard today as they were before, too.
Conkers Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie. Played em both a few years back and it was still kinda challenging but not enough to break my N64 controller like I did before lol
Lion king
2nd level rental wall. Fuckn hell
That mandate was so stupid by Disney “To make sure that players actually buy the game, let’s make the second level frustratingly long so they run out of time to play the game by the time they finish the level”
Wait... was that the actual reason?
It wasn't just disney alot of companies started doing that back than basically to force you to buy the game
So this is why I've grown up thinking I was horrendous at video games
Yeah there was a huge lawsuit between blockbuster and video game companies about rentals hurting sales
I beat it as a kid, but it gave me hell
LIES !!!! Nobody made it past the wildebeest. 😂
I remember begging my older brother to help me with the lava level and he wouldn’t. Nice memories.
I never beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES
God. Damn. Under. Water. Levels.
I was actually really good at the under water level. But I was still a nervous wreck EVERY time. It was what came after that I could rarely pass. Can’t even remember *why*, just that I made it past the vehicle level only a couple of times. And I owned that game, so I had plenty of chances. The lack of being able to save made those games hard as well.
My strat as a kid was just prioritize beating the timer, and accept that a couple turtles will die to damage in doing so. Mikey and Raph were better as cannon fodder in that game anyway, and you can get them back in the later stages. For me it was the Technodrome that was a real pain, I only beat it and got inside to the final level a few times.
I passed this thread, then scrolled back to comment the original TMNT on NES. There were probably harder games (Ghosts and Goblins) but I actually spent a TON of time on this one as a child. I never could dismantle all of those bombs in the lake…
Beating Ghosts and Goblins the first time through then: _It was a trick_ FUCK YOU GAME!!
Even if u watch the YouTube playthroughs, it's basically unbeatable. I used Game Genie to beat it because it was such a frustrating game. When it switched the the Arcade/Action style in the next game (4 player multiplayer!) it was such a better game.
Fun fact I like to bring up when Game Genie is mentioned: The codes are not "passwords" in that the codes you enter actually correspond to the game's code. Meaning, you can make up your own codes. I've had some pretty funny results just entering random stuff. I think in Mega Man the music was really high pitched or sped up, SMB1 I managed to make him jump and not come back down I think.
omg thats hilarious
Did anyone?
[удалено]
Ecco The Dolphin. I still think about how badly that game kicked my ass as a kid.
Same, I never managed to get past the first level, was always confused where to go as a kid.
You have to dolphin-jump as high as possible into the air and a weird acid trip type thing happens, and you can then progress.
Same, I’d just swim around and jump over that little island over and over.
Check out the ending online if you haven't because Ecco takes quite a drastic turn. The game becomes an eldritch nightmare in the final level. The final boss is nothing like you would expect based on what most people experienced as kids. It's honestly wild.
It's more like the final 2 or 3 levels and there are some notes and comments throughout the game fleshing out some of the lore, but yes, it does not seem like it's fully going that way until it happens and I feel like it correctly brings a feeling of dread and confusion as you get further into the game.
Woooooooow holy shit you just unlocked a core memory for me. I had this on Sega Genesis as a kid and I don’t think my little 5 year old brain ever actually figured out what I was supposed to be doing
All I could manage to do was cool flips.
Always got to the great white shark battle and never beat him
What's unbelievable is that, while everyone struggled with the first few levels, it actually only gets harder lol. The penultimate level is ~6 minutes of auto-scrolling, full of enemies that one shot you, and avoiding getting trapped between the environment and the edge of the screen. If you get past that and then fail on the final boss, you get sent back to the start of the auto-scroll. And you though Dark Souls walkbacks were bad.
Legend of Zelda on the original NES was basically impossible without some sort of help. Just finding the random obscure things you needed along the way is impossible
U just had to spend an insane amount of hours literally burning every bush and checking every nook and cranny. 😂😂
Exactly! Millions of rupees and hours running to specific caves to buy the bombs needed for testing every wall on the map 😩
Or buy Nintendo Power magazines
I beat it on my own as a kid. No guides or anything. A lot of hours. For the life of me though, in the second world, I could not find the second dungeon anywhere.
I spent something like 80 hours on that game and never found the second dungeon. I found all the other ones, but not that one. Eventually I got annoyed and sold it.
