Some people like to argue games today are too easy, and that we've forgotten what it means for something to be 'Nintendo hard'. I don't think that's true. The difficulty is still there, but only for those who seek it out. As games seek to reach a wider and wider audience, they have become more flexible. Load up a random, modern game and chances are you'll be asked to pick a difficulty ranging from easy to hard to groin-shot-nightmare-extravaganza. Most people don't pick that last one.

Some of these insane difficulty modes are unlocked straight away, while others are only awarded after you've finished the game on a lesser mode. However you get them, these are the hardest of the hard, capable of transforming otherwise enjoyable games into masochistic exercises of personal torment. They're not for the faint of heart, but they'll fetch you some hefty bragging rights should you persevere.

XCOM is one of those games where everything can go wrong without a moment's notice. One turn you're silently sneaking between the trees, searching for a crashed UFO. And then BAM! you're neck-deep in Floaters who are flying all over the place handing out grenades like party favors while a couple of Sectoids roll up and hit your flank. And it's around now that Rookie Redshirt panics and hunkers down right in the middle of the chaos. Why would you think that's a good idea!?

Playing on impossible difficulty basically raises the stakes for every decision up to 11. Rewards are smaller, costs are greater, and every decision you make has far-reaching consequences. If you're not on top of your game from day one - complete with an overall strategy in mind that'll carry you through to the final mission - things can and will unravel very quickly. As the game's Wiki so helpfully notes, "...every funding nation can be lost during the first month, depending on alien activity and the efficiency of XCOM's response." This might be the speediest response from the international community to any issue in this history of forever.

Playing Metro: 2033 Redux on the Ranger difficulty means you and your knife are going to be close friends. This mode attempts to make the game more realistic - or about as 'realistic' as you'd want a post-nuclear-apocalyptic Russian horror game to be - by removing several modern conveniences. An abundance of health? Gone. A decent supply of ammo? Gone. Literally the entire HUD and all the valuable information contained therein? It's outta' here, baby, and this is just Ranger Easy mode.

Ranger Hardcore ups the ante even further by making you less of a survivor and more of a - shall we say - dead man walking. You are extremely fragile, which means engaging enemies using stealth is basically your only shot at survival. And you can forget about ever having a reasonable supply of ammo. Enemies will fall to one or two gunshots, sure, but if you end up actually using your gun it had better be because the person (or horrible monster) on the other end inflicted some sort of deep, personal offense upon you.

Fire Emblem is already a tough-as-nails series. When your characters die, they're gone forever; weapons degrade over time, especially the good ones, and stat bonuses are doled out randomly when you level up. Fire Emblem: Awakening lets you mitigate - or enhance - these challenges through various difficulty options, the toughest of which is Lunatic+. This mode packs the same crippling difficulty of Lunatic, but with an added twist found only in this mode.

As it turns out, that "+" stands for a grab bag of brand-new, enemy-exclusive abilities that are randomly assigned to grunts and bosses alike. These include Luna+ (all attacks halve your defense), Pavise+ (all your attacks deal half damage), and several others. Early on, this can make fights flat-out impossible, forcing you to constantly reload the same battle over and over in the hopes you get a more favorable distribution of skills on the enemy team. Don't expect Frederick to bail you out of this one.

F-Zero GX is one of the unsung greats from the Nintendo GameCube. It offers an incredible sense of speed on par with the best in the racing genre while keeping the F-Zero basics of vehicular combat and track memorization intact. It's an edge-of-your-seat racer that demands a lot of its players, and is easily one of the most challenging racing games ever created.

This game gives you very little, and demands everything in return. Learning the layouts of each track is required. Learning the nuances of each racer is required. Practicing races over and over again is RE-FREAKING-QUIRED. It's not for everyone - which is surprising for a Nintendo release - but putting the time in will reward you with a genuine challenge that feels difficult because it's actually taxing your skills as a player, not because it's hitting you with blue shells moments before you cross the finish line.

