Difficulty is NOT a bad thing!

So a few days ago I started playing Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on my PC and then today I started playing Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure on my DS.  Both of these games are fucking fantastic and I will go into detail about why these games are so good in future posts.

But for now, I've come across a problem with today's gaming community, and my problem is that there is a vast majority of people who have all become little nancy boys afraid of a little difficulty!  Now to be fair, I don't blame them, games today ARE a lot easier than they used to be, but for good reason.  Modern gaming gives you experiences upwards of 8 hours while older games only really had an hour or two worths of time on the cartridge or whatever, so older games were made really hard so that you'd play them longer.

But a challenge is fun right?  Part of the appeal of this hobby is that you are kind of being issued a challenge by the developer to beat their game, they've spent time programming shit to try and stop you, so you have to overcome that, right?

Well apparently I'm wrong and being challenged and being made to learn to play well is too much for people today.  Dark Souls AND Henry Hatsworth have both had criticisms thrown at them for being hard and having "unforgiving" or "frustrating" difficulty.

Now there do exist games which are "bullshit" hard, but Dark Souls and Henry Hatsworth are NOT that, yet people still get upset when the game throws up a couple of road blocks.  I mean come on, what the fuck happened?!  Back when I was a lad, when we played a hard game we wouldn't throw up our arms and say that the difficulty was a problem, we'd band together and come up with techniques and strategies to get to the end of the game!

It's about time companies started making MORE hard games, not less, and it's also about time that people started actually started earning those endings instead of just giving up after they realise they can't win if their brain dead playing doesn't work.

We need a balance of hard games and games that can be played just to chill and relax, and right now we don't have it.  But we're never going to achieve that balance if critics keep pointing out difficulty as a negative point.  Call it out if it's bullshit, but games like Dark Souls and Hatsworth are NOT bullshit, so fucking stop it.