Originally posted by: scaryice
Originally posted by: Svankmajer
I think it took me two months to beat Battletoads. Playing an hour a day. It definitely is harder than the average platformer.
If you want to beat Battletoads, step #1 is stocking up on lives in stage 2 by juggling the birds. It's also very helpful to stay at the bottom of the screen in the inferno stage so none of the lower missiles can hit you. Then you just have to pray that the rat glitch doesn't happen (which it did to me once when I was trying to beat it for the first time, so frustrating).
Indeed, and its very trial and error and memorization for the most parts. Meaning its quite impossible to know what to do first time playing through, so you have to learn by playing patiently over and over. This combined with limited lives and continues is probably what makes the game so notorious for being hard. Of course, judging by comments on the net 90% just can't get past the turbo tunnel on third level. Its a shame most people never saw anything past that level, because it has a lot of cool level designs.
I heard Battletoads was designed so hard because they expected it to be a popular rental, and they didn't want to be too easy since they wanted people to also buy the game, so they tweaked the difficulty according to that. (No idea if this is true or not)
As for other hard platformers on NES Ghost N' Goblins is as difficult in some ways, but it seems they understood the hard difficulty (the game originally coming from a arcade machine where you were supposed to drop coins in the machine everytime you died) so instead of tweaking they just let you have infinite lives, endless continues and letting you start from last checkpoint on the NES port.
Then there's Adventure Island, and that one is not that much of a burden until the later stages. Thats where it gets brutal. Everyone can get pretty far into it, but beating it is another thing. A couple of levels are so unbalanced its easy to suspect they hadn't been testplaying it enough for release. It seems likely its just bad programming in this case.
I would also put Werewolf and Ninja Gaiden 3 up there.