A game that challenges you mentaly = A good game?

[Jamanticus]

I think the mentally challenging puzzle aspect of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time was one of the things that made it one of the greatest games ever made....
Every bit of that game had something that forced you to look at things a bit differently, as well as some creative puzzles.

So yes, in my opinion, games that are mentally challenging (as well as having a good story and gameplay, etc) are games that are good

 

[nikomas1]

I agree with the OP in precisely the way that he speaks of. He speaks of realistic games like GRID and Operation Flashpoint, both games which demand that the player plays as realistically as possible. I'm strongly in favour of these sorts of games, because the difficulty of the stated games is not arbitrary, as stated by Caliostro.

That was exactly what I meant. To many games just makes your enemys able to take more hits and dish out more damege, While GRID and Operation flashpoint makes the game more realistic. (And makes your opponents dricve better)

Now I'm not sayi'n that unrealistic games are bad, But strategy games are a good example, Some of them even state in the manual that the higher difficultys your opponents will cheat. Other cheap difficulty settings LIMIT the units your opponent can use. An example is command and conquer generals. If you play that game on easy your opponent won't build anything arial at all, And that is a little cheap to. And the AI will only attack with like 1 - 3 tanks and some infartry, Then repeat.

 

[Stalington]

I play for the challenge! If I wanted easy entertainment I would go to a day-care and start punting kids over the fence.

 

[Flour]

As long as a game challenges you without cheating [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty], it's a good game.

Games like Ninja Gaiden(only played the first 20 minutes of NG2, but IMO it was a good impression of the rest of the game), God of War and Devil May Cry are good examples of this, as long as they're played on the highest available difficulty.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

May I suggest Gladius to anyone who liked FFtactics?

I read it was in a list of 'Greatest Xbox games that no-one played', and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it is a similar turn based strategy thing, based on gladatiors, with a novel twist of using various 'golf swing meters' to add some variety to the attacks, hit the sweet spot and you'll crit, that kind of thing. It's out on PS2/Gamecube and Xbox, and I doubt you'd pay more than $10 for it now.

 

[mark_n_b]

At the risk of being blocked, I have to say that I have a hard time considering any debate about the mental attributes of a game loses energy when "mentally" is misspelled in the title. It makes me think that the game being considered as a mental challenge is Pong.

English isn't nikomas' first language so I'm more forgiving of some misspellings.

As for the topic of the thread. Challenge is always a good component of gaming whether it be mental or otherwise. It can go too far and delve into frustration and there are plenty of games which forgo mental challenge for twitch. I wonder if nik's examples aren't a little bit of an example of this.

For me, Bioshock allotted for some mental challenge because you could develop different strategies for dealing with the world. And if you changed your strategy (stealth vs. melee vs. power shooting vs. etc.) you needed to change your approach to the level. I wanted it to go even further. There was more than one clusterfuck you could not avoid and had to just beat your way through.