Oldschool Hard

If you’ve seen this screen before, you probably used the Konami code.

If you’ve played games like Shinobi on PS2, or the Ninja Gaiden series on the 360 (ninjas, why’s it always gotta be ninjas?), you know what hard feels like. The margin for error is slim. The game is unforgiving. The difficulty level goes from ‘hard’ to ‘harder’ to ‘rock hard’ to ‘Superman’s dick’, and will never auto-adjust – you need to get better, the game won’t make itself easier for you.

These games stand out now largely because they’re so rare. Sure, many games on the top difficulty setting(s) are hard, but if you want to get through the game and see the sights, you have a choice. WHEN I WERE A LAD, walking 10 miles a day to and from school, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot, these type of games didn’t stand out: they were the norm. They were Nintendo Hard.

Bottomless pits. Limited lives. Limited continues. No regenerating health. No pointers to guide you to where you need to go – only lots of guesswork – “What the hell do I do now?” instead of “Hmm, what should I do next?” – Like Simon’s Quest with its completely obtuse ‘select the right crystal and then kneel in the right spot’ mechanic. Obtuse is okay in an adventure game where the point of the game is to solve puzzles, not in an action-adventure game where the point of the game is ACTION and ADVENTURE.

Possibly the ultimate Nintendo Hard game is Contra/Probotector. Everything that isn’t a powerup wants to kill you, inadvertantly grabbing a powerup can turn a good gun into a crappy one, and unless you’ve played it so much you could do it in your sleep, good luck trying to beat it without the Konami code.

Some other examples? A Boy and his Blob. Instant death drops, guesswork on how to use items to affect things that are screens away, limited jellybeans, and having no explanation of what each jellybean does until you use them. The worst part is, David Crane said he originally wanted to make it harder and only give you the exact number of jellybeans needed to complete the game.

Battletoads. A friend and I used to play this at least 2 weekends a month for about 2 years. I think the furthest we ever got was level 5, and as far as I know that wasn’t even halfway through the game.

Bionic Commando warms you up nicely with a reasonable difficulty curve, then SKULLFUCKS you towards the end of the game. Double Dragon with no continues and no way to get more lives (being able to beat up on your mate to win the affections of the girl was awesome, though), and Double Dragon III, which looked more ‘modern’ (at the time), but was even harder and a lot less fun. Double Dragon II was at least relatively merciful.

Metroid – what’s a map? Shadowgate, where instant death is the norm and you can be killed just by looking at things. Any of the Simpsons NES games, particularly Bart vs. The Space Mutants, with their floaty controls combined with the need for pixel-perfect jumps. Mega Man, especially if you don’t know the ‘right’ order in which to do the levels. Castlevania. (The original) Super Mario Bros. 2/The Lost Levels. The original Ninja Gaiden series. Zelda II. Milon’s Secret Castle. Robowarrior. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Punch-out. Gradius. And these are just the most famous examples – there’s plenty more Nintendo Hard NES games.

There’s often very little separating the best of these type of games from the worst of these type of games. Really, the only difference is that the best of these games don’t feel arbitrary. When you die, it’s because you made a mistake that you could recognise, not because the random number generator made a bullet fly at you in such a way that avoiding it was impossible. Playing these games does feel good in a certain way, though. Some might call it a feeling of accomplishment, I call it a similar feeling to when you beat your head against a wall repeatedly and then stop.

If you’re silly enough to still like Nintendo Hard games, a modern version of them worth a try is I Wanna Be The Guy. Image ripped from from Games Radar and tweaked to my satisfaction.

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I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a small TV by today’s standards, 50cm (20″) or so, passing a controller back and forth. It was like Retro Game Challenge, only less, you know, Japanese. At the time, I didn’t own a NES (and it was almost always a NES) of my own, so it was always at one friend or another’s house. We would play for hours, Super Mario, Battletoads or Super Mario 3, TMNT or Mega Man 2, Probotector (the robot-sprite-swapped Contra Australians and Europeans got) or Double Dragon, in between exploring the neighbourhood, getting into mischief and just generally being kids. I wanted my own copy of TMNT, calling a game competition phone line in an attempt to win one, having to make the choices by spinning the dial on our old rotary phone. It was my sincere hope, and probably in vain – we didn’t have a lot of money back then – that if I won a copy of the game, my parents would cave in and buy me my own NES.

Any information we could get about games came from thick, bright guides, red or blue, or the rarer yellow and green ones, whose name currently escapes me (but must have been made by Nintendo Power, considering they had information about games that never even came out) or magazines like C+VG, Mean Machines, Gamepro, EGM, and Nintendo Power. If the magazines didn’t have the cheats or hints we needed, tough shit, we had to wait until the next issue and hope it was in there. We would prod at games for hours, hoping for something, anything, to move us forward, then cast them aside until we could get the next Nintendo Power (or had put enough time between the last time we begged and now so that we could call the Nintendo tip line at a per-minute rate) to give us the obscure little trick needed to advance, like the Simon’s Quest kneeling trick, which I’m sure I’ll get to in a later post. If we were lucky we might get to rent a game for a weekend, and we would play the shit out of that game, despite our parents and their angry calls to ‘play outside!’, but we always came back to our own games, because if we couldn’t complete them, we sure as shit weren’t getting another one until the next birthday or Christmas.

We eventually moved house as my dad got a better job, and I finally got a NES of my own, with Super Mario Brothers, The Adventures of Lolo, and Zelda 2, in Christmas 1991. When the NES was plugged in through an RF adapter, I remember seeing a vague haze of what looked like a video game and getting more and more distraught until my Dad figured out how to tune it in properly, and then we were in business!

(Now my dad makes me do technical things for him – ‘Here, make this work.’)

I slowly built up my collection of games. When I saw the cool plastic cases with the Nintendo logo that the local rental store used, in awesome shades of dayglo yellow, pink, and green, I got my parents to buy me a bunch and threw out the original game boxes – who needs those pieces of shit when I have wicked plastic cases? I cried a few years later when I went to trade in my system towards some Megadrive (Genesis) games and was told I would’ve got more trade value if the games were in their original boxes…

Living in Australia, while we had a few unique games come out, like Aussie Rules Football or International Cricket, we were also denied a range of releases that the US got. Getting my NES chipped at the weird little hobby store run by a guy with a handlebar moustache, fast-bowler (it’s a cricket thing) neckchain and a mullet opened up a whole new world to me: Grandma could spoil me with new games from America. A lucky few friends had PCs at the time, beige monsters with ‘Turbo’ buttons, which also opened up the world of PC games like Death Track, Rampage, Scorched Earth or Prince of Persia. Sometimes, we’d dial into BBSes with an acoustic coupler to play door games. One PC, unfortunately, got taken out by the Michaelangelo virus, from a dodgy pirate swap meet 5 1/2″ floppy – actually literally floppy. These computers cost 2 or 3 times as much as computers cost now in real terms, and much more than that in inflation-adjusted dollars.

I look back on this period fondly, and remember these games well. Some still stand up today: my all-time favourite game is still River City Ransom/Street Gangs, even if I can now play through it in about 20 minutes flat. It’s not the best game I’ve ever played, but my favourite nonetheless.

I had found one of the great obsessions of my life.

However, nostalgia is an interesting thing. It first brings to mind only the good things, and then you once you think a little bit deeper you remember other things…

Post image from Sean Dreilinger, used under creative commons. Original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/3069425637/in/photostream/.

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