12/26/2007 9:32:27 AM

Oh John, sadly there are a lot of old school games that are exactly like this. While most of these games weren't popular (for obvious reasons), they were still insanely hard for the sake of being insanely hard. Have you ever tried to beat Contra without using a cheat code? How about playing through the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game? These are two examples of popular games that did that, but I can name plenty of other old school games that are just as unforgiving.

These videos are interesting (especially for how brutal the layout is), but it's no worse than some of the games everybody has (thankfully) forgotten about. Whether it was out of pure hatred for the player or because nobody knew any better, but games from the 1980s went out of their way to kill you ... generally in the most unfair way possible. Don't believe me, try to think about how many games have asked you to jump over a large gap where the other side wasn't visible. Worse yet, most of those games wanted you to actually land on a small piece of land and then make another leap of faith. As the retro gamer on staff, I'll be the first to tell you that these kinds of gameplay mechanics are no fun.

Cyril Lachel

3/31/2008 12:24:22 PM

I noticed that you mentioned trying to beat Contra without using the cheat code. I was actually able to do this quite a few times, and actually, I recall ending a game with 5 guys one time, because of the bonus guys you get from hitting certain point levels.

Along with that, I have yet to find anyone that has ever gotten as high as me on the Duck Hunt clay pidgeon game. I got to level 101, which took forever. For those of you that never made it that high, the clay pidgeons get faster and faster the higher the level, but once you get to level 100, they go extremely slow again (slower than level 1), and it actually makes them much harder to hit.

Spazmoose