Hurricane Irene put us on a mandatory gaming vacation after hitting the last week of April. During that time, I only had access to my PSPGo (for a couple of hours) and my Nintendo DS (for slightly longer). Out of those, the only game I was interested in playing was Patapon 2 on the PSP, which is a very fun game in its own right. I wasn't quite sure why I had stopped playing the game until I failed twice on the mission I was on. Patapon 2 isn't the hardest game I've ever played, but there is definitely a lot of death when playing it. I'm all for difficult games, but I did not really have the energy to decide on which team build to take into missions for Patapon 2. It reminded me of an interview from the Designer Director of Silent Hill Downpour. It was mostly about how games have changed so much since the NES-era, the 90's, and even this decade. Believe it or not, a huge portion of the consensus will tell you that our latest games have taken a turn for the worse in many aspects of gameplay. One that will always be up for debate is difficulty.
There are MANY defining attributes to what makes a game difficult. I like to think that it is made up of the following:
Controls : Controls will always make a game seem better or worse than it actually is. Overly tight controls will make every "miss click" a ticket to your own death. Panicking may send you off of a ledge in 1 button press or launch you into an obstacle because you have committed to that single controller tap. Shallow controls can cause you to underestimate gaps, because you to take damage when you THOUGHT you would dodge the attack, or even miss that ever important menu option because the scroll bar doesn't scroll fast enough!
Pattern Memorization: some games count on the player to make mistakes and learn from them in the form of memorization. The simplest form of this is from prediction. "Hey, this level has spikes that fall from the ceiling. There are no enemies in the room. There will probably be spikes on the ceiling." Of course, when prediction is not fun enough, we can bump it up(or down depending on who you ask) to trial and error memorization. So now, instead of guessing that there are spikes in the next room, it becomes "Oh yeah, the spikes aren't on the ceiling after the 1st room. Instead, they shoot from behind you when you turn the corner too fast." This can be extended to boss monsters that will kill you unless you exploit their patterns or puzzles that involve a specific sequence to events.
Randomization: Most events in games are scripted, but when you think of difficulty, randomization becomes the probability you will die when X occurs. Sounds like something I just made up, hunh? Well, in my search for bosses people considered to be difficult, one choice that popped up was Ruby Weapon in FFVII. Ruby Weapon, as well as most RPG bosses deemed difficult are only as difficult as their random number generator allows them to be. If a boss is difficult because it has a CHANCE to one-shot your max level character with a particular attack, then it is only as difficult as the dice roll for that to happen. The more unlucky you are, the more times the boss will use that attack and the more it will hit for maximum damage. The luckier you are, the attack will do minimal damage or may not be performed at all! Same goes for basic monsters in action games and CPU opponents in fighting games. Platform games can be random too, as the timing on a certain jump or obstacle may be slightly changed based on how fast you go through a level. If certain parts of the game aren't synchronized, you may have times where you could die when you normally wouldn't. Imagine running through a level to beat a time and the best path comes from jumping on a flying bee. The bee's flight path is random; sometimes you can hit it just right, other times you miss and are forced to take the harder path.
Those 3 attributes are the broadest features of a hard game. There are plenty more than those such as the amount of actions the player can perform, camera angles, etc. Of course, the most difficult games have a little bit of each of these to make fun(and not so fun) games. If you look around for a list of the best of the best in hair pulling gameplay, you will often see the same retro games popping up:
Battletoads
Megaman
The Legend of Zelda 2
Super Mario: The Lost Levels
Ghouls and Ghosts
Contra
Castlevania
If you look at the comments on a lot of these lists, you will actually see people who believe that this era of gaming is much more entertaining than our current generation. Why? Well, let's not forget that half of us who are making these articles and posting comments about these games, played them when we were children. For a large amount of people who try these for the first time without any prior knowledge of what they were getting into, they would probably toss the game in the garbage. In this age, we expect a lot from our games and calling the current generation of games bad is a little insulting. A lot of the challenge from Retro games comes from hardware limitations.
Author: KamilDowonna
Did you die because you couldn’t see the bat hiding on the pillar thanks to 8bit graphics? Did you die because the bone that was thrown at you was in the process to disappearing and you thought it would have before it hits you? Did an enemy jump through a platform that you couldn't and cost you your life? People who can't do this can be deemed "casuals", "bad players", and what-have-you but there is no denying that hardware limitation is "part of the challenge." You may think that we are spoiled by free moving cameras and instant dodge/block/counter, but I like to believe that most developers from the late 80's and early 90's would implement these too if it were possible.
Once we get past the retro games, there are some late 90's and early 00's video games that make a few lists. In the age of 3D, we have larger screens to implement more obstacles, powerful hardware that can complicate anything, and a couple more buttons on our controllers!
Metal Gear Solid
Ninja Gaiden Black
Fzero GX
Devil May Cry 3
Viewtiful Joe
Ikaruga
Shinobi
At this point in history, skill is rewarded for all players, and not just those who are obsessed with beating games. Limitations are still present in terms of physics and edges. Once you overcome these, you are free to try to beat the game using your own skill. Some games still require some memorization, but because the games are bigger, we got checkpoints! A lot of players forget that retro games can be beaten in 1-2 hours, and not having checkpoints or many lives is reasonable. When your game lasts 8+ hours and has a warning to not play over prolonged periods of time, one should expect the ability to save our process.
Pink Kitty Rose
And now we get to the most important part of the discussion, current generation games. How can you make a game remotely difficult when controllers have 8+ buttons, gameplay is highly responsive, and gamers want more options than ever?
1) Put more enemies on the screen than ever before?
2) Make the game MORE difficult the longer you take to overcome an obstacle?
3) Defy physics in a way that makes players think?
Some of our newest games actually do some of these and are on the many lists you can find on the internet for challenging gameplay:
Demon's Souls
Wipeout HD
Dante's Inferno
Bayonetta
What's great is that most games nowadays have multiple difficulties, challenge levels, and trophies to make them "difficult." A lot of us forget that if a game is too easy, you could easily just put the game on Expert, Professional, Demon Hunter, Killer, Elite, etc difficulty. If you beat the game too quickly, you can do trophies that usually present some sort of a challenge. Even the FPS games that are often used as an example for spoiling this generation of player, have ways to bump up the challenge. Unlike the retro games, a lot of challenging games for Xbox/PS3 generation are all about mastering the controls. As easy as everyone thinks FPS games are and how it has spoiled everyone, I wonder how many have actually tried to challenge themselves?
Author: Futuramaforlife
So in the end, people will never stop complaining about our current generation of games sucks compared to 10+ year-old titles. I highly doubt that most posters on the internet are THAT dissatisfied with games. If that was true, things like Call of Duty and Madden wouldn't be doing so well. Our games aren't bad just they don't kill players for not dodging a little white speck on their screen. Dying because you can't hear the aliens behind you WHILE they attack you(design flaw), you can't run effectively thanks to stilted controls, and poor physics making any platform a deathtrap just isn't fun to me.
And playing "Masochist games" isn't very fun either. It's okay for Google searches every now and then; playing a game that kills you every 5 seconds while you restart a billion times. If that is what people want in real games, perhaps we all need to think for a moment on how much time we are willing to put into something like this:
How much money would you pay for this, really?
