I interviewed the Cauldron creators for Retro Gamer years back. They admitted they’d never done a complete play through - they only tested individual sections to ensure they were possible to pass.
In Cauldron 2 you got to see the whole castle even if you had no chance of completing the game, thanks to the random start positions. That was an unusal and very good design decision.
That explains a lot. I didn't have Cauldron I, but I was never able to get anywhere on Cauldron II as a kid on real hardware, nor now on emulation as the controls seem way too arbitrary. Cool concept but way too frustrating.
Uridium is the only one of these I had. Dragon's Lair II is probably the standout tough game I had. And Aliens: only a few years ago I found out that the full price version came with a map! I had no idea how to navigate.
Great video, but I expected “Raid on Bungling Bay” and “Spelunker” on the list. Raid on BB ramps up the difficulty as the game progresses to insane levels for the last factory. Spelunker is absolutely unforgiving.
Me too mate ...i love loading games up on my real system..sometimes i just sit in my gaming room listening to the sid tunes its like a time machine :-)
The version of Green Beret I used to play was Rushin Attack and my step brother and I would take turns spamming the spacebar because that would throw grenades or something. Nice list, thanks for the quality vid!
@BS Handle Created uk but i was a bigger fan of the cpc464 .... i did have a disk system for that but mainly played tape games as they was £2.99 ish ... c64 just annoyed me as a kid ... i remember disk was about £15-20 in uk
@BS Handle Created i had things like light pens with my cpc could draw on the tv with full colour etc .... my mate had a cpc with hundreds of games.... But your looking at it from a modern perspective at that time i was only a young lad 6/7 power and capabilities wasnt a thing i even remember ... well until i got an amiga then i was on the power bandwagon little bit older then..
@BS Handle Created hahah you must have been older than me at the time ... and still obviously 😂. That would have been well to advanced for me , i could just about type out a game in basic from a magazine... Hehe you never played the danger wank game then 😂
@BS Handle Created haha oceans and hundreds of years apart but your still british i see.... or at least got our sense of humour ... PS IAM WELSH 😁 sorry about other week can we still be freinds. As for yor c64sex toy you are mad lad ... wiggle wiggle 🎮
Alleykat was a game that I really liked but it was sometimes terribly unfair. It was a sort of futuristic racer and sometimes, at the beginning of the race, it would fire your ship straight into some obstacle so that you crashed and died. Nowadays a game like this would give the player a couple of seconds of immortality to get their bearings but that was too much to hope for at the time.
Miami Vice comes to my mind... Not only it was brutally hard and merciless to be able to drive and steer the car without ever crashing it to other cars or pavement but it was also impossible to figure out what to actually do in the game. Hmm let me see... More honorable mentions might be Entombed maybe... H.E.R.O is quite hard altough one can progress quite a lot levels before it almost becomes "impossible". Fort Apocalypse, Skramble and Falcon Patrol 2 comes to my mind for hard side scrollers. Rambo First Blood was quite hard especially at beating the helicopter stage. Very spot on for Green Beret. Altough I should also add "Ghosts'n Goblins" for "almost impossible to beat" C64 platform games sa others also mentioned. Fist 2 is quite hard for a karate game. Bruce Lee and Zorro are quite hard but very enjoyable nevertheless. Swoop (Alieni) quite hard shooter game. Pacman, Lode Runner and Jumpman Junior games are surprising hard also contrary to their popularity. As for Impossible Mission lookalike, Hero of the Golden Talisman can also be considered quite hard. C64 version of 1942 is also quite hard. The Last Ninja (1) is also quite hard. It was a nightmare to be able to do the exact jumps at the swamp.
I remember playing Infiltrator when I was a kid. So frustrating. Flying to the objective was brutal. On the rare occasion I landed successfully, I never completed a single mission.
Neither did I. The flying simulation wasnt the best, and whats worse is that your papers could randomly become out of order, Chris Grey did a bad job of replicating "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein"
What ruined green beret for me was the speed of the enemy bullets. On the arcade and spectrum versions they were about half the speed giving you a chance to avoid close shots but on the C64 you had no chance.
The C-64 version of Aliens was unforgiving to say the least, and the Apple version was a piece of cake in comparison. Although I’ve seen a strategy on RUclips about how to properly do the door-welding sequence, and if you had patience, I suppose you could map out an optimal strategy for the air vent section.
This was one of my favorite games on the C64. I loved being the pipe 5 x 5. I spent hours learning the platform maze. Oh the the air duct maze was a huge pain. It took a while to figure out to use the flame thrower to push the aliens back instead of killing them on the welding section to keep the slower aliens longer and buy time to cut through that door. Fighting the queen and dropping her was so much fun.
Which version of Aliens? The version by Electric Dreams or Activision? The Activision version had some tough parts with the flame thrower stopping aliens getting through.
Stavros Fasoulas also gave us "Mind Roll," no slouch in its own right. Which reminds me of "Spindizzy," which was not exactly a cakewalk, either. And then there was Spectrum Holobyte's "Zig Zag"...which had an absolutely rocking title theme, but HOLY RIGATONI WAS IT HARD. 😱
For a game with a reputation for being difficult, I reckon most people who had a serious go at beating Impossible Mission still managed to complete it.
I never stood a chance as a kid on real hardware with my crappy joystick, but with keyboard controls on an emulator it's way better. Still a challenge, but definitely do able. Even on one life as long as you can clear that one brown room with all the pits along the bottom and the tiny random looking platforms without dying.
