HELLO! This is a crossover with my MostlyFilm piece on videogame difficulty. It’s the full text of my email interviews with Mark and Kasper. I’m shit at questions, but luckily they were good at answers. So here they are!
Answers from Kasper:
What sort of games do you play that you consider to be really difficult?
I play a lot of shmups, so the hardest of those would be the likes of Dodonpachi daioujou, Ketsui or Battle Garegga. I’ve beaten quite a few shmups, but I haven’t beaten those three…
Do you play them for the difficulty factor? If not, what is it that draws you to games that most people would be defeated by in seconds?
It’s not just the difficulty. One of the main factors is that they provide a concentrated dose of pure gameplay with none of the padding that you see in a lot of other games; i.e. no tedious fetch-quests or endless grinding to boost your stats. This guide explains it well (it’s a bit long though):
http://www.racketboy.com/
The most relevant part is probably this:
- Theoretical Perfection ” Perhaps the single most important quality for any respectable shmup to possess: it should be technically possible for a player to make a “perfect” run through the game, without getting hit even once. Put another way, there should never be spots where eating damage is 100 percent unavoidable ” no matter the situation, your raw skills should always be sufficient to get you through if you’re good enough. Of course, only a select few gamers actually are that good, but this ideal MUST be legitimately attainable: failing to tie up this crucial loose end during development is guaranteed to hamstring any shooter, no matter its strengths in other areas
- Minimal Downtime ” The fact that so many shooters routinely skimp on story and other ancillary elements in favor of short, action-packed runtimes isn’t exactly shocking: their audience just plain isn’t interested in stagnation of any sort. By and large they’re here to feel those fingers twitching, and the heck with everything else. Relentlessly overloading shmuppers to the point of mental exhaustion isn’t a wise course either, mind you, but 99 percent of the time there had better be something tangibly engaging going on: enemies that put up a genuine fight. Trickily-placed obstacles to dodge. Exploitable opportunities for scoring bonuses. A well-crafted shooter should never, EVER allow a player to “sleepwalk” ” the game should require your near-constant attention, and you should be only too happy to indulge it.
How long do you play for in a day/week, and how long will a game last you, on average (impossible question, but to give an idea I’m usually playing a game for an hour or two most days for a couple of months)?
There are two main challenges in shmups: The first is the ‘1CC’ which is completing the game in one credit with no continues. The next is the high score. Getting a 1CC in an average shmup might take about 15-20 hours of gameplay, depending on the game. Getting a score to rank with the best might take 50+ hours. (Mainstream reviewers seem to get the point of this a bit better these days, but not that long ago it was common to see reviews of shmups saying that they were ‘too short’, which probably meant that they beat the game with infinite continues in less than an hour and thought that was all the game had to offer.)
Do you ever play ‘casual’ games – Bejeweled, Peggle and the like?
I played Plants vs Zombies! Bit too easy, I thought. I play the odd point and click adventure as well. Do they count as casual?
I’m being provocative here, but isn’t something like the scrolling shmup genre a bit of an antique? Where’s the story, the character, what about ‘emergent gameplay’ and all that business that games are sold on these days?
To the casual observer, the golden age of the arcade shoot ’em up appears to have been the late 1980s to early 1990s – but look at a poll of best shmups (voted by fans) and you’ll find that most of them have been released from about 1995 up to recently. And with the growing popularity of old-school or retro games in recent years, shmups will clearly be around for a bit longer.
Story and character…hmm, pass on that question. Most story-based games don’t even have good stories, so I’m not sure why shmups should be looked down upon for that reason. I mean, given the choice between an good arcade game and one of David Cage’s epic, cinematic, QTE-fests, I know which one I’d rather choose…
Have you always played hardcore games, or did this taste develop later? If it did develop later, do you think it was a conscious reaction to games getting easier?
Always! Hardcore for life! (Don’t print that.)
Answers from Mark:
What sort of games do you play that you consider to be really difficult?
– Certain types of platformers, e.g. Super Meat Boy, Dustforce, VVVVVV, La Mulana.
– Most shmups or arcade action games in general.
