Hard Games - Part 1

So I'm in the middle of Demon's Souls at the moment.  When the game came out in 2009, it was lauded for being a fairly difficult game, at a time when hard games were not in vogue.  Even today there are plenty of crushingly-difficult retro-inspired platformers, but nothing with the high production values of the Souls series.

Why does this matter?  When I was a kid, games were expected to be tough, and for that reason I didn't beat very many of them.  I finished a small minority of the Sega Genesis games I owned - only the easiest of the bunch, like Lion King or Home Alone 2.  I was not a kid who persevered in the face of defeat, and I hated seeing Game Over screens.  Adventure games on the PC promised a way to see more story content than those old platformers anyway.  Certainly, they could be even harder, but with a walkthrough at hand, there was nothing stopping me.  I love adventure games and JRPGs to this day, and I have to admit that a big part of the appeal is that outright failure is pretty rare.

Without realizing it, though, something had stuck with me about those old Genesis games.  On a whim, I replayed Aladdin, an old favorite, while visiting my parent's house several years ago.  This game isn't known for difficulty, but I still remember feeling shock and elation when I beat it on the first try, on hard mode no less.  That feeling is extremely addictive.  After buying a NES after college, I quickly conquered the early Mario and Sonic games, before tackling a few games that (in my mind, at least) constitute my greatest gaming-related achievements.

There are really two "flavors" of difficult games, which I will lazily call the Castlevania model and the Contra model.

The first and third Castlevania games have some of the hardest single moments I've ever encountered - in particular, the crushingly difficult bosses.  The saving grace is that the game uses a checkpoint system with infinite continues, so that one needs to make that perfect execution only once.  For that reason, there's always the feeling of slow, but inevitable progress, no matter how hard each level is.  Beating those games is a great achievement, for sure, but it never felt impossible.  (The first game on NES, unfortunately, didn't allow you to turn the system off without restarting, but that's due solely to regional hardware differences.  I recommend the Game Boy Advance port.)  This checkpoint-based model is easily the most popular today, with games like Super Meat Boy, where level playthroughs can take just a few seconds.

The individual moments in Contra are never as hard as those in Castlevania.  The bosses can be tough, but they usually have recognizable patterns.  The real challenge of Contra is that you have to beat the whole thing with a limited number of lives and continues.  As a result, the game requires you to develop traits that are not often required in today's "angry nerd" gaming culture.

Making it most of the way through the game, only to succumb to a random and easily avoidable bullet is incredibly frustrating, if you don't learn to be patient and manage your expectations.  There would be days I would play Contra and not make one whit of new progress.  But surely and steadily I was getting better at the game.  It's easy to discount the extraordinary sense of accomplishment I felt when I finally beat Contra as rather vacuous, but it seems clear to me that I had become a better person in the process.

This model of game is usually seen as a relic of the arcade era, but it's received something of a comeback recently with the resurgence of rogue-likes like Spelunky.  Even when the levels are randomly generated, there's still plenty to be learned and memorized.

Next time I'll post a few tips for playing hard games.