Jimquisition: A Different Kind of Difficulty

[Redd the Sock]

I don't know. I don't think the lowest rung should be set that low.

Optional challenges have always been a part of video games, but there's something offputting about a "show up and try" level challenge being the main goal. Have we sunk that far that we cater to people that need to be garunteed the "you win" screen? Okay, the main perputrators of this are Kirby Epic Yarn and the Lego movie games, and other kid / family fare, but still, I fear that direction (see Final Fantasy 13's instant battle restart).

I'll admit, I miss the time when beating a game was an acheivement rather than something done so quickly everyone will be spoling the ending online within two days. Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, these were all still fun even though we never got the payoff. It might be more tolerable if the rewards were known to be better for doing the extra challenges. Take Mario 64 for example: get all 120 stars and what do you get? You see Yoshi for a few seconds and get a ton of lives to no longer need. Lame. Fianl Fantasy 7's optional bosses, win and get things you probably already got to beat the optional bosses. At least Kingdom Hearts gives us bonus ending movies. Some give nothing but bragging rights and weird looks from guys like Yahtzee that wonder why we bothered.

 

[TStormer]

Fucking hell this guy is really really fucking funny every so often.

He's getting better and he is going to be a serious big player in a year or two.

 

[winter2]

Jimbo for God Emperor!

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Most of misunderstandings here stem from the fact that many people confuse challenge and difficulty with cheapness. And think about this: optional challenge been done many times, but not cheapness - it's not fun, and therefore cheapness is never optional. Have you ever seen optional broken escort mission? Truly optional? Never.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Double post.

 

[Mid-Boss]

What I love is people who claim to hate Jim but watch his videos every week. Do they do it just so that they can come onto the boards and complain every week?

 

[The Great JT]

Thank you, Escapist, for continuing to bless the interwebs with more of Jim Sterling.

 

[Aureliano]

Well there we go. One minute of entertainment, five minutes of boredom.

It's true. Jim can be funny. He just doesn't bother most of the time and that is a shame. I get that this show is Jim's soapbox, and that isn't itself a problem, but if he wants people to listen he should make the speechifying interesting for the audience.

On a side-note, I totally agree that contemporary games can be just as hard as (and certain games even freaking harder than) Nintendo hard games. I'd still rather play Megaman than Kirby's Epic Yarn because Kirby is lame.

 

[Pr0]

I've avoided the last few weeks of his videos but checked this one out and I have to say, racism, sexism and too much information about bodily functions.

I guess some people like what they're going to like but I find his attempts at humor to appeal to the lowest common denominator at best.

The actual "content" of the show this time wasn't badly thought out but again most of this comes out of "Thank you Captain Obvious" territory for anyone thats been a gamer as part of their lifestyle. Its not really saying anything that hasn't been said.

This is largely where a lot of my problems with this show come from, from the shows I've bothered to watch, he hasn't said anything 1000 other people more qualified than him have already said.

So whats next Mr. Sterling? "Just because a game is popular doesn't mean its bad"? Or do you need to let that John Carmack interview go cold for awhile before you bring this one up?

 

[iron skirt]

simply genius... that's the thing with lego games too... 100% comletion in lego star wars 2 is hard... oh and for you guys who want hardcore games: no one is stoping you to restart the level every time you take minimum amount o damage... ore is that to hard for you? make up tour mind God dam it!

 

[seniormeld]

Does he not realize that those kind of "get your e-peen as big as possible" challenges exist in other games to?. In Super Mario Bros. and MegaMan, there is both the difficulty of getting to the end of the level and also scoring as many points as possible. Getting gold medals in Epic Yarn is the same as getting Master Ninja rank in Ninja Gaiden, the only difference is that Ninja Gaiden makes both goals difficult instead of just one. That is the biggest fault of his argument, the fact that ranking and time trails extend to the games he saying don't have them.

 

[SandroTheMaster]

It is amazing how every single time I can get 100% behind Jim when it comes to who or what he is rallying against, and then be 100% against him when it comes to his solutions, views or alternatives.

Like this time. I'm 100% agreeable to the notion that old-school hard games are not really hard. They are just exercises in repetition and conditioning.

Then he goes on with Kirby and the 100% completionist way of viewing difficulty, and that's even worse for me. I'm all for a player to gauge what he views to be difficulty, but in these particular examples it is just even more repetition and conditioning than just "not dying".

Conditioning is not equal difficulty. It just means becoming less of a human to mechanically perform a task exactly the right way.

Eh, but what do I know. Considering the number of people that consider the dastardly stuff in old-school platforms that are there just to instantly kill you the first time because it simply is impossible to predict what you should do before dying to it, to be A+ game design...

 

[Kuth]

While I can see some fault for using Kirby's Epic Yarn, I see the point he is making. I don't get why some of the opponents of this really need to argue, but Jim has a point. Finishing a game well is a challenge and getting forced into a hard game is just one way of doing it.

I understand some people seeing that Kirby is too easy even with gold in mind, but think of other games that are in the moderate form of this. I look at Sonic Adventure 2. In order to get secondary costumes, you need to get a perfect S rank in every mission and follow up missions objectives for that mission. Meaning for every level you did, you had 5 missions that needed to be completed on S rank based on either time, accuracy, or just plain speed. This is hard, and I see SA2 as one of the hardest games I ever played.

