design

Game Design Talk: Turning the Difficulty Up To 11

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I’ve been putting a lot of time into Street Fighter IV for the iPhone and I’m still having a lot of fun with it. I’ve gotten to the point where I can consistently hit 19-hit combos with Ryu, which is kind of scary, considering the fact that I can’t do that on the real thing.

Thinking I had mad skills, I decided to try playing the game at the toughest difficulty setting. On normal, I could beat the game with Ryu in under 8 minutes. On “Grueling”, it took me 25 minutes to get to the final boss. It was tough, but I didn’t mind the experience. It still felt somewhat fair.

It was when I got to M. Bison that the experience took a turn for the worst. If you’ve played a Street Fighter game, you probably can empathize with my pain. I spent another 30 minutes just trying to beat him before I finally broke through.

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What’s My Motivation?

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Having just finished Episodes From Liberty City, it inspired me to write something about the role of motivation in games, and how my motivation towards these two Grand Theft Auto IV add-ons made me feel very differently in spite of being different takes on the same core thing.

Unhappily Ever After

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The other night, i could sense that I was close to beating Borderlands. When I get that feeling, I can’t stop and leave that game until I beat it. In spite of the game’s flaws, I was having a ton of fun with the game. However, Borderlands suffers from a problem that has plagued video games since games were designed with a clear progression from beginning to end: a crappy endgame experience. I ended my Borderlands experience with a bad taste in my mouth, feeling like the extra time I could have dedicated to sleep that evening were wasted on a poor endgame experience.

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