9-Mar-2008 NGamer descends through the various circles of hell, in search of the toughest games ever to star on a Nintendo platform. Abandon hope all ye that enter here...
In the beginning there was the word. And the word was 'argh goddamnityouevilgame'. Yes, ever since the serpent challenged Adam to a game of 'dare you pluck from the tree of knowledge' - a Kerplunk prototype - man has obsessed over challenges of soul-destroying difficulty.
The number one peddler in frustration? That would be Nintendo. From the stinging paper cuts delivered by their early Hanafuda cards, to their dual screen screammaker Contra 4, Nintendo have been responsible for a downpour of tricky titles to douse even the most resilient gamer's spirit.
Join us as we descend Jacob's ladder through the circles of hell, into the belly of the Game Over beast.
Circle One: Curved Learning
Beware ye, weary traveller, for ye be entering the peaks of insanity. There are few things crueller than a game that promises easy pickings for the most part, before impaling you on difficulty spikes and leaving you to rot.
Metal Gear Solid. With its propensity for lobbing out insta-kill poisoned apples, the final mother brain boss in Metal Slug 3 is a graduate of the same school of evil as the Disney stepmothers.
Naturally, having survived helicopter attacks and close encounters of the bite-your-face-off kind, you'd be foolish for expecting SNK to just let you win at this final hour, but the random patterns of the golden delicious airstrikes make for a violent hike up in deaths.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. The beauty of Monkey Ball is Sega's ability to offer both obvious routes to the finish line and 99% death-guaranteed shortcuts, that beckon, siren-style.
Not so in world 10-5. With the route coated in a ballrejecting spiked texture, it's down to pure chance whether or not your spherical simian will fall off the edge when you land.
Bad news: there are six jumps between you and your goal. And that's the obvious route.
Super Mario Galaxy. A walk in the most delightful astro-park for 119 stars, there is one particular challenge that almost put an end to our issue 18 walkthrough. You probably know the one: Luigi's Purple Coins in the Toy Time Galaxy.
A field of panels stretch out beyond you. Touch one and it'll disappear forever. The conundrum? How to ooh, ahh, waa-hoo to the scattered 100 coins without destroying your route back to where the star appears. This is the real reason that Greener left.
Circle Two: Handheld Hellions
Like a Kinder Egg filled with anthrax, the DS and GBA coo "come play with my dainty curves," while whispering "...so I may eat your soul." Though rarely the first port of call for full-fat frustration, they've certainly had their moments...
Etrian Odyssey. Mooching through the vicious shrubberies of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth is only really perilous for those too impatient to tune up their band of warriors.
Even so, proper progress forces you into a deadly Catch-22 situation in that - now, bear up with us - party-improving weapons require gold, gold is given as reward for completing quests, quests are too hard without partyimproving weapons.
Doh! Death comes often and, as if to rub it in, at the hooves of deer.
Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising Aside from Neotank units and a smattering of new terrain features to cower behind, Advance Wars 2 wasn't much of a change.
So how could it destroy even the most experienced COs? Thrown in at the deep end, it was as if the developers saw this as a direct continuation of the original campaign; ie starts at the difficulty of that title's last mission and only grows harder.
Black Hole Rising? Asshole rising, more like.
Kuru Kuru Kururin. What does the title mean? It's the sound of your teeth grinding through your chin as yet another spinning stick journey through a don't-touch-the-walls maze ends with another loss.
Sitting in the alcoves, waiting to dart down the next twisted corridor, is about as tense as GBA gaming gets, and with later levels designed for perfect synchronised timing, it's at moments like these that Nintendo probably regret designing such an easy-to-throw console.
Circle Three: Heart Breaking
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Alas, it takes more than a sunny outlook to craft a game, and so this circle of hell is reserved for those titles that were made all the more difficult by crummy technical flaws.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Super Ghouls And Ghosts had to feature somewhere - it is, after all, a genuine hardcore SNES classic that'll happily send you and your heart-dotted boxer shorts to the pearly gates within your first 15 steps.
The GBA version features here for some chug-tastic slowdown that transforms the tricky kneejerk reactions into a task of Sisyphean pointlessness.
If the wolves, skeletons, knights, demons, bats and zombies don't get you, the framerate will.
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Castlevanias have us wailing through the night. However, we reckon the prize goes to Circle Of The Moon. A GBA launch title, the dark gothic graphics were designed before the GBA's contrast specs were known, leaving gamers with a black screen which only an intense light source could interpret.
Batman Dark Tomorrow. Along with being complete Bat-tosh, Dark Tomorrow is famous at NGamer Towers for having baffled everyone, including the PR who was sent to demonstrate it.
Watching struggling games journos plummet down the same crevice time and time again, the accompanying PR seized the pad only to plunge the caped crusader straight into the gap himself.
Proclaiming it broken, we mentally filed the moment away for a feature just like this one.
Circle Four: DIY Hell
Blunted by all the other titles featuring in our inferno, some souls are left with no choice but to craft their own masochistic titles, in a desperate attempt to wring something, anything, from their desensitised fun synapses.
