Difficulty

Video game difficulty used to be very easy to measure. A thing was either hard to do, or easy to do. If you couldn't figure out what to do, it was usually because of unclear or absent instructions. This is why most of what are considered the "Hardest Games" are from the 1980's; game mechanics were simple so they had to crank up the performance difficulty in order to create a challenge. This created two flavors of difficulty: challenging and punishing. I will use GT countdowns second and first hardest games as examples. Ghosts and Goblins (2nd) is punishing. Battletoads (1st) is challenging (mostly). I have played both and I will tell you, G&G is sooooo hard that I have never gotten to the first boss. Its not harder than Battletoads(which I have beaten), its just not fun to play. To defeat the enemies in G&G requires a degree of precision that simply isn't worth the feeling of reward that comes from succeeding. The game simply isn't fun to play, even if you succeed. Battletoads level design is clever and the game rarely feels punishing. Sure the vehicle levels are nasty, but once you have the pattern, performance isn't prohibitively hard, and some levels are skip-able. So when you beat a level, you get the "I am awesome" feeling that makes the whole thing worth it. NOTE: for anyone who wants to try Battletoads, some of the later levels start to fall into the punishing category, so I don't suggest you try to beat it unless you absolutely must have the bragging rights.

So lets move to today. Nowadays, games have improved their depth, so now there are two ways to make a game difficult. Difficult to Decipher and Difficult to Perform. Almost all first person shooters are difficult to perform. What you have to do is simple: shoot the bad guy. So to make it hard you make the bad guy have armor, hide behind cover or have numerical advantage. All these things make it harder to shoot the guy, but the objective remains easy to understand. Other games, the method of completing your objective is not so clear. Yes you need to reactivate the generator, but how do you go about doing that? Portal is an excellent example. Most of the puzzles where pretty easy to complete, but only after you had figured out what you needed to do. This lowers the replay value, since once you figure it out, it isn't nearly so difficult. Legend of Zelda and other adventure games are a combination of the two. You have to figure out what to do, but once you know what to do, doing it isn't necessarily easy.
So when some people complain that games nowadays are too easy, a lot of their complaint comes from a skewed perspective. While it is true that some games are made easier so they appeal to more people, a lot of it comes from the games they grew up on. I grew up on adventure platformers, where the difficulty is always a combination of decipher and perform. The complainers grew up on Pac-man, where the difficulty is all in the performance.

COG: Animal Crossing: Wild World
Nothing big to report. It rained a lot today. I met Sahara and got a wallpaper. Got into a fishing contest with the dog in my town. It was a contest to see who could get the rarest fish. I got a blue fish, he got a damn shark.