Games used to be harder and they still are. That’s the lament veteran players now mutter whenever encountering some modern shoot-’em-up or action adventure. It sounds like the same sort of nostalgic elitism that music snobs indulge in, criticising current bands for lacking the legendary quality of yesterday’s heroes. But with games, it’s kind of true.
As the industry has grown, the big titles have moved towards toning down the difficulty, in order to give a smooth experience to as wide a range of players as possible. Nowadays, if you want to face a real challenge, you have to select “hard” mode, which usually just means more enemies and less ammo. But difficulty is at its best when it’s an intrinsic part of the design: players have to think about the game in another way – and earn their progress.
That is certainly true for the titles in this list. They’re not all classics, but even the plainly unfair ones have unforgettable qualities that made us persevere. That’s the thing with difficulty: it only really hurts when you want to see what’s next.
Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls (Fromsoft, 2009/2011)
Dark Souls
When Fromsoft’s Hidetaka Miyazaki set out to rethink the action RPG genre, one of the new foundations was serious challenge. His thinking was: how can a player feel accomplishment without overcoming real odds? In these games, even the most basic enemies murder players again and again, so that the screen message “YOU DIED” is imprinted on the brain. The only consolation is that death is a staple part of how these worlds work. In other games, dying is failure, but here dying is how you learn, how you get better. In Souls, death is just part of the journey.
Ghosts ‘n Goblins (Capcom, 1985)
Ghost n' Goblins
Capcom’s side-scrolling platformer used the ever-present threat of death to create a uniquely intense adventure. One hit reduces protagonist knight Arthur to his heart-patterned boxers, and the second kills. Unpredictable enemies spawn everywhere, power-ups can be traps, and most players never see past the first stage. Those that reach the end find out that they’ve either failed to bring the holy cross, which means replaying the last two levels, or that in bringing it they’ve fallen for “a trap devised by Satan”, and have to do the whole thing over again. On an even higher difficulty setting. Capcom, you rascal.
Ninja Gaiden II (Tecmo Koei, 2008)
Ninja Gaiden
Challenge was always part of the Ninja Gaiden series, but 2008’s Ninja Gaiden II hit a new peak of demanding insanity. These enemies rough-house the player on even “normal” difficulty but, once the setting is at Master Ninja, they attack relentlessly with brutal health-chewing grabs and projectiles. In later levels, foes have cannons for arms that are fire with unerring precision and regularity. It’s impossible to survive at times, nevermind kill anything. Naturally, the internet means someone has done the whole thing in four hours without being hit once.
God Hand (Capcom, 2006)
God Hand
God Hand’s commercial failure means many of the best ideas are yet to be stolen, one being the on-screen difficulty meter that responds to a player’s skill. There are four gradations, from level one to level DIE (the highest level), and if you’re getting smacked around it stays low. Once you get good at this (already tough) game however, it amps up how enemies attack, where they’ll attack from, how much damage they do, and increases the rewards for defeating them. Few games make the demands that God Hand does, and none tie difficulty and performance together with such elegance.
UFO: Enemy Unknown (Mythos Games, 1994)
UFO
This is where the XCOM series began, a deep strategy game with an unforgiving attitude towards lax play. The designer, Julian Gollop, had made many great turn-based titles in 2D but XCOM’s isometric perspective and implementation of fog-of-war added a terrifying strategic dimension – so many soldiers lost to a dark corner you never checked. The aliens exploit mistakes, cut down your soldiers ruthlessly, and back at base force you into hard choices in the desperate scramble to keep humanity safe. If this is anything to go by, we’re screwed.
Fade to Black (Delphine Software, 1995)
FTB
Flashback’s sequel was an early attempt to bring a successful 2D design into 3D – and underestimated just how important precision controls are. Though a forward-thinking third-person design in some respects, Fade to Black was undone by many enemies that could kill in a single hit – one terrifying example being a tiny hard-to-target blob that flips towards the player character before dissolving all their flesh on contact. The lavish cutscenes created by the developer for each possible death make you wonder whether the tail was wagging the dog.
NARC (Williams Electronics, 1988)
NARC
Perhaps Eugene Jarvis is better represented by Robotron 2084, an impossible challenge and a much better game, but that low-fi sci-fi shooter lacks NARC’s crude impact. A two-player arcade game starring Max Force and Hit Man, out to take down Mr Big, NARC was one of the first games to truly glory in gibs and ultraviolence – the various junkies, punks and thugs explode into gory gobbets as the guns of justice blaze. Jarvis’s games are always difficult but, with NARC,they reached a whole new level of cruel theatre.
Smash T.V. (Williams Electronics, 1990)
Smash T.V.
Smash T.V. is an arcade classic and exemplifies a school of design that’s now largely dead: to make people desperate to see the next screen. The setup is perfect, a future gameshow where contestants move through rooms filled with death-dealing nasties and gain more prizes the longer they stay alive. Even the first room won’t hesitate to kill unwary players and, from then on, the gloves come off as Jarvis (again) and co-designer Mark Turmell squeeze as much colour, shrapnel, and explosive ordnance on-screen as possible. “Total carnage,” shouts the announcer. “IIIIIII love it!”
The Simpsons (Konami, 1991)
The Simpsons
There could be any number of arcade beat-em-ups in this spot – TMNT, X-Men, even Final Fight – but in terms of efficiently guzzling coins through gorgeous presentation and artificial difficulty, it’s hard to top The Simpsons arcade game. The visuals, animations, enemies and scenarios are exceptional and clearly a labour of love (unlike the script) but the game beneath them is a brutal slugfest that especially enjoys stunlocking players – where one hit leads to many more.
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Pull together a list of the most iconic video game characters of all time and chances are there would be very few surprises. Classics like Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man, Link, Solid Snake, Donkey Kong and Samus will always be phenomenally important to the fabric of video games, but all of them first appeared on the scene during a completely different era. They're unquestionably iconic, and the only argument is over what order they'd fall into the top 10. They each may have appeared in modern games (with varying degrees of success,) but they're ultimately children of the Eighties and Nineties. If you take that group off the table completely, and focus on the significant characters that made their first appearances this century, you get a very different picture of how video games now present their leading figures. Seen all together like this, they're a potent reminder that the tone of games, for the most part, has changed dramatically post-PlayStation 2 and Xbox. 1....
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