I used to think Impossible Mission was tough, but after finally reading through the instruction book (once I found a legit copy), I was able to finish it pretty easily. I still play it a few times per year because of its randomness and replayability. I consider the C-64 version to be perfection in video gaming. I never, ever get tired of playing it. So much fun, and immersive as well. I would put stuff like Wizard’s Lair on the list. Brutal. Marble Madness was extremely frustrating because of the LONG loading times that made it nearly impossible to practice and improve on difficult segments (before save states made that possible).
Hardest c64 games lis one hell of a list, considering nearly all of them are tough as nails! Whenever i read old review from zzap etc, i always find it difficult to grapple with the idea that those old reviewers finished a lot of these (like uridium). Thanks for the vid!
Back in the 80s, a friend had Impossible Mission for his Commodore 128. The game had stuck in my mind over the years, and several years ago, I found the game on the web and played it. After about five weeks of playing it, I discovered that Impossible Mission wasn’t so impossible after all, and I finally beat it! I’m so impressed as to how much thought and effort went into the game, especially the AI of the robots. And each time you play it, it’s a different experience. The rooms are in different locations in the building, the puzzle pieces are hidden in different objects, and the robots change their behavior.
China Miner, oh how that game was crap. It annoyed my dad at the time as he was bad at it too. I'd love to show him this video if he was still with us.
I love Uridium. I just wish I was'nt so crap at it. If you can get the speed just right, most of the walls are avoidable. Its those bloody mines that get me.
Impossible Mission was a game I mastered so well the only challenge was timing myself beating it. Only on a random start though as on the first default layout is too easy.
There are a couple of mistakes. The Game Over and Army Moves games are Spanish, developed by Dinamic. Imagine just the publisher. I recommend you try the commodore 64 version of the Abu sinvel profanation game. It is another Spanish game, one of the most difficult in its spectrum version, and that had no version for c64 until a couple of years ago. Great video
I never managed to beat quite a few C64 Games in my childhood... among those that stand out in my mind: (In no particular order.) "Psychastria", "Dream Warrior", "Forbidden Forest", & "Return to Forbidden Forest".
have you played Cauldron for spectrum or armstrad? they are much more playable because they simplify flying part, and all games have different level layouts, just in case you will be bored with one version =)
In my C64 days I used to beat Army Moves and Impossible Mission almost every time I play them. The Last V8 was the impossible one to me. Green Beret too, couldn't beat it even with infinite lives.
Oh the good old C64 days. I played a number games back then. Many of them were beyond me. Games like Infiltrator, Impossible Mission or Uridium were just unfair for my age. Many many many years later I had some relief thanks to RUclips. Some lads posted playthroughs on many of my childhood nightmares. It took me over 30 years to see the end of games like Infiltrator, The Lost Patrol, Impossible Mission or some older console games. I remember Phatasy Star from the SMS well. I was stuck on the desert planet on stopped playing for two or three years. An article in a newspaper offered some hints and I was finally able to finish the game. Those were good times. It's 2023 and I'm still playing... probably til I die. Haha. Thanks for the memories.
@5:42 human race ... i tried so many times, epic fail. Green Beret must be the game i've spent the most time with, months and months ... at best level 2. Too bad i had no trainers. And of course i should have learned playin' piano instead of wastin' decades playin' videogames. But I was addicted, i guess.
I did make it off level 1 on human race eventually level 2 is a nightmare also and I did not ever have enough lives to master it then you had to start again! another one I found frustrating dragons lair 2
Many of these lists spark lot of discussion. But it's impossible to agree with Cauldron being on top of this list. Battletoads for NES is a piece of cake compared to Cauldron
@@oldstylegaming I guess it's one of those games if you're willing to put in the time on the front end to learn the controls..... which I was not LOL (way too many easy to learn fun games on the c64 for that)
not only hard games in the 80ties, yesterday I found a 2019 shooter called NEUTRON from Sarah Jane Avory - She did a wonderful job programming that game in only 16KB and surprise - I cannot beat it ;-) too
Ah, Cauldron. Save states afforded me closure 20 years later, finally making all of these unfair jumps in one sitting. However, seeing the end of the game begs the question: Did its developers even consider the possibility of anybody winning?
I dunno, that Commodore rendition of Maple Leaf Rag sounds pretty good in China Miner. But, I would imagine if it looped constantly, it would drive you bonkers after a while.
'V the game' never got anywhere and was just stuck between the green energy barriers on start. Impossible mission...as a kid (and still) didnt have a clue how to solve the puzzles. and what about the yellow chess board console...?
Also 'time machine' I believe from Vivid games..stunning graphics..high anticipations from the video game magazines...but a total letdown since ( for me) as a kid I got clueless about how to progress in the game.
The puzzles - you could flip them and combine four pieces into one. After combining all individual pieces into unique computer chips, you go to the ‘control room’ (has a large screen in the room) and push up on it to complete the game. Took me ages to figure it out! It’s one of the few C64 games I ever completed.
The puzzles were super easy once you got good at the game as there was a button you could press to sacrifice a little time to have it auto-rotate a piece into the correct orientation. That took a couple of minutes but then you could fit each piece together quickly and easily. Mission accomplished. Congratulations.
Impossible Mission is a very challenging game - but one of the hardest C64 games ever? I have to disagree on this one. It's tough, but it is also one of the fairest and best playable games ever created for the C64. I played it more than a dozen times till the end - the last time just a couple of weeks ago, after I finally purchased a C64Mini. You are allowed to make quite a lot of errors and missteps, because you have "unlimited" lives and "only" loose some minutes from your overall time limit. Albeit the A.I. of the robots changes from play to play, the rooms are the same and very memorable. The key for your success are the passcodes, which allow you to "cheat" - f.e. freezing the robots or resetting the platforms.
