I’ve been playing games for a long time. As a kid, I played Pong at my next door neighbor’s house on his pong machine, before he ever got ColecoVision. I played Crazy Kong on the old arcade machine at the Cumberland Farms on Rt 69 where I used to buy Chocodiles. And I played the heck out of Demons to Diamonds, Video Pinball, and Yars Revenge on my Atari 2600, which today is in a box out in my garage. I’ll certainly admit that over that time, the difficulty of video games, on average, has decreased. It’s easy for old-school gamers to tell today’s young Halo, GTA and WoW addicts that they don’t know what a truly hard game is really like until they’ve beaten all the Double Dragon games or gotten to the end of Karate Champ. But why has the status quo become easier games? And is it for the better or for the worse?

In those old days, playing Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games, you’d play a new game, get killed, and start over. You’d get better through repetition, and because 14-year-olds tend to have far more free time than 35-year-olds, that huge time investment would pay off in skill. I could never have beaten games like Double Dragon, Kenseiden, or Forbidden Forest without a skill borne of repetition. Today, though, I’ve got less free time, and less patience for games that require repeated playthroughs to develop the necessary skill. Hence, I don’t play Geometry Wars, Ikaruga, or N+.

But the high difficulty in many of the older games I’ve mentioned may come more from the genre’s immaturity at the time than from anything else. The difficulty may have been the only way the game designers of that era were able to increase the number of hours you’d play a game. If you’d been able to play Super Mario Brothers to completion the first day you owned it, wouldn’t you have felt a bit cheated? It’s not really a long game – you can’t even save your progress. Only the game’s difficulty prevented a first-day completion.

Many of the highly difficult games of those days were certainly less than accessible. I can’t imagine my father playing through Realm of Impossibility, but he absolutely loves Wii Sports. Likewise, I’m not sure how I’d feel about replaying a game like Ultima III nowadays, given that when a character dies in that game, the game immediately deletes him permanently. Hardcore? Yes. Fun? Not so much.

Many of today’s more successful and popular games increase the amount of time players want to invest in that game not by making the game more difficult and thus forcing you to replay large sections of the game, but rather by adding story, (Metal Gear Solid series, Mass Effect) adding repetitive yet enjoyable gameplay, (Puzzle Quest, Team Fortress 2) or just by making the game world massive (Oblivion, World of Warcraft)

I’d like to take a look at some of the games that I personally have failed to complete due to difficulty, and exactly what about those games I found too difficult. Looking over my list, it seems that by far the most common factor is a level in the game that’s just too hard. This was the case for me with Thief: The Dark Project, Trauma Center: Under the Knife, Starcraft: Brood War, the original Freedom Force, and Katamari Damacy. These games all had levels that were simply too hard. And I’m fairly sure that none of these games had adjustable difficulty. Granted, most of the levels that thwarted me were pretty far along in the game, but in the cases of Thief and Trauma Center at least, they were early levels.

Overly hard boss battles are also a common game-ending event. Fighting multiple metal gears at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, the Xel’lotath in Eternal Darkness, Jeane in No More Heroes, and the final battle of Far Cry were all too hard for me. Of these, only two had adjustable difficulty, and I’d have had to restart the game in order to play on an easier level. No thanks.

I stopped playing Resident Evil: Code Veronica because I ran out of ammo and healing supplies and could go no further without restarting. I stopped playing Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow because I couldn’t figure out where to go next, despite reading online FAQs. I stopped playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time because of a battle I couldn’t win. And I stopped playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones because of a single seemingly-impossible jump. All these are issues of difficulty, and I assume they could be fixed with better game design.

A mechanic that could remedy nearly all of the above situations is an adjustable difficulty level that can be modified mid-game, like in Baldur’s Gate or God of War. God of War, on its default difficulty setting, is a hard game. It was almost too hard for me. Almost. Many times, I considered caving in to the “Do you want to switch to easy mode?” prompt. I even stopped playing the game for six months when I had to jump from beam to beam, dodging spinning bladed platforms. But I went back to it and finished without caving to “easy mode”. God of War, to me, is a shining example of difficulty design done right.

Another really good technique for dealing with a different type of difficulty is one used in Indigo Prophecy. When the difficulty is a puzzle, you can’t give it fewer hit points or dumb down its AI. Generally, a game will just give hints. But Indigo Prophecy, much to my delight, allowed me to entirely skip a puzzle when it was too hard. This meant that when I replayed the game, (as I did) I still had at least one fresh puzzle that I had yet to figure out.

I hate feeling forced to use online FAQs or walkthroughs. Granted, I do appreciate that they’re there for the times when I’d otherwise stop playing a game entirely. Back in the days before The Internet, if I got totally stuck on a game like Hacker or The Hobbit, I was screwed. If I was lucky, the game manual had a 900 number to call for hints. Today, it’s easy to find an online walkthrough that will completely spoil all the game’s surprises. But when I find myself facing the possibility of wasting time wandering aimlessly in a game for an hour, I tend to peek at the walkthrough. I always take it as a mark of quality if I play through a game from start to finish never having consulted an online walkthrough, especially if that game includes any number of puzzles. For this reason, games like Portal, Thief:Deadly Shadows, Beyond Good and Evil, Resident Evil 4, and Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass rank highly with me.

Of course, there are a few different types of difficulty. Ninja Gaiden and Ultima III are both very difficult games, but for very different reasons. First, you’ve got twitch difficulty. By this, I mean shooters where you’ve got to quickly aim and fire, or platformers where you’ve got to make a perfectly timed jump so as to not fall to your death. To me, games like Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty 4, and Shadow of the Colossus have appropriate twitch difficulty. Games like N+ and Ninja Gaiden are difficult to the level of inaccessibility, almost as if the designers intended most players to be incapable of completing these games.

A second type of game difficulty comes with puzzles. The puzzles in games like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Psychonauts were well-done and appropriate. The puzzles in games like Zack & Wiki or Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy are just too hard to be enjoyable for many people. Granted, I’m a person who usually has trouble with adventure game style puzzles, but I’ve heard from others that these games are particularly egregious examples of overly difficult puzzle design. Puzzles like those in Portal are much more my speed.

Lastly, there’s the type of difficulty you’d find in strategy games such as Dungeon Keeper, Warcraft III, or Desktop Tower Defense. These games generally include more planning than reaction, and although they typically start off easy, the difficulty can ramp up very quickly. I’ve had a lot of trouble with ending levels of many strategy games, especially game expansions. The end levels of Starcraft: Brood Wars, Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, and Pixeljunk Monsters Encore were all too difficult for me to finish. And yes – I know that Baldur’s Gate is an RPG, but the battle tactics you need are very strategic.

Since games can have varied difficulty settings, I’m willing to say that overall, today’s easier games are a good thing. It allows me to actually complete the games I pay for, and it makes games more accessible to a wider variety of people. If it’s too easy, just play the game on “hard”. Personally, I’ll be starting all games on “medium”, given that difficulties vary so greatly from game to game. If I find it too easy, maybe I’ll crank things up to “hard” for my second playthrough.