Tag Archives: Omnitopic

May Omnitopic Roundup

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Penny Arcade

Hey friends and gentle readers! We’ve gone quite the places in this past month, from being a ragtag band of nobodies who write about games to a large ragtag band of nobodies who write about games, and nothing signifies this more than the results of our recent omnitopic. We had more posts for the omnitopic than we did the entire month of January, which is saying something about the places we’re going. Good places. Happy places, filled with more games than you can shake a stick at.

Tomorrow we’ll be announcing a new omnitopic, so stay tuned for that. For now, though, here were the articles we wrote this past month on May’s topic, Difficulty:

-Patricia offered our initial response, “Disembodied”, which talked about her difficulties adapting to the PC after years as a console gamer. What we in the PC universe would call a noble undertaking.

-Erstwhile Fern (one of the few who, like me, remember the lean years when the gaming crops didn’t grow on our fertile soil) strongly approved of the Super Guide and what it allowed for the games that used it to do.

-I apparently won the popularity contest by talking about my …

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Are Difficulty Settings Necessary?

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windwaker

The pursuit of a challenge can be a driving force in life. The accomplishment of something thought to be unobtainable has a certain allure which some find irresistible. Game designers tend to play off of this concept, creating challenges that seem insurmountable in the context of the game world. Typically there will be an option for the player to affect the likelihood of beating the odds through game difficulty. As a designer, the proper implementation of difficulty, in my opinion, is instituting a learning curve and building from there. Once the player has gleaned the knowledge the game has presented, the designer is free to introduce complex obstacles that utilize this knowledge in varying ways. Approaching the difficulty question from this angle allows designers to create more involving situations during the progression of the game. This concept of “learning in order to succeed” seems to eradicate the necessity of a difficulty option altogether.

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The Difference Between “Hard” and “Frustrating”

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megaman

I would like to preface this by saying I love hard games. I love Demon’s Souls and most Atlus games. I play Touhou, though I have only beaten one of them and only on easy mode. I measure difficulty in ‘Megamans’. I do not believe those who play easier games are lesser or inferior, I just like hard games. The thing is, hard is an ambiguous word. A game can be hard for a lot of reasons, but as far as I am concerned, there are two kinds of difficult games: those that are hard and those that are frustrating. As a final preface note, unless stated otherwise, everything discussed in this article is set to the normal difficulty.

Hard games are deliberately hard. They are designed to be difficult, and make you work to complete a level, to get an item, to win a fight or complete a puzzle. They are games like Super Meat Boy that kill you a lot but keep death a quick thing and don’t make a big deal about it, or games like Persona or Megaman that are simply difficult. They are nothing short of challenging, and despite the difficulty I rarely find myself …

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Right in Front of Your Face

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ico

Elitism still is the big divide. It’s the biggest obstacle facing games today. Elitism is the belief that some individuals, who form an elite — a select group of people with intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views are the only ones that matter.

We are that elite.

Many of my friends resented when Nintendo positioned itself as a beacon to attract non-gamers (including some of my non-gamer friends, interestingly enough). Now, after piling them with shovelware for years, we see our dusted Wiis and state The Wii Is Dead in a dismissive tone that implies See, we were right all along. You shouldn’t have abandoned us. We are the ones that get it, not them.

Because (OMG!) gaming is art. And we are (obviously) the only ones who can see it.
Some pieces of art are difficult to understand or appreciate. That’s why the elite is the elite; and have Bach playing on the background as they discuss the peasant situation. The thing is that while there is only schooling and experience in the way of turning the Average Joe into H. E. Pennypacker, for gaming there is also the …

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Surviving The Horror: Dead Space 2′s Hard Core Difficulty

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deadspace2

When humans get scared, our bodies prepare to take action. Adrenaline courses through our systems, our heart rates skyrocket, and certain bodily functions like digestion get suspended entirely. This is commonly known as the body’s “fight or flight” response. But while “fight or flight” may have a nice ring to it, the terms suggest a simple duality that doesn’t quite mesh with the reality: our fear response covers not just fight OR flight, but every combination of the two. Furthermore, the fear response varies between people. How you react to something scary may not be how I react to it.

Horror game developers are aware of this range of response, and they design their titles to fit a certain segment of it. Some horror fans prefer games that trigger their “fight” reaction. Others prefer games that trigger their “flight” response. Neither is a more valid horror experience than the other, and, contrary to popular belief, titles like Resident Evil 5 and Amnesia can occupy the same market space.

Enter the Dead Space series. The first game appealed to both “fight” and “flight” enthusiasts with its mix of extreme player vulnerability and engaging dismemberment. The second game ramped up the intensity in …

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The Complexity of SeeD

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Difficulty_1

The trend in gaming has been to simplify, simplify, simplify. If games are easier, more people will want to play them. If games are less complex, fewer people will quit them midway through, and the more people who beat games, the more people will play more games, more sequels.

Simpler games mean more money, put simply.

Complexity in games is certainly different from difficulty, the subject of this month’s omnitopic, though the two are often related. The earliest games were extremely difficult, but most featured two buttons and few had even the most rudimentary concepts of player progression and development. In Super Mario Brothers the only way to get better was through trial and error, and the tutorial was the first goomba, walking at you. In Final Fantasy, you improved by leveling up, but the concept of leveling up was not much more complex that killing enough monsters to get more hit points. It was Mario’s trial and error codified into a straight, simple progression, mostly because you couldn’t get much better at hitting the attack button. Contrast this to modern games, where tutorials are all consuming but the games themselves are easier than ever. …

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Disembodied

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pcgaming

So! We have that one thing we call the Omnitopic (which you should all enter, because there are prizes!) going on here at Nightmare Mode, and…this would be the first entry. But Patricia, you might ask, what in the world does this have to do with difficulty? Why, I speak about my difficulty adjusting to PC gaming, of course!

Rumble. It’s a feature I never knew I appreciated until I acquired my first gaming PC last February. Since then, I’ve been spending more and more time playing games on it than my consoles, and, despite enjoying the many benefits of PC gaming–lower price points, better graphics, etc–there’s something that’s been nagging me this entire time. Something unspeakably eerie to me about standard (ie, normal mouse + keyboard) PC gaming experience.

It feels disembodied.

Hell, I’d go so far as to say that it feels downright unnatural. I can’t feel anything, my ‘body’ is denied legibility. I can’t situate myself. Where before sticking to cover produced a dull thud; where every step before jumping off a ledge was palpable; where sliding down a mountain produced an earthy rasp; now, there is nothing but nothingness itself.

In its place was this cold efficiency that the prosthesis …

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Omnitopic: Difficulty

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difficulty

(The imaginatively named Omnitopic is our attempt at community; bow before the might of community, petty mortals! It is a collection of posts circling around a specific topic, floating like a boxer and stinging like a nail through the forearm. It is a combination of opinions into a collection of packages.)

The month of May makes me think of flowers, showers and absurdly difficult games.

What makes a game difficult? There’s no central criteria. Difficulty comes in many forms. Some of these forms are as hard as trying to beat Mega Man 2 as a five year old. Others are games you positively cannot get into, that you try and try to enjoy and eventually find your way in to a new favorite. Some are complicated and arcane, not especially challenging but presenting a difficult front to keep out casual gamers.

And others? Others are just plain easy.

Difficulty in games is a heady topic, one which has spawned countless casual vs. hardcore debates, heated rants, and broken controllers. So this makes it a fantastic pick to revive our long dormant collaborative post series, dead since last May, because it’s a topic with so many avenues of access. Easy and hard are just one …

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