After typing out this tl;dr post, my own comment would be: too many parentheses.

Ninja Gaiden for the XBox 360. The original Ninja Gaiden. The dam level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles. Battletoads. What do they have in common?

They’ve been popularly regarded as hard or mind-numbingly difficult to beat. Downright impossible, even.

I’ve seen so many rants about how difficult these and other games are. How they’re too focused on getting every single detail right just to continue, how they’re too hardcore for the midcore gamer, how high on weed/acid/sugar the people who made the level must’ve been when they made the level. Once you’ve died for the one hundredth time it almost becomes acceptable for you to chuck your controller at the floor/into the TV, swear loudly or to destroy the CD/cartridge with a hammer (kids, don’t try this at home). It’s enough to make you think whether these games were meant to be finished at all, or whether they’re just sadistic pieces of entertainment for the the creators, made to frustrate you to no end. It’s enough to make you feel that the whole universe is conspiring against you.

Some people actually feel this way. And as one who’s tried all four examples stated above, let me tell you: they are hard. They literally give no quarter; they give no mercy.

Ninja Gaiden on the 360 from what I’ve played of it required pinpoint-precision timing to advance. You had to strike at the exact moment of your enemies’ weakness to really deal a significant amount of damage to them, and this window of opportunity seemed to be very, very small indeed.

Ninja Gaiden for the NES required a mastery of the layout of the level and the enemies as well as their patterns, because otherwise birds just conveniently passing by at the exact time of your jump would stop you dead in the air, and consequently make you fall to one of your 3 (by default) deaths.

The dam level in the original TMNT game was a real bitch. A big, hairy, monstrous, electric and explosive bitch. If I remember correctly, you had two minutes to defuse a number of bombs placed underwater by Bebop, Rocksteady, Shredder or Krang (not sure – but it had to be one of them, or at least the dozens and dozens of unnamed Foot Soldiers they had). Things were complicated by electric barriers (underwater! I wonder why you never died just diving into the water), killer seaweeds (i.e., one touch = dead turtle) and unforgiving swimming mechanics.

Just the sight of this picture brings back horrid memories.

As for Battletoads, the first two levels would lull you into a false sense of domination over this game, only to have it ripped from your calloused hands later by the speeder level. That stage was the end of the line for me.

Regardless, what most people seem to forget is how similarly difficult it is to make a difficult game. Think about it: developers have to have some sort of high-level plan to all this frustating gameplay, or else it’d just end up as unplayable crap without any real justifiable point to it. They can’t just crank up the number of baddies, lengthen the gaps between platforms and/or decrease player reaction time windows for the sake of increasing challenge or replay value and call it a day. A game’s difficulty has to be measured and it has to be tested or else no one would buy it (unless of course, you don’t blurt this fact out to the media before selling your game). There has to be an army of quality assurance people chained to consoles somewhere mashing away at buttons and joysticks just to make sure that the game is hard, but is possible to finish eventually. Someone has to have had successfully completed it without resorting to cheats or save state hacking before it gets released. Or at least, that’s what my common sense was tingling for.

And that’s hard. If you’re a person with only two eyes, two ears, two hands and ten fingers (no offense to our comrades with lesser faculties) and you found it hard, then a person testing it, even with his or her increased level of experience playing hard games undoubtedly will also (or at least, it’ll prove to be somewhat challenging). And they have a deadline for finishing this. The Doomsday clock called a project milestone schedule hangs ominously above their heads.

So, game testers, we salute you. For playing games all the time until you puke; for braving the hazards of cataracts, carpal tunnel syndrome, nintendonitis, and being overweight due to a massive intake of Cheetos and cola while sitting down all day; for making sure that we’re not wasting our time playing these curiously hard curiousities; for making sure that at least someone will be able to reach the goddamned end of Battletoads, and in record time no less. No, seriously.

I guess what most people don’t like about really difficult games is that they seem impossible, that they appear to hold no rewards for players’ efforts.

In that case, I guess the only real advice is to stop sucking so much, or don’t play at all. Or just bitch about it into your personal webspace or something. No one’s forcing you to finish that speeder level dude, you’re bringing that suffering upon yourself.

Of course, if you’re talking about the feeling of accomplishment… wait, what accomplishment? That cake is a lie!