what are the hardest games? and what makes a game challenging?

because im not sure i know. ive gotten to a point in a game im making where ive realized that we've overdone the complexity to the point where the game is no longer simply difficult its unfocused and shapeless. balancing difficulty with playability is one of the toughest things for me and so ive been thinking about how really good games make that work and while there are obv variations btw genres i want (hope) to develop a kind of alexandrian pattern template for these design decisions

okay all of this is probably not that interesting but in an attempt to do the above i thought it might be interesting to talk about games that you've found particularly challenging and why

i think the last game that i found fairly challenging was gta iv mostly because i have a v. hard time orienting myself w/in that enviornment. even w/the little map i get lost pretty easily. in one of the essays i was reading kreimeier talks about this type of challenge on a meta level (i.e. not knowing where you are/where to go/what to do next which is a tactic jrpgs use to great annoyance) but its one of my big design peeves in 3d/sandbox games

There's a great post, somewhere, where someone (hang on, is it you?) talks about the Japanese idea of difficulty - I wanted to discuss it more but it was kind of a threadjack. I'll repost it here.

i have to think about this more so this is totally off the top of my head, but i think that most of the games i find challenging in a worthwhile way are sort of non-narrative stuff like side-scrollers or other things where you are never aiming at finishing the game, just getting as far as possible. anything with a narrative endpoint that has a high level of difficulty starts to push you towards the cheat pages pretty fast at a certain point.

i guess what im saying is that difficulty is only its own reward in the geometry wars sort of stuff because it feels more like you are training yourself to have a (totally useless) skill, whereas some role-playing thing that puts you through the ringer with complicated difficult stuff just kind of sucks. stuff like FPS things (which i mostly dont like) get kind of the balance between the two, but the only real skill building is in the multiplayer, any sort of uberhard single player level is pointlessly irritating.

Hm I can't find it! It's on the games of the year thread.

Here are some different ideas of difficulty:

Ikaruga
Nethack
Etrian Odyssey
Crawl
Sam and Max

Championship Manager
Civ

one of the reasons i've started playing more retro games lately is because the challenge is so much lower generally in games these days e.g. i tried playing the new Prince of Persia and being handheld from one cinematic to the next really turned me off.
the sheer brutality of trying to get through a stage in Megaman 9 on the other hand probably horrified some people, but i found the challenge exhilarating.

i guess maybe on one hand what i am trying to achieve is a very different thing, some sort of motor skill twitch deal which is on some lizard brain level rewarding, and any focus on that kind of achievement in a sandbox/RPG environment is going to drive me crazy (fuck you model airplane building bombing level in old school GTA).

seems to me that a lot of "challenging" aspects are often poor game design, like moments in a FPS where it becomes a shitty platformer for a second, and you become painfully aware of how inept the designers are at doing something outside of their skillset. i know that i have def quit games never to return because of moments like these, because i have zero tolerance for having a game fuck me over.

xposts

oh another hella hard game ive played a lot lately is wild guns for the snes - its a 3rd person shooter that is INSANE basically no real attempt to make the play balanced or intuitive or tactical u just fukkin blast away. elements are really simple in fact you can win the game in 2 players mode w/o moving basically its actually really terrible from a design perspective

i feel like this type of hand-eye challenge is kind of lame tho and why i'm not that into stuff like gow. all you have to do to own wild guns is keep playing - eventually yr reflexes are good enough to beat it, like i sd, w/o even moving your character. and w/wild guns in particular the enemies spawn in the same places so it can get pure zen gaming and that type of thoughtless physicality is v. dull imo.

I am strongly predisposed to difficult games - I'm basically not interested in any game that's not one - but talking to you has really made me realise how subjective the term is.

I like:
Games that I can finish (Or complete to my satisfaction for any challenge I think of, in endless games)
Games that it takes me several months of failed play, if not more to finish.
Games that make me feel someone less intelligent/skilled/patient/whatever could not finish, even given years (this is my unhappiness with grinding)
Games that do not require spoilers to complete in this way (so I like Crawl, but not Nethack)

My favourite game, in terms of difficulty, was Deadly Rooms of Death - just a huge collection of massively hard puzzles that took over a year to complete, but never stopped being satisfying.

Or N! I felt N was almost perfect as a template for platformer difficulty - a deep pile of tiny, fulfilling challenges, with no way around them but success.

