God damn!
This thread made me sign up after almost 10 years lurking on this site :P
It's obvious that a lot of you are too young to know what a hard game is. Of course I will repeat a lot of games allready mentioned but here are some:
Zelda 2 (before internet), I don't think it's a hard game but apparently internet does. Oh and of course I didn't use guides (didn't really know about/where aware of guides until the SNES era).
Simon's Quest (before internet) without guide, must admit I only got the black and white ending.
Metroid (before internet), again I don't consider this a hard game but apparently internet does. Of course no guide only maps I drew myself.
Snake Rattle 'n Roll (NES), I still get angry just thinking of ome of the later levels (i think it was level 9 or 10), unforgiving is the only thing that comes to mind.
Doom II, Nightmare difficulty no cheats.
Megaman 9 and 10 are the most recent games I consider difficult that I have beaten. They are truly a great example of games that are Nintendo-hard (to me Nintendo-hard is a positive) and they are way harder then any of the original Megaman games (Megaman 1-6) since I consider the originals as fairly easy games.
What destroys the gaming-youth today is the constant save-scumming. Makes it no effort to beat games when you generally only need to replay max 5 min of the game to pass a challange (I will admit this is a sweeping generalization before someone digs up 1-2 titles (out of hundereds) that are stricter with save spots).
LoZ:BotW, even if it is an exelent game would have been better with no ability for manual saves (except save and quit), longer intervals between autosaves and weapons with a bit more durability.
Now get off my lawn!
EDIT:// tried to edit for crappy spelling and weird autocorrects