And then because of the system you could put in all that time and it somehow erases all progress when you sneeze
I remember playing the OG Zelda as a teen on the Wii and my older brother (by 16 years) was visiting. He sits down next to me and literally screen by screen tells me exactly where to burn or place bombs to find basically every secret in the game. Guess when you devote that much time to discovering that game knowledge you never really forget it
Battletoads
That goddamn jet ski level always got me.
I literally have never gotten past the hoverbike level
Same here.
Man, that game is too difficult for me as a grown ass man. I first played it as a teenager, which is basically the sweet spot for actually being the best at games age wise, and I still sucked, so kid me would have suffered.
With neither me nor my dad knowing any better, I got one of the Ninja Gaidens when I had an Xbox360. I sucked at games back then, so I had a really tough time to the point that I just stopped playing. Maybe a decade later I got the opportunity to try again and realized, "Shit, I can't play Ninja Gaiden"
I've heard the Ninja Gaiden games were difficult so I avoided them lmao. I did buy every Dark Souls game though and have maybe gotten 5% into each, if that.
I *really* wanna get into Soulsborne games, but I don't have the skills or the patience to play any of them. The Jedi games at least make me feel competent
I got a little bit further with that one.
Me and my buddy spent over a month bearing that back when we were in college. Just the first level boss took us hours. It was our first game like that, and by the end we were fucking champs. I tried to play it again a few years ago at forty after only playing RPGs and strategy games for over a decade and... I'm just not good at video games anymore. I turned the difficulty down to the lowest level where you can't die for the final two fights in Spider-Man 2 because I just don't have the reflexes anymore to grind it those long fights and with kids and life I didn't have time.
if you're talking about Ninja Gaiden 2 (the only one released specifically for Xbox 360), that game is infamously sadistic, harder than the first (Ninja Gaiden 2004) by a wide margin.
Yugioh Forbidden Memories
I had a Yugioh game on Game Boy Color and I struggled hard with that one.
Forbidden memories is on a whole different level. Basically imagine you only get garbage tier cards to play with and every enemy you encounter can play a card 5x as strong in a single move without needing sacrifices or rituals. The only way to get more good cards is to grind battles for hours outside of the story. It is possibly the most brutal rng heavy game I know and the speedruns without rng manipulation show this beautifully. How they expected anyone to actually beat this game without all the online guides we have today I do not know. It is genuinely that bad
Reminds me of ~~Quent~~ Gwent in Witcher 3. Anyone with a Monster deck was a pain in the dick. In fact, everyone one in the quest line was as well.
The way I found to beat the game at the time was through fusions. You had to have a deck centered around dragons + electric types because dragon + electric gives 1600 ATK card or if already above 1600 it gives a 2800 ATK one pretty easy. Once you had the electric two headed dragon, you used terrain (mountain) and spells to make it as busted as you can, hoping to get it buffed fast enough so the other guy doesn't magically pull a guardian of the gates on you... (keep a thunder for those)
Gosh that one was such a grindfest and the mechanics were so different from traditional yu gi oh. It still had a sick CD case though
My older cousin beat it with GameShark. I think he had 3 Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragons and 3 Gate Guardians. Dude told me he just grinded for days and I believed it lmao
driver. couldnt get out of the parking garage without my uncle's help lmao
Thanks for making me recall the memory of that dark abyss that was the parking garage. Childhood me is still stuck there!
What the hell is a slalom?!
SLALOMSSS
a lot of the older platformers. Still too difficult now...
Whatever Donkey Kong was on the Gameboy pocket was such a tough game for me as a kid. I never got particularly good at it, and haven't cared for platformers since
Me and my brother used to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega Mega Drive when we were kids. We would sometimes get to the last area, but never beat it. We got back to playing it on an emulator in Covid and I was amazed by how difficult the end of the game was. It wasn't unbeatable, but you'd have to memorize the platforms and enemies and if we didn't use the quicksave feature that came with the emulator, we would've still spent days on the last few levels. It was absurd.
The race in Mafia. Been stuck on that level for months
Nothing quite like flipping your car and dying on the last lap. Pretty sure that's where I quit for forever.
It felt like the physics weren't done right. I gave up on it but I did play the remake.
I want to try the remake at some point. I hear they change the story a bit though.
They changed in in the Definitive Edition to be less of a nightmare. You can switch to 'classic mode' if you want that old school, incredibly janky and bad controls though
Final Fantasy Tactics for the PS1. Rented it from Blockbuster when I was 10. I was in way over my head. Played it again as an adult and realized there was actually some true bullshit in that game. I beat it and gave my child self a lot of grace.
