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Have You Hit a Gaming Wall?
Stephen Totilo, at MTV Games, has hit a gaming wall. At the newly un-flashed Multiplayer site he talks about the bane of gamers everywhere, what developer Jamie Fristrom calls a 'shelf-level event': a gaming wall that makes it hard if not impossible to complete a game. While a lot of gamers can overcome difficulties to reach the end credits, there are some frustrations that can suck all the fun out of play. He cites the bosses from Final Fantasy X and Super Paper Mario as dealbreakers. I personally am playing through God of War again, and the incredibly frustrating spear trap in the 'Paths of Madness' section of the game never fails to provoke hysterics. Have you run into any such obstacles lately? What game obstacles have caused you toss away a controller in frustration and swear off a game entirely?
Bah. Everyone knows that a true game doesn't have an ending: it just gets harder. I don't see what everyone is complaining about.
Note to Nintendo: if you sell a game, make sure that there is some sort of code to use to unlock all the game has to offer, or a reduced difficulty level, I paid for the whole game and to be locked out of 1/5th of the tracks (likely among the best ones) and 4/5ths of the story mode does not feel right.
-- the cake is a lie
Gears Of War I loved, I don't usually play most games that far through, but I hit a bug with the second berserker where I was trapped by a fallen wall behind me (so I couldn't return) and I didn't have the Hammer of Dawn required to kill the berserker. Now this perhaps is more of a bug, but it frustrated me no end, as the save system doesn't allow for multiple saves. There was no way I was going back to the beginning because of that. Result - shelved. Resident Evil 4. Towards the end, the minecart section. If you haven't got enough ammo you are screwed. My other last save points were far too back to contemplate. Shelved. Also Lost Planet. Ridiculously difficult boss only a few levels in that just nails you as soon as you start, and with the character stumbling about and leaving you vulnerable.. Hugely frustrating. I'd spent a good few nights playing to that point and making steady progress.. Once I'd spent three nights just trying to beat that one boss and progress - Shelved again. Look I'm not saying games should not present a challenge (and I admit I am not the worlds greatest game player although I have been playing games for a good 25 years now so I must have some sort of a clue), and I suppose in the case of RE4 I perhaps should have saved more different save points. However, I pay my £40 (yes $80), and if I want to choose the easy level so I get to see all of the awesome graphics, hear the surround sound to as well as get some entertainment (not sheer bloody frustration) out of it I should be able to. These things are supposed to be playtested - doesn't anyone look at the difficulty curves/bugs that need fixing?
And actually I meant to add a fourth - Dead Rising. But I wouldn't know where to start with that one...
If you havn't played the little racer levels, then you don't know what hitting a gaming wall is. All this talk about FF games and Gears of War and Doom 3 and stuff?
Please. Fire up your NES Emulator of choice and see how far you get with Battletoads (without cheating of course..)
Warning: You may want to go shopping for a hairpiece first, because you'll look funny once you pull all your hair out.
Its Deluxe, son. Deluxe!
For the flying missions in GTA:SA make sure your using a game pad. I'm assuming you're talking about the PC version of course and are using keyboard and mouse. It's impossible to fly with the keyboard. Just hook up a gamepad and pick it up when it comes time to fly.
Actually Virtua Tennis may be a good example to broaden the scope of discussion.
I haven't played it. In this sort of game, shouldn't there be a level that you are not necessarily going to win?
This would be so you can always play against players who are better than you. You get a tennis game that retains variety, rather than becoming a game that you've "beat" once, and replays become a form of tetris, with the only real challenge left being speed runs.
That would be different than a wall in a racing game where tracks and cars are locked off, so you never get to see what you bought.
Could you comment on that LibertineR? Or anybody who's played this or similar games where it would apply?
It's hit or miss for me. Some games I probably give up on because they're getting pretty hard, and I'm not having that much fun anyways. Some games I have trouble with, but I'll play them until I figure it out, or until I get every item and find every secret room because I just enjoy the game. I'm a pretty casual gamer, I seldom have a whole afternoon to really dig into a game and get in the flow and perfect my technique to the level that some games seem to need.
A good example is the GTA games. I don't enjoy the missions nearly as much as I enjoy just cruising around and exploring the game world. Unfortunately, the missions are required to unlock various things, and I don't have the patience to do all of that. I might just want to spend a half hour blowing up helicopters with a rocket launcher. And so I turn to cheat codes, which GTA:SA fortunately has in spades.
