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Nintendo Hard
"...it's like playing the game "Operation", but with a bunch of shit flying around trying to kill you!"
-- The Angry Video Game Nerd on The Silver Surfer for the NES

There is a vague idea running among older gamers that videogames have, in general, become less difficult as a way to appeal to a wider demographic. This is a highly disputed assertion. Some cynics suggest that this is only because said gamers were young and inexperienced at the time; or that it may be just the same magnification of memory that tells you that your school's playground slide was fifty feet tall.

However, sometimes it's because the game really was Nintendo Hard. An example of Fake Difficulty, Nintendo Hard games aren't just difficult; they're hair-pullingly frustrating to play. The difficulty usually stems from a combination of factors: The game itself is very difficult, with lots of enemies (or lots of bullets) who are hard to hit or dodge, surprise attacks that can only be avoided by sheerest luck (or memorizing their locations), Malevolent Architecture that poses a constant danger of death even when the player proceeds as cautiously as possible, and a hero who can survive very few hits -- often dying from even the slightest scratch. Nintendo Hard gameplay will frequently force you to move with split-second timing when enemies or traps appear on the screen, because they will kill you if you don't act instantly.

But it gets worse. Nintendo Hard games do not provide saves. If you're lucky, they might give you a password that lets you begin again from the start of the level (assuming it works, which is not guaranteed), but sometimes they'll just expect you to play it through from the very beginning each time. With no continues, and very few lives. Did we mention it's very difficult to get One Ups?

The game mechanics that make a game "Nintendo Hard" were often transported from arcade games that required the player to 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, no or highly limited 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 inherently dangerous.

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

The concept has recently been satirised on the internet, most famous by the Angry Video Game Nerd, formerly the Angry Nintendo Nerd, who points out that via Sturgeon's Law, most examples of Nintendo Hard are a result of sloppy or bad design.

In other cases, it's deliberate. Though perhaps a holdover from the arcades - where making the game nigh-impossible forced people to spend more quarters - it should be noted that many Japanese games were made harder for their US release. One theory on this cites the Japanese frustration with game rentals, which were illegal in Japan but widely available in the United States; developers may have deduced that harder games could not be beaten in a weekend, and would result in more actual purchases. In all likelihood, most gamers were simply infuriated and wrote the games off as unbeatable.

Most games here end up in Guide Dang It territory. Particularly extreme examples of this trope (which are almost always non-commercial games) fall into Platform Hell.

