There are many annoying NES games but the one that caused me the most frustration as a child was Kid Icarus. The game is fucking horrible. But...I didn't realize this when I was young, and continued playing it, putting myself through endless anguish.
Where to start in its suckiness? Well, for one thing, a lot of it is a vertical scroller, finding you climbing up the screen as you jump from platform to platform. However, unlike a game like Metroid, that allowed you to fall back to where you came from, once you crossed a threshold of what you could no longer see, what existed below was a bottomless chasm, which would claim your life if you made the slightest miscalculation in your jumps.
Also, there are the Grim Reaper characters - if one sees you, a grating music comes on, and mini-reapers swirl into the screen to kill you until you destroy them or an allotment of time passes. If the big Grim Reaper sees you again, the process starts over.
Of course, there are also the maze-like boss levels, which feature the Eggplant Wizard, which throws eggplants across the screen at you. If you get hit by one, you turn into an eggplant yourself, with the ability to walk and jump, but no longer attack. Getting back to normal is, of course, frustrating.
The game is huge, and has a password system to save your progress. Kids today will never know the terrors of the NES password system. God have mercy on your soul if you wrote down your code wrong or somehow entered in the wrong letter or number but don't know which.
Those were simpler times, and the games were sometimes very unforgiving.
Oh my gosh. I have no idea how we played all those hard ass NES games back in the day. Kid Icarus was one I never played. I just remember him as a character from the Captain N cartoon. Those medusa heads in Castlevania, or bats in Ninja Gaiden!
oh god, those bats and birds in Ninja Gaiden! That shit drove me mad.
I rented Kid Icarus once and just didn't like it. Jumping just felt off which isn't good when falling into a pit is what kills you most of the time here. I also didn't like Kid Icarus: Uprising because the controls were horrible.
yeah, i should have stopped playing it. But I didn't. 
I enjoyed it, flaws and all. It gets much easier once you clear the first boss. I was into Greek mythology at the time so I dug it even though it played fast and loose with Greek mythology (a more recent favorite, Valkyrie Profile, does the same thing with the Norse myths). The instruction manual showed a female enemy character with bare boobs, which somehow never created an outcry.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters on Game Boy is a genuinely great game. They did away with the cheap falling and improved on the original in every way except ehe lack of color. Surprisingly, despite being Japanese-made it was US-exclusive until it was released on the 3DS. It made me wish Nintendo had made a Super Kid Icarus or a Kid Icarus 64.
Kid Icarus Uprising, while not feeling like a sequel to 1 or 2, laid a damn strong groundwork I wish Nintendo could build upon. Give a sequel analog/motion controls, platforming on land and keep the production values and the franchise could be pretty popular.
I was really into Greek mythology back then too. I still am. I guess I must have enjoyed playing it, or I would have stopped. It did get easier after the first boss when it started sidescrolling.
Remember those treasure rooms where you would shoot the flying enemies, but if you shot the wrong one, you'd lose all the treasure? Jeez.
"Where to start in its suckiness?"
"92% of Google users liked this video game."
Hmm ... Maybe Alex Jones has a point about search engines.
Ha ha. Maybe it was just me!
Or, as I think happens with many lauded pieces of media, people just say they like it cause they think they're supposed to, even if they have never experienced it for themselves or wouldn't actually like it if they did.
Seriously, how bad were those passwords? Man so much frustration when it came time for younger Chris to try and remember if it was a zero or an o. Eventually I got wise and just put a slash inside the zero. I do miss these unforgiving, impossible code games on the NES.
Having never played this game it does have a fond memory for me. There was once this weird kids game show where two kids answered NES game questions, and the winner got to run through some type of obsticle course where they could pull any games off the sides of the course and that was the reward.
yeah, those passwords drove me mad. I never take for granted saving games in files now.
I found a list of codes in my graph paper book for Swords and Serpents. I don't even remember playing that NES game.
"The difficulty is like life, true to experience. Try and master it." That's how I imagine Japanese developers thinking (likely not the case). ha ha