Video games often make complicated tasks look easy, whether it's piloting a spaceship or simply firing a gun. The Guitar Hero series does this as well, simplifying the strumming of a guitar down to a few colorful buttons and a plastic switch. That is, until you round the bend with Legends of Rock on expert mode. All of a sudden, playing a pretend guitar becomes, arguably, more difficult than playing the same song on an actual guitar.

When you watch someone play a song like The Devil Went Down To Georgia on expert it looks like a friggin' Lite-Brite threw up all over the screen. There are so many colorful little circles flying all over the place you basically need to have the song memorized. If you try and keep up running on instinct alone the quick tempo will leave you in the dust. Oh, and just in case expert isn't tough enough, turn on "precision mode", which makes the window for hitting a note even tighter. The only things getting shredded here are your fingers.

Grenades. Grenades everywhere. Call of Duty: World at War, when played on Veteran difficulty, presents a fantastical version of World War II in which every soldier was given a dozen grenades per mission and expected to use them all, at risk of court martial. And every one of them is going to land right at your feet at the most inopportune time which is basically ALL the time because this game is crazy hard.

You want to talk about making meaningful choices in video games: how about choosing between getting blown up by a grenade or being cut down by machine gun fire? It's meaningful because it's the only choice you ever get to make and both options are wrong. You spend more time running away from the fight, in an attempt to avoid all the grenades, than you do breaching doors and doing the standard Call of Duty stuff. But then the game just spawns more dudes in your absence, creating a vicious cycle where you're constantly fighting without making any real progress. And then a grenade kills you.

Ninja Gaiden has built a dynasty upon the broken controllers and mournful cries of its followers. Dating back to 1988 with Ninja Gaiden on the Nintendo Entertainment System, this series has been renowned for its brutal difficulty that really puts the screws to you as soon as you press start. Master Ninja mode in Ninja Gaiden 2 is by far one of the series' greatest challenges, without relying on cheap tricks. It's simply a fast-paced game that demands players use the entirety of Ryu Hayabusa's arsenal, make snap judgements, and watch out for exploding turtles.

To give this some context, most action games - such as God of War or Devil May Cry - get "solved" within a few months to a year of their release. This means someone has posted a video of them beating the game with "100% completion, no damage, one arm tied behind their back!!" Ninja Gaiden 2 has one of these , the only difference being it took the internet SIX YEARS to pull it off. This is especially surprising given that there hasn't been another good Ninja Gaiden game released in that time to distract diehards.

So there you have it, the hardest hard modes in gaming. How many of these bad boys have you bested over the years? Are there any that you think were even harder? Tell your story in the comments, and share your victories and defeats with fellow readers.

And for even more GR+ excitement, you know you gotta' check out .

Video games require a lot of suspension of disbelief, more so than movies or books. And that’s totally fine. We’re in no rush to trade in balletic aerial throwdowns atop fighter jets, sword battles with dragons, or the punching of gods in the face. This is not an article in support of the dull mundanities of the real world. That said, there are plenty of times when things in videogameland don’t even make sense within their own fiction. And if games have taught me anything, it’s that the best way to find out whether something works is by trying to blow it up and seeing how well it holds together.

So, here are eight devices that, when you really think about them, are about as incongruous as a window box on a submarine. That have less point than a nail with a head at both ends. That fall apart faster than ACME flatpack furniture. I wouldn’t change most of them for the world, you understand, but poking holes, and a little fun, won’t do these games much harm. Shall we?

Pokemon

No, not for the reason you’d think. If I can buy into the TARDIS, I can live with unspecified technology capable of shrinking a monster the size of an office block into a tiny sphere. What just doesn’t scan is how this tool of the monster hunting trade ever got out of RD. Every trainer knows that even the puniest Pokemon can bust out of a ball before it’s been weakened, with a tiny capture rate based on blind luck. Oh sure, maybe the very first Pokeball thrower got lucky before he was pecked to death by a rabid Pidgeotto, but remember that they were lobbing a hollowed-out Apricorn, not even one of Silph Co’s weaksauce starter models. It’s unlikely.

