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Remember the 2D era? All the classics, the controllers where u only had to worry about 2-4 buttons and the others were just there for show. Its amazing today how the select button remains yet it still serves no purpose, but that is a whole other article waiting to happen. Ever have a game that was just too hard? A game you played for countless hours and never finished. A game you just got so frustrated with you quit playing it forever? I have had some of those, I even joined the dark side (Game Genie) of gaming and still failed. What in someone's right mind could cause them to create a game that you can't even beat while cheating?!
One of these games was Air Fortress for the NES. This game wasn't hard, it just wasn't finished!! I remember back in the day when I was a small fry, me and my friend sat in his unfinished basement, on the concrete floor playing all day long on his old TV with a dial to change channels and a wooden frame. We played from level one to the end of the game, or supposedly the end in one day (we did that a lot). For those of you who have never played this great game, the object of each level was very simple. You go and destroy the generator and then find the power source, and, of course, take out all enemies in your way. So the last level comes along and we find the generator and take it out. We spend many hours on one level looking for the power source, it was no where to be found on the map, finally we noticed we missed a spot, but it couldn't have been the power source due to the maps nature (in which I will not go into), as soon as we hit that room, BOOM!!! Game freeze! Now wasn't that uncalled for? Maybe the game is beatable, but why spend another 18 hours trying to find out? What were the makers of this game thinking? You have all these levels that were fairly the same and all of the sudden you spike the game intensity 10 fold? Pfft. But enough with air fortress. That leads me to the SNES era with a game that not even the god of gaming can beat without Game Genie.
Vertical side scrollers composed of a space ship facing aliens and turrets mounted on the ceiling and floor. Gradius comes to mind right? Let me tell you about Gradius from hell, or officially called Blazon. This game was ridiculously impossible. If you thought you have played the hardest game ever you thought wrong. No RPG can touch the level of insanity this game proposes. Let me give you and example of one of the lower level bosses. Imagine a giant eye ball you have to shoot, that doesn't sound to bad right? Try shooting it when it has 3 shields that are made from asteroids that you slowly chip away at, not only that, but once you get one shot in on that eyeball all 3 barriers regenerate (Yar's Revenge on Steroids). Oh and when you get the barrier open, the eye shoots a giant laser at you, not to mention that the top and bottom of the tunnel you are in is filled with nothing but holes that shoot semi-homing missiles at you while all of this is going on (non-stop and more than 1 at a time). Now how in the world can anyone expect to beat this? Thank God this was only a rental. There is a reason there are games you never heard of, this is one of them. It makes you wonder the point the creators wanted to bring to the gamer. Did they want to make a game so hard that no one could beat it, not even themselves? Was it to increase Game Genie sales? The world may never know. We live in a 3D gaming world now where games are less frustrating, longer, with more extra things to do in them and with them. Are the games of today getting too easy? That will bring me to my next topic we will view. See you next time, and happy gaming.