I'd agree with this on all the Metal Slugs except for 2. Normally it cost me about $4 (quarter a play) to beat a Metal Slug, but back in the day I could beat 2 for $1. I think it was the rampant slow down that made it easier because X (which is just a special edition of 2 with the bugs worked out) is just as hard to me as the rest.Originally Posted by Genesaturn
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Some versions decidedly more so than others.
Y'know, there's a few games in MAME that are actually pretty easy...those were the ones that win the arcade version of a Darwin award, mainly (e.g. Who Dunit?) but there are some pretty good titles in amongst the easy ones, like some of the Seta titles (Thundercade isn't hard, for example, at least on default settings).
Apparently one of the hardest of the classic spaceship shooters is Truxton 2's Japanese version (Tatsujin Oh / Ou) - that's saying something because this is a Toaplan title. I've gotten a ways into it but even the first boss will usually take me down without question. Of course, it's a checkpoint game, so you can't wear anything out with persistence - you MUST figure out how to do everything right to proceed.
Many games are tougher when you play them for points and some you can play faster as well - like flying to the right side of the screen in Irem's Gallop - Armed Police; Konami's City Bomber and I think also Data East's Break Thru allow faster speed as well.
Edward Randy kicks my ass, which is kinda ironic I suppose.
There are some games I can't see myself coming to grips with - most beat-em-ups; most racers ('specially the Le Mans or Outrun type); some others.
Rygar is one of the hardest
You guys have already hit on a few of my 'hardest' peeves, namely Defender/Stargate and Jack the Giantkiller, so I'll add a few not mentioned yet:
SUPER ZAXXON: Take a fun but hard game like Zaxxon, and then speed it up so it's nearly impossible to play.
VENTURE: Good game, very difficult gameplay, but the horribly clunky joystick kills any potential fun. Not as bad in MAME, but still hard.
SPACE DUNGEON: Again, a really good game....in theory....but it gets way too tough, way too soon.
I thought Double Dragon II was quite hard considering the amount of tokens I used to beat the game. The first Double Dragon was beatable with just 1 token using the same rear elbow move on all opponents so I suppose the designers fixed it by making the bad guys smarter in the second game. The later levels in Combatribes were hard too.
Interesting you should say that (being off topicish) I've worked in a arcade for two years now and I can tell you people who come in now are pretty stupid. We have an arcade machine called stack n' grab. If you've ever played "Stacker" you know what I'm talking about, but you add a claw into it. The prize being a stuffed animal. Now this machine yells out every 30 seconds "STACK THE BLOCKS TO THE TOP AND WIN A PRIZE!", it is posed in three different places how to play, and it gives five audio clues. As well as when you try to move the joystick it buzzes at you to inform you that you're not playing correctly. So... people, being the geniuses they are, come to me and complain that I've stole thier money. Yes, they blame the arcade attendant of purposefully stealing thier money. When I show them how to play any game they usually get angrier. People are fun to deal with sometimes.
Double Dragon II is not that hard.. its just a lot faster and requires more movement.. the Dragon Elbow still rules the day, only now you have to be at a 45 degree angle when you start it, and to move the second the animation is over. The problem with that game is that some operators would set the number of lives at 1 instead of 3, and that's just not right.
Yes Defender and Stargate were hard (Stargate much more so), but they weren't impossible. I can't play either one on a controller either.. can't fire fast enough using thumbs... I think I could still pull down 70,000 if I played an original cabinet, and I used to average over 100,000 at one point.
And yes, the difficulty curve on Metal Slug 2 and above was just ridiculous, but I have come to expect that from SNK games going all the way back to Fatal Fury and Sengoku.
AKA DM Brian, Thaco's Hammer 2nd Edition AD&D Podcast. www.thacoshammer.info
Confessions Of An Arcade Addict Podcast, host, executive producer. http://www.anchor.fm/coaa
Crawl before you walk, walk before you run, run before you fly.
Peter Pac-Rat (Atari) is pretty damn hard... I've played it on MAME and can't get anywhere. Defender & Stargate too... and I've never been a great Asteroids Deluxe player. It's pretty tough compared to Asteroids and Space Duel.
I loved that game when I was a kid. Haven't found ANY in the wild since the 80's though which is sad because it was a charming game. Played it on MAME last month and I never realized how unrelntlessly hard this game was. I want kids that think their geniuses on games like Halo to pick up a game like this so it can crush their egos and put them in their place.......Oh no, I'm starting to sound like a cranky old man now........
Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.
Pope Benedict XVI
It's strange I never memorized any patterns and yet I got the highscore on nearly every Pac-Man machine I've played. I once got 60,000 on a machine off of one credit.
Cyber Lip was a total quarter muncher, but it was fun. Now, Stargate? It was just hard. I know it must be great once you learn to play it, but after 20 quarters I just gave up. Strike Fighter is also brutal as far as new stuff goes.
Haha... that's what I was gonna say. Yeah, I was always better at the console or computer versions of most of those games. I guess the arcade versions were intentionally harder just so they could munch your quarters. But then, it might have been the distraction of other people playing other games next to me, or people standing behind me waiting for their turn, or just watching me, or even commenting on how badly I sucked.And of course, the knowledge that I had a limited amount of quarters and had to be on the top of my game might have made me doubly nervous as well. But I'll say that the most difficult ones for me were Pacman (I did a bit better with Ms. Pacman), Sinistar (as cool as it was), Joust, and fighting games like Street Fighter. I also didn't do too well with Punch-out or Dragon's Lair. I found Zaxxon difficult as a Colecovision game... I don't think I ever played the arcade version. I think the only arcade game I wasn't embarrassingly bad at was Millipede (as I recall I found that a bit easier than Centipede).
