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Tough Love - Can A Game Be Too Hard?
Thanks to Slate for its article discussing the excessive difficulty inherent in some videogames. The writer argues: "Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics... I usually discard them in frustration after a couple of hours and wonder: What's the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it?" He continues: "The latest test of this thesis is Tecmo's new Ninja Gaiden, a game so punishing that even some hard-core players fear picking it up." Although the piece concludes: "Just because a game is hard doesn't mean it'll have a payoff", what games have you played that are insanely tricky to master?
wopr# globalthermonuclearwar
Not as hard as they make it sound. I won it in about 20 hours.
-Cecil
If you think it's too difficult, you're just a little slow... read the book, learn the controls, and then play the game as intended. If the quality assurance team could beat the game before release, you can do it now.
The origianl Donkey Kong arcade game was impossible to beat. I don't know if you could even beat the game or if it had an ending. I had one in my basement and I spent endless hours trying to beat it.
Tic Tac Toe - man, I *never* know which square to pick.
I have been playing first person shooters since the genre was invented. I spend about our hour a day playing Quake 3 Arena online and I still get my ass kicked most of the time.
I think some people must have an innate ability to master some types of games and others need simple games to keep from getting frustrated.
Masochists like me keep trying.
XKobo is one of my favourites, and I still play it today (I'm in stage 242, and there are only 50 stages, they begin repeating after that. Not that I'm addicted or something.. :)
The gameplay basically about dodging enemies in a two-way scrolling space, trying to destroy the bases. The level 6 and some later levels are very hard.
There is a modern version in SDL, called Kobo Deluxe, but I still prefer the original. Beware!
I admit it. I was balked at the first Harry Potter game. Everything went fine until I got to the "Fluffy" dog heads. I could not find a way to get them all to sleep at the same time; gave up after a while.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's pretty hard getting that @ down to level 20.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Lovely graphics, fascinating storyline, beautiful music, blah blah blah...
:-/
But to an RTS-neophyte like me, it's impossible. It's simply no fun when you can't beat the sodding thing. I think I got to the third level or so before giving up. I'll have to have another try - is there anything to make it a bit easier? It might be okay for people who've played millions of RTS-type games before, but I haven't...
hey beavis, that kid sits in his basement all day long beating his donkey kong.
I once made a game, and through the development of it, I found it pretty easy. But then, after a month without trying it out, it was insanely hard to play :P
Man, _THAT_ was dificult. I was a strategy enthusiast when a played this game (at around 1993-4) and nobody i knew could go far in this game.
I wonder if other Slashdoter have gone far with this thing..
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
C64 classic Armalyte.
Just about managed to get to level 2 if I was lucky
CJC
Ghosts and Ghouls.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The only problem I have with difficult games is that now I have to be a "grown up" and go to work everyday I don't get much time to play games.
As little as 3 years ago it would have been fine for me to devote lots of time to a game like Ninja Gaiden, but now 30 minutes could be considered to be a big gaming session for me. Which is one of the reasons I like the quick save in PC games, true it makes a game very easy but it also means I can stop playing when I choose to and resume without having to play large sections of the game again to get back to where I was before.
With Ninja Gaiden if I die it often means replaying 10 minutes worth of stuff I've done before just to get back to the bit I'm having trouble with, which can be frustrating, it can also mean my entire gaming session is spent replaying the same part of the game over and over without making any new progress. I'd probably never see beyond level 1 of most games if we still lived in the days of consoles without memory cards. I lost count of how many hours it took to get to the end of Super Ghouls and Ghosts before being told to go through the whole game again by the princess because she'd dropped her bracelet.
I saw the other day that the creator of Ninja Gaiden wants to make the sequel just as hard, despite people's complaints. I admire the guy for sticking to his design ethics but I think he might out off a lot of potential buyers by doing this.
There are two kinds of hard. One is good, the other is not.
The first kind is the kind you get in a Zelda game. You need to beat a puzzle to proceed. The puzzle is a real mind bender. You sit there thinking and thinking, maybe even dying, and eventually you figure it out. These are good since your lack of skill keeps you from continuing. Also like in a space shooter, if you keep dying at a boss its because your twitch reflexes and button pressing isn't up to snuff, so you don't continue.
What is bad is when arbitrary information prevents you from continuing. For example a Resident Evil type game. Let's say you get to a point where you are completely stuck. There is no puzzle solving or skill shooting or anything like that which prevents you from going forth. It's simply that you don't know that widget X goes in thing Y. The only way to know is to read a FAQ or try everyting. This is stupid and bad game design. If you want someone to figure something out, it has to be in puzzle or riddle form. Don't just give the player stuff and force them to try every combination of places and things with no logic behind it. If there is no thinking or hand moving skill involved its not worth my time.
However, in games with the correct type of difficulty, crank it up all the way. I remember when saying you beat a game was a badge of honor. Sometimes you couldn't even repeat the feat. Seeing the ends of games, however crappy, was the best thing ever. We have to go back to those days. *cough* Silver Surfer *cough*
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If you pick first, pick a corner not the center square. The satisfaction from crushing engineering majors repeatedly in Tic-Tac-Toe is something special. The confusion horror and masochism the exhibit is truly special. It's a game that everyone thinks they've mastered but far fewer have.
Play it right and X can only win or draw, and O can only keep alive by moving into the center square on their first move and a side square on their second. Any deviation will rack up a win for X.
Try and beat this game: Hold the Button
(Obviously, don't give the site any email addresses! But you should know not to do that already.)
It's worth it.
I got a copy of Ninja Gaiden right before I left for Europe for a year and since I was planning to leave my XBox behind I had 10 days to either finish it or leave it alone. I finished it, and man it was worth it. Once you master the game, you realize how good you are and it becomes just plain old fun. There is a certain satisfaction in kicking a boss' ass because you know YOU kicked his ass. The progression from button mashing to (pardon me here for a second) mad skillz is part of the fun.
I don't always want something like Ninja Gaiden, but getting to the end, unlocking the secret costume and playing the first few levels on the unlocked "Very Hard" setting... well worth it.
Says I, anyway.
The last level of XIII was bastard hard. After failing at it 15 times or so, I gave up for the evening. I haven't loaded the game since.
Games these days seem increasingly easier to succeed in. I recall the days of old games such as Rush N' Attack in the arcade....the pain....the quarters. Or how about the "original" Ninja Gaiden on the 8-bit? Or Ghouls and ghosts (What was that original called again?) Minor payoff, major pain in the.. but in the end success was sweet because you had to try so hard and get a bit lucky to win. I believe that today's games and their level of difficulty directly parallel the lackadaisical attitude society projects about what it takes to succeed. Society has programmed individuals to sit back and expect success with little effort. The end result is a culmination of whiny, overweight, and unsuccessful people who think they are perfect and everything is broken around them. I agree with the concept of making games harder under the right premise, (not the unknown-info premise as mentioned earlier) If you are playing games on the easy level, you would be just as well go watch a cartoon and pretend to control the characters.
