10 Impossible Video Game Boss Battles That Totally Broke You

10. Grim Reaper (Castlevania)

People really love to put on the rose-tinted glasses for the NES era, but the vast majority of those games included egregious and offensively annoying difficulty curves, simply to elongate their longevity.

Add in the reality of Nintendo's own "tips hotlines" to get through certain levels, and you have a recipe for titles that were literally built to infuriate.

Enter the Grim Reaper, a boss that - being main-man Simon Belmont's movement was already about as responsive and fun to control as an oil spill - ran circles around the player, peppering the screen with projectiles and attack waves.

To beat him would take hours of pattern and animation memorisation - a nowhere-near-fun case of trial and error that future generations were glad to leave behind.