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?

Ending the neglect.

The blog has taken a serious ignoring from me of late. It's my own fault really, and I thought that I had better explain myself.

It all started, as these things usually do, with a borrowed game. I'd just come off the back of my second run of Bioshock Infinite, and I was looking for something to play. At the same time, I was getting ranted at by my best mate because I'd had his copy of Catherine for something like six months and hadn't touched it. So I bowed to his will and finally slipped Catherine into my disc tray.

What. A. Game.

If you haven't played it, I urge you to go find a copy and fire it up as soon as you're done with The Last of Us, or any other major new release you're playing. Don't expect high octane thrills though. Catherine is a slow burning and thoroughly grown up game, dealing with adult themes like commitment, infidelity, jealousy, fatherhood, and yes, even a bit of sex. And that's before you get to some of the deep seated psychological traumas experienced by the supporting cast. It's tautly written, beautifully voice acted and looks and animates like a top quality Anime. Best of all, the game has a proper morality system that, if you answer truthfully, can surprisingly accurately gauge the kind of person you are. It's spooky.

If you've heard anything about Catherine at all, you'll know the meat of the game itself is a set of melon twisting block puzzles. They're worked into the narrative more effectively than I first imagined they would be, and even though they're hard (even on easy mode) they're more than worth persevering with because of that fantastic story. If you're the sort that doesn't always need huge explosions and enormous bodycounts to have fun, play the game, then evangelise about it to all of your gamer buddies. It's that good.

Anyway, I decided I liked Catherine so much, it was worth blogging about, but while I was dreaming up a post, I stumbled upon the Twisted Pixel Bundle on XBLA. I paid my 800 points, because I thought it would be a good way of cleansing the gaming palette before I moved onto something a bit more substantial. Before I knew it, I was chomping critters down in The Maw. It was short, but interesting though it's not particularly special, even if there is more than a little something Nintendo 64-ish about it. Then I tried 'Splosion Man. And it chewed me to a pulp. 'Splosion man is old-school hard. The week I spent playing it was basically four days worth of sheer fury, with a half a day's worth of end of level elation weaved through them, and the last half day's worth of time spent humming the Donut Song. It's an earworm. I haven't played many games that demand as much precision or practice as 'Splosion Man, but I enjoyed it immensely, even as it tested my abilities, and my temper, to destruction. I finished it, one rainy Saturday evening at my girlfriend's house and I decided I had a blog post about difficult games that I could put up on Monday.

Monday rolled around and Twisted Pixel struck again with the Comic Jumper. I was only going to give it half an hour to see if it was any good. Two and a half hours of laughter, and one Time Cop reference later, I was hooked into another bastard hard game. Comic Jumper is worth the play, if only for it's hilarious script. Alongside Portal and it's sequel, it counts as one of the few truly laugh out loud games in my library. But good lord was it hard, perhaps more so than 'Splosion Man. It's hybrid platformer/twin stick shooter playstyle really taxes the abilities, but it keeps drawing you back with every line of dialogue. If the Twisted Pixel bundle is still available, get it. These two games alone are well worth the 800 point cost of entry, and I haven't even started Ms 'Splosion Man yet. Tell a lie, I've played three levels of it. It's 'Splosion man but more so. More madcap, more difficulty, more irrational meat love, more Big Science. But I needed a break from relentless difficulty for a while.

So, with Comic Jumper finished, Ms 'Splosion man on ice, and my gaming palette suitably cleansed, I'm ashamed to say that I'd forgotten all about the blog. I decided to fire up the last of the proper current gen games in my backlog. Max Payne 3. I don't know why I waited so long to play it. The first Max Payne was the first game I really played that made an effort to tell a mature story, rather than trying to be mature by interjecting every sentence with an F bomb. It blew sixteen year old me away, and I've held Max in a special place in my gaming heart ever since. The sympathetic update of the decade old gameplay, along with the return of Max's voice actor and a great noir script that was faithful to the spirit of the first two Remedy developed titles meant that Max Payne 3 blew me away all over again. But what really grabbed me, and kept me marvelling, was the level of detail throughout the game. The lines in Max's face, the downright incredible animation, the gloss of the Sao Paulo rich boy's night club, the squalor down in the favelas and the stellar voice acting come together to make Max Payne 3 sparkle like the crown jewels. A special mention is owed to the cutscenes too. If you're a fan of the process of film making in any way, give Max's cutscenes a watch. They're beautifully shot, looking like Man on Fire by way of a South American gangster flick. Whoever the director of those cutscenes was, I need to see more of his work. Hell, I'd even like to see him direct a film. They're that good.

So, now I'm almost out of current gen games. I'm still not feeling the urge to play Ms 'Splosion Man just yet, I've hit a wall in my normal fall back of Trials Evolution and Deadly Premonition is going to take some working up to, so I've gone back to Sonic Generations. It's still just as awesome as I remember it, and it turns out that I've missed loads of collectables. I generally ignore collectables, but blasting through Sonic Generations' celebration of one of my first gaming loves is too much fun to let my aversion to collecting things get in the way. It does mean however, that my gaming is much less compulsive than it used to be, which has opened up time for a post. At last.

And there you have it. The reason I've neglected the games blog is because I've been playing games. Not a bad reason all in all, but no excuse really.

Gaming.

It takes over your life if you let it.