There's a great post, somewhere, where someone (hang on, is it you?) talks about the Japanese idea of difficulty - I wanted to discuss it more but it was kind of a threadjack. I'll repost it here.

yah that was me. i think this was on one of the two FF threads - the one that cankles and hi dere turned into a baldur's gate discussion

one of the reasons i've started playing more retro games lately is because the challenge is so much lower generally in games these days e.g. i tried playing the new Prince of Persia and being handheld from one cinematic to the next really turned me off.

ha - this is v. true but only in certain genres. in some ways as john talks about its also because we've gotten better at making games theres fewer dead-ends and fuck-ups in new big budget games. also lol the game im invovled in making the corp ppl were like ***make if hard*** which is why we got trapped in the 1st place

the mega man games were really hard but again the fell prey to some aspects of what i tried to illustrate w/wild guns - too much of this is just "training" or "reflex" challenges. i remember reading someone (in the newyorker i thinkg) dissing mario bros. for being this type of game - he called it shallow, i think? - and hes not totally wrong

otoh mega man did add what church (i think) calls rock-paper-scissors complexity by opening the levels

On the other hand when I played Ikaruga, or Sam and Max, the difficulty presented itself at points as a wall I just had no way of crossing.

I like, I guess, the feeling of levelling myself up when I play something - that yr own adaptation and growing fluidity to the controls or whatever is part of the narrative.

ROBOTRON 2084

Good lord, that game is hard, at least for me. I suppose that's in the Gridwars/Bullet Hell class of difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden, the original NES game, is a game that has perfect difficulty. After playing it about a dozen times, most people can progress a few levels in. But the final levels are murderously difficult. But for the most part, fair. Yes, THOSE FUCKING BIRDS are annoying as hell, and the game has the glitch where if you back up two steps, enemies that you just killed will respawn. But in the end, with enough practice, patience and skill, you get rewarded with progress. It took me years to finally beat, and when I did, it was incredibly satisfying (and then, as is often the case, really depressing about 5 minutes later as I looked through my window and saw people walking in sunshine who hadn't wasted their life on defeating a NES game).

re: what ZS said -

There's a kind of a cap on the theoretical number of Really Hard Games - I'd like to beat Nethack someday, even though I don't care for it, because beating Nethack conveys a certain cachet with some reasonably large number of people. But perhaps there's only room for a few games in that Pantheon - beating Ninja Gaiden, yes, but not Rings Of Power - otherwise the pool of imagined admirers becomes too shallow?

Where can I find this pool of admirers? Because after I told my friends that I finally had beaten Ninja Gaiden (this was a few years ago), and sent them a picture of me standing by the "You beat the game - way to go dude" screen, all I got was a bunch of o_O's.

Ok they're imagined! But, like - I have never played ninja gaiden! And yet I know it is hard! And I am impressed that you, internet person I only know by a pair of probably false initials, beat it! There are many others who would be too, if they only knew!

i wouldve been impressed z s - i only beat ninja gaiden on a rom same w/ghouls n goblins - there are some jumps in ninja gaiden that were impossible

in the games ive never beaten file theres contra III which i hate so fukken much. i think its amongst the hardest games because it takes all the type of reflex challenge stuff and adds layers of total randomness to it ***teeth grinding****

xp. I'm impressed! Ninja Gaiden was tough.

i've played enough ninja gaiden to the point where i can reliably get to the last boss but i've never beat it ;_;

xps. Contra III was pretty tough, my bro and I could beat it, tho did take us a good few attempts.

sometimes i secretly worry that i like easy games more than difficult games.

I like fun games the most. Difficulty is one node on the axis of fun, but that's all.

Rygar is the hardest game I've ever played (and beaten!), but just because it had (as I recall) no saves or continues.

what about pvp? kind of a whole other issue

because there's of course a huge element of environment-experience and willingness-to-be-cheap issues (thinking about stuff like COD4 and 5, primarily) but in the end it does reduce to some pretty raw reflex/manual dexterity/speed thinking differences btw people that are kind of harsh.

and lol try as i might i can't get my kill/death ratio to climb much over .70

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t214/ZachRScott/ninjaend.jpg

:)

for games where the draw is more narrative i tend to turn the diff down cos, what's the fukken point? after i leveled up to 20 in Fallout 3 i dropped it to Easiest cos the idea of making it a slog to experience the rest of the story content seemed pointless, like putting lead weights on a novel you're trying to finish.

xp well done old son

I think I beat NG once a long, long time ago. I always thought the significantly easier second one was a much better balance of difficulty. (The third was just so unfair and crappy, nobody even wanted to beat it) I've never beaten Contra III above Easy mode... still struggling to get through Contra IV on Normal!