This article coming up is a strange coincedence for me -- I feel this way about the latest Rockstar game, Manhunt. Damn it's frustrating!!!
Freakin Rygar, man! 86 hours of game, ONE lonely, solitary sad little life. Play the game for a week, keep it on pause while you sleep, and die near the end, only to have to start over from square one.
Thank [insert deity here] for Game Genie...
I just rented R-Type final for the PS2 last week and that game is insanly hard. The first level I kept dying at this one part and finally I gave up and put the God Mode cheat in. I was able to beat the game within a half an hour but to my disappointment the ending to the game sucked! I didn't feel so bad using the cheat because if I had wasted 20+ hours trying to master the game and finally get a lame ending I would have shot someone or threw the game out the window.
-Dipster
Radio Zonde is the single most difficult game I have ever played. Games like Ikaruga, P.N.03 or Viewtiful Joe (on the harder difficulties, of course) are a walk in the park compared to Zonde. If you manage to make it past the first level without using infinite lives, I salute you. And that's at the lowest difficulty.
The Shrooms secret level (the vomitorium IIRC) on RoTT. Psychodelic mushrooms, trampolines, rockets and Johnny five on crystal meth....
There's a big difference between something which is just "difficult" - e.g. loads of baddies, psychic enemy AI, and something which is a real challenge.
My main criterion is, when I've been killed by something/crashed into a wall/allowed the coloured blocks to stack up too high, whether I'm thinking, "Yeesh, not again! How was I supposed to see that coming?", or "My fault - should have been more catious".
I know it was insanely successful, but I got seriously pissed off with MOHAA because of the sniper sections. Everyone I've spoken to who played it agreed that the only way through was:
i) Walk into new area
ii) Wait to be shot
iii) Try and work out, as you die, where the sniper was
iv) Load save
v) Walk into area, already pointing the right direction and waste sniper.
This is a waste of my time. I want to feel that if I die, it's my fault, and that I could have done better. I don't want to end up feeling that the game designers just deliberately wasted me. As an example of what I do like, I'd suggest Deus Ex and (to a lesser extent) its sequel. I got blown away plenty of times in both games (on "hard" setting) but each time I knew what I should have been doing differently, and learnt a lesson that helped with the rest of the game.
echoing an earlier poster I find that my complete lack of time makes games that others probably find easy much harder for me.
While kids are able to devote a lot of time to games, and eventually become very proficient at them, I find that my adult life has far too many other commitments.
Don't get me wrong, I love gaming, but if a game is initially difficult then I cannot justify spending what little gaming time I get playing through that game. If these things had better learning curves that gradually introduced mew skills and methods then I would be able to play more, as I would feel that I would achieve more at each sitting. Instead I opt for games that I find myself able to play, and thus enjoy my limited time more.
If anyone is looking for a bite-sized game that fits into a hectic adult life easily, but can be expanded to take up as much time as you have then click the link in my sig.
RM
I have no sig yet I must scream.
The hardest game I ever played and completed is Rogue.
;-)
The version I played was written in 1982 and was a port for the IBM PC. It had a bug that prevented one from loading a saved game. This was one of its greatest features in my opinion. Every time you played it you had to start from scratch and because there were so many random elements in the game no game was ever the same.
I played this game for years and a few of my friends did also. Getting into the top 10 scoreboard was nearly impossible and when someone managed it I'd get a phone call "Hey! I got 9th place on rogue!" and we'd swap the score file on floppy disk so everyone had an up to date version.
After a couple of years I wrote a new high score program that screen-scraped your score (how much gold you had) and other stats too. It recorded the top 100 scores. After a couple of years even getting into this top 100 was difficult.
We literally played tens of thousands of games without getting out of the dungeon with the Amulet of Yendor and I thought it impossible - the game couldn't be completed.
One very happy day I managed it though! I can't tell you how excited I was - definately the most difficult game I ever played but because it was such a fun and random game I never bored of it. I still played it after completing it - and managed to complete it two more times and my brother also eventually completed it.
These days I play lots of "press F6 to quicksave" type games - they're a lot of fun but where's the tension and exhilaration that comes from knowing your character could die - and die properly? No re-loading.
The people who made this version of Rogue called themselves Artificial Intelligence Design Systems - AIDS. Heh. Wonder if they're still using that name...?
Think of the games you can't beat. There's many of them!
I was a much better video game player when I was 10 or 12 compared to now. I can still beat most Playstation 2 games.
If I go back and play some NES games like Ghouls and Ghosts, the original Ninja Gaiden, I wonder how I even got as far as I used to.
Man the new CS 1 person game sucks on the Hostage Missions. You personally have to save 4 hostages. If your team kills the terrorists before you can return to the drop zone, you don't get the credit.
I played this one level 52 times before I was able to get the hostages out - lol.
Would be much better if they would give you the credit if you have the hostages in possession when your team wins. Or if they would keep the level running until all the hostages (alive) are rescued or all the good guys are dead.
The game is sweet tho - hehe.
Circa 1983. Has anyone played this DOS game with MIDI music? Its got lots of levels and you have to find secrets and memorize the maps, through which you have to go back and forth throughout the game.
I've reached two levels before the final, the level after the fiery level, and then completely lost my bearings. Ive spent months on it.
If youre looking for a really tough one, with LOTS of levels, a nasty maze but all well-rewarded, get Zeliard from some abandonware site. And tell me how you get across the third last stage..
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
It took me a full 6 months to beat him. It's still one of my all-time crowning game achievements.
Although I can get on board with Ninja Gaiden being frustratingly difficult (rented it, no book, no hint of skills improving, gave up), the hardest game I ever played was Su-27. It was not enough to be a flight sim. It was not enough to be a seemingly-painstakingly-accurate flight sim. It was not enough to be a seemingly-painstakingly-accurate flight sim that put you in VERY sticky situations. It was a seemingly-painstakingly-accurate flight sim that put you in VERY sticky situations and all the controls and indicators were in RUSSIAN.
The "instant action" puts you head on with three OPFOR fighters just outside missile range. Here's how it went the seven times I tried it: Fly for a couple seconds, lock acquired on me, attempt to avert destruction by clever use of countermeasures and/or aerobatics, fail miserably.
I'm a fan of meticulous flight sims. The bigger the manual, the happier I am. I loved the Jane's series from EA, and Falcon 4.0 was right up my alley. But man, Flanker beat my ass and sent me crying home to mama.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
and I only have 4 fingers...
