My two:

Very cliché, I played Ocarina of Time a ton as a child, have memories of playing it both on N64 as a wee child and on game cube as a less small child. Never got past water temple even with the game guide.

Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden memories. Played the crap out of that game on play station, constantly playing on free play praying for the cards I would need to get further. I was never able to beat more than 1-2 of the high mages. Watching speed runs on the game it turns out I was never ever going to beat that game as a kid. The final 6 are just disgustingly brutal.

    • gullible
      5•2 years ago

      Played every sonic game, never managed to beat a single one. The field of view is just too small for the move speed! Same reason Donkey Kong country is impossible.

  • @[email protected]
    4•2 years ago

    Tazmania for the Sega Genesis. I didn’t like the game all that much but I didn’t have a lot of choice back then. I don’t think I ever passed the mine stage.

  • @[email protected]
    3•2 years ago

    Most of them, I sucked at games in the pre-save era. I don’t remember if I ever got to 8-4 in Mario.

  • Dr. Coomer
    1•2 years ago

    Mario and Luigi dream team. Loved that game, but couldn’t get past beef cloud.

  • @[email protected]
    3•2 years ago

    Magic Carpet was incredibly fascinating. A whole planet that you could explore and influence and even modify terrain on? Every kid’s dream, even given proof by Minecraft’s popularity 20 years later. Could never get past the first several levels though.

    Finished the game recently after giving it another go, no wonder only the beginning is kid-friendly. The later levels are devilish puzzles in difficulty. If you do not figure out the exact sequence of actions necessary to solve them, you die! Their open-world nature is only a masquerade to trick you into complacency.

  • @[email protected]
    1•2 years ago

    Sega Game Gear Sonic 2. Had a boss that you had to beat with cannon balls that bounced at you down a hill. No instructions or clues, and no rings in the act to save you. Just don’t die from the same balls.

  • DaveEnglish
    36•2 years ago

    Pretty much all of them… I have so many memories of old 80s computer games where all I remember is level 1. It appears that I was terrible and perfectly happy with that.

    • fiat_lux
      4•2 years ago

      Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn’t just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.

      • @[email protected]
        1•2 years ago

        That’s where the printed hint books came into place. Also, print magazines would attract tons of readers with walkthroughs. Also, many came with CDs full of demos. God, that was good!

        • fiat_lux
          1•2 years ago

          Some of us hand-drew maps and wrote all that stuff down because the official hint books and magazines were all from another continent! And we liked it like that…

          Or, at least, it was the norm and we had no other choice but to accept games were hard 😅

    • @[email protected]
      2•2 years ago

      I have the same memories of playing the Commodore 64. I can’t think of a single game I was any good at, but I remember playing the shit out of them.

  • TheOlympian
    3•2 years ago

    Obsessed with Legacy of the Wizard as a kid on my NES. I didn’t even realize the goal was to get crowns until I revisited as an adult. I can still hum 5 or 6 different scores from the games soundtrack 30 years later.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 years ago

      You got this. Only way to beat ishin is practice each stage until you got it down almost flawless, by the time you finish the fight you will feel like a god.I highly recommend the git gud YouTube channel as it explains what skills you need to build in order to win. You got this