@@oldstylegaming It is mentioned so often because of it's name, in my humble opinion. ;) The truth is: It's one of the fairest C64 games ever, because their are so many features which makes the game easier and more accessible than a lot of other beasts from the eighties. Even when I don't play perfect, I have two or three hours left. It's just a really good game, that aged extremely well.
I completely agree. One of the best games of the 1980s, very fair and not hard to beat as long as you're careful with your lives and don't be afraid to use the passcodes. In reality you have maybe 30 lives to spare at most.
Anthony Flack passcode management is integral to a good playthrough. A pro IM-er can quickly read a room and determine if a password should be used or saved for another layout.
Surprised you didn't include Eliminator. Rocking soundtrack, nice TRON aesthetic, some gravity-defying sections, pretty fun shooty gameplay. But good grief those water-canal levels were insane. Running into a barrier or going into the water should not result in an instant kill!
Almost any game made by Ocean Software/Imagine Software could make this list. I know I would have put in Miami Vice. Its so hard to control the car with all the other cars around, its so easy to crash that thing, let alone find the place you are looking for to find clues and money (and if you had a pirated version of the game, you may not have the list of places to be from the instruction book).
My achilles heel was Monty on the Run. I only used to load it to listen to Hubbard's tune. Surprised some comments are saying Impossible Mission isn't that difficult. I really wanted to love that game and gave it so much of my time, but I just found it too frustrating.
To be honest, I'm not a massive fan of most early European platform games anyway. Only exception for me is Manic Miner (although the first Blagger game from Antony Crowther wasn't too bad either). When I came to early platformers, I preferred the ones that came from the US like Loderunner and Montezuma's Revenge.
In Army Moves I probably didn't know that you can fire horizontally with the space bar, so I never even cleared the first stage. 😊 But I loved the music. One of the hardest games I 've ever played on C64 was Dragon's Lair II, at least as a kid I thought so. Cauldron has to be my favorite Spectrum game and bought it for the C64 also. I hardly made it to the caves, but I was really enjoying the flight. It was pure magic, literally and metaphorically. Monty on the Run was insane also, but the music was a masterpiece. So many things I could say. Another great video!
Uridium - Even using an unlimited lives trainer, making it to the end of this game was a huge pain in the ass. By level 13 or so, the enemy ships go by so fast that you have no chance of avoiding them. You'd hear the sound indicating that ships are approaching and then your ship just explodes. Plus, on the higher levels, there are sections where you have to turn your ship on edge to fit through, and fly slow, but they put a bomb hatch right there, so a homing mine pops out to chase you. I had to snapshot the game on level 14 (I think) and save it to disk so that I could come back and finish it later as my hand was cramping. I probably used up several hundred lives in the process. I don't even remember what happens when you beat the last level. Infiltrator - I never had the instructions and never got past the helicopter launch part, so I had no idea what the rest of the game was like.
Mastertronic's "Spooks", a game I beat a grand total of _once_ . And then, I think, just sat there for a minute, amazed that I had finally succeeded in doing so. ...So many, many ways to instantly die, sometimes just from entering a room for a split second. No lives, no continues, start from scratch.
Out of 20 games, 5 I didn't played. I know what you say when you talk about difficult games for Commodore 64. :) I agree on a selection, but I think one is missing. "House of Usher" was really difficult.
Besides them being transformers, was there ever any point to them transforming. I seem to remember when you turned into a car you couldn't shoot and it was really easy to die.
@@dingo4010 The only good "Transformers" game on the system was an unofficial "Transformers" themed game called Deceptor. That game was actually pretty decent, albeit a tad bit frustrating.
Tales of the Arabian Nights would be another suggestion for one of the hardest games. I rarely got past the first level and if I did I was usually killed pretty quicky on the second.
Ah, Fort Apocalypse was fun because it wasn't a platform game, unlike Impossible Mission. Even though the guided missiles are rather tricky to evade, the game was tons of fun to me, unlike Impossible Mission.
Oh wow, Yolanda on Amiga was inspired by Hercules on C64.. who knew... everyone hates Yolanda but I recently completed it and it gave me some enjoyment learning all the patterns.
Ones i remember were Chiller, Armalyte & Myth...everytime I hit up the latter always got wiped out at the Egyptian level...cracked & trained versions v.much needed on all three!😅
China Miner was one of the first games we bought. Thought the game was broken as I couldn't do the first jump (you have to press up with joystick while hitting the button). My brother got it right though. Then we hit the first breakaway platform, not understanding what was going on (in a age without internet) we thought the game was broken again and took it back, until the shop owner showed us what to do. Finally finished it with an infinite lives cheat and a save system. Was still tough. Some of the levels actually is much easier later on but mixed with tough ones as well...
I was thinking Jet Set Willy and Werewolves of London, however I believe both are physically impossible to finish in their released state on the C64 due to bugs. Jet Set Willy has a mandatory jump that simply isn't physically possible on the Commie due to screwing up the port from the Speccy, while Werewolves of London I believe has a bug where one of the priests or whatever it was, simply does not drop a cross and they're all needed for completion, rendering it impossible.
Most of them aren't really that hard. Cybernoid needs you to be precise and in other games you just have to focus and think rather than just going in one direction expecting it to work. A game can be hard by two reasons: -Its difficult but it still has fair challenge -Its demands someone expierenced to play them well. Or, it can also be difficult for pumping up quarters, but that is just arcade stuff.
