Get over it, Professor Gamer

Ok, confession time: Even though I spend nearly every Friday here banging on about how much I love video games, the sad, sad truth is that I suck at them. A lot.

I’ve always sucked. I’ve only been playing games since the original Playstation era (so, since about 1997 for me. That’s still around 14 years though. Wow, I’m getting old), but even back then I sucked. It took me 10 years to even finish the original Tomb Raider. Bah. Back then though, we didn’t have the internet at home, and so I didn’t have the wealth of walkthroughs, tips and tricks that are now available to me. Without them, half of my games would have been unfinished and I’d have probably given up on gaming altogether as it would have been too frustrating.



Here’s the worst confession: I even had to use walkthroughs on Portal 2. Please, try to hold onto your monocles, I know you’re shocked but it would be terrible if you dropped them into your sherry glasses.

Yes, I got stuck traversing Aperture Science, a problem that no one else seemed to have had, according to the Steam forums. I’m not a member, but I enjoy perusing them for the latest bonkers theories. (Chell is an android! The Ratman used the portal gun to escape to the moon!). While I’ve been trawling the forums for crazy, I’ve spotted several threads complaining that Portal 2 just didn’t match up to the challenge of the original Portal. The complaint has even cropped up in Yahtzee’s review of the game in Zero Punctuation yesterday.



Ok, they may have a point. The people who were chomping at the bit for Portal 2 were those who’d played Portal, replayed it, played the custom levels, spent four years yelling ‘The cake is a lie!’ at each other, replayed it again, written terrible fan fiction, then replayed it again for luck. They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need to be shown the mechanics again, they just wanted to run in, start shooting portals everywhere and discover a whole new challenge.

Problem is, you can’t aim your game solely at the crazy rabid fans. You need to appeal to the newcomers too, the ones who’ve never heard of the Weighted Companion Cube. Those players will need a bit of hand holding, or the game will just be an indecipherable mess to them.



When I think about it, 2 was probably a bit easier than 1, but not by much. So why is there so much whining about it? And it’s not just the Valve fans. Wherever you turn on the internet, there’s people arguing that gaming has been dumbed down for today’s market and now anyone could finish Mr Brown’s Shooty Punch Adventure without even breaking a sweat! How could this be allowed?

Is that really a bad thing though? We have to remember that there needs to be a line drawn between ‘challenging’ and ‘just stupidly difficult’. Portal was challenging, ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ on Guitar Hero 3 is just a case of arthritis waiting to happen.

It also depends on what kind of game you’re playing. On Guitar Hero or Rock Band, if you can complete the hardest songs on the ‘Expert’ setting then you are clearly some kind of mutant that finds joy in racking up high scores and making everyone around you feel inferior (or Sunday Matt). In a story driven game like Portal 2 though, you can’t make your player do the same bit over and over until they figure out the exact solution. It breaks the narrative flow, frustrates the player and if it happens long enough, they’ll give up and trade the thing in for something that won’t make them hurl their controllers at the screen.



I don’t hurl controllers anymore, by the way. They’re expensive now.

The point I was making was, the games aren’t being dumbed down now, their difficulty is just being tailored to suit the gameplay. If you’re so desperate to prove yourself as a ‘hardcore’ gamer, go five star ‘Psychobilly Freakout’ or something.