Nintendo Hard/Video Games/Platform Game


 * Believe it or not, Battletoads manages to up the ante considerably. From the racing segment of level 3 on, the game's difficulty ranges from insanely hard to downright unplayable. Most gamers of that generation have never seen the ending. Perhaps most difficult of all is a level made entirely of Instant Death Spikes(!!). Even with the use of a Game Genie, beating the game is still considered to be quite an achievement among hardcore gamers. Many with a NES agree.
 * This is not helped by the apparent lack of playtesting. Observe: Stage 11, "Clinger Winger," which is literally unplayable in two-player mode, because the second player can't move, meaning they get killed seconds after the level starts. Real smooth, Rare.
 * As demonstrated by The Angry Video Game Nerd, two player mode in general renders Battletoads nearly unplayable, due the ability of players to hurt each other, which will happen frequently whether they are trying to or not. Amazingly, Nintendo Power actually used the ability to hurt your teammate as a selling point.
 * Interestingly, the Japanese version of Battletoads is much easier than its North American counterpart (to name just a few changes, level 11's Hypno Orb moves much slower, and some of the disappearing platforms in level 12 have been replaced by solid ones).
 * The difficulty of the Genesis\Megadrive version is probably based on the Japanese game (with graphical improvements). It's modestly difficult.
 * There's a level 11?!
 * The other games in the Battletoads series are also notorious for their difficulty, but they aren't quite as brutal as the original NES game and its many ports. (Incidentally, the Game Boy game titled Battletoads isn't a port of the NES version; the Game Boy port of the NES game was named Battletoads in Ragnarok's World.)
 * Kayin, creator of the infamous I Wanna Be the Guy says in his FAQ that his game is a ROM hack of the ending of NES Battletoads. Obviously this is a complete lie, but no one can call him on it because no one has actually beaten Battletoads. Yes, the creator of I Wanna Be the Guy thinks Battletoads is impossibly hard.
 * The SNES port should probably go down as the hardest game ever made - Admittedly, there are less levels, but the Jet Bikes are still there, The one hit kill just-about-everything-in-stages-3to7 are there, and there's no health pickups what-so-ever. 3 lives, 3 continues, only two chances to get any lives back (a maximum of three, if you're REALLY good at hitting pins on a checkers piece...) and no save system. Nintendo Hard? Nintendo ain't got nothin' on this..
 * The first Contra game is widely considered to be among the most difficult NES games -- and for good reason. If you touch nearly anything that isn't a powerup or floor, you're dead. No passwords or saves, and if you lose three lives, it's game over -- unless you use the Konami Code, of course, extending your potential death-count to thirty.
 * Even one of the powerups can ruin your game by replacing a perfectly functional weapon with a useless one.
 * The Japanese version of Contra: Hard Corps featured a life bar, allowing you to take a hit or two before dying. It was made in America, though. Contra: Hard Corps is widely considered to be the hardest game in the series. When it was released in Japan, the Japanese thought the same and put in a health bar. That said, with the difficulty being the same, if you can 1cc one you can do the same for the other.
 * The arcade version of Super C is definitely much harder than the NES version, and not in a good way.
 * Contra 3: The Alien Wars, for the Super NES, has multiple difficulty levels and the ability to choose to have more extra lives per continue, making it less frustrating than the earlier games. When set to Hard, however, the game is at least as difficult and unforgiving as its NES predecessors.
 * As matter of fact, more than one game for NES had a lower difficulty level than the arcade game it was based on. Bionic Commando is another good example.
 * The recently released Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS is also considerably challenging, as not only do you have to worry about things shooting at you from two screens, but most Boss Battles are fought against a Sequential Boss.
 * Contra 4 also one-ups the missile-riding sequence from Contra 3 by making your handholds very tiny, constantly moving, opening, and closing, and then throwing deadly missiles at you from several different angles.
 * Playing Contra 4 on hard will make you a man.
 * The Japanese arcade version of Super Contra allows players to replay the entire game on a harder setting after completing the game normally once and unlike the normal game, continues are not allowed, making it one of the more difficult Contra games in the series.


 * The aptly named Impossible Mission games; and at least one version of the first game was literally impossible.
 * Road Runner in the Death Valley Rally. Sunsoft released a few Looney Tunes licensed games for the SNES. While none were too bad, all of them were awfully hard, but this one takes the cake. The game has some quite nasty platforming sections (not helped by the fact that Road Runner was very fast but not too good at braking), that you had very precise jumps while Coyote kept on following you and being pretty much a invincible LedgeBat that bothered you throughout the whole game. The bosses were unbelievably hard too; the first one for instance was a giant catapult that kept on throwing large boulders on you. Thing is, the catapult is humongous and you can't see the proper boulder (which takes about a third of the screen space) being launched - thus it was pure luck if it would hit you or pass by close.
 * The three The Simpsons video games made by Akklaim on the NES are known for being overly difficult, due to shoddy physics and controls and many levels involving jumping across tiny platforms for a prolonged amount of time. For some reason, against usual NES gaming logic, to run you must hold the same button you use to jump, making running jumps impossible unless you press both buttons when jumping. Plus, in most of these games, you lack any kind of weaponry or anything to defend yourself with, and in some you have barely any health.
 * The only one in which you can defend yourself may actually be the worst. Bartman Meets Radioactive Man features the same broken physics and horrible controls, but you are expected to fight with them. Bart punches and kicks like he's up to his neck in molasses. Even the simplest enemies are deadly without absolutely perfect timing.
 * Virtual Bart, a Simpsons game for the SNES/Genesis, also made by Akklaim. This game is as brutal and unforgiving as Battletoads. The dinosaur level and the baby Bart level are probably the worst.
 * The Simpsons: Bart vs The Space Mutants has extraordinarily difficult jumps onto small platforms where, frequently, you can't tell where it's safe to land or not. This is made tougher by the bizarre control scheme - the 'run' and the 'jump' button are the same button. And to do a running jump, you have to hold down the use item button, which wastes frequently wastes your stuff because there's no way to unequip an item. It also has no way to kill enemies. None. And Bart can only take two hits before dying. And in the later levels, the time you're given to get all the way through isn't even close to adequate. The sequel, Bart vs The World, had its bad points (the crypt part of level 4-2, for one), but it upped Bart's life meter to 5 hits and more importantly gave him a way to fight back.
 * Speaking of The Simpsons, The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare is incredibly Nintendo Hard. Not helping matters was the fact that levels were random (or as good as random), meaning that you could enter one expecting a nice, easy stroll to ease you into it - and get obliterated in seconds. The first day I got a D- in that game I was overjoyed(I was 4 years old, and I think I was happier with that than I was with completing Sonic or Ecco the Dolphin). Even worse: there was a time limit until you woke up, meaning you had to rush past the mailboxes and frequent Otto drive-bys to get to a level, which would then reward you by trying its very best to kill you. It was also fantastic, especially the 'Bart is Godzilla' level.
 * The arcade original Shinobi had a difficulty curve that just kept on ascending, and only three lives per continue. Mission 4 defeated most players. The final hidden ninja boss was nigh-on impossible to beat.
