April 4, 2008
No Going Back
Shaz wrote this at 8:44 pm:
Once as a courageous 7 year old, there was no better sensation than to be swooping higher than your rival at the playground swings. Now as a 20 year old, well… consciousness gets the better of me, people would frown if I was caught playing on a swing. *sob*
Putting my immaturity aside, the main point I’m getting to is once you’ve experienced the high point, holding on for life at the chains either side, your dangling legs whipping back and forth, the speed throwing your hair all over the place… (I think you get the point). A casual go on the swings just isn’t as enlightening anymore.
Relating this to the subject of gaming (there’s nothing else we love here at Ready Up!), when it comes to difficulty levels we have our general Easy, Medium, Hard & Expert.
Starting with the cool breezy, Easy leaves us feeling content. Finishing the game without breaking a sweat rewarded with a good story and a nice handful of gamer points (for the score whores).
However the little devils’ start poking us in the cheek and taunting, “You call yourself a gamer? A 5 year old can do that! Look where you are on the leaderboard pfff, you’re a joke compared to your friends…” *poke poke* (The little wretch continuously bullies you and eventually you rise up to the challenge… the next level.)
So in goes more days and nights of hard work, plenty of ups and downs. As we progress from the bottom difficulty to the top there are many joyous cries, swearing stress, joyous cries, swearing stress, joyous cries, swearing stress, over and over:
Practice makes perfect and someday we meet the finishing line of the toughest turns with a joyous cry and OTT celebration!
The devil goes away and you can now brag about your 1337 skills. Proud to own a proof of your completion record in your save file. So then what happens next?
Perhaps there’s still some achievements/unlockables to be found among the difficulty modes. A few minutes has passed and choosing any lower than your conquered level just becomes unbearable. Too easy. Too boring.
Ladies and Gents, once you’ve overcome the hardest difficulty there’s no going back.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I think you’re right about that - I’ve started plumping for the highest difficulty available in almost everything now - Condemned 2 and Viking being the latest - and use the easier levels for the scorewhoring missed points mop-up. I don’t think that the lower difficulty is necessarily boring though - I tend to experiment a bit more on a replay as it doesn’t “count”.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:45 am
nice pictures ;)
Actually sometimes however it is nice to go back to easy. Take COD4 for instance, trudging through the Veteran mode is a pain sometimes, play the easiest difficulty though and its Rambo time! Calms ya down easily :)
Unless you wind up being killed on the easiest difficulty :P
April 5th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I always start on the Easy difficulty in FPSs, ever since Halo; now I do it to get the gist of gameplay etc before getting challenged (and maybe for actually achieving those “beat whatever difficulty” achievements). The only one I haven’t done that in is Half Life 2 as I didn’t know there were multiple difficulties for it…
April 5th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I tend just to go on the Normal difficulty. If I enjoy the game (e.g. Mass Effect) then I’ll try it on a higher setting, otherwise the game will just go into the “I’ll play that on a rainy day” group.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Recently I’ve been punishing myself and playing games on the hardest, just for the satisfaction of finishing it. However some games, like sega superstars tennis need to be played on medium or easy, hard takes the fun out.
April 6th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
My swearbox was quite full during a game of Condemned yesterday. And an outing on the default setting of Dark Sector started out with me thinking “ooo, not too hard this” as I wrapped up two chapters in no time and then chapter 3 is a lot trickier - can imagine how bad it will be on brutal settings.