Kid, you ain't nothing unless you've conquered these incredibly punishing indie platformers. Without the constraints of a mass market audience, these downloadable or browser-based PC titles are free to present unreasonably tough run-and-jump challenges without fear of pissing off scaring away the lowest-common-denominator players. Good luck... you'll need it.

9) Syobon Action (Download)

Take every convention you know about platform games. Got 'em in hand? Now throw them out the window. This is the only way you'll get through Syoban Action, a demented reimagining of the first four levels of Super Mario Bros. featuring a cat protagonist and a wide variety of inventive, seemingly out-of-nowhere threats. Nothing is as it seems as seemingly solid platforms falls away, pipes blast off into space. Even crossing the end-of-level flagpole doesn't spell the end of the threats. True, the game is a bit easier the second time through, once you've memorized where all the traps lay, but even then finishing without a negative number of lives can be tough.

8) Mighty Jill Off (Download)

It's almost appropriate that a game this punishing has a story lightly based on BDSM play. The basic, ultra-high-jump-and-float gameplay will be familiar to anyone who played forgotten NES-era gem Mighty Bomb Jack, and the game eases you into the controls nicely enough. Before long, though, you're tapping the space bar maddeningly to float your way through some extremely narrow spaces and onto tricky, one-block wide landing pads. And then, if you can climb the tower in less than twelve minutes, the extra "Jill Off Harder" stage is where things get really interesting. I hope you have insurance on your space bar. 

7) VVVVVV (Download)

A platform game without a jump button? That's the idea behind VVVVVV, a game where your only way to interact with your character (besides walking left and right) is by reversing gravity  for the entire universe. The game takes this simple idea to its limit, with plenty of inventive puzzles that require both outside-the-box logic and lightning-fast reflexes. While there are whole sections of the game that aren't that tough, it earns a space on the list for its toughest sections, like the one shown in the video above, which literally took me over an hour to execute perfectly. It's an hour I'll never get back, but also one I'll never forget.

I hope you like wall jumps. And buzzsaws. And bloody meat juice all over everything. Because you'll be seeing a lot of all three of these things in this punishing little Newgrounds Flash game. You control a little blob of animated meat, using some extremely floaty jumps,  to guide him past all sorts of projectiles and traps to his lady love at the end of each level. One wrong move means a rather grisly end, and believe me, there are plenty of opportunities for wrong moves. A sequel, Super Meat Boy feels like its been development forever and seems set to be even harder when it hits download services like Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare, hopefully soon.

5) Kaizo Mario World (Download)

Of the countless Super Mario World hacks out there, this one might be the most famously tough. How tough, you ask? Well, the very first level asks you to bounce across a gap on the back of five speeding bullet bills before riding atop a series of spinies (via spin jump, of course) through a narrow corridor of indestructible chompers and inconveniently placed charging chucks. Later levels use even more familiar Mario enemies and items in some ridiculously clever and cruel ways, culminating in a final boss fight that seems to throw all the toughest bits of the game at Mario at once. Put it this way: If the real Super Mario World were this tough, the Nintendo would have been bankrupted by hordes of angry parents demanding their money back sometime around 1991.

4) Punishment 2: The Punishing (Download)

As if the name wasn't clue enough, this monochrome platformer has some of the toughest pinpoint jumps I've ever seen in the genre (see video). But the real punishment comes not in the level design, but in the design of the game as a whole, which requires you to travel back down to the very beginning of the game every time you complete a room, only to work your way back up to your previous high water mark. The result is a game that gets perversely easier as you play, with levels that once seemed impossibly difficult becoming almost routine through sheer repetition. Still, by the time you make it ou of the final room, you'll probably be glad never to see any of these rooms again.

3) Jinesei Owata no Daibouken (Play online)

Just getting out of the first room of this Japanese platformer is likely to drive many gamers to keyboard abuse. Those who persevere, though, get to "enjoy" a series of ridiculous spike traps, dead ends and, bizarrely, screen-filling Street Fighter characters made of text characters. Mere text explanations don't do the craziness justice... play it for yourelf or check out the video above for a taste.

2) N (Download)

Nobody said the life of a ninja was easy... and even if they did, they'd change their mind after playing this game. You're a small black ninja with some amazing leaping abilities, which you'll need to avoid all manners of lasers, robot sentries, homing missiles and plain old mines in a seemingly endless quest to get to the next door. Amazing physics modeling means you have to learn how to use the game's springy blocks, inclined planes and wall jumping momentum to your advantage in this game of microseconds.

While the original set of 100 levels are tough enough, fans have used the level creator to create some truly sadistic masterpieces (shown above). How tough can those levels get? Let's put it this way: Xbox Live Arcade remake N+ actually has a hidden achievement for dying 1,000 times in the game. And it's an achievement most players will get before they finish the game.

1) I Wanna Be the Guy (Download)

I'm not really sure why anyone would want to be the guy if it meant having to work their way through this game. I Wanna Be The Guy is absolutely merciless, throwing every manner of just-plain-unfair jump-and-shoot challenge at your tiny character. Grazing one of the games thousands of inconveniently placed spikes by just a pixel means a grisly death and a free trip back to the last checkpoint, which could be quite a ways back. And we haven't gotten into the bosses: a who's-who of giant, pixelated enemies stolen from classic video games. If you can make it through the Extra Hard mode to actually become the guy, you have truly earned the title of platform game master.