I hate difficulty beyond normal. Im there to play the game, watch the story unfold, and have fun. Not get beatup by the same guy for 2 hours.

God Hand isn't hard.

I wish all games were near impossible. It makes you feel so much more accomplished to beat one level that in todays gaming culture would take 20 mins but 10 years back would take 4-5 hours.

@Jim Reilly:
The game had it's moments. I had to replay the portion near the beginning when the first demon showed up at least twice until I beat it. There was one boss fight that took me probably more than half a dozen tries, and each time he had a sliver of health left.

Zelda could use a touch up in this department. Something along the lines of Majora's Mask's difficulty would be optimal.

It's true, but everyone knows this. games that are any good usually can find a good middle ground. It took me quite a few tries to beat the Strider parts of HL2 on normal. I find that there is a difference between "difficult" and "Hard", hard being like pac-man after 50 or so levels, and difficult being like General RAM in GOW.

thats a lie, God Hand is hard. If you have the patience to get the game and get into the flow you can beat, but to say it isn't challenging in the least? youz a liar!

wheres that pic from, because i love it!

I loved God Hand so much, i wish Clover, i mean Capcom make a God Hand 2!

@NitrousO:
You 'Hate' difficulties beyond normal?
Really?

Not everyone plays at your level so I think it's a good thing if a game can offer multiple difficulties to enable gamers of varying skill to still have a challenging and rewarding experience.

I don't think there's ever been a change of design intent, games were hard in the past because games had nothign else but being hard. Old games haven't always been the $5 VC purchase they are now, they were full priced products and had to give you value for the money. If the original Castlevania were easier you could blow through it in 15 minutes and nobody's happy buying a game that short. So they made it brutally hard so it'd take you 10 hours of practice before you can take those 15 minutes successfully. Games weren't made with just the intention of being difficult in the past, the difference now is we can fill 10 hours of gameplay with things other than difficulty and repetition.

Oh and for the record, God Hand isn't hard if you have any experience with games that encourage fisticuffs.

There's a difference between cheap hard, and good hard. Most games just increase the hitpoints of enemies, a la Halo, which is a joke and the game just feels dumb. However games like Ninja Gaiden and Call of Duty increase difficulty not by changing a game mechanic that you've gotten yourself used to in the normal mode, but by simply making the enemies smarter, more aggressive, more accurate, and harder to kill that way without cheapening the experience by giving them ridiculous amounts of hitpoints.

In Call of Duty and NG, I don't mind dieing because I know it's because I wasn't good enough, whereas something like Halo it's frustrating because the developers have to do things to artificially cheapen the experience in order to make it harder.

I like a game that is difficult but isn't unfair. Legendary on Halo 3 is a good example of where I like the difficulty, as long as I play smart I can win, but if I mess up the game instantly catches me and makes me pay for it.

As for the article's mention of "difficulty spikes" and then seemingly put off, I'm not really sure where they're coming from. A game should ramp up at a consistent pace (albeit at different rates and different times) but a difficulty spike is uncalled for when out of nowhere there's a point in the game that takes you an hour to beat because it's based on luck or perfect timing, or whatever.

There are several games that walk a fine line with me. I like a game that I can beat if I practice and work on it for a while. I like it if I have trouble beating it again if I don't play it for a while. I like a game that has a gradual difficulty curve, and that I get better at (on average) the more I play. Many Shmups are like this. Gate of Thunder is an excellent example. I seem to get a little better each time I play, so it keeps me coming back even though I still haven't beaten it.

I agree that there is a problem with difficulty spikes. Especially if the spike is an area that must be completed or passed to continue with the game. There is a part in Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance for the GBA that I cannot get past. Cruised along pretty well, enjoying the game until I got to that one room, and I have navigate a room faster than a large iron ball. If I beat the ball, I get the items I need to continue, if I don't, I have to try again. I cannot seem to get there faster than the ball after probably hundreds of tries and as a result, I gave up on the game. Haven't played it in over a year. Can't get past that, can't go any farther, the game might as well be over.

But I like difficulty spikes if they are not necessary to continue the game. The challenge comets in Super Mario Galaxy are an example of this. If I can't get the star on a comet level, it's okay, there's other levels I can go and complete. I can come back to the comet and try again later if I feel like it. A difficulty spike does not end the game in this case.

@JocktheMotie: Wait...are you kidding? CoD doesn't change the way the enemies react at all. Play CoD4 on the Epilogue on Easy and then the hardest difficulty and you'll see no difference, at least I didn't. CoD seems to have no AI whatsoever, it's so heavily scripted that they probably just gave them basic actions and called it a day.

It took months, but I felt a great sense of accomplishment after beating all the Story Mode missions in F-Zero GX on all difficulty levels, and beating Master Grand Prix with all 40 characters.

