These games will make you rip your own heart out as a sacrifice to the gaming gods.

Ninja Gaiden - Many early games were difficult because their controls were about as functional as a typist who enjoys wearing boxing gloves to the office. Ninja Gaiden had its share of control issues too - like the fact that trying to jump backwards moves you a whole half of a centimeter in that direction, or that you can't just climb straight up walls, but instead have to go through an annoying process of jumping back and forth as if Ryu's childhood dream was to be the star of Pong. What really makes Ninja Gaiden hard as hell are the re-spawning enemies who repeatedly show up in the same critical spots over and over . What's worse is that the game knows when you're most likely to be in the air, like around items or (my personal favorite) on the other side of a chasm. Now that's asshole style. And this game is the very reason that I now hate bats, because those little fuckers would reappear within 2 seconds of the previous one's death... and then proceed to fly straight into my face, knocking me backwards into a pit. Dead. Ahh, the joys of Ninja Gaiden.

Bart vs the Space Mutants - Now I wasn't sure if this was the type of game that was hard just because I played it as a stupid little kid, or if it is legitimately a difficult game., so I just tried my hand at it again, as an adult (questionably). Shit... fuck this game. Who the hell designs a game where the jump button is SAME BUTTON you need to hold down to run ? What the fuck is that? Bart has two lives in this damn game, and two hits kills him. If this was Super Mario Bros, I'd say, "fine, no problem." But no, this is the maneuver-your-ass-around-all-kinds-of-shit-that-can-maim-you game... and your controls feel like they just came out of a penguin's ass. I don't even know what that means, but I assure you, that's what it feels like. You will die quickly in this game, believe me.





Battletoads - It's not so much that Battletoads was a hard game, but that it had one level - level 3: the rat rocket level - that was FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. I have never even heard of someone finishing that course without cheating. It starts out simple enough; dodging walls with pleeenty of advanced notice. That increases in intensity until Rare decided it'd be funny to start throwing these stupid little speeder bots at you, and then make you complete a series of jumps that would make Carl Lewis shit his pants. After that, you are treated to the let's-see-who-can-react-in -less-than-a-millisecond-about -twenty-times game, where wall after wall is slapped in your face, invariably smushing your stupid amphibious friend time after time after time. In a strange display of mercy, they put a warp in front of... oh, I dunno, the eighth wall or so... knowing that eventually that one would've smacked the shit out of you, too. Thanks for that, Rare... and for the five whole lives I already lost about ten minutes ago, before using the save and reload buttons on my emulator.