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I still fail to see how respecting the game's limited supply of lives is an "arbitrary rule". It's a completely intended part of the game's design, and anything else is an attempt to apply a much more "modern" approach to classic games, where any challenge in a game is designed to be a short range checkpoint-to-checkpoint experience, and extra lives is a novelty with no real value (see: Super Mario Galaxy).
It's the approach where you play a game until you have gone from the start to the end, and then you can move on to the next game - as opposed to having fun replaying the game over and over until you get good enough to master it.

That isn't how games were played back in the NES days, and it's not what they are designed for. There is a reason the screen says "GAME OVER" in capital letters before it allows you to choose "continue". They are designed for true replayability, and to continue challenging the player on every new playthrough. If you don't care to delve deeper into the game, you can choose to spam continues and just spend a few hours with the game, and that's fine if it's fun for you. Hell, a lot of games don't really deserve more than that anyway. But don't come telling me afterwards that the game was "easy" because you beat it in a few hours.

Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.

Perhaps the same could be said about Super mario bros. 3. Well, if you run out of them, you need to redo the world you're on, which is a drastic change of play. But at the same time, the game is extremely generous with 1ups, and the levels are rather short (a bit like close-range checkpoint to checkpoint). So most of the time, you won't experience what a "game over" feels like.

SMB2 is a lot harsher until you're good enough to beat it in one go. Perhaps also a bit harsher than SMB1? I don't remember, it may have been a full decade since i last played SMB1.

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That was actually one of my earliest points in the thread. I feel that SMB3 "level design-wise" is a lot harder than the first SMB, but it gives you a lot of remedies to mitigate that, even to the point of powerups that let you bypass entire stages that you find too difficult. This is a part of the game's design, and as such it's clearly an easier (albeit much longer) game than SMB1.
Despite that, it has a lot of individual stages that are much more difficult than anything SMB1 has to offer. I've considered making a hack for SMB3 that makes it into a leaner, more challenging action game, because it's well designed enough that a 100% no-miss clear is completely possible, but that is very easy to overlook due to how much it allows you to screw up without really punishing it.

In fact, this was the very first thing I posted. That I think there are so many different approaches and different ways to play a game, that it's impossible to compare different people's takes on different games.

Hah, yeah sorry, my memory proved too short there.

Your idea of a hack sounds promising. A more action and skill focused ruleset applied to the already well designed but tough levels of smb3. I'd be happy to try and fail at it.

I was kind of going in the same direction with the idea of removing some of the cheesier/exploitable aspects from Castlevania III. But it's more about nerfing certain subweapons so they can't kill bosses in seconds without requirement of skill (holy water, fire spell, etc), which should also have the side effect varying the players' choice of weapons a bit more by having their versatility evened out.

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That's certainly how we played games back in the NES days. I used warps and tricks as much as I could after learning about them. There was two levels in world 8 of SMB3 that I couldn't beat as a kid. It's the two first levels of the dark part of the world. I think the second one has a black & white sun. I always used a cloud item to skip the first one and a P-wing to fly over the second one. It wasn't until I got a bit older that I started to beat and explore every level in games and also try to 1cc games.

Well if the game allows a certain something it's certainly designed that way, no matter what the initial intention was. The fact that a game may have both lives and continues with not much different between them, or like Galaxy or Eggerland no real different at all, is only because they remain from a concept invented in an arcade environment where it maked sense.

Yes and Super Mario World is even worse in this regard. SMB3 doesn't really just make you redo a world though, it remembers what levels Mario and Luigi has cleared respectively, and if Luigi Game Overs only levels that Luigi has cleared are restored.

Yes you have a good point here. Playing style certainly affects the way you judge the difficulty.

Oh yeah I forgot there's a trick to continue. I guess it's one of those common cheats that's considered part of the game's rules and not a cheat. I've never used it though (I didn't know about it as a kid), and SMB2j is obviously still much harder with or without it.

