Mario: Lost Levels (Mario 2) was quite fun, but the difficulty was pretty extreme compared to the original. In particular, I remember a section (in 3-X, I think) which required the player to make a blind jump from the top of the screen and land a bounce on a Parakoopa to proceed.
Super Meat Boy isn’t too hard for the most part, but Cotton Alley’s Dark World presented a decent challenge. Even still, I can think of a few other indie platformers which were far worse, even without getting into games designed to beat the player. Mighty Jill Off! is probably a decent example.
One design point I’ve noticed in a lot of games is that the easiness seems to be designed wrong. I feel occasional leniency is fine or even good in a game such as specific save checkpoints or reevaluating a control scheme. However, the game shouldn’t play itself and it should attempt to urge the player to improve. I mean, that’s where well planned level design comes into play. Don’t give shortcut commands; add a training mode designed to teach people how to play. Don’t allow people to auto jump across a gap; make gaps in the first few levels non-penalties so the player learns the right timing/spacing. Regenerating health is a tossup. I actually lean against including it and using health packs instead but in some games like Portal it works. Then again, Portal is a bit of a special case since the majority of damage is either instant kill anyways or designed more as a secondary sensory feedback of the real challenge of the puzzles.
Actually, that does touch on a decent concept that could stand to be used better–secondary challenges. In theory the Achievement system in games should aid this but it seems to wind up hindering due to people trying to use loopholes or the goals themselves simply being easy. Been borrowing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance recently and some things with it are interesting. Death is permanent but a dead character doesn’t necessarily mean a mission failure. It gives you an incentive to play well even though it’s not an instant game over. Then again, getting a lot of allies killed will hurt your future chances of success later on especially since the game is overtly trying to kill you.
In my opinion, it’s actually better for the industry to train players to improve because it opens up more gameplay options. That way, making a game easy is more of a design choice than a requirement because there aren’t any players with skill at all.
FE is easy in general and Path of Radiance is super easy I don’t like the way it handles character death either because unless you have played the game once before you arn’t really sure who is okay to lose and who losing will make the game pretty much impossible later on this isn’t a problem in Path of Radiance once you realize Ike can solo the entire game on hard mode. I think super robot wars does a much better system where you get an award for having nobody die and accomplishing some objective killing sub boss/winning in X turns/killing X with Y, and the only penalty for dying is you have to spend some gold on repairs and they don’t get the end of battle bonus XP.
I do agree that in general most games I’ve played didn’t give me a challenge. The last one I played that had me angry was playing God of War II on the hardest difficulty and the Arena mode in God of War I.
Oh wow, I see what happened there. No that wasn’t to you, and sorry cause it very clearly looks like that. I was trying to type a reply to Jos about the name of the game at work on my phone, but it was being a piece of shit and kept fucking up and finally I got pissed and just typed “Doki Doki Panic” instead of trying to explain why. Sadly, during this 10+ minute pain in the ass, you posted and it made it look like I was just being a dick to you for no reason. Hahahaha. Yeah, sorry about the confusion. Any posts I make between 8am-5pm Monday-Friday are usually brief or auto-corrected or just short as fuck, depending on what my phone does with the hospital internet.
I agree with this. On a sidenote, one of my biggest gripes with a lot of modern action games (besides the pre-school difficulty) is the constant inclusion of new abilities that are used once in the “oh look at this new” section, and then maybe once again at the end. Aside from that, they are used almost solely at the players discretion (i.e. never) because they bring nothing new to the table for normal gameplay purposes and are basically existing powers with a different coat of paint. I prefer the games where you have a handful of abilities at the start, and the levels/enemies are designed to force you to use what you were already given in new ways that may not have been obvious from the get-go, but are then apparant as you get more comfortable with how they work and the functions that they can apply.
God of War versus say, Rocket Knight Adventures is a pretty good example of what I mean. While I’m aware that God of War was more of an excuse for a game designer to get to play director, and not saying it’s terrible, I just definitely dislike that aspect. But 16-bit action games were fucking boss. And I don’t really use that adjective. Also, Treasure might be the best game company ever.
Yeah there’s only a handful of people I’d be that big of a dick to, and you’re definitely nowhere near that list haha. Sorry again, even though it was a bit of confusing I’m sure you were still like “wtf is this guy serious” for at least a few hours lol.
Well, a lot of that seems to be a combination of too many abilities plus poor planning in level design. I mean, if a move is only used twice (and it’s not something with limited ammo that’s “too awesome to use”) then why put it in? Then again, I’m not in the industry making big cash. *shrug *Though there’s also the argument that some players lack the ability to be creative. Actually, no. That goes back to the concept of using earlier levels to train the player to learn the mechanics.
ReSe was a blast. Still a bit salty I lost 3 in a row when I was up 2 games against ATL. Definitely choked when it came to Haggar and Wesker. Also played a bunch of games of Tetris Attack with East and beat him pretty bad when we were playing time trial. I fucking love that game. Overall, ReSe was fun as hell I’ll be sure to try to make it to the next one.
On the PSN store you can download PS1 classics. How is the overall quality of the games? I know that there were a few games that when played on PS2 had some issues. I think Legend of Mana was one, where if you had the buffering set to smooth or some shit the game ran at like 2x speed.
I’m mainly looking at Alundra and Xenogears. Possibly others, but those two primarily. And I don’t mean absolute frame perfect. Just not major slowdown or terrible music quality or bad screen tearing or anything.
lol Jimmy I get what you mean on the introducing new abilities for no real point. I love how in games like Lords of Shadow, they give you some new ability that you use once to get past the bostacle that’s right in front of you, then you hardly use it again for the rest of the game.
All this talk of platformers makes me wanna play Tomba again, that game was the shit.
I haven’t noticed any problems with the PS1 games I’ve downloaded on the PSN. The only ones I really sank any time into though were Suikoden and Parasite Eve, so I can’t speak for everything.
I just got off my ass and ordered Silhouette Mirage on eBay. Paid and shipping baby.
And yeah, Lords of Shadow was great, but not for the gameplay. The gameplay was decent, but nothing new that was introduced revolutionized anything. There were so many games that either added next to nothing new, the stuff they added that was new was good and could be used for a lot of things, or just solid level design in general that was thought provoking. Rocket Knight Adventures is such a good example of a solid game. Old school Mario games. Fucking GUNSTAR HEROES. Dynamite Headdy! Alien Soldier!
…
I just named three more Treasure games.
EDIT:
Super Mario Galaxy 2. It introduced a lot of outfits that were designed for specific areas, and some of them you didn’t use that much. But Cloud Mario. Fucking Cloud Mario. Best new outfit. So much use and the most versatile thing in that game because it’s applications were based on the different jumps you used before planting the clouds. It’s primary function was to access the inaccessible, but it also allowed you to access the already accessible even easier and create new shortcuts and just have a lot of fun with it. Something along the lines of Cloud Mario in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is what new games need to strive for when they make a power-up.
If you’re not beating every mode on Hard without losing a character, you’re doing it wrong.
The only thing you’re correct about is that Path of Radiance is by far the easiest FE game because Ike is ridiculous.
