List of difficulty of NES games?

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Pokun
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

Popular games would naturally get more data and therefore more accurate ratings. Trying to order them by difficulty would very hard until enough games has enough data. Less known games will never have enough data though I guess.
Espozo wrote:
Memblers wrote:Ikari Warriors was the first 3rd-party NES game I had as a kid, it's pretty brutal without the cheat code.
I don't own it for NES, but I actually got to play it at an arcade, (Thunder Valley, in Virginia) which was awesome. I went all the way through the first level without dying once, until I reached a helicopter boss and saw that the game basically wanted for me to just hand over my money at that point because there was no way to attack it without being hit as well. This same arcade actually has an After Burner II arcade cabinet, which is really badass. I'd be interested to know just how much the PCB for the game cost in 1987...
It's a Senjou no Ookami/Commando clone but it used an extra stick to aim with. This doesn't work very well on the NES though so it's a very hard game. I used to borrow this game as a kid, the ABBA code stops working at the end of the third level when missiles comes raining down. I never got past that point.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

I got around playing Ninja Gaiden for probably the first time in three years. Even for an NES game, it is really dependent on memorization, because sometimes you need to take it slow and other times you need to just hold right and time your jumps and slashes, which requires memorization largely due to the terrible enemy pop in this game has. Choosing the wrong option will have you get hit by something, and because your invincibility window is so narrow, everything will then combo you until you are knocked off the edge. The final bosses are really the only part of this game that get infuriating, largely due to the penalty for dying on them. Because the second part of 6-2 is so much easier than the first, I would intentionally get a game over if I arrived at the door before the boss with inadequate health or items. People complain about the second stage of the boss, but it's not so bad when you have 99 item power and the flame wheel item and never have to jump. :lol: I actually had the most trouble with the third stage of the boss, because I had no idea what to do; I initially didn't know that you could take out the tail, so I was throwing items at it but I kept dying because the majority of where the boss throws the projectiles is a good ways in front of it, not immediately in front of it.

Man, the ending sequence with the castle falling at the end really goes to show how much this game sought to copy Castlevania. It's a shame the in game artwork is so much uglier than the cutscenes; I couldn't find anything in the credits suggesting that these were handled by different people though. Also, I know it's anime, but still, Ryu Hayabusa is definitely Caucasian.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

It was long time I played this last, how did you get the flame wheel on the final boss? I think someone said the sword spin is useful on it if you can keep it wall the way.
When you chop off the head of the boss it comes crashing down on you. I have no idea if you can get past that without taking damage.

Maybe Ryuu is supposed to be half-Japanese, his father is Joe Hayabusa in Japanese which sounds like he a Caucasian that was adopted into the family or took his wife's last name (hayabusa means peregrine falcon BTW, but the name is written in katakana in the game so I'm not sure how it's written in kanji).
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Sumez
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Sumez »

Espozo wrote:I would intentionally get a game over if I arrived at the door before the boss with inadequate health or items.
(...)
People complain about the second stage of the boss, but it's not so bad when you have 99 item power and the flame wheel item and never have to jump. :lol:
When you reach the boss (or whenever you beat one phase of the boss and proceed to the next) you will always have all your life regained, and all your items taken away. This happens every time a cut-scene happens, and was probably not originally intentional, but something the developers decided to leave in.
This means you have to beat all forms with only your sword, and adds a great challenge IMO since you can't cheese them like you can with every other boss in the game.
It does however allow you to return to the boss fully equipped with a subweapon and ammo if you do mess up, which is a nice helping hand to beginners who are just trying to credit feed through the game, without giving people going for a real hardcore clear the ability to cheese it. It's how I beat the game the first time around, but I wouldn't accept it for a "serious" run of the game :)
Man, the ending sequence with the castle falling at the end really goes to show how much this game sought to copy Castlevania. It's a shame the in game artwork is so much uglier than the cutscenes;
Ninja Gaiden is pretty much a high octane Castlevania, and I love it for it.
The first game tends to get a lot of praise for its graphics for some reason, but I agree that it's ugly. Especially the jungle is a garbled mess. The third game in the series is really good looking, though. One of my favourite examples of characteristic NES graphics.
Pokun wrote: When you chop off the head of the boss it comes crashing down on you. I have no idea if you can get past that without taking damage.
You can't. Objectively bad game design, but at least it's a small offense in an otherwise neat boss fight.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Bregalad »

Sumez wrote: You can compile a list of how difficult games are based on playing each of them "2 hours during an afternoon", and I would even claim such a list is really useful for someone looking for some games they can get through fast for a quick non-demanding game fix. I've picked games based on this many times before, when trying to weed out my backlog.
It wouldn't give a very good indication of the entire scope of that game, and pretty much any decently challenging arcade like action title would end up on the same abstract scale of "very hard", but it's entirely a valid way of looking at the game, as long as you take your prefix into account.

