Whither Difficulty?

This may prove to be a regular feature, as one thing old games are not short of is extreme and frustrating difficulty. These days games are made with fat, balding duffers in their late twenties and early thirties, such as myself, in mind – they’re all about the story, with only a modicum of difficulty acting as a gateway from one chunk of plot to the next. I’m thinking of Bully here – or Canis Canem Edit – which gave me several hours of pleasure despite the fact that none of the ‘missions’ needed a second go. Similarly, the two times I lost my whole team on X-Men Legends – one of those while fighting the final Boss – only gave it the hint of challenge it needed.

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, on the other hand, made me want to find the game developers and snap their necks. Thankfully, I’d earned a ‘cheat’ – one of those freebies they give you in games these days when you collect enough pogs or whatever – that made the game possible. Still, it felt like cheating. I felt old.

Back in the day, if a game was so frustrating you wanted to kill the person who made it, it was a sign of quality. I’m thinking of Jet Set Willy here. There’s a Your Spectrum article that breathlessly reviews the game (a sequel to the first true platformer, Manic Miner – play it here) and practically creams its metaphorical jeans over the sheer impossibility of the thing. The peak of perfection, in the eyes of Your Spectrum, is our first sight of The Attic Bug.

This was a glitch in the game that wasn’t corrected before it went to the shops. Essentially, if you went to the Attic before journeying to various other rooms, you died the moment you entered those other rooms even if you had foolishly entered the Attic on a previous game. The only way to survive the game, then, was to visit all the other rooms first - a virtual impossibility, for reasons which I can’t confirm as I died before ever getting anywhere near any of them.

Imagine if something like that happened today. Imagine if Halo 2 had a bug in it that meant that you died instantly if you’d, say, been in a jeep on level 3. (I don’t know Halo well, I’m afraid, but I did play it drunk once and I do remember being driven about in a jeep, so this is inside the realms of possibility.) There’d be scandal. Product recalls. Riots. Fires. Nuclear annihilation and all sorts.

But back then the Attic Bug was practically a selling point. Other games might think they’re difficult… but this one is actively impossible! It will leave you crying in your bed at night, intellectually sodomised by the sheer toughness of the puzzles!

Oh, stop whining, how tough could it have been? Well, imagine jumps from platform to platform needing to be perfect right down to the pixel in order to avoid death – and now imagine that being a really good thing.

It’s difficult to bring that mindset back, but I was swept up in it like everyone else. Exploring Jet Set Willy was like exploring some kind of deadly alien planet – just making it to a new screen was a mind-blowing achievement, never mind that attempting to collect all the objects in it would only end in humiliation and death. I think my best score was twelve objects. But I never got tired of loading it up, never spent the half hour it took for the tape to grind the program painstakingly into existence in anything less than a state of happy anticipation. I still remember the game cover with a special fondness.

Yes, that’s a man being eaten by a toilet.

So whither difficulty? When did I start taking it easy? When did it become a serious danger to my heart if I couldn’t finish a level? Did I just get lazy, or have I been spoiled by an industry that now values fascinating plot over no plot and mindbending tricksyness? I’ll think more about this tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s the Spectrum version of the sequel – sped up for added DIFFICULTY.