Nintendo Hard/Game Mods

• Grandmaster Galaxy Master Quest - The first hack of a 3D Mario game listed here. Also the first Galaxy 2 hack ever made.
• Binary City, a Battle City hack except you control 2 tanks at the same time. Now a 4-directional action shooter has been turned into a puzzle game which requires a lot of thinking power, a lot of muscle coordination and a quick reflexes to win.
• Lots of Super Metroid hacks are hard for the casual player, requiring tricks that only advanced players learn... but some hacks go the extra mile and are hard even for experts. Super Metroid Impossible, the various RBO hacks, and the original version of Cliffhanger are notoriously difficult.
• Median XL, a Diablo II mod which has several "uberquests" that contain monsters which can instantly pwn your player character, even at max level with good gear. Also veteran monsters in the normal game are instant pwn. Some areas have witches which cannot be killed or targeted by your character, but if you get within their awareness radius, they will instantly kill your character (gauranteed, cannot be resisted and damage is infinite)
• Brotherhood of Shadow for Knights of the Old Republic. Beautiful storyline, excellent characters, and holy Yoda, what an epic scope. But the difficulty level is brutal. Especially the one-on-one duel with Mandalore the Indomitable where you are armed with an unmodified lightsaber and robes and he's armed with a pair of battleaxes! He's also got a Force resistance of "yes."
  • The Tomb of Jesset Dal'Kest is worse. Specialized armor and weapons on everything you fight, no party member backup, and boss-level characters attacking in a Zerg Rush. Even the mod's authors admit that it's world-class brutal.
• Populous: Age of Chaos was an unofficial expansion for Populous: The Beginning which introduced a brand-new, 25-level, single-player campaign that was far, FAR more difficult than both the original campaign and the one from the official expansion, Undiscovered Worlds, for veteran players who had beaten those two campaigns.
• Similar to the Super Metroid example above, ROM hacks of Super Mario World are often ridiculously difficult to the point of parody.
  • The most famous example being Kaizo Mario World, though that one can be better described as Platform Hell.
• Final Fantasy Tactics wasn't the hardest game out there, despite a few truly grueling battles... So some people gathered together and created Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3, which removed many exploits, rebalanced classes and gave enemies ridiculously powerful items and classes way before you can attain such things (unless you steal and use Mediators, of course)
• The Destination Paris mod for Commandos 2 cranks the difficulty of a series already renowned for being Nintendo Hard as it is Up to Eleven. It adds more enemies to missions, makes them more ruthless, adds freezing cold to some missions that will kill your men without arctic gear (a feature in the main game, though only in one level) and takes away the Bottomless Magazines from the pistol. The final mission is particularly brutal, as if you don't react very very quickly, your men will all be spotted and killed within less than a minute.
• The RTS/FPS/Vehicle Combat game, Battlezone 1998 II, has the Fleshstorm 2 mod - a mod which is brutally difficult. One mission requires you to escort a large, slow, unarmed tracked vehicle (your mobile base) through narrow passes while the planet's atmosphere is on fire. The armor of your tank, your Assault Tank, and the mobile base are constantly being whittled down from the heat of the air, so you must constantly keep at least one of your units repaired by your shielded Service Truck. The canyons you're driving through are also dotted with enemies, so there's a delicate balancing act between repairing all your support units, repairing yourself, and repairing the mobile base. Several times during the mission, you have to move ahead to take out targets so the base can pass by safely - meaning you need to leave the protection of your service truck's repair laser. If you go too far out, you'll die before you can make it back to the service truck. If you take too much damage, you'll die before you make it back to the service truck. And unlike the other missions, you cannot eject, as your pilot will die almost instantly under the heat.
• Pokémon Vega, a Japanese hack of Fire Red, makes grinding a painfully time consuming affair by lowering the levels of all trainers and wild Pokémon down to as low as 10 or 15 fewer than the gym leader and evil team administrators' teams. It's necessary, though, since the major trainers come out swinging from the get go and never let up. By the third gym you'll have run into a Starmie with near flawless type coverage, a Kappa-like Pokémon with typically late game moves like Surf and Aura Sphere, and a ground type gym leader sending out a Hitmonchan as his clutch, all likely 5 or six levels higher than your strongest 'mon, unless you went out of your way to grind enough for them.