> Both. Some are stupidly easy, eg. God of War "Load Game. Face Plant Controller. Finish Game. Get Star!".

God of War was not easy at all for me on Hard.

That's interesting. I'm fairly sure I played on Hard, although this was years ago so my memory may be rusty. Some parts of the game were definitely 'hard', but seemed artificially so. Like the last boss eschewing all of the tactics learned prior to it, or a generically drawn 'maze' level which was just confusing for the sake of filling in game time.

My main gripe with this game, and others like it, is that even if the difficulty can be ratcheted up, the result is not engaging gameplay. It doesn't generally require more skill, or novel tactics, or using the right tool for the job, just better timing or more patience. This is the point I was trying to make, although sloppily.

Well-design hard games draw you in with the surprising complexity of thought or skill required to beat their challenges, hidden under a deceptively simple surface. For example Monster Hunter's weapons involve maybe 3 or 4 combos, whereas God of War's had more than I could easily memorise. But using combos in GoW didn't matter anyway because just mashing the buttons had the same effect. Using the wrong combo in MH will likely leave you exposed to a brutal attack, a quick death, and a long walk (or simple failure of the mission, goodbye 50 minutes of game time, you get nothing). Same story in Dark Souls, except you might be able to fight your way back to reclaim the stuff you lost. You really need to think about how you're attacking things, what your positioning is, what you're attacking etc etc. That is the complexity underneath the 'simple' combat systems that makes these games engagingly difficult.

You're right that the different difficulties is implemented in quite a lazy way - usually with just boosting the attack and health of your enemies, and vice versa for yourself. The hardest difficulty is often something like only having one HP. The next level is having more enemies spawn, but it often doesn't go further than that.

As far as fighting in hack-and-slash games are concerned, I find the Onimusha series more interesting (you're a samurai in feudal Japan fighting demons). That's partly because they have the "issen" (critical strike) attack which is triggered either by blocking the attack of the enemy at the last second and countering (relatively easy to learn) or attacking (countering) the enemy at the last split second before his attack lands ("real" issen, more difficult more risky and does more damage). You also have the ability to chain issens by pressing the attack button at the exact time the first issen stops. This is pretty hard to do in Onimusha 3 (too easy in Onimusha Dawn of Dreams, though), because of the hard timing and maybe partly because the animations of the issens can take different amounts of time to complete. (The issen attack has been in the game since instalment one. But curiously the manual said nothing about issens, which meant that I got very confused when all of the sudden I got lucky and one-shot one of my enemies by cleaving them in half.

Issen will one-shot grunt enemies and do a lot of damage to other enemies, and give you more souls (similar to orbs in God of War). I found that this gameplay mechanic was very rewarding to learn to master, because it is very effective and it is satisfying to one-shot enemies (or maybe even take down three at a time) with those sleek animations. By contrast, God of War is much more, like you say, about button mashing since which combo you choose doesn't matter so much (it's mostly about whether you have time for the heavy attaks and if you want to do area of effect damage or single damage). When it comes to difficulty settings, one of the settings in Onimusha 3 involves playing through the game where the only damage that the enemies can suffer are through issens.

They are not hard games to beat, though.

There's "Hard" and there's "Megaman Hard". Today's "Hard" just doesn't even approach the brutality of games a few generations ago, with the exception of some games like Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls.

The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.

Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.

You're using my mention of the Hard difficulty as a springboard to talk about something totally different? My point was that God of War is not so easy as to cruise through the whole game on the harder difficulties (and if it is then I guess you are very familiar with and good at hack-and-slash games).

> The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.

"Executing a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence" is not a good design for a lot of games. It is good for those "match the button pressing to the prompts on the screen" (ala Guitar Hero) and classical platformers, but not for stealth and/or strategy games. It isn't very satisfying for me when it comes to hack-and-slash games, eiher, because it de-emphasizes reaction and adapting to novel situations.

Frequent check-pointing is often a crutch to mask poor gameplay design, but the tedium of having to do a series of perfectly executed actions is often a design that screams "we didn't bother to come up with something really satisfying".

> Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.

No, the frustration is not nearly worth it. Using hours on one level - and the crushing boredom of having to repeat the first 25% of the same god damn level 50 times - does not culminate in some triumphant feeling when everything eventually falls into place. Maybe for something like 10 seconds, but that was hardly worth the frustration. Maybe that's just me, not being a masochist and all.

Games shouldn't try to hold your hand in order to frustrate you - it shouldn't try to hold your hand because it is satisfying to figure things out more by yourself. It will only frustrate you if you are too impatient or if the developers designed the game with poor hinting towards what you should do. And not holding your hands demands better design - or else the frustration is magnified. If you bang your head against the wall for hours, trying every reasonable way (within the confines of the game) to get further ahead, and you only find out about it through reading some FAQ (Or those Nintendo Magazines) that you should balance on the pixel-wide rope, make a jump on the night of the lunar moon and press square - or any other way that doesn't make reasonable intuitive sense within the games universe - that is a failure on the part of the designers, not some "hardcore" feature of the game.

I guess the hard games of old are kinds of badges of honor for some people (having completed them). I guess suburbanites who grew up during the nineties has to have their battle stories, too.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to springboard. I was saying (poorly) that games like God of War, even with their difficulty slider cranked, aren't "hard" in the way that older games were. The difficulty slider is basically just an HP-and-damage dial; the fundamentals that make modern games "easy" are still there. My point is that in many modern games, the cost of failure is minimal.

Games that are unfair just to be frustrating are just horribly designed, no doubt. But, modern games are frequently guilty of reducing the cost of failure in order to keep from frustrating players, sometimes at the cost of one of the biggest rushes in gaming - overcoming something that is genuinely hard-but-surmountable, which requires awareness and timing and cunning and careful use of resources.

I like easy games; I really enjoy the experience of traipsing through a story without too much impediment. But I also really enjoy the experience of getting my butt handed to me over and over because I got impatient or sloppy, and the feeling of accomplishment when I overcome that. Dark Souls is among the best modern examples of that sort of game - it's brutally uncompromising, but you're given all the tools you need. The combat design is extremely precise, but in return it asks for a lot of precision from the player, and it harshly punishes failure; in this way, it's very reminiscent of older games, rather than belonging to the new breed of games where falling off a ledge respawns you on that ledge, or fighting a boss has four different phases, with a checkpoint at each phase.

I'm not advocating for the game being a jerk to the player just to frustrate them. That's never fun. All I'm saying is that the difficulty difference between old games and new games is in how they punish failure, rather than where the HP and damage sliders are set.