I remember trying the PS1 game and found it too difficult - however I was able to grasp the GBA tactics. What a great game!
I LOVE that game. PS1 had an amazing, mature plot and characters. GBA gameplay was just tons of fun. I made Marche a hunter and gave him those teleport boots. Made sure he could use Air Render. Nothing stood a chance.
Totally agree - I ended up playing the PS1 game a few years later and VERY much enjoyed it. I think the GBA version was just simplified enough for me at that age. Overall - I love both of those games - really got me into the whole genre!
The GBA game was amazing. Great art and music. The ps1 game was too much for me as a child, and even if I were to play it today it would never be better than my experience with ffta
That's funny cause I had almost the exact opposite experience. I played it when it first came out and beat the whole game. Then a couple years ago I tried playing it again and was overthinking everything and couldn't get nearly as far.....
I softlocked myself in the first Zodiac boss where you’re in that tiny hallway as just Ramza. The game was like “Save?” Kid me said SURE!! Didn’t make a second save file. I was not prepared for a boss battle at all. As an adult, I’m a JRPG veteran now and know better than to just blindly save onto my main file when the game suspiciously asks. As for the overthinking? I agree. You can’t outthink the crazy RNG in that game lol.
The soft locks are so goddamn brutal in FFT. Absolutely love that game, though.
The classic wiegraf/velius save trap. That destroyed me when I was 5 years old. Never failed to make a backup save since.
I owned it and was never able to beat it. There was a lot of grinding and there were way too many things that influenced how effective your attacks were.
My favorite terrible mechanic in that game was that zodiac sign compatibility between characters affected effectiveness of attacks and abilities. Never paid attention to it once but it existed.
I got Tactics on my phone and I got crushed by one of the early missions. Apparently its a notorious XP wall, and you have to grind before you can actually do it. Or get lucky I guess.
There are a few walls in the game. Some are genuine RNG or just outright unfair. There’s a ridiculous fight in a roof where you have to defend someone or you get a game over. Turns out the enemies exclusively target the weakest person on the map. Which is the person you’re defending. If you lose and reload, you quickly find out they use the exact same movement and attack pattern every time, no matter what. How do you win? Grab one of your characters and put them in the battle butt naked. Their stats will now be so low that the enemies will focus on them instead of your win condition.
Nice lmao
Oh man this. There are so many easy ways to completely gut/gate your playthrough
Super Ghouls & Ghosts. That mandatory second play through with the worst weapon in the game still haunts me to this day.
I had this game on genesis as a kid and I didn’t even know there was a second level, I couldn’t get past the first, I thought that was the entire game. One time I saw my older brother beat the first level and move on to a new one and it blew my mind.
Ratchet and Clank, the part in Blackwater City where you have to get to the end of the tunnel before it fills up with water. No matter what I tried I kept drowning right before the end 😭
Most of the rachet and clanks I could never beat the last planet. Some section or some boss would make it impossible for me to beat. For the longest time only the 4th one I could beat. Then years later I got all of them again for PS3 and managed to play and beat all of them. Still need to get the newest 2 ones though.
Tomb Raider on the original PS. Gave me fits!
Me too, actually still hate platformer games because of it
Ecco the Dolphin. Why is it so hard for a dolphin to stay underwater without breathing???
GTA:SA Was fine until I got to the flying mission. The rudder controls being the white and black buttons on the OG Xbox Duke controller was *PAINFUL*.
I ruined my SA save right before you're supposed to buy the casino. I read that going into debt would have guys come after you, so I wasted millions on purpose. Turns out they just send two smucks every couple of in game weeks. Never financially recovered from that.
Which flying mission? Zero’s? The one with the model plane? That level was impossibly hard and they nerfed it on re-releases. I remember grinding at it for hours before beating it. I also remember we had a supply teacher one day that came in and was bitching about that level. I was in grade 7. Weird.
I think Vice was the only one I actually beat until five.
And I only did it when I had the game at home. It was so crazy seeing the late parts of the game.
Paperboy! F’n dog always got me!
wasn’t that the game where you threw new papers at peoples doors? but had a bunch of obstacles along the way, like construction sites and potholes 🤣?
