Game Essentials - 20 Difficult Games

Last week, in a discussion of the essentials of game design by John Harris, Gamasutra posted a list of twenty really difficult games. It's interesting not only for the purposes of the article (examining the concept of challenge in game creation) but also simply as a personal scorecard for your own gaming career. My personal albatross: "8. Monkey Ball, a.k.a. Super Monkey Ball. Putting that monkey in the ball may have been a whimsical masterstroke, but don't let it fool you. This game is hard. Design lesson: If you're going to make a super hard game, make it fair. No one thinks Monkey Ball is unfair. There is no randomness. Everything that happens is a direct result of the player's actions, and there are no hidden portions of the level waiting to destroy the player. It's not like a boss enemy with secret attacks the player couldn't possibly survive the first time seeing it. It's not only possible to reach and finish Monkey Ball's Master levels, but it could be done on one's first try. Winning the lottery is more likely, but it's possible." How many have you mastered?

Comments

Ikaruga

[benbean]

It made me sit through eleven pages only to find Ikaruga wasn't on the list. Pah.

Not hard

[Pancake Bandit]

I don't really understand the purpose of this list. At least the author doesn't pretend that these are the 20 hardest games ever, just 20 difficult games. Mischief Makers, even getting all the gold gems, was a bit of a challenge but not an extremely frustrating one. Lolo wasn't that much harder than a lot of puzzle games I've played. A few of the games on the list were only difficult because they suffered from poor gameplay, silly programming decisions or lousy instructions.

Re:You won't see any more of these.

[kisrael]

I've been a classic gamer for a long, long time, I was posting on r.g.v.c. since like '93 or so...

Here's the thing: games now have distinct content, lots of it, not just one playfield or enemy set speeded up.

(Ideally, this content involves new interactions, i.e. involving programmers as well as designers, not just the artists saying "well, here's a 'new city' to 'explore')

So people want to get the game that they pay for. Me, and maybe it's a personal fault throughout many aspects of my life, I don't like challenge for its own sake. I want to play with novel interactions in as economical a way as possible. (And, oddly, the time a game uses is counted both towards its cost and its benefit)

Most games, especially sandbox ones, will have some rewards for the really dedicated and skilled player, or at least have challenges so such a player can self-motivate and have something to do. And now you even have youtube and specialty sites to show off your 'l33t skillz. Quit griping that big chunks of content aren't being created (and tested) just for you and your dedicated little band...

Re:You won't see any more of these.

[brkello]

I think what you wrote is a load of crap. Pac-man is in a different genre than the games you are talking about. It belongs in the puzzle game category with games like Tetris or even guitar hero. Can you beat all the songs at 100% on the hardest level? I bet you can't. For that genre, you have simple gameplay that gets progressively harder. Comparing this to World of Warcraft and Half-life is silly.

World of Warcraft is based on an RPG. As long as you keep at it, you will progress in this game to the max level. It slowly introduces skills to you so by the time you are max level, it is actually a lot more complex than when you first started out. Also, there is challenge when encountering new raid instances. Of course, most of the strategies are written online before you get a chance...but it is still difficult to implement a strategy with X other people in the group.

Half-life is an FPS...and if you think the game in the beginning is as easy as it is by the end...then maybe you should to replay it. As you play the game, you get much better at it. On a normal difficulty setting, they try to pace the action so you learn at about the same rate the difficulty increases. Try the game at the hardest setting and you get a real challenge. Say you master that...then you move on to multiplayer where the potential challenge has no limit.

Yeah, I have been playing games since the NES days and I know how hard a lot of those games were. But the big change isn't that they have gotten easier, it is that designers have implemented multiple levels of skill so that their game can be enjoyed by the hardcore and the casual alike. If you long for the challenge of old games...play every game on the hardest skill level from the start.

Re:You won't see any more of these.

[vecctor]

These two comments seem to contradict each other:

Oh for the days, when computer games rewarded ability rather than perseverance. and

Computer games used to be about developing a skill, playing it [for hours and hours, repetively] until you got sufficiently good that you were able to complete something on a higher level. Nowadays, it's about who can put the most amount of time into a game. (bold statement added by me - but it is accurate)

Old games were TOTALLY about perseverance. You had to play that game to death until you mastered every move and memorized every aspect of every enemy. You talk about putting time in with current games, so what do you call the constant pracice/replaying to get good in the older ones?

I don't think that type of gameplay was all that great, and it certainly required MORE time and was less interesting than current games.