Hmmm, interesting. I hadn't heard about that strategy. I couldn't wait to ditch that stupid knife.
I do remember the boss fight against Nosferatu was incredibly easy with the sniper rifle, just zoom and shoot, and he can't touch you. The music during that fight was awesome, though.

It's funny to me that Battletoads is so fondly remembered when everyone seems to agree that its difficulty was outrageous. I eventually just stopped playing it because there was no point when you can only get so far.

Here's another one: the original Mega Man. I never owned it until I was an adult, but I vowed to beat it legit, and that last level before Wily is a nightmare. A boss rush against the 6 Robot Masters, and then the final battle against Wily, all on one lifebar, and if you died you had to do it all again. Probably took me 20-30 tries to finally finish it.

 

There's a giant snake level in Bucky o Hare. Of all the things to put in it, why that? I hates them I do! It's on the ice planet too!

 

Yeah. Well timed Holy Water beats anything... it's almost like cheating. Had finish the game again with the cross.

As for battletoads, the levels mentioned here were my favourite in the game. My least favourite was the rappelling stage. I could never get a 1-up by hitting enemies multiple times.

 

Top Gear Rally

 

No, it wasn't. It took me a long time to realize that the game wasn't intentionally difficult, it was just riddled with horrible game design, questionable hit boxes, and broken mechanics. (It's literally impossible to get through with two players due to one of these flaws.) I would no more call Battletoads a "hard game" than I would say, Batman Forever or Bubsy 3D on the PS1. They're all crap piles of code, the difference being that only one is a visually polished turd. (I know this isn't a popular opinion.)

And I say that as someone who's beaten Ninja Gaiden several times despite the g++damn enemy respawns that occur every time the screen scrolls by more than a single pixel.

My list:
Ninja Gaiden 3
Ghosts 'n' Goblins
7th Saga. The only game that I know of where you can get your a** handed to you just for talking to the wrong person in town.

 

Back in the day, I'd say Ghouls 'n Ghosts on the Sega Genesis. You defeat the final boss just to find out you need to go through the entire game over again. WTF!!!

Today, probably Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne.

 

I had a game called Star Force for the NES that was pretty hard.

Also Castlevania for Game boy - no saves, level timer, and it moved so slowly that each restart took forever.

 

Atomic robo kid- You die WAY too easy, enemy placement is cheap, and the bosses are f'ing insane.

Insector x-Sages creation are and always will be D**ks

Ninja Gaiden 2-Combine the enemy respawn with a harder difficulty, you get recipe for an gamepad destruction

Kabuki-Quantum fighter: ie the matrix 1989, neat idea, but effectively a ninja gaiden clone

Amagon- The fun wears out after the first couple levels, just takes too long

 

I am forced to agree with this.
Even when I was younger I wondered why Battletoads was put on some kind of pedestal. It had great graphics, music, and play control, but frustrating design.

A good example is the tower level where you have to grab a rod and jump off at the right time to land on a moving platform. Since your toad swings the rod when he rips it from the wall, it's a good 2 or 3 seconds from the time you press the button to when he actually falls down, making the timing far too random and difficult.

Yes, I forgot about this one. The Belmont in this game (was it Christopher?) moves like he's walking through molasses. I played it enough that I actually got pretty good at it, to the point that I could usually beat it. Took a while to get to that point, though. The first 3 levels weren't much problem, but the beginning of the 4th level was brutal, with two consecutive large armored knights that respawned if you retreated too far while fighting them.

 

Gunvalkyrie for the original XBox.

The control scheme for this game was completely bananas, designed to simulate the operation of the jetpack your character was strapped to. It would have been a difficult game, even if they had given it a normal button layout rather than one designed by a Nasa engineer that had never played a video game before.

 

I could never get past the second round of levels/second warp room for Crash Bandicoot I and Cortex Strikes Back. Maybe partially because Warped was my first and it was weird to go back to the older ones, but I did legitimately find them hard as shit. Warped is no push over either. I don't have any desire to spend another nearly two decades working on 100% completion.

Kingdom Hearts was my first serious game with a legit plot, dark themes, etc. And much like Crash, it takes way too long to go all the way to the end and do another playthrough. The secret bosses of the Kingdom Hearts series are insane, but the Lingering Will is a legend that I likely will never defeat.

 

Yep it was like he was moving in slow motion.

I just didn't have the patience to keep playing and gave up.

 

Never had an NES, so the version of Battletoads that always stumped me was the Game Boy one. I think i could get to the level where you have to descend into the big pit but could never finish it without running out of lives.

The worst for me, though, is probably Revenge of Shinobi. I don't know why that game is so hard for me, but I can never make it further than a little ways into level 2.

 

Oh god, I had tried to block that game from my memory. It may be harder than its NES counterpart, partly due to the smaller screen. I thought I gave it away years ago, but I recently found it's still in my pile of GB cartridges.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but is level 2 the waterfall? Yeah, that one's a doozy, especially so early in the game. It doesn't get much easier than that one, either.

I actually beat Revenge of Shinobi legit once (and by legit I mean on the original hardware when I was younger), and one time using an emulator and save states. But it just takes soooo long to get to the final level...and then you find out the final level is a maze of doorways. More than once I got to that point and was so mentally exhausted from the previous couple of levels (especially that brutal furnace level) I just couldn't go on.

Fortunately, IIRC that last level maze does have a loop you can exploit. There's a short sequence of doors that leads to a health refill and POW icon, and the power-ups respawn each time you re-enter, so you can easily get fully powered before entering the final boss room. And you need that POW icon, because your regular shuriken aren't powerful enough to beat the boss in time to save your girlfriend.

 

Look up the password system for transferring your save between Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

 

That thing is a mess. Even if all you want are all the djinn and mandatory puzzle solving items, which should have come with them anyway! And if you make one mistake... 

 

Bloodbourne for ps4 is pretty tough cause I'm still in the first 5 or 10 minutes of the game and I'm stuck.

 

Contra 3 was impossible for my mate and I on the snes.

Also gotta say nex machina on the hardest difficulty with 1 life is stressful!