What's the Hardest game you have ever played

[Unesh52]

Demon's Souls is fucking impossible. I'm convinced that those guys on the online leader boards all cheated. Every insurmountable challenge you conquer reveals only a more unfair, unexpected, impossible trial. Blob monster > surprise dragons > fucking swamp poison -- all with half your health bar! And don't even get me started on the weapon crafting system... it's like it's designed to make you regret every decision you make.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

X3 Terran Conflict. I flew around aimlessly for hours, pausing to read the giant unhelpful manual, making a few trades but seeming to make no profit. I couldn't even figure out how to cheat.

 

[Eggbert]

I Wanna Be The Guy seems popular, but there's also Nethack (roguelike), or Dwarf Fortress. Any one of those three, really.

 

[Silent_Protagonist]

Ninja Gaiden on the Nes. I wanted to punch it in the face and drop kick it from a window. Most unforgiving game I ever encounterd I think.

This. I still havn't beaten it. The game is relentless and unforgiving.

 

[ischmalud]

hmmm Supreme Ruler 2020 gold edition or in a sense EVE

 

[asam92]

Demon Souls and the extra stages of the new Donkey Kong, its all practice though, once you get used to the game it gets easier.

 

[Rpground]

nethack hands down! i recently lost my ALMOST WON GAME,just clearing out a few things. so i went over to that fortress place full of those rangers k? so i get there and i just power threw to combat then i die...for no reason...and im like "WTF!? how did i die!?" turns out the AI is SO SMART that some ranger came up to me PICKED UP A COCKATRICE CORPSE AND SMASHED ME OTHER THE HEAD WITH IT! he wasnt wearing gloves so he got stoned aswell but WTF?!?! i died in 3 short turns with that...HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW HE WOULD DO THAT!? HE'S A RANGER THAT FIGHTS IN MELEE COMBAT! here i thought that mind flayers were fucking annoying...no cockatrices are the worst...after liches...well thats another thing to add to my genocide list...AGAIN WTF?! HE DROPPED HIS WEAPONS TO PICK UP A CORPSE,CAUSE IT WAS A MORE EFFECTIVE WEAPON THEN WHAT HE HAD! thats worse then the choking death i had when trying to increase my strength by eating giants...

 

[Zorak the Mantis]

Fallout: Tactics

 

[Issurru]

I feel the lack of Battletoads being mentioned (so far only once) very disturbing, everyone should pick up a SNES and give that game a try

 

[Tratchet]

I wanna be the guy was really hard, but I think the hardest game I've ever played was an obscure game for the DS called "The Dark Spire". I used a guide, and I don't see how I could have beaten it without it. It's mostly cheap hard though, as in the difficulty stems from having to explore every part of the game to find all the necessary items.

 

[DBLT4P]

I remember the old mega man zero games on the GBA being rather challenging, especially if you were trying to get a rank better than a D....

 

[Fishehh]

DCS A-10C WARTHOG (The title is in caps I'm not just shouting it)

Every button in a Warthog's Cockpit is recreated in the this game, the instruction manual is 669 pages and it takes 10 minutes to take off because you have to wait for your engines to rev up, also flying it, you have to watch all these instruments which is hard to do because the anti-aliasing doesn't go high enough that I can read them when it's on 1 monitor, you need atleasr 3 to play this game

 

[Kapri]

Devil May Cry 3 before the special edition release. GAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I'm pretty sure my blood pressure reached unsettling heights.

 

[DanielBrown]

Ninja Gaiden, problably. Got the 360 version and started out on the easiest difficulty setting after being told how hard it is... and damn, they weren't kidding.
I did fine though, but I haven't beaten it yet.

 

[Slenn]

That award used to go to Silent Line Armored Core, which is a 3rd person giant robot game with lots of challenging missions.

BUT now that I've played Touhou 6, SLAC gets completely blown out of the competition. For those who don't know what this game is, it's classified in a special category called "Bullet Hell Shooters". And boy is it hell. Out of the 6 stages on that game, I can get up to the boss on the 5th stage (Sakuya) before I loose all my lives and have to use a continue. That game really pushed my limits as a gamer, and I'm super determined to beat that game for my bucket list.

For a game where the characters look like this:

It sure doesn't look intimidating, but you'd be surprised. My favorite part of that game are the floating books that shoot death lasers at you.

 

[Someone lost on TVTropes]

Hmmmmm, probably:

Super Meat Boy - Incredibly hard, but a lot of fun, plus you feel like you're on top of the world when you beat it.
Starcraft 2 MP - Quite ridiculous, even at lower levels it's pretty hard.
Super Street Fighter 4 - Probably due to the game's really steep learning curve and large skill ceiling.

I haven't played IWBTG yet, but I've watched streams and videos to witness its sadistic difficulty. To be fair though, the difficulty in it was fake difficulty for the most part.