Definitely a vote for Stargunner. I save scummed like a boss to make it through that game

Super Hexagon is also hard as nails but I did complete it after several months. Screenie posted for proof and yes, I'm boasting ;)

Blood on the higher difficulty settings is maddening.

Commandos 1 is pretty tough, I never was able to finish that train level.
Mob rule was buggy as hell though. I found most of that challenge was to make sure you didn't accidentally render the game unbeatable.

I've never played it myself, just heard the cries of frustration from other people ;-)

Yes, those bugs might catch newer players off guard. To my knowledge, System 3 never went out of business, so I'm wondering why they never bothered to patch these issues (along with Constructor's fence bug). But still, all things considered, a buggy Mob Rule is still less difficult than its predecessor (in my humble opinion).

I was one such person in the early 2000s! But due to Constructor's higher learning curve, it tends to get more threads.

I am inclined to agree with you here. Once you set up a "money block" in Mob Rule, your financial troubles are pretty much over. I also remembered that money carries over and not all missions are timed, it's not difficult to ensure you'll have more money than you'll ever need.

With an option to add 3 AI players in Constructor, it can get messy trying to defend against 3 teams foremans taking apart your fences. Not all properties can be defended with dogs either. The Hippies will only ever accept the hedge, the nerds demand the white picket fence and the tennant making house plans demands railings, neither of which can accept a dog kennel.

Even though I have a plan a head of time, Constructor can still be very frantic against 3 AI players :)

Interesting thanks, I definitely wouldn't ever have tried hard!

On normal you also have access to all the undesirables abilities. Not sure if there is much difference normal or hard difficulties either. On normal difficulty, enemy foremen can be relentless with your fences or they can be lazy as hell. On hard, I didn't notice any difference in enemy behavior.

Just to add onto what lanipcga said, on easy half of your undesirables abilities are locked but the enemy AI can still use the locked abilities. I'm guessing this was an oversight by the devs ;)

Definitely sounds like a an oversight yes. I can't remember, but it's quite possible I that I tried playing on easy, at least eventually. I'll definitely remember not to do that next time :P
Ever tried the second one?

Btw, which train level? The one where you had to blow up the headquarters or the one where you had to blow up the bridge?

Yes I did, finished it too and loved it but I have to admit, I enjoyed the 1st one a lot more. Rotating the map could be quite disorienting and the game was a lot more forgiving of errors so this hurt the game a little for me. Nonetheless, C1 and C2 are excellent games, which is more that can be said for the abomination that was C3.

It was the 4th Mission, Thor's Hammer in the Beyond the Call of Duty expansion pack. Out of all the Commandos 1 and 2 missions, that mission was the only one I coudn't finish. I ended up using a cheat to get past that level. It made me feel so dirty :(

Did you ever finish that level?

Yeah, C2 was more forgiving, especially since there were only a finite number of soldiers on any given level. Still, I preferred C2 since the levels themselves were more massive and fun to explore. And you had a very good incentive to explore in that if you found all the secret documents scattered about the map then you would get to play a fun bonus level.

But we don't speak of C3. I spent a good hour in disbelief that the max resolution was 800x600, down from C2's 1280x1024. I just refused to believe it and searched everywhere for the resolution setting, that simply had to be there! I quickly realized why it was the case though : C3's levels are far smaller on average than those of C2. Also, the average number of commandos per level came way down. If I remember correctly there was only one level with the marine, where I couldn't even find a place to use his grappling hook ability!
And why they completely re-hauled C2's perfectly functional interface with all its hotkeys is beyond me.
C3 isn't a bad game I suppose. I mean it has some pretty cool weather and terrain destruction effects, and the train level was pretty cool. It's just that it completely pales in comparison to C2.
Strike Force on the other hand. What were they thinking...