I played 5 minutes of Mega Man 9 and realized it was just way, way too over the top for me today. I guess I've become more used to the idea that games should start out easy and accessible, but get harder as you go, though I still like certain games and even rogue-likes that take the opposite approach. The main thing for me is that games should give you opportunity to learn and master it, that is how they become addictive. Modern games are better about the actual teaching part, while as in the past you just had to die dozens of times and learn the timing of programmed enemies and jumps.

Sam and Max was for the most part, pretty easy, like most Lucasarts games, except later in the game where you had so many places to go/inventory items that it was easy to get lost in how many potential puzzle solutions there were (plus the general nonsensical tone of everything defied conventional logic). Love that game, though!

(let's not get into multiplayer difficulty, that's a whole another bag of worms)

imo the BEST hard game of all time is smb3 but im willing to hear other arguments

think about it:

reflex challenges - slippery as fuk ice levels and the inputs on an nes controller = HARD AS FUCK but the difficulty increases so subtly and carefully that by the time yr @ world 6 yr reflexs have been so honed its like wtf howd i make those jumps I OWN

orientation challenges - pipes + flying levels integrated in the dopest way but added so much challenge. this is mostly adding complexity though but best use of 2D space in game imo

but its really in the details the construction of each challenge is so intuitive even if youve never played a smb in yr lyfe u just know those floating platforms are going to drop no matter how hard it gets it doesnt frustrate in the way other hard games can

I am an extreme SMB3 stan. OTM about the difficulty. Although what's strange is at this point, it's not challenging anymore. I can pick it up after a few years off and zoom through the game. I guess it's muscle memory.

That's what separates SMB3 from SMW - SMW is waaaaay to easy, "tubular" notwithstanding. SMB3 is just right.

Although what's strange is at this point, it's not challenging anymore. I can pick it up after a few years off and zoom through the game. I guess it's muscle memory.

this is my main beef w/reflex difficulty and the reason imo that modern games altho "easier" are more interesting. but i think smb3 moves past this in large part by thinking about how reflex difficulty affects the player and then designing challenges to adapt to progress whereas a game like contra 3 is just kind of like "if 15 enemies are hard then lets put 35 on screen and really give it to 'em" thats not good design, particularly.

also im tryna think of the word but smb3 was the first game (maybe zelda III or dw 2 had it) for me that had a granular difficulty like say working out the method of getting the coin ghost ship or replaying levels looking for hidden sections. again i guess u could argue this is more complexity than difficulty but to some extent its one in the same.

okay here's one of the articles i mentioned while rambling on upthread

his discussion of the elements in mario64 are one of the best encapsulations of how a game is challenging w/o being unnecessarily difficult

i think what i like about games like Megaman is that they are really puzzle games, you go into a screen & have to figure out how to get to the other side without dying. so to play through them you develop/learn a muscle memory, reducing the replay value, but the initial "what do i do here?" is the hook that keeps me interested.

They're puzzle games, but you also have to do some pretty precise stuff to get through any given level, and it is incredibly unforgiving.

Take for example the Metal Gear Solid games, which let you restart from the beginning of the room when you die (w/some notable story-based exceptions). Is it really worth the extra challenge or reward/accomplishment to force the player to do 10-20 rooms in a row, followed by a boss, with limited lives? With some games, perhaps, but most just aren't designed around this anymore.

i started playing star wars: rogue squadron II yesterday and quit after a few levels for two reasons:

1) the little nav display is really confusing, so i kept getting lost on space levels or hunting around blindly for enemies

2) no checkpoints within levels, ie if you die at the very end you have to go through it all again

and maybe i am just dumb/bad at this game, but those aren't very fun reasons to be challenged by a game.

Take for example the Metal Gear Solid games, which let you restart from the beginning of the room when you die (w/some notable story-based exceptions). Is it really worth the extra challenge or reward/accomplishment to force the player to do 10-20 rooms in a row, followed by a boss, with limited lives? With some games, perhaps, but most just aren't designed around this anymore.

this is interesting to me. i guess this goes hand in hand w/complexity though and what church is calling intention. in something like mario its pretty easy to understand why you (as a player) might've died and how to remedy it ~~~ if u could respawn right at the ledge you jumped from the game would be too simple but as intention becomes more opaque a) the expectation is that the player might have to replay a section multiple times before succeeding and b) challenges themselves are more context based thus replaying rooms in mgs4 dont provide the same "training" mechanims for the player that replaying a level from the start in ninja gaiden does

also, i wonder if it seems more instinctively wrong to replay levels in games that are story-based, like "hey, this happened already".

i think a relevant distinction is between games that start out easy and get harder, giving you a chance to improve (like super mario bros. and most games honestly) and games that start out pretty hard and expect you to keep trying the hard levels over and over until you get good enough to get past them (i think maybe mega man is like this?)

