[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Battletoads. Mega Man. Castlevania. Contra. Ninja Gaiden. The NES was infamous for some amazingly difficult games, and that’s not counting the ones that were unbeatable because they were terrible and poorly designed. “Nintendo Hard” describes a video game that’s, well, ridiculously hard. It punishes you for even trying to beat the game by surrounding you by enemies, giving you little to no health, setting up unforeseeable death traps, and basically just setting up every possible obstacle in your way.

Nintendo Hard games can be good or bad. Good Nintendo Hard games are rewarding and well-made, with solid controls. You feel challenged by the game, but you don’t feel it’s truly unfair because of malicious programming. Good Nintendo Hard games have you coming back again and again to get a little bit farther each time. They include Battletoads, Bionic Commando, Contra, and pretty much every NES game you have fond memories of even if you couldn’t actually beat it. Bad Nintendo Hard games are difficult because they were lazily made. Their controls suck, the enemies take too much damage, and you aren’t given enough lives or continues to have a chance to win. These were often the shovelware cash-in games on the NES, like LJN’s many titles, including Back to the Future, Terminator 2, and Wolverine.

Examples of this trope include:

• The first Mega Man game is in the running, too. The six Robot Masters aren’t so bad (except for Guts Man’s infamous lifts and Ice Man’s level, which introduces the possibly more infamous disappearing/appearing platforms), but players who can get past the Yellow Devil boss — to say nothing of Dr. Wily himself — without resorting to the Select trick are few and far between. Mega Man 2 and onward have passwords, but those never go into Wily’s fortress… and he often has more than one. Sometimes the levels will do even worse damage to our patience. Quick Man’s kill beams and Heat Man’s disappearing blocks of doom are noteworthy examples.
• Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, and the rest of the series, have an evil reputation stemming from moderately annoying Jump Physics and extremely unpredictable enemy movement. Which would be pretty hard on its own. But some games in the series (such as Ghosts ‘n Goblins) went further: If you miss a power-up in the fifth level, it kicks you back to the fourth level once you reach the final boss. Even more frustratingly, you have to go through the game twice just in order to see its A Winner Is You ending.
• The three The Simpsons video games made by Acclaim on the NES are known for being overly difficult, due to shoddy physics and controls and many levels involving jumping across tiny platforms for a prolonged amount of time. For some reason, against usual NES gaming logic, to run you must hold the same button you use to jump, making running jumps impossible unless you press both buttons when jumping. Plus, in most of these games, you lack any kind of weaponry or anything to defend yourself with, and in some you have barely any health.
• Kid Chameleon for the Sega Genesis has been called I Wanna Be The Guy Lite, and for good reason; between the multiple drill-blocks, spiked pits, numerous enemies, crushing spiked walls and platforms, blocks that shoot spikes when touched, hailstones that fall like rain during certain levels, mazes during the aforementioned crushing spiked wall chase levels made out of rubber blocks, and the sheer amount of levels you have to go through, it’s a wonder no one has gone insane (that we know of) from playing it. There is one specific level where the floor is mostly bouncy blocks and the player is forced to run through the stage due to a large wall of rapidly moving spikes making this almost Nintendo Hard (it isn’t as most players will learn how to get through this level in five or either tries as it isn’t actually impossible).
• The original Batman game for the NES by Sunsoft would fall into this category. Lightning quick reflexes, level memorization, and maybe a turbo controller were necessary to get through the game, and let’s not even get started on the bosses. There are even times when one MUST abuse the limitations of the hardware and game to get through.