• Top 10 Ways to Tell If You’re Good at Video Games

  

  Written by Zeromage 113 Comments
  Last Updated:: May 18, 2009

  We here at OW get a lot of flack for our beliefs. Further research, however, has shown that we are in fact right. Everything we say is actually the gospel truth! I know, we were just as shocked as you are. That being said, we are taking applications for worshipers. Unlike most religions we don’t want everyone, just your rich, cool, and popular people.  There is a minimum yearly salary requirement and a rather extensive interview process. Also we have put together a list that allows a person to decide if they are good at gaming. These days games are stupid and easy and everyone thinks they are good at games for no particular reason. Here is a way to tell if you’re actually good at video games. And if you remember from the beginning of this list everything we say is the truth. So we win again. Also at a recent staff meeting we have all decided we are willing to sell out completely. If any TV executives, advertising agents, or magazine editor are reading this and want to offer us money we’re in.

  10. You beat World 8-1 in Super Mario 3 without using a P-wing or a Cloud
  This level is the reason they made the P-Wing and the Cloud. If you have a P-Wing, this is the time to use it. There’s no better level to fly over than this one. If you don’t have a P-Wing, use a Cloud. And if you don’t have a Cloud, good luck. You’re probably going to end up smashing a bunch of controllers before you beat this level. Not only are there hard jumps, Piranha Plants, and Bullet Bills in this level, but there’s even a Boo Buddy! Apparently this level wasn’t hard enough with the standard over world enemies, so the game designers decided that it was necessary to put a random ghost in the level as well. Can someone tell me WTF a ghost is doing in this level? Besides the randomly placed Ghost, you have to make it over two almost impossible jumps in this level. The first is the pit you have to jump over with a Red Paratroopa flying in it, and two cannons on the other side. Almost immediately after getting past that jump on your tenth try, you’re faced with yet another leap of faith as you have to jump on a music box to cross another wide chasm. If you can beat this game without a P-wing you’ve probably spent as much time as we have playing Super Mario 3.

  9. You Beat Street Fighter 2 with Zangief
  Street Fighter was a great game. The amount of time Sage and I have spent playing this game is enormous. All those characters to beat the game with and all the two player action that could be had in this game made for one of the best fighting games in history. Play the game with Zangief though, and the player was in for one of the most difficult fighting games of all time. Zangief was slow, had no shooting power and excelled in no area except for basic power, which was useless in a game with fighters as diverse as Ryu and M.Bison. Congratulate yourself if you conquered Street Fighter with Zangief. It’s something even the most adroit players can’t accomplish.

  8. You Beat Bubble Bobble By Yourself

  The only reason anyone has ever beaten Bubble Bobble is because you get infinite continues.  Nobody could beat this game otherwise. Even with infinite continues few people could beat this game by themselves. This game is very easy to learn how to play, and you might not even get killed for a few levels. And then pretty soon you die and it hits you like a ton of bricks.  And you keep dying.  A lot. Remember how you once had a score of 300,000? Well, those days are gone. Each time you start over the score resets. There will come a point for everyone when they hit the challenge wall, and it will be a lot sooner than you’d expect from a game that has over 100 levels’ worth of play. I think for me it was around level 20.  It will probably be even sooner if you’re playing by yourself. The difficulty curve is way too steep for this game.  And if you do make it to level 100, you have to get past Super Drunk.  To wake him up you need to drink the potions at the top of the screen. The potion makes you spit lightning bubbles (60 will take out Super Drunk). If you have no friends, Passing Super Drunk will not give you the happy ending (This is evident after several hours of eye-glazing solo-play. You beat that sh*t and get a screen saying “This Is Not The Happy Ending). Let’s recap: If you’re going to get to the final stage of Super Drunk, you had best be drinking the sh*t that makes you spit hot lightning straight from the bottle. If you drink alone, you might pass Super Drunk, but it will not be a happy ending. There are some important life lessons for you here, kids, I suggest you heed them wisely.