 * The Playstation 2 version of Shinobi had a lot of controller-throwing moments, too. Its sequel, Nightshade (called Kunoichi in Japan), made things a bit less frustrating by giving the player multiple lives instead of just one, meaning that falling into a Bottomless Pit wouldn't boot you all the way back to the beginning of the level and force you to use a continue.
 * However, the geniuses who made Nightshade also put several large Bottomless Pits into the game that you need to cross by dashing from enemy to enemy. This wouldn't be too bad normally, but the unlockable protagonist of the previous game lacks a move necessary for crossing said pits, making it an Unwinnable situation for him. And that's not even going into other gameplay changes they made...
 * Your own sword wants you dead. If you go too long without killing something, the damn thing starts draining your health, essentially turning every level into a Timed Mission.
 * Bucky O'Hare for NES has excellent programming, wide variety of levels, refined gameplay and devious difficulty level by default. Of course, player could also input HARD! as a password and push her/his sanity to the brink playing a hidden, prominently harder difficulty level only to lose what is left of it after finding out that using given passwords continues the game from default difficulty...
 * On the other hand, the difficulty in the game is rarely (if ever) actual fake difficulty. The game can be completed on harder difficulty and levels are designed so that player can survive every single situation if he or she knows the right strategy. In other words, the sadistic difficulty is not cheap, but done in a very, very calculating manner.
 * If you lived in Russia and got the game pirated, an anti-piracy measure would cause the "HARD!" difficulty to be the default one. Ouch...
 * Ironically, the game gets easier (relatively speaking) on HARD! mode the farther along you go. In many of the later levels, your character dies in 1 hit even on normal mode, so the traps are much more avoidable, whereas the early levels where getting hit was ordinarily not a big deal became much more treacherous. The hardest level in the entire game on HARD! mode is a level very early in the game where you are trapped on a rapidly shrinking (slippery) iceberg while having to dodge a continuous stream of enemies firing projectiles at you. On normal difficulty, this stage takes about a minute and is barely worth mentioning.
 * They call it "Castlevania Frustration Syndrome" for a reason. Several early games in that series were murderously hard, especially the first. Between being slower than many enemies, being unable to adjust your jumps in any fashion, and getting trapped on staircases (and unable to dismount with any semblance of speed) at the most inopportune moments... well, it was Goddamn hard, especially since running into an enemy could see you Blown Across the Room at the slightest touch. Usually the launch would send one sailing gracefully backward into one of the castle's many walls of Spikes of Doom, or quite possibly a conveniently placed pool of water.
 * The first Castlevania 1986 doesn't get too harsh until Frankenstein (a real pain in the hunchback without the fire bomb), and Death is a pain but far from insurmountable; you just gotta keep trying. It's Dracula that ramps it up to Nintendo Hard level. Warping all over the place, including right on top of you (and frequently), tossing a trio of fireballs each time that required precise timing to either knock down or evade, can only be damaged in the head, and takes sixteen hits to beat...whereupon he transforms into a bounding firebreathing hulk that takes another sixteen hits to finally do away with. And did you know that at this stage you can only take four hits yourself before dying? (Yes, there's a definite pattern to what he does and it's actually possible to slay him without taking any damage, but this definitely qualifies.) It's so unforgiving that Konami actually did a Japan-only rerelease in 1993 (long after the NES had been supplanted by the 16-bit systems) just to add an Easy level.
 * At least the cartridge release for the NES had infinite continues and the original Famicom Disk System release in Japan let the player save the game. The MSX 2 version of the original Castlevania, known as Vampire Killer in Europe, was even harder and had neither of these. Just try playing it to the second boss.
 * The eldritch horrors disguised as game designers who localized Castlevania III decided that exponentially elevated difficulty was a fair trade-up for the loss of the better sound chip. If you thought that Dracula's third form was a bit difficult after having played Akumajo Densetsu (it can be; the bottomless pits in the floor are a pain)...oh, just wait until you get to that point in the American-European version. Dracula's Frickin' Laser Beams are not only fired more frequently, they're longer and can launch in any of sixteen directions instead of the usual eight. Good luck, and may $Deity have mercy on your thumbs.
 * Before you worry about Dracula, try getting to him. If the myraid skeletons, bats, spiders, crows, medusa heads, gargoyles, pillars 'o bones, fish men, hunchbacks, mummies, floating eyes, and slimes, all of which are faster and more aggressive than in the first two games, don't take you out, you still have to contend with crumbling blocks, falling blocks, dripping acid, trapdoors, and spiked trapdoors. Oh, and auto-scrolling stages.
 * The European version has one small mercy - your stopwatch gets you one extra second of frozen time as compared to the Japanese or American games.
 * And God help you if you attempt Hard Mode without using a cleared file. Just out of the first half-hour of gameplay, the Wake Up Call Boss now plays with a form of Bullet Hell, and the level immediately following it is a long, long stream of Goddamn Bats-turned-Demonic Spiders that will kill you in 3-6 hits.
 * Thought the console Castlevanias were hard? Haunted Castle, an arcade-exclusive Castlevania title, multiplies the frustration by giving you only one life per credit, a four-credit limit (no Bribing Your Way to Victory here, folks), and awkwardly placed flying enemies that are guaranteed to hit you. The Version M release of the game is notorious for the amount of damage you take from enemy attacks; a bone thrown from a skeleton enemy will deplete half of your life meter.
 * Worse still, the four-credit limit can't be changed in the game's dip switches, either. It's a really fucking stupid strategy when the purpose of an arcade game is to make money and you're not only dissuading players from putting in more quarters, but making the possibility of even trying again disgust them.
 * This was even referenced in the otherwise completely unrelated game, Snatcher. Upon faced with a pair of cosplayers dressed as Simon Belmont and Dracula, Metal tells Gillian that the lack of the ability to jump on the stairs caused the teen suicide rate to "triple that year."
 * Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES is hard for another reason: The game gives you no information on what to do or where to go. The villagers who normally help you in this kind of game instead LIE. And they don't tell obvious lies, they say stuff that is sneakily misleading, with the occasional true statement to mess with your head. Add in "puzzles" like having to duck for seven seconds at a certain place to continue in the game with a certain item selected, and you get the idea.
 * It can also be dreadfully glitchy. MyNameIsKaz's LP demonstrates a few of the happy funtime mutations the game will toss at you (a GREEN crystal!?).
 * Tangentially: it's not a mistranslation or a missing period, they really are talking about ducks in the graveyard. The Japanese text is 'sutorigoi bochi de ahiru kara kinu fukuro yo morau to naga ikiseru' (If you get a silk bag from a duck at Strigoi graveyard, you will live long.) There is no duck. There never was a duck. Clearly Dracula's Curse has made everybody in the entire game bloody insane - and it will make gamers insane too.
 * Bionic Commando, for the NES and the original Game Boy, is easier than the arcade version but still manages to become extremely difficult by the end of the game. You start with only one life (although you do have a health bar), and continues have to be earned by killing enemies in optional areas. The bosses tend to be fast and brutal, and there are plenty of Bottomless Pits and Spikes of Doom around as well.
