Game difficulty; or how I learned to stop worrying and love my hero's horrible deaths

Opinion by Shaan J. 

I love dying in games.

It's tough to nail down the exact reason though. I didn't grow up spending much time on the 8 and 16-bit consoles, so the term “NES-hard” never really resonated with me. Those games that I did play were games where death was a minimal part of the experience, a (somewhat) ineffective deterrent to poor play. And then in modern games death is typically a minor part of the experience indeed; sure, while running out of lives might have carried some weight in the old-school Mario games, lives are virtually meaningless in Mario's modern exploits, and they often feel included for the sake of tradition.

But there's been a bit of a resistance to this trend for games to become "easier." Turning the difficulty up to Veteran in a typical shooter might still not mean that much, but we only need to point to the resurgence of the roguelike genre amongst certain circles to see that there's an appetite still for truly difficult games.

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A familiar darkness? Hands on with Dark Souls 2

Preview by Matt S.

I've always been a bit concerned about Dark Souls 2, after I heard it was announced. My concern was always tied in to the budget of the game - Dark Souls 2 clearly has a bigger budget, and that means it needs to sell more copies to justify the investment on the management side of the business. The only way to achieve that is to make the game reach out to a broader audience, and this tends to bring up that scary "a" word... accessibility.

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Prepare to lose your Soul - again

Of course, the real test will come when it is time to play the game. Here everything is visually detailed and interesting, but some of the screenshots certainly help convey the sense of menace and often times oppressive atmosphere.

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