As a man of my advanced age, having turned 26 yesterday, I am able to recall playing Contra on NES when the system was the standard console that allowed for in-home gaming. My brother and I spent hours getting shot to death and starting over, and I honestly don’t know if we ever actually beat the game. Now, all these years later, The Fine Bros. have decided to introduce the anger-inducing side-scroller to a group of teenagers in their popular series of Teens React. For this episode, they split the teenagers into pairs and threw them into the deep end of alien hunting madness. As we can all assume, they didn’t fair well.

The teens quickly face the hardship of early video games by being presented with no tips or strategy to make it through Contra’s infamous first jungle level. Some push to work hard and make it farther and farther into the level, while others take to less productive strategies of blaming each other and claiming the game is “cheating.” Soon, however, they are able to grasp basic strategies on their own including “just run” and “shoot everything.” As the teams keep dying and get on to their last continue, you can’t help but root for them to at least make it to the end of the first level.

I will admit, I don’t know if I would make it to the base at the end of the jungle without the Konami Code 99 lives cheat at this point in my life, but then again, I don’t know if I ever did when I was younger, either. Maybe now these dang kids will be grateful for what they have, because back in my day, you only had 3 lives, and everything killed you in one hit!

Can you think of a game that was even harder than Contra? Let us know in the comments below!