Grim Reaper's Game

We've all heard the term “Nintendo Hard”. If you haven't then you're probably at the wrong site. (Google can help you find more on whatever boring subjects you'd prefer to read about) Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a sucker for old school games. Honestly, though, I'm not a fan of the difficulty. I find it amusing at best but if you've read my previous articles, you know that I cheat a lot when it comes to beating any game that so much as looks at me funny. I'm a strange hybrid of gamer that prefers the nostalgia of retro gaming but thoroughly enjoys the benefits of games that have a “very easy” difficulty setting that in no way effects the outcome of the game.

I played it on "Narrative" and got the same ending as everyone else...

In my last article, I mentioned something called “artificial difficulty”. Some of you might be wondering what that was. (When you weren't wondering why I was displaying some rather creepy childhood cartoon crushes that I may or may not still maintain)

In games, you really have two kinds of difficulty. Kinds that you can control and kinds that you can't. For example: Bongo Bongo in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might be one of the harder bosses in that game. The reason is because he does a lot of damage and is kind of a pain in the butt to actually damage. This is the first kind of difficulty. You're in control of you character and the challenge comes from controlling your character in such a way that you can be victorious. Link dodge-rolls, shoots arrows, and attacks disembodied hands in just the way that you're accustomed to and if you lose, despite how much you might be yelling at the television through bitter, bitter tears of frustration, you ultimately have to admit that it was your fault that you lost.

Really Navi?!!! I just have to look at it with the Eye of Truth?!!! WHY DON'T YOU TRY TO DO IT THEN!!!!

The second kind of difficulty is what we call artificial difficulty. This is difficulty that you can't really control. This comes from poor game design. At the risk of beating a dead horse to undeath, creating some horrible My Little Pony: Zombies are Magic situation that will slowly sweep the nation's young-adult demographic, I'm going to refer back to the Sonic 06 example in his infuriating “Let's Speed It Up” segments.

Sonic is rushing down a linear road, going insanely fast. The challenge in this part should be the dodging of enemies and obstacles while keeping your ring count high. Sonic should be under your reasonable control, allowing you to rely on your wits and reflexes to complete this part. Anyone who has played this game understands that this isn't the case. The best wits and reflexes are thrown out the window when the game designers decided to put the camera in front of you instead of behind you, forcing you to watch the harmless terror behind you (glorious to see, but ultimately, benign) and taking your eyes off of the cars and debris which might be immediately in front of you, causing you to spill rings. Or, even worse, a pit-fall which instantly punishes you, the player, for what was ultimately the creator's screw-up. You're no longer in control of your destiny. You're at the hands of fate. And Fate, as we can recall from Chrono Cross, is a complete bitch in video games.

You killed Robo!

This is the kind of rookie mistake that Nintendo Hard games made. You'd think that this kind of crap couldn't have lasted long. This week I'll be reviewing the most infuriating Artificial Difficulty situation that survived for far too long.

Instant Death

This one is on the list because instant death is kind of a disproportionate punishment in most situations. The best of the worst examples of NES Hard games that best demonstrate this is Battletoads. Show me a man who has beaten the game, and I'll show you a man who knows that there really isn't that much “battling” for the toads to do in that game.

ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit!

I recently had the pleasure to try and tackle this game with a close friend. This was the first time that I would ever regret choosing a multi-player option in a game that wasn't a Mario Party game. (Only really applies when your friend up and leaves mid-game, forcing you to either wait for him to get back or restart the punishment all over again.) Everyone important knows about the infamous “hoverbikes” portion that consist of level three. One hit and you have died. The obstacles come at you really really fast that you either need millisecond reaction time, or have the entire course cataloged into muscle memory. (Just knowing where shit's coming from isn't good enough for the Battletoads.)

I wanted to know what came after that level for so long. So, after using cheats, and then realizing that cheats wouldn't help, gratuitous use of save states finally allowed me to see the rest of the game. I should point out here that this is why I regret choosing 2 Player: if you die in 2-Player, both of you have to restart that portion. So, unless me and my friend Jack got so synchronized that we could pilot two EVAs to take down the seventh Angel, we were doomed to repeat and repeat until luck allowed us to both make the jumps.

Well, much to my dismay, level 3 wasn't just a poorly planned level in comparison to the rest of the game; it was an appetizer for things to come. Out of the 12 levels that we had completed so far, only 3 involved actual battling. The rest were platforming nightmares that required you to know what was going to happen. The slightest error would result in your untimely death and many curses of frustration to the health bar that hadn't been touched in the past four hours.