Robotron.
"I forgot my mantra."
It takes months to "master" driving these beasts... but it's so rewarding when you get there. It was a commercial failure (less than 100k copies sold), but it's still in wide use after over 5 years (and beautifully updated by the community too!).
There's better ways around the difficulty problem than quicksave. For example, the extremely challenging shooter Ikaruga lets you play any level section you want from the main menu. You also have the option of playing it in slow-mo to work out technique, or watching a master play through the level.
Ikaruga gives you all the joy of getting better at the game, without replaying sections you can get through. The design is centered around this, actually - and it's pretty satisfying.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
So far I'm the only person I know who can beat a game I made (not that many have tried).
Spew, a tetris clone where the board spins around while you try to play. There are 7 levels. See if you can beat it.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Zeliard was from Sierra in around 1991 I believe (not 1983) - and it really is a great game. From what I remember, there wasn't a lot of tricks to getting to the last level (just make sure you've explored every section again) - and I never found the Fairy Flame Sword that in-game characters are always whining about. I never understood why this game never got noticed - it was as fun as any Zelda game I've played.
Anywho, if you really want to know how to get through it, there's a walkthrough at GameFaqs.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
HalfLife was the perfect game until you got to the end and there was the jumping puzzle from hell. The audio and visual effects and different creatures created the alien feeling. The jumping puzzles added nothing to this.
To this day I still have no idea what the level designers where thinking. It had nothing to do with the rest of the game, it was boring and tedious (Woops you were 1 second off, reload and repeat).
Today, Far Cry has point saves (You can only save at certain points). Why would they do this on a PC game? Why do game designers force you to play something in one sitting?
When its fun, its a challenge. When its not, it gets me out of the "game" mode and start thinking about how poor the level designers were when they had to resort to making things difficult which has nothing to do with the game or having fun.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Zero Wing is one hard game. I know there are some important instructions in the intro text, but I can't figure out what "All your base are belong" or "Every ZIG" means.
NetHack !
4D tictactoe (naughts and crosses, for brits) is a very difficult game to master. I've written an implementation with a fairly naive computer player that just weights each square based on the sum of a weighting of each line that goes through it, and I still have a really hard time beating the computer at it. I guess the computer's just much better at visualizing 4 dimensions than I am ;)
/. to let me render this... I'll show a 2^4 grid instead of the normal 4^4 one to save typing...)
If you're interested in the implementation, I'm afraid it's not publically available right now, but it's not that hard to write. The main insight is that your entire 4D gui can be done in straight HTML tables (let's see if I can get
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
Why 4^4 rather than 3^4? It turns out that 3^n for any n>2 has an easy strategy that allows the first player to always win. Proving that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ugh.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Challenging is more like it. My friends and I rented a PlayStation from Blockbuster just to try that game when it first came out. We didnt know that you could save your progress if you had a memory card. I think we slept about 4 hours that whole weekend from having to start from scratch after each death.
Never really had a problem figuring out the "puzzles" in RE or Tomb Raider for that matter. I do agree that 'twitch hard' is the greater evil. I hate all those damn 6 year olds that know every combo in the fighter games and I have problems doing the stupid fireball move!!
Jak II is ludicrously difficult in places. That would be excusable, but unfortunately it's ludicrously difficult in very boring and arbitrary ways.
For example, the "shoot your way out of the boardwalk" mission, where the computer will simply drop limitless quantities of Crimzon Guards at you until you shoot a few thousand and get out, or die. VERY VERY BORING.
Then towards the end of the game (last two or three missions) the game designers felt it would be a good idea to stop giving you save points. Dum dum dum dum dum.
Also, whoever thought that random traffic jams to prevent progress would liven up missions needs to be killed as a warning to others.
Hopefully they'll get the design right for Jak III, and it'll be the masterpiece Jak II could have been.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Gran Turismo (PS1) is probably the hardest game I've stuck with long enough to master and what that game teaches you is incredible -- like high-speed racing is all about braking, unless you are in a Suzuki Escudo PP, of course.
I recall one specific night shortly after I bought GT where all I did was drive a 1985 nissan 280 around the short Autumn track for *SIX* *HOURS*. After four hours or so, I was able to get all the way around without spinning out in the hairpins. The best part is that different cars really are different, so you have to take some time to learn how to drive the tracks all over again. After you put enough hours in, of course, you adapt to new cars more quickly, but the learning curve over those first few hurdles is immense.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Ninja Gadien was/is hard.. but not impossibly so.
:) , but then make you pick it up for 'one more go'. - queue 3 am.
I think personally the balance is just right.. I almost gave up before the end of the first level. The first end of level boss was just so hard.
However, i moved on from button mashing and got control of the situation, and it owned.
I love games that make you throw the controller at the floor
Another hard game that I have been playing too death at the mo is Amped 2.. Now that is a hard game, but again rewards skills and mastery of the control system.
Both these games have one thing in common.. the controls are perfect, Ninja Gadien reacts to your moves just as you need.. no lag etc etc, and the same with Amped too. This is the difference,yes its hard. But you blame yourself and not the controler/game when you mess up.. Tony Hawks is another example.. when you crashed is caues you were trying 'just one extra kickflip' or just 'hold that grind' a little to long..
I had a friend who was bulemic who just couldn't get the hang of Pac-man. 'You mean I'm supposed to EAT the dots. But look, he's so round!! He doesn't NEED to eat!!'
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Hard games? Nothing has ever compared to the baseball diamond puzzle in Zork II...
I spent hours playing this game, it was annoyingly frustrating at points. There is no way I would have gotten through it without using the hints guide. I was able to figure out putting together the improbability drive, solve each of the scenarios, and I knew enough to collect everything I found in the game.
But seriously, how in hell were you supposed to figure out to plant all the fluffs in the damn pot to grow a plant???
And talk about an anticlimactic ending. After so many hours of typing obscenities into the game engine out of absolute frustration, you finally complete it and there was absolutely zero reward, not even a joke from D.A. (except for the one on the player I guess).
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
One of the hardest games I ever played was Hulk on Commodore 64... You begin the game as Bruce Banner tied to a chair... I never succeeded getting free. It's a text adventure and we tried everything: "get angry", "cut ropes", "break free", "you're a wimp"... and all sorts of insults to get Bruce to turn into Hulk but it never worked...after a couple of hours we stopped trying and never played again.
The other one is Einhander for Playstation. A Shoot 'em Up so packed with ennemies it's hard to move around the screen without crashing into one... and you don't get a lot of lives or continues... another game left on the shelf!
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics
True. But that isn't necessarily a problem: it takes longer than that to master the basics of classic games like chess or Go, games that have deservedly survived for a long time.
