Comment by yareally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yareally | Hacker News Reader

A lot of older games abused "cheap" ways to make the game more difficult (though still sometimes happens today, but not as often). Games of today, in some cases I think have been watered down for the sake of letting a more casual game player beat them before getting overly frustrated. However, not all games are like that and some of the games I've played in recent years are as hard as they come if you're upping the difficulty. If you're playing on easy/normal, then that's the issue :)

Just some things I recall from really bad games in the 90s and early 00s:

-Only having one or a few lives for the entire game

-No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)

-Ridiculously short timers for getting through an area

-No health meter (one hit and you're dead)

-Having to go back through areas of the game you already beat to do some inane mission that's slightly different and feels like it was added to pad the difficulty/play time

-Spawning for the sake of having more fodder thrown at you (or spawning in ridiculous areas like the ledge you're about to jump to and the enemy was not there before jumping). I still hate spawning to this day in most cases. If you just left an area and destroyed everything in sight, it should not be totally rebuilt as soon as you turn around.

-Unfairly slanting difficulty towards enemies (like bullets that travel through objects, while yours do not)

-Dying and having to restart a huge level all the way from the beginning

-Poor clipping so your weapon passes through enemies unscathed or you get hit by an enemy when you shouldn't have. Also clipping that results in you missing a platform when you clearly didn't.

-Poor controls (still a problem now, but nowhere as bad as it was)

My list is nowhere complete though and I'm sure others have plenty of annoyances to amend it with.

> -Only having one or a few lives for the entire game

> -No saves/continues (usually combined with the above)

Sometimes these mechanics define a genre, such as roguelikes. Permadeath and single saves makes games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup nail-biting experiences that keep you striving to improve, even though these turn-based games give you all the time in the world to plan your next move.

Granted, the audience for this kind of game is self-limiting, and the games themselves are designed around replayability. But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.

I can't tell you how many times I've lost a Nethack character in the Astral Planes, losing hundreds of thousands of turns and sometimes weeks of effort just before the end. But each time I died, I learned how to counter yet another combination of states that resulted in my death, and Nethack finally became boring when I could ascend in a few hours. This point took me 16 years to reach. Very, very few modern games can reach that level of engagement.

> But you see new games such as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls use similar negative-reinforcement techniques to create truly engaging experiences that some people find fun and addicting.

In fact, Dark Souls teaches you patience. You don't die a lot if you are sufficiently careful. There are a few unexpected traps but those are rare. Most of the time you will have to progress carefully, gauging the terrain, the aggro ranges of the monsters, carefully dodging and blocking their attacks until you understand their moveset enough to land counterattacks.

Dark Souls is a game of learning, but boy it is rewarding. You will find yourself storm easily through areas of the game that gave you a hard time once you have learned to take it slowly. But you could also die easily on very weak monster (like the torch Zombies when you return to the asylum) if you just think you can run and mash buttons without caution.

I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable gaming experience of these last years, and have poured much more hours into it that I would have liked to.

TV Tropes has an endless supply of these: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard

Great for nostalgia. :)

see also Angry Video Game Nerd [1] for some examples of accidentally difficult game design in older games.

[1] http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/

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