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Most
everyone who grew up in the 1980s has enjoyed the experience of
throwing their Nintendo controller into a wall in a fit of blind,
screaming rage; many of us have even broken our fair share. The fact
is, video games were hard back then, on the whole a lot harder
than they are now. And while the NES still provides me with the
majority of my fond gaming memories, it also fomented more frustration
and anger in me than any other single gaming system.
I've picked out seven classic NES games that managed to really
piss me off for one reason or another. If you know of a harder one
that didn't make this list, chances are I never played it, or it
didn't interest me enough to actually anger me. For example, Bayou
Billy may have been frustrating, but I also didn't care enough to
see what was next to be bothered; I simply cast it aside to make time
for the next game. These games were ones I really wanted to
play through to the end, which is why they had so much power to anger
me.
Ghosts 'N Goblins
If I
recall correctly, my sister and I split the cost of this game and
bought it together, a decision we came to regret about five minutes
after popping in the cartridge. I'd heard nothing but how cool this
game was, and when I saw the opening scene in the graveyard and heard
the awesome spooky music, I knew I'd heard correctly. Unfortunately,
the game was also nearly impossible to play. Yes, I know that
two of you are reading this right now and thinking "What a pussy! That
game was easy!". Well, you're not human, you're fucking aliens, I'm on
to you, and I'm reporting you to the FBI, or the Men in Black, or
whoever it is you call in a situation like this.
I think
I made it past the initial graveyard stage once, which was
cause for a screaming, jumping-up-and-down celebration. Then after
about a minute into the city stage, I was dead again, shouted
obscenities, and smashed my controller into a wall. I think the thing
that made me so mad about this game was that you run around wearing
full plate mail, which you might think would provide some kind of
protection. Only it turns out to be completely useless, as one single
hit will knock the armor right off of you and you're suddenly running
around in your boxers. It was like every time I found a new suit of
plate mail, the game was taunting me by teaching me the true meaning
of futility.
Castlevania
This is
one of two games on this list I've actually beaten years after
initially playing them, thanks to an obsessive-compulsive, twitchy
persistence that only comes with the need to prove something. I really
like this game. I also really, really hate this game in an
eye-bulging, foaming at the mouth, vein popping out on my forehead
kind of way. For some annoying reason, Simon Belmont couldn't jump off
of stairs, which meant that if some enemy chose to attack you while
you were busy climbing up or down a level, you were pretty much
fucked. Also, much like Arthur in Ghosts 'N Goblins, you can't
change direction once you hit that jump button. And perhaps that is
more realistic than the aerial acrobatics featured in some games, but
there's nothing more frustrating than realizing you just made a
horrible error in judgment and being forced to watch your character
tumble helplessly into oblivion.
Of
course, the hardest thing about this game was the bosses, which were
deceptively easy until you got to Frankenstein, who slowly lumbers
across the screen in a relatively non-threatening manner.
Unfortunately, when the crazed, dancing, methamphetamine-abusing
monkey who rides around on his back hops off and starts pinballing
around the room shooting "monkey balls" at you, you've got a whole new
batch of problems. I finally bested him after a great many attempts,
only to discover that the hardest boss in the game, Death, is next in
line. If you're lucky enough to make it past the insane gauntlet that
is the hallway preceding Death's chamber with any health left at all,
you might just last two seconds before he kills you. The only way I
was able to get past him was to chump him with holy water, ensuring an
unfair fight that wouldn't even allow him the chance to move.
Fortunately, I read on the internet that this is a generally accepted
way to beat the boss, and that you can chump Death without being
considered too much of a pussy.
Ninja Gaiden
I
recently downloaded this on the Wii's Virtual Console, as my parents
decided to sell my copy (along with all my other NES games) at a yard
sale while I was off at college. I had remembered I found it extremely
difficult when I was twelve, but figured that in my older age I'd be
better suited to face the challenges provided by this game. I was
wrong. See, I went through the majority of the boards with little
difficulty, wondering why I'd ever had a hard time with it in the
first place, until I managed to get to the last several boards
preceding the final boss fights. While I do remember getting to the
Jaquio, a fat guy in an 'intestine suit', once or twice when I was a
kid, I could never get past him. These days I've yet to even reach him
again. (By the way, I know a lot of people don't consider this to be
the hardest game in the series, but it's the one I remember the best).
What
really burns my biscuits about this game is that it never seems to be
a worthy opponent that takes me down, but rather it's always some
stupid animal like an eagle or a bat that manages to shuffle me off
this digital coil. A ninja with a jetpack, I could deal with. That
guy's clearly a menace. But a fucking eagle? Either the Jaquio has
somehow hired soldiers from the animal kingdom to work for him, or Ryu
Hayabusa has an extraordinary talent for accidentally stumbling too
close to birds' nests and pissing off overly protective mothers.
There's one board near the end I must have attempted a hundred times,
only to be clawed to death by a bird every single time as I plummet to
my painful death. You know what else is weird? On the first stage
where you're in the city, you have knife-throwing punks, street thugs
with bats and even boxers coming after you. Kind of makes sense,
right? But when you get to the final stages in an ancient ruin in the
Amazon, you still have the same ol' punks, street thugs and
boxers coming after you. Where does the Jaquio find these guys?
