(3) Gauntlet 3 (IIRC; it was more RPGish for the first time in the series)
LOL. They made three of them? I remember playing the original Gauntlet arcade game. I put more money in it than probably any game that I've purchased to date. I finally got good at it to the point where I literally could not lose health. I'd just run through the levels destroying everything. Totally maxed out elf is a terror to behold.
@the_spyder They actually made quite a few. I looked into it and I was mistaken. It wasn't Gauntlet 3 I enjoyed and found difficult but Gauntlet 4 for Sega.
They slowly started getting less hack n' slash and more RPGish, but then when the newer systems were released, it was almost as if they favored graphics over anything else, as I found the newer ones *very* repetitive in gameplay, which is saying something because I didn't feel that way about the original. They were pretty, but shallow. In my opinion, Gauntlet 4 was kind of the apex of the series, and while cool, the PS versions were lacking and getting me bored quickly.
Upon looking into this, I also noticed that they actually rebooted the series last year:
Thanks for the info. I guess I kind of did know that they rebooted it. I almost purchased it based on nostalgia. But I've currently got PoE, Wasteland 2 and DA:I yet to play, not to mention my half finished IWD:EE game and my mostly finished BG2:EE game so I opted out of that for the time being.
I definitely should have put stock in the company though. I swear I must have blown $200 in quarters with the original. But then towards the end, I could play for HOURS on one quarter. Once you knew the angles and the patterns? Simple stuff. they changed that in Gauntlet 2, made the monsters all follow weird pathing so you couldn't just mow them down.
Anyone remembers very old games? - Albion (hardcore RPG) - got easier, when you grinded a lot - Battle-Isle:Incubation (hardcore tactical strategy) - very difficult, the usual "more dakka" approach did not work, you had to make use of movement and environment to kill enemies - and the ammunition was sparse. - old Mario (or it's predecessor on Commodore 64 - Giana Sisters) - plattformer - Target: Renegade (very, very old fighting game on ZX Spectrum) - you broke several joysticks until you found out how to kill certain enemies.
And how about that music? They don't make 'em like they used to. The music is good, but this is just catchy and memorable. I still find myself humming the Maniac Mansion song to this day. I can't think of a single PS or Xbox game that has music that stuck with me like that.
I want to throw Ghosts N' Goblins in there, but while the C64 version was challenging, it was sadly and badly incomplete.
Ha! Every time I thought I was getting far, I would try to jump across water using the stones and fall right in because of the wonky controls. But that raises an important question: what kind of ninja can't swim? I guess the last ninja.
The old ninja turtles sidescroller, can't remember the name, it's kinda like golden axe. Actually Golden Axe for that matter was kinda hard as I recall, I can't remember much about it besides tossing many many many of parents hard earned moneys at these two games at the arcade. Actually pretty much anything made for Arcades, I mean those games where all built to kill you as fast as possible. More deaths = more restarts = more money for the arcades. Also Contra was great and Castlevania pretty hard too. Abe's Odyssey is probably one of the first games I remember being very frustrated with and being completely over joyed when I finished it. I think alot of old game difficulty comes from poor design choices and the internet not really being a thing back then. If you got stuck in a game you where stuck, till you figured it out or somebody helped you, now with the internet.....
Shining in thr Darkness was my first RPG and I thought, that it is the hardest game I ever see. For now I've walked through it for many times with and without mods, of course. But for the age of 10 it was very hard, especially first half of it. Also, from the time I first see the logo "Shining in the Darkness", my world changed forever...
Dark Souls 1 was kind of a beast to beat. You die Soooo VERY much. It almost became a point of honor to get through. I did finally beat the main bad guy, but that wasn't till after 300+ hours of game play, most of which was humiliating defeats one right after the other.
I recently got Dark souls to work, and hated it a LOT. I got it on steam, but previously it would try to log in to some legacy microsoft site, and generally fail. Perhaps steam patched it without me noticing, perhaps disabling internet makes it skip that and just load.
