Difficulty Options are Bullshit

The topic of difficulty options have, for some reason, become a hot topic of debate on social media.  I feel that every couple of weeks or so a series of threads turns up on something like Twitter either complaining about games not having difficulty options or people complaining that a game included some kind of "auto-win" mode or something like that and people of course losing their minds and throwing insults at each other.  So I got thinking about it and I have come to the conclusion that in most cases difficulty options are complete dogshit.

As a concept they make sense, skilled players pick hard and new players pick easy, and there are a variety of games where they have been used effectively but in a staggeringly large number of cases, the difficulty settings are just frustrating bullshit that's lazily mismanaged by whatever developers are making the game.  So for the next few paragraphs in this post I will outline just a few of the ways in which having an option AT ALL is a pile of garbage.

1) The Pump and Dump

This is probably the most common thing you'll come across in games, where a playthrough on easy and a playthrough on hard is identical in every way except the numbers on damage done and damage taken are just raised and lowered depending on what mode you're on.  The worst example I can think of this off the top of my head is basically any game made by modern day Naughty Dog.  If you play Uncharted on easy or normal, Nathan Drake can walk right into direct fire of a mounted machine gun, take all of those bullets to the face and the only thing that happens is the screen gets a bit grey and you have to suck your thumb behind a rock for a bit to heal up.  If you then play that game on Crushing Nathan turns into a man made of wet toilet paper and will go rag-dolling off into space if an enemy so much as coughs on him.  Everything else about the game is the same, the only thing your mode choice dictates is how much hiding behind walls you have to do.  This is especially boring if you're the kind of person who likes to play normal first and then hard because unless the game really gripped you, playing the exact same game again in the exact same way again but slower just isn't fun.  

2) Built for Upgrades

I feel like I never noticed this being a problem until semi recently but another way difficulty is mis-managed is linking it directly to the games upgrade system and new game + playthroughs.  The game that really hit home just how bad this gets is Dante's Inferno on PS3.  In that game you can pick at the start if you want to play on easy, normal or hard but if you pick hard mode from a new game file then you are going to have a hell of a hard time (lol).  But, if you play through the game once, get a bunch of upgrades and soul points, beat the game and then carry that shit over into a hard mode run, the challenge becomes a lot more manageable.  This is bullshit because when you die it starts to feel like it's not your fault.  Like imagine someone comes up to you and says "hey solve this jigsaw puzzle" but then the set of pieces they give you is just missing a bunch of pieces.  That wouldn't be fun, right? and that's exactly what it feels like to play a game on hard mode when it's been built around an upgrade system.

3) Locked

This is a real pet peeve of mine as someone who likes to play games on a harder mode most of the time but locking a hard mode behind a full game clear is an UNFORGIVEABLE practice and any developer that has done this deserves to stub their toe on the leg of a metal coffee table.  One thing people love to complain about when they talk about difficulty is that "they don't have time to learn the game and get good", which personally I think is a dogshit argument but OK I'll roll with it.  But by that same logic, I'm also a busy man with a large backlog of games and I do not have all the time in the world to play through a game twice just to get the experience that I mainly enjoy.  I can understand locking challenge modes behind a clear like Dante Must Die in Devil May Cry but when I buy a game, load it up and my options for difficulty are "easy, normal and LOCKED" I want to start swinging at people

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This is just 3 ways that I pulled off the top of my head and I'm sure if you gave me a stack of games and a couple of days I could probably come up with a lot more.  But what is the solution?  Well, it's to probably get rid of difficulty settings altogether.  A game that springs right to the forefront of my mind in this regard is Celeste.  The base game where you get the story of the girl going up the mountain is a challenging yet fair experience that I think anyone can clear with a little bit of practice.  When you finish the game, you can either fuck off and never play it again OR you can go and hunt down the B-Sides, C-Sides, Golden Berries etc. which are all challenging extras that players who want to push themselves with absolutely enjoy.  The game is designed in such a way so that EVERYONE can get a win but those who want to master the mechanics and platforming can get even more satisfaction after the credits roll

Another example of this would be a game like Bastion.  When you start Bastion up you aren't given any difficulty settings but a short ways into the game you unlock the shrine.  In the shrine you can unlock little statues that you activate and for each active statue you get an experience and currency bonus in return for the game becoming harder.  This allows players to customize their own experience to make the game as hard or as easy and they would like and players who do go for the extra challenge are appropriately rewarded.  If you don't like a hard game and just want the story, leave the shrine alone, but if you want to show just how good you are at Bastion then head into that shrine and activate EVERYTHING and see how hard the game gets.  The annoying thing about this example in particular is the time it takes to get the shrine and the statues but my point is that instead of having an "easy, normal, hard" mode setting, let players tweak certain aspects of the game themselves to get the challenge that they would like.

