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Bring Challenge Back To Games

Posted January 7th 2004 by Andrew.

I've been going back and playing some of the classics of my childhood, especially on NES. Nearly everyone is familiar with, even if they haven't played, games like Mega Man 1 and 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Final Fantasy 2. For some reason or another I get an urge to play one of these games every now and again. What I really want to analyze in this editorial is the challenge of games. There are a lot of benefits to making games harder and smarter if the developer knows what they're doing. What we see this generation, though, is more games that teach you how to be even more of a couch slouch. Now where's the fun in that?

Why Games Keep Getting Easier

Games today are made for the casual gamer. While some do have time to sit down for a 4-hour gaming session, the older demographic that has come into gaming with the PS1 and PS2, do not. Increasingly busy teenagers don't have the time either. There are many changes involved in appealing to this demographic. Most games aren't difficult because you can't make any progress in 30 minutes anymore and people want quick gratification, just like in other media forms. Unfortunately, it looks as though the more gaming gets popular as an industry, the easier it's going to get. Games keep costing more to produce; levels and worlds continue to get bigger as graphical power increases, but game-makers don't have time to make all these individual instances that can test your talent. They have the tendency to create an open world and have you fight through it without testing the player all that much. That's fundamentally different than many side-scrolling games on the NES where each scene meant a new challenge or variation.

GameCube and GBA owners don't get more easier games compared to the other consoles. The exception, however, is from the big honchos themselves: Nintendo. The reason they do it is for the sake of appealing to the younger demographic. They do not have to make them easy though! Wait, aren't kids just a bunch of sniffling, impatient, run-a-bouts that can't handle hard games anyways? No. If you look back we all grew up with very hard games on the NES. The kind of games that you might not actually beat, ever.

Bucky O' Hare was one of those great 80's cartoon franchises that was turned into a great NES game. It certainly took more than one rent to be good enough to beat it. The same can be said with Captain Skyhawk for NES. An extreme example that you might know more about would be Super Ghouls N' Ghosts on SNES. What made the game wonderful was its fascinating medieval design and rock-solid gameplay, but the very high difficulty is what we remember it being great for more than anything. Similarly, a current-generation game like Ikaruga would not stand-out if it didn't have bitchin' hard levels; it wouldn't be any fun without them either.

Differences In Approach & Game Experience

Developers and gamers have lost touch with the challenge of games, even though so many proclaim that gameplay is king. Games on the NES kept our attention by mastering the art of gameplay and music. That gameplay wouldn't have been much if you could breeze through the game like we can now. Seriously, many of them seem hardcore compared to today's standards. If anything, current gamers can't handle the games of old. The original Metroid didn't even have any map in the game, but that's why it had the greatest sense of exploration and was exciting! Who knows what other remarkable things developers could be doing.

The complexity of today's modern, mainstream systems has transformed gaming and gameplay. The density and nature of 3D graphics has really done a number on gameplay, for better and worse. I like Miyamoto's statement a couple months back that games should be made to be simpler. (But for God's sake, not easier please.) You have to break a game down to make sure it's providing the experience you want. There's so much to see in games now. You have a lot more to take in with so many more possibilities. Racing games, platformers, first-person shooters, they all require a whole slew of controls and commands. And that last reason is why some developers would like to simplify games.Things like exploration take so much more time in a 3D realistic world verses a 2D game that it can feel tedious. Instead of the hum-drum conventional exploration that's dished out, challenge can turn it into great discovery, but sadly we don't see that in games.

In 3D gaming the developers have to control the whole environment to focus the player on what's happening if they want to make it a profound experience. That could be a reason why so many use letter-box cinemas. For me, though, the most profound times in gaming were parts like defeating Mother Brain in Metroid. To think, there was no accompanying cinema scene at all, and yet it's something I like replaying again and again. The only thing I can attribute it to is the lasting challenge and gameplay of that moment.

To successfully capture and keep a player's attention, we need to start with great gameplay. When such a balance is made between gameplay and challenge, it probably has the makings of a long-lasting game, one liklier to become a classic. That is much better than letting people win easily only to have them stop playing the game or get bored with it in the same week. It's okay if you die frequently, it happened all the time on NES. From games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, you'd think it was a sin to have to use a continue. Games on the NES were inherently difficult. On GameCube, GBA, PS2, and Xbox, what we sometimes have is harder difficulty modes instead. These of course aren't anything new. Now though, sophisticated new games are creating lasting challenge by making harder difficulties settings with actual changes to the game and gameplay for each mode.

The best example I've seen of this is Metal Gear Solid 2 on PS2. More surveillance cameras, guard amounts and positions, and moreover how enemies act and how sequences play out differently are essential to the challenge of the game. To top it off, on the hardest difficulty, extreme, it can take an hour to be good enough to beat a boss. And yet I love the game all the more for it because it avoids making it frustrating and the gameplay becomes addictive.The biggest change in difficulty that I've seen while playing current-generation games is that you're rarely ever in danger of dying. In action games it's as though they want you to be able to stay alive all the time, either by giving too many refills or simply making it too easy to survive in a level, which is defeating the purpose of the game. Normal enemies are too weak to do anything and the bosses are easy to avoid.

One game that kept away from this was Donkey Kong Country, a very classic game. You have a little bit of safety by having two characters that each have one hit against them, but that's where the reliance on that safety ended and it made the player depend on your good playing. Many NES games also used the one hit rule (if the hero is hit once by an enemy then they die). This created games where you were actively playing, as opposed to passively playing. They also had a lot less room to avoid getting hit in. It turned it into more reflexive gameplay, you know, like where you flinched all the time with the controller in hand because you were so close to death. Not anymore.

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Posted in: Features