I have loads of friends on Xbox Live who obviously play MW3, or if not they have at least played a Call of Duty, as it’s almost a rite of passage. Now, if you’re a hardcore gamer like me and find you’re sweating it out all day and night on every new game you get, you’re completing it in the first 24 hours of receiving/buying the title.
Therefore, I always choose the option to play the game on the hardest difficulty setting first, it’s simple maths. The harder the setting = The longer the game will last, right? This can be the case, but it’s becoming clear that you can change the difficulty but not the game, and it still seems easy. HOW!? WHY!?
Back the point. My shining example, Call of Duty. Veteran is a difficulty now that’s seen as a taboo subject, it’s either too hard or too easy. But I fail to see what the people behind these games are playing at. Every time a new “COD” game is released the veteran difficulty is a little bit easier, and there’s no need for it. The choice is there, Veteran with the little description to ward off inexperienced players; “You will not survive”. If this is the choice why do Activision make it easier to play veteran? If any of you have played Call of Duty World at War (or COD 5 as it’s affectionately known), which is controversially my favourite COD game in the franchise, you will find that the Veteran difficulty lives up to its name, mainly because you can’t step a foot out of cover without getting sniped by a pistol and seeing that horrible death screen with a quote from some famous guy about wars and stuff.
This means that due to the linear difficulties these days, people are getting their egos fed with this “I’m better because I can do Veteran attitude”, whereas if they were faced with a game that has a pretty decent challenge they cower back to their little dens and cry over the fact that ammunition weighs something on hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas. Games like that with their hardcore modes are truly challenging, which is why I absolutely love RPG’s (Role Playing Games). They keep me entertained for weeks and weeks on end. What’s not to love about levelling up your character so they summon fire from their hands or allowing them to take off a mutants head in one bullet? Having a marriage, house, horse, dog arrghhh! It’s all too much! But what I’m getting at is the hardcore modes in-game are something else. You have to agree, some people out there with their “Best lightsaber noise impression 3 years running” award will disagree, saying they didn’t break a sweat, but come on, it does get difficult sometimes.
I think the really hard games are the ones that make you need to survive, so I’m going to pull out the zombie card here lads.
Specifically I’m going to play the Resident evil card, the old ones to narrow it down. If you haven’t completed them before, then the first run through will always be the most frustrating thing you will ever do (that and blending a smoothie with no blender lid, but you know what I mean). It was because of 3 simple rules it worked so well :
1) The health system. By this I don’t just mean the amount of health. To be quite honest there actually wasn’t much health or health bar but a little picture encompassed with a little heart rate animation saying if your health was 1 of 3 things. Fine, which was lit up green for good health, Caution, which was orange for half way to quite bad and red, which was panic time as you were in Danger. This was a nice way to represent your impending doom. The other little annoying trinkets appear in truck loads, like the amount of damage you could take. A typical zombie grabs you and would bite you between 2 to 6 times, depending on how violently you battered your controller, and 6 bites would put you on danger easily. There was no way of recovering health automatically. No. You had to find one of two things, be it herbs which you could combine with others for a different effect or first aid sprays which healed your character completely. All this sounds pretty well.. sound, but the first aid was scarce. It was all quite upsetting.
2) Ammunition. Doesn’t matter, didn’t want any anyway! So you find a box of bullets, a nice 20 mag of 9mm death points, but the joy in your face you would think that you got 2 boats and high quality ham for Christmas. Ammo was nowhere on R.E. you couldn’t find it, you’d have to ration it round like the last tin of beans at a Russian campsite, and you only use what you need to, no more. 3 zombies? Run, just run!
3) Fixed camera angles. Your senses were your only friend, standing in a corridor and only seeing half of what you should need to, hearing footsteps and thinking to yourself “Is that a zombie? Nahhh can’t be. Is it? Where is it? Is the game broke? Is it stuck? WHERE IS IT!?”
My hat goes off to the really difficult and time-consuming games that have had me on the edge of my seat so many times, just to reach the nearest checkpoint. There’s hundreds of games out there that have had me screaming at my TV with pure anger on why the games developers think it’s a good idea to add the most hardest situations to the most simplest of things! I’m going to finish on two words that I hope you agree are really annoying, but they give a good amount of pleasure in being difficult. Dark Souls.
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