Forgot what made me think about this topic but I’ve been considering this for a week or two… Curious what you all think.
When I mean “hardest” “video game”, I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it’s a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so… Hence I was curious about your rationale.
I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn’t share that in the main post to bias results…
Army Moves, Navy Moves, or any other old Dynamic Software game. You’d have to be very skilled to get out of the first stage.
I’m gonna say Jet Force Gemini. It’s not hard in that enemies or bosses are difficult, though some were. It was those damn Tribals. You had to save every single one of them if you wanted to beat the game, and some were a pain to save without them getting killed.
Old games were brutal.
Jet set willie comes to mind.
EU4…
I like most other Paradox games and I’m at least decent in them I’d say but EU4 just eludes me.
For the people unaware why EU4 is hard:
Take risk (the board game)
Now split the provinces till you have more than 3000 provinces. Then add variables to each region for culture, claims, trade good, trade power, buildings, development (in 3 aspects), the region they are part of, the trade node they are part of, religion, autonomy, unrest, devestation, temporary effects, and many many more.
Do the same for armies.
Add complicated politics, with royal marriages that allow countries to inherit other countries, war goals, casus belli requirements, etc.
Add colonization mechanics.
Add government mechanics (with many different variants for different governments ofcourse).
Add a compex Holy Roman Empire system and a complex system for the Chinese empire.
Add mechnics for different religions, including a pope and a religous war that can bring all of europe into a giant war.
Add a pool of diplomats, merchants, generals, and missionaries.
Now realise that I haven’t played the game for ages, and this was just mechanics from the top of my head, and without what they added in the last few years.
EU4 is not hard due to required reflexes, muscle memory learning, or rythm feeling. It is just a lot of things to learn and to keep track of, woven into a super complicated simulation.
It’s just so much stuff and I never knew what’s actually important and what not
EU4 is pretty much exactly as difficult as being a real king in history just without any of the long term consequences. Paradox worked pretty hard to make this the case.
The hardest one I can say I’m honestly proud I figured out are the old “Impossible Mission” games from Epyx.
They have set rules, and once you figure out all the rules, they are solvable, but the platforming elements require precision and the puzzle elements are challenging.
8-bit Souls-Like?
Longplay - 1:
Longplay 2:
I used to play the first one on the Macintosh’s on display at the store. Not sure I ever finished a level in the few minutes I always had to play when my parents were shopping. Very difficult, but fun!
Faster Than Light.
Seriously you could play ten games a day for a year and not even come close to winning, even if you’re quite good at it.
Try DCSS.
Probably “Trap Adventure 2”.
Imagine an old Mario game where Bowser has the most rediculous traps set up. You need to memorize all of the trap locations as well as have the coordination to tip-toe around them to survive.old Mario game where Bowser has the most rediculous traps set up
Related classic: https://youtu.be/in6RZzdGki8
Dark souls, Bloodborne
There is one game, one level, that was so hard to beat that I just gave up and walked away, never to return. The stampede on Lion King from the SNES.
A lot of games from that era were epically hard; few games had a difficulty setting, a lot of tie-ins meant games looked and played polished but no effort was given to make a solid game, computing power meant there was usually only one way to complete a mission or level. However this was a game made for kids and that fucking game, that fucking level was simply bullshit.
I got all the way to the last level once… but never beat it. The lava level man.
The Stampede?
I hardly ever beat Level 2…aka. the platformer version of “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King”.
And Level 3 has some annoyingly tough jumps too. I think The Stampede is level 4?
The only way most of us ever played the second half of the game is level select…
Even if I somehow managed to outrun the stampede and climb the waterfall, I could never ever manage to beat Scar. Thank goodness for older siblings.
The classic arcade game Venture. Go ahead, make my day:
https://archive.org/details/arcade_venture#
Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the “Hallmonsters”, according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as “Evil Otto” in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score. The goal of each room is only to steal the room’s treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in “The Two-Headed Room”, two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize. Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game’s AI allows them to dodge the player’s shots with varying degrees of “intelligence” (for example, the snakes of “The Serpent Room” are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of “The Troll Room” are quite adept at evasion). The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
\Released
1981The Donkey Kong tilt minigame in Nintendo Land is brutal.
Ninja Garden 2 on Master Ninja mode. It’s the hardest action game I’ve ever played. Non-stop Incendiary Shuriken ninjas, rockets, and mini bosses. You literally cannot stop moving, make any mistakes, and have to react in split seconds the entire time or you’re dead. It’s borderline impossible. Never again.
Battletoads
Gosh damn fuckin bike level
Just try to play Dwarf Fortress, and you’ll drop any other opinion on this subject. Especially the ASCII version of the game, not the fancy graphical one.
I tried to get into this game because I like Rimworld but damn is it so hard to learn. I couldn’t even get past the tutorial.
Hey, at least there is a tutorial. When I started, there wasn’t.
I can’t speak for ASCII mode. But DF is not hard, once you learn the game, unless you specifically go looking for a challenge.
The only real difficulty is just how much there is to learn about the game.
If you build defenses, never dig too deeply, and learn the basics of keeping your dwarves happy, you could play a fortress for hundreds of in game years. But that would get boring.
Having played a lot of Dwarf fortress in ascii mode as well as with tilesets, I agree with you. It’s not especially difficult to make a successful fortress. However the game is definitely obtuse, even more so with the ascii graphics. Just figuring out what is happening on the screen and which combination of buttons to press to do what you want is quite difficult.
The steam release does some work to remedy the situation though.
Adventure Mode is even more difficult within Dwarf Fortress: I once had a fresh character start in a village and he died from blood loss while I was grinding levels by wrestling salmon in a nearby river, and it bit my characters toe off.
That’s the kind of stories only DF writes. No other game comes even close to this.
I have to admit that I have never done adventure mode, and can’t do it now as I am to busy with my other hobbies to play anything but a quick round of solitaire. But DF will always hold a special place in my heart, and I hope I can one day play the courage 1.0 version of it.
Toss up between RC Pro-Am and Ninja Gaiden on the NES. I beat them both and they were both a real bitch. So, so many times I got to the final race or stage and couldn’t do it… so you start all over from the beginning.
Games like that don’t exist anymore.