The problem with many computer games lies in the specifics that makes them difficult. For many games, the difficulty is just in poorly designed menu structures and other non-gameplay related issues.
And there is no point in learning a difficult games if it's not replayable and doesn't look like it's going to become a classic.
Effort in games should be small compared to the expected life of the game for you, and users should be able to feel that it is an intellectual challenge that they can work out, not just memorization of arbitrary decisions made by the game designers.
I've seen this as well. My girlfriend has always been a gamer, back well into the days of 8-bit consoles and sierra adventure games. She did, however, have quite a bit of time off from gaming during college and medical school-- which coincided nicely with the advent of the 3D gaming era.
I was amazed by how much we just take for granted-- and the painstaking detail required to "bring somebody up to speed." (you have to manage the camera? is moving body-relative or screen-relative? how can i tell where i'll land from a jump without depth perception?) It turned out that the easiest way was to drag out the old N64 and let her start 3D gaming from where 3D gaming started. The games were simpler, and the rules upon rules hadn't been built yet.
There are other things, as well-- things we just don't realize. Consider all of the graphical conventions. The average slashdotter probably recognizes three or four different ways to indicate a "status ailment" in an RPG, for example. But to somebody new, in the middle of a fast fight, how can you explain the difference for the status ailment indication, and the powerup indication? It can be done, but it's tricky, and it's a huge barrier to entry. She expressed an interest in Battlefield 1942 a while back, and I'm not sure *how* I'm going to get her up and running with the PC FPS genre without teaching a class.
I am an avid fan of MOM, MOO, and MOO2, but please don't tell me that Master of Orion 3 was not difficult. It was so confusing that I couldn't even figure out the whole colonization thing properly. Some times I would colonize and some times my ships would just kind of hang out. There were so many things to tweak but you never knew what they were doing. Maybe one day, I'll go back and try it again, but I uninstalled it to save room on my PC (I have beaten these other games, plenty, and a couple XComs to boot). Sidebar: Please bring on MOM2! Are there any OSS sequels to MOM?
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
I don't think I've ever played a PC game that was "way too hard", but I've had some PS2 games that were. Most recently come to mind is SSX3. It's pretty easy to start, and the medium levels aren't too bad once you've gotten good.
But the very top-level challenges are excruciatingly hard. I'm talking about things like a 20 minute downhill run (which is cool) that you are going to have to master to an almost perfect degree to beat the gold medal time. Or the trick levels where my highest score is 400k and the gold score is 1M.
I spent probably 4 hours on this one race just to get the silver, and had what I would consider a 90% perfect run. Then I saw the gold time and it was like 2 minutes faster! I gave up then and settled for my second place ribbon. And I'd already mastered SSX1 and 2.
Above and beyond anything else, the one thing that always ticks me off is when a game relies on arbitrary limitations of the game itself to make something really hard. The best example is always JUMPING.
It never fails -- if you're in a game that allows the player to jump, there will be some level or test which requires you to RUN right up to the teeter-tottering edge of plunging to your death, then perform an AMAZING jump, which will allow you to just BARELY make it to safety on the other side.
In my opinion, it's rarely much fun. Doom did this a few times and I still remember how annoyed I was. I mean, if you were that super badass Marine, wouldn't you just say Screw It and grab the ledge and haul yourself up or something? "Dammit, I'm a badass Marine fighting the minions of Hell, yet I just can't seem to manage those extra two pixels!"
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Easy mode in most games is what I would consider to be "normal". What EASY mode should be is so easy that only an idiot would fail.
Easy mode should give you too much gold so you can buy all the equipment you want. Monsters should be simple to defeat. Timed traps and tricks should allow you to walk through unharmed, or be really slow. Easy mode should have lots of hints.
Easy mode should allow a user to see the end of the game without having to struggle. It should teach you the basics of the button sequences to get around in the game.
Easy mode should NOT force a user to play a section 20-30 times just to get past it (LOTR TTT : Cave Troll vs. Aragorn). It should not be so hard that you give up (LOTR TTT : Helms Deep Courtyard vs. Legolas). It should NOT force you to do difficult tasks (Harry Potter Sorcerer's Stone Broom Flying).
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
There are lots of different kinds of difficulty.
There is the kind where you must hone your skills to razor-sharp levels to defeat the game. In my opinion, thats fine (some people might not like it, but thats their problem).
On the other hand, there are the bad kinds of difficulty:
Too far between save points: In some games this is OK, but mostly it's annoying because nowadays I don't have the time to play in 3 hours segments that often anymore. Of course this is nowhere near as bad as it was in the megadrive/SNES era where it was common for a game to take 6+ hours to finish and have no save states, passwords, or anything.
Related to this, I'd like to take the opportunity to moan about "Viewtiful Joe". It's a lovely game, but has one really annoying feature. Every time you kill and enemy you get money to spend on powerups, which make the game easier. If however you turn off without finishing a level, you lose it all. Therefore my game playing tended to go:
Play for 3 hours, build up 150,000 points, turn off in frustration.
Turn back on, build up 20,000 points and finish level refreshed.
Meaning I end up low-powered for the next level. grr!
Impossible to survive first time: Lots of games face you with parts which are impossible (in my opinion) to pass first time, so you have to go along, die, and then repeat.
Save coins / get level-ups: Some games (like Final Fantasy) are "hard" because you have to every so often break off and spend 3 hours doing random battles to get harder. Almost no-one enjoys doing this, it's just extending the game in an un-natural way.
Poor controls: One big problem 3d games had for a long time was poor controls (although they are getting better). I don't mind dying in games, but I hate dying when I feel it wasn't my fault (see Tomb raider and stupid jumps, turning around oh-so-slowly in Resident Evil, etc.)
So to sum up (and is anyone still reading?) Difficulty is good, as long as it is actual skill-based difficulty and not some artifical hack to make finishing the game take longer
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Maximo is very difficult, largely due to "unfairness" in the way it handles collision detection and enemy attacks....
The driving in that game is pretty fun, and I really liked it, except here's where it sucked. As you started to get several levels into the game, their version of "increasing the difficulty" was that this one car, the orange one I think, would just turn into Superman. You would go about a lap and then this orange one would just decide, "Hey, I don't need to poke along with you guys, see ya!" and he would just start zooming along twice as fast as the cars were supposed to go--completely lap everybody in the time it took us to get halfway around. That pissed me off to no end!