Because I haven't played any PROPER OLD SCHOOL RPGS in a while, when i first died in the world ends with you i got really confused by the lack of a 'continue' button and by having to RELOAD from a save i'd made hours previously - it seemed really wrong! i'd convinced myself it was saving after each battle! similarly in persona 4 i keep slacking through the dungeons and then letting some random encounter start getting crits and knocking dudes down and then think "oh wait i can lose TWO HOURS here"

(n.b. in twewy you CAN save after each battle, but it involves going through two menus and waiting for the cart to write. qn: would anything be lost by a continue option, in this context?)

another model of difficulty: 'i wanna be the guy' and dongs.exe (can't remember the real name) and stuff like that.

the old thread on 'roguism' seems relevant here too, probably.

Germane and hilarious:

Megaman is really easy on a fundamental level, in that all you have to know is shoot, jump, move. You could play Megaman 9 with a NES controller, hypothetically. And the basic process of moving around and jumping and shooting is very straightforward. So in that sense, it is MUCH easier than a game like Halo, which has a lot of buttons that are all somewhat important, and many that are very important.

And for this gift of simplicity, the game gives you the secondary gift of allowing you to accomplish truly great things without any hand-holding, and with very little b.s. in the overall presentation. Just get out there and do your best!

i really liked the difficulty in geometry wars or grid wars or whatever the clone i played was called.

i really dislike the aspects of difficulty in team fortress 2 and left 4 dead: i think they'd be much better in some utopian player-free paradise where everyone is playing for the first time every time. admittedly this sux as a business model

'learn the maps' - fuck you!

i think this might be a matter of 'difficulty' vs 'work'

one of the guys from (i think) rare blogged ages ago somewhere about being amazed when he first started working on the NES and someone from nintendo of america implied to him that games were meant to be BEATABLE: having gotten used to the idea that difficulty arcs were just a matter of increasing a variable somewhere

i've noticed i keep capitalising words semi-randomly on ilx, wtf up with that

games that start out pretty hard and expect you to keep trying the hard levels over and over until you get good enough to get past them (i think maybe mega man is like this?

well mega man 2 e.g. is, like a lot of nes platformers, hard from the start but inside each of the stages theres a progression. mega man is mostly different because it presents itself as a possible multistrategy game (since you can start with any of the stages) but theres really only one optimal strategy to use.

so its like if zelda had let you play any of the temples from the start w/o telling u that u need an item hidden in the swamp palace to beat the boss in the ice cave. it adds an entirely different layer of difficulty to an already challenging trad platformer which is pretty cool i think

i think the distinction u make is more of a genre thing - rpgs for example dont really become *harder* as u progress and sometimes can become much easier - the only platform game i can think of that doesnt progress is ghouls n goblins and thats one of the worst designed games ever imo

I have never gotten past the first stage of Ghouls n Goblins. That game is infuriating.

the cool thing about mega man 2 is that you CAN beat any of the stages from the start. it's really hard (ie, imagine beating heat man if you had to actually jump on all of those disappearing blocks instead of breezing across with the rocket sled, and stay alive against the boss long enough to beat him with the default gun instead of the bubble lead), but possible. doing the stages in the "correct" order just makes easier.

it's a cool way of letting you set your own difficulty level (although there's also the hard mode which just makes the enemies more durable)

The Mario 3 example is an apt one. The game's later stages are far more difficult than the earlier ones, there is a definite difficulty ramp-up as the game goes along (as opposed to SMW or even NSMB, which are not as well planned). Not only that, the philosophy of adding crazy, one-level-only powerups and new stage types in each world keeps the game consistently fresh.

I actually loved Rogue Squadron II when I played it years ago - I think maybe it was the Star Wars music/sound effects/presentation that hooked me in long enough so that I actually wanted to overcome the challenges. (It also helps that there's sort of a stage select and the game encourages you to replay for better medals)

TWEWY is absolutely fantastic and innovative when it comes to difficulty. Okay, it's weird that they don't give you the "Continue on Easy" option until after the first section of the game, but everything else is incredible - you can not set the difficulty of the monsters you fight anytime during the game, AND there is a difficulty slider bar that manually controls your risk vs. reward (number of hit points vs. item pickup %). And except for a handful of instances you're not forced to touch it AT ALL. So if you want to cruise through the game for the story, it's very easy, and if you want to collect every single Pin and master everything, you can set it to the highest difficulty and give yourself minimum hit points. Hopefully games in the future will take notice of this.