Anyway, it really expects an XBox controller, so tells you to press 'A', 'X', 'B' etc. Which are totally mapped by default to some other random buttons, so I remapped them, but then they are rubbishly positioned. Anyway, I got as far as the first demon, and .. just OMG. I'll probably give it another try when I'm not such a big girl's blouse, but really move along unless you like getting whipped.
The original Rayman for the PS1 was really really hard. I've watched quite a few Let's Plays of it, and in the majority of them either they cheat to give themselves 99 lives or they use save states. I can get quite far in the game but I've never been able to unlock the final level.
Another really hard game was Odin Sphere for the PS2. It's one of those games where it's much easier if you grind a lot, but if you don't it's incredibly hard. On my first playthrough, I remember dying more than 50 times to the fourth boss. On easy mode.
F-Zero GX for the Nintendo GameCube. Specifically, Story Mode.
You will play through the individual missions, struggling all the while, but eventually you shall prevail. "That was extraordinarily difficult," you might say, "but doable in the end." Your enthusiasm vanishes, however, when you realise that there are two higher difficulty levels! And you have to complete Story Mode on the hardest difficulty to unlock the AX racers...unless you take your memory card to an F-Zero AX machine, and good luck finding one of those outside Japan.
Goonies 2: Took a full day for four people, me, my brother and our two cousins, to beat it fair and square.
Roller derby: Another unforgiving NES game, albeit easier than Bayou Billy.
Ninja Gaiden 1: Best music in a game ever though. But after the 50'th time you tried to jump from a ladder on to a platform only to be attacked mid-air by a bird and dropping to your death you were ready to through that f....ing console out of the window
I would liked to have beat Life Force without the iconic Konami cheat code, but alas I have not. God knows I tried, but 3 lives for that game was just insane. Even with 30 lives it was a challange!
On Amiga: Cruise for a corpse: Wow, this game was hard. You had to be at the right place at the right TIME in order to advance the story. If you weren't in the storage room at the correct hour to listen in on a conversation, you were stuck. Yeah, this game was difficult on way more dimenstions that other games both before and after.
Cabal: Awesome game. An old arcade classic I played on Amiga as well. Completed it only once and only with another player up until the very last when he died and I managed to beat it. He got pissed of course, being so close. I would never in a thousand years been able to beat it solo though.
Lost Patrol: Awesome, awesome game. So different from anything I ever played before and after. Best music in an amiga game ever (even better than Turrican!). Look it up on youtube: lost patrol OST. Only managed to beat it by reading tips and tricks though since it was too difficult for a ~12 year old me to empirically beat it by my own.
I never beat Turrican, neither 1 nor 2. It still haunts me.
I remember rage quitting a bunch of games (yes, I probably have anger management issues) such as:
SSI Gold Box: Pools of Darkness X-com Mass Effect 1 (though this may be my issue and not necessarily game difficulty) Diablo 3 (again, not "Necessarily" due to difficulty but just stupid mechanics) Sins of a Solar Empire Arkham Origins (at the Deathlock fight) Ninja Gaiden Black
- go down corridor; you die - don't go down corridor; you die - open chest; you die - don't open chest; you die - open door; you die - don't open door; you die - attack enemy; you die - don't attack enemy; you die such great times.... Another Nethack 'clone' I found great fun ( as in, drinking Drano and putting crushed glass in yours eyes while sticking bamboo under your fingernails type fun) was the original "Ragnarok". The best part, after months of (re)-starting, was finally getting to the end to save Asgard and discovering "you took too long, Loki and the Frost Giants have destroyed Asgard, please try again". A new monitor and keyboard was more expensive than I anticipated...
I remember rage quitting a bunch of games (yes, I probably have anger management issues) such as:
SSI Gold Box: Pools of Darkness X-com Mass Effect 1 (though this may be my issue and not necessarily game difficulty) Diablo 3 (again, not "Necessarily" due to difficulty but just stupid mechanics) Sins of a Solar Empire Arkham Origins (at the Deathlock fight) Ninja Gaiden Black
just to name a very few.
