Favorite Abusively Difficult Games
After our discussion yesterday, numerous (but not all) folk suggested that people who preferred more challenging "do it yourself"-ness in games were in the minority. I admitted that I, too, get frustrated in games, and while I usually do not want to be led by the nose, I often find myself saying, "Okay, I give, what am I supposed to do now?" For me - figuring it out for myself and conquering the tough challenges on my own is a big part of the fun. But there's a fine line between "fun" and "frustration" when it comes to difficulty or confusion level, often related to the quality of the game.

This got me thinking about really hard games. I'm talking the practically abusive games that we love. The ones where you think the designer(s) had some kind of passive-aggressive hatred of players, and wanted to punish them. The kinds of games that seemed to want to bend you over, spank you with a pledge paddle, and make you say, "Thank you sir! May I have another?"

You don't see many of them these days. At least, you don't see many of them where there isn't some kind of difficulty level setting so you can dial it down to taste. I have been playing a couple of old Nintendo games from the 8- and 16-bit era, and noted that designers of the era still had that coin-op arcade-game mentality, killing the player within two minutes as if the NES needed a constant diet of quarters.

But some games are worse than others. Even some arcade games just seemed to reach out and almost physically pimp-slap the player. At least, they did to me. Maybe it was just because I sucked. But, for some reason, a few of them I still loved, in spite of our abusive relationship. The games turned my crank as they beat me to a pulp. I never really grew to be their master, but in some cases I played long enough and hard enough that I could at least hold my own for a while.

Here are the most abusively difficult games that I still loved in spite of - or because of - the punishment they doled out on me:

Sinistar
I heard in an interview with one of the developers that this arcade game was originally a lot easier, but the manufacturer was worried that it would not suck down the quarters fast enough. So they cranked up the difficulty to a level for release, and now simply beating the first level is something of an accomplishment. I think I've made it to level three once or twice. Once Sinistar becomes "live," you'd better pray you've created enough Sinibombs, because that giant space station with a face will hunt you through the entire map, knocking asteroids out of his way, and then EATING YOU. In space. The game is sheer evil, and is one of my favorites from the arcade.

"Beware, I live!"

The Bard's Tale
Okay, I'd forgotten about how horribly difficult this one was just to get started on. If you decided to create your own party - one without the bard's starting gear of a magic horn (am I remembering this correctly? Help me out here, guys... it's been a while), you ended up facing some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing where the survivors of a dozen failed attempts to get through the first two hours of the game would end up getting together into some kind of "super-party" which actually had a prayer of making it through fifth level or something. Again, the details are sketchy, and I don't remember how easy it was to save or load games. But I imagine the overpowered default starting party came about as a result of playtesting, when the QA guys screamed bloody murder about how they would NEVER see the end of the game.

Falcon 4.0
The game had a manual with lessons in it that mirrored actual flight school for F-16 "drivers," co-written by an actual F-16 instructor. And you needed to go through them, because the game was hopelessly complicated. Just getting your missiles armed and ready to fire and in a radar mode where they could actually hit something took some serious effort. In real life, this all makes sense, because you don't want pilots accidentally thumbing the "A" button and sending a missile off to blow up whatever little passenger plane happens to be within 20 miles in front of them.

The first time I got into a particular type of stall, I swore the game was bugged, because it didn't behave anything like a real aircraft. I later discovered a whole chapter in the manual devoted to this condition, which arises because the F-16's on-board computer gets confused by the fact the plane is going "backwards" (it's dropping tail-first). You have to first hit the "manual override" button to disable the fly-by-wire interpretations of your control inputs. So, I guess you could say it's a bug, but it's actually an accurate simulation of a real-world bug and standard operating procedure of the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Add to this some enemy missiles that were practically impossible to dodge, bombs that would blow YOU up if you dropped them too low, insanely complex operating procedures for locking and firing a maverick missile at a tank, landing gear that felt like it was made out of glass and required HOURS of practice just to learn how to land properly, and a dynamic campaign that felt like drinking from a firehose with sheer task overload, and you had a torture device masquerading as entertainment. Amazingly, I thought this was incredible fun. I still do. Blowing up a tank in a video game is no big deal. Blowing one up in Falcon 4.0 was an accomplishment that almost made you believe the Air Force could set you in a cockpit of the real thing tomorrow.

(Incidentally, Lock-On: Modern Air Combat is just as psychotic in its adherence to realism, though I haven't really gotten into it like I got into Falcon 4.0 back in the day.

Streak
This was a game created by my old company, Singletrac. I wasn't on the development team, but I loved the game. Streak was Singletrac's poorly-marketed attempt to go with a new publisher (our new owners) and IP with what we'd learned from Jet Moto. The game was about hoverboard racing, and your maximum speed was based on "confidence" that you built up by doing ridiculously tricky and risky stunts in the middle of a race. And yeah, there were other games that came later and stole our thunder (and got accolades for their innovation), but we were there first. But the game was also pretty vicious in its difficulty level. It was designed, tested, and produced by veterans of the Jet Moto series, and they made a game which was moderately challenging for them. Which meant practically impossible to unlock the last levels for anybody else. But I loved the game. Maybe because I was a Jet Moto development veteran who thought the game was only somewhat too difficult.

Suspended
Sheer evil in a text adventure, by Infocom. You played some dude in suspended animation, who is supposed to be the "brains" of a facility that controls a terra-formed planet. However, you are stuck inside your chamber, unable to physically interract with the world. Instead, you control a handful of robots, each with dramatically unique capabilities and temperments. For example, only one robot has visual sensors and can actually "see" a room. Only one other can hear what's going on. One can perform diagnostics on the machinery, but it always recites its findings in the form of abstract-sounding poetry.

You wake up with the planet in a state of crisis because the machinery falling apart. There are a whole bunch of colonists who are trying to break into the facility to kill you and replace you with another controller. So you have a limited number of turns to use these robots to repair the damage and make things right again. If it sounds nuts, that's because it is. I can't recall how many times I played this game before giving up, unsure if I'd really made any progress.

Okay. There's my list. There are plenty of harder games I've played that I considered (anybody else play one of the first graphic adventure games, "The Wizard and the Princess," by Sierra? Nasty ultra-lethal maze in practically the first room! Well, first location in the desert), but they weren't games I really liked as much as these.

So - your turn. What are your favorite, abusively difficult games? Do you have any?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:13 AM (Permalink)