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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
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.
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!
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.
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*
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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.
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...?
I think maybe a line has to be drawn here, because you're confusing two different concepts.
If you go to college or university, you're expected to work hard because you're getting an education. This is where the hard work and perseverence is applicable, because you're paying for an education.
With gaming, it's totally different. You're paying for entertainment, and the expectation here is that you're going to be entertained. Difficulty and rewards versus how much you put in shouldn't be dictated by how skilled you are. Sure, there are basic skill requirements for any game, but the objective isn't to weed out those unfit for, what, the sequel? I've paid for my game, I've paid to be entertained, I don't need to be weeded out because I can't afford to put in 4 hours a day trying to figure out how to get past [insert stupid crazy button press combo/timing crud here].
In case you're wondering why I'm making the comparison to education, it comes to mind because I knew a guy who looked at it from the other angle; I'm paying for my education, why don't they pass me? Needless to say, the guy was a bit of a moron.. (If you're reading, bud, it's because you were PLAYING ZELDA WHEN YOU SHOULD'VE BEEN STUDYING.)
Just, um, clearing that up.
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.
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.
and I only have 4 fingers...
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...
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.
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
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
|_|_| |_|_|
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.
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
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. --
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.
Tic Tac Toe (aka Noughts and Crosses) loses all interest once you realise that it's impossible to win, you just wait for you oponent to lose. That is, you can't force a win, you just hope for a mistake.
Why is anything anything?
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!!!
Sets you back two whole levels? Dude, there's a savepoint near the beginning of every level (expect for the very last boss battle, I believe.) It isn't handed to you on a silver platter, but your -first- order of business upon reaching a new area should be to find that savepoint, and not get killed in the process.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Did you try:- "Turn into hulk"
(If I remember correctly you had to kick yourself over backwards on the chair, hitting your head on the floor, which made you angry, which turned you into the Hulk. That might be totally wrong though)
I have no sig yet I must scream.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
All too often, searching for that save point results in blundering into what was supposed to be the challenge that that save point would let you repeatedly attempt. Also, the save points tended to be quite far back from said challenge (usually a boss), requiring you to repeatedly run the same jumping puzzle and defeat the same bunch of enemies to get back to the boss and try again.
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.
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 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!!
How does one cheat at real life? It seems to me that one always has to play within the rules, unless the GM decides to intervene.
:)
I had heard of a case of nepotism on the part of the GM where he let his son respawn after 3 days with more xp and an intact identity, but those may be unsubstantiated rumors flying around the player population.