 * It's slightly tempered by the fact that the missile launcher is one of the most overpowered weapons in NES history, making several of the bosses comically easy to beat. Of course, they then tempered its power in the remake....
 * In particular, the helicopter boss at the end of Area 12 requires the player to fire a single rocket through the windshield of the helicopter as the player is falling. If the player misses, they're killed by machine gun fire. The chopper pilot is Hitler's expy, however, who looks just like the man himself. The game rewards you for passing its murderously difficult stages by giving you a chance to shoot Hitler in the face with a rocket launcher and his head explodes.
 * Bionic Commando Rearmed, the recent remake of the NES version, is harder on its first level than the original was on its final levels - and it only scales up from there. Yahtzee went on to note that even though he'd never played the original Bionic Commando, he could still tell Rearmed was a faithful remake because of how console-stompingly frustrating it was.
 * And then if you go to any difficulty level above normal? Forget about it. On the hardest difficulty level, Super Joe Hard, you become a One-Hit-Point Wonder, enemies fire as if they have turbo controllers and duck behind cover almost immediately. Blocking bullets with the bionic arm, difficult on normal difficulty, becomes a requirement, making the game reach new levels of impossible, like...Super Nintendo Hard.
 * In fact, it was so hard that the 1.1 patch for it had to tone down the difficulty on the easy and normal difficulties. For the truly insane, Super Joe Hard was not changed.
 * The entire Mega Man Zero series, particularly the first two. They do away with heart and sub-tank collectibles, so you're stuck at normal health. There's a ranking system similar to that of 'Mega Man X 6, which is very unforgiving, making maintaining an A-rank or higher necessary to get the EX techs in the later games that much more annoying. There's things called Cyber-Elves which have all sorts of neat powers (including health increases and Sub Tanks), except the game penalizes you for using them by knocking points off your level rank.
 * The first Zero game was considered by many reviewers upon its release to be notoriously hard.
 * Zero 4's stages are as genuinely hard as its predecessors', with the added bonus of weather effects that will make a stage easier or difficult. Needless to say, choose any weather except for the difficult one, your score gets dropped. However, since you only need the correct weather for the extras, the game goes from an hours-long grind to a couple hours of fast-paced fun by a decent player, just because you don't go through every stage fifty times trying to get that last point for the A-rank.
 * The levels in the Mega Man ZX series were just as hard, if not harder, than in the Zero series. The main difference is the wide variety of player choice. It was easy to find a model that fit your own playstyle. That and the sprites were smaller so it was easier to see what was around you.
 * The first Mega Man game is in the running, too. The six Robot Masters aren't so bad (except for Guts Man's infamous lifts and Ice Man's level, which introduces the possibly more infamous disappearing/appearing platforms), but players who can get past the Yellow Devil boss -- to say nothing of Dr. Wily himself -- without resorting to the Select trick are few and far between. 2 and onward have passwords, but those never go into Wily's fortress...and he often has more than one. Sometimes the levels will do even worse damage to our patience. Quick Man's kill beams and Heat Man's disappearing blocks of doom are noteworthy examples.
 * And even the Yellow Devil is cake compared to the final level. There, you're required to fight Bomb Man, Fire Man, Ice Man, and Guts Man a second time. The catch is that you have to do it all on one life - they respawn if you die - and the bosses don't drop any refills when you kill them. Even if you have a whole bunch of lives, you'll eventually run out of weapon power after two or three tries. Later installments of the game reprised the element of refighting earlier bosses, but at least there you could pick the order, you got a large life power-up for each one you defeated, and they'd stay dead if you lost a life along the way.
 * Capcom's final bosses are particularly noteworthy, in this series and others. They always have multiple forms, devastating attacks, and iron defense. Wily will make you tear your hair out in some games, especially 7; the X series' Sigma is even worse. And you almost always have to start over from the first form if the last form kills you.
 * The Anniversary Collection - at least the Gamecube version - adds another level of Fake Difficulty to all the original games by reversing the controls so you now jump with the B button and shoot with the A button. If you've got it burned into your brain as to which buttons to push from playing the originals... Yeah.
 * Averted if you play the Gamecube first. Wasn't that difficult, besides Gutsman.
 * The severe overuse of Spikes of Doom and Trial and Error Gameplay in X6 made it extremely difficult to complete. Due to the Nightmare System, there were parts (such as one section of Metal Shark Player's stage with Spikes of Doom) that could be physically impossible to complete if the level loaded the wrong way.
 * X7 took X6's formula and suffered to the Polygon Ceiling on top of that. There's a good reason we don't talk about these two.
 * Mega Man 9, essentially a love letter to the NES games, brings back that same wonderfully frustrating, one-false-move-and-you're-dead feeling from the earliest games. It's gloriously fiendish.
 * Mega Man & Bass. Just for example, there's Dynamo Man, who heals himself in battle. If you don't take out his healing machine, good luck bringing him back down from full health a second time.
 * King in the combined tank/robot thing - he takes up from one to two thirds of the screen threatening you with Collision Damage, has multiple painful and hard to dodge and one impossible to dodge attack and his sole weak spot can be reached only with double jump or use of disappearing platform.
 * Not to mention that the GBA adds Fake Difficulty for Bass, by having no remappable controls, and thus a dash that can only be done by double-tapping forward. Good luck beating the snowman in Coldman's level.
 * The Japanese indie game Rosenkreuzstilette (an obvious moe take on classic Mega Man) takes this to ridiculous extremes. Remember Quick Man's stage kill beams? Well, how about a whole freaking stage full of them??
 * Though on the whole, the game is easier than your average Mega Man game.
 * This is fixed in Rosenkreuzstilette Grollschwert, an additional story mode to Rosenkreuzstilette featuring Grolla, this game's version of Zero. It's so bad, the game tells you right at the start that this mode will try your sanity. Why is it so hard?
 * First, Grolla can only use her sword through the whole game, instead of acquiring new weapons after each boss, eliminating the elemental weaknesses of all bosses.
 * Second, Grolla's sword only has one long range attack, in a game designed to have you fight at a distance. Said attack is pathetically weak unless Grolla is at less than half health, which increases the range and power of the attack.
 * Finally, and most damnably, Grolla takes twice as much damage as Spiritia, the heroine of the main game. To put all that into perspective, this means that, not only do you needed to get dangerously close to bosses to hurt them, but in order to hit them with your best attack, you need to be at a point where you'll die four times faster than in the main game. Without the weapons that made most bosses beatable in the first place. Hope you've got health tanks!
 * By the way, that charged attack? You need it against a certain fortress boss (nothing else reaches far enough across the pit). So you're basically at one-eighth of Spiritia's health against an enemy that gave her no end of trouble. Hard? You have no idea.
 * The sequel, Rosenkreuzstilette Frudenstachel, featuring Freudia, ups this factor even more, to the point where the same warning that pops up in Grollschwert shows up in the intro to the demo.
