How hard is too hard?

Ever had the Rage? That all consuming wave of anger that makes you tear the Stuntman disc from your PS2 and Frisbee it out of the window? This is a thing that has happened to me. Truth. The same anger made me stomp into the garden to retrieve the offending circle of plastic, roughly dust it off and then shove it back into the PS2 with my fingers crossed, hoping that it would still be readable. Thankfully it was, and I persevered for another two hours, remembering the route, traffic patterns, speeds and instructions that would give me the precision skills to finally beat a level that stretched to five minutes long at most. Two hours.

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?

In Real Life

Games have influence, universal fact. From the innocuous way that playing Metro 2033 sent me to buy the novel it's based upon, to the debate around violent games that has recently flared up again. I'm not going to wade into said debate, because at the moment I don't think it's something that I can frame properly and say something worthwhile about. It's an extremely narrow view, but personal experience says violence in games hasn't affected me. I'm a lover of Tekken, and do you know what I take away from it? Not the need to go and punch someone in the face, but the urge to put a real life kung fu moviestar name to the games characters. As a for instance, Raven is obviously based on Wesley Snipes, Law and Lei are famously Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, Feng is clearly the guy with the rings from Kung Fu Hustle. Tekken bowl mode in the original Tekken Tag made me attempt to take up bowling as a hobby. I was terrible at it and I remain so.

So, I make real life decisions based upon what I've played. I suspect a lot of other people do too, and hopefully we can be well rounded and sensible enough to apply some common sense to those decisions. It's because of games that I developed a minor taste for adrenaline. I'm one of probably millions of people who took up skateboarding as a spotty teen after playing the first Tony Hawk games. I was rubbish, like most of us probably were, and I went on to getting my kicks on two wheels instead. I owe pretty much all of my scars to the mountain bike that I turned to after giving up on skating.

My best friend and I spend an awful lot of time on racing games, we've been karting several times to take the competition into real life. It turns out that most of the racecraft you learn in Gran Turismo can be quite useful. It takes a lot practice and adjustment, but the skills to learn a track, its braking points, racing lines, the fundamentals of drafting, and learning to judge grip translate quite handily from a gamepad to a kart. I can't speak for whether or not it applies to a proper sportscar as well though.

I learned about snowboarding from SSX. Although I don't ride, it does mean that I spend an awful lot of time on the Red Bull website, and of course, the reason I own a motorcycle is completely down to Road Rash. And this is just me. Aside from all of this I reckon games greatest influence is in the realm of music. How many of us have discovered new bands from a good licensed soundtrack? I can pretty much track back the entire range of my musical taste back to two games. Gran Turismo and Wipeout 2097. The rock from Gran Turismo, the electronica from Wipeout. I was 12 and 14 when I played these games. My mind was malleable. The Prodigy's Firestarter drilled itself into my brain and it's stayed there forever.

EA games in particular are great for finding new music. Say what you like about the games themselves, the licensed soundtracks have always seemed to be curated with care to maintain a particular atmosphere appropriate to the game it was a part of. From the laid back hip-hop of the NBA street games, the thundering electronica of SSX, the punk and indie of Burnout, to the rock and pop of FIFA. There are artists in those games who still have albums in my CD collection.

And now game music is flowing in the opposite direction. Where before, games companies bought in mainstream sounds, now original compositions are now going out and influencing tastes in the world outside of our hobby. A recent article, the one that actually inspired this post, in Edge Magazine detailed how Aeris' Theme from Final Fantasy VII and the theme from Skyrim have recently gatecrashed the Classic FM hall of fame. Aeris' theme is very high on the list, above several very famous classical pieces. Amongst gamers, it is rightly hailed as a masterpiece, and although it doesn't need it, it kind of feels good to have a piece of music so close to many people's hearts recognised by the relative mainstream.

We now live in a world where the London leg of the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds tour can sell out the Royal Albert Hall in a few minutes. Where Nobuo Uematsu's oeuvre can be considered a legitimate enough artform to be hosted at said venue. A world where the Final Fantasy VI opera can be performed live with genuine opera singers, backed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Voices. Most amazingly of all, the people performing this music, were obviously enjoying themselves. In case you haven't gathered yet, I was there. I was sat right above the stage. You could see the musicians faces and hear what the conductor was saying to them. It was an incredible experience. An event like Distant Worlds would not have happened in the UK even five years ago, and if it did it wouldn't be in a venue as prestigious as the Royal Albert Hall. I went to a Videogames Live concert a while back in Cardiff, and while the venue was large it still felt slightly under the radar. Flash forward a few years and Distant Worlds has all the hallmarks of a serious cultural event. It's amazing to see the change happening.

Less orchestral sounds are breaking out too. I'm a big fan of Bastion. I love its art, I love its story, I love the bluesy vibe woven by the narrator and the soundtrack. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the soundtrack for Christmas and the CD hasn't left my stereo since. The Bastion OST is pretty much the most listenable album I've heard in a very long time, by any mainstream artist or otherwise. Darren Korb's blend of complex beats, guitars in various esoteric tunings, strings and world instruments makes for an incredibly interesting listen. From the straightforward blues of The Pantheon, to the hazy opium den sitars of The Sole Regret, no two songs sound the same. People have asked what I'm listening to and are genuinely surprised when I tell them it's a game soundtrack. It's like they wonder for a moment why it's not all chiptune bleeps and bloops.

Then again, while chiptunes are still somewhat niche, there are slightly less underground producers out there working with synths mashed into all sorts of old consoles. Check out this cut from Joker. I recommend decent speakers. If you're a fan of the Hyperdub label you've probably heard of him. The synth genuinely sounds like its innards were transplanted from a Megadrive and the track itself sounds like something right out of Streets of Rage. It's not chart fodder for sure, but this is a producer with a record deal from an influential label using something that is, if not old games hardware, certainly sounds like it. It's people like this who will drag the sounds of our hobby out of the stereotypical darkened bedroom and into the daylight.

I genuinely feel like we're at the beginning of something here. Where the grand scores of games like Final Fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus and Journey find their way into regular play on Classic FM the way film scores have, and where composers step away from the orchestra and experiment with genre blending in the way Darren Korb and to a lesser extent, Akira Yamaoka have in their soundtracks to Bastion and Silent Hill. Eventually it might be perfectly normal to have a rack of game OSTs sat next to a rack of film soundtracks.

Gaming is culture too, and although some gamers might want to keep games underground, I personally think that if the music breaks into the mainstream, the rest of the world might be a bit more understanding about our sometimes obsessive hobby. Perhaps they might even wonder what they've been missing and give gaming a go themselves...