Over at Gamasutra today, they have a game-design article by John Harris on “20 Difficult Games”.
Not surprising, the majority of titles are early arcade games. Two RPGs show up: Rogue and Bard’s Tale II (a game I heartily disliked). What is oddly missing from his list is any adventure game.
That is a surprise. Many of the early adventures were tough going for a lot of players, as I know from the mail I received.
I can’t quarrel with his list, because of them all, I played only BT II, and agree it deserves a place in the roster. The descriptions of the others do indeed make them sound difficult (and, for that matter, unappealing). Yet I think he could have found room for one or two adventures.
That was a time of few resources for the stumped gamer. Hint books were rare, and only a relative handful of players were online, where access to message boards or walkthrus could provide help.
And if there was room for only one, I’d have to nominate Suspended, one of the hardest adventures I ever played, from Infocom or anyone else. It was a steep learning curve just to figure out the robots – who each had different sensory apparatus – never mind the actual puzzles. Along with that, the longer it took you to figure things out, the more people died on the surface world above.
How John came to miss this, or a couple other titles that come to mind, is amazing. Then again, as his bunch focuses mainly on the arcades, perhaps he never got around to playing many adventures.
Of course, “hard” is an elastic term. What some find difficult, others breeze right by with no trouble at all. Sooner or later, however, almost everyone gets stuck somewhere, though it may not be in the same place.
On the other hand, when a game is, so to speak, “tough all over”, then we can really call it “difficult”, which is the quality all the titles in John’s article share.
Check out the article and see what you think. Would any of those games be interesting to today’s gamers? I have my doubts.
Aw, man…
Sinister. Defender & Stargate. Kaboom! Zelda. Rogue. Bard’s Tale II. Lode Runner. Wow. This list has a whole bunch of my favorite old-school games on the list.
I think I’m a masochist at heart.
Coyote, all gamers are like that, some more so than others ;)
I had Loderunner on my old Atari. Not too long ago I ran it under the Atari800Win emulator and was able to complete it. The difference is the emulator had a save state, which basically did a memory dump allowing you to save at any point. There would have been no way I could have made it through otherwise.
Maximo for the PS2 was quite hard. It was an action-adventure type game, but you could only take a few hits before you were dead. You started losing your armour with each hit, and you knew you were about to die when you were down to wearing nothing but polka dotted underwear.
Suspended was one Infocom game I played that I never finished. I remember that it was the hardest text adventure that I had ever played.
I played Suspended. Dozens of times. Got yanked out of cryo by an angry mob every time without even getting close to solving the game.
I did the same as you Xian, with Loderunner. I completed it a few years ago with Atariwin. The game has stood the test of time well. It never depended on graphics and sound, it was all about the puzzles.
I would love a modern remake of Loderunner, with a few more puzzle elements to keep things interesting. The Mario vs Donkey Kong series is somewhat similar.
Hey malcom, long time no see. I never played Loderunner myself. It wasn’t the kind of game that interested me.
Coyote, wow, never finished, eh? I did finally manage to struggle through, but it wasn’t easy. Hence my saying it ought to have been on that list.