I have never gotten past the first stage of Ghouls n Goblins. That game is infuriating.

― I f'd up the word rear (Z S), Tuesday, March 31, 2009 12:00 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is where i proudly say i fuckin loved this game and i beat it... i remember playing it for so long my genesis would almost overheat

ghouls and ghosts right

Well, there's "hard" and then there's "just plain bad". Lots of games think they're the former when they're really the latter. Ghosts and Ghouls (particularly on home platforms) is just bad, hell, even in the arcade it was not good.

But what do I know? I still haven't gotten past the end stage of the hospital level of Left4Dead on "normal."

Paperboy was fucking hard. It was very hard to time your paper shots, and then if you made it past a day or so, there were so many shots you had to hit that it was impossible...for me. Did it just repeat once you made it far enough?

this is where i proudly say i fuckin loved this game and i beat it...

HOLY SHIT that's amazing. When you can beat a game like that, it's every videogame nerd's weird narcissistic dream for someone to watch the process and be awed by the skillz. I would totally watch you beat that and be awed.

Have we talked about the game that Beat Takeshi Kitano came out with, deliberately because he 'hated' video games? I think it was released around the same time as Mother 1/2...

Find the first episode of GameCenter CX (aka the show Retro Game Challenge spawned), it's focuses on that very game and is hilarious.

(pretty sure it's subbed, up on youtube somewhere)

nhex i totally approve of all the other difficulty related stuff in TWEWY, i just thought it was relevant that i'd forgotten that games you couldn't continue existed. (it was also stupid.)

i have zero tolerance for having a game fuck me over.

yeah I have too many games already and I spend too much time playing them, fucked if I'm gonna retry something that massively annoys me. This is part of why I have never got more than halfway through a GTA; I just soak up the atmosphere until I get bored of shooting people because the main game is dead to me once I've had to retry something that takes more than 20 minutes a few times

I want sports games and fighting games to be hard or else they are pointless; people tend to say "who gives a shit about the single player" about games like this but sometimes I just want to kick back, take a few hours of me-time and try and re-establish Nottingham Forest as European giants. If Wolves and Reading aren't raping me 4-0 at the start of that journey then the masochistic thrill is lost.

Narrative based games I generally don't care because I just want to see everything

Replayed Oblivion a bit lately which is a weird one; it gives you an onscreen prompt and a map marker at every stage of a mission, but it also becomes impossibly difficult if you don't choose your character upgrades in a weird, counter-intuitive way. I do whatever I want and tweak the difficulty as I go along rather than do the whole thing as a stat maxing exercise from some internet guide, but it does feel a bit artificial that you're constantly in control of how many hits it takes you to kill a guy

(I also partially do this because seeing a guy get hit with a sword eight times and not die kind of ruins the immersion, particularly if you snuck up on him and hit him in the head while he was sleeping)

@ slocki ghosts and ghouls was the sequel ~~~ i was talking about ghosts and goblins but f'd up the title it was for NES maybe they are similar but idk i never played ghosts and ghouls because of hating the first one so much

I want sports games and fighting games to be hard or else they are pointless

lol sf4 basically has no single player tho i mean it seems like a pretty obv example of a game that couldnt have been successful before widespread online play. ai in this game is worse than previous editions maybe in part because the game was balanced/designed/tested mostly for 2 player modes. so making it "hard" involves looking @ design choices in a totally different way. its dorkishly interesting to me but its cool to think of what a great ai vs. player SFIV would look like

I really enjoyed the work required to get Bushido Blade but I can't imagine enjoying the work required to get any 2D fighter.

Game that rewards people spending too much time on it in a really lame way: Super Smash Bros and iterations thereof.

Re this in Oblivion: "Replayed Oblivion a bit lately which is a weird one; it gives you an onscreen prompt and a map marker at every stage of a mission, but it also becomes impossibly difficult if you don't choose your character upgrades in a weird, counter-intuitive way. " - is this a bit like how if you concentrate on developing an actual balanced force in SRPGs you'll find it really hard, but if you pick the one or two game-breaking classes you're golden?

HOLY SHIT that's amazing. When you can beat a game like that, it's every videogame nerd's weird narcissistic dream for someone to watch the process and be awed by the skillz. I would totally watch you beat that and be awed.

