[[PennyArcade http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/cit_Penny_Arcade_2004-03-08_-_ninja_gaiden_on_hard_mode.png]]
[[caption-width:300:[[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/08/ Oh,]] you think [[NinjaGaiden that's hard]]?! [[http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/445123 I'm just the tutorial level!!"]]]]

->''"WE ARE NINTENDO. WE CHALLENGE ALL PLAYERS. '''YOU CANNOT BEAT US."'''''
-->-- ''[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta0DlcxyY5M 80's Australian NES commercial]]''

The first NintendoEntertainmentSystem was known for two things: [[TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983 reviving home console gaming]] and having ridiculously difficult games.

Back in the '80s, video games didn't have the advanced storylines of today and much of the feeling of accomplishment one could derive was from overcoming the insane difficulty that the games provided, if only so one could [[BraggingRightsReward brag]] to one's friends. [[GoddamnedBats Plethoras of enemies]] and [[PlatformHell impossible jumps]] were not just the name of the game, they ''were'' the game. These games weren't just hard; they were NintendoHard!

Of course, nowadays, the concept of NintendoHard has been expanded to include any game that relies largely on FakeDifficulty for their challenge.

[[hardline]]
The difficulty of these games usually stems from a combination of factors:
* lots of enemies ([[BulletHell or lots of bullets]]) that are [[GoddamnedBats hard to hit or dodge]].
* surprise attacks that can only be avoided by sheerest luck or [[TrialAndErrorGameplay memorizing their locations]].
* MalevolentArchitecture that poses a [[EverythingTryingToKillYou constant danger of death]] even when the player proceeds as cautiously as possible.
* a hero who can survive very few hits -- often dying from even the [[OneHitPointWonder slightest scratch]].
* lack of, or very few {{check point}}s or {{save point}}s.
* a limited number of [[VideoGameLives lives]] and/or continues.

For further building blocks of Nintendo Hard, see ClassicVideoGameScrewYous.

The game mechanics that make a game "Nintendo Hard" were often transported from arcade games that required the player to [[AttractMode spend more money]] to keep playing after his character was killed. Except that when they got ported over to the console, there was no coin slot, leaving you stuck with a fixed number of lives, and, very often, highly limited or non-existent continues.

This trope is, of course, not limited to the eight-bit NES (whose library of games ran from the insanely difficult to the mediocre), but it was an extremely widespread console for its time. On the other hand, many {{Nintendo}} games seemed [[EverythingTryingToKillYou inherently dangerous]].

Almost invariably, actually winning a game of this sort got you little more than AWinnerIsYou, and -- on the arcade versions -- a free replay, if you were lucky.

The concept has recently been satirized on the Internet, most famous by the TheAngryVideoGameNerd, formerly the Angry Nintendo Nerd, who points out that via [[SturgeonsLaw Sturgeon's Law]], most examples of Nintendo Hard are a result of sloppy or bad design.

No genre is exempt from this. See SurpriseDifficulty. May lead to exclamations of: "GuideDangIt!"

As the Discussion will testify, [[YourMileageMayVary your mileage with this Trope may vary]] depending on how extreme your skill is. '''Some caution in adding examples may be wise.''' If you feel inclined to add the words "for ThisTroper" or "could be considered" and cannot make a strong statement on the universal difficulty of the game in question, '''please reconsider.'''
----
!!Examples:
* The '''Bit Trip'' series of rhythm action games for Wiiware. Here's the [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbSbhg0sDw8 first one]] This is [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO0hliWO7Kg the sequel]] It's fun, but it WILL make you weep.
* To say that the ''MidnightClub'' street racing franchise from Rockstar Games is tough is putting it nicely. The second game in the series, for example, is so hard that you have to input ''howhardcanitbe0'' into the cheats menu to have a shot at winning any of the later races.
** The latest game in the series, ''Midnight Club: Los Angeles'', toned down the difficulty somewhat, but it'll still kick your ass, even with a well-timed EMP or Roar special ability- the AI is just that good. [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Or they don't play fair.]] One of the two. However, any talk about difficulty goes out the window once you unlock the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14. Besides being one of the cheapest vehicles in the game ($17,000 to purchase, about $60,000 to max out performance), once you get used to riding it, the game becomes a cakewalk. ThisTroper was blowing out opponents with alarming frequency on a maxed-out Kawasaki.
*** To make things more interesting, Rockstar Games issued a patch for ''Midnight Club LA'' that made the game ''easier'' for the first third or so of the game. ThisTroper didn't notice, though, because when the patch was issued, I was about 80 percent complete...
* ''NeedForSpeed'' since Underground, has RubberBandAI which falls through this trope. Despite this guy found the vehicle tuning fun, the race mostly don't.
** Underground 2, on the other hand, is easier. Most Wanted returns to NintendoHard during races (while cop car chase [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome just plain awesome]]). Carbon has more balanced AI than the previous game.
* The most common recurring complaint people had with ''GuitarHero 3'' was that it was ''far'' more difficult than the preceding games. While the difficulty needed to be steeper than Guitar Hero 2 in order to provide some challenge to the players that had mastered that game, a lot of the songs were just plain unreasonable, with note structures that didn't serve any purpose except to make your life hell. And even if you could handle most of the game, the last set ('Raining Blood', 'Cliffs of Dover', 'Number of the Beast' and 'One', followed by going head to head with the Devil in 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia') went beyond insane. 'Raining Blood' is widely regarded as the hardest (compulsory) song in the series- at least 'Through the Fire & the Flames' is only a bonus track...
** Outside of the legendarily difficult final tier, seventh-tier song Before I Forget by Slipknot is infamous for its bridge chord progression that, on Expert, goes (GY)(RB)(GY)(RB)(YO)(RB)(GY)(RB) at an eighth note rhythm, then adds in some (RB)(YO)(RB) changes at sixteenth-note rhythm for good measure. For the uninitiated, that basically means your fretting hand would sooner liberate itself from the corresponding arm and desert your body than be subjected to that kind of torture.
*** Even before the bridge, the song is just loaded with "why not?"-style 2- and 3-button chords.
** Interestingly, GuitarHero 3 was the first in the Guitar Hero franchise not to be made by the original developers Harmonix, and instead being handed off to Activision's replacement team after Harmonix left to partner with EA. It is possible that in their relative inexperience, they resorted to a certain amount of [[FakeDifficulty fake difficulty]].
*** However, this is somewhat countered by a more generous timing window than the Harmonix games. In the faster sections, the challenge comes in being able to hit (or pull-off to) frets in the correct sequence at that speed, without having to worry so much about the rhythm of it. Good news for masochists though; there's a [[SelfImposedChallenge precision mode]] which makes the timing window even tighter than the old games!
** You guys complain about GH3? You should see GuitarHero Smash Hit's final tier. It's made entirely of Series ThatOneBoss. That means "Freebird", "Raining Blood", "Play With Me", "Psychobilly Freakout", and "Bark At the Moon" are the final tier. Ending in [[DragonForce TTFAF]]. At least GH3 had "Cliffs of Dover" and GH2 had "The Beast and The Harlot".
*** I'm not very familiar with Smash Hits, but if it doesn't contain Cowboys from hell it's a joke. You'd be hard pressed to find a player of the first game on Expert that doesn't know the intro riff by heart. That was real difficulty, not random three note chords and synthesized keyboard parts.
*** As a note, it does contain Cowboys From Hell. *And* Beast and the Harlot.
*** Smash Hits has a wider timing window than GH1, so the two versions are incomperable. However, broken hammer-ons/pull-offs are not real difficulty.
* The first ''{{Contra}}'' game is widely considered to be among the most difficult NES games -- and for good reason. If you touch nearly anything that isn't a powerup, [[CollisionDamage you're dead.]] No passwords or saves, and if you lose three lives, it's game over -- unless you use the [[ClassicCheatCode Konami Code]], of course, extending your potential death-count to thirty.
** Even one of the powerups can ruin your game by replacing a perfectly functional weapon with [[PowerupLetdown a useless one]].
** The Japanese version of ''Contra: Hard Corps'' featured a life bar, allowing you to take a hit or two before dying. The US and European versions removed the lifebars, but didn't adjust the difficulty accordingly. Consequently, Hard Corps is widely considered to be the hardest game in the series. That said, with the difficulty being the same, if you can 1cc one you can do the same for the other.
** NES versions of Contra and Super Contra were actually relatively easy when compared to the original arcade versions. The gaping maws in the last level of the arcade version of Super Contra might qualify as GoddamnedBats and are one major reason why this editor hasn't managed to complete the arcade version without continues.
*** ''Contra 3: The Alien Wars'', for the Super NES, has multiple difficulty levels and the ability to choose to have more extra lives per continue, making it less frustrating than the earlier games. When set to Hard, however, the game is at least as difficult and unforgiving as its NES predecessors.
*** As matter of fact, more than one game for NES had a lower difficulty level than the arcade game it was based on. ''BionicCommando'' is another good example.
**** On the other hand, NES versions of ''Salamander/Life Force'' and ''Gradius 2'' and the MSX version of the former aren't.
***** Actually, the NES/Famicom versions of both ''Salamander/Life Force'' and ''Gradius 2'' really are easier on the whole than their arcade counterparts.
** The recently released ''Contra 4'' for the Nintendo DS is also considerably challenging, as not only do you have to worry about things shooting at you from two screens, but most [[BossBattle Boss Battles]] are fought against a SequentialBoss.
*** ''Contra 4'' also one-ups the missile-riding sequence from ''Contra 3'' by making your handholds very tiny, constantly moving, opening, and closing, and then throwing deadly missiles at you from several different angles.
* ''Moon Patrol'' actually starts out nice and easy, especially for an early '80s arcade title...and then it throws the Champion course at you, which quickly escalates from fairly challenging into downright Nintendo Hard. The Champion course is just ''littered'' with areas with multiple rocks on both sides of a pit, jumping sequences where your timing has to be ''just'' right, and sometimes a couple ''dozen'' airborne enemies on screen...sometimes ''in combination.''
** But you CAN finish it. Many, many quarters. But it is doable. MANY quarters :-).
* ''BionicCommando'', for the NES and the original Game Boy, is easier than the arcade version but still manages to become extremely difficult by the end of the game. You start with only one life (although you do have a health bar), and continues have to be earned by killing enemies in optional areas. The bosses tend to be fast and brutal, and there are plenty of BottomlessPits and SpikesOfDoom around as well.
** It's slightly tempered by the fact that the missile launcher is one of the most overpowered weapons in NES history, making several of the bosses comically easy to beat. Of course, they then tempered its power in the remake....
** In particular, the helicopter boss at the end of Area 12 requires the player to fire a single rocket through the windshield of the helicopter as the player is falling. If the player misses, they're killed by machine gun fire.
** ''Bionic Commando Rearmed'', the recent remake of the NES version, is harder on its first level than the original was on its final levels - and it only scales up from there. This troper had to go play the original on an emulator to make sure his memories weren't deceiving him! [[ZeroPunctuation Yahtzee]] went on to note that even though he'd never played the original Bionic Commando, he could still tell Rearmed was a faithful remake because of how console-stompingly frustrating it was.
*** And then if you go to any difficulty level above normal? Forget about it. On the hardest difficulty level, Super Joe Hard, you become a OneHitPointWonder, enemies fire as if they have turbo controllers and duck behind cover almost immediately. Blocking bullets with the bionic arm, difficult on normal difficulty, becomes a requirement, making the game reach new levels of impossible, like...''Super'' NintendoHard.
* Believe it or not, ''{{Battletoads}}'' manages to up the ante considerably. From the racing segment of level 3 on, the game's difficulty ranges from insanely hard to downright unplayable. Most gamers of that generation have never seen the ending. Perhaps most difficult of all is a level made entirely of [[SpikesOfDoom Instant Death Spikes]](!!). Even with the use of a GameGenie, beating the game is still considered to be quite an achievement among hardcore gamers. Many with a NES agree.
** This is not helped by the apparent lack of playtesting. Observe: Stage 11, "Clinger Winger," which is ''literally'' unplayable in two-player mode, because the second player can't move, meaning they get killed seconds after the level starts. [[{{Unwinnable}} Real smooth, Rare.]]
*** As demonstrated by the AngryVideoGameNerd, two player mode in general renders Battletoads nearly unplayable, due the ability of players to hurt each other, which will happen frequently whether they are trying to or not.
*** Interestingly, the Japanese version of Battletoads is much ''[[DifficultyByRegion easier]]'' than its North American counterpart (to name just a few changes, level 11's Hypno Orb moves much slower, and some of the disappearing platforms in level 12 have been replaced by solid ones).
**** The difficulty of the Genesis\Megadrive version is probably based on the Japanese game (with graphical improvements). It's modestly difficult.
*** ''There's a level 11?!''
** The other games in the Battletoads series are also notorious for their difficulty, but they aren't quite as brutal as the original NES game and its many ports. (Incidentally, the Game Boy game titled ''Battletoads'' isn't a port of the NES version; the Game Boy port of the NES game was named ''Battletoads in Ragnarok's World''.)
** Kayin, creator of the infamous IWannaBeTheGuy says in his FAQ that his game is a ROM hack of the ending of NES Battletoads. Obviously this is a complete lie, but no one can call him on it because no one has actually beaten Battletoads. Yes, the creator of IWannaBeTheGuy thinks Battletoads is impossibly hard.
*** This troper did beat Battletoads... more than 10 years later... on an emulator... thanks to state saves. It was still extremely hard.
**** This troper beat the game when he was a kid (7 or 8). He then destroyed it so it will not frustrate anyone again. I now regret my action.
*The ''entire'' ''MegamanZero'' series.
** It should be noted that this series is known for being hard, but its hard for the right reasons as FakeDifficulty is almost never used.
** The ''Zero'' series is only hard because you need to hold onto an A-rank or higher to get the EX techs. ''Zero 4'''s stages are as genuinely hard as its predecessors' and some of the stages are even harder on the correct weather, but since the correct weather is all you need to see the cool content in this one, the game goes from an hours-long grind to a couple hours of fast-paced fun by a decent player, ''just'' because you don't go through every stage fifty times trying to get that last point for the A-rank.
** Seriously, this troper knew something was ''very'' evil about the MMZ series' (And for while, the the ''whole MegaMan franchise'') difficulty when he actually got a GameOver ''several times'' in the second game's ''introduction stage'' (granted, MMZ2 was actually his first forray into the MegaMan mainstream games and was completely unfamiliar with the gameplay). He nearly gave up on it when he maraculoiusly beat the level at last, and cheered for a good 15 minutes... And then cringed when he realized the insanity was ''just getting started''.
* Arcade cabinet horizontal spaceship ShootEmUps à la ''ZeroWing'' are a famous example of this trope. A particularly egregious one is ''Zed Blade'', also known as ''Operation Ragnarok''. After a deceptively easy start, the player has to fight ever-increasing number of enemies, most of which are pretty strong and require a lot of pummeling to go down. This would not be particularly deserving of note, if it wasn't that the player is required to avoid a veritable storm of bullets directed at him, most of which can't be shot down. This impressive amount of firepower is often shot by the enemies in such a pattern that there's no way to avoid being hit by at least one bullet. Since the ship has no shields and even one hit will result in a life loss, this makes the game practically unplayable... unless one uses an emulator and a cheat file to make the player ship invulnerable. Of particular notice is the last level, in which along with the usual hailstorm of enemies and bullets, there is a background boss that ''cannot be destroyed''. It'll stay there until the end of the level, spewing even more bolts in the player's direction. This writer doubts anyone ever saw the end of ''Zed Blade'' before emulation came along.
** In Japanese, a subset of games called [[BulletHell danmaku]] are modern versions that often feature extremely elaborate and beautiful patterns of bullet flows, especially for bosses, with hundreds and sometimes thousands of bullets on the screen at once, requiring constant weaving. The most well known are the ''{{Touhou}}'' games.
*** Adding to the hardness, some danmaku games, especially Touhou, actually ''reward'' you for getting as close to the bullets as possible. Being able to "graze" bullets by having them pass through your sprite but not your hitbox earns you extra points for your score, but ups your chances of dying immensely. Thankfully, these games (again, especially Touhou) have mechanics to keep the grazing from getting ''too'' worthy of a keyboard/controller/arcade machine toss--such as offering plenty of lives, or the "death bomb" mechanic found in Touhou (which allows the player to use up a bomb rather than a life right after getting hit).
**** ''Perfect Cherry Blossom'', one of the Touhou games, even gives periods of ''temporary invincibility''--and, of course, Touhou allows players to continue if they lose all their lives--but continuing means [[MultipleEndings not getting to see a good ending]].
*** Touhou has nothing on many other ShootEmUps. For many players that had played the infinitely easier SNES version, trying the original ''Gradius III'' arcade version tends to be a ''complete bitchslap to the face''. Yeah, so we're going to shift the enemies around, speed them up, make them much more dogged in their pursuit of you--oh, and while we're at it, you might want to know some of the more useful weapon configurations didn't exist here and the bosses are more resilient. Have fun!
**** Objectively, Gradius III is about as difficult as Touhou on hard, normal if you master shooting down bullets. The only real difference is Gradius' draconian punishment for dying. Touhou has a very different difficulty curve, in that it allows you to memorize the late stages before the first levels are permanently burned into your brain. In short, Easiness is different than a generous learning curve.
*** Thanks to a recent fan effort to [[http://www.weeaboo.nl/?cat=8 bring Touhou to the DS]], it can now be literally considered NintendoHard. Plenty of dual screen agony for those who thought the official games weren't hard enough already.
*** Touhou has always been more of pretty bullet patterns to look at, bad for the twitch gamers who constantly move around randomly, easy for those who sees the pattern well. Other danmaku games however will make you cry
** Other shooting games that have gained renown for being pretty hard are ''Mushihimesama'', which writes the Curtain in Curtain Fire with capital letters (it is not unusual to barely see your ship among the thousands upon thousands of bullets as the difficulty starts ramping up), ''Ikaruga'' (which features patterns that you are practically required to memorize and position yourself well before they are shot if you want to have a chance to dodge them) or ''Radiant Silvergun'', which is just long and hard as hell. And the less said about infamous titles like ''Pulstar'' or ''Viewpoint'', the better...
*** most of Cave's shmups became notorious for their elaborate scoring mechanics, and their difficulty; their most successful titles have earned the attention of non-competitive shmup players and score-competitive ones alike, and are often [[http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=26325 ranked high]] in terms of player preference. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that Cave has defined its own standards of difficulty, where {{NintendoHard}} isn't enough to express it. For example, the {{Touhou}} community has created a hacked version of its 6th game that's inspired by Mushihimesama's Ultra Mode. Now, [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQOc4cWcYw for your viewing pleasure]]
* They call it "''{{Castlevania}}'' Frustration Syndrome" for a reason. Several early games in that series were murderously hard, especially the first. Between being slower than many enemies, being unable to [[JumpPhysics adjust your jumps]] in any fashion, and getting trapped on staircases (and unable to dismount with any semblance of speed) at the most inopportune moments... well, it was goddamn hard.
