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.
Years ago when hldj worked on TF2 I had a soundboard I’d play on my main server. Drowining theme is something I’d toss up when I wanted to give people a heart attack
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.
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.
You guys actually had the ET atari game?! I’ve only heard about it 😁
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I didn’t learn that shit. I got incredibly good at this level. It only took a few months.
Oh, so that’s what it’s like to access trauma-blocked memories from ages ago. Thanks OP.
Every 10 years I think “huh I wonder why I never finished that game”. This was thoroughly blocked from my memory until today.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/RU_mDGyVDcM?si=FlK0z2kDY-52CAcs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The music is what sits with me.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Me, an adult pushing 40, still can’t beat that section.
Late 30s here and I beat that level for the first time very recently. My mind was blown when I learned that was not the final level of the game.
There’s so much more game after it.
The only way I saw later stages was in walkthroughs and magazines. I should go back and try it again, I think I bought the collection recently.
I had the stupid PC version with the bug in one of the sewer levels that made the game impossible to actually beat due to a platform being just out of the range of a jump. :(
I think I know what platform you are talking about, a gap right at the ceiling you needed to cross to get missiles for the battlewagon. You just needed ro walk across.
It wasn’t that it was hard; the DOS version literally could not be beaten because of the bug. Other platforms, like the NES, it was super difficult but not impossible.
Nice video about it here : https://youtu.be/cZLed1krEEQ
Tldw: US DOS version actually has 2 separate impossible jumps on a level that aren’t present on the European DOS or NES versions.
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.
