Don't Lock the Difficulty

A while ago you may remember me having a bit of a gush about Metal Gear Rising, I thought it was great.  If you don't remember me having a gush about Rising, have a flick through the archive and dig out my "review".

Anyway, Rising, along with many other games did something that I really can't fucking stand.  In the game there are 5 difficulty levels.  Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard and Revengeance.  I'm not trying to sound big or anything like that, but if you're like me then you want the biggest challenge you can get out of a game, so I always play on the hardest settings when possible.  However Rising doesn't let me do that, I have to beat the game fucking TWICE to unlock revengeance mode. 

I just want to challenge myself with the toughest thing that game has to offer, why does the game feel the need to make me prove my worth before it'll even let me fucking try.  That said though, Rising is a bad example because it turns out you can put in the Konami code to unlock them all from the start, but who's going to go looking for cheat codes on a first playthrough?! It's still bullshit.

Still, Rising isn't the only game that does this whole locked difficulty thing, in fact most games do and I seriously wish they would fucking stop.  Games today are pretty fucking easy to begin with, so don't make me play through the snoozefest easy modes before I can even attempt what sorry excuse for a hard mode you came up with.

Bottom line, make all difficulties available from the start of the goddamn game! No cheat codes! No having to play the game multiple times! No any other bullshit you can think of to make me work for bullshit that should be there anyway!  Just let me play the game on the difficulty I want to play it at, arsebag.