This level explains my 30+ year fear of being strangled by seaweed.
The very few times I was able to clear this level (with a low-health Don), I immediately died in the van level. Yet I kept coming back…
Ahh the joy of having no other games.
Earthworm Jim and several Sonic games also had really difficult underwater sections with traumatizing drowning music and timers. They really wanted our generation to stay out of the water, huh?
99% of the time, hard levels were to prevent people from beating the game when they rented it from a video rental store. The publisher wanted to basically “force” people to buy the game.
The Sonic drowning music pops in my head randomly during other stressful situations.
It’s like my brain has the worst possible soundtrack.
Also, I learned to give up on games from the infamous Atari ET game, which was one of the like 3 games at grandma’s house. Even understanding what’s happening on screen is difficult, let alone figuring out what you’re supposed to do.
I figured it out and it was still a huge disappointment. Only worse game was Journey: Escape.
You guys actually had the ET atari game?! I’ve only heard about it 😁
I was lucky enough to have the manual for ET lying around. It helps greatly in explaining the game’s bizarre logic (and how to escape the infamous pits). It’s not much weirder than most 2600 games once you read it, provided somebody didn’t throw it out thinking it was useless.
Actual 80s kids grinded this level until they could make it through without taking much damage. When you only owned a half dozen games you got pretty good at all of them.
I only ever had 3 when I was young(11): Mario/duckhunt combo, contra and Zelda. Boy was I excited when I got my Nintendo magazine with the first and second quest walkthrough for Zelda. But around 14 I learned Hollywood video Rented games and I got to play a lot more. This was the only game I rented and never finished cause I couldn’t afford the rental late fee.
My mom bought me this game when I was little. I got stuck on this level, she tried to help me, decided the game was broken and took it back. She traded it for Mario 3 and I was not disappointed.
Years later I went back and finished this game.
Yeah, this level pops up all the time on “Nintendo hard” (read: unfair difficulty) level lists, but it really wasn’t much of a problem. You would often lose some of your health bar and at worst have to switch out one of the turtles because of low health, but that should’ve been mostly it. The game itself was pretty damn hard overall and there are plenty of unfair jumps, annoying respawning enemies, and mazes to complain about that are all designed to make you redo sections and sap your health, but the dam in particular never really felt like all that much of an issue.
That level’s song lives rent-free in my mind. Usually with the “low health” beeping.
Had to go and watch a video of the level. Yep, that music still haunts me.
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The music is what sits with me.
What?
I remember this game, and this wasn’t anything compared to the time I rented Battletoads for a weekend.
That game taught kids failure
Battletoads is mostly about pattern matching. If you try to react to the speeder levels you literally cannot win because of the patterns and speed. But, over time, you learn the sequence and they are largely easy.
The bomb defusal levels in TMNT actually have fundamentally broken mechanics (there are plenty of youtubes out there). They are “fair” once you understand those, but it mostly results in a lot of deaths about 30 minutes into a run.
Two very different kinds of “Nintendo Hard” bullshit. Which is probably why I gravitated towards PC games at that age.
And honorable mention to Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. Both of which are easier to beat if you rush or speedrun because of enemy spawn patterns making progression impossible if you take too long on some jumps.
I agree with your take, but none of these games are as frustrating as Bayou Billy. I wonder if some dev at Konami just hated Americans?
The NES version is harder than the Famicom version; enemies in the beat-'em-up stages are more aggressive and have more health, the player starts the shooting stages with less ammunition, and the driving stages have narrower roads. The driving stages in the Famicom version also give Billy’s jeep a health gauge, allowing it to withstand collision from enemy vehicles and road hazards, a benefit not available in the NES version.
I understand that changes like this were to do with the rental market, which was much bigger in the US compared to Japan; the idea being that if you made your game stupidly difficult but still reasonably compelling, people would just keep renting it until they finally beat it. Pretty cheeky move.
Exactly. Battletoads isn’t unfair, its just extremely hard (not different from Dark Souls). It’s different kind of hard, compared to Turtles, which had bad controls in example.
There are definitely control issues with like the sticky walls level. Some of the jumping has like completely bullshit edge detection and the rocket riding is way harder than the turbo tunnel, but you never hear anyone complain about it because no one ever makes it there.
Here is a very good technical video about this topic: The Bad Jump Design and 30 FPS Gravity of TMNT (NES) - Behind the Code
Edit: I linked the wrong video. Here is the one I wanted to link, from the same guy:
The Broken Water Level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) - Behind the CodeThis was a great watch. Thanks for posting it!
