Difficulties

[unoleian]

Best name for a difficulty setting comes from Heretic. Easiest difficulty is "Thou Needest a Wet-Nurse."

I think one of the hardest games I ever played was Devil May Cry 3. I've never game-overed so many times in the freakin' opening act of ANYTHING in recent memory. And it was on something fairly easy...

 

[ethaninja]

I loved Rise of the Triads difficulties.

Easy - I am a chew toy
Medium - Will of Iron, Knees of Jell-O
Hard - I'm in my element: lead
Extreme - Two Words: Reaper Man

 

[TheDist]

Carmageddon 1 & 2 had some err.. interesting difficulty settings. As I recall the hardest for 1 was "hard as french kissing a cobra" and for 2 it was "As hard as fisting a velociraptor"

 

[CloggedDonkey]

I always found the Tom Clancy games humorous with their hardest difficulty setting.

Easy
Normal
Realistic

... and I couldn't beet Chaos Theory on easy.
Conviction was easy though. seriously, why did they give Sam Fisher regenerating health? that's just stupid.

anyway, I remember some game being "normal, hard, very hard, rape" a while back, can't remember what though.

 

[firedfns13]

"Ace" from Ace Combat is pretty hard. You're fucked if you get shot by a bullet, unlucky enough to hit a cloud of flak, have more than 1 plane to take on at a time. (They're normally found in 3s or more)

But by far, Veteran from CoD4 is the hardest I've played. It's just so unforgiving!
Stalker difficulties make you die incredibly easy as well.

 

[Jfswift]

I still like Wolfenstein with it's varying difficulty levels, such as, "I am Death Incarnate!", love that. XD

As for hardest I usually take the vanilla or slightly more than vanilla route like Legendary in the Halo series although I did try Insanity in Mass Effect 2 because i'm competent of my battle skills in that game. I'm about halfway through right now (go badass anti-material rifle, oh how I love you).

 

[chromewarriorXIII]

Never got to try the Heaven & Hell mode on DMC3, but from what a friend told me everything dies in one hit but so do you. That sounds pretty crazy.

But I actually found DMC1 to be harder on it normal difficulty. I could beat DMC3 on normal with few problems but on DMC1 I couldn't make it past the first boss, but hadn't done bad enough on the previous missions to "unlock" easy difficulty. That annoyed me to no end.

In terms of easiest "Hard" difficulties, I would have to say Level 9 CPUs on Super Smash Bros. Melee. The only difference is that they start to actually understand the characters moveset. I've found that the best way to get a hard difficulty is to set the Handicap to automatic, this way, if you are kicking ass then you start taking a ton of damage per hit, while your enemy takes less damage.

 

[shemoanscazrex3]

Pft, DMC4 has nothing on DMC3!

If DMC4's difficulty is the equivalent of beating you up and stealing your lunch money, DMC3 burns your house down, turns your family into string puppets and sells their intestines at the local flee market.

And that's not even half-way through the game

And this couldn't be any further from the truth. It took me forever to beat that game(original not greatest hits version) on the easiest mode. Guess you gotta make up for DMC2 somehow