Oh my gosh. I have no idea how we played all those hard ass NES games back in the day. Kid Icarus was one I never played. I just remember him as a character from the Captain N cartoon. Those medusa heads in Castlevania, or bats in Ninja Gaiden!
Bottomless Pit - Kid Icarus
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 On 05/17/2020 at 08:04 PM by Matt Snee See More From This User » |
There are many annoying NES games but the one that caused me the most frustration as a child was Kid Icarus. The game is fucking horrible. But...I didn't realize this when I was young, and continued playing it, putting myself through endless anguish.
Where to start in its suckiness? Well, for one thing, a lot of it is a vertical scroller, finding you climbing up the screen as you jump from platform to platform. However, unlike a game like Metroid, that allowed you to fall back to where you came from, once you crossed a threshold of what you could no longer see, what existed below was a bottomless chasm, which would claim your life if you made the slightest miscalculation in your jumps.
Also, there are the Grim Reaper characters - if one sees you, a grating music comes on, and mini-reapers swirl into the screen to kill you until you destroy them or an allotment of time passes. If the big Grim Reaper sees you again, the process starts over.
Of course, there are also the maze-like boss levels, which feature the Eggplant Wizard, which throws eggplants across the screen at you. If you get hit by one, you turn into an eggplant yourself, with the ability to walk and jump, but no longer attack. Getting back to normal is, of course, frustrating.
The game is huge, and has a password system to save your progress. Kids today will never know the terrors of the NES password system. God have mercy on your soul if you wrote down your code wrong or somehow entered in the wrong letter or number but don't know which.
Those were simpler times, and the games were sometimes very unforgiving.
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