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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The Hardest NES Games of All-Time

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With the recently released Cyber Shadow, publisher Yacht Club Games (the studio behind the brilliant Shovel Knight) prove that they’re the masters of revitalizing those brutally difficult NES games that defined an era and haunt gamers to this day.

The absurd difficulty of the average NES game can be attributed to a variety of factors, but the fact remains that there’s a reason the term “NES Hard” exists in the gaming lexicon. The hardest NES games weren’t just difficult: they were nightmarish excursions into another world where demands for perfect inputs met fundamentally unforgiving (and sometimes simply terrible) game design.

Those are the games we’re going to look at today. Some are good, some are bad, but for one reason or another, these are the absolute hardest NES games ever made.

15. Punch-Out!!

The problem with Punch-Out!! is that every new set of fighters essentially bumps up the game’s difficulty setting by a couple of levels. That makes it nearly impossible for anyone to really learn the game at a reasonable pace.

To make matters worse, this game basically treats your accomplishments with a level of spite typically only seen in house cats. By the time you reach the Mike Tyson fight, it assumes that you must be a literally perfect player.

However, there’s no way to practice for Tyson’s punching pattern the first time around, and reaching him again makes you navigate such extreme levels of difficulty that “lesser” fighters can actually make you worse. It’s an absolutely devious piece of game design that leads you to believe the game is fairer than it really is.

14. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Konami eventually got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles right (which is a statement that really ages this era of gaming), but their debut effort is the reason many people don’t trust licensed games to this day.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a fundamentally poorly designed game. However, it uses excellent graphics, good music, and the strength of its developer’s name to cover its nearly impossible jumps, terrible resource system, and crippling framerate issues.

By the time most of us reached the infamous swimming level that required you to be accurate and fast in a game designed to offer neither of those concepts, we realized we’d been had. The rest of us never made it past the Technodrome.

13. Gauntlet

NES gamers eventually realized that most NES ports of arcade games were going to be a shell of their former selves that typically only retained the crushing difficulty, but Gauntlet abuses the privilege of forgiveness typically afforded to these titles.

As one of the first NES games developed in the United States, Gauntlet does its best to justify the old “Made in America” manufacturing jokes with its shoddy combat system and terrible visuals. Yet, Gauntlet truly earns its place on this list by virtue of its maze-like levels, unintuitive puzzles, and the fact your health is constantly dropping. That means you’re solving those levels and puzzles while battling a soft time limit.

There’s just no reason to play this punishing game, which is really a shame considering the other versions of this arcade classic are actually quite good.

12. Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom

The debate over which Ninja Gaiden game is the toughest will undoubtedly continue, but Ninja Gaiden 3 earns its spot on this list by virtue of how punishing it is in comparison to its predecessors.

Ninja Gaiden 3’s limited continue system, overwhelming number of constantly respawning enemies, and floaty jump controls essentially take away everything that you could have used in previous Ninja Gaiden games to gradually make your way through them.

Sadly, the fact that Ninja Gaiden 3 offers so few illusions that you can eventually beat it makes it the least enjoyable entry in the original series for everyone but expert players.

11. Ikari Warriors

Yes, Contra was hard, but it was also a well-designed game that is rightfully remembered as an action classic. We were lucky to have Contra in our NES libraries. Some kids had to settle for Ikari Warriors.

Like Contra, Ikari Warriors fills the screen with deadly projectiles ready to end your limited life pool in an instant. Unlike Contra, Ikari Warriors’ awful controls, worse graphics, and hidden threats mean that you’re never really sure why you’re dying.

Incredibly, Ikari Warrior’s version of Contra’s cheat code doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to beat the game even if you somehow possess the patience and motivation to do so.

10. Final Fantasy

The thing you have to remember about Final Fantasy is that it helped kick off a genre (and a legendary franchise) that wouldn’t be refined for years to come.

As such, the original Final Fantasy embodies the worst elements of JRPG design as well as the most challenging. Do you hate grinding in JRPGs? Final Fantasy demands it to make simple progress. Do you hate random battles? Both the appearance and difficulty of Final Fantasy’s enemies are truly random. Because there’s no way to mechanically master Final Fantasy, some of these random fights are either nearly impossible or (at times) legitimately impossible.

