The hardest games you played, and what made it so difficult.

Battletoads and double dragon 3 on NES, i ended up beating those 2 games only because i had no internet for about 2 weeks and had my brother's old NES collection at the time.

A classic.. I have it for PS2 lying around somewhere.. I saw it on PSN too I think I'll pick it up there. Never finished the game, but it was much fun.

Dwarf Fortress

• Esoteric interface

• Insane level of complexity

• Catsplosions.

• Moody dwarves, one suicidal dwarf can cause your entire fortress to go insane via relationship chain effects.

• "Uldir Ognor" has been killed by a Giant Skeletal Whale.

On the bright side I can turn a volcano into a fucking cannon.

Brogue

Incredible environment generation packed with some of the smartest Roguelike A.I. out there. The creator has really raised the bar for what I expect from Roguelikes with his algorithms.

SWAT 4

Playing on Elite means you need to get exactly 100 points to beat the levels. You cannot have a single civilian casualty, the A.I. has an almost unfair rotation speed increase and you need to capture most of the hostiles, along with collect all of their weapons for evidence. Definitely the best co-op tactical FPS I have ever played though. Raven Shield is a close contender.

Arma II CO /w ACE & ACRE

• Being a squad leader.

• Trying to get people to follow orders.

• Dodging RPGs from less than 20 meters away in a helicopter.

• Sniping on a windy day from 1.5Km+ distances.

• Being stranded as the sole survivor of your squad in a city of insurgents.

• Too many to list...

Still an incredible experience every time though, haven't found another game out there that pushes my mind to it's strategic limits.

Chess

There is always someone better.

Counter-strike: Source

Competitively it's one hell of a challenge, but also an extremely rewarding experience. Even when I was in Gold, League never even came close to matching the level of exhilaration I felt when I was in a heated battle.

Life

Especially when Gracious & Glorious start appearing, they're the hardest enemies in the game (no flinching, you can't normally get WT from them, bounce off your combos and escaping from theirs is hard), it's even worse when they appear more often in higher difficulties.
I got my ass kicked a lot since I started playing it in Normal right away, but I liked the game.

Also, God Hand, for reasons already well known or mentioned in this topic already.

Etrian Odyssey 3, even though I heard this was easier than the previous ones (never played the first two, only found this one in a used game sale), I still had a hard time with it, got killed by a certain monster on the very first floor at the beginning, and later there was the FOE's and bosses.
Also, I had to get used to the system, how each character class worked, but maybe that was more of being new to the series and not so much about the game.

That's all I can remember for now.

Digimon world 3 for the PS1

I was only about 10ish when I first played and before that I hadn't really played too many turn based strategy. Really the only reason I bought it was because I was a huge fan of the 4th series. Before several years ago when i first figured what I was doing, I could only progress about a half hour into the game before dieing and becoming extremely depressed over its game over screen with that sad, sad tune that it played. I remember trying to get past that part some many times but never could so I just left the game till i was about 17 and found all my PS1 games my parents had stored in the attic.

Aside "Dark Souls" being the default option for me..hmmm..I must say "Record Of Agarest Wars" in hard mode was fucking difficult, I was stuck in the "last" battle for almost a week until said "screw it" and watched a strategy video.

I finished it with 10% skills and 90% luck.

Touhou EoSD is really hard, even for a pleb like me on Normal mode I can't get to Flandre because I always end up using a continue. Billet hells are crazy man, I dont know how some people beat it on Lunatic mode, they seem inhuman.

lol I had that game. It was a pretty basic RPG. Only thing retarded about it was the card game because eventually the computers would pull these crazy combos out of their asses that you just had to sit there and watch as they raped your much shittier deck.

BeetleJuice on the NES

What made it difficult: It was a LJN.[size=7] but I beat that son of a bitch...[/h]

Ya I know

I guess the real rewards are the satisfaction of reaching her and the battle theme, right?

ONLY thing? So you didn't find it retarded that, to get the true Digivolution line of your Digimon, you have to level them up in Rookie form?

If you don't get what I'm saying: Guilmon, one of the starters there, Digivolves into Growlmon at level 5, but then you have to keep levelling Guilmon, NOT Growlmon, to level 20 to get his next natural Ultimate, WarGrowlmon, and then get Guilmon again to level 40 for Gallantmon. Levelling up any of the Digivolved forms will only yield you Digivolutions of other, completely unrelated Digimon.

That wasn't that retarded. I mean, the rookie and digivolution got exp after each battle. It was a decent system to get a bunch of digivolutions with a limited pool of rookies. Sometimes the leveling was ridiculous (you had to level multiple digivolutions to lv. 99 for rare ones) but overall it wasn't that bad.