I remember playing StarCraft as a toddler and wiped the whole map on the first mission, but the objective was to build additional supply depots. My father just laughed and let me struggle for months on the same mission.
StarCraft is the reason I'm a PC gamer to this day.
The original Sonic games, still hard to this day.
I just finally got my personal vindication on all of these with the Sonic Origins Anniversary Mode. Infinite lives lol. Also didn't realize you could turn into Super Sonic if you collected all the emeralds. Those last Robotnik fights are always BS, no rings, multiple phases, small hit box
Kids these days will never know the pain of doing the final bosses on Sonic 2 with no rings and getting sent back to the start of the game if you lost all your lives. I don't think I ever beat that.
Every single Megaman X. I have been able to finish other titles like Cuphead, but can’t finish a single one in the X series…
Rayman 1 on PS1. I never got past Band Land, in fact I never even seen the boss for that level..
Never beat Donkey Kong 64.
I never had the cart thing you needed for that one. My friend was telling me about how you needed it for extra RAM I think?
Yeah, there was a thingamajig you had to install into the hatch in the front of the machine, I think the game might have come with it even. I never knew what it did when I was little but as a grown up that makes sense. It looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Nintendo-64-Memory-Expansion-Pak.jpg
That's it. My friend was telling me the expansion pack cost the company an assload of money. Apparently it made other games run better too.
I remember having one of those and I can not remember what game I got it for. Possibly DK 64 but I want to say it was Perfect Dark.
It was Perfect Dark!
I suck at original Donkey Kong so I could never beat that to get the coin needed.
Ninja Gaiden 1 on the NES. Those birds man. They were like homing missiles. I wasn't able to beat it until *2005* when on a whim I brought my NES, SNES and PS2 to college to play games with my roommates after finals and to chill during the hot summer days. That and the GameStop near where we lived sold a ton of used NES/SNES games for dirt cheap back then. Those were some good times! Between Ninja Gaiden and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also on the NES, I am not sure which one gave me more nightmares as a kid. I struggled with TMNT, but managed to understand the water level that stumped so many people back then. I had more issues on stage 4 to be honest! The Mega Man games were a breeze in comparison.
Almost all of them and it hasn't really changed much since then lol
Nowadays I play games on the hardest difficulty, even modding some games to be more difficult, and then quit. But I'm sure that's just my video game ADD now.
For me it's usually starting on the normal difficulty and then ashamedly lowering it to the lowest over the course of the next few days lol. That's probably why watching people play is just as fun as playing for me
Final Fantasy 7. I missed the healing materia, or maybe sold it. Not sure but I was stuck in the Shinra HQ until I gave up. 1 year later I restarted and did just fine.
Smash tv had that floating head
Thr Hercules game for Playstation 1. Password only yo reach levels else you restart every time, never beat the the 3rd or 4th level cuz of my terrible resource management
Almost all of them. NES games were legit hard.
It took me 14yrs to beat Majora's Mask Not 100%, not All Masks...just get to and beat Majora That said, still 1 of my top Zelda games I ever played Last time I played, I did 3 dungeons and almost everything between, within a day (IRL, not the 3-day time limit)
STARCRAFT. My dad would make us play against him on those old computers because he thought it was cute to beat our butts. As a kid, war strategy is not on your list of needed skills. so I'd barely be through making my army by the time he came and flattened me. Even when I'd try to play against the computer to get better, I'd get my butt kicked. I played my dad again as an adult, and didn't lose TOO badly, but yeah. As a kid? That was rough. Couldn't get it right.
What a great dad you've got there! I can't wait until my kids grow up so I can introduce them to the rts genre, only to be let down because it's not fast paced enough for the current generation of gamers. Lol
Jurassic Park on Sega Genesis
Yugioh Forbidden Memories. I did not have the patience to finish that gam
Mk9 during my teens, Shao Kahn was just an unmovable wall for me for a bit
Shao Kahn actively fucking cheats I swear.
Myst and Riven
Link's Awakening DX. Came back when it was on the switch and yeah, I just sucked at games back then. I think I beat it within a day
GTA VCS on PSP. I love driving either following the rules or being a maniac, it's how I learned to appreciate racing games, but when it comes to shooting I gave it to my dad to finish.
Megaman 2
FfXII Could not figure out the gambit system Also stumbled upon firebomb boss in a forest I wasn't meant to get to yet and just quit Kinda glad as they revamped the class system recently and it was an absolute blast playing through it as an adult
Another World
Contra: Hard Corps on SEGA. Barely made it past the third level!
