Hard, but fair... what is the hardest game you have played.

[Super Toast]

I Wanna Be the Guy. And I finished it, too.

 

[AlphaOmega]

Imperishable Night on Lunatic.

 

[Angerwing]

Spelunky. It's long, it's bloody difficult, but all rules are consistent, and everything is pretty much obvious. I recommend this game to anybody. It's free as well.

http://www.spelunkyworld.com/original.html

9.5 megabytes. Of solid win.

 

[Straz]

Monster Hunter is really hard, it seems unfair at times but people have shown me it's mostly all down to skill and preparation.

N is a really fun difficult game too
The difficulty is insane, and so is the amount of levels!

Their must be like 2000 unique "official" levels spread across all versions. The PC version alone has about 500.

The other versions like PSP and Xbox aren't as hard but not by much. I think i managed about 3/4 of the PSP version, but i've only ever managed ep 1-10 on PC.

I'm at 58 on PC.
Check out the user levels if you still play, and get yourself nreality.
n is brilliant.

I Wanna Be the Guy. And I finished it, too.

IWBTG struck me as not that good.
I quit.

It's funny that the OP listed games that are nearly unwinnable by design.

This. If we include the criteria "fair", a -lot- of hard as hell games fall off the charts. Castlevania is nail bitingly hard, but is it fair? No way. You're gonna die so many times because of the stair ascending alone, leaving you almost helpless for Goddamn Bats to finish you off. Whereas you usually fall into a conveniently placed pool of water. I Wanna Be The Guy is the most unfair game I've ever played; the game constantly tries to outright trick you, and the only way to beat that game is by constant trial, error and memorization.

Finding a game that is amazingly hard but also fair is quite a challenge, IMO. Most, if not all, game developers resort to fake difficulty here and there.

I call ngame hard but fair.
OKAY?

 

[Straz]

-Snip- double post

 

[P.Tsunami]

I call ngame hard but fair.
OKAY?

Uh... sure. I have no idea what "ngame" is or means.

 

[Optimus Hagrid]

Super Ghosts 'n' Goblins isn't all that hard. Seriously. Just jump at the right time. Still, I love it.

I have difficulty in Super Star Wars though. Bloody landspeeder levels.

 

[Straz]

I call ngame hard but fair.
OKAY?

Uh... sure. I have no idea what "ngame" is or means.

ngame is n.
It's been mentioned on this thread.

 

[AWAR]

Probably Ridge Racer, a simple mistake and you're done..

 

[erto101]

I wanna be the guy. Hard and not at all fair. Apples falling up?!?

 

[blankedboy]

Has ANYONE here played rRootage?
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/rr0_23.zip
You'll never win that game, I bet you.
Try the last level on Expert.

 

[ShrapnelHound]

super ghouls and ghosts, i love it but it was hard

 

[Yumi_and_Erea]

Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call.

I know for a fact that it's possible to beat it but Jesus H. Christ is it hard.

 

[The Blue Mongoose]

GodHand. It was hard as balls, but fair. If you learn how to avoid attacks, recognise patterns etc. you'll be fine. Hard and takes a lot of effort, but so worth it.

Hard but not fair: I Wanna Be The Guy.

 

[Fetzenfisch]

Prince of Persia on NES. (Even if you managed it to the end of the game, you entered the last level with a 30 second time cap or something, because you have to play it through in one hour.)
Disneys Aladinn and Lion King. (damn those were supposed for children weren't they? damn)

 

[TerribleAssassin]

Through the fire and the flames on expert.


The torture...

 

[The Blue Mongoose]

GodHand. It was hard as balls, but fair. If you learn how to avoid attacks, recognise patterns etc. you'll be fine. Hard and takes a lot of effort, but so worth it.

Hard but not fair: I Wanna Be The Guy.

Not to mention you can cancel out of pretty much any attack animation in God Hand which makes stunning and avoiding attacks even easier.

While there are some that claim that this cheapens the game, I must agree with you sir. Some bosses (hell, some normal enemies) on level Die required me to abuse the hell out of this. Especially with the Yes Mam Kablam and Granny Smacker.

 

[Daedalus1942]

Another post got me thinking of this. What is the hardest game you know. The game has to be hard, but it has to be fair, and winable. Some examples - I wanna be the guy, Kid Ikirus, Deamons' Souls, Ghosts n' Goblins. These are all games of punishing difficulty, but when I played them (Demons' Souls aside, I have not played that yet), and I died I always felt it was on me. The game played fair, I made a mistake, and death followed.

Don't give me games that go on forever and jsut go up in difficulty, or games that can't be beaten due to some error, or are unbeatable by design.

Battletoads. Beat it as a kid with my friend Adrian. We are no longer friends and I can't beat it anymore.

I'm willing to bet you did not beat Battletoads on two player mode though, since the Clinger Winger level has a fatal flaw if you're doing two player. That being said, my thoughts concerning Battletoads, "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF....."

No... we did beat it on 2 player mode (on the sega mega drive version). It's not easy (and I'd have major trouble doing it nowadays), but at the time we played literally nothing else, so we finished it in two weeks.
I was able to finish Toy Story and Jurassic Park on Sega without losing any lives back then.
Damn I was good. Not these days. Now I struggle to get through many of the Megaman X games.