Extremely difficult games

[Don]

Recently I've been playing Touhou Project and it brings back memory from the days of the NES where you have extremely difficult games like Megaman 1 or Ninja Gaiden where it's not obvious if you're ever going to beat the game. It is hard to beat the feeling when you beat the game that seems impossible, but the problem is that it is also entirely possible that you will never beat the game. I never actually beat any of the Ninja Gaidens because after a while I got tired of spending an hour to get to the last stage, screw up, die, and then have no realistic chance of beating it after you die. Sure if you spend *enough* time you'll eventually beat it, but there's a point where patience run out. Contra is quit a difficult game, and if not for the konami code, a lot of people will quite possibly never beat it. Eventually I got good enough at it to pass it with 3 lives (maybe even 1), but I don't think I'd have been motivated to get better at this game if not for the konami code, because you'd just game over at stage 4 or so for a very long time and decide it's not worth continuing to waste your time.

Extremely difficult game seems to be all cult games. Either you're with them or you're not. But it doesn't have to be this way. I believe Metal Gear Solid can have some truly insane difficulty level that few players can beat, but it still sells well. That's because you don't have to play the game on super duper hard to get all the game has to offer. Unfortunately the concept of accessibility is lost on those who make such games. Sonic the Hedgehog, for example, basically tells you 'you suck' if you fail to get all the Chaos Emeralds. Now Sonic is pretty far away from an extremely difficult game, but getting all the Chaos Emerald is by no means trivial. Due to the nature of the game you can easily spend an hour getting close and then screw up at a crucial moment and waste all your time if you fail a Chaos Emerald stage or die. The extra stage in the Touhou Project series require beating the game without continuing, and like a classic extremely difficult game almost all the difficult is in the last stage, so you can quite possibly get to the final stage without dying at all and then promptly use up your 5 lives in the first 3 lifebars of the last boss, and then you have to take another 30 minutes or so to start over. For a game that prides as the prettiest shooter ever, it sure is odd that the vast majority of people who played this game will never see any of the pretty patterns.

I suppose games are extremely hard because people need something to brag about, but I think a simple score suffices. Most modern games do not have the concept of a 'score' anymore because most games are designed so that anybody can beat them and do everything, so there's not much point to keep track of a score. But if you have a game where it is not possible to do everything, then a score becomes meaningful. In TIE Fighter you take a 90% score penalty for having either invulnerabilty or unlimited ammo on, but you still get a score. My high score in Touhou Project is around 15 million and i know there are people who can get 2.5 billion or more points, and the scoring system clearly reflects how good a player is. So if I'm going to be here with my meager 15 million points, I think I should at least be able to beat the game and see what the game has to offer instead of being told 'sorry you lose try again'. The achievement system for XBox will work too. Joe Hardcore could get the 'beat the game without ever dying' award for whatever XBox awesome points, but at least other people should be allowed to beat the game.

[Zeus]

Mega Man 1 was extremely difficult? Not really. It's like saying Bionic Commando was extremely difficult. They weren't cakewalks but we're not talking about Ghosts 'N Goblins or Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts (not the GBA one) here.

If you notice, it's a lot of older games that are hard. Try playing Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Galaga, or Space Invaders sometime. Those games ain't easy. Not really sure why (can't just be technological) but there weren't too many easy games back in the day.

In a way it is a bragging thing but it's also a sense of accomplishment to beat a difficult game. If you're a competitve person by nature you get the whole "this game ain't gonna beat me" mentality and you want to beat it because it's tough. Of course, it has to be a good game. We played a lot of hard games which just sucked (such as Deadly Towers) and you just don't have the desire to beat something like that. But when you get a Radiant or Ikaruga that's tough as nails but awesomely fun, you want to beat it.

The Jap companies don't make tough games anymore 'cause the audience there constantly complains about things being "too difficult" or "I don't understand". And with the expansion of the industry where the hardcores are becoming less and less of the overall revenue stream, it'll only get worse.

[Julius Seeker]

Getting the Chaos Emeralds isn't too difficult a task either, but it does take efffort. It should be possible to get all of them even on a first play through the games for any advanced gamer (maybe with two players in Sonic 2, which is the most difficult of the three by far, if my memory serves me correctly).

