Be prepared to see this a lot.
"WE ARE NINTENDO. WE CHALLENGE ALL PLAYERS. YOU CANNOT BEAT US."
The first Nintendo Entertainment System was known for two things: reviving home console gaming and having ridiculously difficult games.
Back in the '80s, video games didn't have the advanced storylines of today; Excuse Plots were the norm. So much of the feeling of accomplishment one could derive was from overcoming the insane difficulty that the games provided, if only so one could brag to one's friends. A plethora of enemies and difficult jumps were not just the name of the game, they were the game. These games weren't just hard; they were Nintendo Hard!
The difficulty of these games usually stems from a combination of factors:
- Lots of enemies (or lots of bullets) that are hard to hit or dodge.
- Surprise attacks that can only be avoided by sheerest luck or memorizing their locations.
- Malevolent Architecture that poses a constant danger of death even when the player proceeds as cautiously as possible.
- A hero who can survive very few hits — often dying from even the slightest scratch.
- Lack of, or very few Check Points or Save Points.
- A limited number of lives and/or continues.
- No way to adjust the difficulty, or doing so is pretty much superficial. Even those that did allow difficulty changes featured Easy-Mode Mockery, making it often not worth the time to even play on Easy.
- Losing all or most of your weapons/powerups when you die.
- Stiff, clunky, and perhaps somewhat unresponsive controls (but only when applied to the original 8-bit, 16-bit, and (to a small extent) 32-bit generations; in more modern games, it ceases to be expected and veers right into Fake Difficulty.)
- Inflexible Jump Physics render it impossible to accurately dodge attacks in midair, especially if your character's jump height is less than half that of Mario's.
- The inability to attack anywhere but left or right while Goddamned Bats swarmed you from up and down of your position. Most games with this setup even denied you crouching to take out the enemies that crawled under your shots.
section of GameFAQs is a good measure of a game's difficulty as long as it has a sufficiently large number (50+) of difficulty votes. The minimum threshold for Nintendo Hard is approximately 3.50, and those that average over 4.00 are among the hardest games in existence. (Note: it is effectively a 2.5-4.0 scale)
A lot of arcade games were, and still are, Nintendo Hard for the purposes of encouraging a steady flow of quarters into the machine. The arcade owners have to make money somehow, you know.
Contrary to the claims of some derisors, modern Nintendo games can still be Nintendo Hard, though it's rather rare.
Nintendo products themselves are physically very hard (to break, which is fortunate when playing games like this), but that's Tonka Tough, not Nintendo Hard.
Apparently several classic Nintendo games are, in general, NP-hard, which is also not the same, but interesting.
The contrapositive corollary is Sequel Difficulty Drop.
When you add examples, please be sure to read the following sentence: If you feel inclined to add the words "for This Troper" or "could be considered" and cannot make a strong statement on the universal difficulty of the game in question, then it is not an example.
If you know where an example filed under "Uncategorised" goes, then please sort it.
Examples:
Video Game Examples- Action-Adventure
- Adventure Games
- Beat'em Ups
- First Person Shooters
- Game Mods
- Hack'n Slash Games
- Platform Games
- Puzzle Games
- Racing Games
- Rhythm Games
- Roguelikes
- Role-Playing Games
- Simulation Games
- Shoot'em Ups
- Sports Games
- Turn-Based Strategy
- Uncategorised (Video Games)
- Video Game Publishers
Cranky Kong: You call these games hard? Bah! I was beating games with twice the difficulty these had before any of you were born!
