One of the best ways to tell a game you love it is to play on the hardest difficulty. It's a show of commitment, a sign of willingness to learn the in's-and-out's of a game in exchange for an engrossing challenge that'll blister your thumbs and rattle your brain. And only a select, dedicated few ever attempt such a feat - let alone succeed. Just look at any global achievement or trophy rankings if you don't believe me. Hell, most players don't typically finish the game in question, regardless of difficulty.

Each entrant on this list has accomplished something most players never will. They stand alone, stoic and proud, having faced horrors and surmounted challenges that have destroyed so many others. But where do you fall within these hallowed halls? Nearly every game out there either has some crazy achievement to unlock or is just innately difficult. Which one rises to the top as your crowning gaming achievement?

Ninja Gaiden is like a Shakespearean romance: beautiful, but cruel and unfair and with a really horrible camera system. Maybe that analogy doesn't work. Point is, Ninja Gaiden isn't just hard because of its unrelenting, swarming enemies and overpowered bosses. It's fundamentally broken - and staying with a broken game is diamond-on-diamond hard. Keeping track of Ryu Hayabusa’s jumping, spinning frame as he runs along walls means the slob on the camera gets left behind, clipping and pin-balling against the environment, trying its best to keep up. Learning the camera’s limitations is just as gruelling as mastering the actual game - how and when to block, exploiting enemy patterns, and budgeting my spend in the shops. Coming out of a fight with an inventory full of potions was a symphony of controller, man and game, with each playing its own movement.

Getting all of this right (or at least learning the technical limitations) was beyond satisfying, and there are parts of this game that are forever burned into my cortex. This was complete mastery, a stubborn, defiant 'up yours' to a gremlin - the sodding camera - that threatened to tank one of the greatest action games ever made. I loved you, Ninja Gaiden, but what should I have expected? The course of true love never did run smooth.

The Game Gear version of Sonic 2 is insane. It's identical to the already-tough Master System version, only there's one crucial difference: the zoomed-in viewpoint. This may make Sonic big and detailed, showcasing the 8-bit handheld's power, but it also makes it impossible to react to anything ahead of you. Maybe Sonic Team forgot during the conversion that 8-bit Sonic 2 also features one of the most ludicrous spring sections in any game ever. Single springs, hundreds of feet apart. No way to see them coming. With insta-death in-between. That's probably why you can rack up countless extra lives in Green Hill Zone. You really need them.

So I actually 'learned' Sonic 2. The exact cloud tiles under which lay an invisible spring to reach a Chaos Emerald way up in the sky. How many microseconds I had to release the d-pad in order to scrub enough speed to reach the next platform in Green Hill's boss level. The sequence of pipe direction changes to beat the boss. I did it all, got all of the Chaos Emeralds, finished the secret level and saved Tails. Can I do that today, some 23 years later? NOPE.

"What," I hear you cry, "the game where you play as a small, sticky blob? The charming LittleBigPlanet-alike where you build the soundtrack as you collect little happy notes?" Yup, that’s the one. The one with Death Mode. The practically impossible Death Mode that must be completed in its entirety in order to gain a shiny platinum trophy. And I wanted that trophy. Badly. So badly that I think, somewhere in the darkness, part of my brain is still playing Sound Shapes.

Twenty unique mini levels unlock once you’ve completed the main campaign. The goal is to collect a number of randomly placed notes within a time limit, dodging various deadly hazards: 20 notes in 30 seconds, 19 notes in 37 seconds, you get the idea. There’s no way to cheat, and no tips. It's just you and your thumbs. Facing death over and over again, I reached a zen-like state. I would do levels 50 times in one sitting. And yes, I won in the end. My last level was Aquatica: a hell spawned combination of underwater flight and spinning blades. I don’t think I could even speak when it was over.

While it may not be a full game, BioShock Infinite's Clash in the Clouds DLC is definitely the hardest stand-alone dollop of game I've ever played. While its baseline goal is pretty simple - clear a given stage of all enemies to advance, rinse and repeat - in a fit of unquenchable achievement thirst, I decided to attempt the Blue Ribbon Challenge.

