Hardest games (again!)

[HenAi]

Why Super Meat Boy is a poor example of video game difficulty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuFSjmpYBEQ#t=2385

Let's see him beat this part. It's just a single minute so it can't be difficult, right?

When you can restart instantly and try over and over, it's really not
even if you suck, you will fluke your way through eventually

Unless you have decent shmup skills already, I doubt that.

But let's try the reverse anyway. Suppose you had a game that required you to press one of two buttons every 5 seconds, with a window of 2 seconds for pressing the button. Easy, right? Anyone could do it. How about if you had to do it for 18 hours straight without making a single mistake? Suddenly seems pretty hard to do, doesn't it.
The point is, having to keep up a certain level of play over a length of time is one aspect of difficulty. The level of play you need to have during that time is another.
Reducing one of the two aspects of difficulty makes the game easier, but it doesn't somehow make it not difficult at all.

If someone hands you a sniper rifle and says "ok, now shoot that PS4 over there. it's just one mile away. you get unlimited shots.", then you're probably going to hit it eventually. Doesn't make the shot any less difficult.

I guess it boils down to whether you see difficult as "not everyone can do this" or (also) as "will consume time and may induce rage upon repeated failure".

[copy-paster]

Battletoads
I've only reach stage 6 and never played it again...

Rockman & Forte
The whole stage are most brutal and cheapest level designs and difficulty I've ever played in the series ( Playing this with Rockman on GBA version equals of trying to fuck yourself ), even worse that the developer said that the game is targeted for younger kids, is the japanese kids was masochistic in that days ?
And this is the game I've ever beat using save states...

The first Ninja Gaiden on NES was brutal too, still can't beat the final boss's second form

[Skykid]

The hell? If anything, Vice is TOO easy for a game of its genre, and your bullets/grenades recharge to a small amount after a few seconds if you run out normally. Maybe not in the shooting gallery, but those are both extremely easy and mostly there as a change of pace. It's your own fault if you're sucking there and out of ammo. I mean, shit, I'm not very good at Ninja Gaiden-style games and I didn't have any serious issues clearing it.

Just realised you guys are talking about Gun-Dec. Yeah, gotta side with Roo, Ed, that game is pretty easy but also kind of great while it lasts. I finished it in an evening in about an hour and a half iirc, same as watching a movie. Really, I have no idea why you would mess with the experience of beating such a short-lived game by save stating through it, but if that's your thing, that's your thing.

Personally I think classic games shine best when approached in the way they were intended.

[Stevens]

Someone mentioned the Sega CD version, but the Mega Drive version deserves mention:

The Adventures of Batman and Robin.

Technically it is amazing, but my fucking lord. Stage 1 and the start of stage 2 aren't bad. Then you get a ridiculously long shooting section towards the end of stage 2 complete with shitty checkpoints. Still not bad though..

Stage 3 is where a great game goes to shit. The Mad Hatter stage where toy robots spawn FUCKING ENDLESSLY. Which would be OK if you could move and shoot, but you can't, and you will die.

And when you do the power down makes it an impossible task.

You essentially have to no miss the entire game. Which I do believe is possible, but I just don't care enough anymore to try.\

I would be all over a remake where you can switch between fixed and free shot on the fly/and or a strafe button.

[Shepardus]

Why Super Meat Boy is a poor example of video game difficulty.

Interesting article. I do agree with many of the points it makes; I found Super Meat Boy boring and frustrating with mediocre controls/character physics, and I can't help but cringe whenever I see people state that difficult games in the modern age should punish death as little as possible and cite Super Meat Boy as a good example of this. In my experience such short cycles of repetition lead to burnout, frustration, and rage much faster than any traditionally-structured shmup I've played, where every run paces content to give me the variety of conquering stuff I'm already familiar with as well as things I'm less familiar with. With longer play sessions you're also encouraged to think more about your mistakes after each run, unlike Super Meat Boy which really encourages throwing yourself against the wall repeatedly with no breaks in between attempts. This structure also limits the options for improvement since you can't really improve your performance and consistency in earlier stages to help you in the later stages, and it also limits the types of difficulty the game can take advantage of. I'm not sure I would say that Super Meat Boy doesn't have difficulty like what the article says, but it certainly relies a lot more on the moment-to-moment difficulty than the difficulty of stringing different components together over time. The additional challenge of pulling everything off in a single run allows shmups to have easier moment-to-moment difficulty while still being tough overall, and because of this lower moment-to-moment difficulty shmups feel less exhausting to me (yes, there are shmups where every moment is just as hard as anything Super Meat Boy throws at the player, but that's beside the point). Super Meat Boy also offers little of the self-motivated challenge like most good shmups do with their scoring systems - besides the fixed challenges designed by the devs, whether mandatory or optional, there's... speedrunning, I guess? The game doesn't do much to facilitate players introducing their own difficulty to the game and using the power of competition to take the game further than the developers' initial design, which I feel is a missed opportunity.

[Ed Oscuro]

I think "punish failure as little as possible" is a great design philosophy. Of course, it's still got to be enough of a punishment to serve the gameplay purposes; I wouldn't say that 10-second checkpoints and saving anywhere serve many gameplay designs well.

I wonder if it doesn't normally balance partly against progress awards. If you're able to just charge through (completing 5-minute quests in a Bethesda game also counts), then having no punishment for failure and overly generous progress awards and requirements means that there's essentially no point to the gameplay. "Playing" the game becomes more akin to just going sightseeing, and whatever it is you're expected to do in order to crank the movie reel along becomes a chore, instead of the point of the game.

If that's true, the balance or tension between these elements serves to regulate rewards in a game.