As the Discussion will testify, 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 This Troper" or "could be considered" and cannot make a strong statement on the universal difficulty of the game in question, please reconsider.
Examples:
  • 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, you're dead. No passwords or saves, and if you lose three lives, it's game over -- unless you use the Konami Code, of course, extending your potential death-count to thirty.
    • 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.
    • 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 Goddamned Bats 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. Bionic Commando 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.
    • 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 Boss Battles are fought against a Sequential Boss.
  • Bionic Commando, 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 Bottomless Pits and Spikes Of Doom around as well.
  • 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 Instant Death Spikes(!!).
    • 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. Real smooth, Rare.
      • Interestingly, the Japanese version of Battletoads is much 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).
    • Even with the use of a Game Genie, beating the game is still considered to be quite an achievement among hardcore gamers.
  • Arcade cabinet horizontal spaceship Shoot Em Ups à la Zero Wing 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 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.
      • To be fair, Touhou has quite a few things that help it avoid being Nintendo Hard. For example, if you use a bomb a split-second after taking a hit, you'll use the bomb successfully and avoid losing a life. The game also offers plenty of extra lives and tons of bombs. (around 30 bombs and 10 extra lives in a single six-level playthrough). It also features in-game hints and/or commentary for any given boss attack. And on top of all that, in Perfect Cherry Blossom you get regular periods of temporary invincibility! Even then if you still can't complete it, you can just use up to three continues before you get a game over. (although using a continue means you don't get to see the ending)
  • 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 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.
    • 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'.
  • The first Mega Man 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. Mega Man 2 and onward have passwords, but those never go into Wily's fortress... and he often has more than one.
    • Capcom's final bosses are particularly noteworthy, in this series and others. They always have multiple forms, devastating attacks, and iron defense. Wily will make you tear your hair out in some games, especially Mega Man 7; the Mega Man X series' Sigma is even worse. And you almost always have to start over from the first form if the last form kills you.
    • The Mega Man Zero series is pretty difficult, but its first Big Bad Copy X was pretty easy even without having to resort to using weaknesses. The game otherwise kicked this editor's ass, as did the sequel.
      • This editor remembers downright giving up after going through Mega Man Zero 4 with a perfect S-rank, only to get his butt kicked by Dr. Weil's final form. Talk about frustration. That GBA no longer functions.
      • For the record, you did not really need to get even an A-rank for that game to see the interesting content, as opposed to the previous three games in that series.
    • The severe overuse of Spikes Of Doom and Trial And Error Gameplay in Mega Man X6 made it extremely difficult to complete.
      • Due to the Nightmare System, there were parts of X6 (such as one section of Metal Shark Player's stage with Spikes Of Doom) that could be physically impossible to complete if the level loaded the wrong way.
    • X7 took X6's formula and added Camera Screw, X8 went back to pure 2D, but managed to be even worse thanks to severely limited continues. There's a good reason we don't talk about the last 3 X games.
    • This troper still considers the first NES and Gameboy games the worst. Maybe it was his inability, but... You had to have like perfect timing and positioning to jump every wider pit in the games and there was no sprint or wall climbing. And the bosses' attacks had to be dodged by jumping or walking! Again,no wall jump, no running, sliding or anything...you might think the atacks must have been very simple to dodge, but no, they weren't. It was freaking crazy.
  • Anyone that claims to have beaten Solomon's Key without having thoughts of murdering the designer is a lying bastard.
  • Ghosts 'n Goblins, Ghouls and Ghosts, and the rest of the series, has an evil reputation stemming from moderately annoying Jump Physics and extremely 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 A Winner Is You ending.
    • This troper beat Ghosts and Goblins. Ghouls and Ghosts however kicked his ass. He did not finish the second stage.
  • A modern heir to the title of Nintendo Hard is God Hand. 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.
  • The three The Simpsons 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.
  • 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.
  • The original American release of Devil May Cry 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. Both Devil May Cry 1 and 3 on the aptly-named "Dante Must Die" mode are also noteworthy.
  • 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 Bottomless Pit 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 Bottomless Pits 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 Luck Based Mission, 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...
  • La Mulana 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 Hell Temple, which goes from being merely hard to being I Wanna Be The Guy-caliber.
  • The 8-bit era Ninja Gaiden games are notoriously difficult. Gamers who could clear Mega Man 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).
    • The modern remake of Ninja Gaiden is little kinder, even with a Life Meter 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 Fake Difficulty so much as forcing players to always remain focused against the Mook Chivalry-dishonoring hordes.
      • Preliminary reports indicate the sequel lives up to the merciless mook swarm standards of the original, and adds some Fake Difficulty 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.