That's my general complaint of worst thing about game difficulty, and I think the games on NES did this more than many. Apparently they didn't have good enough AI processing to increase the difficulty by making the computer opponent smarter, so they would just allow the CPU player to just cheat massively. Here's another example. I really loved Tecmo Super Bowl. As you tried to play through the season and got into the playoffs, the computer, in addition to playing a little smarter (like covering all my receivers on defense) would just be able to complete every pass when they were on offense. I would go back and know who he was going to, and triple cover him, and it would still just drop in there and complete anyway. Or their other one there was that they would strangely enough never fumble anymore, but my team starts "accidentally" fumbling three or four times a game.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Damned hard, on any difficulty level, and it has 4 of them... Most people I know can barely beat it on easy (called 'Kids') let alone anything else.
It is rewarding however, not only is the gameplay insanely fun, but you unlock some fairly cool extras for each difficulty level you beat it on. That and it is one of the rare games that is enjoyable even while you are getting thrashed by the bosses - you just feel more determined to beat them next time.
For those not as old as me or don't remember, the game is a platform shooter. Convicts are enlisted to play the game. The person is prepared by having his lower body cut off, armor applied to what's left, and given weapons. The player walks and jumps using his arms. Play starts at the bottom of a well. The contestant must fight his way to the top to get his freedom. Oh, and some menacing fluid fills the well, adding a time limit to the game.
I'm still not good at Tony Hawk. I can't do million-point combos like most people.
Tony Hawk 3 was fun for me. I could accomplish the little goals or have my friend do it, who's an SSX Tricky veteran.
Then Tony Hawk 4 came around. It was a bit harder, and there was a point where my friend nor I could get past any goal in Kona park. It lost its appeal to me from being so darn hard it gathered dust.
It seems things changed with Tony Hawk Underground. many of the challenges are so darn easy even a n00b like me can do them. But there's a difference: I'm actually enjoying playing THUG than getting frustrated on timers running down/failing overall in Tony Hawk 4.
I loved those games and they were really fun, but holy hell the AI was brutal. I was thinking of reinstalling them, but I knew I'd only die and die fast.
Ikaruga.
Unbelievably difficult, even on easy mode. Ramp it up to hard and I don't think 10 years of playing could get me through the game.
Also Super Monkey Ball (1) It is doable, but the hardest setting is virtually impossible, especially when you consider you have to get though 50 levels without using any of your continues if you want to unlock the bonus levels at the end. Come very close to throwing the controller through the TV a couple of times with these ones =)
Two issues are the level of diffulity and the constant arms rece between game makers and buyers and players inthe hardware field. I liked Fallout and Baulders gate. They were simple games to play and ran on what I had.
I have purchased some games for my 17yr old daughter but they do not interest me. I have no real interest in multiplayer games; I just do not have the time to invest in playing them well.
My desires are, simple graphics, a good story, easy to start and stop. And no, I do not want to read a 2" book to play it (flight sims) if I want to work at something I will go to work (or just stay late).
Actually, as far as I know, movie theaters will give you a refund or a certificate for a free movie, if you really hate the movie you just saw. You have talk to theater management right after the movie (or right after you walk out). My father told me this a while ago. I've never tested it out, though, because I only see movies in a theater when I know I'll like it (based on topic, reviews from friends, writer/director, etc).
... This is America, and in America, if something sucks, you get your money back.
And, obligatory South Park quote:
Let's go see Mel Gibson to get our money back.
Oh, and so as not to make this a total threadjack: I prefer easier games. I hate having to re-do a section of a game 30+ times before I can continue. It seems like a lot of games rely on difficulty, as opposed to storyline or gameplay, to make it entertaining. It's seeing a movie, whose only redeeming factor is a spectacular stunt at the 1.5 hr mark, instead of it being a compelling way of telling a story. (Jerry Bruckheimer, I'm looking in your direction.)
"Righteous speed demon and trust fund party darling of justice"
"Real Life"
:).
1) No quicksaves/quickrestore. No save spots. No save games. Nada.
2) There's no respawn button[1].
3) Too often there's no background music that warns you that a Big Baddie is near or something important is about to happen.
4) Too many cheaters, lamers and arseholes ruining the game.
5) AFAIK almost all players die.
The graphics, sound, smell etc are pretty realistic though.
Replayability? Let me think about this
[1] Whilst there have been reports (unverified) of respawning, since almost everything changes - attributes, XP, location, era etc, that's not really very helpful.
Old 8-bit NES had an AD&D game. IIRC, you have eight characters that you pick one of as your avator. Run into an enemy and it will kill off three or four of you. I considered it a great accomplishment to reach a window to jump out of, suicide being a better way to go than the monsters. Did anyone actually get anywhere in this?
Another hard NES game: 8 Eyes. It's like Castlevania with a sword and falcon instead of a whip. The falcon is an awesome gameplay device that I don't think I've seen replicated in any other game, where you can control two avatars well with one simple command set. Unfortunately, the boss enemies are nearly impossible to beat unless you have the special sword from the previous boss that you're supposed to attack in order or else you only do 1/8th damage. I think I only ever beat the card-throwing boss once. Then there were the nearly impossible mazes (Germany, I'm talking to you) that I would spend hours on.
Another hard NES game I haven't seen mentioned yet, but usually comes up in hard-game discussions: Battletoads. The first two levels give you the greatest multiplayer NES fighting action this side of River City Ransom (and possibly surpassing that). After that, the rest of the game is puzzles where you *can't* have a second player because it's hard enough for one player to get through the level, and if either one of you screws up once, you both have to start over. They should have made this two games, a m-p fighting game and a 1-p puzzle game. Instead, all the sequels (at least, those I've played) have had the same formula: early fighting, then almost-impossible puzzles.
The 7th Guest
It was a great game, but the puzzles were seriously difficult to solve without any sort of cheat or reference (I didn't go back with a walkthrough until after 11 Hour came out and I wanted to reminisce). Most of them struck me as if they were planned by the designers mapping out a part of the game on a dart board, then throwing darts at something else to figure out how to solve them. Very little logic sense to puzzles, none of the 'ohhh.. that makes sense' after finally figuring something out.
Case in point (apologies for my hazy memory): the never ending labyrinth that would reset itself once you went the wrong way (but you had no indication that you did something wrong) - that you could only escape if you had the map on the library(?) floor rug, but you couldn't go back and get once you were inside.
Or the puzzle where (iirc) you had to do something with bottles and cans in the kitchen.. I don't remember anything about the puzzle anymore, but still to this day it brings back memories of 'WTF was that puzzle all about?'.
Another great game, but could have been a lot more challenging: Phantasmagoria 1 (the 2nd one just plain sucked).
One of the hardest games I ever played was Hulk on Commodore 64... You begin the game as Bruce Banner tied to a chair... I never succeeded getting free. It's a text adventure and we tried everything: "get angry", "cut ropes", "break free", "you're a wimp"... and all sorts of insults to get Bruce to turn into Hulk but it never worked...after a couple of hours we stopped trying and never played again.
