famousringo said
I remember playing a Contra game on the PS2. I have never played a harder Contra game before or since. Every step of the game required rote memorization of hazards and how to avoid them. In order to learn about these hazards, you had to die to them. After a series of deaths, you learned how to get to the next phase of the first level, so that when you have to start all over, you can waste all those lives learning the next phase of the first level. It was dehumanizing, like the game was trying to program me to be the perfect computer response to its hard-coded attack patterns. After we beat the first boss, my buddy and I got sick of it and never played it again. They spent so much time making it hard, they forgot to put the fun in. |
Now see there, you're detailing what I think could be one of two different things when it comes to difficulty. I think of something like Zelda or Resident Evil as hard - where the game forces you to think of every conceivable option in order to achieve a goal. That to me is the definition of hard.
What you're describing is something I see in games like Contra, Viewtiful Joe and god knows how many old school sh'mups where the game forces you to simply remember something by forcing you to suffer it the hard way. There's a huge difference, I'd rather learn to do something in progression rather than learn by steps.
Example in Zelda: "Hmm, I've done 'A' which didn't work, 'B' could work but I'd have to think about 'C' maybe as a contingency"
Example in Contra: "Ok I kill the guy with the rocket launcher, than big ass helicopter comes, I step back two inches and a nasty pops out the ground..."
Maybe this is a very badly written example or I couldn't define it clearly enough, but there's a difference between learning something, and being forced to remember something and I don't think that's a good way to prove difficulty in games.