** At least the cartridge release for the NES had infinite continues and the original Famicom Disk System release in Japan let the player save the game. The {{MSX2}} version of the original Castlevania, known as Vampire Killer in Europe, was even harder AND had neither of these. Just try playing it to the second boss.
** Whatever eldritch horrors disguised as staff localised ''Castlevania III'' decided that exponentially elevated difficulty was a fair trade-up for the loss of the better sound chip. If you thought that Dracula's third form was a bit difficult after having played ''Akumajo Densetsu'' (it can be; the bottomless pits in the floor are a pain)...oh, just wait until you get to that point in the American-European version. Dracula's [[FrickinLaserBeams Frickin' Laser Beams]] are not only fired more frequently, they're longer and can launch in any of sixteen directions instead of the usual eight. Good luck, and may [[CrystalDragonJesus $Deity]] have mercy on your thumbs.
*** The European version has one small mercy - your stopwatch gets you one extra second of frozen time as compared to the Japanese or American games.
** ''Order of Ecclesia'' harkens back to the days of old, making the game considerably more difficult than the previous Metroidvania titles. Although it is not nearly as hard as the first few games, you can still expect to die. A lot. And that's to say nothing of the [[BonusDungeon bonus dungeons]].
** Thought the console Castlevanias were hard? ''Haunted Castle'', an arcade-exclusive Castlevania title, multiplies the frustration by giving you only one life per credit, a four-credit limit, and awkwardly placed flying enemies that are guaranteed to hit you. The Version M release of the game is notorious for the amount of damage you take from enemy attacks; a bone thrown from a skeleton enemy will deplete half of your life meter.
** This was even referenced in the otherwise completely unrelated game, ''{{Snatcher}}''. Upon faced with a pair of cosplayers dressed as Simon Belmont and Dracula, Metal tells Gillian that the lack of the ability to jump on the stairs caused the teen suicide rate to "triple that year."
**Ironically, Aria of Sorrow is one of the easiest games this Troper has ever played.
** Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES is hard for another reason: The game gives you no information on what to do or where to go. The villagers who normally help you in this kind of game instead LIE. And they don't tell obvious lies, they say stuff that is sneakily misleading, with the occasional true statement to mess with your head. Add in "puzzles" like having to duck for seven seconds at a certain place to continue in the game with a certain item selected, and you get the idea.
* The first ''MegaMan'' game is in the running, too. The six Robot Masters aren't so bad (except for Guts Man's infamous lifts and Ice Man's level, which introduces the possibly more infamous disappearing/appearing platforms), but players who can get past the Yellow Devil boss -- to say nothing of Dr. Wily himself -- without resorting to the Select trick are few and far between. ''MegaMan 2'' and onward have passwords, but those never go into Wily's fortress... and he often has more than one. Sometimes the levels will do even worse damage to our patience. Quick Man's kill beams and Heat Man's disappearing blocks of doom are noteworthy examples, though ThisTroper could count some controller breaking moments from 4-5 (5 with that speed bike level definitely).
** Capcom's final bosses are particularly noteworthy, in this series and others. They ''always'' have [[OneWingedAngel multiple forms]], devastating attacks, and iron defense. Wily will make you tear your hair out in some games, especially ''Mega Man 7''; the ''MegaManX'' series' Sigma is even worse. And you almost always have to start over from the first form if the last form kills you.
** The MegaMan Anniversary Collection - at least the Gamecube version - adds another level of FakeDifficulty to all the original games by ''reversing the controls'' so you now jump with the B button and shoot with the A button. If you've got it burned into your brain as to which buttons to push from playing the originals... [[SoYeah Yeah]].
** The severe overuse of SpikesOfDoom and TrialAndErrorGameplay in ''Mega Man X6'' made it extremely difficult to complete. Due to the Nightmare System, there were parts (such as one section of Metal Shark Player's stage with SpikesOfDoom) that could be physically impossible to complete if the level loaded the wrong way.
** X7 took X6's formula and suffered to the PolygonCeiling on top of that. There's a good reason [[DisContinuity we don't talk about these two]].
** ''MegaMan 9'', essentially [[{{Retraux}} a love letter to the NES games]], brings back that same wonderfully frustrating, one-false-move-and-you're-dead feeling from the earliest games. It's gloriously fiendish.
** ''Mega Man & Bass''. Just for example, there's Dynamo Man, who ''heals himself in battle''. If you don't take out his healing machine, good luck bringing him back down from full health a second time.
*** King in the combined tank/robot thing - he takes up from one to two thirds of the screen threatening you with CollisionDamage, has multiple painful and hard to dodge and one impossible to dodge attack and his sole weak spot can be reached only with double jump or use of disappearing platform.
*** Not to mention that the [=GBA=] adds FakeDifficulty for Bass, by having no remappable controls, and thus a dash that can only be done by double-tapping forward. Good luck beating the snowman in Coldman's level.
** The Japanese indie game ''{{Rosenkreuzstilette}}'' (an obvious moe take on classic Mega Man) takes this to ridiculous extremes. Remember Quick Man's stage kill beams? Well, how about '''[[PlatformHell a whole freaking stage full of them??]]'''
*** Though on the whole, the game is easier than your average ''Mega Man'' game.
** This is fixed in Rosenkreuzstilette Grollschwert, an [[AnotherSideAnotherStory additional story mode]] to Rosenkreuzstilette featuring Grolla, this game's version of Zero. It's so bad, the game tells you right at the start that this mode will [[ThisIsGonnaSuck try your sanity.]] Why is it so hard?
*** First, Grolla can only use her sword through the whole game, instead of [[MegaManning acquiring new weapons after each boss]], eliminating the [[ElementalRockPaperScissors elemental weaknesses]] of all bosses.
*** Second, Grolla's sword only has one long range attack, in a game designed to have you fight at a distance. Said attack is pathetically weak unless Grolla is at less than half health, which increases the range and power of the attack.
*** Finally, and most damnably, Grolla ''takes twice as much damage'' as Spiritia, the heroine of the main game. To put all that into perspective, this means that, not only do you needed to get [[CollisionDamage dangerously close]] to bosses to hurt them, but in order to hit them with your best attack, you need to be at a point where ''you'll die four times faster than in the main game.'' Without the weapons that made most bosses beatable in the first place. Hope you've got health tanks!
* The Japanese ''SuperMarioBros 2''. Originally not released in the US in part because it was thought that the sheer difficulty would hurt sales. Instead, the US ''SuperMarioBros 2'' was a DolledUpInstallment of ''Doki Doki Panic''. It is widely believed that sales of ''SuperMarioBros 2'' - the Lost Levels version, not the ''Doki Doki Panic'' version - in Japan were significantly lower than the sales of other games in the series.
** But ''NewSuperMarioBrosWii'' comes close. [[StopHavingFunGuys Certain players]] complained that the '[[MercyMode Super Guide]]' mode would [[ItsEasySoItSucks make it too easy]]. They were wrong- the developers felt free to make the game extra hard. And [[HilarityEnsues in multiplayer...]]
* Anyone that claims to have beaten ''Solomon's Key'' without having thoughts of murdering the designer is a lying bastard.
* ''[=~Ghosts 'n Goblins~=]'', ''[=~Ghouls 'n Ghosts~=]'', and the rest of the series, have an evil reputation stemming from moderately annoying JumpPhysics and extremely [[GoddamnedBats unpredictable enemy movement]]. Which would be pretty hard on its own. But some games in the series (such as ''Ghosts 'n Goblins'') went further: If you miss a power-up in the fifth level, it kicks you back to the fourth level once you reach the final boss. Even more frustratingly, you have to go through the game ''twice'' just in order to see its AWinnerIsYou ending.
* A modern heir to the title of NintendoHard is ''GodHand''. Yes, you have unlimited continues, but this is because you ''will'' need them. Starting with the very first stage, the enemies will hand you your own ass--repeatedly. At least it will hand you your ass ''honestly''--''GodHand'' avoids resorting to cheap FakeDifficulty tactics.
** To illustrate: this troper used up at least 20 continues on one level, and still was rewarded bonus points. This means ''they expected you to die more.''
** To make matters worse, when you do well, you don't level up. The enemies do. Once they've beaten your ass enough, though, it does go back to being easy (if you can call it that).
* The three ''TheSimpsons'' video games made by Acclaim on the NES are known for being overly difficult, due to shoddy physics and controls and many levels involving jumping across tiny platforms for a prolonged amount of time. For some reason, against usual NES gaming logic, to run you must hold the same button you use to jump, making running jumps impossible unless you press ''both'' buttons when jumping. Plus, in most of these games, you lack any kind of weaponry or anything to defend yourself with, and in some you have barely any health.
** The only one in which you ''can'' defend yourself may actually be the worst. ''Bartman Meets Radioactive Man'' features the same broken physics and horrible controls, but you are expected to '''fight''' with them. Bart punches and kicks like he's up to his neck in molasses. Even the simplest enemies are deadly without absolutely perfect timing.
* Popular freeware game ''{{N}}'' features this like crazy. An infinite number of retries for a given level are just a button press away, but your little ninja has no attacks, dies in one hit, and is pitted against such threats as homing missiles, laser turrets, moving laser drones, and rapidfire chaingun drones, ''all'' of whom can and will aim in any direction and attack as soon as you're in their line of sight, not to mention the standard touch of death drones, mines and death by falling too far. And to top it off you have a timer, not just for each level but for each set of ''five'' levels. Did I mention that's how often you get to save, by the way? Dozens of deaths to get past a single tough level is expected.
** On the plus side, because of the RagdollPhysics and randomly-scattering dismembered ninja-limbs, these deaths are usually pretty entertaining to watch.
* The original American release of ''DevilMayCry 3'' is stupidly hard for all but dedicated fans to pick up, since in the US version "Normal" was actually the Japanese version's "Hard" difficulty. ''DevilMayCry 1'', ''3'' and ''4'' on the aptly named "[[HarderThanHard Dante Must Die]]" mode are also noteworthy.
** Unlike most Nintendo Hard games, however, the ''Devil May Cry'' games are not examples of ''FakeDifficulty'' or ''TrialAndErrorGameplay'' but rather are simply very difficult to complete without great skill at the game. When playing through the game, you yourself notice how much better you get; in the original game, there is a shadow dog which is an early bossish creature which gives many players fits and takes several attempts to beat. Later in the game they're normal enemies you fight in groups, and while you are indeed slightly more powerful, the real difference is simply your greater skill at the game.
*** Except against Vergil/Dante 3 in [=DMC3=]. Good luck.
*** That's a matter of opinion, of course. One of the biggest reasons This Troper never got beyond [[ThatOneBoss Agni]] and [[DualBoss Rudra]] was because the camera wasn't up to par.
** To say nothing of the "Hell and Hell" difficulty in [=DMC4=]--it's basically Son of Sparda mode ([=DMC4=]'s "hard" mode) wherein you are a OneHitPointWonder. Heaven or Hell on the other hand has everybody die in one hit, which could make it even easier than the normal difficulty setting ("Devil Hunter") if you're skilled enough. Then again, you have to beat the game on Son of Sparda to unlock it, so maybe you are that skilled...
**Heaven or Hell can be beaten in 20 minutes and without even hitting the melee attack button, there is no "Skill" involved. You have a gun...
*** It's a lot more "skill required" in DMC3, where you die in one hit from environmental obstacles as well as enemies.
* The arcade original ''Shinobi'' had a difficulty curve that just kept on ascending, and only three lives per continue. Mission 4 defeated most players. The final hidden ninja boss was nigh-on impossible to beat.
* The Playstation 2 version of ''Shinobi'' had a lot of controller-throwing moments, too. Its sequel, ''Nightshade'' (called ''Kunoichi'' in Japan), made things a bit less frustrating by giving the player multiple lives instead of just one, meaning that falling into a BottomlessPit wouldn't boot you all the way back to the beginning of the level and force you to use a continue.
** However, the geniuses who made Nightshade also put several large BottomlessPits into the game that you need to cross by dashing from enemy to enemy. This wouldn't be too bad normally, but they inexplicably gave the said enemies the ability to block, causing you to bounce off them and die with no real way to prevent it, making the act of crossing said pits a LuckBasedMission, and the unlockable protagonist of the previous game lacks a move necessary for crossing said pits, making it an {{Unwinnable}} situation for him. And that's not even going into other gameplay changes they made...
**Lets not forget the fact that your own sword wants you dead. With later levels in the game getting harder, the sword will at times seem like an enemy.
* ''LaMulana'' brings the old school looks and difficulty to the 21st century, with nearly every boss in the game making you come back for seconds, and some for thirds and fourths. And then there's the [[BonusLevelOfHell Hell Temple]], which goes from being merely hard to being ''IWannaBeTheGuy''-caliber.
** Not to mention the myriad apparently impossible and arbitrary puzzles and riddles requiring you to pay meticulous attention to the many stone tablets you come across all over the place as well as a significant dose of outside-of-the-box thinking. In fact, neglecting to read three specific tablets in completely different locations (to learn the pattern--in the form of another riddle--that the boss is vulnerable to) makes the final boss unbeatable.
* The 8-bit era ''NinjaGaiden'' games are notoriously difficult. Gamers who could clear ''MegaMan'' and ''Battletoads'' in their sleep would curse about trying to clear any of them (the first was by far the hardest, but all of them were steep challenges).
** To iterate how difficult NinjaGaiden is...at the end of the first and second games, you would face off against the BigBad, who had powerful attacks that were difficult to dodge. No big deal, right? Well, immediately after this boss, you'd have to fight the OneWingedAngel form, which had attacks that were just as powerful and even ''more'' difficult to dodge, and to top it all off, the boss fully healed. You didn't. The second game takes this to the extreme, requiring a ''third'' final boss to be defeated without healing. And if you die on any of the forms, of course you start back at boss number one.
**Further to this, for most of the first game, when you ran out of lives, you started again at the beginning of the level. Running out of lives while fighting the final boss, however, sent you back several levels, which meant that if you were on your last life as you approached the final boss, you were better off intentionally dying and only getting sent back ONE level.
** The original, for all its insanely hard enemies doing their best at killing you, had a few saving graces for the elite players willing to make it through to the end. First, by holding the jump button after sticking to a wall and rapidly taping left and right, Ryu would climb up walls, a feature only implemented in the second and third game. This gave sneaky players a fighting chance when landing a pixel short of a platform jump or fighting the BigBad. Also, cinematic sequences had the odd effect of refilling your life bar, though if you blew your attempt at the ensuing boss fights, the [[UnstableEquilibrium next attempt went right to the battle]] with no cinematic or life refill. If you missed your first chance at fighting the final boss... well, there's always the reset button! This troper managed to finish this behemoth of NintendoHard in ''one life'' and still considers it the hardest game he's ever beaten.
** The modern remake of ''NinjaGaiden'' is little kinder, even with a LifeMeter and some reasonably potent armament. Its director Tomonobu Itagaki has boasted that only 10% of gamers would be able to complete its highest "Master Ninja" difficulty, and ignoring the ridiculously superlative feats of the title's most hardcore enthusiasts, this claim seems to have held true. On the other hand, given that the game has been praised for responsive control, some argue that the title isn't using FakeDifficulty so much as forcing players to always remain focused against the MookChivalry-dishonoring hordes.
*** Preliminary reports indicate the sequel lives up to the merciless mook swarm standards of the original, and adds some FakeDifficulty in the form of camera issues and slowdown to boot.
** ''Ninja Gaiden III'', a difficult enough game in its Japanese Famicom release, was deliberately made ''far'' more difficult when it was released on the NES in the United States. Just about ''all'' the enemies do at least three bars of damage (on previous games, and on the Japanese version, only a few strong enemies inflicted that much pain). To make matters worse, while the Japanese game had passwords allowing the game to be completed in multiple sittings, the U.S. version not only did not have this, but limited the player to 5 continues.
**The original Ninja Gaiden on the NES made this troper become a avid bird hunter. Fricken birds...
* Beyond ridiculous is ''FireEmblem Radiant Dawn'' for the Wii. Your main character is little more than a StaffChick, you have no JeiganCharacter, and one slip-up in the early chapters and it's game over.
** For starters. In RD's aptly named "Hard" mode, you cannot see how far the enemy move. Most enemies give little EXP/stages give almost no BEXP. There's no [[TacticalRockPaperScissors weapon triangle]], so no chances of using that to win. To make things worse, almost every single mook is more powerful than you. Also. Did I mention that battle saves are disabled, forcing you to start the level all over again if you've messed up on something? "Hard" doesn't even begin to cover it.
***To be fair, English's normal is Japan's hard and English's hard is Japan's [[HarderThanHard Maniac]] difficulty. That fact doesn't make it any less difficult than it is now, though.
** Of course, there is an Easy Mode, which is indeed very easy. Though no one ever actually plays it, [[EasyModeMockery fo some reason...]]
* A variant of the ''danmaku'', ''{{Ikaruga}}'' is often cited as one of the hardest games ever made. And that's not even regarding going for the evasive "S++" rankings. Part of this is due to the fact that, once again, Treasure found a way to make a shooter that [[strike:encourages]] ''requires'' the player to fly ''into'' enemy fire.
** And on top of that, memorize every enemy pattern and every enemy movement to get said S++ rank. This troper, who can at least ''survive'' in ''Ikaruga'', is not gonna bother playing it anymore due to the ridiculously memorization-based chaining system.
* The ''Shadow Of The Beast'' Genesis port was faster than the Amiga version due to sloppy porting, meaning some fast enemies would fly at you faster. The hit collision is also poor. Did I mention that there is no continues!
* ''{{F-Zero}} GX'' is considered by some to be another modern example of NintendoHard. The multiple gameplay modes all have several available difficulties, ranging from the "antsy but doable" Novice to the "I'd dang well better get a trillion bucks as a reward for all this" Master. It took this editor an entire ''year'' to unlock everything.
** To elaborate, there are three main single-player modes. Can you master them all? 1) beat all 5 Grand Prix cups on the Master difficulty. This is very hard. 2) beat all 10 story chapters on the Very Hard. This is extremely hard. 3) unlock all the staff ghosts in time trial and beat them, which is "don't even think about doing this" hard. Also, some sick dev decided to set up a bunch of interview questions and responses... each of 41 characters has over a dozen to answer, and only one is given each time you win a four race cup with that player). Getting even ''most'' of them together is a [[http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/gamecube/file/560617/26083 team effort]].