Does anyone know which game the thumbnail is taken from? I remember the artwork vividly, just can't recall the name of the game (good job, marketing team! ). Personally I loved Airwolf, didn't find it tricky at all. Cauldron, on the other hand...
Well, there's a reason why Cybernoid is so bloody hard. The original version (which was on the Spectrum) was developed by Raffeale Cecco. LOL. Pretty much all his games were ridiculously hard
Younger people do not understand, but these games had no possibility to make a savegame. The only C64 games I remember for using savegame, are Elite and Ultima series (there were few others, too). These games could take weeks to play, so naturally they needed a save function.
There were definitely a few really tough ones. Inventing youtube was worth it because of these games alone because that is the only way to see what is actually to be seen in these hard-hitting hacks after the loading screen. After all, Impossible Mission was still manageable if you got a good arrangement of the rooms (they were rearranged with every game).
I've just didn't played in these games :)) Don't like to torture myself. I was a ZX-Spectrum user back in the days. And one of the hardest yet the best was 1942! I've had a joystick so playing in 1942 was a real fun.
I started playing Cauldron again on an emulator a couple of years ago as it never used to load when I as a kid. I would agree it is seriously impossible.
With the old sideways scrolling shoot-em-up, you could go a long way if you had all the fruity weapons but as soon as you died you were soooo weak. Goes the same for the arcade games like Nemesis too
Some games that I found to be difficult were Big Trouble In Little China, Black Knight (it was on a compilation with a tonne of other games like Alien Kill 1 and 2), Galactic Games, The Last Ninja 3, a text game called Escape, Aliens (UK version), Highlander (because it was just broken), and Impossible Mission 2.
I interviewed the Cauldron creators for Retro Gamer years back. They admitted they’d never done a complete play through - they only tested individual sections to ensure they were possible to pass.
Epoch plus5 I liked them as technical achievements, and I persevered for ages with the second one. But they were absolute pigs to play.
@@CraigGrannell Cauldron 1 especially. Cauldron II was hard, but not nearly as bad as the first
In Cauldron 2 you got to see the whole castle even if you had no chance of completing the game, thanks to the random start positions. That was an unusal and very good design decision.
That explains a lot. I didn't have Cauldron I, but I was never able to get anywhere on Cauldron II as a kid on real hardware, nor now on emulation as the controls seem way too arbitrary. Cool concept but way too frustrating.
Before it even started I knew impossible mission was gonna be on there.
Remember the 'jumps' in the Last Ninja games?? bloody nightmare!!
To be honest, LN2 had those toned down quite a bit but the first and especially the third games...fucking hell
Glad to see I was/am champ on some of these! :)
Delta, Uridium, Green Beret...
Great video :)
One game that stands out for me was Zoids. It was a good game, but I seem to remember it being brutal. Maybe I was just pish at it, though...
I remember having a really bad time with Wizball....
Stupidly hard to control until you got the first power up, poor game design that.
Uridium is the only one of these I had.
Dragon's Lair II is probably the standout tough game I had.
And Aliens: only a few years ago I found out that the full price version came with a map! I had no idea how to navigate.
Great video, but I expected “Raid on Bungling Bay” and “Spelunker” on the list. Raid on BB ramps up the difficulty as the game progresses to insane levels for the last factory. Spelunker is absolutely unforgiving.
Spelunker... loved to hate that game.
I finished Raid On BB so many times, hard to find it difficulty nowadays :D
I get massive waves of nostalgia when I watch your c64 videos. God I loved that machine.
Me too mate ...i love loading games up on my real system..sometimes i just sit in my gaming room listening to the sid tunes its like a time machine :-)
@@oldstylegaming how do you hook your c64 to your modern TV?
I have a din to RCA adapter.
they like £6 off ebay
The sound in Game Over sounds just like Starquake
The version of Green Beret I used to play was Rushin Attack and my step brother and I would take turns spamming the spacebar because that would throw grenades or something. Nice list, thanks for the quality vid!
thanks mate...yeah pressing the space bar when you are under so much stress and pressure isnt ideal on C64 games lol
Hardest game on the c64 was waiting for it to load.
I lived it too mate 😑
@BS Handle Created uk but i was a bigger fan of the cpc464 .... i did have a disk system for that but mainly played tape games as they was £2.99 ish ... c64 just annoyed me as a kid ... i remember disk was about £15-20 in uk
@BS Handle Created i had things like light pens with my cpc could draw on the tv with full colour etc .... my mate had a cpc with hundreds of games....
But your looking at it from a modern perspective at that time i was only a young lad 6/7 power and capabilities wasnt a thing i even remember ... well until i got an amiga then i was on the power bandwagon little bit older then..
@BS Handle Created hahah you must have been older than me at the time ... and still obviously 😂. That would have been well to advanced for me , i could just about type out a game in basic from a magazine...
Hehe you never played the danger wank game then 😂
@BS Handle Created haha oceans and hundreds of years apart but your still british i see.... or at least got our sense of humour ...
PS IAM WELSH 😁 sorry about other week can we still be freinds.
As for yor c64sex toy you are mad lad ... wiggle wiggle 🎮
I would definitely add to the list Miami Vice.
Interesting concept as a game but a nightmare to play!
Alleykat was a game that I really liked but it was sometimes terribly unfair. It was a sort of futuristic racer and sometimes, at the beginning of the race, it would fire your ship straight into some obstacle so that you crashed and died. Nowadays a game like this would give the player a couple of seconds of immortality to get their bearings but that was too much to hope for at the time.
You could fly unscathed if you stuck to one side of the screen on early levels of I remember..