 * The freeware fangame Mega Man: Day in the Limelight revels in this trope. Much to the frustration of a certain reviewer.
 * The Japanese Super Mario Bros 2. Originally not released in the US in part because it was thought that the sheer difficulty would hurt sales. Instead, the US Super Mario Bros 2 was a Dolled-Up Installment of Doki Doki Panic. It is widely believed that sales of Super Mario Bros 2 - the Lost Levels version, not the Doki Doki Panic version - in Japan were significantly lower than the sales of other games in the series.
 * But New Super Mario Bros Wii comes close. Certain players complained that the 'Super Guide' mode would make it too easy. They were wrong- the developers felt free to make the game extra hard. And in multiplayer...
 * Several of the secret missions in Super Mario Sunshine can fall into this, as well as some of the FLUDD-less platforming stages.
 * Super Mario Galaxy 2 is widely agreed to be harder than the original Galaxy, but most of is particularly tough, and  can be flat-out sadistic at times, getting even worse in.
 * Ghosts N Goblins, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and the rest of the series, have an evil reputation stemming from moderately annoying Jump Physics and extremely unpredictable enemy movement. Which would be pretty hard on its own. But some games in the series (such as Ghosts 'n Goblins) went further: If you miss a power-up in the fifth level, it kicks you back to the fourth level once you reach the final boss. Even more frustratingly, you have to go through the game twice just in order to see its A Winner Is You ending.
 * Zelda II: Adventure of Link is easily the most challenging game in the franchise, although it doesn't mean much given that more modern and recent Zeldas have begun to edge into It's Easy, So It Sucks territory. Mooks that are easy cannon fodder in all other games are super-deadly here. The bats will kill you. The hopping spider things will kill you. The rats with boomerangs will trap you between two of them and stay out of your range; you get hit no matter what. Many normal enemies can only be damaged one way or at certain times. Opportunities to recharge your health and magic are much scarcer than in other games. Enemies are poised so that knockback will send you off the platform and into the lava every time. When you get a Game Over, you don't start from the beginning of the dungeon, but from the beginning of the overworld and must take the (often difficult) path to the dungeon again. Random Encounters go from "free XP" at the beginning to "you will not reach the Great Palace alive" by the end. If you aren't following an FAQ or a fanmade map, good luck making your way to the end at all due to super-vague hints for actions nobody would think to take on their own.
 * Speaking of the Great Palace, the final dungeon is more of a fiendish maze, and most of the enemies in there some of the most powerful enemies in the entire game. The first half of the final bosses is Thunderbird. To even damage the boss at all, you have to use the insanely costly spell Thunder (no using your healing spell after this!) and then you have to jump up in the air to hit the boss's now-exposed face while it drops fireballs at you. Then, with no way of recharging your health or magic in between, you fight Dark Link. Dark Link is the same as you, except incredibly hard to hit. He does Collision Damage to you, you don't to him. If you run out of lives, you get to take the Great Palace all over again. (Whatever you do, don't turn off your machine, or even if you saved, you'll be back at the starting point of the overworld, and you will have to retake the path to the Great Palace, which is worse than any dungeon.)
 * The path bears special mention. No roads that let you avoid the wandering monsters, meaning you'll have to deal with several mini-levels that are suddenly extremely treacherous (the earlier ones send a few enemies at you in predictable patterns. These have lava, Goddamned Bats to knock you into it, and Boss in Mook Clothing monsters in places where you can't jump over 'em.) There are three unavoidable stages where you'll have to face unhittable enemies dropping rocks on you, and ghosts that do damage and steal your Experience Points, and a Dinolfos or two. It's arguably the most brutal part of the game - harder than the dungeon itself aside from the bosses. But the whole game is tough and very unforgiving.
 * The classical ZX Spectrum game Jet Set Willy. Contact with any hazard (or falling from too high) causes you to lose a life, and the game frequently requires perfectly accurate jumping. To make things even worse, when you die, you re-enter the room in exactly the same way you entered it originally; this quite often resulted in the entire game being lost by a single mistake: you enter (usually fall into) a room, die before you can do anything, re-enter, die... (The sequel Jet Set Willy 2 attempted to fix the problem by causing you to respawn at the spot where you died, or the spot from where you fell or jumped to your death, which works ... unless the place is also the starting point of some monster, in which case you enter the infinite loop of death without any warning that it could be the case.) Not to mention that the original game contained a bug: entering one of the rooms caused several other rooms to become corrupted, making the game impossible to complete.
 * La-Mulana brings the old school looks and difficulty to the 21st century. A game where even the slightest bump with an enemy sends you flying backwards, where every puzzle is a trick wrapped in a riddle split up and scattered across a huge area, where every boss can and will flatten you without much of a problem. With this game, you either learn to think like it wants you to, or you won't get out of the first area.
 * Hell Temple manages to take this to an absolutely mind-boggling level. Tiny platforms in rooms full of Goddamned Bats, insane platform jumps with stiff controls, puzzles that flirt recklessly with Guide Dang It status, and downright sadistic traps take Platform Hell to a bone-crackingly difficult level that would make I Wanna Be the Guy jealous.
 * The Shadow of the Beast Genesis port was faster than the Amiga version due to sloppy porting, meaning some fast enemies would fly at you faster. The hit collision is also poor. Did I mention that there is no continues!
 * The Amiga version is this, but at least it doesn't have as many flaws. The Genesis port, however, is for the wrong reasons.
 * Shadow of the Beast 2 (at least the Amiga version, haven't tried the others) is even crueler. The general combat was a tad easier, in that there were more opportunities to heal. The game compensated, however, by throwing in a Sierra-like level of Unwinnable situations. You could screw your game over four different ways in the first five minutes, and it just gets worse from there.
 * Spelunky is a cross between a roguelike and an Everything Trying to Kill You platformer. Its difficulty is indicated by the variety of things that, even when they aren't actual One Hit Kills, can easily inflict more damage than you will ever have health -- and continues are practically nonexistent.
 * Impossamole(for Amiga, C64, and TG 16) nearly lives up to its name. Goddamned Bats that knock you backwards, often into other enemies or onto Spikes of Doom (or off a cliff of no return, possibly causing a Scroll to be Lost Forever), limited attack range unless you get one of the guns, which only last a minute or so, plenty of invincible enemies, which are especially annoying if they are produced by a Mook Maker, falling blocks that hurt you even if you touch them while they're on the ground, arduous platform jumping sequences exacerbated by Goddamned Bats, long low-ceilinged "hallways of doom" riddled with falling ceiling blocks, Demonic Spiders, and Mook Makers, and a Gotta Catch Em All gameplay element that involves collecting Scrolls, where you can get stuck in an Unwinnable situation if you missed one before a Point of No Return in the stage. And you can't attack underwater, making all underwater enemies Invincible Minor Minion. At least the TG 16 version had a password system, in the computer version, you don't even have any extra lives. Borders on Platform Hell.