You should have read the instructions, it's explained there.
The trick is to get your character to feel pain, to start the transformation.
> ovgr yvc
(in rot13)
I found a game called Gomoku that's supposed to be the "infinite board" but it looks like a whole bunch of sites just stole some dude's java applet because they all have the same 21x21 limitation and the same description. Get them here: windows app or java applet
The infinite board is insanely hard... at least without having read up on strategies before starting. Equus (mentioned in grandparent post) is most fun when played with another human. I found another version of the game here: http://www.rootaction.net/~tsunami/f-game.html which has a Human-vs-PC mode, but the AI is like playing a 5 year old. :P Better than nothing though, eh? ;)
The other one I linked to has a network-play option so you can start up a game through the internet and even have a game/chat server going. pretty crazy.
Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga gets my vote for the hardest game ever. The game was insanely difficult and you only had one life, if you died you had to start from scratch.
I love the music, but it doesn't seem possible to get anywhere without constantly taking damage. Everything takes way too many shots to destroy and shoots stuff at you that you can't really dodge. I've only managed to beat the first level once or twice only to get killed by a boss.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
There is a secret to beating him. I won't spoil it, though.
When Compared, Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a cake walk. this is one of the only games where you go from full armor, to underwear, to bones. Thats just two hits and you're toast. Not to mention that when you get hit my the Nintendo Lag its insane.
All the jump timing and the fact that you can only kill the final boss with one weapon. Then after you painstakingly complete it, you have to complete it again!
You'd think that when you originally played a game and thought it was insanely difficult, it was only because you were young. Some cases you're rightm but sometimes you realize the game was just REALLY impossible.
Also, BATTLETOADS. That one was insanely difficult. Only was able to actually beat it once, and I think I was just lucky.
Shadow of the Beast is by far the hardest game I've ever played. No saves, no extra men. 3 hits and the game is over.
Second hardest is probably Ghosts and Goblins/Super Ghouls and Ghosts series.
is brief and evocative.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
So I RTFA, and it occurs to me why I don't like so many of the new games. They are button mashers. The article says (paraphrased) "You wade into a group of bad guys mashing buttons and hope to do something brilliant, which you then try to re-create. After you can do the move, you can kill everything easily." So basically, it's frustrating until it's boring.
I have been playing Ms. Pac-Man for almost 20 years, and the first maze is still challenging enough that I can't sleep through it. On the other hand, my 6 year old can usually beat it too.
Bring back gameplay and I'll buy an Xbox. Till then, it's classic coin op.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
I'd say Deadly Rooms of Death is the hardest game I have played. The puzzles are just mindboggling hard. I think back on level 15 with horror.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Alright. Here's some REAL hard games.
Contra: Hard Corps - Genesis
This is where the men and boys separate. It's quite possibly the ultimate test of skill because every time you die, you KNOW that it was YOUR fault and not the game cheating. Contra doesn't play that crap.
Batman and Robin - Genesis
The epitome of controller-flinging difficulty. The Mad Hatter boss encounter will send your input device pad screaming towards a was at an appreciable fraction of light speed.
Mickey Mania - Sega CD
What's that? A DISNEY game? You better believe it. Mickey Mania was one of the best Sega CD games, and probably the most underrated platformers of all time. It's also REALLY fucking hard. The early levels start out nice enough, but as you progress they get more difficult at an alarming rate. The bonus levels are nearly impossible!
Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side - Sega CD
Possibly the hardest fighting game ever. Limited special move use, an unconventional fighting system, and a hell of a lot of blood add up to make one of the most frustrating single player experiences ever.
DoDonPachi - Arcade/Saturn/Playstation
Th ultimate twitchfest. Screens literally filled with bullets, most of them your own. Insane weaponry and combo systems. No controller throwing here. You're too busy hitting the start button for another go.
ESPrade - arcade
Also by Cave (makers of DoDonPachi), ESPrade is the heart warming tale of some kids with ESP and... uh.... well, they blow the shit out of stuff. And you play as them. Amazing graphics and brain-numbing difficulty.
Battle Garegga - arcade
Made by Raizing, this may be the most difficult shooter ever. Bullets that are about 5 pixels in size combine with backgrounds of a similar color to make one of the most shrapnel filled games in existence as you repeatedly run headfirst into shit you didn't see.
Honorable mentions:
Chakan: The Forever Man - Genesis
Rally Raid - PC
Axelay - SNES
R-Type Leo - arcade
Armed Police Batrider - arcade
Try out any of these games for a taste of REAL difficulty.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
And what of Nethack?
The hardest games were all on the old platforms. These new PS2 and Xbox games are dumbed down for the slow reactions of adults. BlasterMaster (NES) was one of the best games ever made, but it was hard as hell. No saves, limited lives, and incredibly difficult levels (especially the last).
(\(\
(^.^) INFECTED
(")")
The difficulty level in Final DOOM is just insane compared to the DOOM and DOOM II experience. I have beaten TNT: Evilution (after a lot of yelling and screaming...), but I cannot see how it is possible to defeat the pure evil that is Plutonia.
:)
All this is on Ultra-Violence level, of course. Anything less is for children, and Nightmare is nearly impossible in any version of DOOM
YMMV, of course. I've noticed that games that are hard to impossible for one person can be much less of a challenge to others.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
Anyone play the old Atari 8-bit game Shamus? Sort of like Bezerk!, but with much less maneuvering space, electrified walls, tons of enemies shooting tons of shots, keys and locks (so you'd have to repeat maze sections), a more deadly 'evil otto' type guy, and tons of bullets flying at you, so many that you often had to shoot them out of the air just to make room to dodge the rest. It took hours to reach the end, you had only a limited number of guys (with new guys at bonus point levels), and no save. I finished it once, and was twitching for hours afterwords.
I'm surprised Ikaruga hasn't been mentioned. At first I thought that the game was just flat out difficult. Now I've realized there still is a learning curve, it just starts out much higher than most. Also it was very rewarding to beat GT2 without using the Pike's Peak Rally car and to beat all the bonus levels in Yoshi's Island.
Ninja Gaiden isn't that bad; I think the problem is more that people are expecting games to come easier and be more accepting of button mashing. In an era of "Respawn and frag again!" style games (Quake, Savage, Doom, et al) a game where death is something to be actively, intelligently avoided is automatically considered hard. Now add in the component "must be able to respond to different situations in different manners" and you've got "really hard." Now throw in the dreaded "have to be able to hit buttons in a certain combination while responding to different situations in different manners" and heaven forbid "USE THE APPROPRIATE TOOL FOR THE JOB".... well, wowee zowee, you've got Ninja Gaiden. However, NG doesn't rank on the all time "hard" list simply because at no time does it "luck kill" you. Everything that happens is directly traceable to player skill. No "Ooops, we felt like you should die now." No "A random piano fell from the sky because you thought for too long." Develop the skills. Learn the responses. Appreciate the tools for the job. Ninja Gaiden isn't a hard game - it's just not a "gimme my gory gratification instantly with no work" game.
