Hardest game ever?
Always an interesting question this. However, I must be more specific- what is the hardest game you have played in the modern age? From 16 bit machines onwards.
Is epcify this because back in the early days of gaming (when most of you were very young, iuf alive at all), games were sometimes made ludicrously, even unplayably, difficult as it was the only thing that made them last. I mean, reviews used to rate games on the amount of SCREENS they had, y'know? 40 screens, 50 screens... the first classic game I ever played, Lords of Midnight (that my name and Avatar are from) blew that away to a shocked woprld by having 10000 and eventually the first true 3-d game, Driller, had over a million (rubbish game though), nbut that demonstates the longevity problesm some games had.
So, since those old days, what is the hardest game you ever played?
I prefer games that are hard with good reason, rather than hard just to make you annoyed. And the hardest game I ever plated was Grand Prix Legens on the PC from a few years back, a devastatingly accurate simulation of 1967 Grand Prix racing.
The game is fantastic. The car tinkering is spot ion, the feel of the game (as basically GP drivers (who did not pit stop in that era) carried enough fuels for eighty laps and were basically behind the wheel of moving bombs) is perfect, the AI is absolutely FANTASTIC- as the highly skilled, historically accurate AI drivers happily watch and learn your technique lap by lap before easily breezing by you at the right point- the sounds are brilliant, each race is automaticaly recorded from about 12 different angles (your view, chase view, suspension view, gear box view, piut cam, two different camera angles, and each of the car views done for EVERY car in the race), the multi-player netowrk coding uis the bst I have ever seen with no stuttering (I remember this comparing badly to Star Wars Racer, otherwise a fun game but in multi-play the game could not make up its mind where the other humans were and they juddered badly) and witb you able to take the point of view of any other pl;ayer in the game and just watch them for a while with 100% timing and no drop out or lag, and the game had longevity and playability and brains... you could download patches for additional cars and courses and even seasons
... in short I love it and I am tempted to go play it again now.
But **** ME was it hard! OMG, they did not pull any punches in that game! It takes days just to learn how to turn a corner at anything like a racing speed- you will not believe how hard these cars were to drive! No bloody wonder so many drivers died back then! My brother, the master of the game, practiced months and months and months before he even won a race. And that was a cut down 12 lap race. As for the proper races, lasting two hours or more, you haven;t got a flipping hope. As for trying to do a whole Grand Prix for the whole season with all the realism options on... (not to mention that the game will happily simulate reliability, so if you are in a Lotus you have a great performance car but there is a 50% chance it will blow up each race)... I mean, I never won a race EVER. I was lucky to get halfway up the field in qualifying, and was happy to even FINISH a race, let alone win one (as I watch my brother's Lotus speed off into the distance as I sturggle just to steer...)
Probably didn't help that my Brabham I drove, whilst very reliable, had a small problem of automatically taking you off the road if you so much as touched the steering wheel whilst braking. Very twitchy...
Anyway, it didn't matter, because the difficulty fitted so damn well. This was a game that could, and has, last you years because there is just so much to it and I doubt anyomne could ever actually master it 100%, though some people were damn good at it, to judge by the net community.
(the game was also worthwhile for keeping records of spectacular crashes, as my friend Christ often caused, on purpose, including some good attempts to break the physics engine. One amazing crash has important information not known about it as the cars do not contain an altimeter...)
So, that is the most difficult game I have ever played... what was yours? And was the difficulty worth it, did it feel like it was part of the game- or was it just bloody irritating?