Nintendo Okie

Last week on the podcast we talked about Mega Man 10 having an easy mode.  I expressed my distaste for such a mode in a Mega Man game.  To me, the best part of Mega Man is figuring out how to defeat the seemingly unbeatable levels.  Easy mode will totally nullify that.  I realize I don’t have to play it and I won’t.  I never used any of the helpful items in Mega Man 9 that make things simpler for our fighting robot but it still kind of bothers me they are there.

Maybe this is a result of my upbringing on the NES.  Have you played your favorite NES games lately?  They are pretty hard.  Contra, Life Force and Kid Icarus are all brutally hard games that I have played since I was a child.  I beat all of those games when I was younger but the only one I can still beat today is Contra (without using the thirty lives code by the way).  I remember attempting to beat Kid Icarus in preparation for Brawl.  I could’t get past level three.  Oh how I tried but after a grueling hour and a half I gave up deciding that my eight-year-old self was the superior game player.

How could I be worse at games now than when I was younger?  Have I been coddled by modern video games?  Has regenerating health and auto lock aiming systems turned my video game skills into a pudgy, out of shape couch potato?  I don’t think so.  At least I hope not.  I think games are just more accessible these days.  Gaming has changed from being a nerdy thing, to a main stream form of entertainment.  That means more players with a wider range of skill levels, which means games need to be easier.

Start any new game now and the first thing you will be presented with is a difficulty option.  This lets both the “noobs” and the experienced players set the experience to their skill level.  I like when games accompany the choices with descriptions of what that difficulty level will bring.  Some games will even let you change the difficulty in the middle of things.  That is a great feature when realize your initial choice is causing the game to be too easy or too hard.  This is a feature I could have used in No More Heroes.

Not long after starting the game, I began to feel I was overpowered.  At first I thought this was by design and the game would increase in difficulty as I played, but that never happened.  It wasn’t until I defeated the game and unlocked the “hard” difficulty setting that I realized I had played on easy the whole time.  Maybe I should have realized that when I was choosing the skill level but my choices were “Sweet” and “Mild.”  When I was presented those options, I felt like I was choosing between bathroom doors labeled “Hitch ‘em Up” and “Saddle Bags.”  Maybe it was just me, but I was confused.  I still had fun with the game but I am kind of worried about No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle.  Hopefully I truly earned my rank as number one assassin.

That is another thing that bugs me.  Why do you have to unlock the higher difficulty options in a game?  Shouldn’t we be able to go straight to the most unforgiving enemies and game AI if we want?  I don’t remember picking difficulties on the NES or Genesis.  I’m sure I never picked a difficulty on an arcade machine.  Then again, all arcade cabinets we probably set to kill you as fast as possible to get you to pop in more quarters.  I shudder to think how much change I shoveled into that X-Men beat ‘em up.  I guess that is another reason games are easier now.  They aren’t designed to steal the lunch money of kids across the world.  Instead of games costing twenty five cents at a time, you have to shell out fifty to sixty dollars.

So games are easier now.  That isn’t a bad thing.  Just because a game is easy doesn’t mean they are less fun.  Maybe the sense of accomplishment will seem a little watered down.  If this means the medium reaches out to more people, and in return gaming becomes an accepted form of entertainment like movies and TV, then the trade is worth it.  We will always have our games like Mega Man to remind us of how games used to steal our money in a worse way than any school bully ever could.