  7. You got to Friday in Paperboy

  Being a paperboy might be easy in real life, but in the video game world its one of the hardest jobs out there.  One would think that being a professional spy or maybe a hit man would be one of the harder jobs out there.  But compare how easy 007 is to Paperboy and you’ll see just how wrong you are.  Anyone who tells you that they love this game has no idea why they love it. Maybe they liked getting knocked down after the 3^rd house on the left by movers moving glass that they cannot get up on the curb for the life of them. Maybe they liked spending days and days of game play just to get to the end of the first day with the shitty bonus level that somehow turned from a street into a skateboard park with poorly designed skateboard ramps in the vein of the poor designs of Skate or Die. I have no idea why anyone would like a game this difficult. If getting by Monday was difficult, just trying getting by Tuesday and Wednesday. These were each about 10 times more difficult than Monday exponentially. Paperboy was a tiringly difficult game. Any game that you had trouble getting by the first level on had no business being recognized as a great game. Some gamers will try to convince you they got to Wednesday and even Friday, but you can be sure that most of these people are liars. Something about the cover of this game screams “simplicity”, but that has nothing to do with the fact that its extremely difficult to get half way down the street in the first level with the neighborhood elements being thrown at you. If anyone disputes these claims, they can send us their own personal video of playing paperboy and getting to Friday.

  6. You beat the first level of Ghosts n’ Goblins

  Some games start out easy and then gradually get harder.  In other games the first level is nearly impossible to beat.  There is no game that exemplifies this upshot from sheer difficulty like Ghosts ‘n Goblins. 1/8th through the first level you’re surrounded by mounds and mounds of enemies. As you’re walking as your character, you’re basically surrounded by a force field of enemies coming at you from every possible angle. Okay, maybe if you had a lot of energy or someone decent armor, you could take the level one onslaught of nefarious enemies. As you walk, you see you do have armor, looks like pretty strong armor, until a weak ass looking bird swoops down, barely hits you, and your armor comes flying off. Not even faux-Halloween armor is this poor. I’m pretty sure that if a bird touched a plastic armor suit that you wore for Halloween, it wouldn’t come flying off. As your worthless armor comes flying off, you’re left with an almost-naked character who is left with nothing on except underwear. Q: Who wears nothing under armor? Am I inept to mid-evil tradition or is there something completely untenable about someone wearing nothing under armor? You’re basically left naked running around in the wild with a force field of petulant enemy’s surrounding you at every second. This stultifying game play leads you to give up after 1 to 2 minutes making you feel like shit and making you retire to much more germane games with more sane difficulty levels. If you were one of the few people who made it to level two, consider yourself to be one of the elite in the gaming world.

  5. You’ve landed on the aircraft carrier in Top Gun once

  Ever try landing on the aircraft carry in Top Gun for the NES?  When landing your plane on an aircraft carrier, you are given terse directions from your “command screen” which you follow. If you follow the directions 100% perfectly, you will have about a 5% chance of landing the plane. I have personally seen the plane landed once. I remember that eventful day. I was at a friend’s house and four of us were watching my friends’ father trying to overcome this insuperable task. The first time we saw it land, we had a party. I remember looking over at one of my friends who may have been crying out of joy, that the annoyingly impossible task could be circumvented. The excitement lasted until the end of the next level where we all knew it couldn’t happen again, and it didn’t.  The dogfights are easy and the missiles given to you in the fights are smartly efficient enough to create a moderate difficult level in the sky. The rest of the game is easy, but try landing on the aircraft carrier and you are thrown into one of the most difficult moments in video game history. It’s one of the greater accomplishments in life itself.

  4. You beat Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!

  Mike Tyson’s Punchout was actually moderately difficult to play through. Certainly, fighters such as Glass Joe and Don Flamingo were no challenge for little Mac. As one became good at this game, one could beat the likes of Mr. Sandman and Super Macho man easily and with a little practice. It was the last boss in Mike Tyson though that we witness one of the most difficult moments in video game history. One was amazed by how one small uppercut by Tyson could take Little Mac to the ground gasping for breath as Doc smiled on. Could a  final boss really be this hard? Where was the gradual increase in difficulty level that could get you ready for this domination? Certainly, it wasn’t Super Macho Man regardless of how powerful his Tornado punches were. It wasn’t Don Flamenco part two who had the stamina of 10 men. Nothing could get you prepared for having to dodge oddly timed uppercuts by the Bronx basher. Timing down Tyson’s uppercuts was beyond challenging. The gamer had better hope he had a game genie where one punch to an opponent could knock them down, or infinite stamina so that Tyson’s punch no longer had any impact. Take away the cheats, and one had to time all the uppercuts perfectly which was unbearably difficult.  Tyson could be beat with hours and hours of practice. Still, Mike Tyson is one of the most noticeable signifiers for “Difficult Boss” in video game history. Every gamer is struck with fear in having to battle an opponent who could spell game over for you in 1 hit.

