So back in the day, before there was game shark, before there was a "pussy mode" implemented on games, in a day when the games with the best graphics were pixelated 2D side scrollers, there were games that were infinitely harder than your Modern Warfare on the OMGIWASJUSTBUTTRAPEDBYABRAZILLIANDUDE setting.
So anyway. Imagine you're a little 8-bit character and you have to jump onto a little 8-bit platform that's JUST your size. Not jumping enough, or jumping too far will result in your imminent lava-y death. You fail over and over again to get to that little platform only to realize you have to do it again. TEN MORE TIMES. FFFFFFFFFFF. Only, the farther in you get, these little flying minions will swoop down and try to knock you off said platforms. Or if you hit them while trying to jump you'll die in mid-air. THEN you'll fall into the lava. Oh 80s games, where simply touching a monster gave you fast acting cancer that killed you on the spot. : )
And you think friendly fire is bad? Try friendly fire in a 2-D game where you and your buddy are smashed together in one little area and expected to kill all the enemies without killing one another. Yes, I'm talking about battletoads. This game picked your ass up, kicked it around until you cried, then feasted upon your young, precious tears. Need I remind you of the bike part?
So you think Halo is hard? Went crying to mommy when you got butthurt by the guy that killed you 10 times in Modern Warfare? Zombies eating your brains in Left4Dead? Then you've obviously never played Contra. This game was so hard, there was an entire code made for it to give you 30 lives to start with, yes the famous Konami code. And by god you needed those lives.
And let's not forget the days before checkpoints and memory cards. Yes my friend, you wrote down passwords. And GOD FORBID you should mess up one letter and not be able to get back to level 9/30 in whatever game it was. I guarantee you people had sheets of paper with these passwords written down to share with their friends who also had a bitch of a time getting past a certain point in Mario. (It was the days before internet cheatcodes existed too you schmuck).
But despite all that, some of the best games of all time were released for the early systems. My personal favorite is Streets of Rage 2, which had some of the best video game music and playstyles ever. It was one of the best hack n' slash (relatively speaking considering you used your fists most of the time :P) video games to be released and hardly any can top it. Check out some game play from this epic here. If you're interested in the SoR games you can check out the Streets of Rage Remake project here. I support what they're doing with it, it's an awesome game and I'm looking forward to the full release.
Well that wasn't as ragey as I thought it would be. Oh well. I'm a little bit rusty. And no you're not getting an explanation for why I went a year without posts. I was busy or something. :P
