I think I may have done a thread like this in the past, but as I get older, my memory's getting more and more like a sieve (though I can tell you the stats for pretty much any character from 2nd edition Warhammer 40K for some reason). Besides, mulling over rehashes of old threads (What's your favourite game? What's your least favourite game? Which game made you realise you're getting old?*) is what we do. Anyhoo, most of the time, I like to play games on their hardest difficulty (excepting iron man style affairs etc.). However, once in a while, something comes along that kicks my arse. Here's my list (in alphabetical order, because why not): Alien: Isolation Too damn scary! Tried playing on the hardest mode (where you don't even have a HUD), got to a door that I had to hack, heard the alien coming up behind me, noped out of the game and went and had a cup of tea instead. Fun fact: I started watching a playthrough of the Nostromo DLC and had to stop as it was too tense for me. Easy mode made the game far more tolerable. Still had its underwear ruining moments though. Alien Trilogy Yeah, yeah, it's a PlayStation game. Whatever. I couldn't even do this on easy, and not just because it scared the poo out of me. My brother, who's a better gamer than me for the most part, couldn't complete this on hard either, mainly because after a few level the enemies' hit points are dramatically increased, meaning that you need the average ammunition output of a moderately sized country to take down one enemy. At least the facehuggers weren't instakill... Alien vs Predator (2000) Aside from yet again me being a scaredy cat, it's hard to get anywhere in a game where killing an alien too close to yourself results in being sprayed with an amount of acid sufficient to melt the Titanic, let alone your piddly arse. And **** those hybrid xenomorph/robot things and their one hit kill hitscan LAZOR, even on easy. Or the predators that instamurdered you if you got too close or stayed still too long - on easy. Remember that on launch there was no save option during the missions, either. I never did play the legendary Alien Resurrection. Probably a good thing, because even just watching playthroughs makes me nervous. Doom Eternal A step up in terms of pace from the 2016 reboot, I realised early on that unless I was willing to invest a serious amount of time in getting gud, I was likely to end getting to a point where I would get stuck. And to be honest, I'm kinda glad I had the common sense to, as I ended up enjoying it a bit more and not getting potentially annoyed at the time spent/quality ratio. Ground Control I don't have much to say about this game, other than even on easy, it's hard. In fact, the first "Let's Play" video of it I found(because nostalgia) had the narrator say he was cheating and putting it on God mode, so I feel actually pretty good about completing it without cheating. I have PTSD flashbacks to the last mission, which involves you holding a position for a while. During this time, you will see most of your units destroyed, and your air force has to be considered expendable to hit some artillery enemies. Then an expansion pack, Dark Conspiracy, was released. Jesus Christ. I had to cheat to get through that about 2-3 missions in. And that was on easy. Thank God Ground Control 2 was more well rounded. Liked that game. Space Hulk: Deathwing What can I say? I just ended up getting chewed up by genestealers. I suspect that I wasn't making the most of my librarian powers (not to mention the rapid fire plasma cannon that makes life easier isn't available for ages). Still, not exactly a must play game, so meh. Warzone 2100 This game was amazing when it was first released as IIRC it was the first all 3D RTS. What starts out as a relatively straightforward strategy game soundly becomes impossible a few missions in, mainly due to a bloody annoying time limit on most missions (the final mission even has a secret 2 hour timer that will fail you if you take too long). I remember spending ages and multiple attempts on this one mission, only to get absolutely dicked on the next mission thanks to unit and base continuity between missions (and I had next to no units left). At this point I gave up and resorted to cheat codes to regularly purge all enemy units - and even then the game was still bloody difficult. Also, you think Starcraft's multitasking is hard? Try this game. Base building and defence, huge research trees, designing new units, managing a myriad of ground units with different abilities (artillery, anti-air, command units, anti-structure, anti-artillery...air units with similar choices). Jesus. Also apparently the game used Gouraud shading for the first time, which I still can't tell you what it means. But it did. Wing Commander IV I played Wing Commander Prophecy before this, which was probably one of the most replayed games in my young life. I decided to pick up WCIV and launched into hard...and kept getting nailed, mainly by one hit kill missiles. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- OVER TO YOU! *Actually, that's an interesting one, probably more so than this. Someone feel free to start that one up.
Yakuza Zero I'm not sure it was forced, more so that whilst I enjoyed the game for its story etc, the button mashing combat is a bit Janky and after a few repetitions of the last boss battle I decided I was bored of it and turned it down, at which point it was stupidly easy. I could have done some other things like go off on an array of side quest missions levelling up through a million random battles to up my characters skills, but really, I have more to do in my life. Liked most of the game, characters and story but unlike many into these titles I spent a fair bit of time running from battles because after a point they were dull. Hasn't put me off doing other titles in the series as I do like them and they do get better especially once you can save anywhere.
Play, play it, play it. It's amazing, but the underwater sections are... tense. Yup, that was one seriously hard game. I only ever beat it on easy, which was not easy at all. Project Wingman I started my first run at PW thinking I could beat it on hard first try, since I've been playing Ace Combat since 1995 and know the drill. It was going fine until I hit Machine of the Mantle, that mission kicked my arse twice, then I turned it down to Normal. I've beat it on Mercenary since, but only with the aid of the Mk1 and it's absurd Macross Missile Massacre secondary weapon.
Not sure if it's the first, but I'm thinking Battlefield 3 on the X360 might be in the process of doing that to me. I can't remember if I've ignored it for so long because I'm stubbornly refusing to turn it down (because achievement points) or because I can't do so at the point I'm at and will have to start all over again, at which stage my ceebs will kick in and I do want to see it through.
I never got far in the original AvP. It was, in my opinion, a horrible game - I just never got on with that kind of late 90s, early 2000s FPS that's really slippery and fast and twitchy. The Quake 3 Arena school of FPS. I find it frustrating and boring at the same time, like trying to swat flies. AvP2 was more my speed, but even it was a bit of a dice roll on higher difficulties. Looking the wrong way when you walked across the script trigger? You're dead. Hid from that bomb blast 2 pixels to the left of the developer's intentions? You're dead. Came across a predator as one of the other species? You're dead. I made a lot of use of the quicksave functionality... Oblivion gets a special mention. First, for having the dumbest, most immersion breaking implementation of a difficulty setting ever. Literally just a slider that you can adjust at any time from the pause menu. Second, for having such a monstrously broken set of core RPG mechanics that using the difficulty slider was basically mandatory sometimes. I hated Oblivion so much. I was so excited about it, and it was so broken and clunky. In the end I spent more time modding it than playing it. Crysis is a weird one. It didn't literally force me to turn down the difficulty, but it forced me to gimp my playstyle miles and miles away from what felt natural for the game design and plot, by having AI that could spot you in 0.2 seconds through a bush from 600 metres away. Gunsmith entertained me for hours with his videos arguing that it isn't a stealth game, everyone on earth was just playing it wrong and bad because they're scrubs, but after many hours trying to emulate his achievements I concluded that there is such a thing as innate prodiguous skill and decided to play other games that didn't require it to work as intended. Dragon Age Origins. Curious game. Mostly very easy, with occasional spikes in difficulty that make you wonder what happened to the game in its childhood to make it so bad tempered and aggressive. Bioshock Infinite. Not because I couldn't do it on max difficulty, but because the gameplay was a side ring chore and I mainly played the game for its amazing story and visuals, and wanted to experience them with as little disruption as possible.
