The hardest part of most of today's videogames is getting them out of the wrapping. With their auto-saves and instant respawns, modern videogames are like going back to preschool. Which is why I'm going to force myself to finish the hardest games in videogame history.
I've got enough retro emulation hardware to convince my computer it's a Dalek.
The catch: I'll be drinking every time I die. Because as an Irishman, I'm culturally required to drink when there's a death in the family, and you can't get more family than yourself (unless you're Alabaman, in which case you're hopefully drunk already).
Let the games begin!
Manic Miner (C64)
You're now either having traumatic flashbacks or a whippersnapper.
Manic Miner is about an untrained civilian who falls down an abandoned mineshaft, and his survival prospects are exactly as good as that would suggest. This game is so astonishingly lethal that landmines are scared of it. If you're dying of ebola, play this and the virus will flee your body in self-defense.
There is nothing in that title, or level, that doesn't want you dead.
Playing: Manic Miner is proof that children will put up with anything if you call it a "videogame." The game is more painful than many full-time jobs, including the entirely fictional "bare-handed porcupine plucker and salt-mixer." It's more stupid, and ridiculously unfair, than a fixed Russian Roulette tournament.
Every level features at least three stupid deathtraps you can only "detect" by triggering them, and you only get three lives, and they all send you back to the start of the game. That's not just pain: that's an evil electronic inversion of Buddhist philosophy where the only way to proceed is to keep dying, learning a tiny bit more each time until you finally escape. But in Manic Miner you don't escape. You get another level.
If a single Bond villain had played Manic Miner, he'd have won.
Oh, and to "save memory" there's no death animation or event; the screen just flashes and you're back at the start of the level (which will often kill you in seconds) without any acknowledgement that you died, and no option but to try again. That's not fun: that's how they sent people to hell in at least three episodes of The Twilight Zone. In the time I wasted on this game as I kid, I could not only have learned the piano, but taught one to speak French.
Result: VICTORY!
As a kid I could only play this for fifteen minutes before getting pissed off, and that's including the five minutes to load it from tape. This is but one of many past shortcomings now cured by drinking! But my Valhallan approach of "Drink when you die" almost killed me.
Six down, unknown to go
One six-pack isn't much, but I was drinking so constantly my stomach thought I was back in college, on my birthday, and drowning. "Stone Hammer" seemed like it'd go great with a mining game, and it did: drinking this was painful, dirty work that felt like I was being exposed to dangerous chemicals without insurance. I think this beer is a cunning way to get people to help dispose of used batteries. And I'm still sober, proving that exactly the right drip of pure hatred can cancel out alcohol.
Super Ghouls'N Ghosts (SNES)
The second sequel to one of the hardest games of all time, and the only change they made was to improve the graphics. Which is like being told the firing squad is using hand-painted bullets.
Playing: This isn't a game, it's a paranoid psychosis simulator. There is nothing in SG'NG that doesn't want to murder you. Wildlife kills you, things rise from the ground to kill you, the power-up chests can kill you, and on the first level the background rises up to kill you, with no way to avoid it. How can you hide from the game's scenery?
If you see anything threatening in this image, drop whatever you're holding and seek immediate psychiatric help
But your most lethal foe is your own legs: King Arthur has a double-jump, but because you can't steer it after launch it's less a "useful skill" and more a "suicidal catapult." You're firing yourself through screens loaded with lethal creatures, using trajectories so impossible to calculate that even a rocket scientist would say, "Screw it, let's figure out how to travel back in time instead."
Yes, even the floating platforms are your enemy over 75% of their surface
These games come from an era when accessibility was seen as a sign of weakness. It's like paying to go to prison: the game had to kill the first player they saw, just so the other inmates would respect him. It's so brutal that beginner players are being murdered in their underpants. And that's not a gag. The game actually strips you to your underpants before killing you, which is a cunning way for programmers to get "WE'RE BUGGERING YOU" past censors.
Since no one will believe I've played the game if I don't say this: I swear to God, I'm going to find out who programmed that Red Demon and torture them to death. It isn't just an enemy, it's proof that we'll lose the man-machine war and it was programmed twenty years ago. After the fortieth time that crimson c-word knocks you off a ledge, you'd sacrifice your own face just to kill the thing once.
Did you ever get the feeling a level doesn't like you?
This game is such incredible training in patience and lethality, the only reason they don't use it to train bomb disposal techs is they don't want those guys to be used to dying.
Result: SANE VICTORY!
There are two ways to beat this game:
a) The "True Ending," where on beating it you're told you have to play it through all the way again to get a magic bracelet
b) The "Sane Ending," where on seeing the True Ending, you invent a way for computers to have sex with themselves, just so you can tell the machine to go do that.
The "double ending" couldn't be better proof that the game hated you than if the ending screen was Tubgirl costarring with another girl and a cup. You just spent hours beating this game, and they turn it into a punishment.
It's at this point Arthur realizes there are loads of other girls
This game took much longer than necessary, because I've already reached the point where it's an alcoholism simulator: things keep going wrong, but it's not my fault because the world really is unfair, so I drink after every mistake. And I make more mistakes because I'm drinking. Luckily, unlike real alcoholics, the only lives I'm ruining are King Arthur's. And luckily for my liver, I ran out of beer far before I finished the game.
Don't judge me. It was either Corona, or not drinking at all while playing that
Please continue to Part 2: BEWARE, I LIVE! RUN, COWARD!
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