Disorder Reviews: Top 5 Games That Need Hard Difficulty Modes

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Martintox

Mister Disorder
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Apr 3, 2020
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Martintox Presents: Disorder Reviews

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I have a new album and a new Disorder Reviews blog. I have recently recovered from a stroke, and I am now in serious debt.

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TOP 5 GAMES THAT NEED HARD DIFFICULTY MODES

There is no beating around the bush: us pro gamers never have it our way. Since the dawn of the medium, we've had to suffer the caprices of amateurs, casuls, and other leeches that plead incessantly to manufacturers and developers to adjust their products and make them easier to digest. First, they make the controllers more intuitive to use; then, they add more bits to the microprocessors and improve the graphics so that you don't have to rub your precious handful of neurons together to fill in the blanks; finally, they start offering you challenges that you can feasibly overcome without the need for luck or brute force trial and error. What next, are they going to put a book in your hand and keep you entertained with good prose instead? In short, I find it highly offensive that developers have been catering to people who aren't as willing as I am to spend inordinate amounts of time banging my head against a wall. As a gamer, I am obligated to play as many games as possible (hence the title of "gamer"): if I were to skip a few of them because they didn't interest me enough to complete them, I would suffer such disgrace that I would have to hang myself with a controller wire to restore my gamer honor. For this purpose, I will go over five video games which, among many others, are in dire need of a hard mode so as to better accommodate dedicated players such as I.

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#5: DEAR ESTHER


Dear Esther may very well be the game that kickstarted the trend of walking simulators -- titles where the only things you need to win are the ability to hold a button to move forward and the patience to hold that button until you reach the end instead of quitting and uninstalling while you're ahead. One may argue in bad faith that listening to a story is already a great enough challenge for most gamers, but unlike many fake gamer girls, I'm the world record holder for the 100% speedrun of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and I'm astute enough to realize that the lore of Dark Souls III contradicts that of the first game at almost every turn; a procedurally generated short story about a dead wife and which requires you to walk to hear the next paragraph is peanuts in comparison. To make Dear Esther more palatable to elite gamers, it needs a fail condition that's appropriate for its approach. Since the story is the central focus, I propose the inclusion of puzzles where players have to type down an interpretive essay on the plot by jumping on letter tiles, all while avoiding landslides and deep crevices. If they die or are caught plagiarizing, they return to the beginning and have to hear the voice-over once again, because if they lose, then they clearly haven't been paying enough attention.

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#4: ELMO'S LETTER ADVENTURE


You may consider this a rather unfair addition to this list as well: being a Sesame Street edutainment game specifically for children, Elmo's Letter Adventure is on the perfect level of difficulty for most gamers. However, believe it or not, your averaje player alredy haz a more then solid grasp on da Englsih leksicon, makin the chalenge theirin more then redundent. (Honestly, reading the instruction manual is more difficult than the game proper.) If a player has any sort of issue with language, it's rather that he uses it too much: therefore, instead of teaching you more words, the hard mode should test your ability to gauge the room and learn which words are more appropriate than others. For instance, if you're doing a podcast with a few friends, you should stay on topic and avoid comparing the topic of discussion to Undertale. As another example, if you're at a Black Lives Matter rally, you should refrain from making what is colloquially known as a pro gamer move in front of everyone. Not only will such gameplay be quite challenging for even the most experienced of players, it will further drive home the game's value as a teaching tool.

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#3: DARK SOULS


This will surely come across as a shock to a lot of my pro gamer readers: contrary to what the Bandai Namco marketing team wants you to think, Dark Souls isn't just "le epic hardest game evar XDDDDD": it's a deeply philosophical and existential work that uses the world as a foundation for the gameplay instead of the other way around, going as far as to forgo questions of balance regarding certain mechanics so as to allow many viable character builds and avoid compromising on the essential principles of the setting that the player explores (PvP shills need not apply; if you were too much of a ***** to work around Homing Soulmass before 1.04 then it was your own fault). When you think about it that way, DS1 sounds like some kiddie stuff, am I right? Where are the bullshit death traps and the dozens of enemies that attack 5 times in a row, destroy your weapon durability, and drain your stamina instantly? Why does poise work? A hypothetical hard mode will have to take much inspiration from the DS sequels, bastions of meaningfully challenging game mechanics that they are: of the many possible changes, I would highly recommend removing any defensive option other than rolling and parrying, halving the player's health every time they die without restoring their humanity, having their save file delete itself when they die from Curse, and giving every boss at least 8 phases. I think the Gwyn battle would benefit a lot from 14 additional movesets.

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#2: SPY FOX IN "DRY CEREAL"


It's here that we enter forbidden realms of brutally easy difficulty. Point-and-click games are so simple that the genre name is also an accurate description of just about everything you do in them. People talk all the time about how cryptic titles of the sort were in the 1990s, but trying every single item combination and reloading a bunch isn't really hard; it's merely a test of patience, and hardly one as demanding as the kaizo masterpiece I Wanna Be the Guy. In that case, how can you possibly make such a game harder? You have to crank up the tedium, and that is why Spy Fox is a perfect fit for such an experiment. I used to be a spy for the Ethiopian government, and it isn't at all what you think it would be: the only accurate part is you get to fuck women all the time, but that's actually the one thing you'd wish isn't true to reality, since you have two chances in three of getting gonorrhea that way. Most importantly, though, you have to go through an abominable amount of paperwork before you even go in the field. Consequently, there's an obvious way to make Spy Fox more difficult: every time the player takes a step in Hard Mode, they have to sign 50 documents. They gotta make sure to read the fine print too, otherwise they might accidentally contradict one of those agreements and get covertly executed so they don't leak state secrets. Let me tell you, after you get a few thousand papers in, Monkeypenny's cockteasing is gonna hit a lot closer to home.

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#1: COOKIE CLICKER


Now this one's a fucking joke. Here, you don't even need to point -- you just click on a cookie and watch the number go higher. Even Twitter solicits your motor functions more, and its average user is already braindead! If that isn't enough, as soon as you buy something like cursors, clicking is no longer required either; Cookie Clicker plays itself for you. Not only is the "game" insultingly easy, it's a propaganda piece that pretends you can get on the fast track to constant profit just by clicking a handful of times on a fancy button. To give this title some semblance of a challenge, you have to give the player an actual incentive to keep laboring: the hard mode should encourage them to click as much as possible, all day and all night, lest the collectors come over and slice their fingers off for being overdue on debt that has already tripled with interest since the original loan. I don't mean to say that I've personally experienced that, let alone that I am currently in such a situation, or even that I have just recently gone through surgery to get those fingers back on, but having been a part of Disorder Reviews for so long, I can tell you that such a thing is a little more accurate to the entrepreneur life than whatever Cookie Clicker is peddling. (As an alternative to getting your fingers sliced off, you can also play Clicking Bad instead.)

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Neuromancer

Endless Struggle
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Now that you mention it, I believe that Twitter deserves a hard mode. 280 characters offers too much leniency, so the system is mechanically abusable. Most high level twitter players have figured out how to get the highest scores by utilising the rather easy to use outrage per character (OPC) strat That strat is so easy, even a medically-induced comatose Jordan Peterson can use it. If we made a Twitter hardmode of 28 letters, only true lacedaemonians would be able to achieve the high scores.
 
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PointlessKnowledge

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I think humanity needs to engage hard mode. All those doomsday cults so far have not delivered the end times upon us, thus existing is far too easy. We need flaming meteors impacting the planet continuously while angels, demons and aliens use people as bonus points in their eternal war. I did not have to dodge a single flaming sword of creation today and this fact disappoints me.
 
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