Games that were difficult in your childhood

Having recently found time to try some of the many, many games I have on my Amiga 1200, I've realised many of them are infuriatingly impossible. Some of these issues being: no game saves, having to restart at the begining of levels each time, dodgy hit detection, infinite enemy respwans and the lack of the lighting reflexes i used to have.

Some of the main culprits: Alien 3, Total Recall, Another World, Midnight Resistance, Platoon and Barbarian 2.

However, there are some great games that I can still enjoy without becoming uber frustrated at my middle-aged lack of talent: Speedball 2, Syndycate, Monkey Island, Swiv, Rocket Ranger, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Robocop, Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, The Chaos Engine and Stardust to name a few.

I know nostalgia comes into it, but I think the old game designers really knew how to make relatively simple games (by today's standards), fun.
 
Minusorange said:
I was remembering back to my childhood of old games that were notoriously difficult at the time and I remembered Zarch which at the time I only got to play at primary school so no chance to properly learn it like you would a game you could play for hours at home but I always remember it being one of the most frustrating games I've ever played


What other vintage games did any of you struggle with or seem to remember as being hard ?
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We had an archimedes at home and I got pretty good at Zarch.
Once you had the coordination right you had lots of control, but learning how to do it took ages. None of my friends could do it :)

Thinking back zarch may have prepared me for rc helicopter flying. The fixed perspective camera and resulting "backwards" controls when flying towards you are good orientation training.

I also had a game called "chuck Rock" a sideways scrolling platformer. You got 3 lives and no save game.
I never completed it as you had to play for ages to get to the final levels and even with 3 lives left I never worked out how to kill that rhino final boss.

Edit - added rc heli gumf.
 
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jsmoke said:
Spellbound on the ZX spectrum was tough
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Did you play any of the other Magic Knight games? I thought Spellbound was semi logical compared to Knight Tyme and especially Stormbringer...couldn't even get past the first few screens in that one.
 
x-st said:
Did you play any of the other Magic Knight games? I thought Spellbound was semi logical compared to Knight Tyme and especially Stormbringer...couldn't even get past the first few screens in that one.
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Only remember SB but I did have quite a few games, I forget a lot of them.
 
Spellbound was hard for me. I used to be able to get to the 4th floor (I think) where by you had a wall and had to use a horn to blow it over. I know this now but, at the time, I had no idea how to get past it.

Chaos Strikes Back. I've completed this recently but this game was absolutely solid.

Parallax was evil. I loved playing it on the C64 but could only get a little bit into this game.




M.
 
I remember being invited to a friend's house, aged about 10, and he showed me an adventure game on his Amiga that he just couldn't proceed on. He could get about 5 minutes into it, but was stuck and was a bit disappointed with what had been a quite expensive xmas present.

Years later, I was going through a bit of an Amiga phase (having never owned one: too poor), and looked it up. Took ages to figure out which game it was, as I could only remember a couple of early details (jail cell, underwater with a fish bowl on your head, a shark bit htat my mate got stuck on... not much else), but found it in the end: Curse of Enchantia. It's still very tough, but I got about halfway through before getting bored (might have consulted a guide once or twice: not an option back in the early 90s).
 
Toughest thing about the spectrum was waiting 5 minutes for a game to load.. then see it crash before you got to play it.

Jet Set Willy was tough!!! Pixel perfect movement required.

Some of those old games required amazing memory - you had to remember what was coming next. Not sure my powers of recall would work too well nowadays on the old classics..
 
As above, C64, Spellbound, Finders Keepers - I never finished them. I have been looking up youtube video walkthroughs which are quite interesting and fun to watch the game to completion.

Also, the Dizzy games, Harrier Attack (could you finish that?) Impossible Mission (stay a while, stay forever!!!!) as i had no clue what i was meant to be doing, same with V.
 
The Rings Of Power on the Mega Drive was quite a challenge.

You'd spend hours looking for stuff, through the most cryptic of clues that were often multiple branched. Even now with the online page that has the dedicated guide, it requires some working out.

Awesome game though, well ahead of it's time.
 
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