The toughest games ever.. according to GameDaily

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Words Of Wisdom said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:

Words Of Wisdom said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:
Games have been getting easier and easier for decades.

Easily disprovable generalization. 

The video I posted above is of a game released in 2004.  Feel free to pee your pants while watching (the music is also brilliant).

I should have added "Outside of a minority of SHMUP masochists."  Yeah I know about bullet hell games and they're really fun to watch.  They make our current top 50 games every month look like dumbed down casual trash.  Bullet hell gamers are the only true 1337 hardcore gamers around.  Ikaruga's about as much as I can handle, and barely.

But I think bullet hell games are some sort of sick demented alternate future of 80s gaming, where 2D games, which were already hard as hell, just got harder and harder, instead of getting replaced with easier 3D versions.  I don't know of any 3D equivalent to that madness.  I guess a 3D version of bullet hell would be trying to fly through the virtual reality area in The Lawnmower Man, and rotating your body to fit through tiny holes in the walls.  They should make one like that on Wii and PS3 for tilt controls to rotate your body.

Games haven't necessarily gotten easier so much as they've simply changed.

Most games are no longer designed with the intent of being played in a single sitting. 

Few games use the endless levels + high score pattern now so the game is over when you finish and not when it gets too fast for you.

A lot of older game mechanics have simply been phased out.

Yeah I think it's partly due to today's huge stories and huge cutscenes.  When developers dump tons of money into a half hour movie at the end, they want people to see it.  And when you pay writers to come up with zany plot twists you want people to find out what happens.  Now nobody can get away with a screen that says "A winner is you!" anymore, or just tell you in text that you learned the secret of love and friendship.

And especially cliffhanger endings for for forced trilogies or "episodes."  It used to be that beating a game was near impossible, but now they actually want everybody to beat the game since the ending is an advertisement for the sequel.

But from a technological standpoint, I mainly blame the jump from 2D to 3D.  When you're controlling movement and aiming in 3 axes at once, the level of precision 2D games require is impossible.  I'm just glad the spirit of Smash TV lives on in games like Geometry Wars and hopefully that new Zombie Apocalypse game.