So what do you use to weaken Pokemon to get them inside Pokeballs? Why, Pokemon, of course. In Pokeballs. Which got there how? It’s the chicken and the egg all over again, except the egg is a white-and-red gacha capsule and the chicken can shoot lightning from its cheeks. People bang on about how Pokeballs are a dark, prison-like concept, but they’re a sunshiny picnic compared to thoughts of early trainers in the long grass toting baseball bats covered in Rattata blood from all the, ahem, weakening they’ve been doing. Brrr.

Halo

Oh no! The Flood are infesting everything in sight. However shall we stop them? Why, by building a bunch of gigantic death-rings in space, slaughtering every thinking being in the galaxy so the Flood starve to death, and then starting over. Obviously. But you know what, mass extinction of all life just seems so callous and wasteful, so let’s also use those death rings to study Flood specimens, where they won’t suffer any harm when we murderise all the other, not galaxy-threatening, sentient life. What could possibly go wrong?

Not only is this the worst plan in history - like trying to put out a forest fire while coating all your fire engines in napalm - but even the Forerunners didn’t totally buy into it, building a master ring to rule them all (OK, it has petals too) outside of the galaxy, where they could take key species to survive the whole inconvenience of extinction. Its great defenses are anonymity and distance, so what do the geniuses at the Forerunner council cook up? That’s right, a portal that takes you straight there. At which point, you might as well paint ‘Guys, we totally left the keys in the ignition in case you needed a climactic battle over the fate of the universe. Hugs!’ on the side of thing and have done, no?

Lego Indiana Jones

OK, it’s hardly TT Games’ fault, but this iconic cinematic moment makes even less sense when subject to the clumsy fingers of players. And that’s from a base level of making no sense whatsoever. If you’re designing an elaborate mechanism to protect a priceless golden idol, by all means throw in pressure plates and poison arrows and spike traps before any light-fingered rogues can lift the thing off its pedestal. I don’t envy you the cleaning bill, or the smell, but objective achieved. Far less sensible is placing a trap trigger after the thief is making off with your precious statue. I'm pretty sure having to climb down into a spike pit to retrieve an idol is the dreaded fast-food chain career of the pre-industrial world.

The boulder trap, however, doesn’t just risk damage to the idol. It ensures it. Assuming it even works. What really is the plan here? To give successful thieves a bonus cardiac workout? And is that worth rolling your nice, soft, golden cave-candy into a spectacularly ugly plate? Imagine having to explain that one to the gods. Gulp.

Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Forget the three-in-one grenades that ensure exactly 66.66 per cent of each one is wasted. Forget the sound suppression charge that stops enemies from being alerted to your presence by creating a highly noticeable absence of sound. Nope, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s least plausible technology is these magnetic gloves. Because why? Why do men wearing Exo suits that can rocket jump them into the air suddenly need to haul themselves up very specifically constructed buildings? You know, ones made of sheet metal, not the much more common stone or brick. Are they... CLONG! Are they for...CLONG! Aretheyforstealth? CLONG! Nope, they’re clearly not for fricking stealth purposes either.

Look, I get there hasn’t been a decent Spider-man game in bloody ages. And kudos, really, for trying. But if rubber-faced Kevin Spacey wants to turn this whole Atlas thing into an earner, he might want to can the mag gloves and look into supplying grappling hooks. I mean, even the Sentinel Task Force seems to have worked that one out, and it’s not like they were particularly smart when it came to shutting down a certain, obviously evil private military company leader before he went rogue...

Dead Space

Isaac Clarke is many things. Engineer. Man of action. Handy with a Plasma Cutter. Delusional. Paranoid. But Mr Fantastic he is not, and it’s therefore a bit of a stretch (if you’ll pardon the pun; please do, it was awful) to see why RIG suits only put their wearer’s health read-out on the spine, where everyone but the occupant can see it. Developer Visceral knows this. That’s why a little searching in Chapter 7 will turn up a poster emblazoned “Watch each other’s back! Safety begins with teamwork.” Cute, but it explains so very little.