  3. You beat Contra without the code

  Contra contained the most conspicuous cheat code in gaming history and for good reason. We won’t go into the code because we know its already inculcated into every gamer’s brain beyond any doubt. Why is this code so well known though? Could it be that Contra was so hard that it became a staple for anyone who even attempted to start their journey in the game? This is precisely the reason why any code becomes imprinted on the human genome. It’s to bad too, because Contra is actually one of the finer moments in early gaming history when one knew they could waste 30 lives on a level. Take away this ability though, and you were doomed to the first level, maybe the second if your practiced it for over two months. Once you were in the second level you were pretty much lost to the electric shocks and countless enemies throwing bombs at you. The game after the second level just starts getting good too. The third level as the waterfall level in the game has one of the most perfectly abject bosses in gaming history. The gamer who thought he was good enough not to use the code would never be able to experience this boss, instead, throwing his controller to the wall in the event of being hit by the guns coming out of the ground in the first level. Contra today is known as a great game because it has become accepted that to play it in any casual fashion requires the code. The gamer does not feel remorse at having to play Contra with a cheat because he knows everyone else has to and that there is no one on earth who can possibly come close to beating the game without the code. One wonders if the creators of Contra ever knew how hard it would be to conquer the game without the code.

  2. You’ve beaten Super Mario the Lost Levels

  This game is near impossible. If you can beat this game you are beyond great. We here at OW have all beaten this game and we are all great. There isn’t anything easy about any part of it. Except the beginning when you press start after that it’s all work. This game is unlike modern games which are all easy. That’s right, all modern games are easy. And stupid. This game however is hard for the sake of hard. You truly have to become a master of every aspect of Lost Levels. You have to wear your controller down until it becomes ergonomic through erosion, not ergonomic by design. You have to live eat and breath Lost Levels until the very end and only then will you be a master of video games. Nay only a few have completed this quest, but they shall live on in the halls of eternity. Where they shall eat not but the finest meals, drink not but the finest wines, and sleep on not but the finest linens. Actually nobody will really care and it won’t really affect your life in any way at all. Trust us we have a religion based on us now.

  1. You Beat the Turbo Tunnel Level in Battletoads on Your First Try

113 Comments

1. #1 George says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 7:03 pm

   @trugamer619
   YOU are the butthurt one.
   You are not a true gamer, you are a fraud.
   I beat all the challenges
2. #2 GTB says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 8:56 pm

   I’m Listening to every gamer on this site. Me Personally I started with NES. I was born in 1986 and yes Those games were hard as hell. I have an answer for the Crew here at OW. You claim the current games are easy. The newer games have Achievements (Xbox 360) or Trophies (PS3). These games may be very easy but why don’t you try to get all the trophies or Achievements for some of the new games. I think the perfect games for the OW crew would be the Guitar Hero Series. The Idea of the game is really simple but yet Complex. Try getting 100% of your trophies or achievements in these games. Theres a challenge for you. I couldn’t complete all 100%. But I can at least play on Expert.
3. #3 GTB says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 8:13 am

   Ok my 1st system was the NES and yea those games were really tough for me. I was born in 1986 and I’ve been playing games since I could remember. I own all the current Next-Gen Consoles. I see the Old Wizard Crew says the newer games are easy. I can agree with that to a point. The newer games have achievements *Xbox 360* or Trophies *PS3*. Try getting 100% of the Trophies or achievements in some of the newer games. I have the perfect game for you goes at Old Wiz to try. It is very simple but yet very complex at the same time. This would be any of the new Guitar Hero’s. I couldn’t get 100% If you wanna cry about using the guitar dont!! You can use a controller.
4. #4 Alberto says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 10:48 pm

   What???!!! no “beat Halo in legendary mode”

   I actually did #6, but it took a lot of continues.
   I made it to 3rd level.

   That Fucking game is so hard
5. #5 TKO says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 11:42 pm

   I have done 9 and 7 but those are probably the easiest ones on the list.
6. #6 Aaron Byl says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 7:49 am

   Hey I’m 15 and alls i can say is that i have got to be the only teenager in America who agrees with you guys. these games are harder than fuck! I reached lvl 6 in contra but couldnt beat it without the code.im still working on 10 and 2 but then again i suck at the old mario games. im not used to having so little control over mario.
7. #7 Andy says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 3:40 pm

   The only one i did on this list was beat Mike Tyson. I’ve beat him by decision and KO. and for Mario 3 i always made sure i had a cloud saved for lvl 8-1, haha.
8. #8 Mike says:
   March 17th, 2010 at 4:57 pm

   Aw man, really? You forgot to add “Beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES without save-states or cheats”! That should be #1.