More and more, I’m finding that I’ve got to play games on the easiest setting rather than normal, which is what I’ve generally done in the past. Ghostbusters was the first game I can think of that I found too difficult and played through on easy. I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal – John had suggested that I play on easy, and many reviews I’d read spoke of the game’s many difficulty spikes. So I played the game on easy, enjoyed the story, and didn’t feel like a wuss for having done so.

Then I started playing Street Fighter 4 online and discovered that I wasn’t nearly as much of a badass at the game as I’d expected to be.

I’ve also been enjoying Prototype. The jumping, flying, and consuming challenges are a lot of fun. They’re just the right amount of challenge – it takes me a good half dozen tries to get a gold medal. But when I got to the battle with “The Specialist”, I was destroyed. I replayed that fight six or eight times, and didn’t even come as close to winning as I had the first time. I looked up a couple FAQs and walkthroughs, which suggested that I use whipfist rather than the claw attack I’d been using, so I tried that, and lost even more quickly than I had before. The primary walkthrough on GameFAQs says “This guy isn’t very hard to beat at all. He’s mostly just an annoyance.” You might imagine how frustrated I got to read this after having lost so often. So my plan with Prototype is to go a few weeks without playing, and then go back and restart the game on easy. I only hope that the challenges aren’t too easy.

The same night that I got my ass handed to me by The Specialist in Prototype, I tried to start playing Resistance: Fall of Man. I got the PS3 game cheap on EBay since it’s so old at this point. Long story short: I keep getting killed. I might have to restart this one on easy too. I suck at shooters where I can’t use a mouse and keyboard.

Lastly, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I’m currently stuck on this one. I think that if I have to restart this one on easy, I might just have to commit sepuku with a frisbee.

Certain annoyances have disappeared entirely as the medium has evolved. For example, I can’t remember the last time I played a game in which you were able to save your game in a state from which you can’t possibly proceed. (stuck in terrain, having permanently lost a plot-critical item) I think the last time I played a game with that particular issue was on the Commodore 64. But there are plenty of other problems that I see all over the place.

The most recent was when I was playing Ghostbusters last week. I’d reached the edge of a rooftop, and having captured all the ghosts on the roof, I found that there was nowhere else to go. I ran around making sure I didn’t need to trap more ghosts in order to trigger an event. I checked the doors and ladders to see if there was another area I needed to go to. I tried talking to Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler. No love. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Reloading the game fixed the issue, but the same exact issue popped up again later in the game, when I was in the museum. I’d killed all the ghosts in the area, and found myself locked in the Aztec exhibit with no exits.

Ghostbusters wasn’t the first time I’d seen that issue. In God of War 2, I hit a very similar situation – I’d reached the edge of a cliff I thought I needed to jump off, but there was an invisible wall stopping me from proceeding. When I reloaded and replayed, the invisible wall was gone. In Vampire: Bloodlines, someone told me to go to the second floor of building – I hunted for that second floor for hours, but it didn’t seem to exist and I in the end I had to stop playing the game.

Another issue that I hit in Ghostbusters is that of erratic difficulty. When playing the game on normal, I found that whle certain parts had a perfectly good difficulty level, certain parts were just way too hard. I had to restart the game on easy difficulty. Maybe the game should have a Kind Code.

And then there are my gripes about partner AI. There aren’t many games that make you play with a computer-controlled partner. Enter The Matrix comes to mind. (If Niobe was a blue pill, she’d never have passed her drivers’ test) The game I’m primarily talking about here is Resident Evil 5. In Resident Evil 4, you at least had a good amount of control over the girl you were protecting. I’m sure that was made easier by the fact that she had no inventory and didn’t try to fight enemies. You could tell her to follow you, or stay put. But in Resident Evil 5, your partner tries to fight and to help you solve puzzles. And worst of all, at certain points in the game, you need her.

At this point, I need to make a disclaimer. I’m referring to the AI partner as ‘she’ because I chose to play the game as Chris Redfield. Had I chosen to play as Sheva, Chris would be the idiot AI partner. No gender bias here. Purely circumstantial.

Sheva loves her handgun so much that when she runs out of bullets, she won’t use the machine gun. I can’t count the number of times when I’m fighting a miniboss and Sheva refuses to use her grenade launcher. I’ll be out of magnum ammo, and have to resort to using my handgun and flash grenades despite the fact that my partner has a goddamned grenade launcher. Sheva also likes to run far away when I’m being attacked so that when I go down and need her to revive me, she has no way to get to me in time.

But I’m not the only one she likes to get killed. One time, she ran ahead of me directly onto a conveyor belt that led into a furnace. Another time, she refused to stay more than three feet away from a reaper with an instant-kill attack. I wish I could ask her to hide in a dumpster while I fight the enemies by myself.

The most recent thing she’s done to piss me off is when I was fighting Albert Wesker. One of the items you need in this fight is a special rocket launcher. She took it and ran away, leaving me to fight the boss who I couldn’t possibly hurt without the rocket launcher. A minute later, I died because she was too far away to revive me when I was hit. If you’re reading this and can identify with my complaints about Sheva’s mental retardation, I suggest checking out Yahtzee’s review of the Resident Evil 5. He agrees, hilariously.

My last game gripe for the day? CD checks. I could vent all day about oppressive DRM, but CD checks aren’t oppressive so much as they’re simply antiquated. Why do games still require you to leave the CD in the drive in order to play? In the days before CD burners were mainstream, it may have been an effective anti-piracy measure. Today, I think its primary effect is to annoy me and make me buy more of my games from Steam. I tend to play 3-4 games at a time, and I’ve only got two optical drives in my PC. This means constantly swapping out CDs, which annoys me to no end. I generally go out and find a no-CD patch, which I have no qualms using because I’ve legitimately purchased the game. Companies like Stardock and Steam have it right. Just let me play the game for which I’ve paid you without the goddamned CD in the goddamned drive!

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.