Nintendo Hard/Other

• The casino game "Diana" Surprisingly old, predating Nintendo, the TV itself, and even radio! was introduced to the Wild West in the 1800s, but did not gain popularity as the odds were apparently murderous.
• Most puzzle- or skill-based toys are simple once you get the trick. However, there are a few that remain fiendishly difficult, even after hours of practice. Worth special mention is one that consists of a box topped by a tilting platform, controlled by two knobs on the sides. The object is to navigate a marble through the maze on the platform by tilting it using the knobs. It wouldn't be that hard, except that the platform has a bunch of holes in it in addition to the walls of the maze. Falling through a hole forces you to start over, and all it takes is a momentary lapse in concentration.
  • There is now a 3-dimensional version of that puzzle, encased in a clear plastic sphere. This one offers a "save point", but also many new challenges.
• Homestar Runner parodied this trope. There's the easter egg game "Super Kingio Bros," in which you cannot possibly avoid the first enemy, who you find within the first second of the game.
• The classic Dating Sim Tokimeki Memorial has Shiori Fujisaki, which is infamously difficult to get. The finals stats to get her are so high you actually can end meeting all of the other girls first, which, given the "bomb" system where the neglected girls get angry and you and spread to hate towards other girls; but if you try to appease the rest of the large dateable cast you cannot date Shiori enough times to get her ending nor see her special love events. To make it worse, in the Super Famicom port you could get all her special events and stats high enough to get her, and still she didn't confess to you. One letsplayer called her route "the path of Utter Perfection" (bold included). There are other difficult routes on the other games of the franchise, but those are more in the Guide Dang It realm of difficulty and are not as frustrating as hers.