 * Ecco CD for the Sega CD is so difficult that you can die when you have the invincibility god mode on. Even the cheat codes are hard to use and difficult to implement (there's one that lets you teleport to X Y coordinates which will usually end up with Ecco crushed in a wall...which will probably kill you). Which is a shame, since the music and FMVs are quite gorgeous.
 * The Ecco the Dolphin series in general (except for Ecco Jr., of course) is brutally hard. Oh, sure, it stars a cute little dolphin, but he is going to die. A lot. The first game is hard to beat even if you enter the invincibility code and the level select code to begin on the final boss.
 * Surpringly, the 360/PS3 version of Sonic Unleashed is absurdly hard compared to its predecessors, in the later levels, mostly due to Trial and Error Gameplay and sometimes rather unforgiving Press X to Not Die and Action Commands. In comparison, the Wii/PS2 version is usually easier.
 * WiiS2 Eggmanland will make anyone sweat the first couple times. It's six stages - one Day stage with some minorly sadistic twists and turns and an unforgiving S rank time (4:30!), and the rest are Werehog stages. If you're not a fan of the Werehog's "grab" button, expect a Cluster F-Bomb or two.
 * PS360 Eggmanland is even worse. Sadistic grind rails, Press X to Not Die to the max, robots out the ass, swing poles with Dark Bat patrols around them, and enough Titans at the end to make you weep in agony. Yes, those are both Hedgehog and Werehog elements. Yes, this is all in one stage. Yes, you WILL be switching between the two. And if that's not enough, the level WILL take over forty-five minutes to clear. Makes you pine for those ten minute limits of yore.
 * And now the punchline: If you want all the Achievements, you'll have to beat Eggmanland without dying once THREE TIMES OVER. Muahahahahaa!!
 * And may Yuji Naka have mercy on your soul if you're going for all the S-Ranks. Sonic is insanely fast in this one, so you're going to have to memorize incredibly long stages to have any chance at the daytime levels. It is addicting as all get out, though.
 * Also Sonic the Hedgehog related, Sonic 2 for the Game Gear. Tiny screen messes around with your resolution, there are traps everywhere, awkwardly controlled gimmicks such as those damn hang gliders, no rings for any boss (and many are fiendishly hard, the first one is the very worst!), a schizophrenic difficulty curve, needing to get all the emeralds to actually beat the full thing, and some are not easy to find, and a lot of trial and error (especially in Scrambled Egg). You do get loads of lives and rings easily, but even so. Aqua Lake, the water level, is pretty brutal as well in it's second act, which is entirely underwater. (the bigger screen for the Master System version kinda lowers the difficulty)
 * Sonic Rush Series is no walk in the park when it comes to later zones and bosses.
 * Alien Soldier requires the player to juggle swarms of enemies, traps, fiendishly hard bosses, a timer that always seems too short, greatly limited ammunition, and the fact that you are vulnerable when switching between weapons. After a while, Contra starts to look easy by comparison.
 * The NES game Time Lord (nothing to do with Gallifrey). This sci-fi platformer had you travelling through locations in a set of time periods, having to defeat a bunch of foes while collecting a number of MacGuffins before you could progress to the boss, and the next level. Nintendo Hard examples include:
 * Starting each level with nothing to fight with but your knuckles, while each level had progressively trickier foes from the off.
 * The first level (medieval) had a lengthy area of infinite invulnerable rushing at you if you stepped out from behind a wall. Perfect jumping was required.
 * The second level (western)'s boss was a fat gunslinging bandito that took, no joke, at least 8 minutes of repetitive maneuvering to kill. All the while shooting huge bullets that could eat up on of your 3 precious life points.
 * You could render yourself invulnerable to his bullets (somehowe) by spamming the fire button while using the pistol. Not that that one's easy to figure out. He still takes considerably more time to kill than any boss like that reasonably should.
 * Various rather annoying platforming puzzles to get the required objective items.
 * Including some instances where the player must punch a particular spot in midair for a jump boost, with no indication that this might work, or where the player must shoot the MacGuffin for a jump boost or to keep it from floating away as the player walks toward it, with no indication that this might work either.
 * In addition, the entire game is one big Timed Mission. Fail to beat it in under 30 minutes (and with the gunslinger boss, it's 95% guaranteed), and it's Nonstandard Game Over for you.
 * Milon's Secret Castle looks like a simple platformer at first, but quickly becomes incredibly frustrating. How bad is it? As The Angry Video Game Nerd discovered, the section of Nintendo Power normally reserved for cheat codes or advanced strategy had a section on MSC called Getting Started.
 * To get into detail, the whole game has an abundance of secrets, some of which are required to find in order to move on. Some are easy to locate, but others are quite impossible to find. It doesn't help matters that Milon runs pretty slow at first, which makes it slightly difficult to avoid projectiles and enemies and that he doesn't go invisible after getting hit, so Milon's life can be drained pretty fast.
 * Platformer Rick Dangerous and its sequel are examples of unfair difficulty, with many booby traps that simply cannot be detected in advance, and requiring you to play the entire game start-to-finish with the handful of lives you're given to actually see the ending sequence. They're effectively unplayable except with an infinite lives cheat.
 * Aero the Acro-bat, a mediocre platform game for the Genesis and Super Nintendo, deserves a mention here. The controls are problematic, and the levels are packed full of well placed instantly lethal spikes and Mine Cart Hell (or, in this case, Roller Coaster Hell) where one false move and you're dead. It gets especially bad toward the end.
 * This game doesn't forgive mistakes, either. Not only there are no passwords or backup, but the continues are limited and if you lose all of your lives and continue, you start at the beginning of the world you are on, which is tedious considering how large the levels are.
 * Popular freeware game N features this like crazy. An infinite number of retries for a given level are just a button press away, but your little ninja has no attacks, dies in one hit, and is pitted against such threats as homing missiles, laser turrets, moving laser drones, and rapidfire chaingun drones, all of whom can and will aim in any direction and attack as soon as you're in their line of sight, not to mention the standard touch of death drones, mines and death by falling too far. And to top it off you have a timer, not just for each level but for each set of five levels. Did I mention that's how often you get to save, by the way? Dozens of deaths to get past a single tough level is expected.
 * On the plus side, because of the Ragdoll Physics and randomly-scattering dismembered ninja-limbs, these deaths are usually pretty entertaining to watch.
 * The original Metroid (on the NES, of course). "Wait, people finish it in less than 30 minutes!" Those are the people who have memorized the layout of the game. Those who play the game from scratch know that between Copy and Paste Environments inside of a maze, not starting at full energy (you have to fill it) regardless of passwords, only being able to shoot forward and up, needing the ice beam to fight Metroids in the last level despite not being told of this and having a choice of other weapons, and real hard bosses (specially the last one, which requires you to shoot while being harassed by turrets and "onion rings of death"), getting through the game at all is almost insane.
 * It's even worse if you played the sequels, as it lacks a map, shooting in other directions other than straight and up, and shooting kneeled (which means enemies lower than your gun will never get caught...).