Glad you like it. He always does this in-dept technical explanation, which sometimes is too technical for me. I noticed it wasn’t even the video I wanted to link and updated the reply with the additional link about the water level specifically.
Wow! What a cool video! And what a cool channel! I’ve watched a few now, thanks for pointing it out!
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I very much disagree on the Dark Souls comparison. It is a large part of why there has increasingly been the distinction between “Nintendo Hard” and “Hard but Fair” with (From) Souls games very much being the latter.
In a From-Souls, every boss short of the later DLCs (and puzzle bosses) have multiple viable paths. You can carry a tower shield or use ranged attacks or whatever.
Whereas, in the god awful speeder sequence especially, there really is one real path and it is to memroize the pattern and enter in the specific sequence.
The closest From-Souls got was Malenia and needing to know how to counter her Water Fowl attack. There was still the way to stagger her to death, but that was very build specific and a LOT of that game has the Dark Souls 2 problem of enemies with way too much poise. Combine that with dodging her dive bomb in phase 2 and she was VERY “sequence-y”. Which is why she got nerfed pretty heavily over the first few patches.
I guess honorable mention to most of the back half Sekiro bosses where people tend to learn how to bait the AI into sequences to exploit. But that is mostly a “failing” on the player. The most egregious example is main path
spoiler
Ishin and that is actually a REALLY bullshit trick by From. You fight him in a field of tall grass. But if you run about twenty meters back, you fight him in an open field and can now see his legs and identify all the attacks and react and punish accordingly.
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This level is 1,000% trivial compared to the work it takes to get deep into battle toads. I never considered this that hard as a kid compared to what comes later.
Yes, the pattern matching is important. There was a sequel to Contra on PS2 (I think) that my friend and I found pretty hard. We learned the patterns of where to be and where/when to aim. Then, we kicked butt. We turned it up to the hardest setting and didn’t really need to adjust much. So, it ended up being really easy at that point. We loved playing that game after we learned the patterns.
Lion King was ten times worse than Battletoads. The developers were told by Disney to make it impossible to beat during the rental period. That game was the first time I rage quit.
Were you playing it on Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis?
SNES. Was there a difference between the two in regards to gameplay?
I’m not 100% certain as I only ever had it on SNES, but I’ve heard that the way the frame timings worked on SNES made the jumping in levels like Just Can’t Wait To Be King much harder. YMMV
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Oh god that Lion King game. That wildebeest sequence was the first time I experienced tunnel vison. What the godamned fuck Disney?
My favorite was ghosts and goblins, beating it just to find out you have to beat it twice to actually win. That was rough one.
And with a very specific weapon that has limited range, and other weapon pickups show up along the way. Grab one, you’re screwed.
I distinctly remember my cousin and I beating Battletoads. The worst part was the boss where you had to throw the adds at the screen to hurt him. Otherwise I have very rosy recalls of the game.
Oh, so that’s what it’s like to access trauma-blocked memories from ages ago. Thanks OP.
I didn’t learn that shit. I got incredibly good at this level. It only took a few months.
Every 10 years I think “huh I wonder why I never finished that game”. This was thoroughly blocked from my memory until today.
This entire game had moments that felt impossibly hard. Just seeing this screenshot made me frustratingly angry lol.
Ah yes, the NES version of the Kobayashi Maru
Game Genie is a valid battle strategy.
I see what you did.
That was the first level as a child that I learned true patience, few things can compare.
This stage was tough, but it wasn’t unfair; I beat it many times. The next stage, the one with the Turtle Van—that one was tough because of the mob enemies and because I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Watching long plays of it later, it’s really obvious why I only beat it a few times. The Mechaturtle boss was also brutal!
I never did make it past the airport. This game was ridiculous.
I remember the first time beating the dam level, only to get to the van and be absolutely confused about what to do next. Good times!
Yeah, I am always surprised by people complaining about the damn when it’s so much easier than what comes afterwards.
The biggest challenge I feel is actually knowing where to go to diffuse the bombs. As a kid, I could pretty much beat dam level on the first try after I knew where I was going.
That level is what teaches you that sometimes things are not built to be fair and are in fact built to frustrate you and make you fail.
Displaced Gamers channel on YouTube has several technical videos on this game. Including the water level in question and why it’s so broken.
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The MS-DOS version of this game was actually not winnable without cheats because the jumping physics changed and they didn’t update the level layouts for that.
I tried to make stupid jump for years. Got the game on NES and was amazed at how easy it was. Many years later I found out it was impossible on PC.
Different jump. It was in the sewer.
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