** This troper actually and honestly beat Expert difficulty on the first tier levels, but had to use the snaking glitch to beat two more. He can't beat the last tier even WITH snaking. It truly is the hardest racing game he's ever played.
** Story Mode had so many moments of FakeDifficulty, that trying to get the AX racers without GameShark is a masochistic endeavor.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike Roguelikes]]. One of the most famous ones is ''{{NetHack}}''. Their defining feature is having one life which, when lost, also deletes your save. Combining this with (seemingly) EverythingTryingToKillYou and (often) dying repeatedly whilst learning how to survive in the gameworld ("Medusa - causes petrification. Sadly, so does eating her corpse") is part of the attraction.
** Part of Nethack's difficulty is caused by the sheer randomness of the game with limited efforts to balance. There was one player who died without ever taking a turn - all because the game generated a random monster in line of sight of them at the start of the game, then randomly generated a wand in the possession of the monster, and randomly selected that wand to be a wand of death.
** Is ''NetHack'' too easy for you? Then it's time to play ''ADOM''. Yup, it's a roguelike with a world map. Which means that there are multiple randomly-generated death trap dungeons for you to perish in. It's not uncommon for gamers to play a month or two before even getting to the main dungeon. And unlike ''NetHack'', it only gets harder as you play. (If it takes a year before the average first win in ''NetHack'', it takes about 5 years for ''ADOM''. And let's not even mention the ultra endings...)
** ''Slash'EM'' is another variant that takes NetHack and ups the ante. "Nethack doesn't care if you live or die. Slash'EM wants you dead."
** The worst Roguelike of all is probably ''Iter Vehemens ad Necem'' (usually called IVAN). Its name translates from Latin as "A Violent Road To Death." It's intended to be effectively {{Unwinnable}}, although some players have managed to win anyway. This is a bug and will be fixed in the next release. ;)
** Don't forget ''DwarfFortress'', where the main question is not "will your fortress collapse?" but "when and how will your fortress collapse?"
*** The question may also be "How do you feel like destroying this fortress?".
*** This is turned UpToEleven by the "Dig Deeper" mod, which introduces [[DemonicSpiders orcs]]: trap-proof, door-unlocking fiends that turn up in huge numbers before the end of the first in-game year. (It's possible to end up outnumbered 7:1 by Orc mobs appearing before you've even got your first immigration wave, complete with Orc spearmasters, archers and mace lords).
* The fact that this trope is now rarely used was highlighted when in ''DonkeyKong 64'', you must defeat a few levels of the original ''Donkey Kong'' arcade game to progress. This editor was surprised to find out that these levels were harder than the rest of the newfangled 3-D game. (Most amazingly, they actually made them ''harder'' than the arcade game by giving you only one (1) life instead of three.)
* Though the first four stages aren't all that rough for veteran shmuppers, psuedo-''danmaku'' arcade/Dreamcast ShootEmUp ''Gigawing'' goes stupid-hard on the final level (with [[SequentialBoss three majorly hard bosses one right after the other]]) by lobbing screen-clogging waves of kamikazes and danmaku cloud-spewers. The [[MultipleEndings hidden (good) endings]] require you to beat the game on [[NoDamageRun a single credit]], so losing here means you need to start aaall the way back at the beginning and go through the snoozer levels once again. Nice story too. On an unrelated note [[http://gh.ffshrine.org/soundtracks/2638 the second game has much better music]].
* Although ''{{Scarface}}: The World Is Yours'' is usually kind to gamers, some particularly long missions are stingy with checkpoints, forcing them to backtrack a long way upon failure. There's no in-mission saving, either. This is most evident in [[ScrappyLevel the final mission]], where f-ing up (that's what the game's Game Over message is) means all the way back to the start. Considering that there is a veritable army of mooks to go through and ''three'' bosses, it can severely frustrate.
* The Paramedic Missions in ''GrandTheftAuto III''. Picture this: 20 seconds to drive halfway across the city. Your car tips over at the slightest turns. Every other driver around you has the driving skill of a 3 year old. You cannot repair your ambulance if it suffers too much damage for your liking. Failing means you have to start again, and this mission can take up to 40 minutes. And, if you're doing it at the end of the game, half the city wants you dead, and WILL shoot your car down as you try and save people. Sounds fun, right?
** The difficulty drops considerably with the use of regular brakes. Most players don't realize that trying to powerdrift with an unbalanced van might be a bad idea
* Platformer ''Rick Dangerous'' and its sequel are examples of unfair difficulty, with many booby traps that simply cannot be detected in advance, and requiring you to play the entire game start-to-finish with the handful of lives you're given to actually see the ending sequence. They're effectively unplayable except with an infinite lives cheat.
** The game is unbeatable with the infinite life, dynamite and ammo cheat. That is, you can finish the game, at which point it adds points for each ammo, life, and dynamite remaining. Being infinite, the count never ends and the end never shows.
* ''Bucky O'Hare'' for NES has excellent programming, wide variety of levels, refined gameplay and devious difficulty level by default. Of course, player could also input HARD! as a password and push her/his sanity to the brink playing a hidden, [[OneHitPointWonder prominently harder difficulty level]] only to lose what is left of it after finding out that using given passwords continues the game from default difficulty...
** On the other hand, the difficulty in the game is rarely (if ever) actual [[FakeDifficulty fake difficulty]]. The game can be completed on harder difficulty and levels are designed so that player can survive every single situation if he or she knows the right strategy. In other words, the sadistic difficulty is not cheap, but done in a very, ''very'' calculating manner.
** If you lived in Russia and got the game pirated, an anti-piracy measure would cause the "HARD!" difficulty to be the default one. Ouch...
*''Cobra Triangle'' is possibly the most evil vehicle-based game that ever came out for the original Nintendo. A boat racing game in theory, there were a number of levels in which you had your boat doing everything from protecting random swimmers to ''jumping over waterfalls''. This editor could never get past the giant, fire-breathing shark, himself.
* Lampshaded in ''{{Doom}}'': when the player selects [[HarderThanHard Nightmare! difficulty]], the game asks "Are you sure? This skill level isn't even remotely fair." Nightmare difficulty features faster, harder hitting monsters that [[RespawningEnemies respawn]] a bit after being killed. It was designed to be nearly impossible to beat. Naturally gamers have since created Nightmare speed run competitions (and this editor sometimes runs through the first game on Nightmare when bored. He's also beaten Nethack twice and IWBTG on Very Hard so he may not be representative of gamers as a whole).
** The current Doom 2 Nightmare speed run record is under 30 minutes. ''[[http://competn.doom2.net/pub/compet-n/doom2/movie/30nm2956.zip Under thirty minutes!]]''
** Even the first episode of {{Doom}} 1 on Ultra-Violent (the highest "playable" difficulty level) is quite a bit harder than most games today.
** The ''Plutonia Experiment'' official expansion for ''Doom II'' spawned an incredibly difficult subset of Doom levels that emphasizes combat against vast hordes of monsters, often dozens at a time. Levels have been made with literally ''thousands'' of enemies, often with fights against multiple "Arch-Viles" - [[DemonicSpiders powerful enemies]] who revive other monsters and have a delayed line-of-sight attack which can take off 80% or more of the player's health.
*** Literally impossible on Nightmare?
*** While ''Plutonia'' may have significantly upped the difficulty level compared to the previous installments, it was the user-created map set of ''Hell Revealed'' that brought about gigantic monster hordes. In fact, such maps are said to have "''Hell Revealed'' style gameplay within the community.
**** In particular, ''Hell Revealed'''s 24th level, "Post Mortem," has so many monsters (over 500!) that ''it's impossible to save your game on it'', unless you're using a source port of the game.
**** And then you have Hell Revealed 2's super-secret level, "Playground," which has over 1,600 monsters. Even on the lowest difficulty, this map will likely cause you to tear your hair out many times over. And lets not EVEN get started on the map31.............
** To top it off, cheat codes are disabled while running in Nightmare mode, just to make it all that extra bit of unfair. (This typically only applies to the original engine and faithful source ports like Chocolate Doom; source ports with no intention of preserving the original feel, such as ZDoom, allow cheat codes in Nightmare mode.)
* While kinder than most NintendoHard games, ''SuperRobotWars Original Generation 2'' produced nightmares in which the final bosses of the game would show up early and often, usually just there to scare you, but at least one time you have to survive multiple turns in a real fight against the FinalBoss... little more then 1/4th through the game. Did I mention the bosses can heal almost half their HP in one turn every turn and usually can kill any character of yours in just one hit? And the final three missions are nothing but bosses over and over.
*** The most infuriating of these aforementioned bosses is {=ZweiZerGain=}, which has heightened damage resistance, increased hit/evade rates, and most notably the support ability After Image which makes any move completely miss it, even if you have a 100% hit rate. He pulls After Image so much one has to save after every move and abuse the reset function to try and hit him.
** ''SuperRobotWarsF'' and its sequel ''F Final'' were horrifically sadistic, with a wide range of mooks who were mostly invulnerable to the most common attack type in the game, insane dodging capabilities and the power to tear right through even your best units.
** Let's not forget about ''SuperRobotWars 3''. The goddamn Beam Absorb ability was so broken that pretty much every beam attack is useless and in fact *heals* the opponent. The second-to-last level has you fight *six* end-of-game bosses, all of whom go out of their way to hunt down and kill your weakest units.
** A Portable manages to inherit the Nintendo Hard Skull-throne. Its enemies have high hit rates, and hit hard, compared to your low hit rates. To make matters worse, this game introduced a new system where each time a unit dodges an attack, the dodge rate ''decreases until it gets hit.'' This means the old tactic of "send in a a FragileSpeedster and have it dodge everything" isn't going to work. Plus the enemies do enough damage to make you cautious about even your SuperRobots. Combine all this with the low accuracy rate you have in general, and you'll be grouping your units around battleships with their accuracy/evade bonus aura a lot. Of course... grouping your enemies together makes you vulnerable to Map Attacks... and the final bit of difficulty? This game employs a FireEmblem style RNG, AKA: No resetting.
* ''Operation: Flashpoint'' for PC is one of the few modern examples where the entire game is uniformly hard. This is due to the fact that the game is incredibly realistic, where two shots can kill you, combined with the fact that in many later missions you're fighting off practically the entire Soviet army by yourself, factor in the multiple one hit kill snipers, tanks, helicopter gunships, and then add in the fact that missions are around forty minutes long on average with only one save point. Its expansion pack, Red Hammer, manages to somehow become EVEN HARDER. Much of the difficulty seems to come from the design plans, which apparently were "Make the most realistic game possible, and then pile on all the "realism" that will make it harder." Not only does the character handle like a cow and your ammo count is severely limited beyond what the modern soldier carries, but your enemies are also all trained sharpshooters.
** This isn't even realistic. In real combat, soldiers will fire hundreds and even thousands of rounds for every enemy casualty.
** Don't even talk about the sequel to OFP, ''Armed Assault'' (or just ArmA). TheComputerIsACheatingBastard. That's all that needs to be said. After they miss one time firing at you, they can suddenly compensate for every factor affecting the flight of their bullets. You can get gunned down with a sniper rifle by a guy with a pistol. The main storyline puts you up against impossible odds, which makes it slightly Nintendo Hard as well.
* ''OdinSphere''. The game pretty much flat-out gives you infinite lives straight off the bat, and take our word when we say you'll ''need'' them. Almost every boss -- and a fair few {{sub boss}}es -- are ThatOneBoss, and most four- and five-star levels are full of swarms of GoddamnedBats.
** ''OdinSphere'' is made exponentially more difficult by the sheer loving detail put into the animation - which means you'll spend a good three seconds doing ''anything'', from simple attacks to eating health items. Meanwhile you ''will'' be swarmed by enemies. Your character is knocked back by enemy attacks. Enemy characters are not, and will continue to attack ''through'' your attacks. Several levels also require a potion to prevent an ''automatic'' ongoing status ailment. The often stuttery frame rate will also prevent your actions from registering on a regular basis. Hello, FakeDifficulty.
* Much of the ''{{Gradius}}'' series is a test of patience and being able to recover out of a death that strips you of all of the powerups that keep the game easy. The arcade version of ''Gradius III'' (not Arcade difficulty of the SNES version, I mean the original arcade version), in particular is a notorious example; the first stage alone will make you '''CRY.'''
** And if you manage to make it past the dreaded 3D segment and Moai stage, you'll start raging at the end of the ice stage, with flying ice cubes that seem to be magnetically attracted to Vic Viper. Plus you have to face the boss too. And have fun during the final level's "escape sequence" after you kill the final boss.
**Gradius Rebirth. Take 5 of the most frustrating level types from the Gradius series, add in some more stuff that kills you, ''and make you go though them repeatedly, each time changing the set up and making things shoot faster to the point where you can't even move without being killed.'' Oh and the reset points? ''Typically have the powerup enemies just about to exit the screen, making it hard to also grab them for a chance of survival.''
*** And you can't practice all of that later stuff unless you're on the [=PS2=] version (thanks to stage select), because this version offers no continues. And the escape sequence? Dear God, when I got to that, I ''gave up.''
* ''Project X'' gives you five lives to complete five levels, each one capped with a boss you'd be lucky to beat with ten. One of them even ''laughs at you when you die''.
* Owata or (also known as ''The Life Ending Adventure''). The entire ''game'' is (intentionally) NintendoHard -- no matter which way the player goes, or what he attempts, he will be confronted by an impossibly difficult obstacle (such as falling spikes that require a sense of timing that borders on the precognitive), or a deliberately fatal dead end (such as a ladder that the player automatically climbs down -- but then ends about three rungs below the top of the screen).
* Also parodied on ''HomestarRunner'', there's the easter egg game "Super Kingio Bros," in which you cannot possibly avoid the first enemy, who you find within the first second of the game.
* The TurboGrafx/Playstation game ''Military Madness'' is an example of this trope in a turn-based strategy game. Things get tricky by mission 3, the enemy matches your numbers and has the advantage of a factory to repair units. In the later missions, and especially in hard mode, you will often be pitted against ridiculous odds; the enemy will have a lot more factories than you, have soldiers spread throughout the entire map, the player will be grossly outnumbered and have inferior weapons (the game loves to give the player's side "Rabbits," buggies that move quickly and pack a pretty good punch but apparently have [[OneHitPointWonder cardboard armor]]. Meanwhile, the computer will get half a dozen Slaggers, tanks that have heavy armor, staggering firepower, ''and'' move faster than any other tank in the game). Making things worse is, in the original game, it was impossible to save mid-mission and the AI was damn good for 1988. In nearly all of the later missions, the player will have to exploit the AI's flaws and have no room for error to even have a snowball's chance in hell. The Playstation version's CD case doesn't kid when it says "This mission calls for only the most seasoned operators with the wit and cunning of a chess grandmaster." (I still love the game, though).
* There's a ''Super Mario'' knockoff game that can be [[http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9374 downloaded for free]] that parodies the trope by taking it to ridiculous extremes - clouds that randomly come to life and kill the player, powerups that look useful but kill the player, ? blocks that endlessly spawn poison mushrooms, ''invisible'' SpikesOfDoom, and platforms that collapse with no warning all rain death and hellfire on the player - and just touching the flagpole at the end of the level is grossly difficult. [[http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/151568.html See for yourself.]]
** Another well-known example of a nearly impossible ROM Hack is "Kaizo Mario World." [[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8995799804738175148&q=kaizo+mario+world&ei=wYGWSNy5Do7-qwK82IBF This playthrough should cover all of the bases.]]
** A large number of ROM hacks fall into this category. The most likely logic is that, since the designer must assume that the player has access to save states, the game should be difficult enough to provide a challenge even when someone uses them.
** Though similar to all others, there is one particular hacked rom that deserves mention due to its name: ''Asshole Mario''. No, they aren't kidding.
*** The term "Asshole Mario" was a name given to Kaizo Mario World by sibladeko, the person to convert and upload all of the initial videos to youtube.
* In the ''GranTurismo'' games, you are required to complete a series of driving tests to be able to compete in all races. These driving tests, which are usually pretty unforgiving, have tight time limits and disqualify you immediately for straying off the track, meaning it's easy to have to replay some tests tens of times. One in particular, from ''GT4'', involves doing a lap around Nürburgring -- a 30 km track -- behind a slow car that must not be hit.
** Or overtaken.
** The Mercedes Showdown in ''[=GT4=]'' is the legendary grand champion of NintendoHard motherf**ing races. You race on the Nürburgring, the opponents are given a 3 minute head start, your otherwise ultra-powerful car handles "like a fish out of water", and you only have one chance to catch up to them.
*** GT5 shows that the developers at least realize that not everyone wants to do the stupid license tests: you can download the licenses. For a fee. In real money terms. Bastards.
* Arguably, ''EverQuest''. Designed to allow you to play by yourself until level 5 to 10 or so, after that, the game becomes rapidly harder to play alone until it becomes outright impossible for all but some specific character classes that can avoid direct combat. Some choice Nintendo Hard decisions:
** Not giving you any in game map nor even a compass, combined with...
** ... Making towns extremely large and maze like (the wood elf town and dark elf towns are somewhat legendary for this), to say nothing about dungeons
** ... Starting night blind races in incredibly dark zones (Tox Forest).
** Making it so that if you discover you need to flee a battle, you cannot (due to the game slowing you down when you run low on health, and increasing the chance of you being stunned when attacked from behind)
*** Oh yes, and mobs never, ever stop chasing you (unlike, say, WoW). The only way to escape is if you load into another zone, or the mob dies, or ''you'' die...or you aggrodump the pack onto some other poor, unsuspecing player. The last option is a bannable offense, by the way. A panicked cry of "Train!" ''means'' something in this game.
** Requiring players who ARE grouped together to spend literally weeks just getting ''keyed'' for certain dungeons (finding random items that allow you to finish a quest for a key, often with drop rates of less than 0.1%)
** Making your character lose all their equipment upon death, requiring they find their way back to their corpse, without any equipment
** Making characters lose 10% of a level upon death, undoing literally days of work for one mistake
** Some levels (the infamous "hell levels") require 4 times the amount of XP to progress through, meaning the 10% of a level upon death becomes, essentially, 40%
** The later expansions were increasingly geared towards the 1% of the player base which had finished the previous expansion (the so called "über guilds"), meaning that there are rapid plateaus of difficulty -- the idea being that you are expected to spend months "farming" bosses by killing them over and over in groups of literally dozens of players to get the equipment required to take down the next plateau's bosses.
*** Due to the game originally being envisioned as a Pay Per Hour system, as most online games were when the game began development, some of these decisions were extremely suspect.
*** Some of these decisions were later undone, notably, the modern game has a sub-par compass and map system; characters can recover their corpses using an NPC in game (although this requires a decent amount of in game resources to do); Hell levels were smoothed out; and while it is still utterly impossible to solo in the game for most classes, the addition of instanced dungeons allow quick groups to band together for an afternoon's worth of gaming.