 * Metroid Prime 2: Echoes brought back all of the difficulty that you know and love. It starts out fighting large groups of possessed troopers, and just gets worse from there. Even the basic enemies hit surprisingly hard, bosses hit like runaway ice cream vans, and there are several downright sadistic platform challenges. And that's before you take into account a Dark World that constantly drains your life, and swarms with even nastier enemies.
 * Due to complaints over the insane difficulty of the game, Retro Studios ended up reducing the difficulty of the Wii re-release, but not by much.
 * The NES version of Dragons Lair. Not just because of the awful controls, but also because of the sheer number of things that will kill you instantly despite you having a lifebar.
 * The main problem is the game's littered with some of the worst examples of Fake Difficulty on the NES. It isn't just because of the cheap difficulty, but rather because B jumps and A attacks. There's a slight delay between ducking, making the game harder than it already is. Just the first screen in the game, the "dragon" shoots fireballs in a wildly unpredictable pattern. OH, you can't attack him from the right side. You have to attack him from the left side and avoid his One-Hit Kill fireballs whilst throwing daggers at him. The European and Japanese versions increases the game's frame rate. Another reason why the game's hard (for the wrong reasons) is that there's a legion of enemies and obstacles waiting to kill Dirk the Daring in one hit.
 * The arcade version of Dragons Lair also qualifies. Lampshaded here.
 * The Ganbare Goemon (Legend of the Mystical Ninja in english) SNES platformers qualify as this. Timed jumps, long gaps, and other various difficult traps will force you to get your reflexes in gear if you hope to beat them. The N64 sequels and the 2005 Nintendo DS offering were soft spongy cakes compared to these games.
 * There were actually three more SNES games (plus one spin-off), but Japan-only. Ganbare Goemon 4 ("titled "The Day I Became A Dancer") is one of the most innovative, most gorgeous, and most enjoyable game in the series. Too bad it also has th most hair-twitching situations: three out of five boss battles are one big Button Mashing hell, not mentioning a level (admittedly, it IS an early dungeon) with many unforgiving precision jumps whre you are followed by a big fast mecha-mahradja inflicting a One-Hit Kill attack, where at the end of the path there is door requiring 28 hits to break, after which it is very possible if you somehow make it through to get grasped anyways by the big hand hitbox... Cue more quicksand madness with enemies all the way along, before the next cutscene.
 * Another dungeons have you in stadiums with scarce floating platforms where you are bombarded with dozens of basketballs, the audience' "Hurrah" letters, and bazooka handling enemies, which should send you bouncing helplessly to your doom. Other levels has a fast karateka hand breaking the platforms you must CLIMB, then jump perfectly to the second platform. It is Hard enough that the Ganbare Goemon games have you restart, upon a game over, from the middle chekpoint of the level you were actually in, aknowledging the sheer diffiulty.
 * The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES. The fittingly-named dam level is only the second of six.
 * The dam level was nothing compared to the fifth level, where there were multiple manholes to go down, each with long tunnels with tons of respawning enemies that were absolutely merciless. The real killer was that only one tunnel was the one that led to the end of the level and the boss fight with the Technodrome. The other tunnels all led to a dead end, and by that time you've probably lost so much health that you were never going to make it out alive. Another problem is that the location of the boss was randomly selected from three possible spots every time you started the game. This meant that you had to guess which tunnel was the correct one EVERY TIME you played the game, because if you chose incorrectly, you were pretty guaranteed to die and have to sacrifice one of your TWO continues to try again, assuming you had any continues left. And even if you chose correctly one the first try, you still had the agony of the extremely difficult Technodrome fight. Oh, and it doesn't end there, because even if you defeat the Technodrome and made it inside, well.... good luck because you're going to need it, especially if you made it through the minibosses and to the final boss, Shredder who was quite "overpowered" if you know what I mean.
 * there was actually a way to figure out which sewer tunnel led to the Technodrome - the screen would scroll slightly more slowly between areas if you were in the correct sewer. Obviously, this was an actual glitch and not a hint and would only be discovered through guides. To add to the fun, almost every aspect of the Technodrome could hurt your Turtle during the final battle, including the tracks of the machine itself. Did the hitboxes on those tracks stay active in the level-ending cutscene, even after you had won the bossfight? Only those players who have narrowily beaten the Technodrome, watched their Turtle walk towards victory, then seen him curl up in a heap as he lost his last sliver of health on an already dead and unmoving enemy and then had to replay the ENTIRE BLOODY LEVEL as a result will ever know. (See Kaizo Trap).
 * People who figured out how powerful the scroll subweapon was and patiently stockpiled a large supply had an easier time, especially against the final boss, who would never even touch you if you spammed it, but you still had to learn the route to get there with your supply of them intact. Of course, continuing stripped all of the subweapons away. Good thing there are some to find in level 5 where you probably continued, if you have the skill to collect them.
 * Wolverine: Adamantium Rage is insanely difficult, especially the Genesis where a timer makes the regeneration factor utterly useless.
 * The fact that this trope is now rarely used was highlighted when in Donkey Kong 64, you must defeat a few levels of the original Donkey Kong arcade game to progress. These levels were harder than the rest of the newfangled 3-D game. (Most amazingly, they actually made them harder than the arcade game by giving you only one (1) life instead of three.)
 * The Donkey Kong Country series dance on the border between this and Platform Hell. The most recent installment, Donkey Kong Country Returns, does not disappoint. Try to beat World 8 without losing more than 50 lives.
 * World 4 in Donkey Kong Country Returns deserves special mention: just about the entire world (including the boss) is a fast-paced exercise in Trial and Error Gameplay where you're sure to die countless times just so you'll know where to go. Worse, the layout of these levels often tries to screw with your muscle memory. YMMV, but players may also find the Wii controls far less intuitive for sensitive platforming than the SNES layout.
 * After the relatively easy Jak and Daxter The Precursor Legacy, Jak II: Renegade amped up the difficulty level by a great amount, going from fighting a dozen mooks simultaneously at most to shooting your way through a neverending amount of armed Krimzon Guards. The third installment brought it down somewhat.
 * The Jumper series of freeware 2D platformers. Every stage beginning with Stage 2-1 in every game is an exercise in patience, finger dexterity, reflexes, platformer jumping skills, and precision. Unlike I Wanna Be the Guy, however, Jumper is more honest. It doesn't try to ruin your life with booby traps around every corner that you need to memorize; every single death in this game is less of the stage's fault and more of your fault for not being careful enough.
 * Prinny Can I Really Be the Hero will make that those unfamiliar with platformers tear their hair out, dood. The Prinny's most important move is rather unresponive and slow (unless you mash the button like crazy, not always an easy feat while holding the screen), enemies are Makai Kingdom cannon fodder with 5000 levels in badass, and then there's the bosses and the ridiculous jumping puzzles required to unlock the features of the home base... Let's put it this way. The game gives you one thousand lives, and then makes you need them.
 * Captain Comic I for MS-DOS is a good game, but boy, is it hard. It's made even harder by the fact that the game lacks any save-game capability, meaning it has to be played through in one sitting, but good luck getting more than halfway through before running out of lives.