Even if you suffer through the basic gameplay, Final Fantasy’s confusing world navigation and ambiguous puzzles will leave you wondering whether it’s better to find an online guide or just leave the memory alone.

9. The Adventures of Bayou Billy

The diversity of the NES library is exemplified in the difference between Final Fantasy and The Adventures of Bayou Billy. Whereas Final Fantasy makes you suffer through repetition, The Adventures of Bayou Billy pulls off the impressive feat of making you suffer through variety.

Bayou Billy’s side-scrolling levels are already among the genre’s most challenging, but this game’s driving levels hold the unique distinction of being some of the most difficult driving levels on a console infamous for them. On top of that, you’ve got incredibly challenging light gun levels that are nearly impossible to overcome even if you do have a working NES zapper.

Having said that, I have to give Konami credit for making a game called The Adventures of Bayou Billy so difficult that we’re still talking about it over 30 years later alongside games like Mega Man, Castlevania, and Ninja Gaiden.

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8. Paperboy

There’s a legitimate argument to be made that Paperboy is the most famous NES game that few players beat and fewer players actually enjoy.

Despite being one of those NES games that you can beat in 15 minutes if you’re good enough, Paperboy’s unforgiving controls and avalanche of oncoming obstacles offered quite a bit of value the hard way to a generation of gamers who were forced to play such titles over and over again.

Honestly, why is a game about being a Paperboy so hard? Were American parents of the ‘50s constantly encouraging their kids to get paper routes so that they’d be able to quietly get rid of them and enjoy a life of reasonable real estate prices, afternoon cocktails, and social oppression?

7. Ghosts and Goblins

Ghosts and Goblins has been synonymous with difficulty for so long that it’s easy to forget why the game is so challenging in the first place.

However, even a few minutes with this infamous action/adventure title will quickly reveal that Ghosts and Goblins‘ biggest hurdle is the game’s enemies. From the infamous red devils that kill most players in a few minutes to wandering foes placed in the absolute worst positions, Ghosts and Goblins’ basic enemies could easily be minibosses in lesser games.

To make matters worse, there’s really only one viable weapon in Ghosts and Goblins and the game only allows you to take two hits before dying. It’s not the “cheapest” game on this list, but it is one of the most mechanically frustrating.

6. The Immortal

We’ve talked about The Immortal before, but it would be irresponsible to talk about the hardest NES games without giving this devil its due.

The Immortal is a practical joke disguised as a game. Its carnival of traps and hidden dangers means that the only ways through this nightmare involve cheating and dying over and over again until you find out the literal pixels that you can and cannot interact with.

Shout out to The Immortal for accurately recreating the feeling of being thrown into the deepest pit of the most dangerous dungeon, but it turns out that there’s little pleasure to be found in a game where the biggest reward is no longer having to play it.

5. Battletoads

Yes, we all know that Battletoads legendary speed bike level is the shining single example of NES difficulty and one of those pieces of shared misery that make this era in difficult gaming so special. However, I really want to talk about Battletoads’ co-op mode.

At a time when siblings were often forced to share time with the NES, Battletoads co-op mode felt like one of the best ways to play a game together. That’s why it’s that much crueler that the co-op mode is designed to make you hate whoever you’re playing with.

From melee friendly fire that’s nearly impossible to avoid to a shared life total that ends your run when one player dies, managing to beat Battletoads with another human rightfully ranks among retro gaming’s most impressive achievements.

4. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse

The biggest case I can make for Castlevania 3’s pot on this list is that the game is so difficult that many people retroactively consider the original Castlevania to be fair by comparison.

Castlevania 3 is rightfully (if painfully) remembered for its stairs. Several levels in the game require you to climb stairs while dodging enemies and projectiles. The problem is that the stairs limit your movement to such a degree that avoiding everything requires you to move at a glacial pace, except for the times when you actually need to move quickly to have a chance to survive. It’s cheap in a way that other games in the series often avoid.

