Gaming too easy ... try these!

[abradley]

One of the main complaints now a'days about computer gaming is, 'It's dumbed down', too easy and in many ways it's true. But is that a bad thing, like one of my favorite CRPGs is Morrowind, great scenery, like the leveling system, and not too difficult once you know the tricks, like my low level PC took on one of the biggest baddest guys who was decked out in the best armour and was armed with a weapon of unspeakable power. My pc was decked out in a Dark Brotherhood outfit (Leather+) and using a dagger, no he didn't sneak up on him, it was a face to face battle that had my PC near exhausted and the daggers almost completely dulled near the end. How did he do it, dashed in close, face to face, and started daggering, didn't give the foe a chance to fight back. You can do that in Morrowind. Too easy, but fun.

At Gamasutra.com there'a an old (2007) article entitled Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games, you'll notice it's not 'The most difficult games ..', it's just 20 difficult, the author does say:

Take note: although some of the hardest games ever made are on this list, it is by no means a list of the absolute hardest games. That’s why it includes Mischief Makers before Alien Storm; not because the latter game isn’t harder, but because Mischief Makers’ difficulty is particularly instructive. Of course, both of them pale before the terrible majesty of Sinistar.

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The mix includes mainly arcade games, completely beyond my abilities (old age and shaky), but there are three that look interesting, Deadly Towers, Rogue, and The Bards Tale 2. Haven't played any of the 20 mentioned, did mess with Rogue but the graphics and commands turned me off.

CRPG Addict this to say about Rogue:

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/02/rogue-most-difficult-crpg-ive-played.html
Rogue was the second game I played as part of this little project, and it nearly ended the project.

Computer games can up the difficulty--and, hence, much of the excitement--based on how often they allow you to save the game. If I recall correctly, the first few editions of Might and Magic only allow you to save at inns. Every time something good happened to your party out in the world, you'd pray that you could make it back to an inn to save your progress. Ultima IV, at least for the C64, wouldn't let you save inside dungeons. I can't remember how many times I entered the Stygian Abyss only to be killed on the seventh level. Modern CRPGs, I would argue, make it far too easy. Why carefully manage your resources and spells, use a thief to scout ahead, craft a plan of battle if you can just save and reload when the battle goes ill? When playing newer games, I force myself to save only once when I enter a new map and not again until I leave. That way, if my character dies, it actually has consequences.

Well. Someone should have told me about Rogue. In all my previous CRPG playing, I had never played it or any of the "Roguelike" games. Here's the key difference between Rogue and any other game you might play: permanent death. You see, while you can save your game for later play, every time you start up Rogue and choose to continue your progress, the game deletes the save file. If your character dies, he dies permanently. There's no reloading. You can't try to take on that dragon with only a mace "just to see what happens" or use an unidentified potion "just to test it." There is no testing, no trial runs, in Rogue.

Link to video.

Am thinking of trying 'The Bards Tale', that means going back to hand drawn mapping ... am spoiled with automapping.

Another item, these games are older, need Emulators, Android emulators, plus the games are small so should work on handhelds.

 

[PhilBowles]

One of the main complaints now a'days about computer gaming is, 'It's dumbed down', too easy and in many ways it's true. But is that a bad thing, like one of my favorite CRPGs is Morrowind, great scenery, like the leveling system, and not too difficult once you know the tricks, like my low level PC took on one of the biggest baddest guys who was decked out in the best armour and was armed with a weapon of unspeakable power. My pc was decked out in a Dark Brotherhood outfit (Leather+) and using a dagger, no he didn't sneak up on him, it was a face to face battle that had my PC near exhausted and the daggers almost completely dulled near the end. How did he do it, dashed in close, face to face, and started daggering, didn't give the foe a chance to fight back. You can do that in Morrowind. Too easy, but fun.

At Gamasutra.com there'a an old (2007) article entitled Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games, you'll notice it's not 'The most difficult games ..', it's just 20 difficult, the author does say: .

The mix includes mainly arcade games, completely beyond my abilities (old age and shaky), but there are three that look interesting, Deadly Towers, Rogue, and The Bards Tale 2. Haven't played any of the 20 mentioned, did mess with Rogue but the graphics and commands turned me off.