  • All of the Fire Emblem games. Not only is it easy for anyone to die, they're out of the game permanently once they're dead. Making you go for the reset button again and again and again... Nevertheless, the series began smack-dab in the middle of the NES era, natch.
    • Beyond ridiculous is Radiant Dawn for the Wii. Your main character is little more than a Staff Chick, you have no Jeigan Character, and one slip-up in the early chapters and it's game over.
    • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is much worse, due to the fatigue system and the RNG hating you to the point where one poster here said that it takes a miracle to beat the game.
      • Games 1 through 6 are noticeably harder than 7, 8 and 9. Maybe they toned down the difficulty because it was assumed that International audiences wouldn't play a game that hard.
    • Fire Emblem 9's the difficulties were renamed. So Normal became Easy, Hard became Normal, and Maniac became Hard.
      • Fire Emblem 10 had the difficulties renamed, Fire Emblem 9 had its Difficulties REPLACED. This is why English Easy mode saves can't translate from 9 to 10, as FE 10 had no Easy Difficulty. It also means that people thinking they were playing the Normal mode on FE 10 couldn't figure out why they were losing so often, when in reality, they were playing the game's hard mode.
    • Depends on the game. It is possible to complete many Fire Emblem games using a single character.
  • 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 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.
  • F-Zero GX is considered by some to be another modern example of Nintendo Hard. 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.
  • The fact that this trope is now rarely used was highlighted when in Donkey Kong 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, Gigawing (arcade/Dreamcast) goes stupid-hard on the final level (with three majorly hard bosses one right after the other) by lobbing screen-clogging waves of kamikazes and danmaku cloud-spewers. The hidden (good) endings require you to beat the game on 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 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 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 Grand Theft Auto 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?
  • 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 got to actually see the ending sequence. Effectively they're 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, 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 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.
  • 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) Everything Trying To Kill You 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.
    • Net Hack at least has "bones files"; sometimes you'll come across the mangled corpse of one of your previous characters, along with all their collected loot. Of course, most of the loot is now cursed, and whatever killed them will also still be there...
    • Is Net Hack 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 Net Hack, it only gets harder as you play. (If it takes a year before the average first win in Net Hack, it takes about 5 years for ADOM. And let's not even mention the ultra endings...)
    • The obscure game Izuna: The Legend of the Unemployed Ninja for the Nintendo DS has kiddy graphics, a light-hearted comedy storyline, and simple controls... but it's also a Roguelike, and therefore completely merciless. Every time you die you lose every item, weapon, and dollar to your name, and it takes both level-grinding and sheer luck to even beat the first dungeon. Especially when dungeon floors (which are randomly spawned) end up with no walls-- when this happens, your only course of action is to run like hell for the staircase or you're going to die, quick. Did we mention that the game saves automatically when you leave a dungeon, even if you die?
      • And don't try to turn off the game without saving and exiting the game. If that happens, you count as having died.
    • Suberted in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. At its core, its gameplay is inarguably Roguelike, but the difficulty curve is fair (even easy if you're Bulbasaur, who gets the game-breaking Sleep Powder,) there's no unavoidable instant death for doing something stupid as in the other listed examples, etc. Until you beat the game and see the credits, anyway. There are still no flat-out instant deaths, but other than that, you'll notice the kiddie gloves have come off if you try to do any of the post-game content....
  • 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.
  • The "Labyrinth Zone" boss in Sonic the Hedgehog involved you chasing the Big Bad Dr. Robotnik through a maze where the walls, floors, and ceilings all had spikes that would shoot out at regular intervals. And the water is rising, and Sonic cannot swim, so you must climb as fast as possible, even though every surface in the entire maze is harmful.
  • Lampshaded in Doom: when the player selects Nightmare! difficulty, the game asks "Are you sure? This skill level isn't even remotely fair." (Nightmare difficulty is essentially unplayable in single-player mode, but it's beatable when playing cooperatively with several players, because even though the enemies respawn, in multiplayer mode, the players can, too.)
    • 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"—powerful enemies who revive other monsters and have a delayed line-of-sight attack can take off 80% or more of the player's health.
      • 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.
  • While kinder then most Nintendo Hard games, Super Robot Wars 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 Final Boss... 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.
    • Super Robot Wars F 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. Even worse, one of the endings had you facing off with multiple level 99 bosses including one who was mostly immune to ranged attacks... which are mostly the only attacks worth using.
    • Let's not forget about Super Robot Wars 3. The goddamn Beam Coating 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. And to unlock the last level, you need to keep one said unit *alive*. Not fun.
  • 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. It's expansion pack, Red Hammer, manages to somehow become EVEN HARDER.
