Oldschool Hard

If you’ve seen this screen before, you probably used the Konami code.

If you’ve played games like Shinobi on PS2, or the Ninja Gaiden series on the 360 (ninjas, why’s it always gotta be ninjas?), you know what hard feels like. The margin for error is slim. The game is unforgiving. The difficulty level goes from ‘hard’ to ‘harder’ to ‘rock hard’ to ‘Superman’s dick’, and will never auto-adjust – you need to get better, the game won’t make itself easier for you.

These games stand out now largely because they’re so rare. Sure, many games on the top difficulty setting(s) are hard, but if you want to get through the game and see the sights, you have a choice. WHEN I WERE A LAD, walking 10 miles a day to and from school, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot, these type of games didn’t stand out: they were the norm. They were Nintendo Hard.

Bottomless pits. Limited lives. Limited continues. No regenerating health. No pointers to guide you to where you need to go – only lots of guesswork – “What the hell do I do now?” instead of “Hmm, what should I do next?” – Like Simon’s Quest with its completely obtuse ‘select the right crystal and then kneel in the right spot’ mechanic. Obtuse is okay in an adventure game where the point of the game is to solve puzzles, not in an action-adventure game where the point of the game is ACTION and ADVENTURE.

Possibly the ultimate Nintendo Hard game is Contra/Probotector. Everything that isn’t a powerup wants to kill you, inadvertantly grabbing a powerup can turn a good gun into a crappy one, and unless you’ve played it so much you could do it in your sleep, good luck trying to beat it without the Konami code.

Some other examples? A Boy and his Blob. Instant death drops, guesswork on how to use items to affect things that are screens away, limited jellybeans, and having no explanation of what each jellybean does until you use them. The worst part is, David Crane said he originally wanted to make it harder and only give you the exact number of jellybeans needed to complete the game.

Battletoads. A friend and I used to play this at least 2 weekends a month for about 2 years. I think the furthest we ever got was level 5, and as far as I know that wasn’t even halfway through the game.

Bionic Commando warms you up nicely with a reasonable difficulty curve, then SKULLFUCKS you towards the end of the game. Double Dragon with no continues and no way to get more lives (being able to beat up on your mate to win the affections of the girl was awesome, though), and Double Dragon III, which looked more ‘modern’ (at the time), but was even harder and a lot less fun. Double Dragon II was at least relatively merciful.

Metroid – what’s a map? Shadowgate, where instant death is the norm and you can be killed just by looking at things. Any of the Simpsons NES games, particularly Bart vs. The Space Mutants, with their floaty controls combined with the need for pixel-perfect jumps. Mega Man, especially if you don’t know the ‘right’ order in which to do the levels. Castlevania. (The original) Super Mario Bros. 2/The Lost Levels. The original Ninja Gaiden series. Zelda II. Milon’s Secret Castle. Robowarrior. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Punch-out. Gradius. And these are just the most famous examples – there’s plenty more Nintendo Hard NES games.

There’s often very little separating the best of these type of games from the worst of these type of games. Really, the only difference is that the best of these games don’t feel arbitrary. When you die, it’s because you made a mistake that you could recognise, not because the random number generator made a bullet fly at you in such a way that avoiding it was impossible. Playing these games does feel good in a certain way, though. Some might call it a feeling of accomplishment, I call it a similar feeling to when you beat your head against a wall repeatedly and then stop.

If you’re silly enough to still like Nintendo Hard games, a modern version of them worth a try is I Wanna Be The Guy. Image ripped from from Games Radar and tweaked to my satisfaction.

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This guy is why you can’t have nice things, Gears of War.

“HEY. YOU. FAT BOY. YEAH, YOU, CAPTAIN BALDING. You said you were gonna talk about the mistakes made by games, but it’s been four fucking posts and all you’ve done is waffle on about your unremarkable childhood and poor taste. Get with it, already.”

Alright, shaddap. The first common gaming mistake I’m going to tackle is mostly, but not exclusively, a problem with newer games. It’s one that’s been brought home to me as I play through Mass Effect again, procrastinating on getting to the game pile (aside: procrastinating on playing games, by playing a game you’ve already played, is that the absolute depths of sloth?) so I can refresh on Shepard’s world in anticipation for Mass Effect 2, and get in a Bioware mood for when my crappy download-limited Australian net connection rolls over to next month and I can download Dragon Age: Origins at a speed greater than 64kbps. Makes me a little misty-eyed, remembering that I put up with dial-up for more than 6 years past broadband’s introduction.

Oh, yeah, games. Right. I came to the part where you rescue Liara, at my leisurely sidequest-ing pace, about 8 hours into the game. Because I am terrible at both games and life, it took me about 5 attempts to beat that charging Krogan. Every frigging time having to make the same three or four choices. Again. And watch the dialogue. Again. While I could skip parts of the dialogue, I couldn’t skip the whole scene. And because after the scene you go directly into combat, I couldn’t save. So after I died again, I then had to make the same three…you get the idea.

(At this point I will say: I’m aware Negative Gamer, among others, talked about this first, but they talk about generalities, not specific games. Besides, I like Negative Gamer. They have a similar ethos to mine, but with actual talent.)

Now, one solution is to not suck so much, but most games (ie. not Ninja Gaiden 2 – which, incidentally, also had unskippable cutscenes) are supposed to cater for both the hardcore (you) and the terribad (me). Hell, you don’t even necessarily have to be in the game to have unskippable scenes, do you, Borderlands?. Not allowing me to skip the company logos that show up every time I start the game, not even after the first time I see them? Learn to play nice with others.

Again proving my terribad-ness, if I have to watch a helicopter flyover of General RAAM in Gears of War one more time, I think I’ll snap the disc. I beat the game, got my crappy 100 achievement points, and I doubt I’ll never put it back in the drive again. Too Human was another game which ‘punished’ you for dying by making you watch the elaborate half-minute death sequence over and over again. Not quite right in a game where you there’s no actual gameplay-based penalty for dying. I was already being punished by playing your good idea wrapped up in a crappy implementation, Silicon Knights, please don’t punish me any further. And I know there’s a heap more examples of this in gaming – this is only what I can reel off without having to actually tax my brain by trying to actively remember or my fingers by going past 750 words.

While older games didn’t necessarily have as many/any cutscenes, they tended to manifest the ‘unskippable’ problem in another way – inappropriate save points. One of my PS2 controllers still rattles from me hurling it to the floor, after about the 10th time of doing the half hour run from the last save point to Sin in Final Fantasy X, and watching as a Marlboro (or similar) again cast ‘Confuse’ on my whole party. What drove me to hurling the controller down was not my party dying, but having to SIT AND WATCH for 10 minutes while they killed each other before the game would give me the courtesy of a game over screen. At least the cutscenes were skippable in this one. And it’s a less nerd rage moment than a friend of mine who hurled an N64 controller through a wall. I can’t remember why, specifically, but I bet it had something to do with Oddjob in Goldeneye multiplayer…

Picture again shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. I still cropped it myself.

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