Digital Punishment

“There’s no comparing the games of yesterday to the games of today” – a brash opening statement.

The 3D world has arguably been fully realised with the 8-bit soundtrack being replaced by a philharmonic orchestra and the multiplayer experience extending way beyond the other end of your sofa (Provided the controller cables actually stretched that far). Not a day goes by here at GamingLives.com that we’re not all sidetracked into conversation about the games of our youth, reflecting back on the days where the only way to go was right and if a game ever became too difficult, you had no other choice than to simply get better at it. It would seem that in this era, games have become a great deal more forgiving and a lot less punishing to those not up to the challenge. But for those of us that are up to the task, why is it that we are forced to complete the game before we are then able to select the hardest difficulties? Many could argue that we have all simply become more adept at games and that the 3rd Generation developer are unable to challenge us anymore, or on a more pessimistic note, that the publishers won’t allow them too. Allow me to now demonstrate how I believe the modern game has degenerated into ensuring everyone gets a patronising pat on the head for turning up to the party and how we could all benefit from a little Digital Punishment now and again.

If your Uncle asked you to fly a plane, would you say no?

The very first time I realised I’d bitten off more than I could chew (I actually don’t put too much stock behind that saying, there’s very little I can’t bite off and subsequently chew. Except maybe if I were to bite a Wookiee, I don’t imagine the hair makes for a nice texture, though quite why I’d bite a Wookiee is beyond me) appeared on the Sega Mega Drive with Disney’s Quackshot. By no standards was this a game that challenged you in the same ways that the Contra series or Megaman titles ever did, Quackshot was a fairly standard and straight forward platformer for its time. It was however one of the longest platformers on the market at the time and would require the gamer to dedicate almost two hours of their day (everyone was pressed for time in the early 90s and they all had digital watches to remind them of this fact) in order to see out the game through to its wonderful credit sequence. Two hours may not sound like an awful lot in an age where a game less than six hours long keeps our £39.99 firmly in our pockets, but this was two hours of straight-play gaming, no quicksave, no passcodes. Imagine the frustration felt when in the final few levels of the game, you just could not make that jump or could not beat that boss. Even with Disney providing unlimited continues, not being good enough really did try your patience in a manner that would normally have you reaching for a quick fix of satisfaction on another title. But with the 16 bit-cartridge setting you back £10 more than you would pay for a game today, failure taught you to be better, not to play something else.

They show extraordinary intelligence, even problem-solving. Especially the big one. We bred eight originally, but when she came in she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one... when she looks at you, you can tell she's working things out

Skip ahead to the CD generation and we’re finally given the tools to keep that form of rage at bay with Tomb Raider: one of the first titles to feature mid-level saving on the consoles (along with being the first game to make you want to crush your own hand in a vice). Like Quackshot, Tomb Raider was your average platformer, with substantial technical advancements of course. The jumps could still be missed and the enemies you’d killed a hundred times before with relative ease could still surprise you, though with the safety of the save crystal and the switch from the staple ‘3 hearts’ health system to a full size health bar, Lara Croft’s punishment was less harsh than Donald Duck’s . The challenge in Tomb Raider wasn’t the sodding great T-Rex (Video Games greatest ‘WTF’ moment) or the packs of wolves chasing you down the narrowest corridor, both were perfectly capable of killing you repeatedly but with the advent of the 1MB memory card, you could always just turn it off and walk away if it ever got too much -safe in the knowledge you could re-load when you were ready to try again. The Digital Punishment in Tomb Raider was far more sinister in that it would often throw you into a room, all alone with no enemies to kill and just leave you to rot whilst you tried to figure out how the hell you were supposed to get out. Generally speaking, there wasn’t many time constraints on the puzzles, you really were free to take as long as you needed to solve them. The only problem was, so few of us knew where to start. Unless you had access to a guide book, a 28.8 kb/s connection to the internet or Dr. Henry Jones for a father, there was no other way to advance in the game without spending a punishing number of hours pulling levers, dropping switches and throwing yourself at ledges seemingly out of human reach, all in the hope that what you were doing was hopefully the right thing to do. Whilst the puzzle genre was nothing new (Games such as Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer and Myst had us all scratching our hat stands long before Tomb Raider challenged for the crown), this certainly was the first of many to break into the mainstream and the first time many were forced to face the possibility that they weren’t up to the challenge Crystal Dynamics had produced.

Let’s keep with the chronology and move on to the ‘2nd Generation’ of the console era; the age of the autosave. With Microsoft entering the fold and bringing with them their years of experience of PC architecture, it was inevitable that the introduction of the Hard Drive would see a change to the way our tempers could be tested. Leading the charge was Bungie Studios Halo: Combat Evolved, one of those lesser known titles that like Tomb Raider, you’ve probably never heard of. Ignoring the technical boundaries that the Xbox’ HDD allowed to be pushed, the ability to save quickly, on the fly and without requiring a series of confirmation menus to click through kept you well protected from the frustration of having to fall back to content you hoped you’d completed 30 minutes ago.

I’m quite happy to go against the grain and say that Halo was nothing more than a run of the mill shooter at the core that without the opt-in challenge of Legendary mode was otherwise fairly straight forward in terms of difficulty. The punishment in Halo didn’t lie in dying, where that occasional mishap off of a cliff simply reset to the instant reload to the checkpoint only 30 seconds back. Where Bungie got you was in Death itself. The ‘Groundhog Day’ situation, where you keep repeating the same challenge over and over again really is one of the worst punishments to endure in any game. For PlayStation 2 users, this was even more frustrating as with most titles they were often forced to sit through a loading screen in between the re-incarnation process, adding an extra patience testing minute to the cycle, giving you the time to calm and collect yourself or be pushed from the couch and out into the big scary world outside. With Halo’s auto-save came the console quick-load and a far more relentless punishment as now you could die once a minute instead of once every two. Even Bill Murray got a lie-in every now and again.

There's nothing worse than having to hear Sonny and Cher every re-load

Which brings us up to our current state of affairs. The trinity of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all provide the developers with all the tools they need to go for challenge over frustration, but are they willing to test us gamers anymore? Modern Warfare 2’s Veteran mode is much more forgiving than its predecessor and Lara Croft’s adventures have become more of a Prince of Persia Redux platformer than the puzzle game that tested our Vulcan side over a decade ago. It seems that anything that used to challenge us doesn’t even try to anymore and the games that try to break that mould fall into the trap of testing patience rather than skill. Occasionally a game like Ninja Gaiden 2 comes along that strikes a balance between the two, offering the ability to learn the techniques you need to master in order to overcome the obstacle, but too often are we subjected to the grind of Lost Odyssey where the only challenge is keeping sane long enough to level up high enough in order to stand toe-to-toe in the games boss fights.

But do we even want to be punished anymore? For many of us, games are too expensive and our time too limited (I don’t even have time to put on my digital watch anymore) to engage in a sadomasochistic exercise where we’re punished for the smallest mistakes, time and time again. The little pat on the head we get from the Trophy and Achievement systems provide us with that extra spur to chase down those end of game credit sequences so that we can all feel better for having actually finished a game before the next game on your list is released. It seems to be that the challenge today lies in working through a games single player campaign, picking up all the skills you need and then taking it all online. Though with the current level of intelligence in the online field being comparable to a Giraffe firing pickles out of its nostrils in an attempt to become the Sahara’s ultimate predator, I’m sure that many of you will agree with me that Multiplayer these days really is just another extension of the patience test. We’re ready for a challenge whenever you are developers.

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