I found that CoD4 fell apart for me at the (SPOILER?) arcadey helicopter mission. I switched to a lower difficulty and finished it – it was WELL worth it.

Speaking of which, I’ve found STALKER to be very uneven. Even on the hardest difficulty level some sections are unbearably easy and some are quite the opposite. The (SPOILER again?) crazy psychic monsters that do the line-of-sight attack add a great deal to the narrative with their presence – sort of like a cliff that you CAN climb, but the question is what does it mean to you?

I didn’t finish BioShock, but what I did play was hard play-wise but very easy resource-wise.

God Hand, on the other hand…while frequently cheap, it most purely offers the sort of continuous, limit-pushing brutality that forces you to really be on your game. And when you *are*, you can achieve amazing things. I can’t handle it, myself, but I’m watching a friend play my copy from time to time and it’s a thing to behold, that’s for sure. I’d still rather have most games follow the Bioshock accessibility mold, but the occasional God Hand or Ninja Gaiden would definitely be welcome.

He’s arguing that the gameplay has no effect on the story. But if a character is, say, a baddie, and in-game he is extraordinarily hard, you will see him as ‘more’ bad, more scary. The hardness contributes to characterisation.

Or if you need a long test of skill to reach an area (say, a last island, or a girlfriend’s bed, or a new guild or whatever), that achievement of reaching it becomes sweeter, it has more value, it becomes a ‘better’ place, one worth defending and so on and so on.

Challenge feeds in to narrative too. All gameplay does. Imagine Stalker but with a superhard space marine in the lead role. The feel, and the story, will be different. Certainly less scary and atmospheric.

Challenge is another game design tool, to be used as the game and narrative sees fit.

I tend to find strategy games are the most consistently hard games. FPS struggle to be hard without being unfair, since often you’re pitted against multiple enemies who technically should have the same skills as you (i.e not seeing through walls or being alerted to your presence) especially in ww2 shooters.

Maybe as AI develops we’ll be given a more fair hard experience, a shooter crossed with god hand….. hmmm I guess that would be something along the lines of serious sam?

Surely the whole concept of a game is for it to contain some kind of challenge. I vote for anything that doesnt, to be reclassified with some kind of derogatory term, perhaps “Nearly Interactive Movie” or “Watch it on Youtube”.

Yeah, but the AI generally won’t be as much of a dick about it. I’d rather beat a silent AI than play a properly difficult game against a dozen halfwit twelve-year-olds with no vocabulary beyond the word “gay.”

Also, you can put a single-player game on pause when the baby wakes up or the phone rings.

I left behind a large chunk of the ammo and money that Bioshock threw at me. I reached the final boss with everything maxed out. I also left a bunch of vending machines with loads of bought items lying in front of them. And I did this practically without using the vitae chambers. Bioshock’s gameplay was generally dire.

I think the term I’d use would be… ‘punishingly easy’.

Meanwhile, The Escapist have been long established in my mind as being a hell of a lot more verbose than it is smart, but I never expected they were so damned foolish that they’d decide putting an unremovable banner ad (which opens in the same screen and interrupts the video, seemingly irretrievably) over the top of a video is acceptable? I know bandwidth doesn’t pay for itself, but what impetus do I have to actually go to The Escapist and read ZP if they’re going to obscure the bottom half? At least your IGN-type sites with preliminary/afterward ad clips allow you to watch the ad, get past it, and view what you’re supposed to be viewing without obfuscation.

I think the changing difficulty level is just an indication of growing diversity in gaming?

I’m glad, that the mainstream has largely moved on from that. Research with young children has shown that they much more prefer to explore a game world, and make their own challenges, than meet set tasks by trying again and again. It can only be a good thing that Lego games, the Sims and the like are providing that.

I loved SS2 because of how difficult, stubborn, mocking and unforgiving it was. I love Stalker for the same reasons, and Blood Money scratches that ‘beat the game itch’.

But it’s not hard to see how those approaches are just not possible in an expanding industry, and where games can now actually tell a story. However, this might be because the game insustry has adopted narrative techniques from films. I’d be pissed if I had to read the same chapter, or see the same scene 3-4 times each before I got to the end.

I don’t think punishing difficulty is antithetic to narrative. See Stalker, at least in the early stages. But straight-repetition is.

I love a bit of those arcade style challenges, which are a differing form of difficulty and challenge than online or SS2/stalker-esque difficulties. I’m especially a sucker for shmups. I’m also very glad this has been left largely in the hands of ‘indies’, who cater for more niche tastes.

Like my love for broken game-boy techno, I would be very surprised if the mainstream turned out to be just as masochistic…