< Nintendo Hard

Nintendo Hard/First Person Shooters


  • Doom Lampshaded when the player selects Nightmare! difficulty: the game asks "Are you sure? This skill level isn't even remotely fair." Nightmare difficulty features faster monsters that respawn a bit after being killed, and the speed of some fireballs is vastly increased. It was designed to be nearly impossible to beat. Naturally, gamers have since created Nightmare Speed Run competitions.
    • To top it off, cheat codes are disabled while running in Nightmare mode, just to make it all that extra bit of unfair. (This typically only applies to the original engine and faithful source ports like Chocolate Doom; source ports with no intention of preserving the original feel, such as ZDoom, allow cheat codes in Nightmare mode.)
    • Ultimate DOOM, the retail version of the original, contains an extra episode called "Thy Flesh Consumed", which is a pretty accurate description of what will happen the moment you start playing it. It's the closest thing to playing "Nightmare" mode without actually playing on it.
And while it didn't contain any content on the level of the above example, the official sequel, DOOM II: Hell on Earth is noticeably harder than the original's "standard" episodes. Imagine what playing "Nightmare" on that game must be like...
    • The Plutonia Experiment official expansion for Doom II spawned an incredibly difficult subset of Doom levels that emphasizes combat against vast hordes of monsters, often dozens at a time. Levels have been made with literally thousands of enemies, often with fights against multiple "Arch-Viles" - powerful enemies who revive other monsters and have a delayed line-of-sight attack which can take off 80% or more of the player's health.
    • While Plutonia may have significantly upped the difficulty level compared to the previous installments, it was the user-created map set of Hell Revealed that brought about gigantic monster hordes. In fact, such maps are said to have "Hell Revealed" style gameplay within the community.
In particular, Hell Revealeds 24th level, "Post Mortem," has so many monsters (over 500!) that it's impossible to save your game on it, unless you're using a source port of the game. And then you have Hell Revealed 2s super-secret level, "Playground," which has over 1,600 monsters. Even on the lowest difficulty, this map will likely cause you to tear your hair out many times over. And let's not EVEN get started on MAP31.[1]
    • Since Hell Revealed, the "HR" style of gameplay involving huge, intensely difficult fights has become a staple of Doom mods. One of the most famous levels ever, NUTS, is nothing but two huge rooms with over 10,000 monsters. It's infamous for getting around 1FPS regardless of what computer or source port you play on. Sunder is a good choice for the most difficult serious map set ever created. Most of the levels are unbeatable without cheats, yet the entire thing was (according to the author) playtested and balanced.
  • The original Red Faction turned from challenging to nightmarish about 2/3 through the game. The introduction of heavy machine gun wielding mooks and instant death wall-penetrating sniper railguns mooks made the game a painful affair.
  • Marathon Durandal isn't particularly difficult - until you get to the end of "All Roads Lead to Sol", the default ending mission. THEN you have to float through a pool of lava and take on ten enemies in a tiny room with your lava-eaten shields. And one of the enemies is a Juggernaut, meaning you can't take any more than the slightest bit of damage lest you get killed when its corpse explodes.
  • Tactical FPS/mil-sim Operation Flashpoint is... unforgiving, to say the least. You can generally take no more damage than your enemies can (two or three shots is usually all it takes), and most combat takes place out in open countryside where ranges are long and there's little cover. Missions often last longer than 15 minutes, but you can only save once per mission (in addition to the automatic checkpoints). One particularly maddening mission starts with you in the forest (alone, your entire squad having been killed off), from where you have to make it a kilometer and a half through enemy territory, dodging enemy patrols, a helicopter, and the occasional tank to get to the extraction point, which then gets overrun just before you get there. Then you're taken prisoner.
    • The Resistance campaign from the expansion pack of the same name is even more difficult. At least in the Cold War Crisis campaign you're fighting as part of an organized army, with tanks, air support and so on, but in Resistance you become the leader of a poorly-equipped band of guerrillas. You weapon supply must be restocked by collecting weapons in the battlefield, and guerrillas killed do not re-appear in following missions. At least it simulates those who have to hide out in the mountains to survive and steal equipment from the better-trained and equipped enemy.
    • And don't even talk about the Red Hammer campaign, which is truly Nintendo Hard and at one point contained a bug that made it impossible to finish it at all. The final patch for the game, which actually renamed the game to ARMA: Cold War Assault, also removed this campaign.
    • The fact that it's a very non-linear game helps, though, because if you can't succeed one way you almost always have the freedom to change your tactics up and try to do it another way. Most often, there's nothing stopping you from going right around an objective and attacking it from a different angle.
    • The aforementioned mission where you're the only member of your squad left? You have to really be the only survivor, with no real advantage. Also, the camera showing who killed you has a habit of panning through a town, a forest, over a hill, through another town, and up a mountain range.
