Hey there folks,

Enjoying my holiday time with the family, chilling inside with the really crappy weather out. Installing SS" with mods, and it had me thinking of the difficulty of games, and how nowadays they tend to be a lot easier than the older ones.

So my friends, think back to your childhood, and recount the oldest game you played (and on which system), and share it with us all.

So for myself, I would have to say the dizzy games on the C64, especially the first dizzy. One life, and you had to complete the game without being hit :(

I could never beat the last boss in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega Mega Drive. He doesnt even seem that difficult but It would take me half of the day to get there because there were no save gamaes and then Id just have a limited lives.

The hardest game Ive ever played was probably the first Dangerous Dave and I did finish it.

EDIT: actually the hardest game Ive played was Ghouls'n Ghosts and I never got past the first level.

This. Though it was the SNES version for me. And I did get past the first level, but never anywhere close to the final levels.

And also the NES Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden games.

Ugh... One of the first games I ever played was Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts. I don't think I ever got to the end of game one (you need to play the entire thing twice to win.)
I did watch my brother finish game two. It was more difficult just watching that than playing pretty much any another game.

Battletoads

Ultima 4 and 5.

Prince of Persia (DOS) was very hard but somehow magical game as a child.

The original Wolfenstein C64/Apple II

The only non-pc game console I've ever had was a C64. I didn't have many games, but the hardest one was "Impossible Mission". I could never finish it, but maybe that's because I was only 7 maybe 8 yrs old when I played it :D
It was also a pretty awesome game, there is a free PC version available, called "Implausible Mission", it's the very same game, just for PC. I was able to finish that one, but that's because playing with keyboard it much, much easier than with joystick, at least for me :)

Hardest and oldest probably won't be the same thing in my case, but here goes. :)

One of the very first games I remember playing (and it was probably the first, although I'm not 100% sure) was Alley Cat, a platformer in which you had to guide a tomcat to his lady friend by climbing a building while avoiding other cats. I was only just born when it was released in 84, so I played it some years later, when I was 7 or so. You couldn't really finish it: the level of difficulty kept rising each time you reached the top, and you just kept going as long as you could. I wasn't very good at it. :)

The hardest game of my childhood was Zeliard. It was an action RPG / platformer hybrid in which you had to navigate through a series of labyrinthine caves in a side view perspective. Monsters respawned each time you left a cave, if you died you respawned at the very first village, and to top it off, the maps of the caves looped in all four directions, making it hell to get any sense of direction or progress. I only ever cleared the first boss and never made it past the second village. ^^; I really, REALLY hope this game will find its way to GOG one day! Eugh, yes, I forgot about this one. That was the main reason I entirely skipped the Sands of Time trilogy, because I thought if would be the same frustrating, infuriating, keyboard-smashing hard kind of game (I do know better now, though ;) ). I never had any patience with the original PoP, "try and die" (and die, and die, and KEEP DYING) just isn't my kind of thing. ^^;

Alley Cat is the first game i have ever seen and played, replayed it many times since.
Title theme music is a blast :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCf8SFnW2Z4

I'm fairly certain you mix things up a little. There were three lives in Dizzy 1, however, you could only carry one item. The second Dizzy (Treasure Island) had it reversed - three items and only one life. But let us not forget that moving enemies were pretty rare in Dizzy 2. There were more stationary traps which were considerably easier to avoid.

I managed to finish every Dizzy game on C64 but I must admit - it was really hard.

I'm a newschool gamer s o most of the hard old gems pasted me by. I've heard though that Hercules for the Commandor 64 is just a game long dick move where everything up to and including walking left, walking right and standing still kills you.
"I Wanna be the Guy for the 80's" Jon Tron.

*SQUEAL!*
I haven't heard that in ages! It is a blast indeed, it makes me want to play the game again! :D

EDIT: ... aaand now it's stuck in my head. ^^;