Is "NES hard" real? What are some good but challenging NES games? Hard mode: no saves or password systems; only releases that had to be beaten in one sitting.
there were hard games with saves and passes and easy games without them. gauntlet is one of the hardest nes games and has passes.
>>12654280Almost all the good games had some way to continue or at least had some kind of shortcut. Usually they put you at a disadvantage like limited extra lifes or you lose your upgrades. One that doesn't is Contra but you have the 30 lives cheat if you know it. That was an arcade game first though. The Mario games are pretty hard but have ways to skip levels. The Mega Man games have passwords but the final set of stages in each game are some of the hardest and I think most of them don't save your progress. So say you've got the hardest 4 stages, you make it through 3, you game over, you start back at the 1st. inb4 someone says these games aren't hard because they've been playing them for decades or can beat them in minutes because they play them several hours a day and discuss strategies on discord
>>12654280These games sound horrible to play and enjoy, I understand enjoying hard games but 1cc no saves and shit is way to much.
>>12654280>What are some good but challenging NES games? Hard mode: no saves or password systems; only releases that had to be beaten in one sitting.Micro Machines
>>12654280>Is "NES hard" real?I don't really know or care>good but challengingDouble Dragon II, Street Fighter 2010, Battletoads
>>12654314>The Mega Man games have passwords but the final set of stages in each game are some of the hardest and I think most of them don't save your progressThe fuck are you talking about? If you game over a wily stage it drops you at the exact same stage
>so Hard I haven't beaten them (yet)Lolo's Adventure 3Micro MachinesSnake Rattle & RollMotocross Championthat Metal adjacent action sidescrolling I've forgotten the name of>Hardest NES games that I've beatenAdventure IslandRad RacerKung-Fu Heroes>meme hard (not that hard)Hector '87BattletoadsStreet Fighter 2010Ninja GaidenSilver Surfer>might be hard, haven't played enough to tellMurasame CastleSolstice>Never played, not sure if hard or meme categoryPunch Out
>>12654280Solomon's Key might be the hardest.>50 levels>no saves>no passwords>gigabrained puzzles>requires precise timing>can easily ruin your chances to win in any given room>too much shit happening on-screen at onceThe world record is about 20 minutes but a full play through for most people is probably gonna be a few hours.
>>12654280Tbh most NES game difficulty comes from shitty controls and other technical limitations. Respawning enemies for example, if you don't want them to respawn that's more code and some space in RAM. If you didn't have the space for that, you just let them trigger every time X coordinates are reached. Hit detection is another one.The number of "good but difficult" games on the NES is far outnumbered by the jank stemming from these kinds of technical limitations.
>>12654971Filtered by Ninja Gaiden
Its only considered hard because video games have been made significantly more casual and hand holdy for the past 2 decades
>>12654839>If you game overThen game over.>>12654879>Battletoads>Ninja GaidenIf you used continues you didnt beat the game
>>12654971I think even if there was a cheesy technical intention it can make for distinct gameplay. in something like ninja gaiden you have to puzzle your way through oscillating waves of enemies, one n done spawns would never be the same thing.
>>12654995>Battletoads>If you used continues you didnt beat the gameActually according to the devs that would be warps>>12654971>Technical limitationsAdding a flag and checking against it when an enemy is killed isn't the 200 IQ high level programming that requiers a 64-bit processor you think it is. A single RAM adress could fit a check for 256 enemies, more than enough for any game's stage, and the code to check it against would be a few bytes. I haven't checked Ninja Gaiden's RAM map or available space in the ROM but I'm certain it could easily have been squeezed in. Also, Super Mario Bros 3 does it just to name one example.
>>12654280"NES hard" is real, but its massively overstated from both a) boomers who havent played these games since they were 9, and b) zoomers who used rewind and savestates so excessively that they just brute force through the games with terrible strategies until they get through and then think the game must be unfair bullshit.Castlevania 1 is a great example of this. The entire game is trivial if you just approach each situation calmly and carefully, but if you jump around wildly trying to hit everything just before it hits you you're going to get your ass kicked. If you know about the holy water, you can abuse it and kill every boss except dracula for free. on top of all of that, you can farm infinite lives in the first stage, and you get infinite continues anyways, which worst case scenario set you back about 60-90 seconds. yet somehow people pretend like its some legendarily difficult and shitty game when in reality its mostly well designed and pretty easy.
>>12654280It's real but games on all 8-bit systems were hard.You'd find more games with unfair difficulty on formats like speccy and commodore because a bigger chunk of them were made by amateurs with no idea about game design.
>>12654280it's overstated but yes. you were much more likely to encounter harsh, unintuitive difficulty back then even in more polished noteworthy games.
>>12654280>Is "NES hard" real?NOPE. Every """"""""""hard"""""""""""" NES game is an example of horseshit artificial difficulty due to limited lives/continues.In reality modern games of the same genre are often MILLION MILES HARDER than le ebin hard NES gamerinos.Super Meat Boy is leagues above in difficulty to any NES platformer.Same with Cuphead and run n gun. If you beat those - you can breeaze through any NES game with infinite continues no diff/thread
>>12654280Ninja Gaiden was objectively a bad game. It was overhyped to no end because of its difficulty.It was a completely vanilla platformer with no dynamic elements like moving platforms or shortcuts, a fully linear level design.Even Super Mario Bros. had more complex level design with the pipes and the warps, secrets like climbing on the roof, etc.Even worse, the level/enemy design was a one trick pony: all the difficulty in the game relied on spawning enemies in your face every time you jump over the pit. This is literally the entire game, every level. Having a gunner shoot at the point you would land. Spawning a bat above you as you jump. And so on. The entire game was just a series of cheap as fuck pits and enemy placement over and over and over, where you just simply had to memorize if the game would spawn an enemy above, below, in front or behind you to prepare for it before you commit to the jump.
>>12656249'artificial difficulty'. Use real phrases with real definitions. Not reading the rest of your trash.
>>12656249can you just stop? your gimmick is old.
>>12656292ninja gaiden is definitely flawed but I don't think the game concept is completely bankrupt. this screen is a great demonstration of it when it works. threading the needle on a spawn pattern *can* feel good.
>>12656335>getting triggered by a phrase this hard>>12656338what gimmick?
>ctrl+f>deadly towers>0 resultsYou don't know hell.
>>12656712Hardest part is sitting through the music.
>>12654280People just use it as a blanket term to not have to over explain what they mean. They usually think of certain games like NG as you posted, Ghosts n Goblins, etc. Don't take it too seriously. Its more that the idea of how games should be during that time seemed to often take a certain form and that often meant difficulty to extend the play time of what ultimately would be very short games otherwise. Without the difficulty though a lot of those games would have ended up being terrible. Imagine NG with completely awful passive enemies, no platforming to speak of, no time limits, infinite saves, etc. It would have sucks balls.