    • Not to mention that the character handles like a drunken cow, or that you can never carry more then about 120 rounds of ammo for your rifle. On the whole this is somewhat justified as it is probably one of the most realistic (no, not "realistic") shooters ever released.
    • Don't even talk about the sequel to OFP, Armed Assault (or just Arm A). The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. 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.
  • Odin Sphere. 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 bosses -- are That One Boss, and most four- and five-star levels are full of swarms of Goddamned Bats.
  • Every Gradius game ever produced is a diabolical exercise in suffering after the first wave of enemies.
    • The arcade release of Gradius III is practically the Battletoads of shmups, far surpassing the likes of Mushihime-sama and Ikaruga. On top of that, there's no continues, so you can't just credit-spam through the game. Worse yet, Stage 9 has a section where crystal cubes fly toward the left of the screen and stick there, randomly changing direction on their way to the left, and Stage 10's post-boss escape section requires you to navigate through narrow tunnels at ludicrously high speed; die, and it's back to just before the boss.
  • 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 The Life Ending Adventure. The entire game is (intentionally) Nintendo Hard -- 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 precognizant), 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 Homestar Runner .com, the game "Super Kingio Bros", in which you cannot possibly avoid the first enemy, who you find within the first second of the game.
  • Recent example: The Ferris Wheel scene in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is insanely difficult, even being toned down by the programmers at Infinity Ward when not even a single game tester was able to beat it on any but the lowest difficulty setting. In fact, this scene is the culmination of the most difficult mission in the game, which this editor finds ironic, as it's taking place in a flashback, from a soldier who (obviously) survived it.
  • The Turbo Grafx/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 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 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 Spikes Of Doom, 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. See for yourself.
    • 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.
  • In the Gran Turismo 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 GT 4, involves doing a lap around Nürburgring -- a 30km track -- behind a slow car that must not be hit.
  • 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
    • 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)
    • 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 "uber 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.
    • When you think about it, pretty much any MMORPG will qualify. Especially large-group play (e.g. World Of Warcraft's raids). Many battles, especially boss fights, there is no room for error - a single unlucky critical hit, Internet disconnect, a newbie or a Leeroy Jenkins will screw up the entire raid.
  • Drakengard's Final Boss, accompanied by an Unexpected Genre Change, is horribly difficult to defeat. The game has done a good job with the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil and keeping the challenge proportional to the player's status in the game, but when you hit that final chapter, the Final Boss will make you rip your hair out.
    • Actually it's only a matter of "Know the Scheme". Pause, memorize, unpause is common technique, or just getting the sequence from a guide and playing it from paper. It only appears difficult, but is nowhere near Nitendo Hard.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The classical ZX Spectrum game Jet Set Willy. Contact with any hazard (or falling from too high) 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 impossible to complete.
  • One mission in Kane and Lynch: Dead Men involved the player having to protect an NPC from a bunch of gun toting Mooks. Once you dispatch the first wave, a massive dump truck arrives and attempts to run over the NPC. The only way to stop it is to shoot the driver, who is surrounded by bullet resistant glass. Add to the fact that all you have is a rather inaccurate submachine gun, that the truck is moving very fast, that the truck cab is very high off the ground, and that there is absolutely no way to tell if you're hitting the driver or not, and you have several hours of enraged controller smashing.
  • Solitaire. Hey, stop laughing! Think about it. Often Unwinnable just by an unlucky spread of cards (red queen covers both black kings on the biggest stack, for instance), one wrong decision, even if it seems like a good idea at the time, can irrevocably screw you over. Then you have Vegas-style scoring, where you get a sharply limited number of cycles through the deck.
  • Kid Chameleon for the Sega Genesis has been called I Wanna Be The Guy 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.
    • And to top it all off, there's no way to save your progress! Thanks, Sega!
  • Super Smash Bros Brawl has this on the higher difficulties of the Boss Rush mode. Several bosses have the ability to kill you instantly if you make a mistake, and you can't continue unlike in other modes. And for extra fun, the associated challenges are the only ones that can't be bypassed with the golden hammers.
    • Two words: Cruel Melee
      • This was made much easier in Brawl, where the AI will jump to thier doom if you hover off the edge of the battlefield with a character who has multiple jumps.
    • Melee also had a Nintendo Hard unlockable trophy that requires you to beat any of the singleplayer modes without taking a single % of damage, among other things.
      • It's a little easier if you use Donkey Kong. A little.
  • Super Star Wars 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. This troper doesn't have the patience to try and get past that level.
    • 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.
  • Serious Sam: The First and Second Encounters: Games where literally hundreds of enemies often appear simultaneously. Many battles occur in small, enclosed areas. Enemies move very quickly, some explode upon dying and chaos is inevitable. These are great games with nonstop action. Serious Sam 2 however was very easy and dull.