In general, Castlevania 3 is a collection of platforming death traps capped off by a stunningly difficult three-stage boss fight that requires you to start the level over if you die at any point during it. What a beautiful nightmare of a game.

3. Mega Man

The game that is sometimes credited for ushering in a new era of NES difficulty impressively manages to remain one of the hardest NES games ever despite years of worthy challengers.

The original Mega Man is difficult for the same reasons every other retro Mega Man game is difficult (tricky platforming, tough bosses, and durable enemies), but this historic gem elevates itself above the rest of the franchise by virtue of the things it lacks.

No energy tanks, no passwords, and unrefined controls make the original Mega Man harder than many of its successors, despite the fact that the pure content in a game like Mega Man 3 is arguably designed to be more challenging.

2. Fester’s Quest

To this day, my mind wants to rebel against the idea that a game based on the ‘60s Addams Family series could rank cleanly amongst the hardest NES titles of all-time, but the years have proven it is worthy of that position for all the wrong reasons.

Most of the challenge of Fester’s Quest comes from the game’s controls. Fester moves like he’s as excited to play this game as you are, yet you’re expected to navigate the often tight areas loaded with constantly respawning enemies that don’t offer a moment to breathe. You are able to defend yourself, but unless you have a turbo controller, be prepared to constantly mash the attack button just to have a chance to inch your way forward.

Even if you resolved all of those problems, you’d still have the game’s unintuitive puzzles and bizarre first-person segments that were ahead of their time in the worst way possible. Fester’s Quest is both legitimately challenging and challenging because of historically awful game design.

1. Silver Surfer

By their design, these flight style side-scrolling action games are intended to be hard. That’s why NES games like Gradius and Life Force offer some of the console’s most memorable challenges.

However, Silver Surfer takes that concept to a whole new level. This game would be hard enough if it only featured the bullet hell death maze patterns that it already requires you to navigate, but the experience is made historically memorable by virtue of truly bad visual design that can make it nearly impossible to reasonably guess what is a projectile and what’s part of the environment.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

If nothing else, Silver Surfer remains “Exhibit A” in the case of why only truly talented developers should attempt to make genuinely challenging games.

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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago

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More Voices from the Dust -- Old Testament and Related Studies -- HUGH NIBLEY 1986

More Voices from the Dust

Even if it were only fiction, the story of the finding of the Qumran Manuscripts (also called the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ‘Ain Feshkha manuscripts) would be exciting reading. In a hundred journals the tale has now been repeated of how in June 1947 an Arab shepherd looking for a lost sheep came across the all-but-invisible entrance to a cave in which reposed “the first major biblical manuscripts of great antiquity” ever found—”older by more than a millennium than the Hebrew texts which are the basis of our biblical translations.”1

In the same cave with the now famous Isaiah text were found fragments of Genesis, Judges, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, the apocryphal book of Jubilees, and the extensive writings dealing with the doctrines and practices of an ancient Jewish sect that had inhabited that part of the desert in the time of Christ. Small wonder that “the little world of biblical scholarship has been turned topsy-turvy by the discoveries,” or that “the howling wilderness of Ta’amireh also has been turned upside down in consequence of the finds.”2 As a result of this feverish search, more than forty caves have now come to light, many of them containing ancient writings; for example, the first six caves opened around Qumran “have produced manuscript material representing an original collection of some four hundred to five hundred works that included all of the Old Testament books, numerous apocrypha, both known and unknown, and sectarian documents of all kinds.”3 From another group of caves nearby, two of which are described as nothing less than “mighty caverns,” even richer treasures came forth in 1952. The now famous Cave IV at Qumran has yielded three hundred fragments of writings, some of which are thought to go back to the fourth century B.C. As a result of these finds “we now have larger or smaller fragments of every book of the Old Testament except Esther, most of the known Apocrypha, and many new ones.”4

