My Review of the Hardest Game of All Time: I Wanna Be the Guy May 29 '11    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in PlayStation 2 Games Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain for PlayStation 2 From $9 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream for PlayStation 2 From $15 The Bottom Line Quite simply, there's never been a more insanely difficult game.  Is that a good thing?  I'm not sure, but it's worth a try. Ask anyone who’s played the 8-bit Nintendo classics and they’ll tell you the same, video games today just aren’t as tough as they used to be.  Perhaps that’s why so many creators of fan-made games who grew up with the NES and want to design a game in that style make their games so ridiculously difficult.  But no NES game or fan-made game can ever claim to have been so insanely hard as I Wanna Be The Guy, an absolutely punishing freeware title available online where it’s an accomplish to make it through the first room alive. I had heard a lot of talk about this game before finally deciding to give it a try, and I was surprised to learn that all the hype about the obscene level of difficulty was not at all exaggerated.  No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will die, a lot.  Of course, the problem with that is that the only way most people will ever get to see the later areas of the game where it gets really interesting is by watching a youtube video of someone playing through the game who’s obviously spent the better part of a year without stopping to sleep or go to work.  But that’s not exactly a criticism given that the game freely admits how cruel it is.  The easiest level of difficulty even available to play at is medium (there is no easy), and if you so much as select medium, your main character will suddenly be wearing a little pink bow with every save spot labeled “wuss” (seriously, I’m not making this up).  The game excels at taunting the player, but on the plus side, the feeling of accomplishment you get when you advance another room is astounding. But if you’re able to somehow make it through the increasingly insane stages (or at least watch the video of one of the masters playing it through), there’s some really innovative and amazing stuff in this game.  The game creatively blends numerous classics including Mario, Metroid, Ghouls ’N Ghosts, Mega Man, and so much more, with crazy boss fights such as an enormous Mike Tyson (from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!) and a bizarre fusion of Zangief from Street Fighter II and Kraid from Super Metroid.  Some of the homages to classic video games are at times brilliant, such as a sequence where your character is stuck in the Tetris game having to dodge falling blocks until you can climb up to escape, and in another room distorting the overhead view from the original Legend of Zelda into a 2D side-scroller that you have to see to understand.  The game often infuses the references with a sense of humor as well, such as a reenactment of the now famous opening sequence from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (famous for its bad voice acting and dialogue).  And in another example, the game even pops up a fake computer error message that will then fall on your character and crush you if you stop to read it. Unfortunately, for all of the innovation that goes into portions of the game, it just as often suffers from tedious rooms with little personality where you have to make your way through a large barrage of spikes or deadly fruit that unexpectedly flies in your direction.  At these points, the game starts to feel like pointless trial and error mixed with rote memorization, and by the eightieth try, you just feel like throwing your computer through the window, with the only thing keeping you going to see what’s in the next room.  Some of these rooms feature crudely drawn graphics (such as trees that look like they were drawn in Photoshop in about a minute or less), and the game would have benefitted more by taking not only in-game sprites and music from classic titles, but more of the backgrounds and objects from the video games being paid homage to without attempting to create original graphics and environments.  Another small gripe I have is that in all the references to classic video games I never once spotted a reference to one particular classic, the Final Fantasy series, which easily could have been worked in at some point based on its cultural relevance. The end result is a game that while not one of my favorites of all time, and probably not one I’ll want to frequently go back and play after having broken down and watched it on youtube, is still a game that I think everyone should try at least once, even if only for five minutes before ripping all their hair out.

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