Todays youth are too thin skinned in gaming. It’s all hand holding this and tutorial that. Getting your butt kicked? Turn it down to easy mode. Oooh that boss in Dark Souls destroying you repeatedly? Open that can of beer and turn on some proper unfairly difficult games from our youth.
That’s right, this is an opinion piece where for no reason I attack the younger generations of gamers just because I’m older and hate their all so easy lifestyles. None of this chimney sweeping or living in a one up one down house, in a family of ten, always fearing you’ll end up in a work house… oh. Sorry, I got drawn into my imaginary Dickens world again.
Let’s see what retro games were just so hard, you’d cry for hours trying to play them nowadays. And to be fair, probably back in the day too.
ROBOCOP
It doesn’t even have the theme music from the game, but it does have a real forking awesome track instead. And that is really surprising considering it’s by Ocean Software. But that’s all just a front to trick you into thinking you are about to take a gentle stroll down a road, maybe kill a bad guy or two using the awesome software you now currently have built into your brain. Nope.
Holy mother forking shirt balls, this is The Bad Place! That’s because it’s the kinda torture Shaun would lay onto all those that enter his domain upon dying. It’s brutally unfair in the difficulty. You wanna jump? Haha, good luck with your insane IQ being preventing you from understanding how to use your legs for anything other than walking.
In that first level alone, if you don’t die, you shoot and kill more enemies than in the film. In fact, according to this game, everyone is a bad guy. The chances are, you’ll never get past the first level so really what happens next isn’t important. Though if you do manage it and you decided to play the C64 version, you may find this game ever so slightly impossible to complete.
There is apparently one level where it’s impossible to complete due to the timer being shorter than what it takes to finish the level itself. Now, how anyone got far enough to figure this out something of a mystery, but some people do have supernatural powers.
Just stick to the RoboCop game on current generation consoles.
TREASURE ISLAND DIZZY
The second game in the Dizzy series, this makes significant improvements over the first entry. For starters, you can now hold more than one item at once. Secondly, you don’t need to worry about acid rain, falling apples, spiders and bats as enemies that can kill you in a single hit. However the inventory system is still not perfect like future games. You can’t select which item you put down or use at a particular time. Therefore it’s possible to accidentally take off the snorkel under water and die. How an egg can die is beyond me, but then why an egg has a face and arms and legs also makes no sense.
Due to a bug that couldn’t be fixed, there is only one life to complete the game. So if you die at any point, you’re kinda screwed. That alone makes this the most difficult game in the entire Dizzy series.
DRIVER
Yes, that’s right. Driver for the PS1 is so hard that you will be crying before you even get past the tutorial stage. Unfortunately for reasons only no one will ever know, unless they perhaps worked on the game, or know someone that did and actually asked, the tutorial cannot be skipped. And it’s not like half the things you need to do in order to pass within the time limit is even needed once you play the game.
If you are able to waste hours, days, weeks or months of your life to successfully complete the tutorial, you will actually find the game itself is much easier. Though it’s still really difficult.
SUPER MARIO SUNSHINE
No, this game is not and is by no means a worthy follow up to Super Mario 64, which did a far better job at bringing Mario into the 3D realm than Sonic Adventure did for Sonic. And Sega had way more time to work it out!
Firstly, the physics of the game are way off. It should not be this challenging to do basic things that are required to play the game. Using the water as a jetpack type deal to get you to go higher is neither fun nor well executed. Whereas in Super Mario Odyssey, where this isn’t even one of the main things you need to do in the game, it’s in like one level, and it’s much better dealt with. This game is just a mess.
It was evidently rushed when it became clear that Luigi’s Mansion as a launch title for the GameCube wasn’t the big draw Nintendo hoped it would be. And then the system started failing in the sales department too. Luckily there is only Nintendo and Sony in the hardware race. Can you imagine if a third company came in and took Sega’s place. I mean, there was the Xbox prototype but… what ever happened to that? Did it ever come out?
Oh yeah, this game was designed with analogue triggers in mind, something Nintendo hasn’t used since the GameCube. So playing it on the Switch is that little bit more rage inducing.
UNCHARTED: DRAKE’S FORTUNE
Seen as a revolutionary title upon release, according to PlayStation centric journalists, it was certainly a big departure for Naughty Dog. Unfortunately now they seem to be uninterested in fun and want to remind us all how we are going to die and it’ll be after a long, depressing life. Or something like that. The problem is, the first game in particular, doesn’t really hold up. Even in the PS4 remastered collection, it doesn’t hold up.
For a game that on average, apparently takes 9 hours to complete, it’s probably got about ten minutes of story told through cutscenes surrounded by wave after wave of enemies you must kill while hiding behind conveniently placed rubble. Oh and there’s a puzzle here and there. Or that moment you keep shouting at the screen as you run towards the camera and the floor is collapsing. Or the moment you fork up a jump and fall to your death. Or any moment you die. Or turn on the game.
Uncharted gets props for taking the Tomb Raider and action Indiana Jones genre and revitalising it to such a high level that Tomb Raider would go on to base itself on Uncharted. But that doesn’t mean this game is full on throw your controller at the wall levels of anger generating.
EARTHWORM JIM 3D
Ahh the age of mascots. Every developer and console maker wanted to own a Mario sized mascot to make huge piles of cash from through multiple avenues of media and merchandise. Earthworm Jim was probably the most successful in that attempt, aside from Sonic obviously.
Earthworm Jim managed to achieve both a highly successful couple of games, critically and in terms of sales. It also managed to have a fairly successful cartoon series adaptation. So it managed to do two things Bubsy never could.
Unfortunately that’s where the successes end and both Earthworm Jim and Bubsy find familiar ground. Earthworm Jim 3D, developed by VIS Interactive and published by Interplay Entertainment here in the United Kingdom and Europe, and by Rockstar in North America. It was released for both the N64 and Windows.
Considering it released in 1999, on a console that saw the hugely successful 3D transition of Mario in 1996 and one year earlier, Rare’s own Banjo-Kazooie, you’d think there would be plenty of evidence in how to create a decent game.
Nope. Instead the development team of Earthworm Jim 3D went for the bang a hammer against the keyboard approach and toss out whatever the end results are.
You have a absolutely God awful camera, which even by the standards of early 3D games is torturous. Add to the insults the graphics look like someone took a photo of the shit in a toilet and used it as the basis for textures, just variants in colour, and it somehow manages to make all the things that’s great about the first two games, feel so poor that you may just have to destroy the game cartridge so nobody ever has to experience it again.