― I f'd up the word rear (Z S), Tuesday, March 31, 2009 4:14 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its funny i was never really aware of it being that "hard"... but when you only own like one game you can get really good at it

although it did take me ages iirc... whereas i fully expect to beat any new game i acquire these days in a matter of a week or two

Something about championship manager is that it *feels* more difficult than it is - up to about 2002 you could just download a set of tactics off the web and then inevitably glide to victory, but because Macclesfield-Town-in-the-Champions-League is such an impossible achievement in the real life it mirrors, it has a weight of its own. Whereas RPGs have this ridiculous deflater whereby five of the guys just hanging out in the final town could have saved the world before you were out of the first dungeon, if only they'd gotten off their ass.

i think we've talked about this before, but there are a lot of nes games where the difficulty level just hits a wall (for me anyway) where you can't go any further, but it's still totally enjoyable to play up to that point. i'm thinking of rc pro am for sure, but there were a bunch of games like this.

Super Off-Road on SNES was like that. It would be loads of fun for about an hour, until suddenly you realize everyone else has 99 nitros, you only have 4, and you can't stop yelling "Fucking Gray Car!" at the screen.

the life ending adventure, z is jump, x is shoot. it's like a choose your own adventure book where you have so many fancy ways to die.

give up yet? watch some of the ways to die for pure enjoyment.
then watch the path to airman and a different path to get you a superbuster gun
unfortunately not every type of death trap is recorded

I got to airman once but without the superbuster you are basically a goner

- is this a bit like how if you concentrate on developing an actual balanced force in SRPGs you'll find it really hard, but if you pick the one or two game-breaking classes you're golden?

yeah sort of but Oblivion just has a load of relatively useless skills that aren't worth focusing on; you can't get through the game without killing people so who the fuck wants to waste time accidentally levelling up their personality and mercantile scores and making their arms all weak in the process

I think this is a really interesting question, but a bit philosophical so I don't know that there's any real answer to it. To be vague, what makes a game challenging is it staying 1 step ahead of your current skill until you improve to the point you can get past that challenge to take on the next challenge and once again fall just short of the mark.

Games have used different techniques to manage this; increasing the speed (puzzles like Tetris, etc), more enemies at once (Gauntlet, R-Type), stronger enemies you can't beat til you are stronger (most RPGs), and I think where most games fall down on 'challenging' and become downright hard is that the increase in challenge is either too big a step at a certain point, or just too hard from the start. I mean, level 15+ on Tetris is fine once you're used to the game and worked your way there, but if the game just started there it'd be a different story altogether. Sure, you could just just keep playing it over, and over, and over again for 30 seconds at a time til you slowly get better and improve the amount of time you can stay alive, but most people wont put in the time. Same with Guitar Hero; if all songs on a partiuclar difficulty were as hard as the final block it would be infuriating. But you work your way there and it's not so crazy once you've worked your way there because the game has 'taught' you to be better at it though the subtle progression.

Of course there's always the 'difficulty setting' which is handled to varying degrees; Make enemies take more hits to kill, or make their attacks have a more severe impact, as opposed to improving the AI. This in particular is a double-edged sword, as just changing the amount of hits to kill seems lazy, but at the same time you don't want easy to be taking on enemies that are total morons. One game that's always bothered me with its difficulty is Pro Evo Soccer, because it isn't necessarily much harder, it just changes its tactics. Once you learn the exploits for those specific tactics it becomes easy again. I wont go into the computer cheatery that goes on in it as I think that's another issue altogether...

I guess part of 'challenge' is reward. Whether that reward is greater skill at the game that you can show off (I'm thinking things like Streetfighter, which I suck at), story line progression, or just perks like getting new weapons (or a Goomba's Shoe!) to play with. Games that fail to offer me suitable motivation to work harder just get abandoned. Like Contra III on the DS - Hard as nails. I have no interest in playing it because I grinded through the first level to be rewarded with nothing. I don't feel I'm any better at the game, or that I'm brining any skill further into the game becuase the next level is exactly the same grind through and I can see I'm getting slightly further on every play through but not because I'm "better" at the game. I don't mean that as "there's no point because you're just rewarded with more of the same", as I love puzzles like Tetris, which are repetitive, but you have a tangible improvement that I just don't see with some games. I guess what I'm getting at is games giving you skills that help you with later parts of the game.

Games that I've found difficult in the past I've done so for different reasons too. I gave up on Contra 3 because I just can't kill everyone and avoid all their bullets all at once, I guess because I'm no good at analysing where the 'safe' spots on the screen are at any one time - the same goes for R-Type games. I've also gotten stuck on Zelda games, for example, just because I have no idea what to do or where to go next. There's only so long you can wander around talking to people hoping someone gives you a hint before you check a walkthrough. Similarly point-and-clicks - there's only so long I can try combining everything in my inventory with each other, wandering around every location hoping for some inspiration, before I have to check a guide to find out the obscure solution.

