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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?
well there have been people that have scored @1,000,000 on this game and no ending, after the 22nd level the timer is way too low, so basically you just squeeze out a few points extra at that point. Heres a recap of the current world record
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Hard games? Nothing has ever compared to the baseball diamond puzzle in Zork II...
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.
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 myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator?
F-Zero X, the version of the venerable high-speed racing series for N64, had such a generator in it's secret "X Cup", which unfortunately was difficult to unlock because F-Zero X is one of those games that epitomizes extreme difficulty.
F-Zero GX is even harder -- it has a "story mode" that is just about the hardest thing I've ever seen. It was programmed by the Super Monkey Ball people, and it shows.
And Super Monkey Ball! Getting to the secret ultra-tough Master levels (which requires getting through 50 super-tough Expert levels without continuing, then getting through 10 hyper-tough Expert Extra levels also without continuing) may be the hardest of all video game challenges. My record is 37 levels without continuing.
But I'll get it someday!!