Obviously difficulty settings aren't just going to dissapear and like I said, they CAN be used well in certain cases but the point is that most devs are very lazy with them and in a lot of cases just letting the creators deliver the experience THEY want to give you is probably the better option.  Game too hard and has no modes? Just play something else.  Game has an easy mode that's far too easy for you? Just don't use it.  More importantly, shut the fuck up about it on Twitter

Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe

 

Every so often a game (or a film etc.) comes along that falls into the category of "so bad it's good".  An example of these in gaming would be something like Deadly Premonition (although I just think it's good, but whatever) and in film, The Room.  These are the kind of games that people know kind of suck for a plethroa of reasons and yet playing/watching them brings the person great joy.  So people see how favorably these films and games are spoken about and then they try to make something similar but attempts at this kind of film and game making almost always fall flat

Which is what Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe is.  Someone trying to make a game that's "so bad that it's awesome" except it fails at the entire second half of that phrase and ends up just being bad.  The game is about a little blue girl fighting an army of skeletons and she does this by running, jumping and punching her way through 7 or 8 stages.  The dialogue is full of needless cursing and very obviously done on purpose spelling mistakes to try and be all eDgY and while it's going for humor the only thing it achieves is eye rolls.

The gameplay, while not awful is generally not very good and is sort of a chore to play.  Benbo, which I assume is the girls name, is somehow both too floaty while also feeling extremely stiff which makes platforming and absolute pain in the ass.  It's fine in early stages but the last few levels actually require some precision and it's hard to achieve that level of precision when you feel like a cinderblock on an ice rink.  Occasionally you'll have to punch an enemy or two and most enemies die in one hit but the real shittiness comes out in the bossfights which all boil down to running up to the enemy and mashing the attack button until you win.  Sometimes you might die, sometimes the boss will die in the blink of an eye, just keep restarting until the game lets you through.  I think the best way to describe the way Super Benbo Quest plays is just painfully boring.

I thought at first it was trying to emulate the kind of humor you'd find in the early days of sites like Newgrounds but that's sort of an insult to those creators.  Sure, there was plenty of edgy stuff on Newgrounds back in the day but it wasn't edgy just for the sake of being edgy in most cases, there was some sense in a lot of those old animations that the person making it did at least care a little bit about the project they were working on.  Super Benbo Quest feels like it had no effort put into it because it's purposefully trying to go for the "so bad it's good" appeal so anything shitty is just going to be part of the games "charm"

Here's the thing, if you strive to make something good and it turns out shit, people may still fall in love with it because they recognise the vision, the hard work and the passion behind the project.  When you strive to make something shit, the only thing it can possibly be is shit and boy howdy is Super Benbo a pile of shit.

Don't play it

Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance

 Baldurs Gate is a series one might be quite familar with if you're into the Dungeons and Dragons RPG games for PC but if you have never played Dark Alliance and expected something similar to those PC entries, then you're in for a bit of a surprise.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, released for the PS2 in 2001, does away with the slow, methodical RPG-based in table top style game play of the PC versions and instead goes for a more action oriented approach.  You start the game by picking a Dwarf fighter, a human archer or an elven mage and as far as character creation goes that's where it ends.  You watch a cutscene and then are quickly thrust in a sewer to go kill a bunch of rats, as is common for these kind of games.  The game probably bares more similarity to something like Diablo more than anything else where you go through dungeons, hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies and hopefully collect some sweet loot on the way.

That's not to say that ALL Dungeons and Dragons stuff has gone completely out of the window.  Each monster you slay gives experience and when you fill up your bar you gain a level.  Gaining a level grants you skill points to apply to various feats which are things ranging from hit harder and die less to all new skills to play with depending on which starting class you picked.  The last playthrough I did I chose the Dwarf fighter, so all my feats were pretty much hit harder and die less but I did get one skill called Bull Rush which made traversing the environment a bit less dull sometimes.

There is also a cool multiplayer mode where you and a friend can slay things at the same time but the game doesn't automate any of the loot sharing, it's all first come first serve so if you have a particularly greedy buddy you can expect a few arguments from time to time. My recent play of this game was solo so I'm not entirely sure but I think that experience isn't shared either which is extra annoying if you can't get any killing blows in because your buddy who stole all the good swords is doing all the killing instead.  I'm basing this on a memory from when I played this with some school buddies though so there's a chance my memory is flawed on this one.  