This is artificial difficulty since just because I touched a spike, I'm doomed to repeat the entire ordeal over again. There is no forgiveness for error. And considering that after level 3, about 90% of all the following stages would be made of spikes, gas traps, or crushing platforms that all resulted in death. The enemies were no threat in comparison. (In case you wondering, the rest of the levels were 5% benign platforms, 4% empty space, and 1% enemies that you could actually fight)

In the old NES Hard games, this was understandable, since a great deal of games were ports from arcade games, and the purpose of arcade games was to make you spend as many quarters as humanely possible. You only got that by high life-turnover. While it took game developers a little while to catch on to the fact that playing at a home console was completely different from playing in an arcade, they all finally figured out that players rarely wanted to dish out $60 to be punished. 

But it kept going...

While the Sonic games kept pitfalls (which have always been an instant-death scenario) alive and well, the problem got worse in the 3D games, since there were a near-infinite amount of opportunities to fall into a pit. Most of this was because of the fact that the levels needed to seem like they were open spaces, just like the old Sega Genesis games did. But, they can't actually be open, so they needed a happy-medium: lots of open space in the nether in which every level hung. This made it so you were actively punished for trying to go off the beaten path by instant-death.

But, since I've said enough about Sonic to last at least a month, I'll use the best example I've ever had with this particular game design error:

Parasite Eve.

Back when Square could crap out a battle-system and label it 'innovative'

While a majority of the game was pretty nice and interesting, allowing for proper difficulty for the controls at the time, there was one moment that was unforgivable: the ending.

After defeating the three phases of the end boss, it was reduced to some blue, watery-looking skeleton thingy. They talked vaguely about how it was still dangerous, but, I brazenly walked right up to it. I now had a gun that did 9999 damage per shot, and even if the magic, phlebotinum bullets couldn't be used, my gun had dealt pretty sick damage before anyways. I'd be fine... Except that when I touched the beast, it devoured me instantly.

This being a Square RPG, I had to start back at the previous save point, which would be right before the boss-fight. So, I laugh at myself and beat the boss again. This time I run into the ship I'm on and head straight for the phone, figuring that if I'm going to die, I might as well save right now so I don't have to keep fighting the boss again. The phone was dead, not allowing me to save. The sad side-effect of this was that the time I used to run to use the phone had allowed the beast to catch up to me. He caught me and killed me. Again.

Lame, right? Well, I could laboriously detail every encounter in the ending, but to make a long story a little shorter, I died 7 times before ever seeing the ending. The ending sequence required you to know exactly what to do (rig the ship to explode) which was kind of counter-intuitive to what you wanted to do (run away from the monster slowly getting faster behind you).

There are still examples of this in games now, but luckily, most games have gotten better at not instantly killing you. Even the Resident Evil games have gotten better at that, although they did it at the expense of losing the “Survival Horror” part of the genre and slowly turned it into “zombie action shooter”. Don't get me wrong, I still love the series (and the fact that I go to work every day with my Tri-Cell messenger bag should be evidence of that), but it felt more like survival horror when an encounter with three, slowly-shambling zombies scared the crap out of you because you only had, like, 5 bullets and a boss fight was coming up soon.

She's about to become one hell of a Jill sandwich...

Best Evasion

Zelda has always been good about this one. If you fall, you lose a heart. If you get crushed, you lose a heart. In fact, I've played almost every Zelda game and I can't think of many (if any) situations that will instantly kill you. The only one that comes to mind is waiting until day 4 in Majora's Mask, and considering that you had 3 days leading up to that, it's not like that was completely unavoidable...

Procrastination is like masturbation: in the end, you'll kill everyone with the moon.

 As far as most games nowadays go, however, we've gone in the complete opposite direction with this, and while that's mostly a good thing, it does however eliminate the excitement that we used to have from old games. Earlier today I beat Castlevania: Bloodlines and my heartrate dramatically increased when fighting Dracula at the end. Compare to last night when I beat Fallout New Vegas and casually mowed down all of Caesar's Legion while listening to episodes of Scrubs.

So, now we have an interesting dilemma where the problem is the opposite: we don't get punished enough for our mistakes. We simply have to reload from our last save point. And since a lot of games now allow you to save wherever you want to, we've made it that much easier to enable my cheating. 

The only game that retained unreasonable punishment as a feature would have to be Steel Battalion. The game forced you to restart the entire game if you died or retreated from your mission. This, in my eyes, is excusable since it was going the extra mile to establish it as a mech-warrior simulator, including simulating what dying in a mech would mean, assuming that you had a bunch of clones or were reincarnated again and again as a mech pilot.

Welcome to life human clone #224, please report to basic training.