Cuntishly tricky games

[Hangthebuggers]

I've been on a bit of a masochistic phase - Eve online, Dark Souls, DayZ and Crusader Kings II to name a few.

Eve online has a very steep learning curve and a hell of a lot of information to take in. That said, it's a tad easier to approach these days what with CCP redesigning the tutorials and such, although still a tricky one to advance in, without outside help. I've wasted so much time in this game, exploring everything from faction warfare, corporation wars, industry, mining, ambushes, scamming, trading etc etc... It's a great yet unforgiving sandbox. A game that rewards patience and thinking.

Dark Souls is a right bastard. I play this once a week. It's nearly perfect for what it is. Fiendish, intense, addictive. A fantastic setting, surreal, sombre atmosphere, very little hand-holding... So many ways to die. Argh.. Fuck you Dark Souls.

DayZ, as BigJack Mcbastard can attest, is a combination of two things. One, a decent survival simulator, populated with scarce resources and dozens of sociopaths with rifles. Add to this the huge variety of entertaining glitches, bugs, hackers and server problems this does begin to test one's patience (especially as you know it'll be a great game when it finally gets optimised). However when things work out for you, it's usually quite memorable. I'm hoping this game gets fixed soon. The biggest problem I find is how much joy can be sucked out of you, when you just simply want to team up with your friends? This usually involves both parties looking for a signpost in some vague backwater town and then looking at a 3rd party software map and then wandering 30km roughly in their direction, only to get shot, lose connection or overlap them by 3km. By the time you do meet up, it's usually 4am and nobody can be arsed anymore. Or you get shot.

Crusader Kings II - A thoroughly brilliant and engaging strategy with a lot of meat on the bone. Deep, engaging politics, ruthless characters, lots and lots of options. The only reason I add it to this list is because I just cannot seem to survive for longer than a dozen generations. Lots of ways to die - Assassinations, battles, being left to rot in a dungeon, plagues, sieges, old age... Great game if you can get to grip with the mechanics. But defo a tough one.

[biggytitbo]

Ghouls and ghosts of course.

[Hangthebuggers]

Ghouls and ghosts of course.

That was a great game though. One of the first to introduce dynamics in regards to armour in side-scrolling games (if I recall correctly). The music was outstanding too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzC4EwRGmDA&index=1&list=PLC9BAE126D9EBD6B3 (Arcade)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDRUhhBVrng (SNES) <-- amazing.

[Hangthebuggers]

Weird Dreams was a cunt of a game. Unsettling too.

[thraxx]

Last Ninja 2 on the C64.  That last boss bit where you have to light the 5 candles while getting your arse kicked in and then kill the nails Samurai in the pentagram was too hard:  If you got it right it took just 3 minutes or so, but the first time I completed the game just that bit took me 8 hours of trying to do it.  That was a proper game that I genuinely felt proud to complete. 

From about 13.30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVIEMFtRyNs


Shadow Of The Beast II on the Amiga. The hardest game EVER. Every enemy could kill you easily, loads of pixel perfect jumping with traps and spikes and acid pits, and then the fact that the actual game was just loads of impossible to work out puzzles that had to be done in exactly the right order or you had to start all over again.  The game gave NO feedback at all, and of course if you fucked up, the game didn't tell you so it was possible to spend ages fruitlessly just wandering round thinking that you were advancing, but in fact the game was dead and impossible to complete.  Looked amazing and great music but a horrible cuntish game.

[QDRPHNC]

Computers used to be really shit, didn't they?

[Hangthebuggers]

QWOP is a good one.

http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html?utm_source=The+List&utm_campaign=c3c42380e5-Digital+Ops+-+QWOP+%26+SC2&utm_medium=email

[thraxx]

Computers used to be really shit, didn't they?

In 25 years we'll look back at what we have now and think it's shit probably.

Beast II, at the time, was by far the most beautiful game of it's time, and the music (as with most Psychnosis) games was fucking ace.