I like certain difficult games, and yes, I agree, they almost have a purely cult following because the general gaming audience tends not to enjoy games that are too hard for them to finish on the first try.

[Kupek]

The difficulty of old school games is largely an artifact of technology. Ninja Gaiden and Sonic had no means of saving progress, so they were hard because you always had to start from the beginning. (Although perhaps this isn't so much hard as demoralizing).

I will point out, thought, that in some cases, you don't get the full benefit of the game on easier difficulties. With Halo 3, for example, I've heard several people say that you won't appreciate the nuances of weapon design and level construction until you play it on Hard. The easier difficulties allow you to ignore those considerations and blast your way through.

[Don]

You generally only have one shot at a Chaos Emerald per stage and you need either 6 or 7 of them (I forgot), so usually that means you only got 12 shots at them. Sonic 2 had the easiest chaos emerald stages because you get one shot per save point, which bumps the number of tries to roughly double the normal. In fact it's the only Sonic game I got all the Chaos Emerald legitmately.

Sonic 3 has a saving feature I think (or was it Sonic & Knuckles) but the one-shot nature of Chaos Emerald didn't change. You can save your game but if you miss a Chaos Emerald, then that's it. The game was, by design, hard to satisfy the Chaos Emerald requirement even though the game is quite easily beaten. The problem is that the game keeps on rub it in your face that you did not get the real ending.

For Megaman 1, I think the game's difficulty is seriously underestimated due to Nostaglia. It takes a good hour to get to Yellow Devil, and I think if you die, your energy do not refill, which means you only have ONE shot at him unless you use the pause trick, and he's a boss that cannot be beaten without a special weapon for a normal player (if you could have then you would never have died). Again I don't think this can be entirely blamed on technology. In a game like Ninja Gaiden or Gradius it is abundantly clear that once you die, when you start again with no powerups, then things is going to seriously suck, and that is a design not a technology limitation. I remember in one of the fast scrolling stages in Gradius, if you die on the boss and don't have a power up stored, you don't even start with enough speed to clear the movement phase of the stage!

I'm all for putting intricate and possibly even insane elements as long as they don't interfere with what the game has to offer. My roommate sucked at Metal Gear Solid and he was always dying left and right in that game, but the game doesn't tell you 'Sorry Snake, you got to beat it on Very Hard without dying to see what the game is really like!' I'm guessing most people will never get the Big Boss rank in a MGS game, but that's just something to brag about. It's not like only people with the Big Boss rank can see the ending and unlock a vital part of the game.

Heck, take something like Contra. With 30 lives you can get away with some pretty lousy playing (but can't be completely reckless). To beat the game within a normal setting obviously requires mastery of the game. The difference is that when you're allowed to start with 30 lives (well it's well known enough to be considered allowed) you can at least see the whole game, and if the game is good, it might make you motivated to get better, as opposed to just dying and give up before the allged good parts come.

[Julius Seeker]

You get more tries in Sonic 2, but the bonus stages are also much more difficult. The second game overall is the most difficult of the three. Sonic 3 does have a saving feature.

[Don]

I thought the mini game in Sonic 2 was easy because it's not a one and done thing. You just have to know the pattern the rings come in and you can recover from mistakes. Sonic 1 and 3's minigame isn't hard, but if you slip somewhere it ends immediately, and when you only have limited tries at them, it adds up.

[Julius Seeker]

I will point out, thought, that in some cases, you don't get the full benefit of the game on easier difficulties.

To mention a recent game: this is very very true with SPORE, I have found.

[SineSwiper]

I thought the mini game in Sonic 2 was easy because it's not a one and done thing. You just have to know the pattern the rings come in and you can recover from mistakes. Sonic 1 and 3's minigame isn't hard, but if you slip somewhere it ends immediately, and when you only have limited tries at them, it adds up.

That sort of thing isn't difficulty. It's a cheap trick to extend gameplay. Read Kupek's thing about no continues.

[Don]

I thought the mini game in Sonic 2 was easy because it's not a one and done thing. You just have to know the pattern the rings come in and you can recover from mistakes. Sonic 1 and 3's minigame isn't hard, but if you slip somewhere it ends immediately, and when you only have limited tries at them, it adds up.