For those who haven't heard about this study in gaming masochism, it works like this: every stage has a Blue Ribbon condition, where you're rewarded with a bit of colorful digital fabric for abiding by a specific handicap. Sometimes it's easy ("Defeat all enemies with the shotgun"), sometimes it's tricky ("Defeat five enemies with a single Devil's Kiss blast"), and sometimes it's so punishing and exact that you'll want to rip your hair out and eat it because you've gone a bit over the edge. We're talking challenges where you have to make specific enemies kill themselves with a specific move while airborne, or spend ten minutes picking off baddies with environment traps and then lose because two guys shot each other at the last second. Oh yeah, and there's SIXTY STAGES! And yet, somehow, I pulled it off after hours of incredible adversity, ripping victory from the putrid pits of failure. I AM THE BEAST OF AMERICA!

Crushing difficulty doesn't add new variables to Uncharted 2's environmental puzzles, and it doesn't make the wall-scaling, cliff-leaping exploration segments any more death-defying. Actually, that second point isn't entirely true, because you are dead if an enemy catches you climbing that lamppost. Crushing difficulty lets baddies absorb more damage, making fast and frequent headshots essential to your survival, and lets any shmuck with a pistol drop you after a few shots, meaning you either find cover or die outright.

One of Uncharted's common criticisms is that it devotes too much time to stop-and-pop gunfights. I totally agree, but I love Uncharted 2 so much that I still felt compelled to bump up the difficulty and start over every time I finished. Thankfully, Crushing isn't too bad once you learn to always stay near cover, but that final battle / hide-and-seek match with Lazarevic was almost too much - almost. I have a Gold Trophy to prove I could do it, which, according to the timestamp, I earned at 4:19 on a Sunday morning. Priorities.

Imagine if Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Rastan had a baby. Now imagine that baby leaping out of its crib, knocking you to the ground, and putting you into a headlock until you blacked out. That aggressive little tyke would be Volgarr the Viking, a hardcore 2D platformer that takes after its brutal forefathers with gameplay that demands your absolute focus. The magnificently bearded protagonist Volgarr takes after Capcom's Sir Arthur in all the best ways, from his weighty, fixed-trajectory double-jumping, to his power-ups (found in hidden chests) that shatter when you take a single hit. If you lose your fire sword and sweet steel shield midway through a level, you may as well jump headlong into the nearest lava pit.

Volgarr's difficulty curve is the best kind: seemingly impossible at first, but full of patterns and predictable enemy movements that you'll pick up on after the first dozen or so deaths. And like a Super Nintendo cartridge with no battery saves or passwords, quitting out means restarting the whole shebang from scratch. Or so I thought, because if memory serves, I finished the game completely oblivious to the fact that you can resume your progress by simply walking to the left at the beginning of each stage. Oh well, still worth it.

This throwback downloadable is one of my all-time favorites, even if it's the most taxing title I've ever completed. The game is agony and ecstasy: the pain of dying dozens, even hundreds of times in the same brutal stage, followed by the joy of finally completing it. Super Meat Boy starts with a modest challenge, then escalates to the point where I'm very close to smashing the controller.

Super Meat Boy's fake-out finale was the moment when I nearly gave up. I spent close to two hours trying to beat what I thought was the last stage, and I was near tears when I beat it. Then SMB goes all Metroid on me, surprising me with an 'escape the exploding stage' challenge. The whiplash of emotions had me cursing the Heavens so loud that I'm surprised my neighbors didn't call the police. It's a credit to the game that I pushed through my rage to ultimately beat the game and about half of the new game +.

"I made it to Shredder in the original TMNT :( But gave up and didn't beat it."

Sophia's story of struggle and loss is a somber tribute to all those who have fallen short of these trying challenges. And, to be fair, we all have more failures than successes in the realm of gaming, but it's those very same failures that make our achievements shine that much brighter. So, what about you? What is the most difficult game (or in-game challenge) you've ever completed? Let us known in the comments below.

For an added challenge on GR+ look up .

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 .

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 .