** And if that isn't insane enough, [[FollowTheLeader nearly every other MMO afterwards]] seemed to think that all of the timesinks, frustration and the kind of game design that would be considered SoBadItsHorrible in a single-player game was a ''good thing''.
* ''[[AnotherWorldTheGame Another World]]'' (known as ''Out of This World'' in America). Make even a ''tiny'' mistake and you're dead.
** From the same developers, ''Heart of Darkness'' for the original Playstation.
** And ''FlashbackTheQuestForIdentity''
* ''The Immortal''. It's an isometric adventure game rather than a platformer, but just like in ''Another World'', you can and ''will'' die a lot - to the extent that you can die in ''the very first room'' if you stand on one particular spot just a few seconds too long. To put it simply: the title? It refers to [[spoiler:the BigBad]] - ''not to you''.
** There's something written on that amulet you picked up. Do you want to read it? ''You just blew up.''
** One of the puzzles ''requires'' you to drink poison in order to move further ahead. Better find that antidote in the next level quickly enough...
** Did you miss the Fire Resistance spell? The Magnetic Hands spell? The Stone Form spell? Sorry, if you're missing even a ''single'' one, the dragon at the end cannot be defeated and the game becomes {{Unwinnable}}. Time to restart...
** ElectronicArts sold a promotional T-shirt at the game's release which read "It's not when, it's how." The rest of the shirt was covered with pictures of human skulls in various states of damage with labels like "Crushed", "Fried", "Impaled", "Squid-bait"...
* ''[[TheLegendOfZelda Zelda II: Adventure of Link]]'' is easily the most challenging game in the franchise, although it doesn't mean much given that more modern and recent Zeldas have begun to edge into ItsEasySoItSucks territory. It isn't ''that'' challenging until you enter the Great Temple. [[GuideDangIt If you aren't following an FAQ or a fanmade map, good luck making your way to the end.]] As if it wasn't bad enough that the temple itself is more of a fiendish maze, most of the enemies in there some of the most powerful enemies in the entire game. The first half of the final ''bosses'' of the Great Temple is Thunderbird/Guardian Angel. To even damage the boss at all, you have to use the insanely costly spell Thunder and then you have to jump up in the air to hit the boss. Then, with no break in between, you fight Dark Link. Dark Link is the same as you, except incredibly hard to hit. If you run out of lives, game over and start the Great Temple all over again.
** The original ''Legend of Zelda'' is no cake-walk, either. Speedruns and videos of players breaking the dungeon sequence are common today, but when the game was released in 1986, there were no online [=FAQs=] to follow; players had to depend entirely upon word-of-mouth or the pages of ''Nintendo Power'' for strategies. Simply put, if you don't already know where to go and what to do, then there's no way to find out apart from the cryptic clues given by [=NPCs=]. Finding hidden rooms and the entrances to some dungeons was a process that had to be conducted entirely through trial-and-error, screen-by-screen, a laborious task that only becomes more common in the game's sadistic "second quest", which includes new dungeons, tougher enemies, and traps where the Old Man will force you to surrender either 50 rupees ''or a Heart Container''. These reasons (among others) led Gamasutra to include ''Zelda'' on its [[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1640/game_design_essentials_20_.php?page=8 list of 20 difficult games]].
* The classical ZX Spectrum game ''Jet Set Willy''. Contact with any hazard (or falling from too high) [[OneHitPointWonder causes you to lose a life]], and the game frequently requires perfectly accurate jumping. To make things even worse, when you die, you re-enter the room in exactly the same way you entered it originally; this quite often resulted in the entire game being lost by a single mistake: you enter (usually fall into) a room, die before you can do anything, re-enter, die ... (The sequel Jet Set Willy 2 attempted to fix the problem by causing you to respawn at the spot where you died, or the spot from where you fell or jumped to your death, which works ... unless the place is also the starting point of some monster, in which case you enter the infinite loop of death without any warning that it could be the case.) Not to mention that the original game contained a bug: entering one of the rooms caused several other rooms to become corrupted, making the game [[UnWinnable impossible to complete]].
* Any game made by the Sega Technical Institute tends to be like this.
** ''Kid Chameleon'' for the Sega Genesis has been called ''IWannaBeTheGuy Lite'', and for good reason; between the multiple drill-blocks, spiked pits, numerous enemies, crushing spiked walls and platforms, blocks that ''shoot spikes when touched'', hailstones that fall like rain during certain levels, mazes during the aforementioned crushing spiked wall chase levels made out of rubber blocks, and the sheer amount of levels you have to go through, it's a wonder no one has gone insane (that we know of) from playing it. There is one specific level where the floor is mostly bouncy blocks and the player is forced to run through the stage due to a large wall of rapidly moving spikes making this almost Nintendo Hard (it isn't as most players will learn how to get through this level in five or either tries as it isn't actually impossible).
*** Don't forget the dozens upon dozens of "elsewhere" levels in the game. If you take an alternate exit, you end up "elsewhere". Early in the game, this wasn't bad because finishing elsewhere usually took you a few levels forward. Later, who knows? Backwards, forwards, sideways... you'll have no idea until you see another level (maybe an "Elsewhere" level) that you already played a while ago... a long while ago. It's enough to make the "TOO BAD" level (in which taking the wrong path out of two = die and start the level again) seem downright friendly. And just to really rub it in, there's a secret to skip right to the final boss from the second level of the game, and get the same (crappy) ending you'd otherwise need to spend a gazillion hours to see.
** ''{{Comix Zone}}''. 6 stages, 2 lives (only accessible after finishing the first two stages), [[ThatOneBoss ridiculously hard 4th stage boss]], time-based ending for the final battle, very few healing items, no save system, and the amazing idea that someone had to make you '''take damage''' every time your character punched a non-enemy object, and you were more or less forced to destroy several of them over the course of the game to proceed, sacrificing a good chunk of your health in process. Oh, and the first stage ends with a jump that must be spot on. Still considered an enjoyable game, mostly for the aesthetic and great soundtrack.
* ''RollerCoasterTycoon'' has some rather mean objectives for you to set out on.
** Harmony Hills: 1,200 guests in 3 years without adjusting land, scenery or building over trees.
** Micro Park: Get a park rating of $10,000 at the end of the 3rd year with a park 13x13 big. And you thought Dinky/Pokey Park was hard.
** Mothball Mountain: 900 guests in 3 years with poor terrain, wet weather, land is rather expensive and your max loan is $15,000. T_T
** Fiasco Forest. 800 guests in one year, and the danger factor is like Action Park on steroids.
* ''Super StarWars'' on the SNES and all its sequels. The first level is a cakewalk, but the difficulty sky-rockets when you get to the sandcrawler and have to ascend a variety of moving platforms. You fell? Unless you luckily land on another platform, you're landing right back at the bottom (and probably next to some respawning Jawas). Inside the sand-crawler is even worse, with moving turrets that fire ricocheting projectiles while fire is blasted behind or beneath you, so you have to dodge both while attacking the turret. The Jawas and those square robot things that fire at you the minute they come on screen, often before you get the chance to fire back unless you stop every few seconds to fire randomly don't make it any easier, especially because they cause more damage than the healing items they regularly drop replenish.
** Not to mention those incessant laser beam walls in the sandcrawler which you can barely get across even by sliding.
** Oh god: The Kalhar boss monster in the cantina and the Imperial hover combat carrier in Docking Bay 94. They're the hardest two bosses I found out about. Aside from Vader in Super Empire Strikes Back (and only in that game. as he is [[spoiler:too easy to beat in Super Return of the Jedi]]).
** Made by the same people, ''{{IndianaJones}}'' Greatest Adventures is somewhat more forgiving... in places. The second level involves having to escape a giant Mode7 boulder, a task that may sound simple except you are given very little room to see any of the obstacles in front of you, so unless you are ''extremely'' careful or manage to memorize the traps you'll usually die after hitting one set of spikes and getting knocked backwards into the boulder.
** An example of when NintendoHard can be a blessing: this troper could never (and still can't) get past the third level of ''[[StarWars The Empire Strikes Back]]'' for the Game Boy...which is just as well, because he was playing the game long before he ever saw the film, and would have been [[YouShouldKnowThisAlready spoilered to kingdom come]] had he completed it.
*** The Game Boy version is a port of the NES game, which deviates from the movie so much that you wouldn't have to worry about "[[LukeIAmYourFather the revelation]]." Just to let you know, [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQzKdurHeNw this review of that game]] shows the sort of deviations from the film, and makes the reviewer angry at the game.
* ''SeriousSam: The First and Second Encounters'': Serious and Mental difficulty. Games where [[TheWarSequence literally hundreds of enemies often appear simultaneously]]. In addition to large assaults, many battles occur in small, enclosed areas with less room to retreat. Enemies move very quickly, some explode upon dying and chaos is inevitable. These are great games with nonstop action. ''SeriousSam 2'' however was very easy and dull.
**Although tourist difficulty inverts this trope. Dying isn't an option in tourist difficulty.
* ''Breakdown'': Controls take a very long time to master although not in a FakeDifficulty way. Enemies are very strong and every hit disorients the player, forcing him to adjust the view while under attack. Its penultimate battle is a five round deathmatch with no save points. Actions are slow but in a great, detailed manner, not FakeDifficulty. Save points are sometimes very distant. Breakdown is worth beating though because it is an excellent game.
* ''{{Oni}}'': A great game but almost as complicated and unforgiving as ''Breakdown''. Controls are equally elaborate, well designed and difficult to learn. Very difficult jumps are placed throughout the game. Save points and health packs are rare. Enemies hit hard and are quite numerous.
** Truth be told, ''Oni'' is only hard to play if you absolutely want to master every move. If you specialize in a few and repeat them over and over, it's not actually so bad. Most people probably play it like this - some of the most advanced moves are stupidly hard to execute even when practicing, let alone when you have to worry about fifty angry riot cops itching to rape yo' ass.
** ThisTroper confirms. Couldn't remotely hope to live through five minutes of any other game on this page, but have repeatedly gone through ''Oni'' front to back without a single cheat code. (Not on the higher difficulty settings, admitted.) The trick is just what the prior troper said -- learn those moves that suit your play style, and then rehearse them until you can execute 'em in your sleep. The highest-level moves are apparently intended just for the lulz, they're neither intended to be relied upon or necessary to clear the last stages. PS -- when fighting Muro in the 'good ending' mode, make sure your first action is to ''move the fight down to the extreme lower end of the map and behind one of the transformers''. Fighting him gets ginormously easier if all his minions (who are busy dancing with your NPC allies) lose LOS to you right away, because then they don't come down and keep hitting you in the back. Also, it gives you a chance to put Muro in a corner and then just keep punching him stupid.
*** Now [[FanRemake Anniversary Edition]] ''{{Oni}}''... remove all the AI oddities like jogging directly into weapons fire, tighten up the combat, up the AI skill levels and grant some of the Syndicate Techs and robots partial ninja movesets, and now we're talkin'!
* There's a new generation of Nintendo Hard games, which take play mechanics from NES classics and cranks up the difficulty way past eleven, to a number that can't be displayed on a standard pocket calculator. Homebrew game designer Dessgeega has referred to these games as "masocore," or games for hardcore masochistic players. She also created her own game in the genre, ''Mighty Jill Off'', which is a tribute to ''Mighty Bomb Jack''. The difference is that there are no bombs... instead, the player is forced to master the high jumps and gliding that defined the Bomb Jack series in order to climb to the top of a very high, very dangerous tower.
** The first tower is relatively tame, but [[BonusLevelOfHell the second one]]... Well, just to tip you off, the criteria to play it is to finish the first level under twelve minutes. If you still want to play it, you'd better be prepared for some nasty tricks, such as [[spoiler:jumping through a section with seemingly glitched graphics, jumping through what looks like solid floor or having to kill yourself to get through a dead end... ''twice''.]] Fortunately, the game plays fair and these obstacles aren't that hard to figure out.
* ''[[SuperMarioBros Mario]] Strikers Charged.''
** See also ''Mario Hoops 3-on-3'', which has the super-secret hidden option of turning your DS into a projectile weapon.
*** See also any [[SuperMarioBros Mario franchise]] sports title in the single player modes. Nowhere else is [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the computer ''more'' of a cheating bastard.]]
*** Ninjas shouldn't be ''allowed'' to play basketball. It's not fair. They're '''''[[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/9/20/ ninjas.]]'''''
* ''DanceDanceRevolution'' features an Oni (or Challenge) mode in which you need to clear several songs in a row, usually accompanied with frantic step charts. Any judgment of "Good" (apparently not good enough) or worse takes away a life. Lose 4 lives and you're dead. There's no temporary invincibility so losing the rhythm for a split second can take you from 4 lives to dead. Most games will give you a single extra life after each level if you're not maxed out (newer US home versions will generously top you off each time). In the arcade versions the reward is that Oni courses are usually longer (and if you have the technical skill they're not quite as bad as they seem).
** ''In The Groove'' 's courses didn't have a life system like Oni, but the courses in that game had tons of modifiers that ensured the incoming arrows did everything but appear normally, flying around in every direction but straight. ITG2 also had a survival mode which provided the player with limited time that constantly wound down, only rewarding extra time for hitting steps with the best possible accuracy (fantastic), and docked more precious time for anything below "Excellent." It's quite easy to hit every single arrow quite accurately and still lose. Since the time is always winding down, one can easily put themselves into an unwinnable situation by not leaving enough time to possibly finish the song even if they do perfectly.
** The ''{{Beatmania}} [=IIDX=]'' series is known amongst many fans of music-based games for having off-the-scale challenge. Any song that is higher than level 1 will most likely kill a new player. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW34iG4bsQw These]] [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwsOrOISHA videos]] [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg2TXCZZiBY show]] just how hard this game gets.
*** On top of how hard {{Beatmania}} [=IIDX=] already is, Bemani decided to add in yet another difficulty level since the game was apparently too easy. Look at this [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV5naNtRbJc&feature=related video]] to see one of these new stupid hard songs. And Americans think Through the Fire and Flames is tough...
** The vast majority of fan-made song files for DDR type games are Nintendo hard, because most of the fans that make them are the ones devoted enough to the game to be able to play at that level of difficulty. You are also totally screwed if you try to use your feet and a dance mat to play a song that was intended to be played with a keyboard.
* The original ''MaxPayne'' was truly NintendoHard for this editor, given the fact that most enemies had spot-on aim, what seemed like limitless ammunition and, in many cases, as much health or more than the game's protagonist, which leaves the player with almost no advantage over his enemies, besides being able to [[BulletTime slow down time]], use [[HealThyself healing items]] and switch weapons. Add to this the game's somewhat bizarre use of RubberBandAI, and you have a truly difficult game in your hands.
** The later levels, where you face enemies with weapons that can rip you apart in short order while trying to navigate explosive obstacles that can kill you in one go, are especially a bitch. This troper nearly ripped his hair out the first twenty times trying to get past the goddamned grenadiers on "Nothing to Lose."
** The ''Hard-Boiled'' and ''Dead On Arrival'' difficulty levels evens out the game considerably, most notably because the game no longer corrects for being really good or really bad: the enemies are just ratcheted up to the highest difficulty level, which means they can take a lot of rounds (aim for the head!) to kill, they have ''much'' better accuracy, and healing items restore less health and take longer to do it. Suicidal is one term, but the game is still very much winnable, particularly if you take advantage of the fact that Max cannot die while shootdodging.
* ''RondoOfSwords'' for the DS is a ridiculously hard strategy-{{RPG}}. The challenge derives from gameplay that is [[DamnYouMuscleMemory superficially similar]] to typical ''FireEmblem'' / ''FinalFantasyTactics''-type stuff while being critically different in the details; incredibly fragile player characters resulting in little margin for error; and just plain challenging enemy setups.
** It also lets you pull out of battle at any time, resetting all your characters' "Hurt" statuses while keeping any experience earned. In this way, it becomes merely a poster child for LevelGrinding.
* The game ''Stuntman'', especially in the later levels. You have to drive a car through a long sequence with numerous stunts with very little margin of error. The strict time limit and stunt requirements make it so that if you make a mistake at any point, you pretty much have to restart the level. Several levels take dozens of retries to get through. This Troper once spent more than 3 hours on a single level near the end of the game. The sequel, thankfully, was much more forgiving, allowing you to get through most levels without much trouble, though it's still challenging to get a high score on them.
* ''VagrantStory'' has a system called Risk points. The higher the Risk, the more damage you take and the worse your accuracy. At 100+ Risk you'll be missing four out of five times. And the way it raises is with successful combo attacks. This makes ''VagrantStory'' probably the only video game in history that actually ''punishes you for playing the game well.'' Most of the random enemies encountered are even harder than bosses, because some weapons don't work on them at all due to elemental and weapon attributes. You also have invisible traps AND out-of-the-blue enemies in inescapable dungeons. Not to mention the final boss has a special attack that can kill you even if you have only 3-5 points of Risk Points and it cannot be blocked with magic buffs. And the enemies that can use an instant death spell on you... and you're only controlling one person for the whole game.
* While otherwise a great game, Apogee's side-scrolling shooter ''{{Stargunner}}'' is incredibly difficult. Even on the easiest difficulty, the guardian bosses every three levels, and especially at the end of an episode, will eat through your available lives like popcorn, and you only have a maximum of nine. The rapid loss of lives when facing the bosses tends to either come from them having incredibly powerful weapons and being really good shots or just simply being extremely maneuverable and colliding with your ship. This troper still hasn't managed to finish the first registered-only episode, even using cheats for money to buy the maximum number of lives.
** The fact that you can save and load your exact gameplay position makes the game a good deal easier. But the fact that no other shmup known to man gives you this option makes realizing the said ability infinitely more difficult than it should be.
* ''BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'' for the Super Nintendo was a somewhat challenging, very fun game. (At least until you got to the Batmobile stage, whose [[TimedMission timer]] was agonizingly unforgiving.) Its Genesis version however was a barely playable, Nintendo Hard game from Hell. Enemies swarmed everywhere and poor controls made fighting very difficult.
** Speaking of which, the original ''Batman'' game for the NES by Sunsoft would fall into this category. Lightning quick reflexes, level memorization, and maybe a turbo controller were necessary to get through the game, and let's not even get started on the bosses. There are even times when one MUST abuse the limitations of the hardware and game to get through. The sequel, ''Batman: Return of the Joker'' (which was even ''less'' related to the movies or comics) tried to compensate by giving you [[{{BFG}} ridiculously powerful wrist-mounted guns]].
*** To give an idea of how hard Batman NES is, the most well-known ROM hack for it is designed to make the game ''easier''.