Thanks to this material, the conventional ideals of Christian and Jewish religion are even now undergoing major revisions. We are told, for example, that “one conclusion is difficult to avoid: John, so far from being the creation of Hellenistic Christianity, has exceedingly close ties with sectarian Judaism, and may prove to be the most ‘Jewish’ of the Gospels.” 5 At the same time we learn that the all-but-discredited Septuagint is really a very ancient and reliable text, “a literal and faithful translation of its Hebrew predecessor.”6 As to church history, “All the problems relative to primitive Christianity—problems examined for so many centuries—all these problems henceforth find themselves placed in a new light, which forces us to reconsider them completely.”7

The texts are packed with matter of greatest interest to Latter-day Saints. The people who wrote and hid these records had our own conception of continued revelation, of this life as a probation, of the preexistence and resurrection, of the dispensations of the gospel with falling away and restoration; their covenants and ordinances closely resemble ours; and their book of doctrine and covenants (now called the Manual of Discipline) is surprisingly like our own, as are their ideas of priesthood, prophecy, heaven and earth, marriage and eternal progeny, and so on. To go through the scrolls illustrating these things point by point would require a whole book. Here one significant illustration must suffice.

Speaking of the Qumran manuscripts, Time magazine recently reported:

The most startling disclosure of the Essene documents so far published is that the sect possessed, years before Christ, a terminology and practice that have always been considered uniquely Christian. The Essenes practiced baptism and shared a liturgical repast of bread and wine presided over by a priest. They believed in redemption and in the immortality of the soul. Their most important leader was . . . a Messianic prophet-priest blessed with divine revelation. . . . Many phrases, symbols, and precepts similar to those in Essene literature are used in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John and the Pauline Epistles.8

This was not only a “startling disclosure” but also a very disturbing one. Many Jewish and Christian scholars heaped scorn on the scrolls years after their discovery, or even refused to consider them at all, calling them a hoax, a “conglomeration of words . . . written by an uneducated Jew in the Middle Ages,” “a garbage collection,” and whatnot, 9 for a Dupont-Sommer pointed out from the first, if the scrolls are genuine, then the scholars have been wrong all along in their conception of Christianity and Judaism. Worst of all is the maddening habit these writings have of “jumping the gun” on the New Testament. The Gospel of John, for example, “employs the vocabulary characteristic of the DSD,” that is, the Manual of Discipline, written years before the gospel.10 Much of this literature is biblical, and yet it is not biblical: thus “the hymns in the collection are reminiscent of the latest biblical psalms, and more especially the psalm in the prologue of Luke. They draw heavily on the Psalter and Prophetic poetry for inspiration, and borrow direct phrases, cliches, and style. However, neither in language, spirit, or theology are they biblical.”11That is to say, they are not “biblical” in the sense that modern critics use the word, though they were obviously believed by their authors to be completely biblical. Either those ancients did not understand the Bible, or else the moderns don’t. Yet Dr. Brownlee is willing to concede that their rendering of the scriptures “greatly enriches and improves upon the original form [sic],” and that “it will no doubt receive considerable use on the part of both ministers and rabbis who become familiar with it.”12

Forced to accept the proofs that something like a New Testament church was in full bloom before New Testament times, Mr. G. L. Harding, who has been a most active figure in the discovery and preservation of the scrolls, can only conclude that John the Baptist and even Christ must have acquired much of what they taught in the bosom of the Qumran community itself: “John the Baptist . . . must have studied and worked in this building [the main assembly hall of the sect, near the Qumran caves]: he undoubtedly derived the idea of ritual immersion or baptism from them. Many authorities consider that Christ himself also studied with them for some time. . . . These, then, are the very walls He looked upon, the corridors and rooms through which He wandered and in which He sat, brought to light once again after nearly 1900 years.”13

Now with the discovery and admission of the existence of typical New Testament expressions, doctrines, and ordinances well before the time of Christ, the one effective argument against the Book of Mormon collapses. 14 Within the past year a distinguished European scholar has written an ambitious study on the Book of Mormon, in which he praises it as the most significant work or historiography to appear in America, but at the same time denounces it as a fraud and forgery, stating as his proof that “the character of the forgery is made clear by the revamping of biblical accounts and expressions, especially in the founding of the Church, baptism, and sacrament as accompanying the appearance of Christ in America.”15 That is exactly what was held against the scrolls when they first appeared and almost up to the present moment: they were accused, like the Book of Mormon, of being nothing but a phony rehash of the Bible, with a new slant on particulars and a totally incongruous setting. And had not the evidence continued to pour forth, year after year and cave after cave (“discoveries tread on the heels of discoveries,” says Mr. Cross), the learned could never have been persuaded to admit that the documents were anything but clumsy forgeries.