There’s something incredibly disturbing about a society that's totally comfortable with indiscriminately broadcasting the exact, current welfare of its individual citizens, and something almost sadistic about putting critical information, such as the amount of stasis power you have left, so tantalisingly out of reach. Still, while as a feat of industrial design the RIG is something of an own goal, Isaac is an engineer. A couple of well-placed bathroom mirrors and a few bolts, and he can start soiling himself just as much as we do when that comforting cyan spinal column starts changing colour faster than an LED mood light.

Metroid

Samus’s Power Suit is a thing of wonder. Arm cannon, Grapple Beam, missiles… this thing has the works. It also has the curious ability to do, er, something to its user that prevents them needing a swift trip to AE and a wheelchair for life when it wraps up them up into a ball. Another cheeky nod from the developers here: in Metroid Prime, there’s a lore entry about the Space Pirates attempting to reverse-engineer the Morph Ball. Let’s just say it didn’t end well for the mangled test subjects.

Still, the real question is not how it doesn’t kill Samus, but why it’s part of her arsenal at all. What use does an incredibly weaponised suit of powered armour have for the ability to roll through tunnels, when you have enough firepower on your wrist to clear out a planet? You seriously couldn't make the hole a little wider with a little click-click, boom-boom? Or, you know, crawl, with a far lower profile than a thigh-high ball could possibly offer. Real-life spleunkers manage to wriggle through tiny gaps with air tanks on their backs, so the obviously limber Samus shouldn’t have too much trouble getting through, even with those shoulder pads. Yes, the Morph Ball can jump (how can it jump?), and drop bombs, and is very cool, but with everything else the Power Suit can do, it's just over-engineering on a grand – well, one-thirds – scale.

BioShock Infinite

Ah, the friendly skies. So peaceful. So serene. So pant-wettingly terrifying when you’re 30,000 ft above the ground, suspended only by a thinnish rail and an open, sharp-enough-to-cut-a-face-apart blender attached to a wooden brace. Even assuming that everyone in the world of Columbia has downed a vigor capable of giving them the grip strength of a silverback gorilla (I imagine the bottle would be an Art Deco clenched fist with ice on the knuckles), it’s a terribly unsafe way to travel. What if you sneeze, or there’s standstill traffic on the rail? There’s no way to switch arms when one grows tired. And while the Hook itself may be magnetised to ensure a good lock, sweaty hands seem like an awfully obvious point of failure.

Fictionally, of course, the first rail riders are daredevils, not proles. But when you start giving these things out at public fairs, you’ve got to question exactly who is going to want to go shopping, say, with a Sky-Hook taking up an entire arm? It’s not like you could carry anything home without drastically increasing your chances of becoming a human pancake in the very near future.

Resident Evil

Look, I love the Resident Evil REmake, but the Spencer Mansion’s security system is properly bonkers. And of all the mad ways to protect Umbrella’s questionable research, none is quite as insane as the fun little set-up George Trevor creates for the armour Key. You see, the thing about the armour trap is that it’s a two-parter. Part one is far-fetched enough, involving summoning an undead dog with a whistle, then removing its collar. Assuming all the Umbrella employees handle this like Jill or Chris, the company would be getting through a whole lot of hounds a year just to enter some old rooms.

Still, in a roundabout way, this eventually gives you a fragile imitation of the required key, which – if the intern doesn’t accidentally try it in a lock and break it forever, leaving ol' Spencer in quite a bind – can then be used to deactivate the second part of the trap. Part two means removing the real key from a pedestal, activating a whirligig bladed suit of armour on rails, and then plopping the fake in place to reset the deadly knight before it turns the workie kid you sent to do this into salami. The flaw in this master plan, bar the easily ruined imitation? Any patient thief could take the imitation to their local key cutters and bypass the possibility of inglorious dicing. Maybe stick to key cards next time?

Time to remove my fingers from the light socket of the universe and go and find a good comb. But I’m certain that can’t be all the video game gizmos that unravel faster than a Bubsy game. Call out the ones you’ve noticed in the comments below. Between us, I’m sure we can turn up more madcap gadgets than even Q could store in a lab.

And while you're musing upon that, why not check out some of our related, bad-science features for inspiration? May I recommend ?