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C Games that Hit the Wall and Shatter

Rhody Tobin Profile _ Twitter _ E-mail _ Homepage

"Nintendo Hard" is a real thing. Games were harder in the 8 and 16 bit eras. They were also much shorter. A skilled player can fly through most old games in less than an hour. Just take a look at some speed runs on YouTube. Still, gamers in the 80s and early 90s didn't complain, because games didn't seem that short when it took weeks or months to finish them. Nobody beat Bionic Commando the day they bought it. It was too hard! It took practice. Certain games took it too far, though. Some games were ruined by unfairly difficult levels early on. Take the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES, for example. It's meant for younger children, but you'd never know it, because of the Water Dam level. In the water dam is an underwater level where you have to diffuse a certain number of bombs within a time limit. The stage is a maze, and the time limit is so short that it's impossible to make it through unless you have the map memorized. There's no room for error. One wrong turn WILL be enough to prevent you from finishing the stage within the time limit. Also, for a team of mutant turtles, none of them are very good swimmers. That's a problem when you have to navigate a narrow tunnel of electrified seaweed. This level is unreasonably hard, and there's no way to skip it, so most players never find out what's beyond the dam. Earthworm Jim has a similar level. Most of the game is fine (or was fine in 1994). The platforming is kind of awkward, but it isn't too bad, and the game has a great sense of humour. Unfortunately, that one level threatened to ruin the whole experience. The Tube Race is another underwater level (which tended to be pretty awful anyway, at the time) that involves navigating a glass bubble through a maze with a limited amount of air. The bubble itself is incredibly floaty and difficult to control, not to mention fragile. It only takes a few hits to shatter into a million pieces. This would be more manageable if you didn't have the time limit to deal with. That time limit, by the way, has to be extended by finding semi-hidden air stations, meaning you have to explore with very little wiggle room to actually do so. Luckily, Earthworm Jim has a level skip code, so if you know it, you never really have to do the tube race at all. Finally (and perhaps most notorously), there's Battletoads. Battletoads was one of the first games by Rare to make a big splash. Like Earthworm Jim, its sense of humour gave it a strong cult following that has lasted for 18 years. It is also incredibly hard. The standard beat-em-up levels aren't too tough, but relatively early in the game, you're forced to navigate a hoverbike through an obstacle course. The bike is flying through the stage at about a million miles per hour and you have to weave your way around, over, and even under walls of varying sizes. There's even a part where a jump is hovering in the air above your head and you have to leap up to it to avoid a painful death. It looks easy enough starting off, but anyone who has played it will tell you it's actually quite hard. Especially later in the race when a stream of walls appear in rapid succession without warning. Certain versions of Battletoads have level select codes, but most of them force the player to either beat the Wind Tunnel level or just give up. (A lot of players choose to give up.) These difficulty spikes really are a shame, because for most gamers, these early stages might as well the final ones. If you can never finish level 3, it doesn't matter how good levels 4 through 10 are. Thankfully, situations like these are rare these days. Even the hardest games are pretty beatable. Old school challenge, like in the Mega Man games, is fine, but everybody loses when it's taken too far.

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