The first time I played the game I kind of gave up on the level and just put all my commandos around a specific corner, with pistols drawn, and just killed every soldier that came to investigate the gunshots. It caused several new patrols to appear, but overall the number of guards on the level were significantly reduced so that I could fairly easily beat the level.
On a recent playthrough last year however, I managed to beat the level 'fairly'. The biggest challenge I remember was just to get out of that initial starting location at the bottom-left of the map. After that I hugged the left side of the map and moved and killed my way clockwise to the top right op the map. It worked pretty well, and the rest of the level wasn't particularly difficult.
I could barely contain my excitement when I finally managed to overcome the level that I made a post about in the 'what made you happy today' thread :)
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_made_you_happy_today/post5732
which for some reason links the wrong page for me. It should be:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_made_you_happy_today/page286

When I was still new to Mob Rule, I loved the carry-over feature. After I read somewhere that you should sell all your properties before continuing to the next campaign, I made sure to do so. But now that I play much better, I actually wish the money didn't carry over. I recently started Rangoon Rumpus with an obscene amount of wealth, and it really took the fun out of what should've been a tricky few missions.

I'm probably a masochist, so I usually play with three AI opponents nowadays. But yes, the frequent Foreman attacks are maddening. I'm currently using a laptop with a trackpad instead of a mouse, so the clunky interface makes it difficult to respond to one or more takeovers. The developers were cruel to make certain tenants reject dogs. I end up having my spare Gangsters guard those properties, but they sometimes get killed without me noticing.

You're right; I wasn't too sure since I jumped from Easy to Hard without trying Normal.

Actually there were also limited enemies in the first one. All barracks hold only several "loads" of soldiers. Heck, as a matter of fact I used to slaughter all patrols back in the day. I just positioned my whole squad around a corner next to the barracks and kept firing from the handgun. Do that several times and no more patrols. I always considered this to be a very powerful exploit, actually, and only stopped doing that during my last approach to the game, when I also finally finished the whole thing.

To me C2 has one of the worst interfaces ever made, even worse than in the first game. Even once you've memorised all the hotkeys it's still crappy in my opinion. And it kinda blows my mind that they managed to make the second one's UI both uglier and less intuitive. I don't remember all the details but from what I recall even with hotkeys you can't access all abilities/items because some of them share slots and hotkeys. That's besides the fact that they introduced the utterly unnecessary inventory system. It also didn't help that the screen for configuring the controls is an utter nightmare and the manual doesn't even describe all hotkeys. As I recall it's NOWHERE explained that TAB is the hotkey for displaying vision cones.

However, I seem to be one of very few players who actually preferred C1 over C2... A LOT. And I was very glad that Shadow Tactics was clearly primarily inspired by C1. As a matter of fact it seems like they entirely ignored C2.

And I haven't played C3 yet but looking at screenshots it seems like that one's UI is a major improvement over C2's. Will have to play it one of these days. After everything I've heard I don't expect it to be any good otherwise, though.

Interesting I didn't know that. I tried it a few times, but I never went as far as stopping the patrols coming out altogether. The only time I did it out of necessity was with that train depot level on my first attempt of BtCoD, but I don't recall managing to kill everyone. Usually if I wanted to go that route without, like you say, it feeling exploitative, I'd use explosives to level a barracks.

It's been several years since my last playthrough, but I can't personally remember having any problems with the interface. And I kind of liked the inventory system, how I could use it to ferry explosives and mines among more than one commando for example. But my most recent playthrough was of BtCoD, so perhaps a fresh perspective on Commandos 2's interface could color my view of it.
Still, possible interface issues aside, I fear I'm the opposite :) I prefer C2 over C1, and was sad to see that Shadow Tactics went more for the C1 route than C2. I always wanted to explore the C1 levels more fully by going into all the buildings. Incidentally, Desperado strikes a pretty good middle ground in this sense : It plays a lot more like C1, but several buildings have 2D interiors.

C3's main problem for me was how much it scaled back from both C2 and C1. Apart from 1, maybe 2 levels, the missions felt smaller, simpler and less interesting. This is also reflected in the amount of commandos that join you on each level. Up to Commandos 2, the average was around 4. Specifically, 4 for C1, 3.25 for BtCoD and 4.5 for Commandos 2. But it's only 2.25 for C3.

Wizardy 6

I didn't use a map for it, nor did I make my own. I usually like to make maps, cause I find it fun, but I didn't have to for this one at the start, it was pretty easy to navigate. Then I got to the Dwarven Mines. I was stuck in that maze like place forever! So many stairs, so much looked the same, I went insane. But I finally made it out and was on my way.