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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Diddy Kong Racing was ungodly hard. I find that many kids games have this problem - they make the game hard for the playtesters, and forget that their target audience is 8-year olds.
The second problem is this - my Dad tried to play a modern action game once (and only once). This man is an optical physicist, so he's at least of reasonable intelligece, drives a stick, so he can handle complex controls, and races in go-kart tourneys, so he's got at least minimal reflexes. Modern games assume you've played every predecessor in the genre, so they've got such incredibly complex stacks of rules and are so baroque that it took me 5 minutes to explain the intricacies of the rules (let go of the throttle before you hit the dash zones and you go faster), and another 5 for him to get his hass kicked anyways. This piling of rules upon rules upon rules makes for a nasty barrier to entry.
When will they learn: the good games have simple basis/interface and intricate play, not vice-versa.
The Shrooms secret level (the vomitorium IIRC) on RoTT. Psychodelic mushrooms, trampolines, rockets and Johnny five on crystal meth....
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...?
Given the ammount of times QA are forced to play the game, and the fact that they can just ask the developers for solutions to puzzles, it's not surprising they can beat them. Given time, I'm sure I can beat any game. I'm too casual of a gamer, though. I'll never be able to put in as much time as QA testers do.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
And that isn't even the end of the game! :)
Nethack can go down lower than 50 levels, though from 30-the lowest level are extremely boring. Then you get to traverse back up
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.
Diddy Kong Racing was ungodly hard. I find that many kids games have this problem - they make the game hard for the playtesters, and forget that their target audience is 8-year olds.
I loved Diddy Kong Racing (moreso than the various Mario Kart incarnations). I found it challenging but not overly hard. I unlocked most of the content, but could never beat the clock on many of the tracks, so I never got one of the racers. The problem with Diddy Kong vs Mario Kart, was that DK relied more heavily on one's skill, and the seasoned players would invariably dominate the less experienced in multiplayer (whereas MK has the random power-ups that favor the players not in first place and attempt to equalize things).
The real hard Nintendo game is F-Zero GX. That's just an insane racer. I can't get past the third or forth level in the story mode, nor can I complete some of the tracks with anything resembling skill. It's just impossible and I've given up. The frustrating part is that there is no ramping up of difficulty or training of any sort to prepare you for how hard it actually is. You're just thrown in and stuck on endless repetition until you have maybe figured out how to beat a track with a specific driver. Which all goes out the window if you want to try someone else.
I don't agree that if your twitch reflexes aren't up to snuff, you shouldn't be allowed to proceed. I can see that being the case for shooter games, but sometimes puzzle games require these types of reflexes for some parts and these annoy me to no end. There are some good games that I have played that have gotten me to a certain point far along in a game and then I'm stuck because I couldn't get past a certain part because even though I knew what to do, I couldn't push the buttons fast enough to make it work.
The two examples that I can think of that made me go from loving a game to loathing it are Prince of Persia and Lost Vikings.
In Prince of Persia, there was one room where you had to step on a plate to open a door three or four screens away. If you didn't time it perfectly, the door was shut by the time you get there. This part was insanely harder than anything before or after it and I just didn't like the game after I finally got past that part.
Another similar situation was the Lost Vikings. There was one level where you had to jump on platforms as they are falling to reach the top. I knew what to do, but I just couldn't do it. It's a shame that I missed out on the rest of the puzzles in the game because that level had one insanely hard part to it.
I'm playing a puzzle game to solve puzzles. If I've already figured out what needs to be done and tried my best to do it over a reasonable period of time, I'm going to be annoyed if the puzzle isn't solved. Then again, I don't see beating a game as a badge of courage. I see it as an admission of defeat that the developer has run out of interesing things to put in the game.
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...
Grand Prix Legends is truly a high point in no-compromise game realism and I can well appreciate why the community would find it a satisfying game to still be playing.
Heh, Robotron is still my favorite game of all time.
Challenging, but not impossible. Plus it's just so frenetic, you can never really relax. Always running, always shooting. Bliss. :)
One of these days (like, when I have a larger apartment) I'm going to break down and just buy one of the old Robotron cabinets.
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
|_|_| |_|_|
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|_|_| |_|_|
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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.
Ninja Gaiden - in all of its incarnations - was one of my favorite games of all time. I could never get enough... and in fact, I think I'm going to break out my emulator this weekend, now that I've thought about it!
But the most frustrating game I've ever seen was Dragon's Lair (and of course DLII and Space Ace were just as tough). It wasn't until I got a home version of the game that I even understood it - in the arcades, it was just too tough, and I never had enough quarters to learn it properly.
I also remember ZooKeeper being incredibly challenging in the arcade. Kept me addicted for years.
And for anyone who had a TI99/4a - remember Parsec? With that insanely long refueling tunnel in the later stages? Man, I'd love to find that game again...
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
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
Playing against my 11yo son, I find Diddy Kong tremendously frustrating. It's not so much skill based as it is memorization based. If you haven't memorized the tracks and know all the secret shortcuts, you're screwed. I refuse to play it with him any more. On the other hand, I still like to play Mario Kart with him. MK relies less on secrets. He still beats me, but I don't feel like it's because I didn't know some crucial hidden game element.
Robotron is the epitome of good, hard games. The thing's insanely difficult, but you never feel you're being cheated. It doesn't hide anything from you. All the enemies are in plain view, all the time. I suck at the game, but I know it's because I suck. There's never a point where I say, "WTF? Where did *that* come from?"
