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Nintendo Hard/Uncategorised/Other Media: Difference between revisions
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== Game Shows ==
* The Nickelodeon kids show ''[[Legends of the Hidden Temple]]'' had a really low success rate (less than 25%). The locked doors guaranteed that the artifact you need to find was in the LAST room you'd enter, and you had to perform tasks and solve puzzles in up to 12 rooms before you found it (some were simple, like the Throne of the Pretender, but others, like the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, messed EVERYONE up.) Adding to that were Temple Guards, who would "kidnap" you and would cause your teammate to have to start over from the beginning. Throw in darkness, shadows, music, fog, Kirk Fogg, and more than one kid ended up walking in circles with confused looks on their faces.
* The final round in ''[[Where in
** ''World'' wasn't much better, the beacons the player had to place needed to be put in ''exactly'' the right spot or the sensor wouldn't register. Not only that but they were just ''slightly'' top-heavy and had a tendency to fall over and need to be replaced in order to win. Add in the fact that the locations were given in such an order that it usually forced the player to wind through beacons they had already placed (thus accidentally knocking them over and having to spend extra time putting them back up) led to man grand prizes lost.
* UK show ''[[The Crystal Maze]]'' was won by only a few teams in its entire run. The individual challenges to earn crystals ranged from dead simple to unfair, but what ultimately decided the difference between winning an adventure holiday or going home with only a souvenir paperweight was the Crystal Dome, a giant hollow wind chamber in the shape of a crystal in which the team would have a period of five seconds per crystal to grab at slips of foil, hoping to collect 100 more gold ones than silver ones.
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*** The most devastating obstacle of them all, by far, is the Cliffhanger. It's basically a hand-strength obstacle placed in the middle of the 3rd round, where upper-body strength is the means to victory. The first three versions were rather simple, with anyone with enough hand strength able to get through it handily. Then came the 4th version, which included a rise so that most competitors would have to JUMP across the gaps between bars 2 and 3 to proceed, which was bad enough considering most contestants are EXHAUSTED by that point. [[It Got Worse|Then]], after the Urushihara beat the course, came the [http://sasukepedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Ultimatecliffhanger.png Ultimate Cliffhanger]...
*** Possibly even worse is the female version of the tournament, which only one woman has successfully beaten (and she's done it ''three times''!). In the most recent one, four of the original tournament's recurring competitors (dubbed the All-Stars) had each mentored a female competitor. None of their proteges made it past the first stage.
** ''[[
** ''[[Unbeatable Banzuke]]'' mostly involves either getting through an insanely complicated obstacle course using an unusual method of travel (like walking on one's hands, on stilts, with a wheelbarrow, etc.), completing an oversized children's game, or performing as many exercise feats as possible within a time limit. Out of the hundreds that try their luck, only 2 or 3 on average manage to succeed, with the record before the show's cancellation being 7 wins.
** ''[[Hole In The Wall]]'' is another game that's pretty difficult to win, due to the fact that most of the time the holes are way to small for the average contestants to fit through properly and if the hole is destroyed, the contestant loses the round regardless of whether they were pushed off of the course or not. The difficulty was shot [[Up to Eleven]] during the final round where the contestant was BLINDFOLDED and had to listen to their teammates instructions in order to get through the hole. Couple this with the fact that some of the later rounds had holes that were airborne in the MIDDLE of the wall, which required the contestant to [[Luck-Based Mission|blindly jump and get lucky enough to clear the hole]] and you can see ''why'' the success rate of the winners is so low.
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* UK kids [[Game Show]] ''[[Raven]]'' contains The Way Of The Warrior, an assault course played 3 times a week over each season's four week run. It's played by the contestant currently in last place, and it keeps being played until it's defeated. Over the first 8 seasons, it's been attempted 101 times, and won just four, and each time it's come back harder the next year... Not that no-one defeating it stops them upping the difficulty between seasons, it simply isn't guaranteed to be increased in difficulty unless someone beats it.
