The 05 hardest games ever made, from Ghosts 'n Goblins to Dark Souls
Sunday, September 20, 2015
There's nothing quite like a game that actively hates your guts. Ghosts n Goblins, Capcom's uncompromising side-scroller that turns 30 today, is part of a revered club of ultra-hard classics that still keep gamers coming back with their masochistic difficulty levels. You'll need more than fragile armour to survive this lot...
1. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts (SNES)
The most fiendish of the Ghosts n Goblins series is this third entry, a game of few checkpoints and many enemies where bosses fill the screen and armour's as tough as Lego.
Each stage of Super Ghouls n Ghosts pits the player against one horror after another, but just in case that's not enough, there's a kicker: you've got to beat the game TWICE to see its true ending.
2. Jet Set Willy (ZX Spectrum)
The sequel to Spectrum mega hit Manic Miner saw protagonist Miner Willy CLEANING UP his mansion the morning after a celebration that made Project X look like a tea party at an old folks home.
There were 61 rooms chock-full of death traps, everything was out to murder Willy, and one hit spelled instant death. As if that wasn't enough, buggy code made the game impossible to complete. We'd love to take an axe to that Banyan Tree.
3. Ninja Gaiden (Xbox)
You can't knock Tecmo's 2004 Ninja Gaiden remake for its authenticity. After trying to get our head around its sophisticated combat system, we felt liked we'd gone 12 rounds with a ninjutsu master.
This Xbox hackathon descended from a line of NES platformers that were renowned for being some of the most challenging and merciless games of a generation.
4. Discworld (PC)
So, it turns out you use the butterfly with the lamppost to cause a thunderstorm in the future so you can steal the monk's robe. Why didn't we think of that?
As anyone who played Discworld on PC in the 1990s will tell you, the above statement doesn't make any more sense in context, which is but one reason why Psygnosis' Terry Pratchett adaptation is one of the most illogical and difficult point-and-click adventures ever made.
5. Ikaruga (Arcade)
When we first heard that EA was working on a game called Bulletstorm, we initially thought it might be a sequel to arcade coin-muncher Ikaruga, because that's literally what Treasure's shoot 'em up forced players to contend with throughout.
The screen was a mess of enemy fire at all times, easy mode made a mockery of the term, and the only way to get the better of this one was to play it to death until the layout of every stage had been burned into your retina.
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