  • Breakdown: Controls take a very long time to master although not in a Fake Difficulty 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 ponts. Actions are slow but in a great, detailed manner, not Fake Difficulty. 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.
  • 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.
  • Three words: 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.
  • Dance Dance Revolution 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. ITG 2 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. These videos show just how hard this game gets.
  • The original Max Payne was truly Nintendo Hard 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 slow down time, use healing items and switch weapons. Add to this the game's somewhat bizarre use of Rubber Band AI, 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."
  • Rondo Of Swords for the DS is a ridiculously hard strategy-RPG. The challenge derives from gameplay that is superficially similar to typical Fire Emblem / Final Fantasy Tactics-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 Level Grinding.
  • 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.
  • Vagrant Story 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 Vagrant Story 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.
  • Comix Zone. 6 stages, 2 lives (only accessible after finishing the first two stages), 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • Batman The Animated Series for the Super Nintendo was a somewhat challenging, very fun game. Its Genesis version however was a barely playable, Nintendo Hard game from Hell. Enemies swarmed everywhere and poor controls made fighting very difficult.
  • Mario Kart 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.
  • The original Metroid (on the NES, of course). "Wait, people 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 Copy And Paste Environments 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, 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.
    • 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...).
  • The Metal Slug series: Unless you're inside a tank, every hit will kill you, and you only get three lives for each continue. It's still possible, however, to survive most of the game without dying - except for the boss fights.
  • If you thought 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 I Wanna Be The Guy. Clearing some of the later levels can easily end up taking weeks of practice. Frogger is a One Hit Point Wonder with Super Drowning Skills in a world with Everything Trying To Kill You, strict time limits, and surprisingly realistic Jump Physics that takes quite a bit of getting used to. Furthermore, the camera is ridiculously zoomed in, making it hard to see what obstacles are coming up next and where the level goals are. This troper actually managed to complete the entire game without a guide, but only because nobody had written one yet.
  • 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 Net Hack, and sometimes the right answer is fairly obscure.
    • This Troper 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. No, really. 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 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.
    • 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, woe unto you if your torch ever goes out.
  • Any, and I mean ANY, game 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 That One Boss among a game FULL of them.
    • Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne famously introduced the "Press Turn" battle system, which was later used in spinoffs Digital Devil Saga and Persona 3. 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 Mega Ten so hard. What really makes the game interesting is that if the Hero dies, it's game over.
      • The Persona series was also developed by Atlus, and is correspondingly difficult, with the possible exception of Persona 3, due to it being partly a date sim game. 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.
    • Don't forget Etrian Odyssey, 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.
    • Trauma Center more than deserves a mention here. Under the Knife, Second Opinion, and New Blood have always been known for its 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 Ut K 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 Crowning Moment Of Awesome at the end of the game, it's game over, no questions asked.
    • Basically, you know it's an Atlus game if in your first encounter in 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.
  • Many early Game Boy titles such as Super Mario Land and Kirby's Dreamland had codes that allowed you to replay them Nintendo Hard. And if that wasn't enough, Kirby's Dreamland also had a code that allowed you to change the Life Meter from 6 bars to 1.
  • The Flash-based games The Impossible Quiz and The Impossible Quiz 2. You're requited to complete 110 (120 in the second) questions, most of which require insane logic, wild guessing, or thinking outside of the box. What may be the correct answer may instead yield the dreaded "WRONG! -1 LIFE" box. You are given 3 lives (5 in the second) to complete all of these questions, and with no checkpoints from which to restart if you run out, this game requires you to memorize the entire quiz. Although you are given skips, they are useless in the first Impossible Quiz because on the last question, described as either "the easiest question there is or your worst nightmare," you have to use all of your skips!
  • I Wanna Be The Guy speeds right past Nintendo Hard into Platform Hell. The fact you have frequent save points and unlimited lives is the only thing preventing the game from being completely unbeatable.
    • Not to mention the (still-in-development) sequel, I Wanna Save the Kids.
  • The text-based adventure game of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy is absolutely hellish. Playing without a walkthrough or FAQ page is most definitely not recommended unless you want to spend the rest of your adult life bursting into tears at the mere mention of the phrase "Babel Fish."
  • 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.
  • The House Of The Dead series. It doesn't help that in the Wii port of The House of the Dead 2, you don't get unlimited continues.
  • Abadox. Holy shitcock, Abadox. It looks like Life Force- 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, One Hit Point Wonder 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. I Am Not Making This Up.
  • Anyone ever played