Technological competence assures no more intelligence than any other form, just more elitism.
Another rewarding game it the first Earthworm Jim on the SNES and the Genesis, especially the underwater section where you need to stear the bubble with limited air supply. I recently tried it again after years of not touching it just to see if I could still do it. And just like riding a bike, it came right back and I flew through it on my first try.
Years ago I spent hours on Omikron: The Nomad Soul only to be totally stymied and frustrated by the ending. I never could beat it, no matter how long I played it.
A while ago I happened to meet one of the developers of the game -- he told me that no one in the entire department could beat it -- i.e., the guys who designed the game couldn't beat it. Now that's too damned hard.
I asked him how they could design a game so difficult even the people who made it couldn't finish it, and how they expected the people who bought the game to do so -- he just shrugged. He didn't know.
The original NES megaman games are very difficult to beat without saved states. Of course I could say that for most original NES games on the system. If you have your nice emulator that you can save states on every five seconds not too difficult, but if you have to first, spend two hours getting the silly NES to actually play the game, then spend the next 10 hours or so trying to beat it.
w/o a doubt: dungeons and dragons (any edition). this is truly a gem of a game - actually getting a party to work together to get something done can make this a rediculously hard game.
it could also be that my dm had a thing for killing parties. it could also be that my dm also had a thing for running gygax campaigns. mmm... gygax...
Well I was about 8 years old and had a copy (what's this?!?!?) and not the original game... and of course no internet to go check the manual! but I'll sure try it again on ViceX as soon as I can!
;)
thanks for the help... it's just about 20 years late
Have you ever played any of the Star Wars games for SNES? Those are impossible.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
I find most games these days too EASY, not too hard. Maybe that's because I play RPG's and don't mind taking time out to kill a few extra monsters if it gets me the next ability or whatever. But I've become all too accustomed to ploughing through $50 games without the HINT of challenge, with characters who don't take significant amounts of damage and kill anything in a few hits. Or look at the new Metroid games, where you can expect to finish a $30 GBA game in 5 hours of play and the designers have had to DESIGN the thing for speed runs in order to squeeze any semblance of replay value out of it. And then we have platformers (or even RPG's) where the "challenge" is simply nigh unavoidable threats that you are most likely to "beat" by memorizing level layouts and reacting to them in advance. Guess that might be why people want to play PVP stuff most of the time these days....
It took me weeks to be able to fly with anything vaguely like competence, and months to actually feel fully in control of the craft, but it's incredibly rewarding now to be able to fly well and pull off spectacular swooping moves. I'd recommend it to anyone, it's an excellent game (but you do need lots of patience and determination).
Steel Battalion has some unique kind of difficulty; you'll have to master controlling the VT(mech) with two joysticks, about 30 buttons if i remember correct and three pedals. It's an unique experience that every "serious" gamer should experience.
The difficulty level notches up a bit on the fact that if you die and didn't eject, you'll have to start the campaign from the beginning. Same thing happens if you waste too many expensive VT's, thus not having enough points to buy even the cheapest one.
After playing and playing and playing, you'll start to get a hang of it, but it is still quite difficult. When you complete it you can raise the difficulty if the normal level wasn't enough for you.
I Especially hate games that instead of actually making the gameplay challenging use the following (encountered) cheap tactics to make the game harder:
* mouse is made unadjustably ultra-sluggish as an eye-candy 'feature' but totally prevents any fast life-saving responses in the game itself.
* AI is so dumb your player/team/enemies keep suiciding unless you mother them along constantly.
* Controls can't be mapped to anything natural or are only coded for non-standard hardware (e.g. PC version of Crazy Taxi *needs* digital gamepads). This makes the game/menu navigation an annoying test of dexterity rather than skillful game-playing.
I can't believe that nobody has brought up halo as an example of a game that ramps up the difficulty near-perfectly. It's so perfect in fact that it almost changes genres as you up the difficulty settings. On normal the game is a fairly quick run-and-gun action fest. On legendary, it almost becomes a tactical stealth action game. The only real things that make it harder is that your opponents can aim as well as you can and the class of enemy that is supposedly on par with your character has been toughened up to take the exact amount of punishment that you do to go down.
I must say however the the increase in difficulty was only rewarding to play because of the wonderful balance that was put into the control: the melee attack on every weapon, making grenades a part of the game that's actually used, the appropriately scaled clip sizes and over-heating levels of weapons to match what it takes for an enemy to go down.
Difficulty in control is definitely something I don't enjoy at all and was brought up previously discussing warcraft3 and starcraft. There's no way for a human to be able to control an RTS as well as a computer without some massive improvement of the interface. So basically, I say a computer should be limited to the level of control a human can provide. I think it would be interesting to see the AI of RTS game programmed in a different way where they control a virtual mouse pointer that's set at the same scroll speeds as the player's instead of having direct access to everything. Then the AI might have to display some actual tactics and the genre might become fun to play when not up against other humans.
The common complaint agaisnt Ninja Gaiden is its difficulty. I really do not see the difficulity. I believe gamers might find it difficult is because they do not use useful tactics to beat the enemies. Mashing buttons and just killing everything that moves is not a useful tactic. If you actually use counters and the soul charge move so you can kill enemies in chains( the move the first boss explains to you) you should not have that much of a problem. Also, learning how to use the weapons and when to use them. Also, if u upgrade your wooden sword to the unlabored flawlessness, the game is even easier.
THe key to tackling games is to actully think about what u are doing and dont button mash and let the stylish moves make you think u have to do them. Espically in Ninja Gaiden, u can use about 5 moves and finish the game.
Although a great many are too frustrating.
A game can be very difficult to beat, but as long as failure is still fun to play then its not frustrating.
For example, Far Cry (with the difficulty set up) gives you multiple approaches. You failed and have to do a section again? no problem, just try a different approach, a different path, different weapons, timings, etc.
Fire warrior on the other hand wasn't as hard, but a lot more frustrating. Oh, you failed, well I am going to take you back way to this point back here.. the bet where its easy for 5 minutes before you get to the challenge again. Oh, and its completely linear, there is nothing differnt for you to do and really, all the weapons are the same anyway. You just have to be luckier (or twitch better)
I find the two games a good compare, as they are both FPS games with a check point system, the good and the bad (in gameplay) is almost pure challenge v.s. frustration. Although I would be the first to point out that 'choices' is not the only thing that makes a challenge. If repeating the same thing over and over again is still fun, then its ok. it just wasn't fun in firewarrior.