What exactly made you rage quit Diablo 3 if I may ask?? Was it Belial the first time you faced him??
Majora's Mask. I had to look at a walkthrough before I even knew how to enter the first dungeon. You have to go on multiple unrelated side quests just to enter the area. The game in general is extremely nonlinear, and the path forward is never clear. But I loved going inside the Clock Tower and listening to the Song of Healing while looking at Deku Link's strange and sad expression, and playing my own songs on the Deku Pipes outside. It was a very moving game.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (Game Boy). It was hideously difficult, but very rewarding. Most of all, the game music was awesome. There was only one song, every time, but it was great.
Baldur's Gate 2. It took forever for me to figure out I had to destroy those Mephit Portals to get rid of the Mephits.
I remember rage quitting a bunch of games (yes, I probably have anger management issues) such as:
Diablo 3 (again, not "Necessarily" due to difficulty but just stupid mechanics)
What exactly made you rage quit Diablo 3 if I may ask?? Was it Belial the first time you faced him??
So, really just stupid mechanics, and not so much as any given enemy that I couldn't defeat. But I think I got sick of the increasing amount of surprise deaths that happened with random 'Elite' monsters after defeating the game the first time. Their concession to increasing difficulty beyond the initial play through seemed to be to sharply increase the damage done (and potential damage they could take) by monsters and then have them mob you. This, presumably in an attempt to 'Encourage' you to play multi-player. There were a lot of other aspects of the game design that I didn't like either, but don't wish to turn this into a debate on the relative merits of D3. Let's just say it was personally and subjectively 'not my cup of tea'.
Comments
http://gauntlet.wikia.com/wiki/Gauntlet_IV
They slowly started getting less hack n' slash and more RPGish, but then when the newer systems were released, it was almost as if they favored graphics over anything else, as I found the newer ones *very* repetitive in gameplay, which is saying something because I didn't feel that way about the original. They were pretty, but shallow. In my opinion, Gauntlet 4 was kind of the apex of the series, and while cool, the PS versions were lacking and getting me bored quickly.
Upon looking into this, I also noticed that they actually rebooted the series last year:
http://gauntlet.wikia.com/wiki/Gauntlet_(2014)
I guess it's truer to the original, but given a plot, diversifies the four classes more, changes up the dungeons, and obviously looks modern.
I definitely should have put stock in the company though. I swear I must have blown $200 in quarters with the original. But then towards the end, I could play for HOURS on one quarter. Once you knew the angles and the patterns? Simple stuff. they changed that in Gauntlet 2, made the monsters all follow weird pathing so you couldn't just mow them down.
- Albion (hardcore RPG) - got easier, when you grinded a lot
- Battle-Isle:Incubation (hardcore tactical strategy) - very difficult, the usual "more dakka" approach did not work, you had to make use of movement and environment to kill enemies - and the ammunition was sparse.
- old Mario (or it's predecessor on Commodore 64 - Giana Sisters) - plattformer
- Target: Renegade (very, very old fighting game on ZX Spectrum) - you broke several joysticks until you found out how to kill certain enemies.
Conan -
The Goonies -
Bruce Lee -
Manuac Mansion -
Last Ninja -
Ghostbusters -
And how about that music? They don't make 'em like they used to. The music is good, but this is just catchy and memorable. I still find myself humming the Maniac Mansion song to this day. I can't think of a single PS or Xbox game that has music that stuck with me like that.
I want to throw Ghosts N' Goblins in there, but while the C64 version was challenging, it was sadly and badly incomplete.
Actually Golden Axe for that matter was kinda hard as I recall, I can't remember much about it besides tossing many many many of parents hard earned moneys at these two games at the arcade.
Actually pretty much anything made for Arcades, I mean those games where all built to kill you as fast as possible. More deaths = more restarts = more money for the arcades.