  • Taken even further in the spiritual successor to Operation Flashpoint, the Arm A series.
    • The mission "Dogs of War" is perhaps the single most frustrating mission in the campaign. This, however, is not entirely intentional as the mission is considered one of the buggiest in the game. However, even saying that, you ARE looking for very three people that you have to capture that randomly spawn on a map that's over 225 square kilometres in size.
    • Continued in the fourth mission of the Operation Arrowhead campaign, in Coltan Blues. There, you have to disarm a bomb via a randomly selected password, written in Arabic, on an Arabic number pad. And you have a grand total of about two or three minutes at most between when you realise there's the bomb at the mine and finding your way halfway across the compound to find the scrap of paper, make sense of it, and then make sense of the keyboard being offered, since you can't look at both the paper and panel at the same time.
    • And as a general rule, if playing the Flashpoint: Takistan user-created mission, the same issues mentioned above with the kill-cam of Operation Flashpoint. This issue is not specific to the Flashpoint: Takistan map however, though in this one it is particularly accentuated given the vast expanses of barren terrain.
      • Possibly a Justified Trope in that many ARMA 2 missions portray Special Forces units, and ARMA 2 is based on the same engine the REAL military uses to train REAL soldiers - this is a selling point of the game. Special Forces soldiers train for YEARS to be able to do what they do. While gamers don't need to train for years, the mindset is very important to the game and a lot of players find they just don't know what to do at all.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 presented several mutations (modifications to the general rules and settings of the game) that proudly rests on this trope. These mutations are:
    • Realism VS: A VS game where the survivor team has to play by realism rules (No auras to locate your team or to know if they been pounced on, common infected soak up more damage unless it's a head shot, and Witches kill survivors in one hit). The infected team can still see where the survivors are. Just to make things even more hard, a recent patch has made the Witch in this mode immune to being killed instantly from a head shot!
    • Lone Gunman: You play by yourself without anyone backing you up as you are armed only with a Magnum. You only fight common infected and Boomers, but the damage from the common infected increases greatly, to the point where if you play on Expert, one hit will instantly down you. Oh and you still have to deal with Tanks and Witches!
    • Hard Eight: Special infected can now appear up to eight at a time instead of four, which means not only they are spawning faster, but you can have multiple infected that have the ability to pin someone, thus the chances of the whole team being pinned is higher!
    • Special Delivery: A mode where only special infected are spawned, but their spawn timers are removed and they can come in up to ten at a time!
  • Borderlands second DLC: Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot introduces extended 'Larger Challenges' that take roughly 4-5 hours to complete. If you die you have to start over from the beginning.
    • Grims use the Zerg Rush strategy, similarly to the zombies in Left 4 Dead. However, Grims are highly resistant to automatic weapons such as the Carbine and are only really weak against things like the shotgun and HE .44 Magnum, which will both have ammo in short supply.
  • The Serious Sam franchise is well known for incorporating classic gaming elements into a more modern setting, including sheer fucking nightmarish difficulty. You will probably die more times in one Serious Sam game than in all other FPS games you've played combined. Even on "Normal" mode, the games still qualify for this trope. Thankfully, the extreme difficulty generally comes in waves.
  • From Halo, we have Mythic/L.A.S.O. difficulty. Legendary: All skulls on. Let's see, in addition to the Harder Than Hard Legendary mode, which features halved health for you, fifty percent higher health for your enemies, every enemy getting a rank up, snipers appear every two minutes and are capable of killing you with a bodyshot, we get all the following skull bonuses: no respawns, no automatic shield recharges, enemies that dodge, enemies that spam grenades, a disabled radar, reduced ammo, all enemies recieving promoted ranks, bullets dealing less damage to shields, plasma doing less damage to flesh, and doubled health for enemies.
  • Faceball 2000 (the SNES port) gets difficult once you begin to meet drones that begin to fight back competently (e.g. Wallys, Rovers, maybe Turkeys) starting from the second world. At this point, you probably still don't have enough armor pickups to deal with large numbers of enemies. The end game gets ridiculously hard, as groups of powerful drones can swarm you without warning (e.g. Ninjas, Sharks) and make quick work of you.
