Hardest NES Games

Most people probably wouldn't list them (mostly because they're not well known, but also because they aren't well understood), but the most difficult NES games i had ever encountered were the advanced strategic games by the Japanese company KOEI. Among those i would list PTO II (Pacific Theater or Operations, one of the last games they issued for the American market), Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV (I through III are difficult, but don't even approach the level of intracicy and sophistication of IV), and Nobunaga's Ambition: The Dark Lord.

The AI for all of the KOEI games was consistently superior to that of any other games which were contemporary to them. What makes them really tough, though, is that the reward for success is always disaster. Build up your rice and commercial production until you are wealthy and can afford large armies with expensive weapons, and you are sure to get hit with typhoon, plague, locusts, peasant uprisings--you name it.

My only gripe with the KOEI games is that although the AI was sophisticated, it was not, obviously as good as you you can get with multi-gigabyte PC games. The way they compensated for that is that the game "computer" cheats if it is losing.

They've gotten into PC games now, and still do well with their always popular games based on the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, and their Oda Nobunaga/Sengoku period games from Japanese history. Problem is, since they never did well in the American market anyway, they now only produce the games in Chinese and Japanese.

Metroid! geez. well, at least without cheats.

Yes, metroid indeed. Great game though it took me hours and hours to beat, but it was worth it for sure!

In the same vein, Goonies II was one mind-numblingly difficult game. I can't understand how Konami expected anyone to figure out that you had to hit the old man five times in order to get the candle.