Dr. Cross, eager to allay the misgivings that must inevitably follow the overthrow of accepted ideas of Church history and doctrine, explains the resemblance between the Christian and pre-Christian churches as traceable to a common tradition: both “draw on common resources of language, common theological themes and concepts, and share common religious institutions.” 16 But this common tradition was not that of conventional Judaism, let alone Hellenistic philosophy; it was the ancient tradition of the righteous few who flee to the desert with their wives and children to prepare for the coming of the Lord and escape persecution at the hands of the official religion. Qumran seems to have been the camping-place of such holy fugitives as early as the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., that is, as early as the days of Lehi.17 The Book of Mormon clearly states that its people consider themselves to be in this particular and peculiar line of Israelite tradition.18 The discoveries at and near Qumran now prove not only that such people existed, but also that they produced a peculiar type of literature, and it is to the Book of Mormon that one may turn for some of the most perfect examples of that literature. And so the voices whispering out of the dust on the shores of the Dead Sea may yet provide some of the most powerful confirmation of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

NOTES

* “More Voices from the Dust” appeared in the Instructor (March 1956), pp. 71—72, 74.

1. Cross, Frank Moore, “The Manuscripts of the Dead Sea Caves,” The Biblical Archeologist 17, 1 (February 1954): 3. The fullest general description of the finding of the scrolls is still Harold Henry Rowley, The Zadokite Fragments and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford University Press, 1952).

2. Cross, p. 4.

3. Fritsch, Charles Theodore, “Herod the Great and the Qumran Community,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74 (September 1955): 174.

4. Harding, G. Lankester, “Where Christ Himself May Have Studied: An Essene Monastery at Khirbet Qumran,” Illustrated London News 227 (September 3, 1955): 379.

5. Cross, p. 3.

6. Cross, p. 18. It should be noted that the Inspired Version of the Bible as we have it from Joseph Smith greatly favors the Septuagint.

7. Dupont-Sommer, A., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Preliminary Report (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 100. Time has vindicated this verdict, which Dupont-Sommer has repeated in his latest work. (See Time, “Dead Sea Jewels” [September 5, 1955], p. 34.)

8. Courtesy Time; copyright Time, Inc., 1955.

9. Nibley, Hugh W., “New Approaches to Book of Mormon Study,” Improvement Era (March 1954), pp. 148ff.

10. Brownlee, William H., “A Comparison of the Covenanters of the Dead Sea Scrolls with Pre-Christian Jewish Sects,” The Biblical Archeologist 14, 3 (September 1951): 58.

11. Cross, p. 3; compare Brownlee, “Biblical Interpretation among the Sectaries of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” The Biblical Archeologist 14, 3 (September 1951): 58.

12. Brownlee, ibid., p. 60.

13. Harding.

14. We pointed this out in 1954 (note 9 above), but the recent admissions of such authorities as Cross, Brownlee, and Harding now lend real force to the argument.

15. Meinhold, Peter, “Die Anfänge des Amerikanischen Geschichtsbewusstseins,” Saeculum 5 (1954): 86.

16. Cross, “The Scrolls and the New Testament,” The Christian Century 72 (August 1955): 971.

17. Kelso, James L., “The Archaeology of Qumran,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74 (September 1955): 145. “The roots of the Sect undoubtedly do go back to the pre-Maccabean Hasidim,” according to Fritsch, ibid., p. 177.

18. Nibley, Improvement Era (May 1954), pp. 326—30.

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