My two:
Very cliché, I played Ocarina of Time a ton as a child, have memories of playing it both on N64 as a wee child and on game cube as a less small child. Never got past water temple even with the game guide.
Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden memories. Played the crap out of that game on play station, constantly playing on free play praying for the cards I would need to get further. I was never able to beat more than 1-2 of the high mages. Watching speed runs on the game it turns out I was never ever going to beat that game as a kid. The final 6 are just disgustingly brutal.
Pretty much all of them… I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.
Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn’t just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.
That’s where the printed hint books came into place. Also, print magazines would attract tons of readers with walkthroughs. Also, many came with CDs full of demos. God, that was good!
Some of us hand-drew maps and wrote all that stuff down because the official hint books and magazines were all from another continent! And we liked it like that…
Or, at least, it was the norm and we had no other choice but to accept games were hard 😅
I have the same memories of playing the Commodore 64. I can’t think of a single game I was any good at, but I remember playing the shit out of them.
Or you only had the shareware? Back then I thought doom was only episode 1.
I beat it as an adult but as a kid could never beat the Lion King video game. Spent hours on that game
That game was not fair, so that’s valid.
Most NES games; those fuckers were TOUGH
Dragon Warrior and Ninja Gaiden were some of the first NES games I owned. I had it rough.
haha, I remember bugging my parents to subscribe to Nintendo Power, because they had a giveaway where if you subbed for like 2-3 years, you got Dragon Warrior for FREE. Like, new in box…I actually had two!
I guess that tells you everything you need to know about that game. They literally had to give it away. But I would have loved for a subscription to Nintendo Power.
Lol no way, it was awesome, and the battle music is now playing in my head
Yeah, they had to give it away. They barely sold 2 million copies!
I remember DW being really hard when I was a kid on my NES but I played it emulated on my phone a couple of years ago and it wasn’t hard at all.
I don’t know why but we had Myst and it never failed to annoy 8yr old me every time.
The most frustrating thing is that you technically don’t need to ever leave the original island to beat the game.
Ha! I didn’t even know that. Thanks to your comment and this thread, I’m gonna go and try to figure Myst out. Strategy is to think like a Vulcan. That should work, right? Lol
Battletoads
Earthworm Jim
Shit, I’m dating myself.
Oh Jesus. Battletoads is a really good example. Man fuck that hoverbike level. Holy shit.
I did that level so often that you could put in front of me now and I’d pass it.
The only way to beat it is muscle memory.
I’m with ya homie.
The Peacekeepers
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage
Bart’s Nightmare
Fuck battletoads…
Earthworm Jim 😍🪱
Battletoads/Double Dragon wasn’t too bad. They made that easier than the original battletoads.
Loved it but sucked
Huh. I could’ve sworn I never had an expansion pack, but now I’m wondering how I ever played / beat that game. A quick Google search says it was required and nearly capped usage of the additional 8MB, too. TIL.
The story I heard was that the game would crash on the standard N64 hardware, but it worked fine with the extra memory that the dev kit ran. They couldn’t figure out why the extra memory made a difference since it wasn’t actually using the full amount anyway, but including the expansion pak was an easy solution, so that’s what they did.
It came with it
Commander Keen
Shit yeah, that game is still hard!
Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Absolutely loved that game. I played it constantly. Even when i got a new game, i would always go back to that cursed game. I don’t even remember how far i got, but i did not got far at all.
I had to cheat on that one. Never could figure out the planetarium part.
xcom 2
Majoras mask
Oh I didn’t play that until i was an adult, but that sounds like a nightmare as a kid without guides…
I was like 10 it was tough as nails lol barely made it anywhere
You mean 10 year old you wasn’t able to tell when the solution to a puzzle was to do the puzzle wrong, get some information/piece of gear, then go back in time and do it properly with the new resources?
Or be able to tell when the reason you couldn’t make progress was because you were supposed to show up on day 1 at noon, not day 2? Or because to be able to do a quest on day 3, you needed to do something on day 1?
Like it’s a wonderful wonderful time travel game. Without a guide I don’t understand how far anyone could have gotten.
Appreciate the sympathy haha
I had no guides, but was about 14. A lot of trial and error
Oh man I bet! Especially for the ones that had to be done on day 3 with no speed up mechanic.
Daggerfall. I played that game to death and didn’t even make it past the third or fourth quest.
Eventually I’d give up and just wander off to do whatever I felt like. I must have visited every major city and country, but never set foot in one of those annoying dungeons :)- Prince of Persia 3D
- Age of Empires II
Oh yeah some of those AOE2 campaigns were WAY too hard as a kid.
I play aoe2 now days and got considerably good, but there were a few where you basically just wanted to win via save scumming. Aoe2 DE is amazing and if you haven’t checked it out it’s worth looking at!
Took me like 15 years on/off just to beat the campaigns on standard and some of those expansion campaigns are borderline bullshit
I’ve beaten all of them on hard.
Lemme tell you, there is no borderline. They are bullshit and you must embrace the bull shit to win.
I remember one specific campaign I was stuck until I had the thought to tc drop the ai then won.
Then there was one where you had to like escort 5 different transport ships from the edge of the map to your base, and before each wave came you had to speed run to make a path. I saved after each successful wave so wouldn’t have to start over after each fail.
Another one was like “no castles or walls allowed! This is about army” but they didn’t block building bombard towers, so…
Woah man that’s impressive. I’ve played through the HD campaigns (their DE versions) and currently am doing the DE campaigns. Everything on standard. I want to do it all on hard but I don’t like losing so hard lol
I remember the 5 ships mission. I beat it by blocking the first ship in the starting area with my own ships, so it would never reach the destination. I then slowly constructed a base and defeated all enemies before eventually letting that first ship cross. I never thought about saving between each shipment lol. Would have helped me beat it the “right” way.
Maybe I should shift to hard difficulty. But based on what you say it seems like a lot of pain will be waiting for me that way
If I had thought of your method, I would have done that.
The save scumming method was painful. That mission broke me… and is also what I suggest to people do as a joke to mess with people.
Sonic 2
I beat 1, 3 and & Knuckles, but never 2.
Played every sonic game, never managed to beat a single one. The field of view is just too small for the move speed! Same reason Donkey Kong country is impossible.
3 and 2 for me, no 1!
2 is the only one I have finished but getting close on mania
All those old LucasArts games (Day of the Tentacle, LOOM, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, &c) and similar adventure games (Kyrandia, King’s Quest, &c). My mother played all of them and beat them, and while I watched her play I never really managed to finish any of them without looking up guides.
Battletoads