* ''MarioKart Wii'' has recently come under fire for this. From both this gamer's experiences and others he's heard and witnessed, this game takes the unfairness of the items from the previous games and turns it up to 11. First place? You're going to get hit by lightning while going over a jump, which means Lakitu has to fish you up and dump you back on the track. And then, just because the game hates you, you'll get smacked in the face by two red shells, leaving you somewhere around 9th. Then when you get close to first again, someone with invincibility will just knock you off the track again.
** Even more fun, try for [[RankInflation three stars]] taking all the various misfortunes into consideration. It's a borderline LuckBasedMission, and it's enough to make you want to hurl your Wiimote at the wall.
** To add to this the AI karts have the most blatant display of TheComputerIsACheatingBastard I have ever seen. No matter what kart the player is in or how long you've been in first place you get within site of the finish line on the third lap and BAM: blue shell, another blue shell, star dude, red shell, lightning bolt, and to top things off 2 green shells and suddenly you are in last place. After leading the entire races with people far closer than is physically possible this situation almost led to a broken TV...
** To add to TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the game seems to up the ante when you're closing in on defeating it. Having previously achieved silver on the final cup, coming back to it later when it's the last remaining non-gold cup sees the opponents and item box screw dialed up to eleven.
* The original ''Super MarioKart'' (SNES) should qualify... for Rainbow Road if nothing else. This troper was only able to score the gold in the final circuit by getting four first-place finishes and edging out a fourth-place finish on Rainbow Road.
** Combined with RubberBandAI, you could run out of lives pretty quickly. Lose them all and it's back to the start of the cup for you. Made worse in 2 player mode where if one player gets a GameOver, they can't play for the rest of the cup.
* The original ''{{Metroid}}'' (on the NES, of course). "Wait, people [[{{Speedrun}} finish it in less than 30 minutes!]]" Those are the people who have memorized the layout of the game. Those who play the game from scratch know that between CopyAndPasteEnvironments inside of a maze, not starting at full energy (you have to ''fill it'') regardless of passwords, only being able to shoot forward and up, [[GuideDangIt needing the ice beam to fight Metroids in the last level despite not being told of this and having a choice of other weapons]], and real hard bosses (specially the last one, which requires you to shoot while being harassed by turrets and "onion rings of death"), getting through the game at all is almost insane.
** [[SurpriseDifficulty It's even worse if you played the sequels]], as it lacks a map, shooting in other directions other than straight and up, and shooting kneeled (which means enemies lower than your gun will never get caught...).
* If you thought [[IWannaBeTheGuy being The Guy]] was hard, try being a frog. ''{{Frogger}}: He's Back'', for the original Playstation, is so ridiculously difficult that it rivals even ''IWannaBeTheGuy''. Clearing some of the later levels can easily end up taking ''weeks'' of practice. Frogger is a OneHitPointWonder with SuperDrowningSkills in a world with EverythingTryingToKillYou, [[TimedMission strict time limits]], and surprisingly realistic JumpPhysics that takes quite a bit of getting used to. Furthermore, [[CameraScrew the camera is ridiculously zoomed in]], making it hard to see what obstacles are coming up next and where the level goals are.
* ''{{Shadowgate}}''. Dear God, ''Shadowgate''. Have fun with a first-person point-and-click adventure-type game with even more random instant deaths ("you take a look at the scroll, only to find out it's a scroll of ''explode and kill whoever tries to read it'', nyah nyah") than ''NetHack'', and sometimes the ''right'' answer is fairly obscure.
** ThisTroper remembers one room of the game with three mirrors. The only way to proceed is by smashing one of them with a sledgehammer to reveal a door that you open and go through. However, another one apparently has a magical black hole or something behind it as smashing it reveals a vortex that sucks you in to your death, and the third just has a wall, but trying to smash it somehow leads you to breaking it in such a way that the flying shards kill you. Hope you saved before having to take a complete unaided wild guess as to which one's which.... And that's one of the ''easier'' puzzles.
** One room has a pit with an obvious ladder affixed to one side. I hope you're not dumb enough to think that means you can climb down and that they won't just reveal afterwards that the ladder only goes down about an inch past what you can see from the top and then suddenly stops, leading you to fall to your death. ''Obviously'' the answer is to [[spoiler:only come back much, much later, when you have a spell that can make ropes levitate.]]
** Did we mention your character will sometimes gleefully commit suicide if you so much as look at certain items in your inventory the wrong way?
*** Not only that, but for every window, well, bridge, and basically every piece of the environment for which your character ''can'' interpret the "look at" command as "kill yourself using," he does.
*** Seriously. He really does. It's like deciding that you want to look at a butter knife in your kitchen and your brain interpreting that idea as "let's jam it in my eye and see what happens."
*** They lampshade this a little bit because you actually CAN deliberately kill yourself. Just select the sword from your inventory, and "use" on "self." Your guy guts himself and dies, with the onscreen text pointing out that "suicide will not help you on your quest."
*** Strangely, the same thing happens when you use the sledgehammer on yourself as well. Literally the same thing, down to the same method and description. As in, "you plunge the hammer into your chest. Blood flows from the wound...."
** And the game doesn't care how brightly lit a room you're in or even if you're outside in the middle of the day with the sun visibly shining, [[TimedMission woe unto you if your torch ever goes out.]]
** The Swedish translation of the game (a rare occurrence in those days) makes things worse by ''mistranslating'' one of the objects needed to kill the final boss. The only way to figure it out is by trial and error.
* ''Uninvited'' was MUCH worse than Shadowgate. In the start of the game, there's an upstairs hallway where a mysterious woman appears that is actually a ghost and will kill you. The only way to beat her is to enter one specific room first and find something called "No Ghost" to use on her. If you make her appear BEFORE entering that room, she will kill you when you try to enter it. Oh, and you have to OPEN the No Ghost before using it or it won't work. It just gets worse from there.
** This troper played it recently; in a game like this, a huge ruby sounds like a totally awesome thing that you will need later, so of course you take it. Several minutes later, more than long enough to forget about it in the midst of avoiding all the OTHER death lurking about the place, you get a few cryptic messages about slowly having your consciousness encroached upon by a strange force. Then you die. The game never explains that the ruby in your inventory is the source of the posession, and if you choose to restart after dying of it, you will still have it.
** At the very least, Shadowgate gave clues stating that the Staff of Ages, Golden Blade, Silver Orb, Bladed Sun Talisman and Platinum Horn were they keys to beating the BigBad. No such clues were given as to how to finish Uninvited. So of course you would just figure out that you're supposed to [[spoiler: turn on a bathtub to flood a bathroom and float up to the hatch above, then hit your sister to release the demon inside her, THEN kill the demon with holy water from a goblet that you took from a church much earlier in the game!!!]]
* Many games released by Atlus. This includes the ''{{Shin Megami Tensei}}'' games. In particular, the infamously difficult ''{{Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne}}''. This game was famous for having possibly the most frustrating bosses in the history of JRPG games. Of all the bosses, Matador in particular stands out as being [[ThatOneBoss That One Boss]] among a game FULL of them.
** ''ShinMegamiTenseiNocturne'' famously introduced the "Press Turn" battle system, which was later used in spinoffs ''DigitalDevilSaga'', ''{{Persona 3}}'' and ''{{Persona 4}}''. This meant getting extra turns for exploiting an opponents elemental weakness. And also giving the OPPONENT extra turns for exploiting your own elemental (and in one case, status ailment) weaknesses. Since each party member is weak against a different element (or status ailments) chances are any enemy who can cast hit-all elemental spells (that is, 90% of them) will get extra turns. Which will likely be used to cast same elemental spell again. Given that enemies often appear in groups of 5 (each of which capable of casting an elemental hit-all spell, usually different elements) and you start to get the idea.
*** Even if you have one demon in your party that's weak to a particular element, having a demon that nullifies or absorbs that element will prevent the enemy from getting an extra turn. Of course, this applies to the player as well: if you use a hit-all fire spell like Maragi on mixed enemy party, you won't get an extra turn. Of course, this isn't what makes MegaTen so hard. What really makes the game interesting is that [[WeCannotGoOnWithoutYou if the Hero dies, it's game over]].
*** The ''Persona'' series was also developed by Atlus, and is correspondingly difficult, with the exception of Persona 3, due to the easily abused battle system, inconsequential dating sim, and easy bosses compared to previous games in the series. Odin Sphere, mentioned above, is another. Ogre Battle is another series. Devil Summoner: Raidou was actually criticized for ''not'' being as horribly difficult...on its standard difficulty that is.
*** The situation with Persona 3 was fixed in the re-release, Persona 3 FES, which added a Hard Mode that will ''rape you''. It doesn't help that the second story in the game -- The Answer -- is stuck on Hard Mode for the long haul.
*** And if that's not enough, ''Persona 3 Portable'' will also include a '''[[HarderThanHard Maniax]]''' difficulty. We can hear the terrified sobbing of players worldwide already.
** ''ShinMegamiTensei I'' was no slouch either - your ability to get through dungeons is largely based on how many levels you've ground times your ability to talk your way out of certain enemy battles (especially the sort that hit you with multi-target status effects). Combine that with some absolutely MASSIVE dungeons (good luck remembering where that one location was that you needed to go to because ''it's not marked on the map'') with a long, long walk to every save point (and forget saving before bosses - there's NEVER a save point before a boss) and a limited item list and you'll be spamming save states on an emulator just to maintain your sanity. Oh, and sometimes the map likes to warp you to random locations, and then upon going back you'll be somewhere else. Or you'll fall through the floor. Which will be a damage floor. And you will never, ''ever'' have enough MP, and most of your demons will suck, especially if you're not Neutral and are therefore locked out of recruiting demons of the opposite alignment (and for some reason the hordes of Chaos don't seem to like ''healing spells'').
** Don't forget ''EtrianOdyssey'', which was made Nintendo Hard ''on purpose.'' In interviews with the lead designer, he claimed being greatly inspired by old madness-inducingly hard first-person dungeon crawlers such as ''Dungeon Master'', and specifically wanted to recapture that element. For example, he liked the sensation of having to break out graph paper and draw maps as you're playing, and the strange pride you feel about said maps when they're done, so now ''Etrian Odyssey'' gives you a blank grid and some placeable icons and makes you draw a map instead of doing anything for you. And as any ''Etrian Odyssey'' player can tell you, having to make your own map is the ''least'' of the game's hard elements.
*** The best part is when you get cornered by an F.O.E., and every turn, as you battle it, the surrounding F.O.E.s approach to gang up on you all at once - when any single one of them is a brutally hard boss all on its own. And then there's the floors that are almost entirely damage floors for a whole level - and there's no way to ward that off, by the way.
*** And then there's the invisible F.O.E.
*** [+IOSYS=] managed to [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM5MMqNgUzM beautifully capture the state of mind you will descend to]] if you dare to play.
** ''TraumaCenter'' more than deserves a mention here. ''Under the Knife'', ''Second Opinion'', and ''New Blood'' have always been known for their intense learning curve and mission difficulty. ''Under the Knife 2'' takes the difficulty from the previous games, tears it to pieces, stomps on them for a bit, then incinerates the remains in the fires of Hades. One particular example is the first Pempti mission; in ''Under the Knife'' and ''Second Opinion'', Pempti was stupidly luck-based and difficult on its own. In ''Under the Knife 2'', you have ''two'' Pemptis to deal with at the same time (and if you kill one of them, the remaining one is nigh-guaranteed to kill the patient unless they're at 99 vitals). The final mission can take hours of practice to even get to the last stage (every single GUILT you've fought before appears in the mission, and are able to cause at least ten more damage to vitals than usual), which, in all likelihood, you can lose in a second, due to the game's nature of important things happening when your patient is a second away from death. And this is on ''Normal mode.''
*** The game is so cruel that if you mess up the timing during the CrowningMomentOfAwesome at the end of the game, it's game over, no questions asked.
*** Don't forget the X levels, the insidious, demon-possessed bonus levels that come at the end of the game and belong to their own difficulty level. For months after a new game is released, you can bet any walkthroughs will stop dead at the first one.
** And what of ''Snowboard Kids'', that obscure Atlus racing series for the N64 (and later, the DS)? The original raised TheComputerIsACheatingBastard to a near art form, with AI that performed perfect turns and got to the coins and items before you could, leaving you with nothing unless the game took pity on you and gave you a half-decent item. Using any character beyond Tommy, Slash, or [[GameBreaker Shinobin]] was basically asking to have your ass kicked. Amazingly, this only applied to human players! Computer-controlled characters actually get better stats than they would if you played them!
*** The sequel, ''Snowboard Kids 2'', reduced the AI's omniscience, but included ''boss battles''. In a ''racing game.'' Where, you not only had to beat the boss to the finish line (and they were faster than you could ever hope to be), you also had to collect items on the course and hit the boss enough times with bombs so they would collapse. Damien's robot still haunts many an N64.
*** As an added bonus, anyone who missed the AI from the first game now had Expert Mode, which gave the computer-controlled characters back their ridiculous advantage over any human player.
** Basically, you know it's an Atlus game if in your first encounter in [[strike:a new]] ANY area, you get ambushed by a group of enemies who go first and eliminate your entire party before you get your first turn.
*** If Atlus were as famous as Nindendo, this trope would probably be called "Atlus Hard" instead.
* The poor design in many levels of the Bloons "Player Pack" games (consisting of selected fan-made levels) make success based on trial and error, contributing to the near-impossibility of beating the games (I still can't beat the "White Crane" level in Player Pack 4, where I have to guide the dart through a V without hitting the metal blocks. After that, I have to rapidly fire darts downward at the wooden blocks and hit the bomb before the ice bloon freezes it). The regular Bloons games are slightly easier though.
* Many old first-person RPG dungeon crawlers are ridiculously difficult by today's standards, what with having to make your own maps, teleporters that drop you into identical-looking areas, pitch-black segments of the dungeon, really strong monsters, secret doors indistinguishable from walls, and just about every other cheap trick in the book.
** ''EtrianOdyssey'' tries its hardest to recapture this.
* ''TheHouseOfTheDead'' series. It doesn't help that in the Wii port of ''The House of the Dead 2'', you don't get unlimited continues.
** You would think that, by being given a shotgun in ''3'' and a machine gun in ''4'', along with a supply of grenades, would make those games easier than their predecessors. How wrong you are. ''How very, '''very''' wrong you are...''
** Of course, this troper knows from experience that, without extensive headshot practice, one may only complete one of the HOTD arcade games with at least $10 and a blister on the trigger finger. Furthermore, with the machine gun in ''4'', if one simply aims the gun at head level, many zombies shall fall instantly to automatic weaponry.
** Hell, just about any Sega-created arcade-style light gun game could fit this trope; there's ''Ocean Hunter'' with its slow-to-reload torpedoes and annoyingly frenetic and hard-to-kill bosses, ''Let's Go Jungle'' with its swarms of enemies and irritating minigames to determine how you fare in certain forced scenarios...but the king has to be ''Brave Firefighters'', a ''TimeCrisis''-like firefighting game where ''each and every fire you're supposed to put out, '''including the "boss" fires''''' regenerate their health and spread if you don't take care of them fast enough...before throwing in a "safe the hostage" scenario in ''each "boss" fire'' that - if you allow to get burned - takes time ''off''. Prepare to have your bank account emptied by this game, and try to avoid the AllDevouringBlackHoleLoanSharks, while you're at it.
**What of Typing of the Dead? The last levels will have you snap your keyboard in half after giving you carpal tunnel three times on each wrist... somehow.
* ''Abadox.'' Holy shitcock, Abadox. It looks like ''LifeForce'' - and it is a damned good shooter - but there's one little problem. When you die - and you WILL die - you lose all your powerups. Standard shooter fare, right? Did we mention that if you don't have speed powerups, you control like molasses in January? This in a game full of tight turns, fast-moving landscapes and (especially in the later levels) enemies as fast as you are ''with'' speed powerups. It fits with all the old shmup tropes - huge sprites, OneHitPointWonder and the like - but quite simply, this game is a psychotically hard example. Beating it without using the all-powerful code or savestates is an incredible achievement, on par with one-life-running ''Battletoads.''
* ''Impossamole''(for Amiga, C64, and TG 16) nearly lives up to its name. GoddamnedBats that knock you backwards, often into other enemies or onto SpikesOfDoom (or off a [[PointOfNoReturn cliff of no return]], possibly causing a Scroll to be LostForever), limited attack range unless you get one of the guns, which only last a minute or so, plenty of [[InvincibleMinorMinion invincible enemies]], which are especially annoying if they are produced by a MookMaker, falling blocks that hurt you even if you touch them while they're on the ground, arduous platform jumping sequences exacerbated by GoddamnedBats, long low-ceilinged "hallways of doom" riddled with falling ceiling blocks, DemonicSpiders, and [[MookMaker Mook Makers]], and a GottaCatchEmAll gameplay element that involves collecting Scrolls, where you can get stuck in an {{Unwinnable}} situation if you missed one before a PointOfNoReturn in the stage. And you can't attack underwater, making all underwater enemies InvincibleMinorMinion. At least the TG16 version had a password system, in the computer version, you don't even have any extra lives. Borders on PlatformHell.
* ''[[{{Lufia}} Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals]]'', the second game in the Lufia series, is an RPG that also happens to include several extremely difficult [[BlockPuzzle puzzles]], most of which are not optional. A determined player may also manage to stumble upon what an NPC calls "the world's most difficult trick," which consists of a particularly difficult variation of the {{Klotski}} puzzle. Fortunately, that one ''is'' optional.
* ''Robot Warrior'' on the original NES. Similar to Bomber Man, you had to drop bombs to create a path through a labyrinth of breakable rocks, unbreakable rocks and ennemies. 3 lives, but one hit death, no continue, no password, only one bomb at the time with a 3 second delayed explosion, and a constant Wall of Doom through every single level, getting faster as you make your way through the stages. The only way to make any progress whatsoever was to memorize absolutely everything, from set up to enemies to timing.
* ''Legacy of the Wizard'' for the NES. The game is one massive dungeon, there is no map, you ''will'' get stuck if you try to play without knowing where everything is, and the only place to get a password is at the house where you start.
* All three of [=iNis=]' games in the ''[[OsuTatakaeOuendan Ouendan]]'' series (1, 2, and ''EliteBeatAgents'') are notable for having extremely hard final songs, even on the ''easy'' mode. The sky-rocketing difficulty puts some of the penultimate stages pretty close as well, most notably "Canned Heat" in ''EBA''.
** It's not the beatmaps themselves that are hard. Compared to other rhythm games, they're actually pretty simple. No, what makes the game NintendoHard is the absolutely unforgiving life meter, which penalizes you greatly for missed notes, such that it only takes a few missed notes before you fail out, and even if you manage to survive at first, not only is it really hard to build your meter back up, but you can still fail out later because ''the meter is always decreasing'' when you're not hitting notes. Which, by the way, makes it possible to fail even if you are hitting all the notes, unless you're hitting most of them perfectly. Oh, and the final stages? They like to throw a lot of spinners at you, and then have you hit tricky note sequences after the spinners, which tend to make your hand a little shaky for some time afterwards...