Sinistar gets panned by almost all classic arcade game players. I wasn't that good at it, but I think I played that game simply for the rush of adrenaline I would get when I heard "BEWARE, I LIVE." "RUN, COWARD!"Haha... that's what I was gonna say. Yeah, I was always better at the console or computer versions of most of those games. I guess the arcade versions were intentionally harder just so they could munch your quarters. But then, it might have been the distraction of other people playing other games next to me, or people standing behind me waiting for their turn, or just watching me, or even commenting on how badly I sucked.
10 yard fight: No matter what level you were on, there was a way to get at least down to the 20 every time on the kickoff return. I played it on MAME a few months ago and once I remembered how to do it, I got all the way to the Super team.
Renegade: Yes, this game was extremely hard, but once you learned how you use the back kick it was cheese. This game was almost a direct import from Japan, and even back in the 80s most games coming from Japan directly were going to be insanely hard.
Raiden: As with all games by Seibu Kaihatsu, they started off normal, and then the difficulty curve just got steeper and steeper as it went along. The trick with most Japanese shmups is to not focus on or get distracted by the background movement and pay attention to where the shots of the enemies are going. I might just play a game of Raiden after this post, just to see if I still have it. I was okay at it, but I didn;t really get good at it until the Raiden Project came out for the Playstation in the mid 90s.
Robotron/Defender/Stargate: Yes they were hard, but as others have said, playing the game was rewarding once you knew what you were doing. Although if the operators had the difficulty cranked up insanely high, the games still brought veteran players to their knees.
Punch-Out: You had to learn the timing of your punches and not just mash buttons to get anywhere in that game. Once you won the title and started defending it, the CPU gave most of the fighters an unblockable punch that made your left jab almost useless. Super Punch-Out was a much more fun game.
Dragon's Lair: One of the gaming magazines back in I think 1983 put out a complete walkthrough of it. It just came down to knowing where to go and what to do and when to do it. The Billy Mitchells I hung out with back then figured stuff out really fast and used to put up high scores.
You know what game that used to get my goat? The first Sega Baseball. For that matter, the first vs. Nintendo Baseball can go on this list too. In both games you had to be an absolute master in pitching to even have a chance at winning, because I was convinced both games would cheat in order to suck more quarters out of you. With Nintendo Baseball, the seeming random movement of the fielders on your side, the feast or famine hitting, and the ridiculous hitting of the CPU was frustrating in the extreme. With Sega Baseball, It didn't matter if you were up by one run or twenty, because the game would come back on you. It was as certain as the sun rising the next day, no matter what.
Last edited by Rendclaw; 10-20-2012 at 06:47 PM.
AKA DM Brian, Thaco's Hammer 2nd Edition AD&D Podcast. www.thacoshammer.info
Confessions Of An Arcade Addict Podcast, host, executive producer. http://www.anchor.fm/coaa
Crawl before you walk, walk before you run, run before you fly.
The real trick is no NOT fully power up your weapons beyond a certain point. It's usually superfluous to anyway, but when you do the difficulty of the game ramps up drastically to compensate so that you don't completely dominate. You know how when you die in a most Japanese arcade shooters everything gets easier for a little while? How the bullets are slower, and fewer? It's like that through the entire game when you're power level is lower. Bosses and strong enemies are destroyed easier, too. The weaker your weapon looks, the stronger it actually is (to a point, of course).
One of their favorite tricks to do it to add hail Mary type 'death shots' when you're powered up. That is, when you're weapon is powered up to or beyond a certain point, when you destroy lesser enemies, they automatically sent a bullet racing towards you. One of the worst instances of this is Sage's Creation's Insector X for Genesis/Megadrive. When you've powered up more than three times, they do that death bullet shit, which wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't a bottle neck on the (I believe) 4th stage where you literally cannot go ANYWHERE but forward through a narrow tube, and as you shoot the enemies that are approaching you, they leave those death shots if you're powered up. You either have to go through half the game gimped, avoiding power-ups, or expect to lose a life on that stage.
Last edited by Emperor Megas; 10-21-2012 at 12:22 PM.
Yeah, I know. I used to watch others play so I would know what to do, so if I had seen the walkthrough I'm sure I wouldn't have found it hard. But I think I also got bored with it too quickly to give it a chance... I got only so far & then gave up. So yeah, that was a bad example of a hard arcade game.
The U.S. version of Ghosts and Goblins- real hard, and Dragon Breed, two that were hard. Also Karnov ;-P
A few weeks back i was just going through memories of arcades gone by when i remembered `Space Phantoms` by Zilec,i loved this game which is a clone of Ozma Wars an early B/W snk shooter but the space ship sprites have been changed to give a horror theme.It is so difficult with so many enemy bullets on screen its hard to believe what you are seeing especially for 1979.I have made a video of me playing it with max energy (otherwise it would be game over in less than 1min), it is using Space Invaders sound effects but i believe it did not use the exact S.I hardware.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-cCDEZpycQ
If you have an actual TRON arcade machine:
- open up the coin door
- start a game
- switch to test mode during the countdown
- press the Player 2 button to skip to the level you want to start at
- switch it off of test mode (back to play mode)
- enjoy!
Does Paperboy count? Because screw that game, man.
Oh yeah, totally.
What a frustrating game. I keep trying to give it another chance and it keeps laying the smack down on me.
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