GAMES JUST AIN'T WHAT THEY USED TO BE

Note: So I've been pretty unwell the last couple weeks, meaning I've been lax in writing awesome stuff for Loading. Jimmy has punished me as one would expect, and I am now writing this from the comfort of a wheelchair in protective custody somewhere South of the Norfolk Broads.

We should all face facts: We're not getting any better at gaming. At all. Sure, one could argue that games require more technical skill now than they ever have, or that games are more complex now than they were in the past but there's one thing that we can all agree on:

Games are easier now than they've ever been before.

Have you ever completed Megaman 2? Or Castlevania- the 8-Bit thumb-bleeder which assassinated your evening and made you beg for mercy? If you've completed either of these games you'll know what I'm talking about- hours and hours of sitting in front of a screen in a dimly-lit room memorizing enemy movement patterns and swearing at the television as your HP drains to zero time and time again.

Back in the day games had to be hard. This is a fact. It was a device used to extend the lifetime of a game given the tiny storage capacity of early hardware, but this often gave the software itself an edge over more casual products. You can complete Mario Bros. 2 without really breaking a sweat but doing so felt like less of an achievement than finally killing Dracula, or learning to time your dodges perfectly to navigate the crawling corridors of Contra. The easier a game is the less of a feeling of achievement you get for completing it, so where does the balance lie?

Overwhelming difficulty can often impede the narrative of a game- no-one's going to enjoy a story-intensive game if you never get to finish the story (or indeed defeat the first or second stage), but at the same time if you fill a corridor with enemies who can't damage you then there's no thrill to the game. This often harms the gameplay of RPGs- where story takes precedence over the achievement felt via beating a hard section- but can genuinely improve the feel of a game if you're careful with it.

Street Gangs (known as River City Ransom everywhere else in the world) is a game which perfectly married difficulty with narrative. It was an RPG, but most of the time it was a beat-em-up similar to Streets of Rage and the later stages could be punishing unless you took the time to embrace the stat-increasing and combat enhancements the game had to offer.

The game was rock-hard, but as you mastered it you begin to feel more and more powerful, and that's the way a difficulty curve should work.

Modern games often fail to provide this feeling of excellence that was so prevalent in older titles. Even on the hardest difficulty the Call of Duty or Halo games are a joke in comparison to the games of the 80s and 90s, and even games which claim to be hard such as Super Meat Boy don't quite capture the same essence of F**K YOU CONTROLLER YOU'RE NOT WORKING PROPERLY that my childhood gave me.

And this isn't because I'm any better at games.

If anything chronic alcohol abuse and a lack of attention span has made me worse at games, and it's not like I've stopped playing the retro hardcore stuff. I'm just plain awful at things. This said, even though I've lost the ability to play Crash Bandicoot (which is hard as all hell in retrospect) I can still complete Halo: Reach on Legendary and blaze my way through Uncharted without a single bullet touching my gorgeously rendered noggin.

There is hope though! One series of games is providing us with the same heart-pounding difficulty, stage-design and frustration that we all used to deal with as kids. I am referring, of course, to the Demon's Souls games (or Darksouls or whatever they're calling the multi format sequel). You will die. A lot. It's brilliant- every time you die you get spurred on, rather than put off, and when you DO die the level gets slightly harder.

It's not for casuals, and if you miss the feeling of being a statuesque marble deity then you should pick yourself up a copy. Just don't play it if you're insecure in your abilities with a controller because you'll end up murdering yourself.

Seriously, don't.

Toby Ellis