You know, by 1978 I'm sure they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they never really considered whether or not they should. It's your typical memory-based flip-the-cards-and-get-matches type beat, and while I can certainly dunk on this for entirely being something that's more suited for a mini-game in even an NES game, but this do be like literally year 1 atari stuff so I have plenty of slack to cut in the content regard.

That being said though even in the context of its release I think this game is beaten by an actual deck of cards in a lot of ways. For a console that ships with a controller with 4 directions and a button why the hell would you go with needing a proprietary number pad controller to dial in which cards you want to pick instead of like using the joystick as a cursor and the button to select? The single player mode is entirely player-driven when it comes to goals; the manual doesn't even have anything like "try for a score under 10 to be a real Atari Concentration Camper!" or whatever, you just match pictures, and when it's done it's over. There's also a mode that replaces one pair of pictures with 2 wild cards that can be matched with any other card, except for the fact that it doesn't clear both the card the wild card is matching with as well as the card that it's supposed to be matched with, which just leaves you with a dead game at the end as you have two spare cards that cannot match with each other. It makes the wild cards less of an assist feature as they actually just end up being random game-ruining landmines. Very cool.

I get that this game was released in such an early state of gaming that the mere aspect of interacting with your TV to play something normally designed for tabletop play gave this game enough value through novelty, but like there are 2600 launch titles like combat and pong that have way more intuitive and responsive gameplay and control, so even in its time there would be better options to play imo.

holy shit. I just beat Battletoads.

I've seen the web lambast this game endlessly as the game has been showered with the title of "hardest game of all time" from all sorts of people and places on the internet. For years I had just assumed that this would be a game that I would never even think to pass the infamous Turbo Tunnels, much less actually see the ending. It was only when I saw this game cleared on a two-part Game Center CX playthrough when the illusion of this game being impossibly difficult faded. In fact, it looked like a fun kind of challenge! I figured that if Arino could beat this game, so could I, and as such I put it on the "games-to-stream" backburner until the time had come. And boy, did the time come. Roughly 9 hours of grinding later, here we are.

I think the main reason why this game sticks out so much as being so nightmarishly difficult is mostly due to how outwardly hostile the games design tends to be. Memorizing the levels and becoming intimately familiar with them through repetition (and a little bit of trial and error) is the key to being able to progress. Each level honestly stands out from one another well enough to make climbing back to where you were before at every game over not TOO painful in the grand scheme of things. Each of the 12 levels usually has some kind of gimmick or new mechanic to grapple with, like the ropes in stage 2, the turbo tunnels in 3, ice in 4, surfing in 5, snakes in 6, etc etc. Honestly the game does a solid job introducing the mechanics to let you know how things work before cranking the heat up. Graphically this game is really solid on the NES with plenty of quirks and tricks used to give the game some pizazz. It's definitely more of an A-list Rare NES title that contrasts from the licensed shovelware they occasionally made (likely to fund the projects they actually wanted to make like this)

It is still quite a spicy game, so those that are averse to getting your shit kicked in will have a bad time. Honestly the difficulty felt most similar to like middle-echelon Mario Maker levels. Like, the kind of stuff made by someone who is clearly good at games but not like insane person kaizo shit nawsay? Considering the fact that Rare has mentioned their lead designers being good at games and that a lot of difficult NES games are usually products of the developers also being the playtesters, essentially tuning their games for themselves rather than their players and accidentally cranking it up a bit too much, that's likely why this game is how it is. I had to use every trick the US version of the game could allow to finish this; I used the warps to skip levels 2, 4, and 7 while also alternating both players every continue with down+A+B held to get the most possible lives and continues the game offers, and even then I made it out on my last continue. Against games like this though, you really gotta get every leg up on the game that you can ngl, a clear is a clear. The hardest part for sure was the third rat in Rat Race, if you can pass that point you have enough skills to make it through the rest imo. Clinger Winger or whatever tf it was called was a cakewalk ngl, I heard the horror stories about that level and was surprised when I cleared the speeder section on my first attempt. This game is certainly a hot one, but idk it's definitely not the hardest game ever made. I don't even think it's the hardest game I've played, I had way more struggles with getting through stuff like Ninja Gaiden Sigma and God Hand (to their detriment, mind you. Overly hard games suck imo) than with this. The game is still pretty masochist-core, don't get me wrong, but if it was really the hardest game ever, I wouldn't have been able to get here in the first place. A must-play for pain-seekers, but definitely take-it-or-leave-it for the normal folk out there.

naw man i can't think of any reason why you should play this, especially over the much superior Basketball that came out much earlier. Like, I respect the attempt to innovate by making it be 2v2s instead of 1v1s, the visuals look more like a basketball court instead of the surface of mars, and you can hear the crowd cheer every time you score, but the added complexity of the team aspect of the game really hurts more than it helps.

The court is like split into two horizontal rows that each team player resides in, and you control them at the same time. You can't have the lower player go in the upper half and the upper player can't go in the lower half, it's like theres an invisible barrier that separates your two players. If the ball lands in the middle of the court, is it in the upper or lower half? Who knows! There's also the added problem of the pass and shoot buttons being bound to the singular button on the joystick, so it's very easy to do one action when you were intending to do the other. Awesome! The CPU obviously has none of these problems, and will absolutely smoke you no matter what difficulty settings you might have the game set to. I would say this might be fun with another player as both people are bound to the same control handicaps, but you know what else is more fun either by yourself or with a friend? REGULAR BASKETBALL PLAY THAT INSTEAD THAT GAME OWNS!!! if this is what real sports are I only care about fake sports.

luckily it's very unlikely you could be in a situation where you could only be able to play this and not regular basketball given the fact that this game was never actually released and as such the only way to play it is through compilation titles, flashcarts, or emulation. As far as I can tell, every title that features this game has the superior regular basketball as an option as well with the one exception being... Atari 50?!?!? What's up with that??