* The ''{{Boktai}}'' series on the Gameboy Advance. Difficult games to begin with, considering how in the first game, you had very limited ammo. Part two of the difficulty is that there are very few powerups (though it includes a few Solar Stations to recharge your sunpower in dungeons, and the first game had a 99 per item max capacity), and finally... The game must be played in the sunlight. Not just bright indoor lighting, but actual sunlight. This gives you more recharges for your sunpower, weakens the enemies, and is the final thing needed to kill numerous boss characters. On the downside, you can't see your character or the enemies when you play in the sun with the original GBA. And the method of play for using the GBA special required you to lay back and let your gameboy eclipse the sun, making it impossible to see the screen again because your eyes were squinted shut. Finally, too much time in the sun, your character dies of heatstroke, and you yourself will get thirsty or sunburned.
** If you're burning off a quarter of your Battery on every mook, you're doing it wrong. The first game is stealth-based, not combat-based.
* The ''Jumper'' series of freeware 2D platformers. Every stage beginning with Stage 2-1 in every game is an exercise in patience, finger dexterity, reflexes, platformer jumping skills, and precision. Unlike IWannaBeTheGuy, however, ''Jumper'' is more honest. It doesn't try to [[FakeDifficulty ruin your life]] with [[TrialAndErrorGameplay booby traps around every corner]] that you need to memorize; every single death in this game is less of the stage's fault and more of your fault for not being careful enough.
* ''{{X-COM}}: Terror From the Deep''. Oy vey. OneHitPointWonder player units (at least to begin with; any that survive to gain additional HP are the ''unlucky'' ones) that graduated with honours from the ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy, and you can't even save and reload a level ''because they're randomly generated each time you enter''. High Explosive Round spam was about the only way to get further than about 3 months of game time before getting sacked for sucking so bad.
** Even then, you'd best be prepared to spam '''very''' slowly, as the action point system means that your characters will only be able to do a tiny amount of stuff if you want them to be able to act during the aliens' turn.
** There's a reason for this. The original game had a bug where whatever difficulty level you selected, you were playing in Beginner mode. The developers thus had a large number of complaints about Superhuman mode being too easy, so to fix things, they jacked the difficulty of the game up to where Superhuman mode was ''supposed'' to be. Except the engine (which is basically the same) has the ''same bug''. Result? Whatever difficulty level you played on was Superhuman. Welcome to hell.
** Not to mention the numerous problems with the game itself, difficulty notwithstanding. For example: weapons that can only be used underwater. Don't read the weapon descriptions? You won't know until you try to fire that torpedo launcher on dry land! Whoops! Tentaculats. ''Tentaculats''. An enemy that, when it kills one of your soldiers, turns the soldier into a drone that can hit exceedingly hard. When you kill the drone (which, by the way, retains the original soldier's armor rating, so woe if you outfitted them with the best armor), the killed drone ''immediately'' becomes ''another Tentaculat''. And finally, Lobstermen, which are ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin: giant, bipedal lobsters. With guns. And claws. And ''very tough exoskeletal shells'' that reduce damage from ''all'' sources by at least 70%, along with the highest HP available to non-tank units. If that's not enough to scare you, how about the fact that the only weapon that can reliably damage Lobstermen is the class called "bladed weapons", which require you to ''run up to the Lobsterman'', who is ''armed'' by the way, ''and basically punch him in the face''. The late game was made notoriously difficult by the appearance of Lobstermen, who, once they showed up, ended up in every other mission.
* The ''{{Darius}}'' series of shmups, particularly ''Darius II'' and ''Darius Gaiden''. In ''Darius II'', the player's ship is huge relative to the enemies, and ''Darius Gaiden'' attempts to piss players off with nigh-unavoidable enemy attacks and cheap bosses, several of which fire the dreaded, hard-to-dodge homing lasers.
* ''[[{{Ultima}} Ultima VIII: Pagan]]'' was infamous for its insanely frustrating jumping puzzles, which were likened to Super Mario from hell. Despite being an RPG, the developers decided to add "arcade" elements like running and jumping puzzles. The shoddy interface, poor physics, and the ridiculous save/load times didn't help one bit. The patched version fixed this by allowing targeted jumping and making the platforms stationary.
* ''[[DonkeyKongCountry Donkey Kong Country 3's]]'' final level of the Lost World, Rocket Rush, is a merciless, evil level in the second half. You're launched at full speed in your rocket, with reversed controls, up a corridor filled with plenty of rocks for you to crash into. You also have a limited amount of fuel. If you crash even once, you're not going to make it to the top.
** Want to feel like a real winner? Beat the game with 104% completion. How? Play through the entire game with checkpoints or DK Barrels disabled. It made me feel awesome, and it'll make you feel awesome too!
** Replaying the series, ThisTroper has found that it can actually be rather cruel in general. The first game has plenty of places where enemies hover around checkpoints or DK barrels (which give you an extra character, and since each character is a OneHitPointWonder...). Very easy to either miss them or die trying to get them, screwing you over either way.
* The hardest game this guy's ever played is ''Dragon Rage''. It stars a dragon and was only $5. It has a long tutorial but an easy second level. The third level is nintendo hard. Your playing as a dragon and have to destroy 14 carts on a time limit sounds easy, wrong! The carts split up, go faster then you can fly, have smart AI, and it takes a charged fire move to destroy them. There are wards, mana/MP depleter areas, all over and they love to go through them. Eventually you'll be stuck with the water element which is good for reflection but awful for offense, what you need. Controls are crap and dying isn't the problem. They end up going off map and you'll get backlashed. Harder then it sounds.
* In a rare example of a Nintendo Hard PUZZLE game, the freeware game "Bricks," yet another game inspired by the classic {{Klotski}} puzzle, certainly qualifies. Not only the puzzles themselves are tough as nails, but the discussion board, which you would expect to use for hints, SPECIFICALLY disallows sharing hints/solutions, even a tiny little nudge. You HAVE to take it alone.
* ''Bangai-O Spirits'' for the DS is hard and knows it. The game actually tells you how to do the Invincibility and Infinite LimitBreak cheats ''in the Tutorial'', because they know many people will ''need'' them just to beat some stages.
** The worst part is, the N64 and Dreamcast versions of the original were merely challenging. The DS version cuts out the great graphics and design of the original and replaces it with MacrossMissileMassacre in the first tenth of a second of play, and apparently doubles the play speed to boot. Not exactly what I was hoping for, Treasure...
** RuleOfFun, RuleOfCool. Like ''N'', Bangai-O Spirits stages simply are not all meant to be beaten the first time, or in some cases the first several, but sometimes it can just be getting as far as you can. That's why it's a collection of stages with no plot or even sequence. (Also, gimmick stages. Lots of them.)
* ''DoDonPachi'' is another manic shooter easily as hard as Gigawing or Mars Matrix, except that you can't reflect the enemy bullets, and to fight the secret boss (a giant robo-wasp capable of firing huge ass LAZORZ) you have to one-credit the game and survive a second loop. Of course, the lilliputian "collision mask" (the pixels on the center of the ship's sprite that cause actual damage) helps learn the skills needed, but even though it's stupidly hard and frustrating.
* ''[[AtelierSeries Atelier Lilie]]'', the third game of the Atelier series (and one not released in America), has a reputation for being hellishly difficult compared to its contemporaries. It perhaps is not "hard" in the traditional, Battletoads sense, but getting anything other than a very "generic" ending requires that you plan out your entire approach to the game before you even start playing; you must plan what you'll do ahead of time in terms of whole game-years. And a lot of the endings require that you do a ''lot''. The amount of planning required makes this one NintendoHard for a lot of folks and hurt the sales of the game.
* The NES game ''Time Lord'' (nothing to do with [[DoctorWho Gallifrey]]). This sci-fi platformer had you travelling through locations in a set of time periods, having to defeat a bunch of foes while collecting a number of {{MacGuffin}}s before you could progress to the boss, and the next level. Nintendo Hard examples include:
** Starting each level with nothing to fight with but your knuckles, while each level had progressively trickier foes from the off.
** The first level (medieval) had a lengthy area of infinite invulnerable rushing at you if you stepped out from behind a wall. Perfect jumping was required.
** The second level (western)'s boss was a fat gunslinging bandito that took, no joke, at least 8 minutes of repetitive maneuvering to kill. All the while shooting huge bullets that could eat up on of your 3 precious life points.
** Various rather annoying platforming puzzles to get the required objective items.
** In addition, the entire game is one big TimedMission. Fail to beat it in under 30 minutes (and with the gunslinger boss, it's 95% guaranteed), and it's NonstandardGameOver for you.
* ''Maverick'', which I would say is Jumper's spiritual pre-/sequel, involves constantly shifting physics and one mode of motion: the recoil of your guns. Once you [[spoiler: mercilessly kill]] the magical pig, gravity is reversed, except in the two or three levels where there wasn't any, and you have to proceed to Level 0. In reverse. [[CaptainObvious Which is really, really hard,]] even compared to the already hellish regular levels. Oh, and it ends with an [[FissionMailed error screen]] telling you your software broke, and "maybe you'll get the present next time."
* [[http://www.snubbyland.com/pop.php?type=games&ID=10 The World's Hardest Game.]] He's not kidding people.
**The hell he is. That game's absolute piss compared to Chip's Challenge.
* ''{{Portal}}: Prelude''. ThisTroper playing it. "THE FIRST GOD****ING LEVEL! HOW THE ****ING **** ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO GET THROUGH IT?" I actually want [=GLaDOS=] back now. At least she gave you a fighting chance. You ''will'' use God and noclip. There is no other way.
** There's actually an easy trick that you can find in any walkthrough, but few people found on their own - [[spoiler:quickly turning back just after you exit portal and running outside turret range, then destroying turrents easily one by one]]. Portal: Prelude's insane and unfunny difficulty demonstrates by contrast how awesome game the original Portal was, where they actually playtested the difficulty of all parts of the game.
*** And in unrelated news, it's highly amusing that the actual Portal features an AI voiced by a real actress, while the Prelude third-party mod features two human beings voiced by speech synth software.
** The claims of the game's "action" difficulty have been highly exaggerated. Apparently if people see an obvious, but nigh-impossible to execute solution, their brain shuts off and they stop thinking. A perfect example is level 14's final turret encounter which can be avoided entirely. There's some forced action and it can be hard, but the amount of that forced action is far less than what people think it is. To clarify: this troper played the ''original'' 1.0.0 version, and still thinks the above. One exception is the advanced chambers: they're purposely created to be IWBTG-like insanity.
* ''AceCombat IV'' had a level that where the majarity of the point items were into craters on the top of platues. That ascended 2500 feet in the air. To get them, you had to take your jet to nearly double that height, and nose dive until you came in firing range, which is in the hundreds of feet measurements. Okay, somewhat beatable if you can pull out and zoom away for another run. Now, tack on the bad guy's super weapon, which was capable of shooting down everything above 2000 feet within operational range instantly (operational range being nearly an entire continent the current combat zone just happens to be on) and fires something on the order of once every five minutes, forcing you to abandon precious time trying to make your runs. Then, even if were to get the points necessary to beat the level, you still had to wait for the mission to time out, and endure stuff shooting at you and the superweapon.
** Bombs, bombs, bombs. Bring a reasonably fast plane with Large (or Medium?) Unguided Bombs and you're good to go. Unless you misjudge your dive and pull up too late.
* Any mission in a cave in ''CityOfHeroes'' is bad. The tunnels are tight, hard to maneuver in and force [=PCs=] into close combat which some of them are ill-equipped to survive. But one cave map tile, known to many as "the layercake of doom", takes the cake (pun intended). This large chamber, usually found at the end of a cave, is five levels tall. Not only do the mission objectives often require the whole room to be cleared of foes, but there are many gaps in the floor(s) that can drop an unwary hero down one or more levels, often into a pack of angry enemies, possibly including their boss. And even if it's safe, he still takes falling damage. Groans and expressions of hatred for this room are common whenever it is encountered during a mission.
** Then there's the maps set in the hidden underground city of Oranbega - "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" only begins to cover it. What makes it worse is that the locals have a nasty habit of taking hostages and hiding them in nooks and crannies where they are easily missed.
*** AND the random portals which WILL split your party, whether you want to or not, and the rooms which literally tie themselves in knots, and the hidden passageways which invariably lead to the boss ...
* The supposed "first level" missions in ''Icewind Dale'' for the PC were so difficult and so prone to cause the death of the [=PCs=] that most new players to the game were told "right after you begin the game, use the cheat code to boost yourself to third level.''
** Worse are the later Single-Character missions, especially (of course) at Hard difficulty. Just when your party is balanced enough at rock-paper-sicssors tactics to make it through the main game, you have to pick a single character to survive a long sequence of varied types of enemy. "Damn! Load. OK, this time try it with ... and buff them with ... and ... Damn! ... Load ... Damn!! Let's play HOI2 for a while while I try to calm down, rather than breaking another keyboard."
* ''Midnight Club Los Angeles'' is second only to ''F-Zero GX'' in the Nintendo Hard racing game pantheon. The combination of (allegedly) unstoppable AI opponents, impossible-to-shake police chases, heavy, hard-to-dodge traffic and the where-the-hell-am-I-going nature of the open-world races is enough to frustrate most gamers. Kotaku actually [[http://kotaku.com/5067216/midnight-club-los-angeles-review-the-fast-and-the-infuriating went so far as to call it]] "a ''Ninja Gaiden'' caliber challenge".
** Also, despite being called Midnight Club, the game works on a 24 hour-like clock that means half of the time you will be racing during the day. Hilariously, it is impossible to see traffic coming at you during the day (as half the cars blend into the road itself), but quite easy to see them at night. Furthermore, the latest Midnight Club slows down time to show your car spinning out of control as the AI races past you. Therefore, only race at night, stay close to the center of the map, and use the zone skill to keep your speed on turns, and you might just beat the game while only pressing the restart button 1500 times.
* Of all the inane things, ''Super Tennis'' for the SNES. Not hard, so much as broken. You couldn't actually hit the ball. There was about a two millisecond window where your racket just might connect, but that would be the only time the entire match. Computers, of course, were exempt from the swing-and-a-miss.
* ''Ecco CD'' for the SegaCD is so difficult that ''you can die when you have the invincibility god mode on''. Even the cheat codes are hard to use and difficult to implement (there's one that lets you teleport to X Y coordinates which will usually end up with Ecco crushed in a wall...which will probably kill you). Which is a shame, since the music and [=FMVs=] are quite gorgeous.
** The ''EccoTheDolphin'' series in general (except for ''[[OddballInTheSeries Ecco Jr.]]'', of course) is brutally hard. Oh, sure, it stars a cute little dolphin, but he is going to die. A lot. The first game is hard to beat even if you enter the invincibility code and the level select code to begin on the ''final boss''. Believe me, this troper tried.
* The ''{{Tetris}}: The Grand Master'' series was intentionally meant to be a challenge for seasoned Tetris fans.
** The first TGM game a max speed of 20G halfway through the game (level 500/999; each piece dropped and each line cleared increments the level by one). In 20G, the pieces fall to the bottom instantly, and the player has half a second to move a piece before it automatically locks down. In addition, to get the Grand Master grade (the ultimate objective of the game), the player has to be above certain scores at certain "checkpoint" levels, and finish the game within 13 minutes and 30 seconds.
** Tetris: The Grand Master 2: The Absolute also reached 20G at the halfway point, but it also decreased the delay between pieces and the duration of the line clear animation at every 100 levels after that to make the game faster. At level 900, the lockdown time limit decreases from half a second to 0.283 seconds. In addition, the new Master grade requirements include: A time limit on every section of 100 levels, a required number of Tetrises (4-line clears) on each section except the last, a total time of less than 8'45"00, ''and'' a grade (score) requirement at level 999. That's just for the Master grade; a player who earns the Master grade gets to play the bonus round: The playing field is cleared, and all pieces placed after that turn invisible the instant they lock down. A player must survive one minute under those conditions to earn the Grand Master grade.
** Tetris: The Grand Master 3: Terror-Instinct, the game in the famous [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo "Invisible Tetris" video]], took this even further. A player who performs halfway decently will hit 20G at level 300. The lockdown delay shrinks to 0.283 seconds, then 0.25 seconds. The delay between pieces shrinks all the way down to 1/15 of a second. Section time limits are tighter. And a player who reaches the bonus round is still graded on his/her performance during the invisible challenge. Finally, to actually earn the Grand Master grade, one must first get a [=MasterM=] (second-highest rank) or Grand Master-worthy (i.e. a score that would pass the Grand Master Promotional Exam) score 4 times in 7 games, pass the subsequent [=MasterM=] Promotional Exam by getting a [=MasterM=] or Grand Master-worthy score the next game to pass the Promotional Exam, ''then'' earn a Grand Master-worthy score that would pass 4 out of 7 more games, and ''finally'' earn a passing score on the actual Grand Master Promotional Exam. Note that failing a Promotional Exam requires you to get a score that would pass the exam 4 out of another 7 games, before you can try the Promotional Exam again.
** It worth noting that while [=TGM3:TI=] came out in March 2005, the first person in the world to actually get a Grand Master grade did so in July 2007. It took ''two years'' before anyone truly beat the game.
*** And to this day, only three people have obtained the Grand Master rank. To be a Grand Master in TI is to be one of the greatest Tetris players on the entire planet. And to say nothing of what [[HarderThanHard Shirase Mode]] has in store for us...
* Surpringly, the 360/[=PS3=] version of ''SonicUnleashed'' is absurdly hard compared to its predecessors, in the later levels, mostly due to TrialAndErrorGameplay and sometimes rather unforgiving PressXToNotDie and ActionCommands. In comparison, the Wii/[=PS2=] version is usually easier.
** [=WiiS2=] Eggmanland will make anyone sweat the first couple times. It's six stages - one Day stage with some minorly sadistic twists and turns and an unforgiving S rank time (4:30!), and the rest are Werehog stages. If you're not a fan of the Werehog's "grab" button, expect a ClusterFBomb or two.
** [=PS360=] Eggmanland is even worse. Sadistic grind rails, PressXToNotDie to the max, robots out the ass, swing poles with Dark Bat patrols around them, and enough Titans at the end to make you weep in agony. Yes, those are both Hedgehog and Werehog elements. Yes, this is all in one stage. Yes, you WILL be switching between the two. And if that's not enough, the level WILL take over forty-five minutes to clear. Makes you pine for those ten minute limits of yore.
*** And now the punchline: If you want all the Achievements, you'll have to beat Eggmanland without dying once THREE TIMES OVER. ''Muahahahahaa''!!
