I've already posted this in the "Most complicated game" thread, but I think it deserves mention here as well.

Long ago, in 1986, MicroProse and ORIGIN published an Amiga version of Steve Jackson's board game "OGRE". It's a strategy game played on a hexagonal-cell board. Basically, you have several turns to set up your army, made up of tanks, howitzers, infantry squads, etc., and one HQ. You even get the opportunity to set some "barriers", which basically make a cell permanently unusable, and look like pepperoni slices. After the "setup" period, the OGRE supertank appears. Imagine, if you will, a combination of City 17's Citadel from Half-Life 2, and a Metal Gear. It's a mobile, nuclear powered, battle fortress. I've never beaten it.

Commandos series in general is quite hard.

i´ve finished all of them and i am not a compulsive player. But I recognize that Comandos expansion Beyond the call of duty was a really hard one.

I've heard that this game is very hard. You're always losing HP, wich you recover a bit when you kill a enemy. If you fall in hole, you have to restart the entire level, and they are very long, without checkpoints. Someday I intend to play this game, just to see how many times I'll die. : P

Final Fantasy 2.

Why is this game hard, I hear you say. It's just an early Jarpeg.

Well...

For starters, you don't level by accruing XP points. No. Your characters advance depending on how much they get hit, by what, whether it's magical or physical in nature. The only game I know where it pays off to beat your own characters to death.

Also, the end game? Weeeeeeeelllll, it has going through 10 FLOORS of poisonous, stoning, and other status-ailment inducing enemies. Then if you make it through THAT hell, you get to fight the EMperor...who has two forms and the second one will KEEL yew!!!

So FInal Fantasy 2, Fuck you dirty.

Thank you.

I think the final dungeon in FF3 was even more brutal, and can't imagine playing through that damned thing without savestates. But yeah, FF2 was a very interesting experiment, but the system was terribly broken. On the other hand, some of the fights I had in that game must have been hilarious from the enemies' perspective - my heroes could spend enormous amounts of time deliberately hitting and healing each other, ignoring the confused foe entirely.

OMG You're right there; I.H.N.M.A.I.M.S. is one of the main reasons i won't touch point and click 2d adventure games.
Held off on the machinarium pirate anmesty cause i had a think about it and between IHNMAIMS and Leisure Suit Larry i realized those games REALLY P&## ME OFF!!! lol.
Oh and i wouldn't call it particularly hard for the most part but discworld 2 had me stumped and pulling my hair out all because a shop was split over 2 screens and you had to be in a place that looked impassable in order to get the other side to show so you could get necessary quest items to proceed.
On top of this list i add any text adventure that never came with a manual or in game help on command syntax....
Get pie.... take pie.... use pie... retrieve pie.... pick up pie.... WHAT DO YOU WANT!!!!?!?!?!?!
We all must remember basing the fun of such games in abusing their automatic responses to incorrect syntax, spelling or words simply not in it's database.
'Fry Eggs.'
'Sorry i do not know how to "Fry Eggs".
'Score Wid Da Laddies.'
'Sorry i do not know how to "Score Wid Da Ladies".
Get the picture...
Unrecognised word "The". lol

Ghosts 'n Goblins (and subsequent sequels): So freaking frustrating. Especially thanks to the sheer number of enemies that arrive vertically/diagonally and your inability to attack in those directions.

Battletoads: Almost literally impossible to beat in two player. Particularly thanks to a retarded bug in one of the final levels. Also, hoverbikes. HOVER-FREAKING-BIKES!

The Dig: Be honest, who got stuck at the crystal puzzle near the very start and said screw it and never looked back?

Indiana Jones and uhh... something, something Atlantis: If you don't do something at the very start of the game you have to restart about 2 hours later (thankfully, if you remembered everything, it takes like 20 minutes to get back tot hat spot). Not to mention the final Atlantis puzzle I never did figure out.

Ultima 1-3: Screw you Lord British, screw you!

Xenogears: I'm only putting this here because of the final dungeon. I beat this game THREE YEARS after I reached the final dungeon. All because it wasn't made obvious there are switches on top of the bridges that you need to jump up to! Argh!

Im surprised no one mentioned Dwarf Fortress. Once you get past what may be the most esoteric interface ever devised by man, you find an incredibly fun game that simply can not be won. Oh, it can fool you into thinking you're doing well, but in truth the game is actively doing all it can to destroy you and everything you've built. The dwarves you watch over are insane, suicidal drunks. 99% of the wildlife is out for their blood. Devastating accidents happen easily and often. Even if you get to the Adamantium that all players aspire to mine, an entire legion of hell spawn will rise up to annihilate you. The only other game I've playedr as masochistic would be IVAN, and IVAN makes nethack look like Barbie's First Adventure.

The Friday the 13th game on the NES was pretty annoying and quite difficult. X-com was really hard the first few playthroughs of dying and screaming. And despite the fact that I love strat/ managerial games, the first Sim City really gave me problems when I was a kid. Always in debt and not able to build.

Eye of the Beholder 2. God I hated that game as a kid. All the death traps, teleportation traps, levels where you couldn't rest, skeletal warriors with 90% magic resistance... that game was brutal and unforgiving. Much harder than the first game. SSI must have designed it with the sale of the hint book in mind to pad their sales figures.

Wing Commander: Secret Missions 1. This has to be the hardest expansion pack ever. Some of the overwhelming odds you go into with middling ships and worthless wingmen just boggles the mind. That game separated the gamer men from the boys. What you faced in the sequals of the WC series after that didn't really compare. I'm still surprised I beat that one.

As hard as "modern" games got, say from late 90s onward, they rarely matched that sort of sadistic difficulty. I mean, we take auto-mapping for granted. Among other things.

Having said that, I never finished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. As soon as I got on the road to Priypat, one long radiation-soaked path to hell peppered with snipers, I stopped, as it was no longer fun. Up until that point the game was quite engrossing with just the right amount of challenge,t though. The "zombie" outpost and territories were quite frightening, and the atmosphere of a survivalist wasteland was convincingly done (perhaps because the backdrop has roots in reality), even if respawns were a tad ludicrous in places.

For me its got to be Shadowgate. I played it on the NES system but I assume it to much the same on other 8-bit formats. Where to begin? First of all there are ways of dying instantly just by doing things which arent obviously going to be lethal- such as opening the wrong door. Then theres the huge number of items you pick up on your adventure most of which have no use at all.

Also you've got to keep a torch lit at all times (kind of an artifical time limit) otherwise you stumble about and die instantly. If felt barely like a game and more like interactive torture.

OMG! And wasn't there this one part where you had to click one very specific pixel on a lake screen or something? I had only the Amiga version, but finding the Red Gem or whatever it was (been a long time) had to have been equally as hard, or even more so given the console's limited interface, on the NES. I'll say one thing, it was just a little bit easier than Deja Vu.

I remember beating that game as being one of the most satisfying moments in my young gaming life.

My vote is for Tecmo Bowl on the NES. Why? If you ever tried beating the 49ers while playing as the Colts (this was back in the day when the Niners ruled and the Colts didn't), you wouldn't have to ask.

Yes, there was. At some point you found a ball that radiated intense cold. You went into a room that was impassable due to a large pool of water with a shark in it. There was a door on the other side of the room so clearly you should be able to cross. If you just tried to drop the ball into the water it wouldnt work. Hours of trial and error indicated there was one specific spot on the water you had to place it, for it to work.

I'm sure there are much harder adventure games but shadowgate was just so petty, random and spiteful it felt like it was draining your will to live by playing it.