Hardest dificulties that are ACTUALLY BLOODY HARD!

[Silenttalker22]

Ninja Gaiden 1 and DMC3 are the only 2 that come to mind, as they're the only ones I've done that have combat tight enough to actually push your skill and flexibility the higher you go. Instead of most others where (quoting Yahtzee here) "A challenge is one thing, but trying to break down a cement wall with your forehead isn't a challenge".

 

[Hairetos]

CoD4 on Veteran; still not completed it.

Edit: In fact, have only done 2 proper levels; I couldn't get past Charlie Don't Surf's TV station.

Dunno if you still have the game or are interested in beating it on veteran, but there's an interesting secret about beating CoD4 on Veteran.

Run. Ignore enemy fire as much as possible. Just run your ass off. The more you stop to shoot, the more time you give them to shoot you and you will NEVER kill everyone.

 

[Twad]

If you're not careful on stalker on normal, you can die quickly.

On master? Christ, the game wants to kill you for existing.

its not actually that hard (imho), yes you die FAST if they get the drop on you.. but playing slow and carefully is very effective.
I always play on master difficulty: When facing humans ennemies just use cover a whole lot (lean, crouch) Abuse walls and hills to break line of sight and keep moving (they love to use grenades). Aim for headshots whenever possible. When in close-quarter, check your corners quickly (so you dont get shot to hell by a hidden guy in a corner) Let them expose themselves to your traps rather than you going in the open after them... their AI will force them to look for you.

Against mutants, especially the big bad ones.. find an obstacle to circle around or climb on it and dont stop shooting (for the head). The only ones i still havent found a good strategy against are the chimeras since they move so fast. I havent tried sniping them yet.

 

[Starke]

Any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, though they're more than hard enough already. In the first one you had the exact same amount of HP as your enemies if I remember correctly and in the second one you had very slightly more but they also started throwing grenades in that one, so that didn't really change much. I haven't played Call of Pripyat but I've read that it's not much easier, though apparently difficulty works somewhat differently in that one so that the easier difficulties are easier and the harder ones are harder.

Unless I'm remembering wrong, which is quite possible, the only effect of difficulty in the first game was the abundance of resources.

Because you'd basically be ignoring equipment on corpses anyway and just poking them for stash info on easy after the first couple fights because of the carry limit, it wasn't really that hard.

Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat mixed that up a bit. CoP doesn't tie resource starvation into the difficulty level at all, it's a pure damage dealt, damage taken system. Clear Sky... I'm unsure, it's been too long since I played it.

 

[walrusaurus]

Trouble is a lot of times the hardest difficulty is just super cheap. Civilizations 4 (i'm assuming 5 as well) on Deity is probably the most rediculously impossible task i've ever faced in a video game. But its not because the AI is a genius, but because it gets super impossible amounts of resources to work with. At one point in the game i had a full on modern mech army with jets and tanks and shit roll up when i was still in chariots. Mental.

 

[Dr Jones]

Mass Effect 2's 'Insanity' setting. Everything has at least 2 layers of 'health' and each bar takes a beating. Your shields are like tissue paper if you're out of cover for longer than 1.5 seconds you're probably dead or running from Husks and your decent gun has f-all ammo and F### YOU GODD### F### SCIONS!!!

Puhlease... Mass Effect 2 is one of the most easy games on the hardest difficulty i've ever had the pleasure to play... I'ma say, like someone else did, SLASO in Halo: Reach or just plain ol' 3.. Missing hud.. No gun on the screen...

 

[Pyrokinesis]

touhou, any difficulty.

 

[hecticpicnic]

Demon souls.Obviously.The drums on expert guitar hero world tour are pretty hard(damn you slight delay).Playing fallout 1/2 in a hardcore playthrough (no saves) is fairly hard.You got to be quick and well balanced.And careful what you, if you do one thing wrong, that's it game over.

 

[hazabaza1]

Nier was surprisingly hard on Hard mode. That may have been due to some of the issues in the combat, maybe not, but yeah, it was fairly hard.

 

[major28]

God mode - God of War
Titan mode - God of War II
Chaos mode - God of War III

I mean, I beat all these, but. . . holy shit, was it hard.

This.

Also Hardcore mode on dead space 2, the difficutly is managable but you only get 3 saves so you basicly have to go through the entire game without dieing or else you have to go back several chaptersafter i died on chapter 9 and hadnt saved since chapter 5, I almost burned down an orphanage in blind fury!

 

[emeraldrafael]

Catherine. And I found the Persona games on hardest difficulties to be rather difficult.

Other thent hat... tetris?

 

[Tay051173096]

If you're not careful on stalker on normal, you can die quickly.

On master? Christ, the game wants to kill you for existing.

