10 Stupidly Hard Video Games Clearly Made By Sadists

2. Alex Kidd

Alex Kidd is a wonderfully colourful MegaDrive game where you die in one hit, have limited lives, can't save, and may very well Game Over without progressing so much as 15 steps. The hardest part is that at the end of each world (or whatever you want to call them) you are forced to play a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors as a weird form of boss battle, with each boss having a strategy coded into them that they'd stick to instead of just choosing an option randomly.

In theory this should work to make the game more interesting, as players have to figure out the opponent's strategy to win. Unfortunately there is a fundamental flaw in this, as it is only possible to figure out the opponent's strategy after losing to them multiple times, yet, as you tend to only have three lives and each loss counts as a death, you'll likely get Game Over before you determine how to beat them.

As a result, even if you somehow manage to get past the first couple of levels despite the constant death traps and one-hit-kill enemies, there's still the risk at the end of every world that you might be sent back to the very first level because you lost a game of chance. Colourful cartoon death is waiting around every corner and the developers will bask in your inevitable tears of rage.

Well technically there aren't any corners as it's a 2D game, but you get the point.