Super Mario World: Kaizo Edition. Born in the twisted mind of a Japanese games developer trying to test a pal's hardcore credentials, this Rom hack of Super Mario World is the hardest game on our list.
The platforms have been torn out and reconstructed from bullet bills and pokeys. The Rom lies in wait deep in the caves of tinyurl.com/39lxw2. Anyone with any sense will cheat, and watch this guy complete it instead.
Super Impossible Brothers. No, no, no, this is the hardest game on our list. It's another Rom hack, this time of Super Mario Bros. Platforms are removed in favour of screen-wide leaps of faith, and enemies are deliberately located to create pixel-wide margins of error; trial and error is the only solution.
How is this tougher than Kaizo SMW? Well, because here you're spawned directly over a bottomless pit. If you don't leap for the platform straight away, you're already dead meat. Cripes.
I Wanna Be The Guy. Wait a second; this is the hardest game on our list. Not a Rom hack but a completely new title, IWBTG may pluck textures and sprites from Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, Tetris and Street Fighter, but the challenge is very much a new breed of evil.
After a solid 30 minutes' play we couldn't get off the first screen. Our only salvation, from an unavoidable spiky wall of death, came from YouTube and the Print Screen key. Tears will be wept here.
Circle Five: Sins of the Fathers.
The next level in our cathedral of pain is home to those young tykes that follow in their parents' footsteps to offer a stinging taste of Old Testament in these modern times.
Gradius Galaxies. There's more than a smidgen of guilt in developer Mobile 21's decision to include a hints feature in their GBA take on Konami's space-shooter classic.
By offering exact routes for each section of the game, they were admitting that (as with all Gradius games) you just have to learn the set paths of every bullet in the game.
All eight billion of them. While in space no one can hear you scream, sitting on a bus surrounded by pensioners is a different matter.
Contra 4. Yes, yes, Contra's hard, blah blah blah. But while craggy oldies insist that Contra III is tougher, we're happy to champion Contra 4.
Contra's calling card has always been the sheer number of fat red projectiles winging their way towards your entirely non-bulletresistant form.
With that extra DS screen of enemies, the deathpotential doubles. The alien lab of the second stage is a particular chore - eye the aliens in the vents above and their chums on the ground will gut you in a second.
Mega Man and Bass. Like Contra, the trickiest Mega Man is open to debate. Victims of the original will claim it the hardest, but only because the experience was so horrible that it prevented them from playing another game since.
Modern times brought a modern enemy: this GBA reworking of Japan-only SNES title Mega Man And Forte, breaking you with both stilted platforming and entirely unfair health regeneration. Feel the GBA crumble like old ryvita.
Circle Six: Young Pretenders
Difficulty-wise, things ain't what they used to be. Far from seeing the world go to hell in a hand basket, we've seen the hand basket dart from the fiery pit and spill easy games left, right and centre. A few titles, however, do practise the old ways...
Trauma Center. Pick either Second Opinion or New Blood. Both feature the operation that promises to send blood pressure skyrocketing: aneurysms. Sure, chasing after GUILT and STIGMA calls for a dab laser hand, but aneurysms do it for us.
Injecting anti-inflammatory serum, cutting the blood vessel out, draining the blood, reattaching the vein, sewing it all up - it's so drawn out, that when you face four at once your brain is likely to follow suit and explode.
Guitar Hero 3. We can argue about the toughest song until the cows come home - the fact of the matter is Guitar Hero 3 is freakishly hard. 'Through The Fire And The Flames' on Expert is a moving walkway of rainbow tiddly-winks, spilt over a seven minute hellslog, and Raining Blood has us spitting the stuff.
There's a beautiful transition to it all - check out our forums for a comprehensive diary of gradual reader development - but even the pros choke at these later stages.
Zack and Wiki. Descending into our gaming inferno, the uniting factors in most of these games are reaction times and finger dexterity. Not so here. Unlike the frantic experiences littering these pages, Zack And Wiki is all about calmly letting you dig a massive logical pitfall, and serenely watching you fling yourself in.
Using that old thought muscle of yours, you'll burn bridges and hack through second chances without even noticing. Then do it again. And again.
Circle Seven: The Unholy Trinity
And so we enter the belly of the beast, home to those creatures so dark that even the Devil feels a little uncomfortable having them around. "They're stinking up the place with their bad vibes," says the horned one.
Battletoads. The whole descent into hell idea? Pinched from stage two of Battletoads. Not only is the toad's abseiling journey hard in itself - steel ravens can snip your cable in the blink of an eye - but reaching the bottom means facing stage three.
Turbo Tunnel is the stuff of agonising legend - a journey through the densest network of insta-kill obstacles imaginable. Most galling? Despite the brutality, we still think it's one of NES's most original and underrated titles.
Super Mario Bros 2: The Lost Levels. nd not that turnip yanking silliness Nintendo tried to feed the west, either. We're talking the real deal - the Japan-only sequel so hard that Nintendo were allegedly frightened it would collapse puny western minds.