The one thing I can complain about for sure is the bullshit damage values on hard mode.  When I played this game in my younger days, I played it on Normal, a time before I made playing games on hard my personal standard.  Going back to it to record for the stream I thought to myself "this game is easy, I'll play it on hard!" and while it's no Dark Souls by any stretch, sometimes this game takes the piss with how much damage enemies do.  Damage in this game is always done in a range of values, for example a weapon you pick up will have a strength rating of, lets say, 4-19 or something like that.  So when you hit something it's taking that range, plus whatever stat bonuses you have and then it's applied to your strike.  The same goes for the enemies too only I think their ranges are jacked up in hard because sometimes you'll get hit and less than 1% of your HP will fall away and then a moment later you'll get hit by the same guy only he'll one shot you and cause you to reload a save.  The game IS pretty easy and almost all enemies can be beaten hitless by running in little circles around them but it can be annoying when you take a hit and either have to run away chugging HP potions like some kind of addict or you just flat out die.

Overall though it was fun coming back to Dark Alliance.  If you're looking for a sort of brain-off hit the goblins till they die kind of action game then give it a go.  Even if you aren't into table top games AT ALL it's a fun little romp through a bunch of location severing scalps from heads for EXP and gold and it's just generally very much worth playing

SMT: If...

 

Persona is now a pretty popular series for RPG fans.  Persona 3 roped in a few weebs with it's dating sim elements, Persona 4 got even more popular with it's Scooby Doo-esque setting and story and then P5 really came along and really got people excited.  It's sort of a joke about the fandom ignoring the first two games in the series due to a lack of social links and much clunkier game play but the one game that next to nobody talks about is Shin Megami Tensei If..., the entry in the series that sort of kicked the whole thing off.

Shin Megami Tensei If... starts out with you doing a personality test which will decide a bunch of stuff and then you are thrust into the halls of Karukozaka high school where you do a bit of wandering around and all hell breaks loose.  You find a partner to join you on your quest and then you go dungeon crawling around a bunch of areas loosly based on the seven deadly sins.  For people who have become confortable with the more modern entries in Persona or even mainline, SMT If... may be a little hard to play at first since it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler but if you can stick with it you're in for a good time.

The gameplay is standard first person dungeon crawling affair where you wander around, get lost, find gear, blunder into traps and so on and so forth.  The usual Megami Tensei mechanic of demon negotiation makes an appearance where almost every enemy you come across in a dungeon can be talked to and if your negotiation goes well they well join your party.  Right now it sounds almost entirely like a mainline SMT game and not like a Persona title at all but the seeds of the franchise turn up in something called the Guardian System.

In SMT: If... there are no game overs, death just isn't a thing for the protagonists here.  When you die you are instead given a nice mode 7 sweeping shot of some grassy lands and then an old man gives you a guardian.  A guardian will give your characters stat boosts (or reductions) and in the case of your partner, the guardian will dictate what spells they have throughout the game.  Entering the status menu allows you to see a "guardian meter" which fills as you defeat enemies.  If you die when the bar is yellow then your guardian gets downgraded and if you die while it's red it gets upgraded.  So while you'll never have to worry about a nasty insta-death spell killing you and sending you back to your last save, dying before you're ready for an upgrade can be just as, if not more annoying than a traditional game over.  

The guardian system is pretty much what laid the foundation for the personas in the Persona games.  Obviously later games would do away with demon negotiation and just have full parties of human characters but it's very clear to see where all the inspiration came from.

Aside from that, SMT If... is also bursting with content, with slightly different story routes depending on which partner you pick at the start of the game as well as a special New Game + character that does away with the sin themed dungeons and instead has a completely different dungeons to explore and bosses to kill, it's almost like having two games in one.

There are some annoyances though that come par for the course with a Megami Tensei game.  For example it's extremely easy to get blindsided by a nasty Mudo or Hama spell in some of the later dungeons, instant death attacks that will have you tearing your hair out although there is at least some counter play when you know it's coming.  The worst part of the game that isn't well known to MegaTen fans is the Dungeon of Sloth.  A slow, boring part of the game where you have to wait for students to dig tunnels by just mindlessly walking up and down the level until the in game moon cycle ticks enough times.  If you were going to get pissed off and give up on the game, it would probably be in this exact part and I absolutely couldn't blame you for doing so.

That said though, Sloth dungeon aside SMT If... is an pretty good game and if you're a Persona fan looking to experience a bit more MegaTen, this is a pretty good place to come since it's challenging but not overly brutal.  The game was never officially released outside of Japan but if you're willing to get your emulation on then a fan translation does exist for this game so you can enjoy it in English.

So go check it out, go see where it all began

Zombie Night Terror

 Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected.  Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.  

In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue.  There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.

If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing.  For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain.  You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them.  Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle.  For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom.  Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.

What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles.  For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places.  Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill.  Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them.  If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.

The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way.  One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch.  At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to.  That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels.  Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness.  Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.

Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level.  So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.

