Aug 19, 2008
Bitching on game difficulty
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!
That Ninja Turtles stage brings me bad memories.
I have to agree on the idea that what makes people stop playing difficult games is the lack of a sense of reward after a difficult accomplishment. I’m sure people won’t mind playing to the point of frustration if there was an alternate path to be taken, or if the certain impossible challenge was optional, but had a greater form of reward in the end. For example, FF7’s Emerald and Ruby weapons are the toughest in the game, which were gladly made optional to beat. Can you imagine the frustration of people if those two bosses were required dead to advance the story?
The difficulty of a game can also stem from bad control, such as the case of the original Castlevania where Simon Belmont lacked mid-air control of any sort, thus once false jump can get you killed. Contrast this with Mario, while not armed with a whip :P, was still easier than Castlevania due to its mid-air control while on a jump despite the two being platformers, albeit in different styles. While not entirely the fault of developers, I can imagine that it can be taken as an unforeseen result in the stage of game development.
On a somewhat related subject, what if you already have beaten a difficult game? A certain trend I see in games right now is the greater support for multiplayer and PvP opponents, where all the fun that’s left in a game is beating another person and becoming the best in the world. I’m sure people can relate, especially those who really spend time honing their skills on a particular game (Street Fighter for you as an example, and AC for me XD, and those people claiming high scores in shooter games).
A good example I can think of is Tekken. Jinpachi isn’t the final boss, DT and his Brian 50%-er would take that spot XD. But you get the idea right? The reward now stems from being the best, or at least the pursuit of being the best, which makes some games more re-playable than others. DT is now the man to beat at least in our case, and everyone who has fought him now works hard in their own little way in order to beat him someday… I’m sure his motivation is partially in line with this.
Yup, it sucks to be struggling against the game controls just to be able to play. Bad design or not, it limits a lot of people from playing and enjoying the games themselves, although not all decide to give up so easily. Armored Core, the greatest example on earth.
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For the most part, I was thinking of the single player experience when writing this post, and it seemed to be a logical choice at the time given the examples I had played.
Still, I do agree that the multiplayer aspect - high score tables, profile achievements, online bragging matches - is where it’s all headed now. The “best” isn’t necessarily the one who just finishes the game because apparently millions of other people have already done that.
I still remember the time before the internet, when every kid thought they were the only ones who managed that score/level 99/a time of under one minute in some game. Now, it’s all competitive. Maybe that’s why some people have moved to the more relaxed side of casual games.