I know that doesn't much help on what makes a game challenging, and I'm sure there are loads of other techniques employed to make a game harder. Unfortunately I'm someone that's not too concerned about a game being hard, though I wouldn't say the same about 'challenging'. I just like my games to let me play through them and not hold me back because one bit is just to frustratingly difficult. But part of that is my own laziness. I remember Ninja Gaiden (which, incidentally, I completed) being like that in places where I'd just die repeatedly at the same spot and not get any further. The difference then was that I only had about 4 games, so if I abandoned it I'd be bored as well as frustrated. These days I just can't be bothered with having the play the same part of a game 100 times just to get to the next bit.

I actually finished RType, which I was pretty pleased about. Annoying factor with these games is losing a life, and losing all your great weapons. It's extremely difficutl to get back into the game, it's possible though.

Anyone remember a shootem up on the amiga called Project X. It tried to measure how well you were playing with what it threw at you, so even if you were breezing through a section, the next parts would be doubley difficult with baddies needing more hits. I'm not a fan of this technique because it negates any reward aspect that games need to have.

Ahh Jesus, games that cheat piss me off no end. If we're talking about increasing difficulty, don't give the computer cheat codes. I found this most noticable on racing games, esp. something like Mario Kart where you'd knock the computer out with some red shells and then you'd see them boost along at a billion miles an hour till they're up your arse again.

I think this is a really interesting question, but a bit philosophical so I don't know that there's any real answer to it.

in the abstract yes but irl i mean there are certain choices that developers make in order to increase a games difficulty ack that challenging is relative its still interesting to think about how those choices to conform to broader design patterns e.g. what u identified as maybe call it exponential difficulty - leaving the mechanic/play the same just increasing the variables which is an rpg staple, obv

haha altho thinking about this is maybe the laziest kind of tactic i esp hate in civ where its like, u really cant make the a.i, better??? u just have to give them 800 starting units and production bonuses??? pretty weak imo

As Ste mentioned, Super R-Type (I haven't spent much time with the other R-Types so I can't speak to them) had a really weird scale-up of difficulty. If you can get through the first level without dying, which isn't too hard once you've spent an hour with the game, your ship is powerful, speedy, and weapons are maxed. The next few levels would be a relative breeze to get through a result. And then, yeah, if you accidentally die, it takes a heroic effort to get your ship maxed out again in the later levels. So basically, the hardest part of the entire game is the 30 seconds after you have to start over, when your ship moves like a turtle and your weapons suck. Consequently, after spending a good amount of time with the game, the typical way I "play" Super R-Type these days is to start it up, attempt to beat it on one life, and if I die at all, turn the game off and do something else.

xpost

The AI in Civ has always, always been so jaw-droppingly terrible (at least Civ 1 - 3, never played 4 or Revolution) that it nearly does in the franchise as a whole imo, much as I love it. It just seems that they can't get the AI to attack with any kind of coherent strategy, so you can fend their units off piecemeal. Allowing the AI to cheat only takes you so far - it means they have better defensive units and keeping up with their scientific progress becomes more challenging, but on the offensive they rarely pose a genuine threat to your kingdom unless you get woefully far behind in the tech race.

SFIIHD is a real frustrating exercise currently; I'm good enough to hang with the decent players but not good enough to consistently win. I'm also not nearly good enough to handle the two-combo-and-you're-dead-guys.

the life ending adventure, z is jump, x is shoot. it's like a choose your own adventure book where you have so many fancy ways to die.

give up yet? watch some of the ways to die for pure enjoyment.
then watch the path to airman and a different path to get you a superbuster gun
unfortunately not every type of death trap is recorded

seriously yall should try this (link upthread). I would like to see you all get to the clones without falling for any traps, even after watching the walkthrough youtube.

also you need the japanese language pack or the game looks blocky, and you need to click the japanese writing underneath start to be able to access save points. The lore of this game over the years makes it the bestest.
http://zerodimension.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/owata-01.JPG

Cap you should start your own thread about stuff that interests you and maybe not nag people about it. Just saying this so you know what I'm thinking.

Is it a free online game?

If so, it would probably be a topic more fitting for the free online games thread.

Yeah, that game is a cruel, obvious joke, it goes without saying. I can't imagine who would actually spend the time to play it for more than 15 minutes.