"A bit harsher" is an understatement. SMB2 is so harsh that we got SMB2 instead.

For clarity, i didn't mean SMB2j but the thematical adaption we got instead.

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YMMV, but I consider anything not mentioned in the game's original documentation cheating. ("A+Start to continue" is not mentioned in the manual.)

(That's not to say that I never cheat. Some games just aren't worth the pain.)

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Then Super Mario Bros. is impossible because entering pipes is required to complete WORLD 8-4, and its manual doesn't mention that pipes (which it calls "flower-pots") can be entered. It describes the function of Down on the Control Pad as "Crouch. (Super Mario only.)"

I really have no idea where you're getting that anyone can beat these games in just "a few hours". Ghosts 'N Goblins, Castlevania, and even Mega Man took several "few hour" attempts for me to beat them. I remember the first time I beat R-Type III, (probably the first really hard game I ever beat) I left my Super Nintendo on overnight so I wouldn't lose my progress; that run easily took over 8 hours. You said that games with unlimited continues are more limited by the player's patience than their skill, but can't you make the argument that skill is directly related to patience? I don't know how you could argue that anyone in the world (without a relevant mental disorder) couldn't beat even Battletoads if they practiced literally nonstop, unless you can reveal that certain people are too limited by their genes or something.

And finally, yes, games with unlimited continues are often much more difficult than ones without them if you disregard this. Battletoads is probably the only game with limited continues that ever gets as difficult as Ghosts 'N Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, R-Type, Super Monkey Ball, or other famously difficult games with unlimited continues if you disregard continues.

Yes patience is certainly a necessary skill to get good at games. Those games took me countless hours to beat for the first time, and while my skill level in action games probably isn't anything special in hardcore gaming circles, I'm certainly better than average. A few hours for "anyone" to beat Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania sounds very optimistic to me.

That's my definition of cheating too. Although sometimes you can bend the rules. SMB isn't that difficult of a game though so I don't think it really needs continues. I for one was perfectly happy without them as a kid when games in general was very hard for me. Doesn't matter that I couldn't get far, I just play the same level over and over and thought it was the greatest fun there is. I heard there are no life stock or Game Overs in Mario Odyssey, kids nowdays have it too easy...

lol

^^^

The GameFAQs site actually has some decent feedback from players.
This list, limited to games that have 200+ votes, pretty much has all the games mentioned in this thread right at the top (except TMNT, I'd rather not think about that game too much, heheh).
https://www.gamefaqs.com/games/rankings?platform=41&genre=0&list_type=diff&view_type=0&dlc=1&min_votes=3

When you lower the minimum votes, the list perhaps gets a little noisier, but the more obscure titles will show up.
minimum 50 votes
minimum 5 votes

Those rankings seem fairly agreeable. Doesn't really cover the fairness factor, though. I have heard several experienced players say that Adventure Island might be one of the hardest NES games. I haven't played through it or even attempted to, but it sounds like one of those cases where it has to be a no-death run. If you lose power-ups, you're doomed.

The other day I was thinking about a night when friend and I tried to beat The Three Stooges (not hard overall, it's just random). We couldn't do it, and at some point we just laid the controller down. Then the game continued on by itself, with no further input, avoiding enough of the mouse traps, and picked up enough of the money to actually win.

Ikari Warriors was the first 3rd-party NES game I had as a kid, it's pretty brutal without the cheat code. Even then it's still hard, because the cheat code will happily respawn you inside the walls (it's almost guaranteed to happen in 2-player mode).

Lmao at 1943 not even being on the list. The list looks like more of a popularity contest than anything; why is Castlevania rated higher than Punch-out?


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...

Difficulty rating lists will always be like that, when they are a community effort. Look at how high Mega Man is compared to a ton of other games that are actually difficult.

Also, I don't think any single person would ever put the US Ninja Gaiden III below any of the other NG games. No one in their right mind would do that.