Ok, so firstly +1 to Ghosts N Goblins / Ghouls N Ghosts.
Also, +1 to Battletoads. The number of times i'm flipped shit on that game... *RAGE*
I've been wracking my brain trying to think of THAT game. Ya know, the one that sticks out as a hard game.
I think it was a SuperNES game- Spiderman: Separation Anxiety. If not that one, then another Venom-based SNES spiderman game. I flipped shit on that one. It was a rental, and i returned it that night for another game.
OH! And Trojan, for the NES. So many pissed off evenings with that game...
I can tell you the problem with modern games (in terms of easy/hard)- Control is a MAJOR issue with a lot of games. As they get more in-depth, they need to change how controls work. And in 3d, there's camera control, which usually sucks anyway, so there's a whole separate set of controls needed to be taken into consideration. If they ramp up the difficulty, and the controls are mediocre, that's more irritating than "impossibly" hard games of old.
Side note: So whats the hardest game you've completed? I mean, you can play ANY game, and any number of things could make it too hard to beat level-4, then it's just set aside.
In which game have you trudged through, dying over and over again, cursing up a storm, to find the end-boss and watch those stunning end credits?