Were games really that much harder back then? Disregarding games where most of the difficulty came from "false difficulty" (unfair things that you could not possibly predict, like an enemy suddenly appearing during a tricky jump, that will kill you the first time you do the jump), if you play modern games on harder difficulties they tend to be comparable to those old well designed hard games.


Anyway, Incubation still kicks my behind in all kinds of different embarrassing ways.

So you never got to level 5? It's like level 3 (hoverbike), but worse. Never got past that one. Lots of it comes down to false difficulty though.

Battletoads had a couple of those levels, one was in a sewer like area, but the one im talking about had like a red lavalike feel to it. (I MAY be confusing the jump with Battletoads&Double Dragons, but i dont think so)

The oldest game I've played? I remember my friend's older brother had an Atari 2600 which I played sometimes, this must have been back in ~1981. I don't recall any specific games though.

My family had a Colecovision a little after that, I remember Pitfall, River Raid and Zaxxon for that one (this would probably be ~1983).

Later we got a C=64, I had literally hundreds of games for that one.

Hardest game, I can't really say. But I remember never "completing" games, you just played it and tried to get a little farther each time!

Barbarian by Psygnosis. This 1987 game is insanely hard. Every level is full of many sneaky death traps and enemies that can instantly kill you. The controls were also horrible. I remember dying every 5 minutes and then I stopped playing the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian_%28Psygnosis%29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx7UVhazjxA

I have played that game and completed it. It's probably the best console game I've played. :)

Some bosses are very hard though, really takes some time and practice to beat them.

Star Trek TNG (Echoes from the Past) on the Sega Genesis, lol. Some of the levels were quite difficult and confusing.

Not the hardest game by any means, but just a difficult game I remember beating without cheats and without any help or guides whatsoever.

Zork III, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Spellbreaker or one of several other Infocom text games. Some of those were really hard.
Or, more recently, Dark Souls. Yeesh!

Dark Souls! So difficult!

I'm not enjoying the crappy weather either. It was in the 80's today...Global Warming at work. But I'm indoors playing Wasteland 2 and of course the forums.

As for my oldest game, that would have to be Pong on the Atari.

I think they tended to have a steeper learning curve because they didn't have megabytes worth of disk space to take up. Most of the "hard" games I remember were ones like Zeliard where they used ridiculous game mechanics to make things hard. I would never have beaten that game without a map of the wind currents in that inferno level.

Also, because of the graphics, it was harder to hint people through the game.

One for me I haven't seen listed is Zelda 2.

It is the only Zelda game I've played that I wasn't able to beat without some kind of cheating like a Game Genie or save states.

Does anybody know of Rocky and Pocky? I had it back when for SNES.
Man, this game was tough. Played it about 2-3 years ago after finding it
again, and STILL couldn't beat it. Was only able to go a little further. :/
Oh well.

Zelda 2 wasn't so bad. I played alot other worse nes games that were more insanely difficult.

So yeah a couple games I remember were really difficult like alot of nes games such as Legend of Kage, Ninja Kid, and Ninja Gaiden although I loved the game as a kid and got to the very end only to die, that was brutal.

The C64 also had some tough games, such as Bard's Tale and early Ultima games, you really had to be careful and know what your doing. Some Aliens game based on the movie and Ardok and Kung Fu II

Almost any game before the instant save state generation of better yet before there were even written down passwords =P

Asking a girl out on a date...