Really difficult games I completed: TNMT on NES

When I was younger I complained about the difficulty level of games a lot less. My patience and ability to learn the game's very intricate patterns in order to obtain victory was a lot more profound back then than it is now. I also didn't have immediate access to hundreds of games the way that I do now so if I got a game, that was probably the only new game I was going to have for a while so I had two choices: Git gud at this one, or don't play anything. I was a pre-teen and a teenager so I got gud.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES is lauded as one of the most difficult video games of all time on any system and certainly one of the most difficult on the NES. It was a action platformer like 50% of all games were back in those days and I remember it being a lot of fun.

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Like you would expect, most of this game is running around and killing baddies while jumping from one precarious platform to the next. There are 4 turtles and when they die, that's it, they are gone forever. So you better be really careful with that life-bar because it is really difficult to restore.

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Then there is the rather infamous dam level where basically everything you touch hurts you but you can't slow down too much to avoid damage because there is a timer that is extremely short and if you don't get through before that time is up you lose the turtle altogether.

There are a lot of reasons why I definitely wouldn't finish this game if I were playing it, or something like it today because not only was it exceptionally difficult but it was also very bugged and unbalanced. For example Donatello was really the only useful turtle because of his staff having such incredible range on it.

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_{That's one of the bosses and you can finish him without ever even leaving the platform that he can't reach}

You could cheese almost any enemy in the game with Donatello because he could stand somewhere that he cannot be struck and kill almost anyone in the game. The downside of all of this is that it made the gameplay seem cheap and also, If you manage to lose Donatello, you are in for a horrible surprise since most of the other weapons in the game are damn near useless and have the range of a toothpick.

I haven't gone back to revisit this game because I know the game is bad and while I have fond memories of it I would probably want to kick my own ass for ever liking it in the first place. AVGN sums up what most people feel about this game in one of his earlier videos of his career.

The point of all this is that these days I give up on really difficult games really easily. This is why I am not jumping on the Elder Ring bandwagon and I have never enjoyed any games that can be considered Souls like. There was a time where I had considerably more patience but I can all-but-guarantee that a controller or two was thrown across the room in anger when I was finishing this extremely difficult and famous game.