Something I've been thinking about recently is the difficulty of games, and how it has changed over the years (and not necessarily for the better). I don't want to get too much into a "back in my day" arguement (of course that's what I'll do), but the way game designers have set difficulty levels these days is something I'm not all that happy about.

Lets start with the games that "cheat". You know the ones, the football team that comes from behind with unstoppable running backs and such. To me this is one of the weakest forms of making a game harder. There's no real AI involved, just the computer trying to fuck you over to make a game more "fun". Mario Kart 64 was notorious for this. So was NBA Jam. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and one of the worst.

Then there's something a bit more recent, that of just bad camera angles/controls in games. While there were games that lacked good gameplay in the 2D days, it seems today that developers are still trying to figure out how to properly allow someone to move in a 3D space effectively. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you need to do in a game, but not quite being able to accomplish it because of a bad camera, collision detection, physics, and the like. Of course mastery of the controls is a part of gaming, but you shouldn't have to battle the controls and the camera while you're battling a boss. There's a fine line here and I think a lot of times developers cross it.

I understand that developers want to give players a lot of options in games, but it's also been proven time and again that you don't need a complicated game to make it challenging. A game like Ikaruga or Tetris has very simple rules, yet both are harder than most games out there. I think if developers want to make an engrossing game that lets a player do quite a bit, they need to make sure each element of the game works as well as a game that would just have a simpler rule set. For example, if you're making Grand Theft Auto, there's a driving control scheme, a walking/jumping control scheme, a shooting control scheme, a camera scheme, etc. Each of these should be tight on their own, as tight as they would be if they were in thier own game, and I think then you wouldn't have as many issues with control unnecesarily making the game more complicated than it needs to be. Thankfully GTA does a fairly decent job in this regard (although there's room for improvement).

And speaking of giving players more options, one thing I'm not a huge fan of is giving players the option of difficulty levels in games. Yeah, it's the old schooler in me, but not only does this create lazy gamers, it also creates cheap difficulty. This is why I usually only play a game on the default setting, never harder or easier. Usually this isn't so much a problem until you start talking to other players. People say, "ah that games too easy", and then you find out they played it on the easy level. Of course it's too easy! But more often than not, even if you do think a game is fairly easy on the normal level, playing it on the harder level is usually an excercise in frustration. Not because it actually offers a better challenge mind you, but beacuse it's that cheat (or cheap) difficulty coming back into play. Nothing has really changed to make it harder per se, but now all the enemies are just that much more powerful! To me that's not a better challenge, that's just cheap.

Want to make a game harder? Give me more enemies, smarter enemies, give me changed levels with out the normal hiding spots. Give me some value. But please, for the love of god, do not just make the enemies stronger. If that's the case, don't even bother putting in a difficulty selector. A lot of old school games didn't have it, and they worked just fine. And guess what? You could actually brag that you beat a game back then. It was a right of passage. Now it seems like beating a game is a right every player should just have automatically. Unfortunate, that is.

I'm certianly not harping on all games. There are quite a few these days that get it exactly right (Super Monkey Ball comes to mind), but lately there have been so many bad examples that it makes one a little frustrated to be a gamer. Or, perhaps I'm just getting old and jaded (that's probably the case), so maybe I'm alone in these thoughts.