1st Dizzy. Almost finished but at the end the wizzard starts to shoot at me. I see now on dizzy longplay I didn't have a protective amulet :/
Spin Dizzy was a bastard too
Miami Vice comes to my mind... Not only it was brutally hard and merciless to be able to drive and steer the car without ever crashing it to other cars or pavement but it was also impossible to figure out what to actually do in the game.
Hmm let me see... More honorable mentions might be Entombed maybe...
H.E.R.O is quite hard altough one can progress quite a lot levels before it almost becomes "impossible".
Fort Apocalypse, Skramble and Falcon Patrol 2 comes to my mind for hard side scrollers.
Rambo First Blood was quite hard especially at beating the helicopter stage.
Very spot on for Green Beret. Altough I should also add "Ghosts'n Goblins" for "almost impossible to beat" C64 platform games sa others also mentioned.
Fist 2 is quite hard for a karate game.
Bruce Lee and Zorro are quite hard but very enjoyable nevertheless.
Swoop (Alieni) quite hard shooter game.
Pacman, Lode Runner and Jumpman Junior games are surprising hard also contrary to their popularity.
As for Impossible Mission lookalike, Hero of the Golden Talisman can also be considered quite hard.
C64 version of 1942 is also quite hard.
The Last Ninja (1) is also quite hard. It was a nightmare to be able to do the exact jumps at the swamp.
The Hercules with those sound effects and mechanics and hardness!!!
I remember playing Infiltrator when I was a kid. So frustrating. Flying to the objective was brutal. On the rare occasion I landed successfully, I never completed a single mission.
Never played that but I remember thinking it looked so awesome, with different game modes etc!
Neither did I. The flying simulation wasnt the best, and whats worse is that your papers could randomly become out of order, Chris Grey did a bad job of replicating "Beyond Castle Wolfenstein"
What ruined green beret for me was the speed of the enemy bullets.
On the arcade and spectrum versions they were about half the speed giving you a chance to avoid close shots but on the C64 you had no chance.
Aargh! Green Beret is such a heartbreak. A near perfect conversion except for that one fatal flaw.
There were a lot of games like that, where they made the C64 version A LOT harder for some inexplicable reason.
What ruined Green Beret for me was that it crashed at the end of the second level, 100% of the time.
The C-64 version of Aliens was unforgiving to say the least, and the Apple version was a piece of cake in comparison. Although I’ve seen a strategy on RUclips about how to properly do the door-welding sequence, and if you had patience, I suppose you could map out an optimal strategy for the air vent section.
This was one of my favorite games on the C64. I loved being the pipe 5 x 5. I spent hours learning the platform maze. Oh the the air duct maze was a huge pain. It took a while to figure out to use the flame thrower to push the aliens back instead of killing them on the welding section to keep the slower aliens longer and buy time to cut through that door. Fighting the queen and dropping her was so much fun.
Which version of Aliens? The version by Electric Dreams or Activision? The Activision version had some tough parts with the flame thrower stopping aliens getting through.
Stavros Fasoulas also gave us "Mind Roll," no slouch in its own right.
Which reminds me of "Spindizzy," which was not exactly a cakewalk, either.
And then there was Spectrum Holobyte's "Zig Zag"...which had an absolutely rocking title theme, but HOLY RIGATONI WAS IT HARD. 😱
For a game with a reputation for being difficult, I reckon most people who had a serious go at beating Impossible Mission still managed to complete it.
I love that game. "Another visitor. Stay awhile... Stay forever..."
Unless, like me, you don't really like platform games.
AND literally piecing a puzzle together.
Yeah I remember completing that too, no chance with the sequel though!
No chance on that for me.
I never stood a chance as a kid on real hardware with my crappy joystick, but with keyboard controls on an emulator it's way better. Still a challenge, but definitely do able. Even on one life as long as you can clear that one brown room with all the pits along the bottom and the tiny random looking platforms without dying.
I used to think Impossible Mission was tough, but after finally reading through the instruction book (once I found a legit copy), I was able to finish it pretty easily. I still play it a few times per year because of its randomness and replayability. I consider the C-64 version to be perfection in video gaming. I never, ever get tired of playing it. So much fun, and immersive as well.
I would put stuff like Wizard’s Lair on the list. Brutal. Marble Madness was extremely frustrating because of the LONG loading times that made it nearly impossible to practice and improve on difficult segments (before save states made that possible).
Impossible Mission is class
It's just a fun game. Not too challenging. Figured it out without manual.
I had a bunch of these...it really explains why i feel the way i do about commodore games. They were often impossible.
Hardest c64 games lis one hell of a list, considering nearly all of them are tough as nails! Whenever i read old review from zzap etc, i always find it difficult to grapple with the idea that those old reviewers finished a lot of these (like uridium). Thanks for the vid!
Thanks for watching and taking the time to comment :-)
Ghostbusters 2, couldn't get down the pit at the start.
Back in the 80s, a friend had Impossible Mission for his Commodore 128. The game had stuck in my mind over the years, and several years ago, I found the game on the web and played it. After about five weeks of playing it, I discovered that Impossible Mission wasn’t so impossible after all, and I finally beat it! I’m so impressed as to how much thought and effort went into the game, especially the AI of the robots. And each time you play it, it’s a different experience. The rooms are in different locations in the building, the puzzle pieces are hidden in different objects, and the robots change their behavior.
China Miner, oh how that game was crap. It annoyed my dad at the time as he was bad at it too. I'd love to show him this video if he was still with us.