I´ll read the guy´s article later. But once games were something you had to master, to gain the skill to go through. Now you just have to learn how to input the commands and with patience you go with the flow.

I still play NES's Ninja Gaiden games and I love bullet hell shmups. I don't care if I die, it's fun to play, it's like a sport and I always come back. But (with the ones) today, I beat a game and say "farewell" (or do some sidequests/alt. modes/excuse to boot it up again). There is the sport-game (meaning skill based, not only soccer or basketball stuff) and the movie-like-game. I can play a sport-game over and over, but I can't see the same movie over and over until end of time.

Both are OK, but I'd like to see more balance in the options available. That's why I miss 2D, but I can't leave the stuff of now either.

I WANT A XBOX 360/WII/GAMECUBE/DREAMCAST (yes, DC) TO PLAY IKARUGA!!

First time I played god Hand, I hardly found it hard, just had to use all the moves you had on the exact momment, and that's something you get to get used in a couple of stages.

Second run, man, I found the game rather easy, and then, using the godly moves and getting a lot of cash with staying on death level. Even hard mode I found it rather easy, but still, I WANT GOD HAND 2!!!!

Now, if we are alking of games that are hard....... RESIDENT EVIL!!! If Capcom had made Devil May Cry withouth the infinite ammount of bullets and make it more like Resident Evil, difficulty Dante Must Die would had been pretty hard, but I found it hard

I hate hard games. I have Ninja Gaiden for PS3 and I hate it because I get stuck on the same boss for weeks and never get to advance the story.

Make the game challenging, don't make it difficult.

i like how there is a definate split in what is considered really change in difficulty and what is considered a cheap way to imitate difficulty. one guy says halo is a cheap cop out an another says its a good example. i think both are examples of difficulty being approached in a different way. if you increase the health it doesnt really make you think more about what your doing just have to the dude more, where as if you make the enemies more intelligent makes you consider your moves two and three steps ahead of yourself. i think the increasing health works for halo although i agree that its a cop out but it works for that games demographic where i like more of a chess feel to my gaming where i have to think ahead of myself rather then repeat the same motion many times over.

I play games to relax, not to frustrate myself. If something is unreasonably hard, it is a flaw in the game.
Right now, for instance, I'm in Okami, trying to race a wolf through the woods, but she is ten times faster than me. It has become clear to me that the only way to beat her is to race flawlessly, which is an exercise in frustration. This is a sequence which should have worked when you think to use your brush technique that slows down time - but it doesn't work on her. Not only is it frustratingly hard, but it doesn't even obey the games own rules.

I do like having an easy mode, and definitely appreciate it when easy mode is actually pitched right - Bioshock on easy mode is exactly the right level of difficulty for the way I want to play the game, and I've yet to actually die.
Games that include an easy mode but penalize you for using it are unacceptable. There are different play styles, and game designers need to realize that we don't all enjoy doing the same things over and over till we scream. They don't penalize people playing on the hard mode, and they shouldn't on easy mode either. I don't mind an extra achievement or unlockable for finishing it on hard; I don't care that much, and there should be a reward for putting yourself through that, but telling me I can't play the final level on easy mode is the equivalent of deleting your save when you die on hard, and pretty much guaranteed to make your game an insulting joke.

I remember getting so good with practice at games in the days of 8 and 16-bit that my parents stopped buying me games and instead rented one each weekend, because I only needed a weekend to finish them. (Biggest achievement I can recall: Beating Donkey Kong Country 2 with 100% without guides or help in 2.5 days)

If some friend talked to me about Battletoads being too hard I just used my motto: "No game is impossible". I never got angry when I lost, just shrugged it off and tried again, but I was a 9 year old kid with nothing else to do other than get good grades at school back then.

Fast forward 20 years and I'm not so hardcore. I choose the easiest difficulty setting whenever I can, especially in FPS or RPG games. I haven't run out of Hardened gamer blood though: I Love the insane challenges of Contra 4 and Shattered Soldier, or space shooters like the Gradius and Dodonpachi series, I don't find the Megaman games hard since I'm so used to playing them, and I love Ninja Gaiden Black even if I don't beat it on anything harder than Hard.

I guess it depends on the game I play if I want it to be hard or not. I wouldn't enjoy GTAIV if it was any harder but I won't forgive Tecmo if they make Ninja Gaiden 2 easier and make you sleep through the game once to unlock harder difficulties.

I'm sick of new games being too easy. I don't want to be able to beat games while barely trying at all. A walk in the park is a walk in the park... I'm sick of games being targeted to casuals in order to gain more $ at the expense of gamers who have been playing for a long time.

Nice read. I like a good challenge from a game that makes me think more, react faster and be more careful. What I don't like is when a game is hard just because of uncomfortable controls, bad camera movement or of the fact that the developers wanted to expand the play time of the game by unnecessarily increasing the difficulty at some of stages of the experience.

