Back when I was first playing video games, no strategy guides existed. Unless you were lucky enough to have a Nintendo Power subscription or a friend who was a master of the exact same game that you were playing, you were on your own. I remember fondly all of the difficult challenges that game designers inserted into their games, and how many puzzles were just unsolvable except by random guessing or luck. Platformers were usually unforgiving and punished players for making the tiniest mistake. Everything was trial and error back then, except for a few lenient series like Kirby titles.
Last year, Mike "Kayin" O'Reilly released a beta version of a game which is notorious for its difficulty. Entitled "I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game" or IWBTG for short, it pays homage to those ridiculously difficult challenges that so many familiar NES and Atari games used to provide. Since it's a freeware title, it doesn't cost anything to play it, and you can download it at the following address: http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/downloads.php
IWBTG is a 2-D platformer that puts you in control of "The Kid", who embarks on a quest to defeat "The Guy", in order to claim the title for himself. The story is quite simple, and like most NES titles, making sense wasn't a requirement. "The Kid" isn't able to do much in the game, save for jumping, running, wall-climbing, and shooting a tiny pistol which is insignificant against almost every obstacle in the game. The bosses in the game all reference old-school video game adversaries, and should be familiar to anyone who grew up while games were still being produced for the NES. Among them are such known player-killers as Mike Tyson from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Mecha-Birdo from the Super Mario Bros. series, and Dracula from just about every Castlevania game.
IWBTG is filled with tricks and traps on every screen, and although seemingly impossible to overcome, can technically be beaten. Even though just about everything can destroy "The Kid" in one hit, the player is provided with infinite lives and some save points with which to record your progress. Truly, it's the kind of game that exaggerates all of the hours of mind-numbing aggravation we've all felt while playing difficult games, but I can't recommend it enough.
Give it a try sometime and see how far you can get. Don't say I didn't tell you it was really hard, though!
Final score: 8.8/10.
--Chris.
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