I love Uridium. I just wish I was'nt so crap at it. If you can get the speed just right, most of the walls are avoidable. Its those bloody mines that get me.
never played the og but loved the follow up on amiga.
@@krissymarklewis1793 Did it happen to be named "Psychastria" or somethin like it...? It was freaking impossible...
7:30 No.8 Cybernoid II / Ghost, Dance macabre :D
Cybernoids theme as shown sounds like a bent up changed up version of Stevie wonders happy birthday.
Impossible Mission was a game I mastered so well the only challenge was timing myself beating it. Only on a random start though as on the first default layout is too easy.
There are a couple of mistakes. The Game Over and Army Moves games are Spanish, developed by Dinamic. Imagine just the publisher. I recommend you try the commodore 64 version of the Abu sinvel profanation game. It is another Spanish game, one of the most difficult in its spectrum version, and that had no version for c64 until a couple of years ago. Great video
I never managed to beat quite a few C64 Games in my childhood... among those that stand out in my mind: (In no particular order.) "Psychastria", "Dream Warrior", "Forbidden Forest", & "Return to Forbidden Forest".
The final boss in Forbidden Forest would appear in random locations so killing it was more a matter of luck than skill.
I managed that once or twice.
The hardest games I ever played on the C64 was Short Circuit and Star Trek. Would love to see you touch on those two games
have you played Cauldron for spectrum or armstrad? they are much more playable because they simplify flying part, and all games have different level layouts, just in case you will be bored with one version =)
In my C64 days I used to beat Army Moves and Impossible Mission almost every time I play them. The Last V8 was the impossible one to me. Green Beret too, couldn't beat it even with infinite lives.
It helped a lot to have good joystick with auto fire, not every auto fire was the same. Some were better.
Oh the good old C64 days. I played a number games back then. Many of them were beyond me. Games like Infiltrator, Impossible Mission or Uridium were just unfair for my age. Many many many years later I had some relief thanks to RUclips. Some lads posted playthroughs on many of my childhood nightmares. It took me over 30 years to see the end of games like Infiltrator, The Lost Patrol, Impossible Mission or some older console games. I remember Phatasy Star from the SMS well. I was stuck on the desert planet on stopped playing for two or three years. An article in a newspaper offered some hints and I was finally able to finish the game. Those were good times. It's 2023 and I'm still playing... probably til I die. Haha. Thanks for the memories.
I found Trailblazer to be pretty d... hard!
@5:42 human race ... i tried so many times, epic fail. Green Beret must be the game i've spent the most time with, months and months ... at best level 2. Too bad i had no trainers. And of course i should have learned playin' piano instead of wastin' decades playin' videogames. But I was addicted, i guess.
Ive finished green beret maybe twice in my life....its one hard game
Black Lamp.
You cannot beat it, no matter how good you are.
ZwiebelJack 9000 read about this in a magazine. Searched for it for months. What a let down it was when i found it. Had Great music.
I did make it off level 1 on human race eventually level 2 is a nightmare also and I did not ever have enough lives to master it then you had to start again!
another one I found frustrating dragons lair 2
Many of these lists spark lot of discussion. But it's impossible to agree with Cauldron being on top of this list. Battletoads for NES is a piece of cake compared to Cauldron
This was a much enjoyed blast from the past. Anyone remember Wonder boy
yeah wonder boy was a great looking game ...and yes it was also really hard :-)
But it went on forever. Same boss at the end but a different face
Great list….that sure bought back some fond memories. I seem to remember Mastertronic’s Magic Carpet being infuriating as well
I used to give up on The Last V8 about 12 seconds into the first course lol..... that soundtrack kept me coming back though
I completed it on a long play a few month ago...ill re upload soon as took it down.
old style gaming yeah I watched it and was thoroughly impressed!
thanks :-) it was a hard game but once you got used to the controls was dare i say...Easy.... cos it only had 2 levels
@@oldstylegaming I guess it's one of those games if you're willing to put in the time on the front end to learn the controls..... which I was not LOL (way too many easy to learn fun games on the c64 for that)
At least it only cost 2.99 in its day
thats why we ve got trainers back then...
not only hard games in the 80ties, yesterday I found a 2019 shooter called NEUTRON from Sarah Jane Avory - She did a wonderful job programming that game in only 16KB and surprise - I cannot beat it ;-) too
Ah, Cauldron. Save states afforded me closure 20 years later, finally making all of these unfair jumps in one sitting. However, seeing the end of the game begs the question: Did its developers even consider the possibility of anybody winning?
They used infinite lives mode during the making of the game, which explains a lot..
Cybernoid. What a brilliant game. Great choices here. Classic games all despite their difficulty.
7:44 reminds me of the theme to The Flash.
I found The Last Ninja games, Transformers and the Addams Family ridiculously difficult.
I dunno, that Commodore rendition of Maple Leaf Rag sounds pretty good in China Miner. But, I would imagine if it looped constantly, it would drive you bonkers after a while.
I like that people watch for cover versions and inspirations for video game music, I know I do.
'V the game' never got anywhere and was just stuck between the green energy barriers on start.
Impossible mission...as a kid (and still) didnt have a clue how to solve the puzzles. and what about the yellow chess board console...?
Also 'time machine' I believe from Vivid games..stunning graphics..high anticipations from the video game magazines...but a total letdown since ( for me) as a kid I got clueless about how to progress in the game.
The puzzles - you could flip them and combine four pieces into one. After combining all individual pieces into unique computer chips, you go to the ‘control room’ (has a large screen in the room) and push up on it to complete the game.
Took me ages to figure it out!
It’s one of the few C64 games I ever completed.
