I learned something important that day, how to channel the rage. There are a lot of unforgivably difficult games out there and I have a bit of a weakness for them. I spend hours with them, getting ever more precise until I finally crack that one section that's giving me grief, before doing the same again on the next. Most infamous among these games at the moment for me is Trials Evolution, but the same thing applies to most of the really difficult games I've played through, from R-Type to Ikaruga, to Shinobi, Stuntman, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Vanquish, Geometry Wars, Comic Jumper or 'Splosion Man. And whilst I now rarely get to disc Frisbeeing levels of anger anymore it can still happen. 'Splosion Man's final boss in particular was so cheap it had me wanting to headbutt my way through a wall. But the rules still applied. Persevere, finish the game and then shout, "YOU LOSE!" at the developers, because that moment is what it's really all about. That moment of triumph where you feel like you've got one over on the twisted minds who have been torturing you for so long with their impossible yet oh so addictive game. There really is no feeling like it.
So in the right circumstances, difficulty is fun, if perhaps for a given value of fun. Or maybe instead, it's what is necessarily endured before you can enjoy the feeling of gratification that sweeps over you when you finally nail the level. If you're a gamer like me, who came up through the 8 and 16-bit eras, a certain amount of difficulty might even be expected, but there are times when the it can become a total turn off. Times when I'm not ashamed at all to say I'm playing on easy or normal modes. Those times are when story gets involved.
I still haven't beaten Final Fantasy X, a game known as one of the hardest in the series. JRPGs tell stories. It's what they are best at. As games, they mostly boil down to clicking through menus, but that's OK, because if you're anything like me, if you're playing a JRPG you aren't really there for the game. I was enjoying FFX to a point. It's a great story, beautifully told, but god is it hard. Being a book nerd, story trumps gameplay for me every time, I may like a challenging game, but I love being told a story. Sadly the difficulty of FFX started to get in the way of me enjoying the story around the point of the Zanarkand Cloister. I'd been trying all night to beat the boss there, and no matter what I tried, I couldn't. I put the game down and sadly, never went back. I know I'm right near the end, and weirdly, after all these years I've still not had the ending spoiled, so I have no clue about what happens next. I should probably pick it up again really.
Anyway, from then on I've consciously dialled down the difficulty of any games I'm playing where story is a major factor. I've just finished Catherine, and at the recommendation of the friend who lent it to me, I played it on easy. I'm not afraid to admit that. The game itself is still pretty difficult though, which makes me wonder about just how hard normal mode is. Crucially though, it's not so difficult as to get in the way of Catherine's downright fantastic story, and that's important. I'd much rather be digesting Catherine's musings on the nature of relationships than wracking my brains over it's complex block puzzles. The same applied to Bioshock Infinite, a game that I'm given to gushing over at every possible opportunity. I've completed it twice now, and even at normal difficulty (the level I played it at) it gets pretty hard pretty quickly. Finishing Bioshock once unlocks 1999 mode, which pretty much equates as, "the way games used to be mode." The thing is, I stayed away from 1999 mode, even though I was on my second playthrough. The reason was simply because there is so much to take in aside from the combat that the extra difficulty would divert my attention away from what I was trying to get out of the game. Namely, making sense of the game's events through the lens of a second playthrough. Now I know the story inside out, I may yet test my mettle against 1999 mode and let Bioshock's story take the back seat for a change.
Persona 4 is another good example of this. The game is continually demolishing me on the last floor of the second dungeon. The difficulty has got in the way of me progressing the plot, so I've stopped enjoying it and have had to put the game down and take a break. I really like where Persona 4 is going though, and that makes me want to see it through to the end, so I'm going to have to pick it back up eventually.
It seems that sometimes, difficulty can make or break a game. Personally I find that the purer and more pared back a game becomes, the more I'm willing to accept punishing difficulty and the more attractive the game becomes to me as a result. But when the game starts to deal with more complex issues, for example, relationships, commitment and oncoming fatherhood in the way that Catherine does, that same punishing difficulty can turn me off. I've spoken to a few gaming mates about this, and they feel the same. It's by no means a definitive study, but it does sort of confirm that I'm not just being fussy.
Not that any of that matters at the moment, because I'm back at the wall of pure and relentlessly difficult games, furiously bashing my forehead against a small, pink segment of bricks labelled Ms Splosion Man. I'm hating it for half of the time I'm spending on it. But I'm loving the other half.
Why on earth do I like doing this to myself?
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