* The earlier UK kids [[Game Show]] ''[[Knightmare]]'' had a similar record- 80 teams challenged the Dungeon of Deceit over the course of 8 series. 72 of them failed. The first and third series didn't have a single winner.
* ''[[Wipeout 2008
** In a different vein, the unrelated UK quiz show ''Wipeout'' (also ported to the U.S. with Peter Tomarken as host), which had a fairly standard setup of picking the correct answers from the false ones, all displayed on a big screen. But picking an incorrect answer zeroed your entire winnings so far, each round continued until either all the correct answers or all the 'wipeouts' were found, and the prizes weren't much anyway. Players would usually pass after a correct answer rather than risk another one, and you'd frequently see two players going home with nothing and the third with a hundred quid or so.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Several ''[[
** The original [[
{{quote| '''E. Gary Gygax''': [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html Heh, heh. Oh, man. The Sphere of Annihilation in the statue's mouth. That never gets old.]}}
** As is ''Throne of Bloodstone,'' the module that has your party going to the layer of the Abyss that Orcus resides in order to steal his artifact wand.
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** ''Labyrinth of Madness'' - not only are the monsters and traps extremely deadly, but to progress past certain points, you need to find magical glyphs, without which certain parts of the dungeon (mainly the entrances to new areas) don't even ''exist'' for you. There are twenty in all, and you're pretty much screwed if you miss even one. (To make matters worse, the original printing has a typo that makes one of them impossible to actually get, but honestly, most groups will give up before this actually becomes a problem.)
*** There was a comic book adaptation of the Labyrinth of Madness. The dwarven fighter was instant-killed off about 3 pages in, turned into a zombie and sent back to attack his friends. Says it all, really.
** The Skinsaw Murders, a ''[[
* The [[Cthulhu Mythos]] board game ''[[Arkham Horror]]'' is extremely difficult. The randomly drawnly opponent [[Eldritch Abomination]] [[Big Bad]] changes a number of rules, monsters, and often has instant-kill conditions should the game end in a final battle. Strategy and teamwork is mandatory, random events and blind luck will usually ruin your plans, and it's all a [[Race Against the Clock]]. Expansions for the game generally exist to make the game ever ''harder'', such as adding [[The Dragon]] or [[The Corruption]] to the mix. In general, you don't expect to ''win'' a given game, completely appropriate to the [[Cosmic Horror Story|setting]].
** This intense difficulty can be avoided by using custom characters. Even if they themselves are not unbalanced, putting them together, each designed for a certain task (i.e. one is made to close and explore gates, another is combat, another is movement, etc), makes the game from something incredibly difficult to relatively easy - even beating the end abominations becomes a fairly simple task.
* ''[[
* The ''[[Lone Wolf]]'' [[Gamebook]] series got progressively more difficult around book eight or so, but never really reached this level of madness...except for ''The Prisoners Of Time.'' In addition to the usual death traps and [[Random Number God]] bullshit, there were three extremely difficult fights right at the end. In the first, if you brought the [[Infinity+1 Sword]] from an earlier book, the boss' stats were nearly impossible to overcome. The second featured similar issues, regardless of equipment. And the third was on ''the next entry,'' giving you no chance to heal, '''and''' you started by taking unavoidable damage.
* [[Paranoia|Friend Computer]] would like to remind you that only Commie Mutant Traitors would say the Troubleshooters in Paranoia are given six clones because of the stunningly high death rate in Alpha Complex. Complaining about a 2% survival rate at one week is treason. This information is above your clearance level, Citizen; please report to your nearest termination center immediately or wait for your local extermination team. Have a wonderful daycycle!
* ''[[
* ''[[Betrayal
* The ''[[Deadlands]]'' dime novel adventure ''Night Train'' is alternately referred to as PC Death Train. A locomotive carrying thirty nosferatu and a zombie conductor (and not one of those relatively easy to beat head shot zombies) will do that. Rumors that its writer John Goff gets a royalty every time running it ends in a [[Total Party Kill]] are officially denied, however.
* [[Battlestar Galactica]] the board game is extremely hard for a traitor game. Often favoring the Cylon rather than the Humans. More often than not the Cylons win.
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