I've played many a game in my day. And I've beaten about every game I've ever played, and the ones I haven't...are renowned for their extreme difficulty. Well, loathed by some. Example: The Legend of Zelda 2: Link's Adventure is not a crucible designed to separate wheat from chaff, worthy from scum. It is designed to inspire smoking, barren hatred in the Nintendo generation.

It's one of the games I haven't beaten. The others? Battletoads, Ghostbusters for the NES, and Spy Hunter. Those games are known to me as the worst of the worst, the games I hated enough not to put away, but to keep playing. To over and over again spit in the eye of their contemptible, soulless gray encasements, letting all and sundry know that this was my world, and I was going to govern how I saw fit.

With the exception of Battletoads, though, none of those games offered anything in terms of the barely visible reward that's supposed to come with playing games that have been hence known as Nintendo Hard. Battletoads got so hard I almost cried, at the age of 14, but it looked and played so awesomely that I just had to see how it wound up. I got as far as the jets. (Remember the hoverbikes in Level 3? Picture those, but faster). Spy Hunter offered more slate-gray roads and more armored cars that can take my bullets. Yay. I was told there were boats later in the game, but I never bothered. Ghostbusters was one of the most abysmal games I have ever played, period, and I'm leaving it at that.

I Wanna Be the Guy is somehow leaving all of my "Nintendo Hard" memories eating its own brand of sweetly vitriolic dust. This is difficulty bordering on Sadism, then bounding over Sadism and straight on, headfirst into leering-in-the-dark-while-taunting-you-with-nursery-rhymes Ax Crazy.

Yet, not a bit of it makes me the least bit angry. Let me see if I can explain.

First, the story. You're a little (TINY) guy called "The Kid." You want, as the title suggests, to be "The Guy." So you have to set out to find and kill The Guy so you can take his place. You have a red cape, a pistol and a permanent dur-face on at all times, and you set out for your adventure.

That's the story, such as it is. Sounds simple enough, right? And from the look of it, you could readily assume it's a sort of generic side-scroller, like Mega Man or Whomp 'Em. The downside? You have one hit point, and everything in this game can kill you. And will. Many, many, many times over. The fruit, the stars, the moon. It will all blow you to cinnamon.

The screen up above is a prime and ripe example, and actually sets the sort of tone that needs to be established before you can even begin to take it all on. There's a reason this game is often downloaded as the three-level demo and not as the entire game; most people never make it past the first couple of screens.

So, that screen up there. You will notice that the giant cherry is falling up at our hero. And this is the first real screen of the game. Those trees are, when you start, covered with the giant red fruit, straight out of Super Mario World. When you run under certain pieces of fruit, they fall from the tree onto your hero. Well, I'll just jump over them, then, you think to yourself. The first of many insanely faulty assumptions about this game. As you can see, some of the giant fruits decide that they want to fall UP and smash you. And yeah, everything that touches you immediately reduces you to pulp. Even giant gravity-defying cherries. Again, first screen.



I don't know where this is. I haven't made it here. I may NEVER make it here. But doesn't looking at it kinda just make you think "Oh, my sweet God, what can you even do about that?"

And that's this game in a nutshell. "What the FUCK do I do?" followed appropriately by "How the FUCK did I just die?"
Pro-Tip: it may have been the Q key. While trying to figure out the controls of this game, I pressed Q. Don't do that. It instantly kills you. Yep. You have a self-destruct key. Do be careful.
Also, do not press the R key, or you'll immediately be sent back to your last save point. That can be very frustrating.

Which brings me to an odd little codicil I found myself noticing. For all its Nintendo-levels of difficulty, I was more amused than anything. Sure, after about my 70th time trying to nail a certain jump, only to be intercepted by one thing or another and made a gore sprinkler, I was a little peeved. But like any good (great?) platformer, there are promises made that make you want to keep playing. Like Battletoads, insane difficulty lead to greater plateaus of awesomeness, until you felt good, worthy of the grand quest set before you. That is, before you lost that last continue at the "Snakes and Spikes" level and hid the cartridge under your mattress until your family moved, like some of us did.

So, what keeps me playing I Wanna Be the Guy, easily the most difficult game I have ever played?



Things like the boss fights, really.
And yeah, take a good long look at that. That is the actual first boss in this game. The oversized 8-bit sprite of Mike Tyson from Tyson's Punch-Out!. Putting his fists to your bridge.
Yup. Eventually, you actually fight Dracula from Symphony of the Night, and even more bizarrely, a massive sprite of the arms and upper torso of Zangief from Street Fighter II that fights like Kraid from Super Metroid.
I think that speaks for itself.

This is is still one of my favorite screens in the whole game:



You know when you pick a Robot Master to fight in Mega Man, and this screen comes up, and the heroic music queues in, and your chosen Robot Master drops into that blue band in the starfield? Yeah, that's your character in the blue band itself. And if you don't haul ass, the sprite of Gutsman will indeed fall into that area and crush him like a grape.

Fuck. Yes.

And so far, this is what's been keeping me at this game, having lost +110 lives on "Hard" mode.
(Yeah, that's another thing. There is no "Easy" mode. There's "Medium," "Hard," "Very Hard" and "Impossible." And if you choose "Medium," your character suddenly wears a pink bow in his hair, and all the SAVE points, instead of saying SAVE...say WUSS underneath them. Yeah.)

It's the burgeoning insanity, the constant threat of something new and crazy coming out to kill me. Will the novelty wear off, and will I ever take this game seriously enough to actually give it my time, thus dooming me to put my elbow through my monitor like an ersatz Steve Wynn to a digital Le Rêve?

Only time will tell...

Oh, and we'll get some questions answered tomorrow, too!

How the FUCK IS it the 2nd week of July already?!

Some things were just never meant to be seen in actual, tangible three dimensions. Just my opinion, shared by many others.

That said, I admit both an attracted-ness and respect for this young lady from Stockholm, no doubt now being swarmed by fanboy fanmail begging for her hand in marriage...



...for her $350 representation of Zero Suit Samus, including materials and batteries for the LED lights in the gun. Yep.

And when they catch wind of the fact that she's also responsible for this little number...



...an oil painting (done in 16-bit, no less) of the iconic scene in A Link to the Past of the hero retrieving the Master Sword...well, you're likely to hear the concerted *THUD* of several hundred waning fanboys fainting dead.


Okay! Gonna clean the apartment, and get to some o 'dem questions. Promise. :)