The puzzles were super easy once you got good at the game as there was a button you could press to sacrifice a little time to have it auto-rotate a piece into the correct orientation. That took a couple of minutes but then you could fit each piece together quickly and easily. Mission accomplished. Congratulations.
capitalknockers666 I wanted you to stay a while though!
Impossible Mission is a very challenging game - but one of the hardest C64 games ever? I have to disagree on this one. It's tough, but it is also one of the fairest and best playable games ever created for the C64. I played it more than a dozen times till the end - the last time just a couple of weeks ago, after I finally purchased a C64Mini. You are allowed to make quite a lot of errors and missteps, because you have "unlimited" lives and "only" loose some minutes from your overall time limit. Albeit the A.I. of the robots changes from play to play, the rooms are the same and very memorable. The key for your success are the passcodes, which allow you to "cheat" - f.e. freezing the robots or resetting the platforms.
i said in the video that i can complete Impossible Mission but it got soooo many mentions on the FB page that people must find it hard
@@oldstylegaming It is mentioned so often because of it's name, in my humble opinion. ;) The truth is: It's one of the fairest C64 games ever, because their are so many features which makes the game easier and more accessible than a lot of other beasts from the eighties. Even when I don't play perfect, I have two or three hours left. It's just a really good game, that aged extremely well.
@@andyawardian1868 it has mate thats why its in my 30 Best Commodore 64 Games Ever Made video ;-)
I completely agree. One of the best games of the 1980s, very fair and not hard to beat as long as you're careful with your lives and don't be afraid to use the passcodes. In reality you have maybe 30 lives to spare at most.
Anthony Flack passcode management is integral to a good playthrough. A pro IM-er can quickly read a room and determine if a password should be used or saved for another layout.
What about Decathlon and Aztec Challenge? ;)
Surprised you didn't include Eliminator. Rocking soundtrack, nice TRON aesthetic, some gravity-defying sections, pretty fun shooty gameplay. But good grief those water-canal levels were insane. Running into a barrier or going into the water should not result in an instant kill!
Almost any game made by Ocean Software/Imagine Software could make this list. I know I would have put in Miami Vice. Its so hard to control the car with all the other cars around, its so easy to crash that thing, let alone find the place you are looking for to find clues and money (and if you had a pirated version of the game, you may not have the list of places to be from the instruction book).
Weird, along with Andy Capp, that's two c64 games about alcoholics aimed at kids. Ah the 80s. Good times.
Best times mate
Don't forget Mr. Wino
Don't forget Bozo's Night Out
My achilles heel was Monty on the Run. I only used to load it to listen to Hubbard's tune. Surprised some comments are saying Impossible Mission isn't that difficult. I really wanted to love that game and gave it so much of my time, but I just found it too frustrating.
I actually remember completing MOTR back in the day. Once my brother and I acquired the relevant items to pick at the start. It's bloody hard though.
To be honest, I'm not a massive fan of most early European platform games anyway. Only exception for me is Manic Miner (although the first Blagger game from Antony Crowther wasn't too bad either). When I came to early platformers, I preferred the ones that came from the US like Loderunner and Montezuma's Revenge.
I got a free poster with Game Over which was the box artwork before they censored it.
I had that up on my wall and my mother wasn't happy lol
In Army Moves I probably didn't know that you can fire horizontally with the space bar, so I never even cleared the first stage. 😊 But I loved the music. One of the hardest games I 've ever played on C64 was Dragon's Lair II, at least as a kid I thought so. Cauldron has to be my favorite Spectrum game and bought it for the C64 also. I hardly made it to the caves, but I was really enjoying the flight. It was pure magic, literally and metaphorically. Monty on the Run was insane also, but the music was a masterpiece. So many things I could say. Another great video!
Had a hard time on Paperboy. Snokie was also badass. Pixel perfect jumps right from the start.
Uridium - Even using an unlimited lives trainer, making it to the end of this game was a huge pain in the ass. By level 13 or so, the enemy ships go by so fast that you have no chance of avoiding them. You'd hear the sound indicating that ships are approaching and then your ship just explodes. Plus, on the higher levels, there are sections where you have to turn your ship on edge to fit through, and fly slow, but they put a bomb hatch right there, so a homing mine pops out to chase you. I had to snapshot the game on level 14 (I think) and save it to disk so that I could come back and finish it later as my hand was cramping. I probably used up several hundred lives in the process. I don't even remember what happens when you beat the last level.
Infiltrator - I never had the instructions and never got past the helicopter launch part, so I had no idea what the rest of the game was like.
Quo Vadis. 1000 confusing screens, sparse health and pixel perfect jumping. I only reached about 1% of the game.
I'll check that out :-)
Mastertronic's "Spooks", a game I beat a grand total of _once_ . And then, I think, just sat there for a minute, amazed that I had finally succeeded in doing so.
...So many, many ways to instantly die, sometimes just from entering a room for a split second. No lives, no continues, start from scratch.
I loved Impossible Mission. I played it over and over just trying to beat my previous time.
Out of 20 games, 5 I didn't played. I know what you say when you talk about difficult games for Commodore 64. :)
I agree on a selection, but I think one is missing. "House of Usher" was really difficult.
Nice compilation. Transformers was insanely difficult too!
Besides them being transformers, was there ever any point to them transforming. I seem to remember when you turned into a car you couldn't shoot and it was really easy to die.
@@dingo4010 The only good "Transformers" game on the system was an unofficial "Transformers" themed game called Deceptor. That game was actually pretty decent, albeit a tad bit frustrating.