There's a whole genre of that sort of thing! I think someone tried to make the name 'masocore' stick. There's some wanker did a Let's Play of one who got confused and spends his whole three hour video playthrough talking about how the game kills you so unfairly "only sadists could enjoy it"

The one linked upthread is actually pretty good: likeable in its aesthetic, fair in its unfairness

It does seem like solving it would be trivial if you had old-fashioned restart-at-every-room checkpoints, though.

I mean, I saw the first screen and went, "Okay, that thing is going to jump up and get me, and there's probably another trap once I get to the other side of it"

I don't know, I feel like there are games that have been far more fun but gotten the same point across, like Karoshi.

I mean, I saw the first screen and went, "Okay, that thing is going to jump up and get me, and there's probably another trap once I get to the other side of it"

other Nes games I could never beat: Battletoads, Iron Sword: Wizards and Warriors 2, Little Nemo the Dream Master, TMNT, and Kid Kool.

you know what's a pretty tough game

zelda 2

THAT'S RIGHT MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T FORGET

i remember - i think I quit because you couldn't save or something

I couldn't beat lots of NES games though.

Thinking back, I was sort of surprised to find that the last really difficult game I'd played was the second Jak and Daxter on the PS2 (I played the Xbox Ninja Gaiden for a bit before realizing it would leave me a broken shell of a man, wandering the streets in a stupor and ranting at passersby about THE FUCKING NINJAS, MAN, and so decided to shelf it). Jak 2 was just about right, I think- often screamingly hard, but in a way that forced you to learn until you just got good at the various tasks it set in front of you (or in the case of the hoverboard levels, got good enough to limp through and never speak of it again).

THAT'S RIGHT MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T FORGET

lol i stand by my past comments re: zelda 2, its a rad fukken game

There's a whole genre of that sort of thing! I think someone tried to make the name 'masocore' stick. There's some wanker did a Let's Play of one who got confused and spends his whole three hour video playthrough talking about how the game kills you so unfairly "only sadists could enjoy it"

feelin like these dudes should just switch rackets and fuck solely w/spider solitaire in their quest for meaningless meaning these "games" are stupid and so are the ppl that play them

the fact that I never beat Tyson in Punch Out still haunts me

i actually forgot that was u until we disagreed about something else on another thread and u were like 'is this zelda 2 all over again' and i connected the fucken dots and was like THIS FUXKIN GUY

also, i wonder if it seems more instinctively wrong to replay levels in games that are story-based, like "hey, this happened already".

― meat of beef (Jordan), Monday, March 30, 2009 7:05 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Instinctively wrong, maybe, but I think it has also to do with the difference between parts of a game that are rewards for getting through something hard, and parts that are enjoyable in and of themselves. In Doom or whatever, you feel a sense of accomplishment at beating the level, and are excited to have a new level to explore, but you wouldn't be playing it if machinegunning demons wasn't fun in itself.

Whereas all story stuff in RPGs is reward, and reward that takes a lot of minutes to experience (dialogue and so on). The first time, this is fine - you're glad to have gotten a nice, substantial reward. But this is exhausted the first time you go through it, and becomes extremely tedious very quickly. I watched a guy play Kingdom Hearts for a while and we both went crazy on this, anytime you failed to beat a boss there was at least two minutes of dialogue between the last save point and your next chance to beat a boss.

None of this has much to do with difficulty of course, so here's a disconnected thought: I agree with everybody who says games need to give you time to master certain skills before throwing you new things that tax that mastery. But I'd add to that that it's nice to have some ability to step sideways from the difficulty curve if it's not working at your pace. That is: if the main thrust of the game is getting too difficult too fast, it's cool if there are optional things you can go do that are at the "current" difficulty. This would I guess be side quests, unnecessary dungeons, etc. The payoff is severalfold: one, you get a relief from just being frustrated at failing over and over at the same thing; two, you build your ability with the game's techniques; three, the side quest itself may have some rewards that help you (new sword, or I level up fighting these other guys); four, the side quest might be interesting in its own right (flesh out some minor character's back story, cool-looking enemies, whatever).

This is obviously applicable in RPGs, but also applies I think to things like Mario 64 or Symphony of the Night - if I hit a certain point that's just too damn hard for me I can opt out and go do something else for a while. If the designer can't find anything interesting for me to do in this period - or hasn't realized that I'm going to hit this wall - then you find yourself mindlessly "leveling up" which is like the worst part of RPGs, for me.

The other side of this is when the main thrust of the game is too EASY for a while, and you don't want to slog through the piddly levels all over again. This is one reason Mario 3 has warp zones: after you get sufficiently good at the game, the desert world isn't challenging, just time-consuming. (Also you've probably played through it a bunch of times, and so it's also just old hat.)