Everyone remembers them: the Mega Man series, Mario Brothers, Ghostbusters, A Boy and His Blob – all classic games, all interesting takes on gaming, and all have one primary thing in common: they are ridiculously difficult to complete. There’s a monstrous list of games that I have in my head that I always wanted to beat when I was a kid but couldn’t because I either got too frustrated and gave up, lost the password, or simply lost interest.

I want to run a little experiment right now: think about all of the games you couldn’t beat when systems like the Nintendo, the Genesis, and their secondary generations arrived.  (Wait, how many? Holy crap man, you suck!)  Now think about this current generation of games. Hell, even 

For me (and probably most others) the difference between these two numbers is pretty staggering.  I can honestly say that I remember beating very few games back then but now If it’s a good game that is worth playing I’ll probably complete it faster than I want to and I will be left wanting for more. I’ve only played the newest Resident Evil game once but I’ve played the first two Mega Man games at least a dozen times each at different points of my life (and still have yet to beat them – damn you Wily!). 

So how does this happen? Are we as gamers getting better the more games we play? I don’t really think that’s the only factor behind this because if it were I should by now be able to obliterate that damned old man in a white coat and his bastard of a rock golem creation. Yet, I still lose time and again no matter how many years pass and how many more new games I destroy.

We can even compare a platform game to a platform game so that people can’t say “Well maybe you’re just good at third-person over the shoulder shooters and horrible at other types of games” – The newer Mega Man games, even titles that have been introduced as early as the Playstation, don’t even slightly compare to the challenge presented in the originals and I’ve beaten all of them.

It’s an interesting phenomenon and one that I think has a fairly simple answer: technology. I remember the hardest things about those games wasn’t knowing what an enemy was going to do and when they were going to do it but actually getting movements from my hand to the controls. Vertical jumps, timed running through traps, ducking at just the right time – all of these things seemed simple enough and I knew exactly when to do them after a few tries but the controllers, the power of the system, and the overall game mechanics made those options considerably more difficult than they needed to be. Imagine if one of the original Mario games ran like Mario Galaxy does today and suddenly warp whistles don’t seem as necessary to get through the game.

Many gamers complain that games have gotten too easy but in all reality it isn’t that games have gotten easier compared to their eight and sixteen bit ancestors it’s just that it’s become easier to have full and complete control over the characters and environment. As realism becomes more of a factor in games (things such as physics, graphics, modeling, etc) we’ll start to see them becoming easier and easier because not only will the movements become more lifelike (and therefore easier to understand) the games themselves will become more lifelike and easier to feel and control.

This then means that developers will have to present new and inventive ways to give us a challenge and many of them have been for a long time now. More difficult enemies hit harder and have more life, puzzles suddenly don’t have the easiest solution because of a new twist, and new moves and combinations are given to your opponents (both real life and simulated) with which to pummel you. These are our replacements for shoddy controls and bad game-play mechanics (don’t get me wrong, those last two problems will never go away depending on the developer) and in most games seem to work out just fine.

So the next time you’re complaining about a game being too easy just do this – Only play with the D-pad, two buttons, and restart from the beginning when you die and see what happens. 

This is what it says every time you die in the original Metroid, right?