On the other hand, there's skirmish mode in Starcraft or Warcraft III. The AI just plain cheats. It gets to build units faster than you do, then it simply overruns you before you've had a chance to build up. Also, in tight battles it can target spells with insane speed and precision. It doesn't have the human problem of trying to pick the spellcaster out of the crowd, click him, select a spell, then find and click the target. The AI can whup me any time, and it's not because I suck. It's because I'm good, but not godlike.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Unfortunately, memorisation is a staple of racing games. One of my all-time fave series' is WipeOut, which are very good racing games, but because of the game's obscene speed and powersliding, the game requires a large amount of memorisation. I found myself frustrated at this, and got to wondering: when do we get a racing game with a random track generator? Yes, it would be a lot of work, but would be incredibly rewarding for multiplayer gamin.
Anyhow, I recommend Looney Toons Space Race for the Dreamcast if you're looking for a good and forgiving racing game. The weapons are heavily biased towards reclaiming the lead and the game has an extremely powerful catch-up effect, to the point that I will frequently run from the front to the back of the pack and vice-versa several times in a single race, and still win.
Actually, one of the best games for being forgiving was a very old Playstation title called High Octane. It was a slow hovervehicle racer. The game was very forgiving in that it had very short tracks with very large numbers of laps, so you'd learn all the turns before the 3rd lab, and you still had 5 more to go. The walls were just bouncy surfaces and steep slopes, not the sudden-death fall-offs or sticky walls of other games, so it was rarely even a problem to take a turn wide.
My fave racing game is still always Half-Life Turbo (a Snark racing mod) that is the most obscenely violent race I've ever played. Its buggy, kludgy, and minimalist, but its still my fave.
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.
Rygar for the NES was an incredibly long game but lacked the ability to save your progress. The shortest duration I've seen it beaten is somewhere in the 24-36 hour range.
:P
The game I had in mind while reading thsi thread was Castlevania. Sure, you could continue as many times as you wanted, but the bosses were DAMN HARD.
* The Mummy Men were very difficult until you figured out to use fire or a boomerang. This required patience and stamina from a player, since you could only get fire at the start of the level, and the boomerang midway. If you died past these points, you couldn't go back to get them.
* Frankenstein was the same deal, only two weapons worked well, and you had to hold on to em.
* The Grim Reaper didn't require you to hold on to a particular weapon (the boomerang, which was most effective, was available near the end of the level), but he was just insanely hard.
* Count Dracula was an incredibly tough enemy. You had to have observed two aspects of the game by that point, or you were toast:
- You could make candles re-appear by leaving a screen through stairs.
- You could use a special weapon on targets to get double and triple shot.
You had to collect tons of hearts and triple shot before each go at Count Dracula. If you were persistent enough to get EIGHTEEN hits on his head as he teleported and shot fireballs, he would morph into his second form. Then, if you had enough life and triple shot boomerang, you might have time to kill him.
I spent a good 3 months on that game (a whole month stuck at Dracula) before I decided it was unbeatable. I picked it back up a year later, and beat Dracula. I was so happy
I have only beaten that game on my NES maybe a half-dozen times, it's so hard. You folks with your emulators and save states got it easy.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It's pretty hard getting that @ down to level 20.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Nethack has the nice difficulty curve -- hard at the beginning, but your character's survival chance goes up post-quest and post-castle.
Been playing Dungeon Crawl lately, which seems to be more fatal then Nethack. [Plus you have Xom, the chaotic god, whenever you decide that the game is too easy.] Its damn annoying to hit dungeon level 10 or 12 and find that your character's survival chances aren't much improved since level 1.
Yes, Robotron is classic difficulty. Extremely hard, but ultimately masterable. My high score on default settings is over 500k, but most of the time I average around 150-200k. It's taken a lot of practice to get to even that level.
Williams used to be the king of this. Have you ever played Defender or Stargate (also known as "Defender II")? I very recently had my first 100k game on Stargate, it's *brutal* in difficulty and there certainly are times when there is just no way to survive. And yet, people have rolled the score counters of both games, multiple times. I just don't see how they do it, and I'm not a bad gamer if I say so myself.
I think the reason these games aren't "too hard" has less to do with difficulty, but that with tons of practice the difficulty is surmountable, and more importantly, the games themselves are interesting enough to keep you playing despite it.
I've recently beaten it on V-Rated, and I'm approaching the fight with Fire Leo on Ultra-V (where you get no skull markers warning you where to dodge!), perhaps the hardest task in the game.
I'm not looking forward to it.
Surprisingly enough, Leo isn't what bothers me on Ultra-V, the ninja robots are. If you listen to Leo, he makes a different noise when going high and low. Tap the L-trigger so that you have time to dodge, and learn to react to his sounds. I actually taught myself to do this with my eyes closed on regular V-mode so I would be ready for Ultra.
I do agree with that. I think you slightly misunderstood me. In a puzzle game twitch reflexes should not matter. Just as in a space shooter puzzle solving should not come into play.
I agree greatly that the figuring out how to do the puzzle is the fun part. Once you figure out how something should be done, the doing of it should be automatic. When a game makes it hard to figure out how to do something, then makes it impossibly hard to actually accomplish the feat that is as bad as game design gets.
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