Hmmm...... personally i think making a game too difficult ruins the fun factor and ruins momentum. I think games should just continue to have changeable difficulty levels... so people who want to beaten into submission can be, but those who just want to experience the story can do so too.

i could never make it past 11-2 on super mario bros. :(

@PatMan33: Majora's Mask was easy, just like the rest of Zelda games which focus on exploration of the world rather than having hard enemies to beat.

Games have been getting easier for like past 10 years now, having said that there are 'hard' games out there with which I run out of patience with Lost Odyssey and the very last level of COD4 on veteran.

Super Mario Galaxy works because you can get through the main game without ever breaking a sweat if you want, but if you want to get all of the stars, you're going to have to face some pretty tough parts. Damn purple coins....

It really comes down to hard vs cheap. Playing Mike Tyson's knock out back in the day was the epitome of cheap, because the tiniest error and you had to start over from scratch.

When it feels like no matter how good you play you are being beaten for no sensible reason, then its frustrating. ESPECIALLY when you are then punished severely.

@TheContender: Yes that's something: people got older, with lots of things to do and games are only one of them. Fiding a pattern in a platformer of 8-bit era in order to go through was a puzzle harder than, say, one from God Of War. But we have to earn living, right? It needs time and stamina.

Well, I talked about movie-like games, but we always had movie-like games. But, I don't know. For example, JRPGs once were real games, now many of them are more like Anime Simulators with input here and there. Still fun, but I would not like to see things going thru a funnel until all is much alike.

It's cool to see genres merging, but if all the games, be they brawl, platformer, adventure, whatever, point you easily to completion like a theatre play script, it's not so good.

For difficulty I love a challenging game like God Hand over a game I just work easily through. But at the same time it needs to be simple to playthrough.

Like "I wanna be the guy", that game is mind-shatteringly difficult in a single run-through, but constantly punctuating your progress with save-points means it is never THAT bad. You have challenging sections, unbelievably so, but they never force you to do what you know you can do again. Definitely the worst thing about Okami for me was repeated bosses with no increase in difficulty. At least in DMC4 when they reintroduced bosses they were something different, like when Berial unleashed his purple flame on DMD. I like a difficult game but I don't like a difficult experience.

I don't believe in "difficuly spikes" or a difficulty level being "unfair." If a game has any sort of difficuly setting, I always set it on the hardest as soon as I start it. But games should be as hard as they possibly can be. If you don't like it and the game doesn't have a lesser difficulty setting for you, well tough toenails, don't buy the game.

Someday, I'd like to see some sort of game that is so difficult most players have to resort to hacks to get through it. And then eventually there will be those people that somehow managed to get past a level legitimately and everyone is youtubing their play to see how they did it. That's what I imagine the epitome of a true game should be.

The last game I truly enjoyed the difficulty of was No More Heroes. I went through 9 of the assasins with only the level 2 beam katanna. Multiple times only winning by my last 1/120 life bit. Winning by such small fraction really makes you feel like you accomplished something. After youtubing other people's stradegies out of curiosity, I couldn't find anyone playing it under the circumstances I did, and it made me think I had played the game that way it was truly meant, rather than cruising through the fights effortlessly as others had.

Hmm, I tend to side towards the easier of titles, now that I think of it, because I usually pick games, with more story. However, that does not stop me from picking up games that like to kick my ass, because it is rewarding to be able to beat them. lol

As an older gamer whose skills are not what they used to be, I appreciate the reduced difficulty and generous continue systems of todays games. I just don't have hours to waste trying to beat a difficult section or boss with so much going on in my life.

Example: if Bioshock was old school difficult and the Vita-Chamber system didn't exist. Would it have been as acclaimed if only a small number of people could complete it?

Variable difficulty levels takes care of a lot of the problems - you can breeze through Halo on the easier settings or crank it up to Legendary if you want a challenge. I usually play to be entertained, but it's still fun to tear through Gears on Insane every now and then.

@aka Bitter:
Don't know if the same rules apply on 360 as I played on PC, but I felt Vita-Chambers were fairly redundant anyway due to the ability to save anywhere. If I got raped by a monster closet or whatever, then over to the load screen I go, a rule that will see you in good stead for most PC games.
My top tip then is to save, and save often.
(As a side note, I intentionally never used a Vita-Chamber on my first playthrough of Bioshock, they just seemed to be too good to be true, so I avoided them in case it affected the game in any way.)

Remember that Flash game "The hardest game in the world" ? It lacked the only necessary thing to make it an enjoyable competition: REWARDS. After each level, or during it, there needed to be some rewarding artwork, cheers, whatever. But no, that game had to go out of its way to insult you and your mother. Also, it lacked another thing - stable collision-detection and controls. Every time your circle didn't hit an obstacle when it should have, or vice-versa, you just lost more faith in your reasoning to continue.

