Kaz

I’ll get back to talking about game difficulty soon enough (I’m sure you’re all so disappointed). In fact, I’ll need to internalize Forza 3 and it’s infinite retry button before I start talking about it again.

I’m fully immersed in car-topia as I get that once in a while chance to fuse my inner gamer-nerd with my inner petrol-head. In fact I managed to resist the urge to rewind when I missed a corner bad while trying to overtake in my pimped out digital Cobalt (I know the irony of driving a simulation of my own car). Why did I not rewind this bad move and brake earlier? Because I wanted a reason to take a picture that makes the game seem more action packed than it is.

I’m loving how the achievements are doled out in the new Forza Motorsport. They flow freely as “rewards” for doing “things”. Nothing like Forza 2 in which the game gave achievements only when you did things that involved the words “all” or “every”, for example “Get all the cars in the game” or “Get a gold in every race”.

I’ve been thoroughly rewarded for doing fun things and it shows with how much time I’m putting into the game. The game insidiously tracks how much time you’ve spent racing and how much time you’ve spent in the menus. Which seems like the ratio should be astronomically tilted towards the racing time, but that’s ignoring how much time I will spend laboriously pimping out my cars with various stickers and tuning setups. I’m going to hazard the ratio of time spent in the drivers seat versus fiddling with the various extraneous bits will ultimately be 1:1.

Good bye, life.

Game difficulty is a tricky thing to talk about. I want to look back at my formative years and think to myself that I had it harder than those that followed me. That the games I played were tough and a symbol of how much better I am than the generations of gamers that followed. Of course this is the same thing that people have been doing for generations now. Everyone’s always had it harder than anyone else. I get it.

Now, assume that I understand this viewpoint bias. And let’s talk about game difficulty.

I’m inspired to talk about this by this forum post I found on reddit. It’s a relatively well thought out post saying that games have become easier, but that it’s not a bad thing.Have games become easier?

Defining Hard

Games seem easier from my perspective, but is that really an absolute truth? I suppose we would need a concrete scale on which to determine difficulty. But the problem with defining a scale for difficulty is apparent once you try and discuss it with another person.

Difficult to one person is easy to another. Some games merely require a photographic memory to avoid obstacles, something I really don’t have. Other games need split second reactions, which I only have when a mouse is involved. There are those freaks out there that possess all the skills necessary to reduce any game to a pile of pulverized bits and pixels.

To me the difficulty of a game depends on how many different skills the game requires to make them easy to you. Crossing a grid that contains unseen traps that you must memorize is one kind of difficult. Crossing that same grid but requiring the player to play a music minigame while doing so makes it more difficult. Multitasking is the true difficulty.

A platformer can be made infinitely harder when you have to think several steps ahead. Those sections where you can’t stop are always the most challenging, because you can’t take them at your own pace. If you could slow things down to a crawl imagine just how good you could be at Super Mario Bros. 3. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, people already have videos of it. (Spoilers: they cheated)

To be totally honest, I was tempted, as I’m sure many of you are, to use number of deaths or lose screens to represent difficulty. The reasoning behind this is sound, an average of deaths would produce a compelling and official sounding difficulty rating. I only avoided it because that might make the scale based on frustration more than anything.

Next: Past to Present: Has difficulty changed?

Waltzing into the Cleveland Hts. Gamestop, the one I’d frequented so much in my time at college and subsequently living in the area, I found a glaring error.

Not an error that really bothered me. After all I personally knew one of the managers of the store, they seem a responsible and knowledgeable bunch (despite the looks I got asking for Layton as a grown adult). Not that I really think that any PS3 owner will be crushed when they find out this large box is lie. Frankly, they would only pick it up to argue about polygon count compared to GT5. Not that I think anything of any significance would happen due to this common error. I worked at Best Buy I know how many errors get made in ads across the country.

But I started to think about what this told me about the corporation that is Gamestop. Despite the fact that the store is run buy passionate gamers (at least a couple a store know what’s what) the store is ultimately owned by people who don’t give two craps about games. They don’t care if Modern Warfare 2 is a big hit or if it breaks the record for sales of a game. At least not in the sense that a true gamer would.

Gamestop Global Game Sellers Incorporated (I made that up) is looking for its cut of a profitable market.

What a shame.

How could a large chain like Gamestop not catch this error? By not caring.

I know the kind of nerds that run those stores, I hung out with them in high school. I talked shop with them every time I was dragged to the mall. I guarantee one of those employees caught this box, laughed at it just like I did and told someone above them who laughed and told the person above them. And it went up and up until it got to the person that didn’t laugh, they didn’t get it, they didn’t care.

“Will it affect sales?” he would have asked.

“Well…no…but”

“Then good, no problem at all,” and he would go back to counting money and stroking a sinister looking cat in his leather clad office.

It makes me think about my other games-based passion, board games. A long time ago, normal people played board games too. But ultimately only the mass marketable ones were sold in mega-sized toy-stores and interesting ones flourished in tiny, smelly, nerd huts that cater to Magic players and comic readers.

If you go to find a board game store that specializes in tabletop war games or designer games (eurogames) you’ll likely find a small personally owned store with someone behind the desk that has an opinion about all the games on the shelf, just like the guys behind the counter at Gamestop. he’ll have played all the important ones, just like the guys at Gamestop. And when an ad of his doesn’t look right he’ll pull it down and change it and he won’t tell the guy above him because he’s the top of the line, the guys at the Gamestop won’t.

Where are the small independent game stores? They must exist somewhere. Right?

They don’t near me, as best as I can tell. If I find one I know I’ll shop there. Even if Amazon has better prices, I’ll still gladly pay extra for atmosphere. Someone give me that option.

Maybe the thing missing here is time. It’s taken a long time for competent, passionate people to make stores devoted to things like collectible card games and comics. Maybe I just have to wait.

I thought I’d give people a look behind the scenes here at The Rumble Pack. I edit it out a lot of the times or sometimes append it to the end of the cast, but we record our planning session before the podcast every week. I think the coordination and tone of the pre show warm up correlates to the show’s in almost every way.

This week was particularly random, which is somewhat reflected in the show. Some weeks we’re all business in warm up and nothing of note happens. Usually that happens when we’ve done a bad job communicating before the show. This week however, we had already been aware of what everyone wanted to talk about so pre show discussions weren’t necessary.

I started the recorder 10mins before we started the show. No I didn’t edit this, it’s raw audio, we actually slide into the show with little warning normally.

 Episode 101 Pre Show [10:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download