Five NES Games That Made You Want To Break Your Controller

Long before the age of save states, memory cards, GameFaqs and social media gamers lived in the best of worst times: the NES era. Games were awesome and creative but in order to make an otherwise short game longer they were also often ridiculously hard. If you had an NES you probably love and hate the following games.

Castlevania

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Alright, pretty much all of the NES iterations of this series were hard. But if any single one was the most frustrating it was part 2. The nonsensical things you had to do in order to progress through the game with little to no guidance made a lot of us just quit.

Punch-Out!

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Remember how awesome you thought you were when you figured out how to beat the Great Tiger's teleportation? Then you fought bald bull and barely beat him...only to see him again later in the game and destroy you. You were about to quit playing until you found out you could skip straight to Mike Tyson with a password. You thought "well, maybe if I just practiced hard enough I could beat him" despite the fact that you couldn't even get to Soda Popinski.

Any feeling of confidence you had lasted about ten seconds before Iron Mike hurricane punched you and Referee Mario declared you legally dead.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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Another game guilty of being aimed at kids but being ridiculously hard. Things definitely went up a notch at the underwater section in the dam level (you're hearing the music in your head right now). You better pray that you had most of your turtles healthy by this point or you were pretty screwed.

Of course, the game only got harder after that and even went backwards in logic; if you fell into any body of water after the dam level your turtle (an amphibious reptile with ninja abilities mind you) automatically died.

Battle Toads

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How many of us got excited to play this as kids? We thought "It's like Ninja Turtles...but with frogs!" The cover art looked rad as heck with several barbarian toads beating the snot out of punker rats. Then you got to the speeder/wind tunnel level and had your childhood destroyed.

Somehow though some kid would always tell you that they, or someone they knew, could beat Battle Toads. Those people are called liars.

Ninja Gaiden

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Ninja Friggin' Gaiden. Who didn't have a love/hate relationship with this game? You got to be a ninja, you got to flip through the air, climb walls and throw ninja like weapons like ninja stars and a wall of fireballs (?!). Still, no matter how bad ass your powers were they couldn't prevent enemies from constantly re-spawning so that that already tough to reach platform became damn near impossible to jump to.

Barely anyone you knew growing up made it to the end and those who did were horrified to learn that the final boss had not one, not two, but THREE final forms that would wreck you if you didn't have the right weapon or know the pattern beforehand.