NES too hard?

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The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Metroid, Punch-Out!!, Castlevania, Ghosts n' Goblins, Gradius, Kid Icarus, Ninja Gaiden, Final Fantasy, Contra, Battletoads. All these games (and I'm pretty sure others) have two things in common: They are very hard, and they are on the Nintendo Entertainment System. This has me raising a question about the gray box that saved gaming: Is it just me, or does the NES have the highest difficult-game ratio of any videogame system?

Well, up there with Sega Genesis. See, the game makers realized something after those days.... difficult games took kids a long time to beat, so they bought fewer games while they were trying to beat the ones they had. Their solution, make them easier and/or shorter, and they would buy more games. Consumerism: 1, Challenging Games: 0

I'll grant you Ghosts n' Goblins and Battletoads were b*****es, but were the rest of them all that hard? I remember me and my friends beat Metroid and Contra so often than we had speed contests for those games.



I don't believe in conspiracy theories. I think that games are just so much more expensive to make that they're generally shorter to keep production costs in the realm of sanity.

I've found that most "hard" games are hard because of cheap mechanics. I've rarely played a "hard" game that wasn't like that. Easier games tend to be more enjoyable.

there's actually a piece of gamer slang called "Nintendo Hard". it refers to a game made so difficult by it's controls or it's gameplay that it takes a long time to beat if you beat it at all.

I don't think its so much that the games were harder as it was that they made you think. Like, take Super Mario Bros and Halo 3. Both hit games in their time... but personally I find that SMB was actually harder.

Maybe because SMB didn't show you the enemy? Or maybe because the 360 controller has so many buttons I swear you never have to do a combo?

Whatever it is, I think the older games were better, simply because there wasn't an understood 'idiotness' to them.

Battletoads was essentially an impossible game. Ghosts and Goblins was extremely hard, but very good players could do well in it.

The rest of the games you listed don't seem too hard to me. I'd venture to say that Contra, Metroid, and possibly Zelda I are easy.

my thought is that there is a difference between hard games and fun games, dont get me wrong I thought SMB and battletoads was fun, though I never actualy got very far on them and now my NES dosnt work. And so id ont look like a terible gamer i will admit i was 6-8. plus you have to look alot of games back then had a set of lives and no saving.

Nintendo published NES games aren't very hard. Most of the really difficult games are 3rd-party.

I agree that many of the games on NSE are hard because there wasn't a lot of experiance on gameplay design and not a lot of thought of levels of difficulty... just as long as the game sells.

The silver surfer is a prime example of this.... that game has to be the hardest game on the NES

Come to think of it, I probably never even beat an NES game without cheating.

I beat Final Fantasy many times when I was like 11 years old, but I've never known an RPG to be "hard". I have to agree that many of the "hard" games just had poor mechanics. But then again I usually only play a select few games, and play them so much I can beat them repeatedly, so maybe it's spreading yourself too thin that's the problem?

I've always felt that Sega had wayyyy harder games than NES ever did.

Most of the games for Sega's consoles (Genesis, Sega CD, Dreamcast) are more arcade style, so they're designed in a way to ellicit more quarters from you, rather than providing you the satisfaction of completing them.

I find all those games hard as hell.

No quicksave back then.

That's because the controllers sucked thanks to Nintendo patenting a proper d-pad.

Nah, I've played them on good controllers (even SNES/DS controllers) and they're still hard as heck

You should try out a Dreamcast controller, those things are great. D-pad isn't very good for Street Fighter, the buttons could be a little closer together for FPS, and the analogue stick could use a little bit of rubber grip on it, but other than that, I like it better than the GameCube controller.

Not sure why they took two buttons off of it though (C and Z from the Saturn 3D pad).