*** And may Yuji Naka have mercy on your soul if you're going for [[OneHundredPercentCompletion all the S-Ranks.]] Sonic is [[BeyondTheImpossible insanely fast]] in this one, so you're going to have to memorize incredibly long stages to have any chance at the daytime levels. It is addicting as all get out, though.
* The 360 version of ''IronMan'' is completely unplayable. If there WERE any playtesters for the flight engine, they would have had to be spider monkeys on crystal meth to be able to handle the controls!
* The little-known series of kid's adventure novels ''Micro Adventure'' contained several BASIC program listings, including at least one full, WarioWare-style minigame. ThisTroper tried to type one in once -- the premise was that you had exactly twenty bullets to clear out a room of twenty android replicants in one sweep. If that isn't NintendoHard enough, after an entire day of beating up on the source code to port it to a modern BASIC variant, ThisTroper managed to get it completely debugged only to find out that it was completely unplayable on faster modern hardware. (Then again, it probably wasn't exactly easy on period systems either, even at a manageable speed.)
* Cave have made some of the hardest shoot-em-ups ever, and some of the hardest games ever, period. One of their games, ''Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou'', was out for a year and only 5 people in the entire world had beaten it. And these were all "professional" Japanese shoot-em-up players. Ultra mode in ''Mushihime-sama Futari'' is pretty much legendary in terms of difficulty - you're lucky if you survive more than 30 seconds.
** And the "Black Label" limited edition version has God mode, which features the BonusBoss to end all Bonus Bosses... Spiritual Larsa. This boss is so hard nobody in the ''entire world'' has ever beaten it without dying at least once. And to get to her, you have to beat God Mode (essentially Ultra mode with a tweaked scoring system) without dying, ''ever''. This boss is insanely hard ''even to people who can do this''.
*** The ''ESPGaluda'' games, however, are probably the easiest Cave shmups due to the inclusion of the "Kakusei Mode" that allows the player to slow down the bullets onscreen.
* ''pop'n music'' is why you '''DO NOT''' [[SurpriseDifficulty judge a game's challenge by how mature it looks]].
* ''Strider''. But that's part of what makes it so ''awesome''.
* ''{{Spelunky}}'' is a cross between a roguelike and an EverythingTryingToKillYou platformer. Its difficulty is indicated by the variety of things that, even when they aren't actual {{One Hit Kill}}s, can easily inflict more damage than you will ever have health -- and continues are practically nonexistent.
* ''[=~Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?~=]'' will make that those unfamiliar with {{Metroidvania}} games or platformers tear their hair out, [[VerbalTic dood]]. The Prinny's most important move is rather unresponive and slow (unless you mash the button like crazy, not always an easy feat while holding the screen), enemies are MakaiKingdom cannon fodder [[TookALevelInBadass with 5000 levels in badass]], and then there's the bosses and the ridiculous jumping puzzles required to unlock the features of the home base... Let's put it this way. The game gives you ''one thousand lives'', and then makes you ''need'' them.
* The Adventure Mode of ''DiddyKongRacing'' requires the player to come in first place on all the races. Twice. While collecting silver coins the second time around. And they have to beat the bosses twice as well. And you have to win trophy races on the first four worlds just to get to the fifth and final one.
** And then once you beat the final boss, you unlock Adventure Two, where you get to do it all over again... except not only are all the courses mirrored, but during the Silver Coin Challenges, the coins are placed in some of the most absurd, out-of-the-way areas possible; it might take several run-throughs just to find them all. And you still have to come in first place.
*** Although the game did let you co-up. The later races are only hard until Player Two turns around and sits on an appropriate power-up spot and ejects a stream of infinite rockets. It's possible to hold some opponents in place for the duration of the entire race if done right.
* The obscure ''Milon's Secret Castle'' looks like a simple platformer at first, but quickly becomes incredibly frustrating. How bad is it? As {{The Angry Video Game Nerd}} discovered, the section of ''Nintendo Power'' normally reserved for cheat codes or advanced strategy had a section on MSC called ''Getting Started''.
** To get into detail, the whole game has an abundance of secrets, some of which are required to find in order to move on. Some are easy to locate, but others are quite impossible to find. It doesn't help matters that Milon runs pretty slow at first, which makes it slightly difficult to avoid projectiles and enemies and that he doesn't go invisible after getting hit, so Milon's life can be drained pretty fast.
* ''The Terminator 2'' on the Game Boy. Unless you have the manual or a walkthrough or the patience to jump randomly, you're not going to know that the little flashing blocks are in fact help cubes that give hints. How bad is the game in terms of difficulty? Here's a rundown:
** You start the first level in an apocalyptic future. You have to shoot the beacons at the top of each tower in the order of tallest to smallest. Get the order wrong and its game over! Anyway, once you get order right, you must fight an annoying boss. Once that's done, it's the next level.
** It's Level 2 and you're health hasn't reset. You only have one life and no continues and so far there are no health picks. Down below is another box that starts a timer [[GuideDangit and you have no idea where to go.]] If you die here, it's back to Level One. There's a hallway in this level where, if you want to pass, you have no choice but to get hit by some land mines due to a too-low ceiling.
** You die, game over, burn game, next one!
*** It is either a testiment to my skill or a terrifying glimpse into my madness, but there is in fact a third level which requires the Player to rewire a T-800's circuitry in 3 progressively more difficult stages, in a jarring transition from Side-Scrolling Shoot 'Em Up to Puzzle Game. The idea is to move the cursor around the screen and change the junctions in a 'map' of circuits, so that when the timer hits 0 the released charges of energy travel from one side of the screen to the other, thus completing the circuit. The first is fairly obvious, though the timer is unforgiving. The second requires a keen eye and much practice, with an even shorter timer. The third randomly releases charges from any 4 of 6 possible junctions into an Escher-esque landscape of broken paths, which must be negotiated in just 20 seconds. And the charges have only 5 seconds to make their journey, which means you lose (the game ends and you have to start over from the very beginning) even if you manage to complete all the paths, but one of them takes a split-second too long to arrive. There is no fourth level.
* ''SteelBattalion'' kind of fits this after the first level, there is only 2 ways out of a mission, ejecting and losing that mech permanently or die and lose your save.
* There's no mention of the obscure ''Jim Power: The Arcade Game'' yet? There's not only the usual [[EverythingTryingToKillYou "all manner of obstacles" business]] as well as Jim himself [[OneHitPointWonder phasing out in seconds]] after touching any hazard or enemy, but there is also the SHMUP sections where the ship you are flying is pretty slow (read: annoyingly slow) and there are enemies that toss tons of bullets at you. And, of course, there are the Zig-zag segments in which the autoscrolling randomly speeds up and slows down. Watch Youtube LPer Kikoskia's LP of the game and you'll see how frustrating this game gets... even the '''very first level''' is insane.
* ''{{Hoshigami}}'' for the Playstation probably fits this trope as well. It's a tactics RPG with a ridiculously complicated magic system (which you'll have to master if you want to get anywhere in the game), and the battles are all stacked incredibly heavily against you. There's one early-game mission where you have to save someone who starts on the other side of the map, surrounded by enemies, and you have to rescue her. Did I mention that FinalDeath holds true for any character you lose?
** Which includes ''your'' guys. If you want to replace the fallen teammate, you'll have to recruit a Level '''1''' PlayerMook. Hours upon hours of ForcedLevelGrinding commence. (Incidentally, guess why this game got poor reviews and is basically unheard of.)
* ''[[HenryHatsworthInThePuzzlingAdventure Henry Hatsworth]]''. The game starts simple and easy enough, but around world 3 is when the game stops playing around and you'll be attacked by all sorts of enemies on all sides, generally during platforming segments that are hard enough on their own. The buyable upgrades, invincible robot transformation and the ability to refill your health at somewhat regular intervals help a good deal, but considering the most useful upgrades cost an arm and a leg and require massive amounts of grinding to get them anywhere near the end of the game, the robot transformation is useless for any platforming segments and most of the energy needed to activate it is instantly lost if you take a hit or 2 and the said health refills are gotten most of the time via the enemy puzzle blocks the enemies turn into, which requires you to kill a good amount of them to begin with, it's still pretty goddamned hard overall, even if it is a good game.
* ''The Legend Of Kage'' (NES). You're a {{One Hit Point Wonder}} unless you get a crystal ball...and taking a hit at that point will cost you the extra power-ups the crystal grants. Ninjas fly from EVERYWHERE and you practically need to turbo the sword button to block the incoming shurikens. Of course, the sword can't block the bombs that some ninjas throw...or the fire from the monks.
* ''Super Pitfall'' (NES). Enemies everywhere, horrible control, items only revealed by random jumping...
* Don't know if custom quests from Zelda Classic qualify, but there are several that were designed with extreme difficulty in mind...Demo Quest EX, James Quests 1 & 2, and Hidden Duality Xtreme Mode are among the toughest. Tough enemies early, powerups MUCH later, rooms with multiple boss monsters...
* ''Roxz'' (C64). I was working on this game in the mid 1980s, and ran out of enthusiasm and decided to retire from the games industry mid game. As the game had been announced and previewed with 12 levels and I had only written 8, I just made level 8 impossible. Sorry...
* ''{{DJMAX}} Portable Black Square''[='=]s Club Tour mode has some of the most bullshit missions in a RhythmGame around. At Area 4, which is about halfway through, you get missions that require you to full-combo songs as well as missions where you need '''100% accuracy''', only one of which is on a level-1 song. Later on, you get missions where you need absurd amounts of points while chaining as many as seven or even eight ''GuitarHero''-style {{Limit Break}}s, missions that demand very high combos (which are only achievable if you use the aforementioned LimitBreak to artifically raise your combo), more missions in which you are a OneHitPointWonder (or, at the very least, "miss less than a single-digit number of notes" missions) on very difficult charts, and missions that combine two of these objectives (all while giving you [[ThatOneBoss One Of Those Bosses]] as the song to do these missions on). So why endure all of this crap? Well, to get into certain clubs and areas so you can unlock songs, you need to increase your rank, and the only way to do so is through these missions!
* ''CaptainComic I'' for MS-DOS is a good game, but boy, is it hard. It's made even harder by the fact that the game lacks any save-game capability, meaning it has to be played through in one sitting, but good luck getting more than halfway through before running out of lives. This troper has only finished it a handful of times in over twenty years.
* ''PhantasyStar II'' is unusually difficult for a console RPG. Many of the RandomEncounters are strong enough to threaten a TotalPartyKill. For example, in the first dungeon, most enemies are fairly weak, but once in a while, you'll encounter an enemy named "Blaster" whose attacks hit your entire party for substantial damage. If you haven't done some serious LevelGrinding, you'll probably lose the battle. Additionally, despite abandoning the first-person perspective used in the first PhantasyStar game, you ''will'' get lost in the game's dungeons, because the mazes are [[BeyondTheImpossible just that complicated]]. This troper actually had to resort to ''making his own map on graph paper'' in order to get through them. [[http://www.phantasy-star.net/psii/maps/mapsgreendam.html You can see for yourself how confusing they get!]]
* ''DoubleDragon'' on the original NES. Three lives, no 1-Ups, no continues and no way to recharge your energy during a stage. The best code the Game Genie gave this game was upping the lives to nine. The last stage starts with blocks poking out of the wall and causing major damage. (A Nintendo Power cheat said you can walk by unscathed by waiting for one particular block to punch out twice in a row, but you'll drain the timer doing that!) In the final battle, you must battle two of every foe you faced previously before taking on the TWO {{Big Bad}}s. Get killed by any of them and you have to face all of them again.
* Apparently, ''{{Final Fantasy XIII}}'' will be this according to [[http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173881 this interveiw]] of game director Motomu Toriyama, where [[WordOfGod he says]] that this may be "the most difficult FF ever". But really, the only way they can do that at this point is to make [[ThatOneBoss every single boss frustratingly hard]] and [[GuideDangIt make nearly all sidequests impossible without the aid of a strategy guide.]] [[TemptingFate But there is no way they'll do that. Right?]]
** Ha! They said Dragon Quest IX was going to be the hardest Dragon Quest of all time. It isn't really any worse than the others, unless you go for 100% completion and superboss mayhem. [[TemptingFate I'm sure Final Fantasy XIII won't be any different.]]
*{{Final Fantasy XI}}, the game that currently holds that record, will not be beaten easily. This is the game that produced the infamous '''''[[BeyondTheImpossible 19 hour boss fight]]'''''. The game also allows you to level DOWN, requires a group to do everything, and every area is filled with {{Demonic Spiders}}. And we haven't even begun to speak of [[NighInvulnerable Absolute Virtue]]...
*** OBJECTION! The hardest in the series is clearly FinalFantasyII. Frustrating levelling system aside, every dungeon is full of rooms which may be the place you need to go, or may contain something useful, but 90% of the time they're completely empty, but for some reason teleport you to the middle of the room to walk back out, leaving you incredibly suspectinle to attacks by high level monsters. This isn't rare. This is the ''norm''. To quote [[http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/finalfantasy/ff2/ff2-1.htm Classic Gaming Review]]:
-->"Final Fantasy II will do everything in its power to beat you down. And when I write "you," I am not referring to Frioniel's party. I am referring to you, the player. Final Fantasy II is a pair of simultaneous battles on two separate planes. The first is the fictional struggle of Frioniel and the rebel forces against the might of the Paramekian Empire. The second is the very real battle between you, the player, and Final Fantasy II, in which the game attempts to foil your efforts and demoralize you from ever playing again. As you try to beat Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy II tries to beat you."
-->"If your will somehow remains unbroken at this point and the game is still turned on, Final Fantasy II will begin administering electrical shocks through the controller."
* ''FinalFantasyIII'' was already difficult on the Famicom, thanks partially to a lack of save points, justified by hardware limits. Then it was re-released on the DS, and rather than add save points, the best jobs were nerfed, and the bosses were granted double turns. You'll have to [[ForcedLevelGrinding Grind, Grind, Grind]] if you ever hope to finish it.
* The DS remake of ''FinalFantasyIV'' fits this to a T. While the original in the U.S. was somewhere between the Japanese release and the later ''Easy Type'' version, this Troper remembers playing the Japanese original, and it wasn't this hard. To count the ways...
** Enemies will murder your party outright when you encounter a new set. Either in sheer numbers (good luck with 6 death zombies) or because they have some powerful AOE spell that they can cast over and over, [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard for free]].
** Encounter tend to happen every two steps, tops.
** No amount of level grinding can save you... mostly because enemies give abysmally low amounts of experience points.
** Same with money grinding, for the same reason. It's a good thing Square Enix decided to leave fortunes lying around though.
** Items you need also tend to be scarce, and they're ridiculously expensive.
** Thanks to New Game+, though, the game is only somewhat difficult the first time. It becomes laughably easy the second and third playthrough.
* ''FinalFantasyV'' is no joke either after about the 3rd boss. It is only for hardcore players who know the wrinkles of old school Final Fantasy. You need to know what you're doing with the job system or you will get stomped by the bosses. Money is a big problem too as items and equipment for multiple jobs are very expensive.
* The first few [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DragonQuest Dragon Quest/Warrior]] games certainly qualify although all the games in that series are harder than average. Unless you're using an Emulator, you are going to get destroyed. It doesn't matter how good you are at the game, enemies curb-stomp you. Oh, and II? Hey, let's make a dungeon that's impossible to get through unless you use {{trial and error gameplay}}, or a guide! Did I mention that your spellcasters can't survive being glanced at at by anything, and you're rarely told anything? Puzzles are of the Simon's Quest type, like "use X item at Y tile on the world map to reveal a cave" or "search a random tile for a vital item". Or that the final boss can fully heal himself whenever he feels like it? And there are enemies who have a spell that can one hit kill your entire party, no questions asked?
** Baboons!
** Oh, and in III, the major bosses get invisible health regeneration that you can't see. Kind, ain't it?
* The [[SoBadItsHorrible utterly horrendous]] NES version of ''Dragon's Lair''. Not just because of the awful controls, but also because of the sheer number of things that will kill you instantly despite you having a lifebar.
* ''[[SinAndPunishment Sin & Punishment]]''. After one play-through on Easy, it won't seem so bad, but going up a difficulty doesn't just reduce time and max health, it gives all the bosses superpowers, and adds 'more' bosses. The game was basically a BossRush from the beginning.
** The hardest difficulty is called Turbo Hard.
** The second game doesn't seem to have lowered the difficulty any, either, and perhaps might even have ''raised'' it. Good thing the point controls make aiming so precise, because ''you're going to need every edge you can get''.
* You would think that as long as you have the necessary skills in whatever it is the game is trying to teach you, {{Edutainment Game}}s would avoid this, right? You've obviously never played ''[[SuperSolvers Operation Neptune]]''.
* Not only is ''Siren'' full of HighOctaneNightmareFuel, but if you slip up ''just once'' the game '''WILL''' kill you.
* For all it manages to avoid TheProblemWithLicensedGames, ''AstroBoy: Omega Factor'' is a bastard in later levels. The first playthrough is all right, but once you enter the second one, every enemy doubles the amount of damage they can do. By the time you reach the last level, forget your health bar - you can take maybe three hits. Did I mention some enemies randomly don't go into hit-stun, meaning they can freely attack you while you hit them? And that many of the flying stages are BulletHell? (This ''is'' a {{Treasure}} game.) Oh, and the entire second half of the game is a massive GuideDangIt. Still surprisingly fun.
** [[ThatOneBoss One boss]] late in the second playthrough is about five times bigger than Astro. Super attacks only do about 10% damage. And the worst part? It can kill you in only. One. Hit.
* How is ''OregonTrail'' [[HowDidWeMissThisOne not already here?]] There was a reason that making up [[GraveHumor funny tombstones]] was the best part of the game. Unfortunately, [[SadistTeacher some teachers]] thought it was a good idea to assign this game in lieu of an exam and [[CompletelyMissingThePoint take off points]] for [[EverythingTryingToKillYou every dead party member.]]
* ''[[PunchOut Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!]]'' is notorious for its difficulty. The final three or four boxers on the World Circuit are absolute monsters, to say nothing of Mike himself. It gets really upsetting to work your way through the World, finally beating Super Macho Man for the title and earning your shot at Mike Tyson...[[OneHitKO only for him to knock you down in one hit.]]
** The [[VideoGameRemake remake]] for the Wii isn't too bad...until you beat everyone and win the World Title, which unlocks the absolutely ''merciless'' Title Defense Mode. You have to fight every boxer you've beaten before, except they've all learned new tricks that are guaranteed to cause headaches for players. To put this in perspective, Title Defense Glass Joe, the [[WarmupBoss very first boxer in the game]] sporting a [[{{Jobber}} 1-100 career record]], is [[TookALevelInBadass almost as hard as Mr. Sandman]], the undefeated champion who you just beat. And he's the first, and undoubtedly the weakest, guy you'll fight in Title Defense.