Games should just give difficulty options right from the start. And never repeat Doom3's hilarious Nightmare mode - it was easy, while mocking you and taking-out all ingame rewards (healthpack management).

@somarix: Btw, I also sometimes love when a game is too easy (or more correctly, "when I can set it to "very easy"). It's for when I'm bored but tired.

It seems like a design flaw to put a win-lose system in play for what is essentially an interactive story.

Conversely, it seems silly to hide lots of production and story behind what is supposed to be a test of skill.

It's nonsense to me. Unless the two concepts are sufficiently separated, they hinder eachothers purpose.

Games have to be easy otherwise casual gamers would get frustrated. blah blah game is too hard blah blah.

I like to play through on the harder difficulties to make it a challenge, but tend to leave the hardest alone on my first play through for 2 reasons:
1. It gives me a greater challenge to look forward to.
2. It means I can go through the game at a difficulty that while hard isn't punishing and highly repetitive (thanks to dying a lot).
This isn't always the case as (much like women's dress sizes and hot sauce) the words "Hard" and "Normal don't always mean the same thing. Sometimes "Hard" isn't, and sometimes all that lets up on easy is that the enemies are doing a fraction less damage.
I did play through CoD 4 on Veteran (I think that was what the hardest difficulty was called), simply because I unlocked it via the "Mock-up" time trial test. What made it harder than the other modes was the volume of enemies and the need to get the proper timing down for things. "The Mile High Club" is merely the most extreme example of this, but for any other mission not memorizing the patterns could mean hearing the same dialog a few times.

For a lot of the people I know though, one of the biggest reasons not to go through on the "Hardest" difficulty is that having to repeat things to get through a game can get very time consuming, and the way life is, time is a luxury in and of itself. If you're barely scrapping an hour or two here and there to game, you want to be able to remember an experience and that you time was well spent, not that you kept forgetting about that a-hole with the shotgun behind the third door.

Old games were more difficult because there wasn't much to them, they were really short usually, and without much story or detail graphically. They had to be hard to be worth their price. I think games like GTA and Final fantasy get away with being incredibly easy because they're a lot longer and have great stories. I don't remember dieing a single time in Final fantasy XII, but there would be a lot of people who did find it hard. Pixeljunk monsters was the opposite, really difficult, but no story and very basic gameplay and graphics.

When games have difficulty settings, I always go with normal, but in fps from now on I may play for a minute then restart on hard if it was too easy. I fear hard because I don't want to get near the end and then give up completing it cos there's one vexing part.

I think I'm in the group of people who prefer really difficult games.

It's not because I'm an elitist asshole who considers himself "hardcore," and just wants bragging rights about how easy Ninja Gaiden was for him.

It's just that... When I think back, all of my favorite video game experiences have been moments wherein I triumphed over some great video game evil. When a villain kicked my ass so thoroughly and for such a prolonged period of time, that I actually began to see him as an evil fucking villain. When my motivation, although entirely different, was just as passionate as my character's.

When you just want more than anything for that fucker to die, and after hours of being slaughtered (slightly less severely each time), you finally manage to end his miserable life.. Ah, it's euphoric.

Now, I realize that this could also be accomplished more accessibly with a superb story or a high level of interactivity/non-linearity. But there's something about that video game feel that an incredibly immersive, non-linear, interactive story just can't match for me. I like to feel like I'm playing a game, sometimes. Life bars and continues and impossible boss fights. It gets me nostalgic. It makes me remember why our hobby is the best in the world.

@somarix: That's funny, because I think that sometimes the reward comes from the player himself. The fact that you beat a game or a level, this knowledge, this thing that happens in the mind, I think it's wonderful, a great feeling. It's why I still play Tetris, it's why I see people in the arcade beating a Street Fighter-or-KOF-kinda-game and walking away without seeing the ending sequence. It's so Ryu: "the fight is all".

I like "interactive stories" too but I like to really feel why I'm the hero. So I like the three options: the competition, the story and the story-plus-competition. If there were only one of them, I would be sad.

I don't really think games are getting easier, and am personally quite annoyed with easy modes that turn out to be anything but.

Games should be balanced in the following way:
Easy: An average player should be able to complete the game without dying. A new gamer should die at most 2 or so times per level.
Normal: An average player should die at most 2 times per level.
Hard: An average player should die at most 5 or so times per level.

Assuming that levels are about 1 hour in play length.

I would agree, I haven't played anything decently hard since 1998, or something. The only thing which was has been hard since then was completing NGB, that was truly hard (and I feel good about completing) unlike other games where it feels more like finishing a movie, and getting to see what happens to the hero!