Hotline Miami just kills you and kills you and kills you some more!
Driver not only had a rock hard final level but also didn't give you a save point beforehand, but DID give you a restart point - I ended up leaving my PC on for 2 days straight while I was trying to beat that one!

Oh on the adventure side Sierra went through a whole period of crazy cruelty, Leisure Suit Larry 2 was probably the worst - killing you on the boat because you didn't pick up something you should have on shore or picking up something you should have left alone!

Evidently no one here has ever played Dark Reign or Cossacks. :D

From that list the only one I would call sadistic is Dark Souls. The others are quite playable. In the case of Gothic you only have to get used to the controls. Then the game is not too hard any more.


But games that ARE sadistic / incredibly tough to beat would be:

NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, Super Meat Boy, Ghouls'n'Ghosts (and Ghosts'n'Goblins), the original Castlevania, the origninal Prince of Persia (f*ing time limit!) and the original Contra (I always kept dying. Stupid one-hit glass cannon hero).

Eador :P BTW, why is Gothic considered a hard game ? It's not really, especially the first one.

Agree with this. Once you get used to the controls (which admittedly takes a while) it's actually pretty easy so long as you pay attention when people tell you about enemies and how they attack.

Earthworm Jim, particularly the Peter Puppy level. I had to give myself extra lives to get through that part. =/
And I didn't dare try the advanced route. Even the strategy guide tells you not to. ;)

I don't know about a list but there are obviously games that do that. I am a RTS fiend and there are several titles, good ones, where the enemy will consistently hit you where your defenses aren't. If you reload and move your D to the other side they will then attack from the other side. Some games get a pass on this by sending scouts out which if you look for you can kill but a lot more simply just KNOW where your buildings are period.

Hmm, IL-2 Sturmovik springs to mind.
Talking about sadistic games, a few days ago I finally reached the endboss level in Messiah that one was just plain cheap, I almost threw my pc from the 6th floor.
In the Chronicles of Riddick there is a guy named Ironlord which I haven't been able to defeat yet @#$%$#&*. =(

The Arma series.

I never defeated that end of Chapter 1 boss in Blood 2, thinking about it, that guy was HARD, he'd pound the ground and get you with earthquake damage - never worked out how to avoid it, incredibly well timed jumping, presumably!
Yeah, there's games where you can suffer one shot kills and then there's games where you suffer one hit kills and have not even the vaguest idea which direction the shot came from!


Crimson Skies is a bit tough to for missions where you, for example, precision fly to rescue someone from a train while taking enemy fighter fire, THEN have to kill all the fighters THEN have to strafe takers on the ground THEN have to fairly precision fly into a hanger to steal an upgraded plane THEN have to duel an ace in another such place and if you fail at any point you have to do it all again!

The GTA games are notorious for 'do it all again' syndrome too, of course!

not wanting to show of, but was that guy supposed to be difficult? All i remember, is that i played both of the riddick games through one after another and was glad it was pretty fun and painless experience... the last boss took few tries, but i was "doing it wrong".

Dark Souls is kinda hard...except if you grind levels up know where to get useful stuff for your build, then its not so difficult after all. I am having high hopes for the next one :)

Blade of Darkness i played through with barbarian. It was fun game back the, but i dont think i could play it these days.

Well i real challenge game would be UFO 1, with the hardest and no reloading the land missions. Finish the game like that and ill offer beer or two somewhere around my home :p

Die by the sword was very hard - but that had more to do with the fact, that the game was very very stingy with health potions. incredible much so.

X-Wing and B-Wing were pretty damn difficult at times, far more than Tie-Fighter and Later X-wing Alliance. Then again, i was like what, 10 years old at the time? Does that count :D

Gothic is not hard. Later on, it becomes easy enough for babies.

I remember a certain encounter in Gothic 2 (I think it was a guard to a camp or something) which I just couldn't get past, but then I found a sleep scroll and it was easy. So I think a lot of the "difficulty" in the game is content dependent, you can find specific solutions.

It seems I never learned that lesson and just kept getting my arse kicked :(