What I don't get is why my approach is invalid?
The reason you approach is, not really invalid but instead weird or biased, is that you are ranking how hard it is to 1cc game. But most gamers won't care. Their goal is to beat the game, not to 1cc the game. If you can beat the game, but it will requires many continues, people are still happy to have beaten the game, and only if they want to seek further challenge they will do so. For many of the mentionned games, the problem isn't that people aren't able to fulfull an additional challenge, many people can't beat many games at all, no matter how much time they put onto them.

Maybe YOU are so good of a gamer that "beating a game" is a totally trivial and uninteresting task to YOU. But for weaker gamers like me, it is quite otherwise. Our limited abilities, patience, and available palying time are determining when it comes to how "hard" we percieve a game to be.

This is how the games were played back then. Nobody would sit before the tv 24/7 until you beat a game - instead you just tried to do what you could for 2 or maybe at most 3 hours and then after that time has ellapsed your patience is over in the rare case where you don't have a more important thing to do.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

I don't think it's totally invalid for judging the difficulty, it's a way of playing the game after all. But thinking it's the only way or most common way to judge is naive. If you judge the Megaman games like that, Megaman 2 would probably be the hardest game instead of the next easiest.


All this talk of Ninja Gaiden made me dig it up and play it again after all these years. I seemed to remember most things although I made some bad mistakes early. I used 2 continues and was on my final life when beat it, beating all the final bosses in one go (thanks to all your tips). I should be able to 1cc it with some practice. But now I wanna play Ninja Gaiden 2.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Myask »

FrankenGraphics wrote:
subweapon multipliers in Castlevania is very easy for people to miss out on
When i got CV3, the first thing i did was read through the manual, as part of the whole christmas magic. I think i tended to do that with whatever game i got my hands on. So there's no chance i'd miss the significance of the double/tripple tablets. But for someone playing these games alone for the first time today, that experience might be different like you described.
I do not understand people who do not read manuals.[/url]
Sumez wrote:If you are allowed to continue indefinitely - how do you even measure the game's difficulty? If it's technically impossible to lose the game, what merits succes? And what about games that limit your number of continues? Is that something that makes a game "harder"?
Infinite continues means the highest/longest continuous performance is limited to "between any two checkpoints". You only need to play "at least yea good" for any segment once.
Without continues, you need to play "at least yea good" for the entire run; which means you need to become consistent at playing well, or raise exponentially with length your number of tries to just happen upon the right move.

It's like the difference between having to run 100m while correctly reciting single stanzas 50 (non-consecutive) times vs running a 5k while reciting the entire poem correctly. Or, for the unskilled, flipping a coin and eventually accruing 50 heads, vs flipping it and getting 50 heads in a row. (Finite continues would be how many tails you might get, or being allowed some options to restart 100m+stanza in the 5k on screwing up/being too slow.)
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by tepples »

Myask wrote:I do not understand people who do not read manuals.
After a court ruled that it was copyright infringement for a video game rental shop to make a photocopy of a manual for a rented copy of a video game, video game rental shops stopped including manuals with rented copies.

Or do you also not understand people who rent games?
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by tokumaru »

Myask wrote:I do not understand people who do not read manuals.
I don't think I ever read a game manual in my life, except maybe for a few pages here and there. Part of the reason was that manuals weren't always translated (at first, video games were mostly imported), and I was absolutely clueless about english back when I was a kid. Later, when translated manuals became more common and I started to learn english, I was already used to not reading manuals.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

Thankfully Bergsala always translated the manuals to Swedish. The manuals was part of the fun in the NES and SNES eras, that's why I prefer to collect games CIB or at least with manual. They are filled with great artwork and teaches tricks not always clear in the game. I think it was during the GBA era when manuals stopped being translated to Swedish (although I knew English by then so that alone wasn't a problem) and PAL manuals was thinner and black & white. Later I learned that NTSC manuals was still in colour and not so much thinned down! Nowdays Nintendo manuals are in colour even in PAL regions again but on the other hand they are not as fun as they used to be (applies to all regions). They just contains important (and less important) information on how you play the game with screen shots, no funny artwork or anything. And as games also comes with tutorials and stuff the manuals usually don't contain any unique information either. Thankfully 3DS manuals comes in digital form on the cartridge though, so we don't have to worry so much about loose cartridges in the future.