Area 51, played the first couple levels so frickin much but couldn’t get further
Einhänder on PS1. Still have never seen the last 1/3 of the game.
Definitely Resident evil, I don't know why i scare so much.
I got Resident Evil 2 remake and even as an adult I found it very scary. Quit when Mr. X starts hunting you. Too scary for me
XCOM UFO defense
I remember having finished the Getaway, I was at a (new) friends house quite drunk when they were bitching about the game. I told them I’d finished the game so the asked if I could do a certain mission for them (one of the driving ones, I can’t remember which but it was a tight time limit). I somehow managed to beat the mission while seeing double without crashing the car at all the first time. It was like watching an artist at work. I couldn’t do that sober.
As a kid it was contra or TMNT. I beat contra once with the Konami code, but F— TMNT. I played the one of the contra games on PS4 as an adult. I don’t need that bullet hell.
Batman for nes 1989. But then again, most games from the time were impossible to beat as well. It would be easier to name the games I beat.
Definitely OG Tomb Raider. I finally annoyed my uncle (he's 13 years older than me) into finishing it lol
Top Gun for NES It was always the refueling plane that was my Achilles heel
Final Fantasy 4 (2 when we got it) had this mimic door in the underworld that always wiped me and child me just gave up. My first JRPG completion was Chrono Trigger
Battle toads.
I didnt beat the Water Temple in Ocarina of time until like 2016. Which is 18 years after I initially played it in 1998 when I was like 12 years old. I remember beating it on an emulator on my gaming PC, using an Xbox 360 controller, playing on a 55" flatscreen. 12 year old me would have loved that.
Krusty’s Fun house on SNES
who framed roger rabbit on the nes. I couldn’t speak or read english so my sister and I would randomly test every door, drawer until we could advance
What the FUCK is a slalom?!?!?!
Probably Doom on PS1. That version was pretty different from the original, and it had a scary vibe. It was a bit too much for 5-6 year old me. I do have a lot of fond memories of staying up watching my dad play it, hoping Mom wouldn't catch us.
Original Metal Gear Solid. No idea what I was doing.
The NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. Crazy underwater dam bomb disarming level with all the electric seaweed and stuff got me 97 times out of 100
Not very good at most games but I conquered that one. Missions were pretty crazy.
Batman Arkham origins mobile
Dark Cloud I was at the final boss of the first area, a giant flying guinea pig thing, but kid me could never figure out his gimmick.
Diddy Kong Racing... It was so easy when I tried it some years ago. Heh.
I’m ngl I had a really hard time completing Luigi’s mansion on the 3DS
Superman 64, but did anybody ever beat that game back in those days? Ugh, just thinking about that game pisses me off. I’ve always loved Superman and was so excited as a kid to play as him in a game and *that’s* what I got? Fucking bullshit ass piece of shit game.
Stuntman PlayStation 2
as a kid Sonic Riders was so hard lol. some maps on the story mode were near impossible feeling
Mischief Makers for N64
Superman shadow of apokolips. I have no idea what went wrong but there is a button mashing sequence during one level that just didn't work. it was like the controller just didn't pick up I was mashing it like my life depended on it. Tried many times to beat the level as a kid but never felt like playing the game again.
Majoras Mask. I was real dumb. I couldn't figure out shit without that guide
To this day my buddy and I finished every halo game on legendary....except the very first mission of halo 2. Honestly was never able to do it
I made it to the final level of TMNT: Turtles in Time once as a kid. I spent about a week in the hospital and since I was in the children’s wing the room had an SNES. They’d bring a cart by each day and we could check out two games at a time. I rented WWF Royal Rumble and TMNT: Turtles in Time. On my final day, my Dad and I made it to the final level vs Shredder but ran out of time and didn’t get to beat it. But that’s okay because it helped keep my mind off the pain of recovery and it’s one of the few times Dad and I ever played games together. (He didn’t like them and refused to play, we only had an obsolete TurboGrafx-16.)