While I respect that some people enjoy things that are difficult just for the sake of difficulty (some people like rock climbing for pete's sake), that's not how I prefer to spend my time, and a game that wants to force that sort of playing on me is not something that I'm interested in. Things like cheat codes can sometimes make a game like that enjoyable and appealing to a wider audience.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
As opposed to difficulty. For difficulty based stuff, I can accept some games are just plain hard. The ones that bother me is the ones that don't give you any way out of it, and kick you while you're down. For example, in the Megaman Zero series you used to miss the EX Skills if you suck (need an A rating to obtain them), so if you suck you don't get the moves that makes the game easier and you're basically stuck. Gradius V for PS2 is like that too. You unlock unlimited credits after 15 hours of gameplay, but that's only while playing the game, so if you die 15 minutes into the game at the third stage, it gets boring pretty quickly to try to fill your quota of 60 game overs before you can even have a shot at beating the game. It's one thing that you can suck at a game and have a hard time. It's another that things get progressively worse the more you suck. In Gradius V if you could half an hour before dying, at least you won't be as frustrated with repeatedly dying compared to lasting only 15 minutes so you'll hit your unlimited credits easier.
A counter example of a good difficulty wall would be Shining Force Neo. In the 3 Trials of Light the Demons bosses all do some insane amount of damage compared to anything you may have fought before (heck even some of the random stuff before them is insanely hard), but you can save basically anywhere. The game has a ton of customization so if one combo doesn't work you can always try another. And if you still can't beat it you can do the tried and true level up approach.
Perhaps rather than cheat codes per se, what you want is an "Explore" mode a la Nethack? If you use cheat codes, there is no reason for your score/rank/achievements to count as valid, and if all you want to do is play around with the game, why would the score/rank/achievements matter?
I think it also depends a lot on the type of difficulty. I played Halo (the original) all the way through on regular, heroic, and legendary. I felt that the enemies got faster and smarter. The experience was more intense, but the challenges were over all the same. Halo 2 was a completely different feeling. I felt that instead of making the experience more challenging, they just hyper-inflated the stats of your opponents. I never beat it on legendary. I remember one level in particular near the very end of the game where I restarted from the same checkpoint probably near 200 or 300 times. Not all at once! I would play for an hour or two, surviving for only about a minute, a couple of times a week for a couple of weeks until I finally gave up in disgust. Spawn, lob a grenade at the enemies coming out of a door, try some variant of running for cover and searching for ammo, get wasted, spawn...
I think a lot of old-fashioned turn-based strategy games (like BattleIsle or AdvancedWars) follow the same strategy. Rather than a smart opponent, they just increasingly stack the resources in the opponents favor. This doesn't just make the game hard, it makes it hard and boring.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
So what is an appropriate level of "completion" for the games Animal Crossing Population Growing (Nintendo GameCube) and Animal Crossing Wild World (Nintendo DS)? What about Tetris (almost every platform you've heard of) or SimCity (PC DOS, Mac, Super NES, Windows)?
Now, my PS2 sits idle, and maybe when I get my tax refund, I'll pick up a Wii. I'm really looking forward to really simple gameplay, with a focus on fun and not having mad skillz (which I don't).
For some of us, the cheat codes make the difference between trying to get some mileage out of a game, or putting it down after the first hour and never playing it again. Most games I've played in the last 5-10 years have led me to hit a huge gaming wall, whereby I was stuck, and increasingly frustrated and not enjoying playing at all. Probably the last 10 games I've bought have been wastes of money as I quickly discover that I just don't stand a chance at playing them.
I am firmly of the opinion that is a huge factor in the success of the Wii -- people who haven't been able to really make much headway with games in the last decade want to have something to play with occasionally, and not feel like a total doofus in the process.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ideally there'd be games of all kinds of challenge levels so people who don't find challenges entertaining can still find games simple enough for them. Unfortunately the industry tends to think a game has to appeal to everyone so every game is designed for the same demographic (with only a few games deviating from that). This means if the majority of players want games that they can play through without any real challenges that leaves almost no games to the people who can't find enjoyment in a game if the only interaction is how you beat the enemies, not if.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.