 * Jurassic Park: The Chaos Continues on SNES. It's a great, underrated side-scrolling shooter, similar to Contra... but if you can beat it on even easy without using a Game Genie, you deserve a medal.
 * The NES port of Karnov. You have two hit points (only one in the arcade version) and the restorative-item-to-inexplicably-bullet-shooting-monster ratio approaches 1:100. You have no lateral control while falling off of a ledge. There are unlimited continues, however.
 * All three of Wolf Team's "Annet Trilogy" Mega Drive/Mega CD games qualify here. El Viento alone delights in throwing nigh impossible spike mazes, strange level design, and vampiric Goddamned Bats that never stop respawning at the player. Earnest Evans likes throwing the player into surprise spikes and skewers that knock Earnest into other enemies. Finally, Annet Futatabi (which is more of a standard beat-'em-up) is just an obvious beta where things are skewed waaaaay against the player.
 * Athena has to be one of the hardest platform games ever. (It's not just insanely difficult in the NES Porting Disaster; one reviewer of the PlayStation Mini rerelease of the arcade version strongly advised using a save state even when playing on easy difficulty.) Just how hard is it? There are two different kinds of jumps that happen in sequence, a short jump and a high jump (you cannot control which jump comes up the next time you want to jump). Each level has a time limit. Your character has health, but there are enemies that can poison you and when you are hit you can be hit again right away which lets the enemies juggle you to death if you get cornered. You can move right to move the screen forward, but anything passing the screen on the left is gone forever. In a later level the entire level is one big maze, and since you cant go backwards if you start down a dead end, you are truly dead. Also, in this same level you must find 2 special Plot Coupons or you cannot continue the game. Also, there are 2 fake Plot Coupons in the same level that look exactly like the real ones and they will take all your upgrades if you pick them up and make you do the level all over again. There are power upgrades but they can be lost with damage and use. If you ever happen to make it to the last level, then you must play through all the previous levels all over again also fighting all the bosses all over again before getting to the final fight. Oh, and one of the levels is aptly named, the World of Hell. Good luck, you'll need it!
 * Target Earth is a ludicrously hard Sega Genesis game. The majority of it stems from the massive amounts of enemies and the spray of bullets that they fire, even on the easiest setting (which is Normal, not Easy--that there is no Easy setting should tell you something). Also a factor is that you have to choose between Armor Upgrades and weapons. More armor means more health, but takes up a slot for weapons, which means you have to rely more on your Emergency Weapon. Your health may regenerate, but the infinitely spawning mooks don't leave you alone long enough to gain much benefit from it.
 * Super Meat Boy does not forgive incompetence; special note should be given to Cotton Alley (particularly Dark World Cotton Alley), the pseudo-Minus Worlds, and the level based on I Wanna Be the Guy. But even at the best of times, the game's levels are filled levels with Saws of Doom and various other forms of lethal decor that require incredible precision to navigate.
 * Let's not forget that the original flash game was so difficult that players only needed to finish 60% of the levels in order to reach endgame.
 * The Aladdin Licensed Games provide an interesting inversion of this trope: The Super Nintendo Aladdin is much, much easier than the Sega Genesis Aladdin (which is an essentially different game), so in this case Aladdin is less Nintendo Hard and more Sega Hard.
 * Freeware game 'Give Up, Robot' has no enemies whatsoever. You are a lonely robot going through 50 levels of what could very well be hell. Most of the people who play it give up midway. Those who do persevere do not get so much as a win screen. What they do get is the hard levels. The plot of the game is, as far as can be told, the computer that controls Robot's life is dedicated to tormenting the poor thing. There's a sequel; the tagline on Adult Swim.com is "You'll die a lot, but you get to kill this time", because you actually get to exact your revenge by escaping from the computer's control and foiling its attempts to capture you before finally deactivating it. Well, assuming you don't listen to the title and give up.
 * Splosion Man starts out fairly easy but rapidly becomes this. It gets worse, after you beat the game, you unlock hardcore mode which removes the checkpoints (and levels are long in this game) and makes you a One-Hit-Point Wonder. The multiplayer levels are even worse as mid air 'splodes need to be synchronised quite closely.
 * The unfinished freeware game The Legend of Edgar features very nasty jump sequences, knockback on hits (and non-hit damage!) plus many complex bosses with unique kill rituals. Admittedly this is countered by a plethora of save points, but those don't balance the game so much as prop it up.
 * This Is The Only Level TOO has an unlockable "FML mode". The "FML" is officially short for Frustratingly Manipulative Level, and it's a foregone conclusion that you WILL be spewing the other kind of FMLs while trying to beat it as the game designer did his damnedest best to make the mode as close to Unwinnable By Design as possible without it actually being Unwinnable By Design. Randomly generated spikes pop up everywhere, sometimes even covering up the exit! The map layout changes randomly, almost always resulting in your immediate death! You rip out what's left of your hair when you get to level 29, which is ALREADY Nintendo Hard in regular play!
 * Owata or (also known as The Life Ending Adventure). The entire game is (intentionally) Nintendo Hard -- no matter which way the player goes, or what he attempts, he will be confronted by an impossibly difficult obstacle (such as falling spikes that require a sense of timing that borders on the precognitive), or a deliberately fatal dead end (such as a ladder that the player automatically climbs down -- but then ends about three rungs below the top of the screen).
 * Super Star Wars on the SNES and all its sequels. The first level is a cakewalk, but the difficulty sky-rockets when you get to the sandcrawler and have to ascend a variety of moving platforms. You fell? Unless you luckily land on another platform, you're landing right back at the bottom (and probably next to some respawning Jawas). Inside the sand-crawler is even worse, with moving turrets that fire ricocheting projectiles while fire is blasted behind or beneath you, so you have to dodge both while attacking the turret. The Jawas and those square robot things that fire at you the minute they come on screen, often before you get the chance to fire back unless you stop every few seconds to fire randomly don't make it any easier, especially because they cause more damage than the healing items they regularly drop replenish.
 * Not to mention those incessant laser beam walls in the sandcrawler which you can barely get across even by sliding.
 * Oh god: The Kalhar boss monster in the cantina and the Imperial hover combat carrier in Docking Bay 94. They're the hardest two bosses I found out about. Aside from Vader in Super Empire Strikes Back (and only in that game. as he is too easy to beat in Super Return of the Jedi).
 * Made by the same people, Indiana Jones Greatest Adventures is somewhat more forgiving... in places. The second level involves having to escape a giant Mode7 boulder, a task that may sound simple except you are given very little room to see any of the obstacles in front of you, so unless you are extremely careful or manage to memorize the traps you'll usually die after hitting one set of spikes and getting knocked backwards into the boulder.
 * Namco's Famicom version of Star Wars. In this game, Luke Skywalker dies in one hit and must start all the way back at the beginning if he gets a game over. Also included are two elements of malevolent level design: Plenty of spikes and near-impossible jumps.
 * Batman the Animated Series for the Super Nintendo was a somewhat challenging, very fun game. (At least until you got to the Batmobile stage, whose timer was agonizingly unforgiving.) Its Genesis version however was a barely playable, Nintendo Hard game from Hell. Enemies swarmed everywhere and poor controls made fighting very difficult.