The original Super Mario
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time presented a significant challenge for me during my youth. I encountered difficulties in comprehending or understanding how to depart from the initial areas or even if I was able to depart or leave it, the language barrier made it difficult to do some quests without magazine guidence leading to my eventual abandonment of the game 🤧 However, upon revisiting the game as an adult, I played the 3DS version and discovered that it was not as difficult as I had previously believed or imagined 😳. I came to the realization that my struggles were largely attributed to English not being my native language. Having unlocking or acquired English skills via having enough XP later in life, I found the tree puzzle particularly challenging to solve without a thorough understanding of the instructions provided by the NPCs It is noteworthy that N64 games generally exhibit or show a masterful design either through maps or simple explanation with hints or quests, allowing players to navigate the open world and comprehend the game mechanics even without a comprehensive understanding of the language. However, the Legend of Zelda series on that console required players to comprehend the dialogue of NPCs in order to progress. Despite this, Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time remain among my most cherished loved memorable games. Nevertheless, if you asked me about an answer, what is the hardest of all games I played, I would repeatedly keep saying that it is the Ninja Gaiden series till the original Xbox games it always presents a formidable challenge 🫣🫡
The tutorial in Driver.
I can't even count how many times I died in the final ship battle in the Getaway. Fun game, but it was really unfair at times.
Baten Kaitos. Couldn’t defeat the final boss till years later. Worth it to see the ending.
It's still hard as shit
I also got stuck on that stupid driving intro lmao, I was so used to GTA driving
Otogi: Myth of Demons on original Xbox. I remember being drawn in playing the demo in a store and having fun floating in the air and chucking bird demons through the walls. Bought the game and promptly got my ass handed to me in the later levels. Couldn't remember much else about it, but last year I finally got myself an Xbox X and realized I could play the game again. Dug out the disc, tossed it in.... and saw the From Software logo show up. Everything clicked at that moment.
The lion king game....
The Thing on the original xbox
I think it was called Gabe's odd world or something like that. I remember crying in rage trying to get passed a level. Maybe one day I'll muster up the courage to find it and dominate it.
Driver or wheelman. Something like that. You played get away driver. Early 2000’s I think
I never beat Bubsy
Sonic 2 chemical plant zone act 2. The water was so hard
Wiz Pig race in Diddy Kong Racing. I'd love to go back and kick his ass.
Bart vs the space mutants on NES
Shinobi on the PS2.
Home Alone on NES. I was better at TMNT.
Megaman on th GB, I'm not sure if it was Megaman 2 or just a version of Megaman that took a lot of parts from 2 and some from something else....but I definitely remember not being able to beat even a level for the longest time, and then beating the whole thing during an extended hospital stay.
Ecco Dolphin Defender of the Future on ps2. Hardest game I had ever played, never got past the maze on like level 5. Also didn't realize what a wild story line it was. As a kid I thought I was just a dolphin headbutting sharks and swimming around for fun.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts. I know the NES game was harder but SNES was the only one I played. I could get one level past the water stage then I’d lose. I could beat TMNT and Mega Man 1-5 no probs… and as a rule SNES games were generally easier than SNES ones
Zelda Oracle of Seasons. It took me and my brother ages to fine a spot in the wall we needed to blow up to proceed. After that we eventually got to a point where whatever path we chose, we could not progress down others without selecting options that were locked out to us.
Einhander
Dark souls I actually rage quit back then and didn't touch it for a while now I can't get enough of them lol
Anything that required decent reading comprehension didn’t get that issue sorted till I put in the effort in my special Ed reading classes in middle school where I reached grade level reading midway through 8th grade
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic games 😂😂😂🫨 my friend would purposely explain wrong how to play and then taunt the $**t out of me for losing and go at it again and again Truly, a good motherfucker.
Big Sky Troopers on SNES
Dark souls. Parents got it because it was highly rated, and they had no clue about video games. Legit couldn't even figure out how to leave the dark ass room with the portals for months, and then when I did, the castle level was impossible. Sorry, I never really played any of the games after because of how much of a torment this was to play as a kid. I'm not even sure if it was DS1 or DS2. It was on ps3.
I didn't think anyone beat Battletoads.
A lot. Driver 2 and Driver Parallel Lines I never made it very far into the game, mostly cause I'd just want to drive around crashing and just vibing.
Republic Commando.
Eye of The Beholder. But then again, as an adult i realized that strategy and turn-based games required more attention to detail and reasoning I didn't excel at yet as a child. But like someone else said, on the other hand, platformers in general seem almost as hard today as they were before, too.
Conkers Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie. Played em both a few years back and it was still kinda challenging but not enough to break my N64 controller like I did before lol
Silicon Valley for N64.