And thats just at the Cordon... In Call of Pripyat on hardest the enemy can see for miles and are super accurate... Great game though.

Is there an easy setting on the Stalker games?

Age of Empires 2 is bloody grim on hardest, most RTS's are unholy nightmares against Pc deathmatch.

 

[AnAngryJawa]

Metal Arms: Glitch in the System on the hardest difficulty left me crying in the middle of the ZombieBot wasteland.

http://kascd.com/stephen/Pictures/cool%20pics/metal%20arms/zombiebot2.jpg

Now imagine a dozen of those sprinting and shambling towards you, screeching for your oil and ripping out your still-hot wiring. Did I mention that you have to kill each of them twice, because they spring back to life after their first death?

Incidentally, I had more luck bashing down a brick wall with my head later on in the day, after my GameCube went sailing out of a two story window.

 

[HassEsser]

God mode - God of War
Titan mode - God of War II
Chaos mode - God of War III

I mean, I beat all these, but. . . holy shit, was it hard.

This.

Also Hardcore mode on dead space 2, the difficutly is managable but you only get 3 saves so you basicly have to go through the entire game without dieing or else you have to go back several chaptersafter i died on chapter 9 and hadnt saved since chapter 5, I almost burned down an orphanage in blind fury!

And to think Visceral had originally intended Hardcore mode to allow for no saves whatsoever, only to realize it was too challenging. Fucking psychopaths, lol.

 

[Gottesstrafe]

I have other examples, but one specific level on the hardest difficulty that comes to mind almost immediately is "Heart of the Reich" in Call of Duty: World at War. You could probably get through the rest of the levels on Veteran without THAT much exertion, but the part of "Heart of the Reich" where you storm the courtyard outside of the Reichstag, destroy four FlaK 88s, then make your way to the building is unnecessarily punishing. Let's just forget the fact that the bullets and grenades become realistically hyper-lethal and that enemies become possibly infinite if you don't advance to your objective, but the grenades also have an increased "kill hitbox" to the point where even being a fair distance from a grenade will gut you like a fish. The enemies must've also reached this conclusion, because most of the time they abandon their guns to devote their ENTIRE attention to spamming you with an off-camera box of grenades (you will usually be surrounded upward of 3-4 grenades on short fuses at any point you wish to take cover or move from cover). I actually spent most of the level just throwing back all the grenades around me (running away when they exceeded 2) until my allies finally decided to top collectively take their thumbs out of their asses and advance half an hour in (not to mention multiple replays when I was trapped behind cover by the notorious 6-grenade-combo). It all actually makes me wonder what I looked like double backing between cover to cover from grenades from the Nazi side of the fence...

 

[Voulan]

Kingdom Hearts 1 on it's hardest difficulty is a nightmare. I felt awful yelling at Disney characters, but seriously.

And don't get me started on veteran in COD. All it does is spam grenades that you can't hope to get away from. I once had ten thrown at me at once, I made a point of counting. That's just stupid - that's not challenging, that's impossible.

 

[TyrunnAlberyn]

X-Com: Terror From the Deep on Superhuman difficulty (and patched with Xcomutil, so the game didn't revert back to Beginner). Oh, did that game like stacking the odds against you.

For something slightly newer, Witcher 2's Insane difficulty does not pull punches at all.

 

[TheMann]

Doom 3 on nightmare absolutely offers a real beat down. First, you have to beat the game in another skill level just to unlock it. The enemies don't respawn like in the original Doom, but they do 320% more damage than normal and your health slowly ticks down to 25% no matter what's happening in the game. Also the health kits have been removed, although the health panels are still there (but those are way more rare.) I was slugging my way through that, and let's just say that quicksave is used often.

 

[zerobudgetgamer]

Square-Enix/Squaresoft games always have this quality of having barely beatable bosses with super-moves that they use right when you think that you might stand a chance.

Also, Uncharted 2's highest mode. Only because you get ambushed every two seconds and it only takes like three shots to kill you.

Ever heard of the International Editions (Which, ironically, never make it out of Japan)? FFX's IE had a set of bosses after the Final Boss called the Dark Aeons. You needed max 255 Accuracy PLUS a decent amount of Luck JUST TO BE ABLE TO HIT THEM.

As for a personal vote, I recall Castlevania: Curse of Darkness had less of a difficult Hard Mode and more just a retarded one. Basically, you start the game at level 1 like always, while everything else starts off at around level 15. Oh, and their Normal-Mode EXP rates stayed the same, which meant half of the enemies in the first dungeon gave no EXP, and the highest amount you could get was around 1-3. Just didn't seem like any fun since A. I could just farm for a few hours to even things out, but B. the game practically requires beating two bosses - both of which had some pretty nasty AoE abilities that would one-shot me in HM - before you could find much of anything worth grinding.