Last Ninja 2 does look insanely shit, but it played beautifully and was just right in terms of difficulty - again amazing music.  Can't remember the name of the guy who did that music, Rob something, but all his game music was brilliant.

[lazarou]

That was a great game though. One of the first to introduce dynamics in regards to armour in side-scrolling games (if I recall correctly). The music was outstanding too.

The "finish the game twice with a shittier weapon to see the proper ending" mechanic can do one though.

Last Ninja 2 on the C64

AKA fucking bastard useless crate jumping ninja bastard.

Rick Dangerous is a game by cunts, for cunts, especially the first one. Not hard, just designed to fuck you over at the worst possible places. A memory test dressed up as a challenge. Although superficially similar, Spleunky plays almost entirely opposite to that, giving you the tools and the means to make a tit of yourself, but where every fault you make is your own dumb fault. Infinitely better.

Really obvious ones, but Manic Miner and those first generation platformers were pixel-perfect merciless almost constantly. The first Cauldron has some fun flying around parts mixed with impossibly bastardly platforming, but my pick for ridiculously tough game would probably be Cauldron 2. Just try getting to the other side of a room as this smug prick.

[thraxx]

AKA fucking bastard useless crate jumping ninja bastard.

Fuck, yeah, I'd forgotten about the crate jumping bit!  That took fucking ages.  Pixel perfect jumping on crate stacks where perspective doesn't obey normal laws.

[Spiteface]

Fatal Fury on the Neo Geo.

There's a reason it's called "SNK Boss Syndrome" - Fuck you, Geese Howard, just fuck you.

[Noodle Lizard]

Obvious recent choice, but Alien: Isolation.  The "Hard" setting on that game basically means "we don't want you to ever get anywhere".  The developers had the gall to suggest it as the "recommended" setting to play on, but fucked if it's even possible to do without dying constantly and being sent back half an hour every time.

A slightly weirder choice, but I recently got an emulator to play some of my old N64 favourites and was astonished by how hard I found one bit of Super Mario 64.  There's this part where you have to race a massive penguin down an ice chute and it probably took me about 50 gos before I won, and even then that was purely by chance (I think I hit a glitch towards the end which shot me over the flightless cunt).

I don't remember having much trouble with that when I played it as a kid, so either the emulation is slightly off and gives the penguin a ridiculous advantage, or I've just been spoiled by the litany of great but ultimately quite easy games that dominated second and third-gen consoles.  I mean, SM64's a fucking kid's game and if a fully-grown man like myself was bellowing "CUNT" at the screen each time he beat me, I can't imagine what it might do to someone who doesn't even have pubes of their own to contend with yet.

[BPFHAY]

A slightly weirder choice, but I recently got an emulator to play some of my old N64 favourites and was astonished by how hard I found one bit of Super Mario 64.  There's this part where you have to race a massive penguin down an ice chute and it probably took me about 50 gos before I won, and even then that was purely by chance (I think I hit a glitch towards the end which shot me over the flightless cunt).

I don't remember having much trouble with that when I played it as a kid, so either the emulation is slightly off and gives the penguin a ridiculous advantage, or I've just been spoiled by the litany of great but ultimately quite easy games that dominated second and third-gen consoles.  I mean, SM64's a fucking kid's game and if a fully-grown man like myself was bellowing "CUNT" at the screen each time he beat me, I can't imagine what it might do to someone who doesn't even have pubes of their own to contend with yet.

I bet you didn't cry on camera though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEFr6ACZ8sI

[Thursday]

Obvious recent choice, but Alien: Isolation.  The "Hard" setting on that game basically means "we don't want you to ever get anywhere".  The developers had the gall to suggest it as the "recommended" setting to play on, but fucked if it's even possible to do without dying constantly and being sent back half an hour every time.