Hard Vs Bullshit

 

Recently I've been playing a game on stream called Wings of Vi.  Wings of Vi is a platform game brought to us by a guy named Solgyrn who is probably the most well known for creating a similar game called I wanna be the Boshy.  I Wanna Be the Boshy was a fan game of the notorious I Wanna Be The Guy, a platform game that was designed to troll just as much as it was to challenge the player.  

Hard games are something I usually quite enjoy.  If you were to come to me and tell me that a game presents an above average challenge I'm probably going to buy it.  When a game has multiple difficulty options I'm the kind of person to jump straight into hard mode and completely ignore the normal or easy settings.  I'm not saying this to flex any kind of gaming cred, of course, I'm merely pointing it out so that when I go on to call Wings of Vi "bullshit" in the next few paragraphs, I'm being genuine rather than just throwing my toys out of the pram because I died a bunch of a couple of bosses.

Difficulty is a hard thing for a lot of developers to get right and generally speaking I find that the best games in this aspect don't even have difficulty settings to speak of.  3D Mario games are one example of this where you can usually beat the game with only 70 of the stars/shines/dragon dildos or whatever but for players looking for extra challenge can find it in post game content or in challenging courses when trying to 100% the game.  Another example would be Celeste, a challenging platformer that presents the player with no difficulty settings in the traditional sense but instead gives a reasonable challenge to all players and then ramps up the difficulty in post game content such as B sides, Golden Berries and Farewell.  Dark Souls would be another good example of this where some basic knowledge of the games systems and adapting to the combat a little will get you through all the games story bosses, but extra bosses and self imposed challenges can help bring up the challenge for people who want a bit of punishment. 

Bad difficulty, I find, usually comes in the form of settings that one must pick at the start of the game.  The one that stands out extremely clear in my mind was Nier on PS3 where the hard mode just increased enemy damage and health to the point where almost all the battles were just long slogfests and death would be brought about by a loss of attention due to boredom rather than the game being actually hard.  The other bad example I can think of is Dante's Inferno, also on PS3 where the higher difficulty levels were designed specifically around New Game Plus and the carrying over of skills and stats.  Sure it's POSSIBLE to beat Dante's Inferno on hard from a new game, but it's not fun because you feel like you're playing with your hands tied behind your back rather than because the game is actually any harder than it was on normal.  From what I understand, Resident Evil 8 does a similar thing but I've still not played that yet so I can't say for sure.

Then there's bullshit games like Wings of Vi.  Funnily enough Wings of Vi actually does present you with difficulty settings that change the number of checkpoints and enemy damage but again, nothing actually interesting out side of "die less and jump better".  But the problems in Wings of Vi are much more than that in both platforming and combat.  Platforming bullshit comes in the form of challenges and obstacles that 1) You can't see before it's too late and 2) Aren't obviously clear how to get around them.  Platforming in Vi is extremely precise and the game is almost more of a puzzle experience in this regard than a straight platformer.  Working out which combination of jumps and wing flutters you have to do is difficulty and can be pretty satisfying to achieve when you get it down.  However there are often points in the game where you will be presented with a jumping challenge, you practice and die and attempt to clear it and eventually you get it, only for the screen to shift and you get given more instant death spikes with no time to react and no time to work out what the hell you were supposed to do.  Back to the checkpoint with you, idiot.   A good example of this is a section that involves dashing through rhythmically moving worms.  The timing on the jumps and dashes to get through but when you get above the section you have to make a diagonal dash to safety through an enemy and onto a platform that you CANT FUCKING SEE.  So yeah, har har you got me with the sudden direction change and enemy placement but the death isn't my fault.  Maybe if you had shown me that before I would have made it through but you just covered my eyes for a stupid "gotcha" moment.

The bosses aren't much better where the first 10-50 attempts will be just adapting to whatever attack pattern the enemy has and then every attempt after that is just doing it until you can that one "in the zone" run where you pull it all off.  One boss however, a giant 3 headed worm in a perpetually moving tunnel with floating platforms can make you lose runs to it just not working.  The bosses chases you left to right in phase 1, top to bottom in pase 2 and the left to right in phase 3.  The shift from phase 2 to phase 3 will ALWAYS bug out, I never saw it work properly once and you will die to platformings not spawning and leaving you trapped to take a big chunk of damage.  Bosses that do work right, like Ancient Constructs, aren't any better though, starting off reasonable and then just becoming jank Touhou by the end.

Sure, Wings of Vi and games like it are extremely satisfying to get through but "bet you didn't see that coming" platforming and "bullet hell with a jumbo jet" aren't fun to experience, it's just bullshit bad design so that idiots like me can say that we bashed our head off the wall long enough to get it done.  There's a reason Celeste, Dark Souls and games like it will be celebrated forever and shit like Wings of Vi will be forgotten and fade into obscurity