Ninja Gaiden, the NES Ninja Gaiden, has a rep. It's tough, it's unfair, it's wonky, and it's got great music and cutscenes. I don't remember exactly how I got my hands on a copy back during the summer of 198X, but I did, and I ended up spending a lot of time with it.
I eventually ended up good enough at the game that I could reliably finish it, given enough time and continues (which, I think is probably still technically true). But before all of that, I was pretty rotten at it. But it was summer, I didn't have a job, and my older cousin had come over to watch my sister and me just about every weekday, and we had all the time in the world to play it.
The couple of weeks we devoted to the game went as well as could be expected. We got through the initial 'easy' stages, got hung up when things got harder, traded controllers and tried again. We got good enough at the initial stages that my cousin ended up devising a new way to play the game that she said was for professionals, it was harder and therefore much cooler: she would lay on the couch and put the controller behind her head and play it that way. She insisted that her runs were better than my runs (even if I managed to get further) because of the added challenge of her control scheme. I couldn't argue with that (and, in fact, still can't).
But, summer ended as summers do, and we all went our separate ways to do our separate things. I still plugged away at Ninja Gaiden and realized that it's mostly a game of memorization. You don't really have to react to anything, and if you do the same thing in the same way at the same time, you'll pretty much always succeed. Or fail, I guess, if you keep doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Once I realized that and found that I didn't really have to think about the game until I got to a part I hadn't seen before, that really simplified trying to play it. It was kind of refreshing to be able to do that. To get incrementally better one playthrough at a time, to see the next cutscene, and then to do it all again until I found out how the story ended.
And I did. I managed to get all the way to the end, and defeat the end boss. Or at least I thought I did. At the risk of spoiling a 30-ish year old game, there is a gauntlet of three end bosses you have to defeat. I was never able to run the gauntlet to completion, mostly because after you defeat a boss, you get stripped of your special weapons (and they're really handy). But I found that when you defeat one of the bosses, then you get a Game Over, then you continue, then you make it to the boss room again... That the boss you killed was still dead and you started with the next one in the order, only this time you have whatever special weapon you managed to carry with you. Then you beat the boss, get stripped of your super cool stuff, game over, then repeat it all again for the third time (Or more, if you're like me, and got exhausted running Act VI four times in a row. Did I forget to mention that every time you continue, you go aaaall the way back to the beginning of Act VI, no matter how far you'd gotten?)
But, eventually, I did it! I was victorious, I saw the ending, and all was well. As well as it was going to get. I never bothered to practice much more after that, and I never was able to get very far using the 'professional' control scheme. But I still consider that a net win