On the surface it may look like the original Super Mario Bros, but poison 1-up mushrooms, flying bloopers and gusts of wind that suffocate movement offer vast swear-volumes of evidence to the contrary.
F-Zero GX. As the words F-Zero GX left our mouths while conversing with NGC stalwart Geraint, he promptly leapt up, ran forwards and dived out of the window.
Yes, broken bones and a window bill from our corporate overlords is preferable to dealing with the memories of GX's story mode.
Never have eight missions presented such grief - we'll see Rayman made the official Nintendo mascot before we complete the F-Zero Grand Prix story mission on Very Hard.
Hmmm, I think you might want to edit the name of the first game in the list.
Metal Gear Solid. With its propensity for lobbing out insta-kill poisoned apples, the final mother brain boss in Metal Slug 3 is a graduate of the same school of evil as the Disney stepmothers.
Naturally, having survived helicopter attacks and close encounters of the bite-your-face-off kind, you'd be foolish for expecting SNK to just let you win at this final hour, but the random patterns of the golden delicious airstrikes make for a violent hike up in deaths.
I remember playing the first race of story mode on f-zero gx and thinking I was obviously missing a high gear button or a shortcut, anything! First levels are supposed to ease you in aren't they?
Still the sense of accomplishment you got from completing every chapter was fantastic.
I'm sorry, but this article is terribly written.It's hard to follow, lacks little structure and just becomes really stupid.
This is quite possibly the worst article I've ever read, it just lacks cohesion and doesn't engage on any level.
Everyone, calm down, this is just my opinion. Feel free to have yours.
I think the thing I've learnt about CVG is that the majority of writers are decent, inject a bit of humour into articles etc...
But there are a couple who would struggle to pass GCSE English and aren't helped out by the fact that it would seem they refuse to employ a proof reader.
Metal Gear Solid. With its propensity for lobbing out insta-kill poisoned apples, the final mother brain boss in Metal Slug 3 is a graduate of the same school of evil as the Disney stepmothers.
I do like the way that 2 games that share 1 word in the title are confused. This writer would be screwed if he had to comment on a Tycoon game.
"My favourite sim is Railroad Tycoon, I particularly like the bit where you sell lemonades on a stall to people. Running a Zoo is far harder than you would think, but the feeling of getting to run your own theme park is incredibly empowering.
It is important that you don't allow your staff nurses take too many breaks, and keeping the prices down in your high street stores is important to keep the customers buying.
In summary, the fish require a lot of tending, just like real fish would. All in all, if you want a Golf Course simulator, you can't go wrong with this game."
I've grown weary of substandard CVG articles - if journalism is your career, shouldn't you at least be able to write a coherent article?
Anyway, I'd like to see a proper Top Ten list of hardest games, replete with good commentary. I mean, why didn't Devil May Cry feature here? I remember people complaining how difficult it was (I can't remember whether it was the first, second, or third instalment, but I completed the first one, so it couldn't have been that one ).
Personally, I found Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (some bits) and God of War quite difficult. Ah yes, and the water temple in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. What about other people?
I think you'll find that the Metal Gear Solid confusion was actually intentional guys. They probably meant to flag up the SOLID part and used it as a play on the Metal Slug franchise.
Also stop knocking CVG it was Ngamer's feature.
There's plenty of scope to knock CVG in their many, many, many badly written pieces as it is, we don't need to invent new ones.
To flag another ridiculous error, it reckons that AW2 was harder than AW1 from the start. The very notion of any part of BHR being harder than #1 in any way is stupid enough to start with. Play the darn games you're going to casually mention, mmkay?.
'Through The Fire And The Flames' on Expert is a moving walkway of rainbow tiddly-winks
Official song title: Through The Fire And Flames
You, and so many others: Through The Fire And The Flames
Through The Fire And Flames Through The Fire And The Flames See the difference?
I know it seems like I'm fussing over nothing, but sooooooooooo many people add the extra 'The' in and it drives me insane! I mean, it's written across the screen in big freakin' letters before you start! And I am aware that ZP sings the extra 'The'. Don't try and point that out to me.
'Through The Fire And The Flames' on Expert is a moving walkway of rainbow tiddly-winks
Official song title: Through The Fire And Flames
You, and so many others: Through The Fire And The Flames
Through The Fire And Flames Through The Fire And The Flames See the difference?
I know it seems like I'm fussing over nothing, but sooooooooooo many people add the extra 'The' in and it drives me insane! I mean, it's written across the screen in big freakin' letters before you start! And I am aware that ZP sings the extra 'The'. Don't try and point that out to me.
WTF's that got to do with this?! Post it on an off-topic forum!
hmmmm i thought it was through the fire and fu***** flames, ohh well my bad. get a life its just a name of a song who really cares if they got it right, all in all it was a good article, i just hate people who think everything should be perfect, if your so good why are you not writing these articles.
ohh and i cant spell so ner ner, so get over it moaners.
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ah well, early Monday morning (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it)
