Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Originally posted by: quakefiend420
Originally posted by: HardcoreRobot
TMNT 1
that game was hard...i almost beat it once...but all my turtles died
Would I be totally evil, if I said that I could beat that game without losing a single turtle, at all? (The two hardest parts are those two rooms that you have to drop down through, with the moving instant-death spike-walls, and the underwater level, with the electric beams, and the timer counting down. Secondarily, you have to load up on boomerangs and wave-beam scrolls for the final level too.) I wouldn't say that the game is easy though, but it's possible to memorize the whole thing. I could also (believe it or not) beat Ninja Gaiden, CastleVania, and Ghosts N Goblins without dying. (Maybe the last one was without continuing, it's been a while.)
OTOH, here's the games that I've never beaten, most of which have been mentioned by others:
Battletoads for NES
Solomon's Key for NES
RC Pro-Am for NES
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out for NES
some Chinese Heros game from Culture Brain for NES
Athena for NES
Mighty Bomb Jack for NES
Kid Chameleon for Genesis
Boxxle for Gameboy (*)
* Interesting anecdote here - the game actually has a bug on one of the levels, that prevents you from completing all of the levels straight through. My friend, who was rather clever, managed to hack the password scheme used to keep track of your completed levels, and simply skipped past the "unsolvable" level, but got stuck on a later level, and had to call a "game counsellor" from that company, and the phone rep was floored that my friend had been able to get to that level, because "that wasn't supposed to be possible due to the bug". I found that rather funny myself.
I think that Athena has a similar problem. There was a solution printed in one of the early mags (GamePro, I think), that described how to finish it, but as it figures, that's one of the few issues that I'm missing out of my "early years" collections of video-game mags.
Worst part is, I can play the game all the way to the end boss without dying (a three-hour-plus affair, btw), but unless you go a certain specific way, and get some specific "magic item", which can only be kept if you avoid going a certain other path, in order to actually be able to harm the final end-boss. (SNK always had
evil end-bosses, but this was an entirely cruel trick.) If you've ever played Athena extensively (it's kind of like SMB in terms of number of levels and length, but much slower gameplay), then you have a vague idea of the PITA that this "secret item trick" thing causes. In fact, I don't recall what that item was, or how to get it, not without that issue of the mag. I think it might have been issue #5, not sure.
BattleToads was just... cruel. RARE are a bunch of sadists. (Well, all good video-game designers are, to a certain extent, but RARE simply honed that edge to a knife-point in some of their games.) This is the game that the Game Genie was invented for, folks. Seriously. I mean, I can beat Shadow of the Beast for Genesis, Ninja Gaiden for NES without dying, but not BattleToads. How utterly frustrating. I am forced to admit defeat at the hands of a computer.