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 On 02/23/2013 at 09:50 PM by natron See More From This User » |
Pictured: stupid hard games
Old Nintendo games are, as a matter of principal, really hard… but let’s be honest here. Video games these days for the most part are moronically easy. There are exceptions to this rule, but the rule remains. Challenging video games are a dying art form.
Back in the 8-bit era games had to be hard in order to justify paying $60 (or more) for a video game with 6 stages. Video games of this time period were not played for the amazing, dramatic story arcs, or for mining achievements and trophies- they were played for fun, and often times the fun came from the challenge itself.
If you actually did beat a difficult video game, you either had to have your mom’s camera ready (and I swear, no child took a successful photograph of a TV screen in the 90s) or have a friend/friends (the more the better) present to witness the feat. Barring either of the these scenarios meant you would be open to scorn and subject to burning doubt. I swear to god, I beat Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, but to this day not a single one of my friends believes me because I did it alone in my apartment in 2006. Dicks.
The near unplayably hard games for the NES were not just the Bayou Billys, the Amagons, or the Golgo 13s of the NES library. Some of the most beloved and lovingly remembered video games of the NES era were genuinely challenging affairs. The first 3 Mega Man games, Castlevania I- III, and Contra are among the best and hardest games of the late 80′s and early 90′s. They were also massive financial successes.
The difficulty style of 8-bit video games generally falls into two separate and distinct categories; artificial difficulty and actual difficulty.
Actual, genuinely hard games slowly ramp up the difficulty and always make the player the master of their own fate. The room-crossing lasers in Quickman’s stage from Mega Man 2, the Grim Reaper boss from Castlevania, the final level in Super C. They are all hard, but fairly so. When you die you only have yourself to blame. Enough practice and you can master these obstacles and fly through without a second thought.
Artificial difficulty, commonly referred to as “cheap” difficulty, bursts from the seams of the most irritating hard games because it is, first and foremost, unfair. Randomly disappearing platforms, picky hit detection, over powered enemies, difficult and out of place platforming sections, and the combination of poor level design and one-hit-kill environmental traps all contribute to give a hard game an overall stink of cheapness.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot- the goddamn birds.
Ninja Gaiden, a series famous for it’s high difficulty has three games (the NES trilogy) that entirely owe their reputation as controller smashers to those winged devils. Those fucking Ninja Gaiden birds still haunt my nightmares, and the nightmares of every gamer who has subjected themselves to the original TECMO Ninja Gaiden games. Seriously, jumps that were tricky by themselves, in addition to eternally respawning birds? Together? CONSTANTLY?
Some games, most notably Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, straddle the boundary between actually hard and artificially hard. One could argue that the first half of Zelda II is actually hard, in a good way. A fun, challenging platforming action game that gets a lot of things right. The second half of the game however switches gears, and becomes critically difficult. While certainly grind heavy through-out, it becomes an absolute nightmare to achieve the highest levels because the enemies that yield the most experience are often overpowered and difficult to kill.
“Fuck it. Let her sleep.”
The last few palaces become nightmarishly long themselves, and the frustration mounts as the task of even uncovering their locations becomes more and more convoluted.
In an ironic twist, the North American version of Zelda II was intentionally made to be more difficultthan the original Japanese Famicom Disk System version. Conclusion? Nintendo of America hated us.
Check out my blog at Video Games Are Rad [dot]com. You'll like it a whole lot*
*results not typical
NES = Diffuicult games = how else were they going to justify the Nintendo Power hot line.
Zelda II and Castlevania II were what I call Random difficulty. Where else could it be obvious to kneel at the river with a crystal for 10 sec to open up the next path to advance the game.
Ahhh, the good ol days :)
I never played any games from that era but I heard many times how hard Contra was. I'm kinda glad I didnt play those games, I might not be a gamer today!
I had every game in that stack pictured. That makes me feel all sorts of nostalgic and old.
Awesome blog, man!
Thanks!
Contra is not that hard. I can easily beat it without dying. Then again I've played it a gagillion times lol.
Ninja Gaiden is a nightmare. I hope to conquer it someday. I can get pretty far... but I always get so frustrated that I rage quit. And yeah. Fuck those birds! lol. Great blog!
I LOVE Zelda II. Is it a difficult game? I suppose so, but then again I played that game as a kid a lot. Practice, and patience takes you through the long road that this game is. The only thing that stopped me from beating the game? I did not own the game, and having to leave Canada to Portugal didn't help either (let's just say NA consoles don't work in Europe unless you have this heavy transformer thing). Got it on the Wii's VC, and left it at the same last temple I had reached back in 90/91. I will end it some day.
Have you heard of Faxanadu (NES), or Cobra Triangle(NES)? Sweet, joyful... and painful games to play hahahaha. I LOVE them too.
Zelda II sounds really interesting, and it's terribly relevant because I'm planning on playing it once I finish Zelda 1. First Zelda game I ever played was Ocarina. I had an NES and SNES but I guess I missed out on those Zeldas or never had them come into my possession. I didn't know any better since I was so young but still, I wish I could have played them on the original console and controller.
I'm playing Zelda 1 on Gamecube via the Collector's Edition disc. It's taken a tiny bit of getting use to the control scheme. I love the GC controller but it's still a bit weird playing a game from NES on it. It's been amazing though so I don't want to sound like a downer. Once I finish Zelda I'm going right into Zelda II. I've heard things about the game and I think I'd like it a lot.
man you should talk to my brother. He's a Zelda II fanatic lol. He knows everything there is to know about that game. It's hard as hell. I always thought that Zelda II took a lot of flak for stupid reasons. It's a great game. I think maybe because it was such a radical departure from the Zelda formula.
I never liked Zelda 1 that much. Never. I can say that it is quite a tough game in terms of exploration because of the lack of proper clues. If you manage to finish it then I'm sure you will do fine playing Zelda II.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one to be a part of a community of kids that would lend games to each other, and that's basically how I never owned a single game for the NES except for the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt combo cartridge that came with the system. Did you happen to experience something similar Michael, or did it just happen at a later age?
I love Zelda 2 as well. I don't know why. I love the side scrolling RPG thing. I love the music. I love the graphics. I love everything about that game. HAve I ever won it? No. But damn is it awesome.
When I was a kid I played Ninja Gaiden like a crack addict. I didn't know it was so hard because there was nothing else to compare it to. Games these days are pretty easy, or at least you can adjust it. But I don't have the patience for difficulty as I used to. But still, if a game is too easy I lose interest quickly. I've been playing Trails in the Sky and it has been deliciously difficult. I had to load an old saved game and backtrack because I couldn't get past this part without buying more potions. There's something about that I like.
Attempted Ninja Gaiden. And I must say, it almost destroyed my life. I was so determined to beat it, I didn't realize it had beaten me a LONGGG time ago. Needless to say, I never went back to it. I just pretend it isn't there. But one of these days...I will get my revenge.
"Nintendohard"
That's the term, a bit of research tells me that the only reason these games felt or where near impossible was because of the rental market. Japan didn't have that or it was significantly small so the games their where noticably easier than in the west.
You ever played Sliver Surfer? My gawd, some of my uni mates did a marathon on it, nobody won! XD
Genesis had some tough games, too. I have only finished a small fraction of the Genesis games I own. I introduced one of my nephews to Genesis games a few summers ago with Sonic's UGC. His remark was: "wow, those old games are hard".
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