Tales of the Arabian Nights would be another suggestion for one of the hardest games. I rarely got past the first level and if I did I was usually killed pretty quicky on the second.
Same here, but I recently played it on emulator and it was much easier now I'm older.
My "this is harder than Impossible Mission" was trying to memorize Fort Apocalypse patterns. :) Frustrating as all get out.
Ah, Fort Apocalypse was fun because it wasn't a platform game, unlike Impossible Mission.
Even though the guided missiles are rather tricky to evade, the game was tons of fun to me, unlike Impossible Mission.
I remember Shadow of the beast II (best graphics of any Amiga game) was absurdly hard. Even with infinite energy it was very difficult to complete.
This is a great channel, keep up the great work man.
It took me roughly 29 years to get past the first level of The Human Race. Massive Eureka moment, then died in seconds on level 2.... :)
That game is nearly impossible even with trainers. It was worth loading up for the music though. especially the first level music
The Dizzy games were stupid hard as well. Which was infuriating for me as they looked like a lot of fun to play.
Oh wow, Yolanda on Amiga was inspired by Hercules on C64.. who knew... everyone hates Yolanda but I recently completed it and it gave me some enjoyment learning all the patterns.
Same guy made both games, so it was essentially a spiritual sequel to Hercules
2:51 - Yes I remember that - great artwork! 😁👍
The ability to destroy the walls would make Uridium almost perfect.
Ones i remember were Chiller, Armalyte & Myth...everytime I hit up the latter always got wiped out at the Egyptian level...cracked & trained versions v.much needed on all three!😅
I did a full playthrough of myth last week ..great game and who would have thought the last level would be a shoot em up
Excellent stuff. Subscribed.
I admit I never heard of half the games on the list.
Going to check them out now thanks to this video.
China Miner was one of the first games we bought. Thought the game was broken as I couldn't do the first jump (you have to press up with joystick while hitting the button). My brother got it right though. Then we hit the first breakaway platform, not understanding what was going on (in a age without internet) we thought the game was broken again and took it back, until the shop owner showed us what to do. Finally finished it with an infinite lives cheat and a save system. Was still tough. Some of the levels actually is much easier later on but mixed with tough ones as well...
I'd agree with some of these like Cauldron, Hercules and Airwolf. Impossible Mission for me is the easiest one, lol!
Not surprised at No.1
My god... that game was, as you say in the video, torture.
I was thinking Jet Set Willy and Werewolves of London, however I believe both are physically impossible to finish in their released state on the C64 due to bugs. Jet Set Willy has a mandatory jump that simply isn't physically possible on the Commie due to screwing up the port from the Speccy, while Werewolves of London I believe has a bug where one of the priests or whatever it was, simply does not drop a cross and they're all needed for completion, rendering it impossible.
Most of them aren't really that hard. Cybernoid needs you to be precise and in other games you just have to focus and think rather than just going in one direction expecting it to work. A game can be hard by two reasons:
-Its difficult but it still has fair challenge
-Its demands someone expierenced to play them well.
Or, it can also be difficult for pumping up quarters, but that is just arcade stuff.
Does anyone know which game the thumbnail is taken from? I remember the artwork vividly, just can't recall the name of the game (good job, marketing team! ). Personally I loved Airwolf, didn't find it tricky at all. Cauldron, on the other hand...
Wow some solid ones there mate, I’ve only got near one, impossible mission. Got to the puzzle at the end 😭
Well, there's a reason why Cybernoid is so bloody hard. The original version (which was on the Spectrum) was developed by Raffeale Cecco. LOL. Pretty much all his games were ridiculously hard
Younger people do not understand, but these games had no possibility to make a savegame.
The only C64 games I remember for using savegame, are Elite and Ultima series (there were few others, too). These games could take weeks to play, so naturally they needed a save function.
I remember Bounder. A cousin of mine had to "break" this game to play it.
There were definitely a few really tough ones. Inventing youtube was worth it because of these games alone because that is the only way to see what is actually to be seen in these hard-hitting hacks after the loading screen. After all, Impossible Mission was still manageable if you got a good arrangement of the rooms (they were rearranged with every game).
How do I get out of the truck in Short Circuit? That's 2 screens and then getting shut off.
Cybernoid II still has best game music - ever...
Staff of Karnath used to drive me insane.
I've just didn't played in these games :)) Don't like to torture myself.
I was a ZX-Spectrum user back in the days. And one of the hardest yet the best was 1942! I've had a joystick so playing in 1942 was a real fun.
I played impossible mission!! I was too young to really master it but I loved the graphics and style
I agree, wasn't a fan of the sequel, though. It was OK, but it was kind of meh
I started playing Cauldron again on an emulator a couple of years ago as it never used to load when I as a kid. I would agree it is seriously impossible.
With the old sideways scrolling shoot-em-up, you could go a long way if you had all the fruity weapons but as soon as you died you were soooo weak. Goes the same for the arcade games like Nemesis too
Great vid!
I remember ripping my pants, playing GreenBeret.. So annoyingly hard; like Who Dares Wins on dope.
Haha how do you manage to rip your pants playing green beret lol
old style gaming The pants were actually cotton shorts, so they ripped quite easily; even with my nerdy arm strengthnessless..
@@pelimies1818 Haha
Great channel just subscribed. Re living my teens!!!!
Thanks mate
Some games that I found to be difficult were Big Trouble In Little China, Black Knight (it was on a compilation with a tonne of other games like Alien Kill 1 and 2), Galactic Games, The Last Ninja 3, a text game called Escape, Aliens (UK version), Highlander (because it was just broken), and Impossible Mission 2.