CRPG Addict this to say about Rogue:


Link to video.

Am thinking of trying 'The Bards Tale', that means going back to hand drawn mapping ... am spoiled with automapping.

Another item, these games are older, need Emulators, Android emulators, plus the games are small so should work on handhelds.

I've been going back to The Bard's Tale a few times recently - don't worry about needing to map, it's hard enough to survive Skara Brae (which has an associated map printout) before you even get to the other levels... I remember it being easier at the time.

 

[civvver]

I think a lot of the perceived difficulty was really just tedious or annoying stuff like saving only at inns for example, or having an item weight limit or having to eat food in ultima games. I think that since the old pc games may have lacked like graphics basically and a huge scope they might have tried to make up for it by adding a bunch of obnoxious stuff to make the game harder.

Like final fantasy, the original. It's not a very long game in terms of content and dungeons etc. But you have to grind a ton of levels and gear to stand a chance which makes it long.

Idk a lot of this stuff we just accepted cus there weren't alternatives. I don't really miss it that much. I've never been into super hard games anyway, I beat mass effect and dragon age stuff on normal levels, never felt like replaying on nightmare.

 

[sophie]

That's true, but there are a lot of games, particularly early RPGs that used time as a currency to dissuade safe play. Grinding is an example of this. In many games you can forgo grinding altogether, but the trade-off is you have to have a good command of the game's combat systems and fights are always going to be flying by the seat of your pants kind of affairs. It makes for a more exciting game, but also a more stressful one. You can counteract that by grinding sure, but I think the monotony in this case is intentional because they don't really want you to do that.

Pokemon is a good example of this. Items aside from pokeballs are almost entirely unnecessary. When I was younger I NEVER bought items in the first two generations, because technically speaking you can get by without them. The game tries to dissuade you from doing this though. Battles are tedious - you have to go through a lengthy "enter battle" animation and go through these drawn out introducing pokemon, there are all these menus you have to click through and there's a lot of delays between action. It's tedious, and it's supposed to be tedious because they don't want you to do it. Caves are a good example of this. The whole region is perpetual encounters and it's annoying, going through the tedium of battles against weak pokemon, and not only that but weak pokemon that cast annoying effects on yours. You can, of course, avoid all of this rather easily by simply buying repels, which saves you time and annoyance factor, but costs you experience (i.e. security) and money (the non-renewable resource in the game). The Pokecenter is another example of this. The game lets you heal all your pokemon and cure them of all effects any time you want for free. However you can only do this in a town and you can only do so in a pokecenter. The Pokecenter has really loud obnoxious music playing all the time when you're in them and healing your pokemon entails clicking through a really annoying series of text boxes, including a yes/no box, and after the healing is done you have to click through more boxes, thus making it likely that you'll accidentally re-initiate conversation with nurse joy meaning even MORE boxes to click through. It's not supposed to be a pleasant experience because the game doesn't want you using the pokecenters. The game wants you using potions. The central mechanic of pokemon is to annoy you into playing suboptimally because suboptimal play ultimately leads to more exciting play. Sure you can grind out for hours and always have 10 levels of advantage on any pokemon you fight, but how many trips to the pokecenter, how many level 5 zubats are you willing to kill to get to that point?

If an RPG is done well, grinding isn't there to force you to waste time. Grinding exists as a last resort that you can fall back on when you physically aren't capable of progressing. Because RPGs by design dictated by numbers rather than skill or mechanical mastery, which means it's possible to reach a state where the numbers literally prevent you from advancing. Grinding is a failsafe. Even if you lose all your money and are seriously underleveled, you can still go back to the starting zone and grind for awhile. This has the added benefit of making beating that boss that was wrecking you a more cathartic experience. Because grinding is tedious and the mechanics that enable grinding are also tedious, you're going to try to limit the time you spend grinding, so even when you are desperation grinding to beat a tough boss, you're going to do as little grinding as you need, meaning the fight is going to be exciting thus increasing the satisfaction you feel when you finally win.

Seriously, try a "no pokecenters, no/minimal grinding" pokemon run. It makes the game so much more exciting.

 

[civvver]

Another super hard game for no apparent reason except to be hard is Volgar the viking. Requires a lot of memorization of levels cus the controls kinda suck and you have zero hp.