That sort of thing isn't difficulty. It's a cheap trick to extend gameplay. Read Kupek's thing about no continues.

I consider the lack of resources (lives/continues) to be part of the difficulty. Otherwise you can say Contra is not a difficult game because if you have 30 lives you'll almost certainly get through the game, but obviously Contra is not an easy game if played with the default 3 lives. In the case of Sonic it's a lack of ability to reattempt the same special stages that defines the difficulty.

I'm guessing you're using difficulty in a context like how Shin Akuma is difficult in the sense that you can keep on try to fight him and never beat him if you're not at least at a certain level of skill. While there is certainly difficulty in the sense of an encounter where you can always be prepared at max strength and still lose, I think it's just as fair to have difficulty based on attrition, as long as there is still some feasible way to win. Almost all side-scrolling shooters have difficulty largely derived from attrition, e.g. surviving long enough to have enough lives/bombs to outlast the last guy. This is fine as a challenge as long as there's a way to take a 'wimp out' method. On Gradius for the SNES I can routinely get to the 2nd to last stage without dying (and the last stage is pretty trivial anyway), and then hit a brick wall there because the game does not offer any way to get out of a bad situation. The fact that a certain stage can be super hard is not a problem. The fact that you have absolutely no way around it is. While it's annoying that this stage takes place somewhere around an hour into the game, if it was instead the first stage I think I'd have just never bothered to continue playing the game, so I don't think the placement itself is that important.

[SineSwiper]

It's the fact that nobody likes to replay the same easy stuff just to reach the harder part of the game. They would prefer to retry the harder part until they figure it out.

[Don]

Well Street Fighter Alpha 2 has an Akuma mode where you just fight Shin Akuma right away, or you can do it the normal way by getting like 8 fights without a loss or whatever the criteria is. I like the idea of a boss attack mode but I don't mind people who can do it the long way get some sort of bragging rights, either, as long as it's only bragging rights and not say, a chunk of the game you otherwise can't access.

[Zeus]

In an adventure or FPS game, I can see the need to save regularly. You just don't want to go through it again. Same with an RPG. Should be able to save anywhere except during boss battles and only in certain parts in dungeons or "levels". Platformer design should be to save inbetween levels, there's really no reason to save in the middle of a level other than checkpoints for instant continues. They're already broken up such that you're only talking about a contained area.

[Flip]

I love hard games, especially the old school stuff like we've talked about. I'll torture myself with Battletoads for a week every so often, still.

I wish someone out there would come out with a modern ridiculous game. All the Halo fanboys can cry them themselves to sleep and break their $50 controllers while trying to play an actual hard FPS. Put them in their newb place.

[Zeus]

I love hard games, especially the old school stuff like we've talked about. I'll torture myself with Battletoads for a week every so often, still.

I wish someone out there would come out with a modern ridiculous game. All the Halo fanboys can cry them themselves to sleep and break their $50 controllers while trying to play an actual hard FPS. Put them in their newb place.

Try beating Viewtiful Joe on V-Rated. That game is fucking impossible on Kids mode. I did it but it took me a long time. I didn't even want to try it on Hard, Ultra Hard, or V-Rated. Fucking masochists they had at Clover, I tell ya. I'm willing to be Madworld ain't gonna be simple.

Ikrauga ain't exactly easy either. That game will make you its bitch in no time.

[Flip]

Nonono, not a game with a hard mode, thats crap. I want one out the box that all the new generation kids will never be able to beat and will have to resort to YouTube vids to see the ending. If they could, then they can be considered hard core. 95% of people cant even beat A Boy and His Blob out of the box.

[Don]

I don't think Ikagura is even close to the hardest shooter coming from Japan. I mean, if you are able to beat the game as a normal player, that already puts it several tiers below Touhou Project, where the average player cannot beat the game.

[SineSwiper]

I love hard games, especially the old school stuff like we've talked about. I'll torture myself with Battletoads for a week every so often, still.

I wish someone out there would come out with a modern ridiculous game. All the Halo fanboys can cry them themselves to sleep and break their $50 controllers while trying to play an actual hard FPS. Put them in their newb place. Smile

Nonono, not a game with a hard mode, thats crap. I want one out the box that all the new generation kids will never be able to beat and will have to resort to YouTube vids to see the ending. If they could, then they can be considered hard core. 95% of people cant even beat A Boy and His Blob out of the box.