Kid Icarus
This is
one of those rare games that people say gets progressively easier as
you go through it, so by the time you get to the ending, it's hardly a
challenge at all. I wouldn't know, because I can never get past the
second fucking level. Though I never owned this game myself, I had
several friends who did, so I played my fair share of it. The problem
with this torturous excuse for a game was that the first several
boards were vertical, where you climbed higher and higher as you
traversed the board's terrain. The bad news here is that one false
step would send you plunging to your demise. And since most of these
levels consisted of very small platforms and enemies that were
constantly trying to knock you off of them, there was plenty of demise
to be had.
Annoyingly, the game had fantastic music and a promise of great
excitement and adventure ahead, if only I could keep my fumbling
fingers from misfiring and jumping too soon or too late. The
aggravating thing here is that you're a fucking angel, with
wings, and yet you still couldn't so much as hover or slow
your descent to allow for a pillowy, snuggle-soft landing. After many
repetitive slipups resulting in the same horrible fate, this logical
inconsistency became too much for my brain to handle, and I would
throw the controller somewhere far away, hoping it would fall forever
and die too.
Mega Man
This is
the second game on this list I've recently managed to defeat, but only
by exploiting a flaw in the game to get past the hardest boss (another
technique considered acceptable by a large faction of players). Maybe
it's because I played its successor Mega Man 2 before going
back and playing this one, but I found this game to be nowhere near as
enjoyable as the sequel. Still, the completist in me demanded I
struggle through it so that I could eventually say I beat all the Mega
Man games (a boast that's just sure to have all the ladies
swooning).
Getting
past all the robot masters is manageable enough (though Ice Man's
stage can be quite annoying, and what an X-Man is doing in this game
is beyond me), but it's the big yellow cyclops monster in Dr. Wiley's
first stage that rapidly transforms this game from a passable good
time to a crybaby tearfest. This creature flies across the room in
little blocks that you have to dodge, assembles itself, allows you the
chance to fire off one shot while it itself shoots at you, before it
breaks apart and repeats the process on the opposite end of the
screen. I can never get through one of these sequences without getting
hit at least once, and the amount of damage I inflict each time versus
the amount I take ensures that at my skill level, getting past this is
impossible (without the exploit). I don't think anyone short of a
robot could actually get past this. Ask any Mega Man fan, and they
will likely agree that this is the hardest boss in any of the games,
and the hardest game in the overall series.
Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
The
first thing I remember about this game is that it was full of boring,
shitty "creatures" that passed for enemies and that it involved a lot
of wandering around on an overhead map without having any idea where
to go, entering building after identical building and fighting hordes
of boring, shitty creatures inside. Rocksteady and Bebop did make
brief appearances for what pass as bosses early in the game, but for
the most part you were fighting random unknowns. What also didn't make
sense was that your turtle van ran off the same health meter as your
turtles, which wasn't so life-threatening, but it was plain stupid.
The
second level was a timed underwater swimming mission where
you're searching for bombs to defuse without having any idea where in
the hell they are, and it's also filled with electrical plants that
zapped the shit out of you and more than likely would be the death of
one or more of your turtles. I'd always get past the swimming mission,
only to have one or two severely wounded turtles left with which to
beat the rest of the game. Healing pizzas were few and far between,
and were often hard to get to when you did find them. Unsurprisingly,
I usually met my quick end somewhere on level three and never saw
anything beyond that.
Battletoads
This
game, in no way a blatant rip-off of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
because it only had one descriptor in front of "toads" instead
of three, promised to be a rollicking good time where the TMNT
game had failed. Unfortunately, it lied. This game started off
decently enough, and even allowed for multi-player co-op play, but
shortly after the first several fun stages came the crushing
realization that you'd come as far as you were going to. Especially if
you brought a friend along for the ride.
Because
as soon as you hopped on your "hover cycle", you were doomed to crash
and die. You would race toward obstacles at breakneck speeds, which
would be indicated by their flashing appearance on the edge of the
screen, giving you very little information to judge how much time you
actually had before slamming into one of them. Eventually they would
come so fast and so frequently, forcing you to shift left or right,
jump up or duck down in such quick succession that you could go insane
trying to get through it all. And the bad news is that if there are
two of you playing, you both had to make it through the level
perfectly. One screw up from either of you, and you were both forced
to start over. I almost always played this game with a friend
(primarily because I didn't own a copy myself), and it usually had to
be turned off pretty quickly before a friendship was destroyed. I
heard the game only gets harder from there (which doesn't even seem
possible), but I wouldn't know because I never made it anywhere in
this game.
I really think that for the most part video games were harder back in
the 80s, when things like unlimited continues, save points and
passwords were either unheard of or relatively uncommon. I've seen
speed run videos of all these games being beaten, which has proven to
me that I don't entirely suck at all of these, because the skill
required to get through some of these games is unbelievable. If you
can actually beat any of these games, my hat's off to you, because
there are damn few who can.
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If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out:
NINTENDO: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY!
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