– Rogue-likes – these are mostly RPGs (e.g. Dungeons of Dredmor, Baroque), though can cross-over into other styles, e.g. strategy – Flotilla or FTL, platformers – Spelunky, or top-down shooters – The Binding of Isaac. These types of games involve progressing through randomly generated levels plus ‘permadeath’, meaning that once you’re dead, you’re dead. There are no continues and save functionality (if present) is limited. You have to start from the beginning each time and the goal is to see how far you can progress.
– The occasional puzzle game, e.g. SpaceChem or Trash Panic.
– Strategy games like XCOM or Commandos
– A few FPSs like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or ArmA
Do you play them for the difficulty factor? If not, what is it that draws you to games that most people would be defeated by in seconds?
For me, the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming a challenge is what draws me in. If all games were relatively easy, then the experience would feel too passive for me. It’s an interactive medium, so there needs to be something more than just the experience of taking in the visuals and the narrative. One way of involving you is to provide a challenge, so you have to focus, figure out the mechanics and overcome what it is that the game is demanding from you.
How long do you play for in a day/week, and how long will a game last you, on average (impossible question, but to give an idea I’m usually playing a game for an hour or two most days for a couple of months)?
Play-time depends on how quickly our two-year goes to sleep… I can maybe squeeze in 2-3hrs a day at the moment. How long each game lasts varies widely from game to game. Say, for the games I mentioned in the first question, I’ve probably played in the region of 10-25 hrs each.
Do you ever play ‘casual’ games – Bejeweled, Peggle and the like?
Well, I don’t really regard ‘casual’ as a proper descriptor for most games. I think ‘casual’ is a description of how people can play games, but not of most games themselves, e.g. many games regarded as ‘casual’ can be played in a ‘hardcore’ fashion. If you’re playing Bejeweled for hours trying to better your score and improve your technique, then you’re playing it in a ‘hardcore’ fashion. Conversely many so-called ‘hardcore’ games can be played ‘casually’, either by setting the difficulty to easy so you can coast through it, by abusing infinite continues to get to the end of an arcade game or by button mashing in a fighting game. On Steam’s store, SpaceChem is listed as ‘casual’ (because it’s a puzzle game), which to me is fairly laughable as it’s much, much harder than most FPS or 3rd person shooters I’ve played recently (which most people would consider ‘hardcore’). Casual to me implies ‘unchallenging’ and ‘undemanding’, yet the types of games that are often considered casual, e.g. dance/rhythm/fitness games or puzzle games often require you to expend either more physical or mental effort to play than supposedly ‘’hardcore’ games (which are often quite easy these days on default settings).
I’m being provocative here, but isn’t something like the scrolling shmup genre a bit of an antique? Where’s the story, the character, what about ‘emergent gameplay’ and all that business that games are sold on these days?
Well, it has still evolved over the years, with the advent of ‘bullet hell’ shmups or you have tweaks to the basic mechanics, like e.g. bullet grazing (increasing your score or multiplier by staying close to bullets) in the Shikigami no Shiro series, which adds an extra layer of risk/reward to the scoring system. I think they retain their appeal as it’s a fundamentally simple concept that anyone can grasp (dodge bullets, shoot enemies), yet they’re tough to master, which keeps you coming back for more. Video gaming is an extremely broad medium that encompasses all kinds of different things, so I there’s still plenty of room for non-narrative driven games. There is something refreshing about the purity of a classic arcade game that wouldn’t in any way be improved by shoehorning in some contrived narrative. One of my favourite games this year is the PC-remake of a recent homebrew ZX-Spectrum game (yeah, really) called ‘Endless Forms Most Beautiful’ – it’s a real throwback to mid-80’s arcade platformers and, to me, it is almost perfect. With the bigger budget games, maybe they’re more ambitious, but more often than not, they fall short in some way (maybe the plot, characters, facial animations etc… are flawed or unconvincing in some way) and that can take me out of the experience. Flawless execution of a classic game-style still beats the unrealized potential of a cinematic big budget action thriller for me I guess.
Have you always played hardcore games, or did this taste develop later? If it did develop later, do you think it was a conscious reaction to games getting easier?
It developed pretty early on, since we grew up playing lots of arcade games, which tended to be on the tough side.