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?

Comments

Insanely tricky

[joelparker]

what games have you played that are insanely tricky to master?

wopr# globalthermonuclearwar

Re:Insanely tricky

[minotaurcomputing]

Oh please! That game is soooo simple. The trick to winning is not to play the game.

Origianl Donkey Kong Arcade game

[raminator]

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.

Re:Origianl Donkey Kong Arcade game

[curtisk]

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

Quake

[HardYakka]

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.

Nethack

[tttonyyy]

It's pretty hard getting that @ down to level 20.

hey Beavis

[Anonymous Coward]

hey beavis, that kid sits in his basement all day long beating his donkey kong.

Difficult games

[PhotoBoy]

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.

Two kinds of hard

[Apreche]

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*

Re:Two kinds of hard

[Torgo's Pizza]

I've just got to tweak your post a bit. The "two kinds of hard" that you are describing are actually two schools of game design; logic and reflex. The degree to which they are implemented is difficulty.

Logic puzzles can be extremely simple to just bizarrely difficult. An example of simple logic in a game is a dark room with a switch on the wall. Turn on the switch you have light. Insane logic would be to coat the switch with peanut butter then hold out a ferral squirrel with tongs so the rabid rodent flips the switch. Reflex puzzles mostly involve timing and key combinations. Occasionally they can be mixed with simple logic puzzles to focus in on key areas, such as a glowing spot on an enemy to show their weak spot.

A game will fail when it fails to scale appropriately for the player or the logic used to arrive at an answer is actually in fact, illogical. You are absolutely correct when you state that often a player has to "brute force" his way to a solution. Proper game design shouldn't give an answer away, but instead offer enough clues along the way to offer a solution. Infocom games, while extremely difficult, were possible to solve because enough context and clues were given to solve any puzzle. Riven was horrible for just dumping a puzzle in front of a player and walking away without any explaination.

In the end, you want the player to use his reasoning and increased knowledge of button skill to solve the challenges in the game. It's often too easy to toss out a kick to the crotch to a player by using insane logic or immpossible foes. Difficulty comes through design, not through tricked up foes and puzzles.

If you like the game

[Inexile2002]

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.

Re:Harry Potter. I admit it...

[Pxtl]

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.

Difficulty vs. challenge

[Airwall]

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.

There are solutions...

[JMZero]

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.

GT.

[Asprin]

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.

The "stack of rules"

[raygundan]

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.

Using game limitations

[zero_offset]

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!"

Different kinds of difficulty

[Chris_Jefferson]

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