Thing is though, once you get the flamethrower and other tools, it gets much easier and there's a part of the game where the Alien disappears for a while. So at that point hard isn't so bad. The problem is when you're fighting humans in the beginning, who seem to be able to one-shot you from a mile away across a dark room.

[Noodle Lizard]

I bet you didn't cry on camera though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEFr6ACZ8sI

They weren't even doing the round where you have to race the penguin!  If I were interviewed like that alongside the penguin after every loss, I'd be just as sulky, and progressively more homicidal as the losses stacked up.

[the]

Ghouls and ghosts of course.

In the right prevailing wind and when the JAMMA gods are smiling on me, I have been known to complete the arcade GnG on one credit. Todd Landers eat your tits off

[Kelvin]

Champions Road, the very final level in Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U is one of the cuntiest levels I've ever played on anything. The game records how many lives you lose, so I know for a fact it took me well over 100 lives to complete this with all the stars collected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIYvd5aqeV8

And then, if you want the ultimate reward, you have to do it with 4 others characters!

[Big Jack McBastard]

There were times when I wanted to slap someone for Ninja Gaiden 2. Flaming armadillo boss immediately after an incarnation of the big bad boss who shits all over your health, same health bar for both fights, insta-died about 10 times in a row going into the second fight cos I couldn't sneak a heal in before the end of the first one, died about 15 times a piece either side of it too, pain in the ring.

Aye DayZ is test of patience as much as it is anything else a lot of the time.

[BPFHAY]

Champions Road, the very final level in Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U is one of the cuntiest levels I've ever played on anything. The game records how many lives you lose, so I know for a fact it took me well over 100 lives to complete this with all the stars collected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIYvd5aqeV8

And then, if you want the ultimate reward, you have to do it with 4 others characters!

Just try doing it with more than one player.

[mook]

Weird Dreams was a cunt of a game. Unsettling too.

gahhhh... here we go again.

[Cerys]

Join me.

[Ignatius_S]

...Crusader Kings II - A thoroughly brilliant and engaging strategy with a lot of meat on the bone. Deep, engaging politics, ruthless characters, lots and lots of options. The only reason I add it to this list is because I just cannot seem to survive for longer than a dozen generations. Lots of ways to die - Assassinations, battles, being left to rot in a dungeon, plagues, sieges, old age... Great game if you can get to grip with the mechanics. But defo a tough one.

With that one though, you set the goals – there is the cursory scoring system, but I feel it's up to the player to measure what they've achieved. It's the type of game that I feel that best played for the journey, not the destination. As you say, there are so many ways to be undone, but when you're spoiling plots and outmanoeuvring your enemies, it's completely exhilarating.

Are you playing with the Way of Life DLC? It's on my list!

[Hangthebuggers]

Oh, I completely agree with what you said about CKII - the story is yours to play as you wish. It's very immersive and a massive time-sink when you really get involved. One of my fave games. It's just a bastard sometimes.

Not played that DLC yet. I'll add it to my list pronto.

[FredNurke]

The first Turtles game on the NES. Absolute bastard of a game, and the only game I've ever got real kudos from other people for finishing.

[An Actual Propeller]

Airwolf on the ZX Spectrum can kiss my piss.  I couldn't get past the second screen.

[Crabwalk]

I've never even reached Level 2 on Tetris.

[Beagle 2]

I played through all the Contra games a couple of years ago. Even with save states they were chuffing ludicrous.

[Beagle 2]

Also Xenon.

THECTOR ONE

AGAIN

[BPFHAY]

I can do that bit on VVVVVV as many times in a row as you like. Yeah.

Also beat all bosses as The Lost in Binding of Isaac Rebirth on hard mode.

Also, Cave Story, the Hell challenge. Done that.

Hardest games for me are multiplayer FPS games, I will always be at the bottom of the leaderboard on those.

[Cerys]

I can do that bit on VVVVVV as many times in a row as you like. Yeah.

I've never played this game, but this bloke seems to be a bit serious about it.