BTW I played through Ninja Ryuukenden 2 and 3. 2 was maybe a bit easier than 1. It doesn't have the intense difficulty spike in the last level as 1 had, it's more evened out in the game. Enemies also doesn't spawn on the same spot as easy as in 1. Finally it doesn't require as much memorization. I used tons of continues, but that is only because I haven't played it as much as the first one.
3 is much easier than 1 and 2, and the spawn points are even less aggressive (you have to go quite far to make an enemy respawn), and there's almost no memorization at all. The bosses are also much easier. I used tons on continues on this one too but I have played this game much less than the first two as this is my least favourite out of them. It's the most polished one though, with best graphics, effects and controls.

Looking at the cut scenes I don't really agree that Ryu looks Caucasian though. He looks like a typical Japanese guy do in Japanese manga, I don't think he is half after all (Joe is probably just Jou which I guess could be a Japanese name). Irene and Robert are most likely American or from another English speaking country though, judging by the pronunciation of their names.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Pokun wrote:Looking at the cut scenes I don't really agree that Ryu looks Caucasian though.
Definitely not with the mask on, but I was a bit thrown off with his appearance in the ending cutscene. To me, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=1m20s and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=18m10s don't even look like the same person. I can't look at the pictures side by side, but his eyes look less narrow and his face less sharp, although this could just be due to how the second image is smaller so it's harder to make out fine details. However, his hair in the ending cutscene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=17m36s) is much brighter than is should be to be "fully" Japanese and is definitely different than it appears earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=0m42s It's not a palette issue, it's just that the highlight is far bigger.

However, now that I think about it, Ryu from Street Fighter has had some hair colors atypical for a Japanese person (or any person, for that matter) so you could argue that it's just an art thing.

Image

About manuals, I got a lot of my current SNES and N64 games passed down from my cousin without the manual. However, I got these at an age where I wouldn't even be able to read them, so it didn't matter. :lol: In my opinion, if anyone even needs to read the manual, there's a flaw in the game design. I will admit though, I am sad over the loss of physical manuals for all the artwork and whatnot they had in them. I especially love the DKC manual where Cranky rants about the game.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

He definitely has Caucasian features as well as Japanese ones, but that's just how the Japanese artists draw in general I mean. It's even more clear in Ninja Gaiden 2, 3 and the OVA (recommended watch) where he is drawn even more like a very typical Japanese main character in manga. Realistically, I think he could be half or fully Caucasian though, but I don't think that's what's intended. I can't say anything about him in mask or the less detailed image of him in the intro.

About manuals, I got a lot of my current SNES and N64 games passed down from my cousin without the manual. However, I got these at an age where I wouldn't even be able to read them, so it didn't matter. :lol: In my opinion, if anyone even needs to read the manual, there's a flaw in the game design. I will admit though, I am sad over the loss of physical manuals for all the artwork and whatnot they had in them. I especially love the DKC manual where Cranky rants about the game.
I'm also missing a lot of manuals for my older games. I was careful with my things, but I also loved to read them which often made them break or become lost.
In the NES era, it was much harder to have in-game explanations for things so the manuals was often necessary (although they mostly explain things you could figure out on your own). Nowdays it's easy to have online messages and stuff in the game that shows up and explains every little menu or situation, or a display that shows what the buttons do etc.

Yeah Cranky is a classic example of how great game manuals used to be.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by gauauu »

Pokun wrote:
BTW I played through Ninja Ryuukenden 2 and 3. 2 was maybe a bit easier than 1. It doesn't have the intense difficulty spike in the last level as 1 had, it's more evened out in the game. Enemies also doesn't spawn on the same spot as easy as in 1. Finally it doesn't require as much memorization. I used tons of continues, but that is only because I haven't played it as much as the first one.
3 is much easier than 1 and 2, and the spawn points are even less aggressive (you have to go quite far to make an enemy respawn), and there's almost no memorization at all. The bosses are also much easier. I used tons on continues on this one too but I have played this game much less than the first two as this is my least favourite out of them. It's the most polished one though, with best graphics, effects and controls.
.
From what I read, they made the US version a lot harder than the Japanese version. Which, if you thought it was easier, if believe. The USA NES version is a lot harder than 1 or 2.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Jedi QuestMaster »

As far as Ryu being caucasian, I always thought his look was based off Leonard Whiting.
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Re: List of difficulty of NES games?

Post by Pokun »

From what I read, they made the US version a lot harder than the Japanese version. Which, if you thought it was easier, if believe. The USA NES version is a lot harder than 1 or 2.
Yes the NES US version (but not the SNES US version in Trilogy). I guess they thought the game was way too easy.
It looks like they removed the passwords (not like you need them), increased damage from enemies, limited continues and added more enemies. I played this game a long time ago on emulators, I remember it was very hard.
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