  • Command & Conquer: Renegade. Gameplay is largely a loving throwback to older-style first person shooters, which means that gameplay will lovingly murder you over and over by throwing endless hordes of elite enemies, fortified locations, heavily-armed vehicles, and sadistic ambushes at you. Every opponent save the basic Nod soldiers is a Demonic Spider, with many of them packing weaponry that can kill you in seconds, and they are often backed by tanks or machinegun-equipped buggies or APC transports that eat through your armor and health. Enemies will constantly be respawning until you take out officers, at least through the first few levels, at which point the entire reinforcement pretense is dropped and enemies will simply spawn behind you or leap out of nowhere ahead of you. In a few areas there are nothing but respawning enemies who never end, and in other cases where enemies spawn in close quarters. Helicopters will fly overhead and just behind the player, forcing him to turn instead of bending backwards (only to repeat the tactic again). And many enemies are resistant to entire classes of weapons, forcing the player to rapidly juggle between different guns to deal with different enemies. On top of that, there's no checkpoint system, and levels are huge (the typical level lasts from anywhere to thirty minutes to an hour) and allies are largely underequipped and sparse, generally serving only to briefly draw fire and get killed by hordes of better-armed, respawning, numerically superior enemy troops. Certain levels have truly sadistic ambushes as well, with rocket-equipped troopers on rooftops or cliffs with clear lines of fire who will shoot you to hell before you even realize they're there. In short, the game is horribly hard and frustrating and at times outright sadistic. For all that, the game is still challenging and fun, but it pulls no punches.
  • Rise of the Triad is no slouch in the difficulty department. Most levels are difficult, and not just from the abundance of enemies. There are plenty of traps to worry about, maze-like level design (fortunately the auto-map in single-player helps make this aspect of the game a bit easier to handle), and then there's The NME...
  • Nearly all of the Rainbow Six series, due to the near-psychic enemy AI and cheap one hit kills, as well as perma-death in the early games.
  • Perfect Dark, bonus points for being actual Nintendo game. As first person shooters with complex mission objectives and use of stealth were still relatively new at the time figuring out just how to complete each mission was hard enough. Doing so without being seen made it harder. And thanks to taking away the Mercy Invincibility in its spiritual predecessor Golden Eye 1997, every enemy was a potential Demonic Spider.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is this thanks to grenade spam. It's not uncommon to have five or more grenades used at the one time.
    • Oh god, it's much worse in World at War. The AI can't go for ten seconds on Veteran without chucking yet another grenade right where you're standing.
  • Descent: The unique zero-gravity, floating mechanic made the game harder to learn than most first-person shooters as it is, but the real difficulty comes from the brutally unforgiving enemies. Drillers (hitscan weapons) and Heavy Hulks (homing missiles) are absurdly common enemies that do insane amounts of damage and have huge accuracy, even on low difficulty levels. On the higher difficulty levels, even the easiest enemies are capable of ripping you apart in a matter of seconds due to their shots firing being stronger, faster, shooting more bullets per volley and healing items recovering less as the difficulty gets higher. The Insane difficulty level is very appropriately named.
  • Duke Nukem Forever has been criticized for this. It qualifies on numerous levels: very limited health and thus the ability to be killed with only a couple of direct hits; an overload of monsters in certain areas; limited ammo; and ambush attacks (for example in the level Vegas in Ruins, you find yourself attacked by a massive boss monster who can only be brought down by turrets and explosive weapons. Too bad there are none to be found if you used them all up in the battle preceding its arrival.)
  • The House of the Dead series. It doesn't help that in the Wii port of The House of the Dead 2, you don't get unlimited continues.
    • You would think that, by being given a shotgun in 3 and a machine gun in 4, along with a supply of grenades, would make those games easier than their predecessors. How wrong you are. How very, very wrong you are...
    • I've seen players finish 1, 2, and 4 in one credit and get the best possible endings. 3, on the other hand, would rip your spine out and snap your head off with it. It was really long, it was tough to get shots off quickly with the heavy shotgun, and there were numerous spots were you were guaranteed to take a hit if you didn't have absolutely perfect accuracy and lightning speed. And the bosses, oh, the bosses. Did anyone beat Fool without taking at least 8 hits? No surprise that this is the least popular Hot D of all and didn't even last a year in my arcade.
    • Hell, just about any Sega-created arcade-style light gun game could fit this trope; there's The Ocean Hunter with its slow-to-reload torpedoes and annoyingly frenetic and hard-to-kill bosses, Let's Go Jungle with its swarms of enemies and irritating minigames to determine how you fare in certain forced scenarios...but the king has to be Brave Firefighters, a Time Crisis-like firefighting game where each and every fire you're supposed to put out, including the "boss" fires regenerate their health and spread if you don't take care of them fast enough...before throwing in a "save the hostage" scenario in each "boss" fire that - if you allow to get burned - takes time off. Prepare to have your bank account emptied by this game, and try to avoid the All Devouring Black Hole Loan Sharks, while you're at it.
    • What of Typing of the Dead? The last levels will have you snap your keyboard in half after giving you carpal tunnel three times on each wrist... somehow.
  1. ↑ That's if you can even run the God-damn level. Even with the newest version of ZDoom, GZDoom, or Skulltag (which have significantly improved renderers compared to the original), the sheer amount of demons will make your computer chug.
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