Virtual Vox Pop is a weekly open mic in which we ask you, the reader, to sound off on a particular topic. This week, it’s the hardest games ever.

Games just aren’t as hard as they used to be.

Don’t mistake this statement as one coming from a person looking to artificially give his gaming accomplishments more weight – - I see it as fact. Outside of a few throwback titles (Mega Man 9, Mega Man 10), few contemporary games achieve the level of hair-pulling insanity that ran rampant through the 8- and 16-bit eras.

The 2D-X team has decided to list our most frustrating 2D games and, as expected, they’re all pretty old. Agree? Disagree? Let your voice be heard, folks.

Chris Gampat, News Editor
Action titles, truthfully, have to be amongst the hardest games I’ve ever played. A couple of them really stand out, but the king has to be the original Prince of Persia. The reason why is because you needed to save your beloved princess in one hour while fighting through hordes of palace guards, skeletons, countering your alter ego that is created when you jump through a mirror and navigating traps. The game really started to mess with your mind, too, because you had the counter down at the bottom of the screen telling you “15 mins…30 mins…” and you didn’t know just how many levels there were to navigate and how long it was going to take for you to win this. Eventually you start to realize that you don’t need to fight all the guards in order to win, but back then us gamers really didn’t figure that out. This is probably the first game I’ve ever played where in order to win you really need to just concentrate on getting to your objective and that’s all. It is to date one of the only games I’ve never beaten. In fact, I only know people that have beaten it using cheat codes.

Thomas Rivas, Contributing Editor
The Battle of Olympus has to be one of the most difficult games I’ve ever played. You may not die with one hit, but seemingly never-ending quests filled with absurd obstacles will have most players rethinking whether or not Helene (the damsel in distress) is worth all the trouble. If there’s one thing you’ll be doing a lot of in this game, it’s falling. For a heavily armed man on a perilous journey to save the love of his life, Orpheus (the hero) can’t take a hit. Any contact with a creature or projectile knocks your player back a few steps into an uncontrollable moonwalk-like motion. Normally, that might be pretty cool, but when you’re at the edge of a platform and moonwalk yourself into a pit, it can be anything but.

Jeffrey L. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief
No question, it’s Image Fight II, a semi-obscure Irem-developed PC Engine Super CD shooter that will make you want to toss rocks at grandma . Casual shmup fans like often cite bullet-hell shooters as some of the most difficult in the drama, but few games actually destory your ships and portions of your soul like Image Fight II. Vertical shmups are my preferred style of shooting, and Image Fight II did all it could to take the fun out of it. The sprites are relatively big, which combined with the limited vertical movement, made bobbing and weaving incoming artillery pure bastardy. I never passed the third level. Whatevs.