 * Speaking of Batman games, the original Batman game for the NES by Sunsoft would fall into this category. Lightning quick reflexes, level memorization, and maybe a turbo controller were necessary to get through the game, and let's not even get started on the bosses. There are even times when one MUST abuse the limitations of the hardware and game to get through. The sequel, Batman: Return of the Joker (which was even less related to the movies or comics) tried to compensate by giving you ridiculously powerful wrist-mounted guns, and it's still extremely hard.
 * Batman doesn't even USE GUNS!
 * To give an idea of how hard Batman NES is, the most well-known ROM hack for it is designed to make the game easier.
 * So basically you have to be a Crazy Prepared Super Genius? Sound's pretty damn accurate then.
 * Interestingly, the Genesis version of the original Batman, also made by Sunsoft at the same time, was more closely based on the film and easier to play. It was a rare case of a game from that period where people claimed it was almost "too easy" and "posed no challenge".
 * If you thought being The Guy was hard, try being a frog. Frogger 3D (aka Frogger: He's Back), for the original Playstation and the PC, is notoriously difficult. Clearing some of the later levels can easily end up taking weeks of practice. To put things into context, Frogger is a One-Hit-Point Wonder with Super Drowning Skills in a world with Everything Trying to Kill You, strict time limits, and surprisingly realistic Jump Physics that takes quite a bit of getting used to. Add in some slight Camera Screw, and you're in for one hell of a ride.
 * But he's a frog! How can you drown an amphibian?
 * Super Pitfall (NES). Enemies everywhere, horrible control, items only revealed by random jumping...
 * Bonk's Adventure is considerably harder than its sequels, mainly due to Fake Difficulty. And any boss from round 3 onwards is That One Boss.
 * The Shadow and the Flame, the sequel to Prince of Persia, was similar to the first game, with a time limit on most of the game and all-original instantly lethal traps. The new levels often forced you to take hits, and many of the large health potions (which you would need) were placed behind tricky puzzles. Enemies included skeletons that fully healed themselves seconds after you defeated them in the earlier levels, followed in the next several levels by Goddamned Flying Heads and snakes which kill you in one hit if you're not careful.
 * Most Vic Tokai offerings were definitely Nintendo Hard. The king of them, though, is Kid Kool. Unlimited continues, sure. Problems: You have 3 "days" (hours) to complete the game, and the time doesn't reset when you continue. Also, some of the in-level checkpoints can make levels Unwinnable.
 * Another World (known as Out of This World in America). Make even a tiny mistake and you're dead.
 * From the same developers, Heart of Darkness for the original Playstation.
 * Actually, Heart of Darkness is very easy. Yes, it's horrifying easy (and thanks to the beautiful high-framerate animation, fun) to die, but restart points are frequent except on the floating islands' rock-climbing scene. It can't be that hard if it can be speed-run in 13 minutes.
 * It can. Both Another World and Heart of Darkness are puzzle games at heart. Once you have got past the trial-and-error and figured out the correct way in which to pass each screen, they can be zoomed through easily (hence the speedruns). This doesn't mean that they aren't very, very tough games the first time through.
 * Comic Jumper, which is made by Twisted Pixel, creators of Splosion Man, so you expect it to be hard. And it doesn't disappoint, combining platforming, shooting, and manual aiming all at once, often requiring use of both joysticks at once.
 * Sunsoft's Journey to Silius is only 5 levels, but becomes insanely difficult in its later parts.
 * Metal Slug: So ball-bustingly difficult, the games show how many continues you used at the end. Metal Slug 3 is perhaps the peak of the series' difficulty, with many players taking as many as 60 or even 70 continues to finish the game.
 * ''Focus, a short, little platformer by Jesse Venbrux (the maker of the Karoshi games) is all about dodging missiles and getting these missiles to hit specific parts of the level. Your only aid in this is "Focus", an ability that allows you to slow time down considerably in an area around you and to Flash Step around the level. While the first few levels are fairly easy, the later ones throw three or four missile launchers at you that fire seeking missiles that can traverse the entire room in a split-second every second. Oh, and even if you've cleared the way out of the room, you can still be killed by the missiles. Did I mention you're a One Hit Wonder?
 * The Lion King Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis game has a ridiculously hard second level, even some of the people who worked on the game couldn't beat it. The game also has a habit of having many enemies on the screen at the same time, and you can't save.
 * Distorted Travesty, it starts out easy enough, but soon grows to masochistic levels of difficulty. In fact, the trailer for Distorted Travesty 2 seems to use this as it's selling point.
 * The Unfair Platformer, as per it's name, is ridicuously difficult and unfair by design. It does give hints on how to beat it, but expect playing it's 5 long levels over and over again.
 * The original Rayman is an acclaimed side-scroller, but one thing that sure isn't missed is its grueling difficulty. While the first few stages range from easy to tricky, come Bongo Hills, a Marathon Level with loads of Trial and Error Gameplay and split-second reflex taxing platforming, and the games difficulty escalates from there. And then there's finding all the hidden cages. Oh yes, and continues are impossible to replenish, and extra lives are not easy to obtain.
 * Eversion: Not only the horrific elements of most of it, but the inability to drop down a one-block-sized hole if you're even one pixel off makes it unnecessarily hard to avoid advancing enemies.
 * Exit Path: John Cooney gave Armor Games a duo of surprisingly dark platformers that are living hell. Laser-mounted turrets that auto-target if you're not under cover, pendulums that sometimes spin, buzz saw blades of death, crusher panels, and loads of spikes. The second one even has a massive Interface Screw towards the end.
 * Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. One-Hit-Point Wonder? Check! Trigger Happy guards? Check! Death Traps everywhere? Check! Getting killed by the smallest things? Check! Oh, and don't forget to save the Mudokons along the way unless you want to get the bad ending... As it said on the main Oddworld page: You have infinite lives, and you will need them!
 * The Xbox Live Indie game The Deep Cave has infinite continues (though it does keep count how many times you've died) but it's still has a very high level of difficulty.
 * In Amagon, Amagon's basic form has only a limited supply of bullets to try to hit the fast-moving enemies before they kill him in one hit. You do get continues, but not until late in the game.
 * Claw is no slouch either. While advancing through first half of the game is fairly manageable for an average player, then it goes harder and harder, complete with tricky jumps, countless pits of instant death, inconveniently located enemies and their increasing damage. Then there's Temple which is likely to make you tear out your hair in frustration. And don't get some people started on collecting "Perfect"(all treasures from the level). Even the first level is frustrating in this regard. Another ones are even worse.
 * Think the original Kirby's Dreamland is too easy for you? Try out the hidden "Hard Mode", which speeds up enemies and adds new attack patterns, and even the most seasoned gamers will be given a run for their money, particularly during the boss fights. But wait, that's still not hard enough? Go to the options menu, and set Kirby's lives to 0 and his health to one hit point (which basically amounts to you having to replay an entire stage if you take so much as one hit) and you are in for one long, painful journey.