Also Contra was great and Castlevania pretty hard too.
Abe's Odyssey is probably one of the first games I remember being very frustrated with and being completely over joyed when I finished it.
I think alot of old game difficulty comes from poor design choices and the internet not really being a thing back then.
If you got stuck in a game you where stuck, till you figured it out or somebody helped you, now with the internet.....
Anyway, it really expects an XBox controller, so tells you to press 'A', 'X', 'B' etc. Which are totally mapped by default to some other random buttons, so I remapped them, but then they are rubbishly positioned. Anyway, I got as far as the first demon, and .. just OMG. I'll probably give it another try when I'm not such a big girl's blouse, but really move along unless you like getting whipped.
Another really hard game was Odin Sphere for the PS2. It's one of those games where it's much easier if you grind a lot, but if you don't it's incredibly hard. On my first playthrough, I remember dying more than 50 times to the fourth boss. On easy mode.
You will play through the individual missions, struggling all the while, but eventually you shall prevail. "That was extraordinarily difficult," you might say, "but doable in the end." Your enthusiasm vanishes, however, when you realise that there are two higher difficulty levels! And you have to complete Story Mode on the hardest difficulty to unlock the AX racers...unless you take your memory card to an F-Zero AX machine, and good luck finding one of those outside Japan.
But also on NES:
Goonies 2: Took a full day for four people, me, my brother and our two cousins, to beat it fair and square.
Roller derby: Another unforgiving NES game, albeit easier than Bayou Billy.
Ninja Gaiden 1: Best music in a game ever though. But after the 50'th time you tried to jump from a ladder on to a platform only to be attacked mid-air by a bird and dropping to your death you were ready to through that f....ing console out of the window
I would liked to have beat Life Force without the iconic Konami cheat code, but alas I have not. God knows I tried, but 3 lives for that game was just insane. Even with 30 lives it was a challange!
On Amiga:
Cruise for a corpse: Wow, this game was hard. You had to be at the right place at the right TIME in order to advance the story. If you weren't in the storage room at the correct hour to listen in on a conversation, you were stuck. Yeah, this game was difficult on way more dimenstions that other games both before and after.
Cabal: Awesome game. An old arcade classic I played on Amiga as well. Completed it only once and only with another player up until the very last when he died and I managed to beat it. He got pissed of course, being so close. I would never in a thousand years been able to beat it solo though.
Lost Patrol: Awesome, awesome game. So different from anything I ever played before and after. Best music in an amiga game ever (even better than Turrican!). Look it up on youtube: lost patrol OST. Only managed to beat it by reading tips and tricks though since it was too difficult for a ~12 year old me to empirically beat it by my own.
I never beat Turrican, neither 1 nor 2. It still haunts me.
SSI Gold Box: Pools of Darkness
X-com
Mass Effect 1 (though this may be my issue and not necessarily game difficulty)
Diablo 3 (again, not "Necessarily" due to difficulty but just stupid mechanics)
Sins of a Solar Empire
Arkham Origins (at the Deathlock fight)
Ninja Gaiden Black
just to name a very few.
- go down corridor; you die
- don't go down corridor; you die
- open chest; you die
- don't open chest; you die
- open door; you die
- don't open door; you die
- attack enemy; you die
- don't attack enemy; you die
such great times....
Another Nethack 'clone' I found great fun ( as in, drinking Drano and putting crushed glass in yours eyes while sticking bamboo under your fingernails type fun) was the original "Ragnarok".
The best part, after months of (re)-starting, was finally getting to the end to save Asgard and discovering "you took too long, Loki and the Frost Giants have destroyed Asgard, please try again".
A new monitor and keyboard was more expensive than I anticipated...
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (Game Boy). It was hideously difficult, but very rewarding. Most of all, the game music was awesome. There was only one song, every time, but it was great.
Baldur's Gate 2. It took forever for me to figure out I had to destroy those Mephit Portals to get rid of the Mephits.