Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Re: 20 difficult games

[quote name="Bananadine"]I don't really identify with the Cable opinion that hard games are boring or whatever, but then this very morning I had an experience that pushed me toward the other side. I was playing Solar Jetman for the NES, which I remembered as being a fun, unusual game that was hard, yes, but more because of its breadth than because of any old-game-style cruelty... and I couldn't even get as far as the third planet. I know I went beyond that as a kid, but now, it seems, disinterest has gained a crippling influence on my skill in such games as that. Solar Jetman, it turns out, is <b>boring</b>. Please, game, I wished to say, you surely can tell that I'm able to carry these doodads back to my mothership without event. Why not just give the rest of them to me, then? And it totally didn't so I quit playing. :( Usually I can invoke my past self strongly enough, when I play games like that, to bring up tolerance of their limitations and then enjoyment. It's taken this long but I finally have had my first strong experience of old game as silent film: Historically Important, yet nooo fun. Still, I object when somebody just poops on Defender or whatever, claiming it is punishing and tedious. Not because it isn't--but because the criticism is always couched as a pure judgment of the game. "The game is no fun, so it is bad" is not how we grow beyond Old Man Murray--it is how we languish in <a href="http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=191">the land of the Action Button</a>, where men struggle, usually vainly, to recognize that <i>they</i> have changed and that there just might be something worthwhile to consider and write about within the details of that change, only to give up and return to bonking one another with sticks.[/quote]