Why do we love the games that hate us?

Impossible Jrpgs are my montra, including the Souls games. I just love them so much.

Great article, Ryan! I, too, have been more fond of the "hard games." Not intentionally, mind, but I simply remember and cherish those moments when I've overcome a seemingly impossible obstacle--like just recently, with Tales of Vesperia's Gattuso boss. That was a BITCH to beat, but when I finally did, it felt so damn good. Like you said, I still enjoy my "streamlined" games quite a lot. I'm a huge fan of Halo, and Black Ops II is around the corner and you bet your ass I'll be there at midnight with my friends.

Definitely! It's not really a "this type of game" vs. "another type of game" thing, right? It's just that certain ones are inherently more memorable because they force you to rely on your skills--and, more importantly, they let you fail when you mess up.

This might not seem like it really applies to this, but a lot of what you said is kind of rolled up in my love of proper racing sims. Bear with me, because it's all there: 1. Failure is in nearly all cases because of your poor judgement 2. Success requires the player to learn and apply a specific skill set, a skill set which in most cases is never given by the game, and sometimes isn't even mentioned. You basically have to teach yourself (though in fairness, once you've got it down in a good sim, you've more or less got the hang of it in the rest of the good sims) 3. When you finally do succeed, you feel like you've accomplished something. "Yes! I finally mastered this specific track with this car and I didn't even have nanny aids on" And finally, the most important one 4. All of the nanny aids with the exception of the recent influx of "driving line" diagrams are cribbed directly from nanny aids that real cars really sometimes have, therefore providing you with a legitimate context for them, should you choose to use them Most of this applies as well to well-made arcade racers, i.e. sega rally. In some more recent arcade racers, losing is difficult, but sometimes even then, there's a line between simply succeeding and being truly good at it (I'm sure justin knows exactly what I'm talking about here)

I think that for a lot of people, this experience has been somewhat replaced by multiplayer content. Until you get into the realm of outright cheating, you can never be absolutely certain that you'll achieve victory, whether it be against a team of players or swarms of AI enemies with a small squad of allies. That amazing victory where you take out your enemy with a mere sliver of health left, or finish a brutal wave as the last one standing, those are the sorts of memories you hear most people talking about the most now. They also have the advantage of being brief around 10-40 minutes so that even if you don't come out victorious, you usually don't feel like you've wasted your time.

Yeah! These kind of experiences aren't exclusive to one genre of game, which is one of the awesome things about games in general :D

Dark souls was all the more harder with its stunted controls.

I'm kind of mixed when it comes to gaming difficulty, I don't play games for a challenge but when I find a game that challenges me in a way I like then I'm all for it. I hate when games stimulate difficulty by limiting the number of lives or attempts you have at the challenge, making the only way to win through memorization of attack patterns, etc or when there's a severe punishment like permadeath, losing 8 hours of gameplay sounds like utter hell to me. I like difficult action games like ninja gaiden sigma 2 and bayonetta on a high difficulty because they challenge your ability to correctly time your attacks, dodges, etc and test your spacial awareness all while providing a fast, fluid combat system that's still fun even on easier difficulties. I enjoy having games that are difficult and fast because of how they test your decision making skills, an example of this is burnout 3, when you get in the formula 1 car you go so ridiculously fast in incoming traffic that you need god like decision making skills and reflexes to avoid constantly crashing and get a good position. Another way I enjoy being challenged is in bullet hell games like touhou, they test your spacial awareness and your ability to judge based off of where you think will be a safe spot in ten seconds time. However my utmost favourite form of challenge is the challenge you create yourself, an example is deliberately choosing the worst fighter in a fighting game when versing other people because the sensation of winning a round of blazblue with Rachel, a round of tekken with Julia or a game of smash bros with mr game and watch is great. I always try and make games difficult my way, in dishonored I only took people out by choking them, in skyrim I fought dragons with my fists, in uncharted 3 I took out all the regular enemies by rolling around, jumping from atop cover to the next set of cover and being a total jackass then punching them to death. Sorry for the long wall of text.

I look at it this way, someone paid $733,000 for an unused copy of Killswitch just so that they could be possibly the only person to have completed Ghast's (AKA an avatar that is invisble to all of the enemies and you) champign. That said, the youtube video of said buyer crying at his computer is a likely reason why games are normally not that tough.

Aside from the sometimes wonky auto lock-on, I never really had any problems with the controls. They responded and reacted accordingly to your own movements, unless of course, you made the mistake of over encumbering yourself, that is...

tl;dr

no mention of devil cry 1... and yet faster than light is mentioned oh boy. people just jumped on that bandwagon after totalbiscuit showed a video of it.

I'd say the reason the buyer was crying at his computer was because the entire story was a hoax, including his buying it. There was never a game called Killswitch. (Though there was an unrelated game titled Kill.Switch. :P)

Different games for different people. There's not a definitive list - those are just the ones that do it for me.

Completely agreed. I love the controls for Dark and Demons. They're, to me, how fighting in a game like that should be. You'd better move and react perfectly or you're going to get hurt. Badly. And in that game, you can die just as easily with heavy armor as you can with light armor. Being able to roll and move at top speed is practically a necessity. Prime example: accidentally discovering that miralda the executioner lady in the first area of demons as a complete noob with no good equipment. Scared the hell out of me walking into the dark and hearing "WOOSH". Rolled the %*#@ out the doorway in a heartbeat.

Dark Souls has occasional input lag too, which is annoying, but it happens so rarely that it's barely worth mentioning when the controls tend to be so spot on.

Also he's sort of talking about new games with it, not old ones.

I would be more then happy with xcom, if it wasn't a bug ridden mess. Hell I'd be more then happy to do ironman in xcom overall its a fun game, but when enemies teleport in randomly right in the middle of my troops, shoot me through multiple walls, and my soldiers get stuck under floors, incorrect flanking on troops, and I suddenly get tossed an extra abduction mission even though I just finished one, there is a problem. Hard and fun is one thing, cheap glitches is another. Why does no game website talk about this kinda stuff with xcom? Just curious. Also, FTL is a damn fun game.

oh right i shouldve read it through a bit more properly. thanks.