*** [[ItGotWorse It gets better]]. After you win that, you can play against the defenders in random order, only this time, 3 losses and you're retired. No, not "let's try that again" retired, more like "the career mode on your save file is locked forever and you'll have to make a new file and start all the way from the beginning" retired. Oh, and you no longer have the options to restart or duck out of a fight if it goes badly - no SaveScumming for you this time. Your "reward" for winning 10 fights of that? A new option in exhibition mode to make every attack from every opponent a one-hit KO, and to remove their tells (ie they don't flash red before attacking anymore).
*** [[ButWaitTheresMore But wait, there's even]] ''[[ButWaitTheresMore more!]]'' We almost forgot the additional challenges that come in Exhibition mode, which must be completed to unlock that boxer's music and audio clips. Half of them are fairly simple to accomplish (Find all the ways to get stars, win the fight in so many punches.) if you can figure out the tricks behind them. The others crank up the sadism [[UpToEleven to 11]]. TKO [[HuskyRusskie Soda Popinski]] with 1:11 left in Round 1? Beat [[ScaryBlackMan Mr. Sandman]] without ever dodging or blocking? Defeat Title Defense Piston Hondo without ''ever losing a heart''? Good thing you get unlimited attempts, because you ''will'' need them.
*** After Title Defense, you get the opportunity to fight random opponents until you lose 3 times. Get past 10 fights and you're rewarded with the ultimate masochist's award: a setting in exhibition mode that makes ''every'' attack against you a one-hit KO. Every attack.
* A ''BoulderDash'' clone called ''Supaplex'' took the same gameplay, made controls more responsive, but amplified the level designs to sadistic levels. One little mistake and back to beginning of the level.
* In ''DemonsSouls'', you die in the tutorial and your soul gets bound to the Nexus until you can pay the price to free it, should your soul be killed anywhere in Boletaria, it returns to the Nexus. In-gameplay, this is justification for why you have infinite lives, and why you'll need them all.
* ''JurassicPark: The Chaos Continues'' on SNES. It's a great, underrated side-scrolling shooter, similar to ''{{Contra}}''... but if you can beat it on even ''easy'' without using a Game Genie, you deserve a ''medal''.
* The original ''TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles'' game for the NES. The [[DownTheDrain fittingly-named dam level]] is only the second of six.
* ''Bonk's Adventure'' is considerably harder than its sequels, mainly due to FakeDifficulty. And any boss from round 3 onwards is ThatOneBoss.
* Apogee Software's ''{{Xenophage}}''. Egad! If you're used to beating the computer nine games out of ten on the hardest difficulty in ''OneMustFall'', you're in for a nasty surprise when you try ''Xenophage''. Everything about the computer's behaviour makes it difficult, the special moves are practically useless and the final boss has two forms which you have to beat in one round. On the up side, you do have interesting-looking characters to fight and fight with. Still, don't say you weren't warned when the computer hands you your arse.
* ''The Shadow and the Flame'', the sequel to ''Prince of Persia'', was similar to the first game, with a time limit on most of the game and all-original instantly lethal traps. The new levels often forced you to take hits, and many of the [[HeartContainer large health potions]] (which you would need) were placed behind tricky puzzles. Enemies included skeletons that fully healed themselves seconds after you defeated them in the earlier levels, followed by [[GoddamnedBats Goddamned Flying Heads]] in the next several levels.
* In the original ''StreetFighter2'', M.Bison fought harder and did more damage the lower his health bar got.
** This is common in all Capcom arcade fighting games. The programming discreetly raises their HP levels, defense, and damage, to the point that the final opponent has double the health and stats of the starting opponent. AI also increases in skill in some games.
* ''The LionKing'' video game, for the [[SegaGenesis Genesis]] and {{SNES}}. The "[[ThatOneLevel Can't wait to be King]]" level is nearly [[OneHitPointWonder impossible]] to beat. And,it only gets harder from that.
* ''Aladdin'' of the same era. The game is not too bad, but the final boss...
* ''Ristar'', only if you enter the code for extreme difficulty. Without the code it's a moderately tough game. With the code, it's up there with the Mario hack games in soul-crushing difficulty.
* ''Aero the Acro-bat'', a mediocre platform game for the Genesis and Super Nintendo, deserves a mention here. The controls are problematic, and the levels are packed full of [[PlatformHell well placed instantly lethal spikes]] and Mine Cart Hell (or, in this case, Roller Coaster Hell) where one false move and you're dead. It gets especially bad toward the end. This troper played it as a kid and blames it for his phobia of amusement park rides.
* ''Seicross''. (The arcade version is OlderThanTheNES)
* ''Lightning Fighters''. Came out the same year as ''Raiden'', but quite a bit harder. Has moments of FakeDifficulty in the later levels, as well as suffering from [[ContinuingIsPainful "Gradius Syndrome"]].
* ''MetalGearSolid'' The European edition of Metal Gear Solid 2 was "rewarded" with a "European Extreme" level of difficulty. This entailed, among other things: Defusing bombs before their timers began to stand any chance, a double-shot railgun, more metal gears than were actually depicted in the story, guards, more guards, even more guards, and an escort mission that is akin to escorting butter through a furnace.
* Most Vic Tokai offerings were definitely NintendoHard. The king of them, though, is Kid Kool. Unlimited continues, sure. Problems: You have 3 "days" (hours) to complete the game, and the time doesn't reset when you continue. Also, some of the in-level checkpoints can make levels {{Unwinnable}}.
* TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy adventure game is the text-based puzzle equivalent of PlatformHell. The mere mention of the phrase "Babel fish" can be enough to make grown men cry.
* The ''ThunderForce'' series of ShootEmUps has all sorts of unexpected death traps designed to make life miserable. It doesn't help that players who are very good at these games will [[StopHavingFunGuys hate you if you can't one-credit-clear a Thunder Force game within days of starting to play it]].
* The TombRaider series fluctuates in difficulty, but TombRaider 3 is definitely the hardest, and was clearly intended for players who had beaten the first two games. The very first action in the game involves sliding down a hill while jumping to avoid spikes; seemingly an intentional portent of the overall difficulty. In the second level you start fighting the so-called "Shivas," giant six-armed statues that can crisscross their blades to block your bullets. The wolf ambush that opens the second level of the ''first'' game, panic-inducing for newbies, is almost comically easy in comparison. There are also unkillable piranhas (turning simple ponds into deathtraps), poison from snakes and blowdarts (you better [[VideogameCrueltyPotential kill those natives]] FAST), guys who get off one last shot ''after you've killed them'', and environmental hazards that are extremely hard to get through without heavy damage, and unavoidable in one case outside of glitches (Late in the game, you have to swim through freezing water so deep you have to use health packs ''as you swim'' just to stay alive.) Then there are the save crystals, which you collect and use anywhere you want. This should be better than the first game, in which you saved at fixed points, but there's no indication of where the crystals should be used, turning the whole system into just another stress-inducer (PC players get a break in this regard and can save anywhere, making their version far easier). Another "this should be great but it isn't" feature is that you can choose in which order to play certain levels. But if you play the level where you [[WarringWithoutWeapons lose all the guns and ammo you've collected]] last, then the final area is much tougher to get through.
* ''{{Prototype}}''. Forget all that parroting we here have been doing about Alex being a NighInvulnerable GodModeSue, because there are quite a few real frustrating bits once you actually get to it, with the first Hunter fight just being the start of the mess. And that's before you even get to Hard, which should really be called Alex Mercer's Happy Fun Time or something else so laden with sarcasm that it would take someone... insert term that PoliticalCorrectnessGoneMad prevents one from saying here... to misunderstand.
**The army, oh, God, the army. By the 8th or 9th mission, Alex will have the entire damn army after him for the slightest little bump. Normally, this would be fun, but not when you're in the middle of a mission. It's extremely frustration when you're trying to complete an objective, but there are four APCs and five helicopters firing missiles at you that sends you back 20 feet every time it hits your general area (that's right, ''general area'', not Alex himself). Urrrghhhh!!
* Normally in DrillDozer, you'll be able to have enough health to be able to brute-force your way though hazards, but hard mode takes this away, and hard, as you're given a single hit point. Also, even in normal mode, the secret levels are a pain, since many usually involves being [[BulletHell rained on by gunfire]] or with most of the level consisting of large pits. Worse, beating the game on Hard Mode is merely for bragging rights.
*''{{Little Big Planet}}'' starts off cute and relatively easy... and then you get to Frida's Wedding and the entire game turns gothic and evil on you. The first level of that world was cake up until the bit with the pink platforms and the static death below. My Sackboy suddenly lost the ability to make any decent jumps. The game only gets worse from here -- you'll have to learn to master precise jumping techniques if you want to keep going.
* CallOfDuty 4 has "Veteran" mode, which is aptly described by the game: "You will not survive." Enemies are frighteningly accurate, you drop in 2-4 bullets (and remember, the enemies are shooting automatic weapons at you), and the time limits imposed at certain points in the game are made much tighter. This is somewhat highlighted by the fact that you get a phenomenal amount of achievements/gamerscore just for completing individual levels on Veteran.
** The bonus/epilogue level that occurs after the credits is notorious for its difficulty on Veteran; you have exactly one minute to reach the end of the stage from the start, and you have no grenades, despite there being scores of enemies. Even then, it's not a guaranteed win, as you have to make a headshot on a baddie using a hostage as a body shield, with a pistol. Hit the hostage, hit the enemy anywhere other than the head, or take five seconds without succeeding, and you lose, start over. There are no checkpoints, unlike the other difficulty levels, which save at the hostage part (and allow you to hit him on other parts of the body). Even after successfully completing the hostage part, you can still lose if you don't jump out of the plane in time, though you're given thirty seconds and no enemy resistance (and the door is right next to you), so this part at least is very easy.
*** One [=GameFAQs=] thread was a rather sorry tale of a guy who played the Epilogue level overnight trying to beat it, and being shot and killed hundreds and hundreds of times. When he finally shot the lead terrorist, he put his controller down to jump up and cheer, forgetting that he still had to dive out of the plane. EpicFail.
* The {{Ganbare Goemon}} (''Legend of the Mystical Ninja'' in english) SNES platformers qualify as this. Timed jumps, long gaps, and other various difficult traps will force you to get your reflexes in gear if you hope to beat them. The n64 sequels and the 2005 Nintendo DS offering were soft spongy cakes compared to these games.
* ''The Adventures of Bayou Billy'' was mentioned on ''CaptainNTheGameMaster'' as the only NES game that Kevin was never able to beat. And boy, does it ever live up to that reputation, as [[TheSpoonyExperiment The Spoony One]] [[http://www.spoonyexperiment.com/2007/01/24/adventures-of-bayou-billy-nes-review/ will attest]].
* The [[spoiler: Riku]] battles in every KingdomHearts game are rather harder than the final bosses themselves. A move of his where he flys back and forth hitting you constantly requires perfect timing to dodge, and if you mess up you lose about one full health bar.
* ''The Last Remnant'' - New Square-Enix toy. It has the abitude to spawn, in ALMOST EVERY ZONE, a "rare monster", which looks EXACTELY LIKE the normal monsters, but is much stronger. So strong that, if you didn't grind like mad, and i mean grinding good, because in this game, the level showed is not your level, but the monsters' level, so grinding without a proper plan is counter-productive, it'll kill you. Often, with fire. Also, half of the bosses are ThatOneBoss. On top of it, when you finish it, you get an Hard Mode. which is ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. Also, if you do all the side-quests, the final boss becomes hard BeyondTheImpossible.
* ''Dawn of War 2'' Primarch difficulty can wipe the floor with you on the training level, four seconds after it tells you what's the command to select your units.
* ''EndWar'' will wipe the floor with you in the handheld version if you never played a hex based wargame before.
* ''{{Legend of Legaia}}''. Although a good part of the game is pretty straightforward, there are certain parts that beat you until you are wearing your buttocks as a fancy hat. A perfect example of this is Xain. Xain is the manifestation of ThatOneBoss. With normal attacks that drain half your life, a special attack that drains 3/4ths, and a powerup attack that, if not blocked, will most definitely kill you, Xain was likely the cuase of many controllers hurled through TV screens. Another boss fight consists of your team of 3 characters being broken up to individually fight their counterparts, one after another, and then immediately after, fighting a boss that instant kills you in 5 turns. There is also an optional boss that can easily defeat one of your party members in one turn, and starts the battle by disabling magic, the most powerful attacks in the game. Come to think of it, Legaia is what happens when ThatOneBoss and NintendoHard are combined into one atomic concoction of pain.
* ''{{Glider}} PRO'' and its predecessessors at least approach NintendoHard difficulty: colliding with the floor or furniture will kill you, never mind moving enemies, and you need to [[VentPhysics ride vents]] in order to gain height. There are houses with very BenevolentArchitecture and sparse enemies, and there are houses like "Castle of the Air," which has a room titled "It Gets Worse!"
* The final battle in the home computer version of ''StarTrek 25th Anniversary'' sees you facing off against an alien duplicate of the ''Enterprise'', along with three pirate ships that are allied with it. The duplicate ''Enterprise'' has twice the shield strength of your ship along with more powerful torpedoes, and the pirate ships are roughly as strong as the real ''Enterprise''. Moreover, you have to fly your ship at full speed throughout the battle (which makes accurate manoeuvring a bitch), or else any damage you receive won't be repaired. Needless to say, this battle was where a lot of people decided to call it quits with the game.
* ''Grimm's Hatchery'' - an online game made by Big Fish Games - is one of the most annoying games to complete this troper's ever seen. Getting the Golden Goose is easy enough, as you get a pretty big hint. But it gets worse from there on in. The purse that you find in an urn in the Working Sector is hard to find in the first place, but then you can steal the money out of it. Whoops! Doing that results in ''not being able to get the Noble Sector or any more hatcheries!'' Combining pets almost ALWAYS results in a rotten egg, unless you combine the dragonflies to get some pets that are worth loads. And hatching them is a pain, because you need roughly THIRTY to get THREE of that pet! And get this - not only is it practically impossible after you buy the third hatchery because it takes ages to get, but if you get the key to the Noble Sector, the game becomes impossible because you ''can't get enough Ruby Gryphon/Green Dragon eggs to get the pet while getting the Noble Sector hatchery!'' And I thought that getting 300,000 gold before 80 days were up was bad...
*''Trilby: The Art of Theft'' - a stealth-based platformer from the creator of the {{Chzo Mythos}} series. To win the game 100%, you must complete every level without shocking a single guard or without setting off a single alarm - in some levels, this is nearly impossible, because you are very visible in full light, and whenever a camera or guard spots you, you only have a second to run for it.
* Nobody seems to believe that ''YoshisIsland DS'' could fall into this. And certainly, the game starts off with a difficulty level comparable to its predecessor (but above [[ItsEasySoItSucks Yoshi's Story]]), and you'll gain plenty of MeaninglessLives. But when you reach the last levels... '''you'll need every one of those lives'''. And that's not getting into the [[BonusLevelOfHell bonus levels]], which are hard enough to simply survive, PlatformHell to [[OneHundredPercentCompletion 100%]].
* ''Armed Police Unit Gallop'', aka ''Cosmic Cop'', a GaidenGame to ''RType'', is even more Nintendo-hard than its brethren.


!!Non-videogame examples:
* Several ''DungeonsAndDragons'' modules have developed reputations for being "meat grinders" due to the high mortality rate of parties attempting to tackle them.
** The original TombOfHorrors module more than qualifies.
--->'''E. Gary Gygax''': [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html Heh, heh. Oh, man. The Sphere of Annihilation in the statue's mouth. That never gets old.]]
** As is the module that has your party going to the layer of the Abyss that Orcus resides in order to steal his artifact wand.
** And then there's the DarkSun module "Valley of Dust and Fire" which details the city of Ur Draxa, home of the Dragon of Tyr.
** And let's not forget just about any dungeon created by a KillerGameMaster.
** ''Dungeon Adventures'' magazine was rather infamous for publishing these, as well. There was one that included a nearly-inescapable room-filling-with-sand trap, the goal for the adventure being impossible to achieve without the (level eight to ten) party members having a ''wish'' spell available, and an efreet that literally could not be killed. The only way to even get rid of the efreet involved summoning a 20th-level priest of Set who's been dead and trapped in an amulet for several thousand years, has his full repertoire of combat spells to blast the party with, and is in a ''really bad mood''. Other adventures were even more deadly.
* [[OlderThanTheyThink Surprisingly old]], predating [[OlderThanTheNES Nintendo]], [[OlderThanTelevision the TV itself]], and even [[OlderThanRadio radio!]]. The casino game "Diana" was introduced to the Wild West in the 1800s, but did not gain popularity as the odds were apparently murderous.
* The Japanese sure do love creating sadistic obstacle course shows for the masses to humiliate themselves on:
** ''UnbeatableBanzuke'' mostly involves either getting through an insanely complicated obstacle course using an unusual method of travel (like walking on one's hands, on stilts, with a wheelbarrow, etc.), completing an oversized children's game, or performing as many exercise feats as possible within a time limit. Out of the hundreds that try their luck, only 2 or 3 on average manage to succeed, with the record before the show's cancellation being 7 wins.
** ''NinjaWarrior'' is just pure obstacle course hell, with the obstacles becoming more and more difficult with each season. In all of its 22+ seasons of running, only ''two'' people have successfully completed all four levels of the competition. In fact, the show's design team have admitted that they try each tournament to make the ''first round'' so tough, that ''no one'' could beat it.
*** Possibly even worse is the female version of the tournament, which only one woman has successfully beaten (and she's done it ''three times''!). In the most recent one, four of the original tournament's recurring competitors (dubbed the All-Stars) had each mentored a female competitor. None of their proteges made it past the first stage.
** ''TakeshisCastle'' is Nintendo Hard in TV game show form.
** The concept was imported to the U.S. in the gameshow ''Wipeout''...though they're nice enough to let you finish the course after you inevitably fall off the Big Balls.
* UK kids GameShow ''{{Raven}}'' contains The Way Of The Warrior, an assault course played 3 times a week over each season's four week run. It's played by the contestant currently in last place, and it keeps being played until it's defeated. Over the first 8 seasons, it's been attempted 101 times, and won just four, and each time it's come back harder the next year... Not that no-one defeating it stops them upping the difficulty between seasons, it simply isn't guaranteed to be increased in difficulty unless someone beats it.
* Bizarrely, although it's referenced in at least half a dozen descriptions, ''IWannaBeTheGuy'' has yet to get its own entry here.
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->''....what's the point of making a game if you can't even win it? So stupid... Wanna see what my dad has?''
-->-- Evan, '''{{Superbad}}'''
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