Yet if you take some games like Mega Man, I find those games to be more on a giant game of simon says, then anything else. All you do in any mega man game is memorize patterns and stick with your guns. That's all there is to it. You die and memorize like you're taking a shower with shampoo, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. That is hard, but in the sense you need to do the same level several times.

 

[Rabidkitten]

I'm sure the points I'm going to outline have been said in an earlier post.

A)People who reminisce about the good ol' days are letting nostalgia getting the upper hand on their judgement. They were not good ol' days. It was an era of poor game design, spotted with a few gems that kept us going.

B)Modern games are difficult. People who deny this need to read the start screen where the difficulty setting is located. Or go play people who are actually good online, or try to be a completionist and do all the painful "extra stuff" to get all the golden eggs.

C)Old games are perceived as being more difficult just because the punishment for failure was VERY steep. This results in frustration and creating frustration is what creates the perception of difficulty. If you died, you often got sent back to the beginning of the level or worse the entire game. And you couldn't access content until you had mastered the earlier stages. If Kirby required you to get a golden medal of each stage before progressing to the next, it would be perceived as hard. If "insert fps here" forced you to play on nightmare mode then it would be perceived as hard.

I guess the argument is flawed a little because Kirby is "easy" because its easy to play all the content. While old games require pain and suffering to play all the content.


People think the Witcher 2 is too hard and frustrating, and yet you can turn down the difficulty at any point and enjoy a nice cake walk through any frustrating scene. You also crank up the difficulty for a hair pulling nightmare of an experience.

I gripe a lot about Demon Souls being overrated for the same reasons above. It's not good because it's hard, it poorly designed because you can't scale the challenge.

Games were never harder, they were just poorly designed.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Death doesn't add difficulty to a game, a sense of loss does.

I'll give you the perfect example; Shadow of the Colossus. You can die in this game, but people that've played it will know that the difficulty of this game doesn't come from dying but from falling off of a colossi and having to climb the bastard all over again.

What death - and in SotC's case; falling off - adds is an interruption of the game, of your progress, of your flow... of your pride. And having to make your own difficulty doesn't add a sense of loss, it adds a sense of unnecessary completion.

If the difficulty of the game is something that the player has to go find for him or herself, then it's not a "difficulty"; it's a lazy design to keep little kids who play it from having their brain challenged.

 

[Excludos]

a GOOD episode of Jimquisition?! I'm dumbfounded. I laughed...several times! Keep it up. If you're episodes continue in this direction, all the annoyance I have towards your earlier episodes will be forgotten

Now to the actual point of the episode..I don't agree with you. What you're doing is finding challenges in a game..but the game itself is not challenging unless you put on arbitrary restraints on yourself. Any game is challenging if you do that. Playing through mario is hard, but playing through it without losing a single life? Now thats hardcore.

With that said, some of the most fun I've had in a game was to be found in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. No, not the singleplayer champaign, but the extra, optional, challenges. I was sweating like a right nerd on the final challenge where you have to outrun the police, fbi, and if I remember correctly, the army..for 30 minutes straight!

Edit: as someone mentioned above, this is what Achievements are meant to do as well. The problem with achievements is that they are in every game, and you get them for watching through the intro, taking your first step, shooting your first enemy, etc. You get so tired off them, and you start taking them for granted, that you don't bother looking up the ones that actually brings difficulty, makes you play the game in different way, and is downright fun.

 

[Excludos]

Death doesn't add difficulty to a game, a sense of loss does

While I somewhat agree, this is not always the case. Its rather about game design. When you die in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you don't lose anything. In fact, you start the next room over with full health. Yet I still went through the game, shitting my pants, trying not to die at every corner..because the game was so immersive I felt like I was really there.

 

[GrimoireOfAlice]

That's right kids... Pretending a game is difficult is the new difficult!

...Or not.

Since Jim used Megaman as his example and i'm afraid its not a series I care for much so I can only use the ones I've completed as an example but... Last I checked you could do score runs through Megaman Zero... While still retaining the death difficulty... So that makes kirby what... half the game Megaman Zero is?

In an era of gaming where seeing a game over screen on your first playthrough is almost impossible without dilberately triggering it and where most additional content basically amounts to "Are you persistant enough?" this video is hilariously weak.
Especially when using a game where you essentially cannot fail. In fact you can literally compare kirby's epic yawn to modern day primary-school tests. Where the kids are told no one actually fails, just that some got better scores than others and some get gold stars...

 

[Rossmallo]

Thank you. So much. I agree with this SO much and have tried to argue this point to several people.

Now I have a video to show people rather than typing it all out.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Death doesn't add difficulty to a game, a sense of loss does

While I somewhat agree, this is not always the case. Its rather about game design. When you die in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you don't lose anything. In fact, you start the next room over with full health. Yet I still went through the game, shitting my pants, trying not to die at every corner..because the game was so immersive I felt like I was really there.

Yes, but there's still an obstacle that keeps you from simply breezing through; The obstacle being the sense of fear.

I've never played Amnesia, but I've played plenty of other good horror games. Games like Silent Hill 2 were you basically have to fight your own anxiety in order to progress. And it's not an anxiety through fear of dying since SH2 is also a game were you'll be hard pressed to actually die, it's the anxiety of the atmosphere and sound design.

That's why people who aren't easily scared at all find these games boring, because without the fear there's no real challenge for them.