The day when they don't make 'difficult' games any more because they can't be bothered telling the difference between challenge and frustration, is the day I stop buying games.
I play alot of games but i end up usually playing the game on Easy difficulty level because of this very reason, and more often than not i get stuck and can't complete the game that i paid good money for...
i don't appreciate cheats, don't plan on installing any, i should be able to enjoy the game as a whole, and not have to replay the same scene 500 times before i beat it, which is horrifically 'the norm' in games today.
Far Cry for example, they brag about how good their AI is but the game is almost impossible as a result...a game on easy difficulty should NOT have one-shot kills, should NOT kill the player as quickly as this game does...
sure, make the AI 'ACT' smart, but downplay the damage that they do to compensate...otherwise you are doing you game a major disservice and annoying your players...
Gekido's Lair
Most difficult game, ever. I mean, you have to move up or down to bounce the square thing back. 2 possible movements, what were the developer thinking? And that is just one side, the other side can also move up and down, you have to remember 4 movements to master the game, insane I tell you. Don't get me starter on super-elite games like Space invaders, sideways movement AND firering is just the start. Ludicrous, people will never be able to play those games.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
$ echo "ovgr yvc" | tr 'a-z' 'n-za-m'
bite lip
a little background:
I've been playing vide games since I was 2 years old... as of tomorrow, that'll be 23 years of being a gamer. I used to pride myself as being a good gamer. I could play a hard game like Ninja Gaiden or Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight and beat it in about a day. I've moved up to games like Metal Gear Solid, Ikaruga, and Viewtiful Joe lately. I felt I was still at the top of my game.
last week in IRC, I was telling my friends about Mega Man 2 being the easiest of the series. realizing that I hadn't played it in a while, I fired it up with the intention of beating it. by the time I actually beat the 8 robots, my hands were sweating as if I had just beaten Shinobi on the PS2.
If anything, games have gotten EASIER since the NES and SNES era. go get an emulator, and see for yourself.
Well I was about 8 years old and had a copy (what's this?!?!?) and not the original game...
Sounds more like an anti-piracy measure than a hard game, then.
Although I normally dislike sports games, I've always been a huge fan of the THPS series, and I think it apitomizes what a game should aspire to difficulty wise. A new player, or player who hasn't played in a while, can play through and progress without realizing that they are getting better. At the same time, the levels earlier levles have more difficult challeneges to take one, all the way up to challeneges that seem sick and twisted untill the player suddenly realizes that they have aquired the skills to take on that challenge.
I think this is one of the keys to properly setting a difficult curve, you have to taunt the players with challenges that seem impossible, but at the same time, give paths of lesser resistance so that players can follow the curve at their own pace.
This is a throwback to many of the earlier side scroller games on the 8 and 16 bit systems. Many of these games offered multiple paths of varying difficulty and new things for more skilled players to find.
Another Genre that has the potential to get this right, and some games succeed where others fail, is the RPG genre, where the developers can keep the main quest easy enough to be playable by novice or intermediate players, while still offering sidequests to give better players more of a challenge.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Well one string should tell you the hardest game of all time:a -b-sele ct-start..
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-
With the AI on diabolical.
Some [games] are so freakishly, spoon-bendingly difficult that they take 10 hours of solid play before you've even begun to master the basics...
If you take "master" to mean "get the highest possible score" and "the basics" to mean "the easiest song on the game", it took me 3 years (non-consecutive) before I got all perfects on a song on Basic, nevermind 10 hours.
...for the Sega Genesis. Any game of Quake/Doom/UT/Wolfenstein or any other modern game will seem like a walk in the park afterwards.
The most annoying thing is that it has that good olde "just one more time" factor that makes it so hard to put it down when you die for the umpteenth time.
Jet Grind Radio for the DC was pretty damned hard. I beat it but only after destroying a controller or two.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I laugh at myself when I make an assumption like "I found a bug in the AI" or "this makes my invincible" as it would be with the saber if I assumed it blocked _everything_ and it's then purposely countered by something as obvious as a grenade.. especially when there are other methods available. The game is then not reduced to "use uber-weapon to kill baddie" when faced with anything. I'm not saying they should punish you constantly, but rubbing it in the first time is definately entertainment in my book. Using the "Guess again" style is not necessarily an indicator of flawed design. Good games do it well. Bad games do it poorly.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Perhaps you read the time posted on the net as 36:15 and assumed it was hours, when the 36 was really minutes?
Monkey
Ball.
Now there was an unashamedly insanely hard game. I consider myself an above-average gamer and think it took me something like three solid weeks to finally unlock Master mode, and roughly fifty continues to beat M3 alone, which is probably the hardest genuinely completable (as in, get good enough and you can seriously do it every time) level in ANY game, anywhere.
The beauty of SMB was that when you failed it was always entirely your fault. Though there were some really crazy levels (like the whirling pegs level in the Master section), there were no enemies, no AI, no "puzzles", no tricks or special tactics to be learned which would let you beat levels more easily. Your only enemy was harsh, meticulously-modelled physics, and the only way to get better was to keep playing. Success in SMB boils down to 100% white-hot skill, and I have nothing but respect for Amusement Vision for making it that way. SMB and the aforementioned Ikaruga are my top two GameCube games.
qntm.org
stuntman, it was more of a test than a game
Business Voyeur
Tie Fighter- I played the final mission over and over, and I was never able to keep the Emperor from being assasinated. I came so close once that I nearly threw my computer across the room.
X-Wing- Took me forever to beat the last three missions. The second last mission, where you fought four TIE-Advanced used to take me about an hour to win.
Doom- Only made slightly easier (but no less frustrating) by the quick save/load feature.
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe- Campaign mode. Winning as the Germans was nigh impossible. The wingmen had terrible skills, imagine trying to take down an entire box of B-17s with one FW-190! You could do it if you pumped up your research levels to get the ME-262 quicker, but you had to try hard not to lose too many pilots or manufacturing capacity in the process.
Kiss: Psycho Circus- Some of the characters were ridiculously easy, others unreasonably hard. But the bosses were almost all impossible. The final boss was completely unreasonable. Never beat it.
Homeworld- if you manage to have a decent fleet to survive through the Gardens and the Cathedral, you are home free in terms of resources, but you still need a guide to understand how to allocate those resources in the best fashion possible.
One thing that can make games ridiculously easy is constant saving/loading. I admit to being very guilty of this tactic. I save as often as possible, and, when unsuccessful, or even slightly less than perfect, I will go back and do it over and over. This method can take the difficulty right out of certain games. I've started limiting my saves to beginnings and ends of levels, just to try and keep some games interesting.