If you want difficulty, go outside of the usual avenues. You might find some interesting titles, some genuinely different, some genres that you thought were dead and some really difficult games.
forever saturday said:
2. Marketing games that are really hard is incredibly difficult these days, what with casual gamers all over the place. This is why there are difficulty settings.
It's not like difficulty selection is a new thing. It isn't this. The thing is, even the hardest difficulty in a lot of big name titles today is much much easier than the normal difficulty in a lot of past games. Bioshock for instance (unless you're telling me to handicap myself from using any plasmids while the vita chambers are off, which is kind of proving the point). Any FPS today, really.
forever saturday said:
4. HUD and better graphics make it easier to tell whats going on.
Like the above. Been there since the very beginning. In fact, as graphics get better, game designers have started to try dropping the HUD entirely and use the graphics themselves to tell what's going on.
As for the whole "games have become shorter" argument that I'm seeing, well... those truly hard games, shmups like R-Type, platformers like Mega Man and so can really be beaten in an hour or two if you made it to the end without dying. It isn't that they were longer games, it's that they felt longer due to the difficulty.
Bigeyez said:
You were like what 10 years old back then.
But they also probably spent a lot more time playing games back then. Not to mention the fact that games today are really throughly tested for difficulty. If someone gets stuck, the game is fixed so that they won't. In the past, a lot of the games were tested more for any bugs than things like difficulty.
