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Add falling blocks, an unexpected section with floating rocks where you must have perfect timing else you get impaled by instant-death spikes and many annoyingly placed enemies that send you plummeting to your death if they hit you, and you get many broken controllers. A Rise to the Challenge level with a floating spike-ball rapidly making its way up, forcing you to be constantly on the move, while jumping from small platform to small platform where a single mistake could mean death. Special mention must go to Super Castlevania IV's final level.Belmont's Revenge is also noteworthy for the sudden spike in difficulty for the final two bosses.And then, there's those hard-to-avoid bubble enemies and the statues that shoot arrows at you. Stage 7 starts off with an infinite fleet of eagles carrying Fleamen, and you can only take 4 hits before you die (which you don't experience in the NES original until you hit Stage 13).
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Unfortunately for you, said Giant Mooks not only are immune to one-hit-kills, they're the only enemies that can attack you during the Overly Long Fighting Animation if you one-hit-kill regular mooks, so fights that have both regular and giant mooks become the only legitimately difficult fights on hard mode. Much of the increased difficulty on hard mode comes from increased enemy health, which in the case of Mooks is ignorable if you abuse your unblockable one-hit-kill attack, and in the case of Giant Mooks isn't too unpleasant. Batman: Arkham Asylum is fairly well-balanced on normal difficulty, but it spikes late into the game on hard.Assassin's Creed: The fights go from "could be beaten by a badly-trained monkey" to "enemies with unblockable attack chains that take a sizable chunk out of your health" right around the time you lose the ability to avoid them.In games where the spike occurs earlier than the very end of the game, it may result in the oddity that the section at the beginning of the spike gives the most trouble to players, while the final boss (even though it may be objectively more difficult) is taken out in a relatively short time, because by then the players have adjusted to the new difficulty. This is often made worse by the fact that it is usually more of a challenge to master a difficult section of a game if there is no intermediate difficulty with which the player can "work their way up" to being able to manage that particular section. but then you lose all 99 extra lives to That One Boss in 6-4. You can get through five worlds without a scratch. Nintendo Hard games tend to do this a lot. Perhaps it's bad game design, maybe it's a sadistic developer, who knows? But all of a sudden, the game makes you want to throw your controller through the television. A game that is light and easy suddenly becomes insanely difficult.