Well, there's a difference between a hard game, and something that 95% of the people can't beat. That's not a "hard game".

People beat Ninja Gaiden (on XBox). People beat Bionic Commando Rearmed. People beat Vandal Hearts or FFT. These are hard games, but they aren't impossible games. I don't want all games to be "Capcom" hard, since Capcom seems to have unrealistic and broken ideas of difficulty.

[Don]

People beat Ninja Gaiden (on XBox). People beat Bionic Commando Rearmed. People beat Vandal Hearts or FFT. These are hard games, but they aren't impossible games. I don't want all games to be "Capcom" hard, since Capcom seems to have unrealistic and broken ideas of difficulty.

My roommate in graduate school bought Viewtiful Joe and for a while it didn't look like if he was ever going to beat the game, and of course even if you win there's still what, 3 tiers of difficulty above? And I'd consider being able to use 3 more characters important to my enjoyment of a game. I will say that if I cannot beat Viewtiful Joe at all, I'm certainly not going to buy the sequel to it no matter how awesome it is.

FFT and Vandal Hearts are nowhere near hard, but it is entirely possible to get yourself saved in an unwinnable situation. VH is probably easier than FFT but you also can't just go fight more battles to level up. That I think is just more bad design than a difficulty issue.

[Eric]

Vandal Hearts had a system where if your party members fell behind, they only had to kill like 1 person and they'd gain 2-3 levels in 1-shot.

[Don]

If I recall you never get extra random encounters so it's possible to have a very imbalanced team that ends up making the game very hard. I always kept my team balanced though.

[RentCavalier]

Tough but fair are how I like my games. Ninja Gaiden is "tough" but fair--if you take your time, learn the combat, memorize enemy patterns, etc, you CAN win by using a reliable strategy. The only cheap part is the camera.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is a hard fucking game, but it is fair as everything follows very specific rules and those rules apply to EVERYONE--enemy and ally. You follow the rules, you live. You strategize, plan, think along those rules, you live. It is tough, but it is fair.

Then, there are cheap games. A recent example from a game I played is Donkey Kong 64. DK64 is ridiculously, unbearably tough--it is clear that there are areas in this game that were NOT playtested thoroughly. The racing segments in particular are fucking brutal--you have to beat an already difficult race while collecting little coins (you have to collect like, 10 or 50) AND win. So, it's two different challenges, both of which are not even hinged on skill--there's a sliding race in the second world with turns so sharp that you CANNOT possibly avoid them without comprehensive knowledge of the course, and even then, your opponent is twice as fast as you are, damages you if you touch him, and when you are damaged, you lose coins--and you have to collect 50 coins, and there are at most 70-75 coins on the actual track, the majority of which you cannot collect without sacrificing vital speed, so it takes a very specific route to get all the coins, and even then, as it turns out, you CANNOT win the race unless you attack your opponent at the VERY beginning of the race to slow him down for a precious two second delay. THIS is not fun. This is bullshit, pure and simple--it is cheap, repetative, and irritating. I like a challenge, but I also like a challenge where, if I am skilled enough, I can conquer it in 1-3 attempts--and if that is not possible, I'm at least able to see what I have done wrong in order to correct it.

[Zeus]

Nonono, not a game with a hard mode, thats crap. I want one out the box that all the new generation kids will never be able to beat and will have to resort to YouTube vids to see the ending. If they could, then they can be considered hard core. 95% of people cant even beat A Boy and His Blob out of the box.

Same with Ghosts 'N Goblins or Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts. But they just don't make them that hard anymore, particularly Japanese made games. Viewtiful is one of the few "hard" games to come out in recent generations. Even on the easiest setting it's fucking hard and most people didn't beat it (or even play it). Same with Ikaruga. Even on Normal it's fucking hard

Don, I'm talking about shooters that we got here

[Don]

Can you even get Ikagura here? I thought you always had to import it.

[Zeus]

It came out on the Gamecube. Pretty rare now, though

[Eric]

*Boggle* It's on freakin X-Box Live isn't it?

[SineSwiper]

Uhhh, yeah.