From Battletoads to Bloodborne (and Back) – How Difficult Games Still Kick Our Butts

It’s Sunday afternoon in the summer. You’ve just eaten a big meal and you’re settling down to an hour in front of the TV. Battletoads. You blow the cartridge and put it in. Maybe, just maybe, this’ll be the time you make it past the second level. But probably not, because frankly you suck at this game.

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. If it wasn’t Battletoads, it might have been Mario, Punch Out, Ninja Gaiden or any other title that drove you mad nearly 30 years ago.

Maybe you’re too young for all that. Maybe you cut your teeth on Super Meat Boy, Dark Souls or, well, Ninja Gaiden.

What makes a difficult game has changed an awful lot over the last three decades, but our desire to overcome challenges is still the same.

Back to Battletoads

Old games used to be the wrong kind of difficult, and I don’t care who hears me say it. There’s a kind of gamer who brags about finishing Contra with a Rock Band guitar and one hand tied behind his back, but that guy can go to hell. He is the exception and definitely not the rule.

There was a time when the only way of finishing a game was to play it an extraordinary amount, get the muscle memory right down, and then die repeatedly anyway because guy 3 didn’t do the thing he was supposed to do.

That isn’t difficult. That’s just unfair. It’s a way of extending the challenge for arcade games, and it’s just not good enough for the home console gamer.

In the last week, with the release of the new Battletoads, we’ve seen a lot of rather nostalgic people get teary-eyed about the original game. Those people are officially insane.

Look at that video above and tell me you’d have the patience or sanity to keep at it. No cheat codes: you’d need to get through 12 other levels first.

Most people these days just don’t have the patience, and I can’t blame them. Other than those with a love for retro games, it just doesn’t stand up against today’s titles. And I’m not just talking about quality.

There are so many times in that video where the game actively wants the player to die. It’s not fair and it’s not clever. It’s just very difficult.

The changing wave of difficulty

Games used to feel unfair because unfair was the easiest way for developers to create a challenge. Those days are thankfully long gone.

There’s nowhere this is more obvious than in the games by From, who have difficulty perfectly down. When you die, and you will, it’s always your fault. It’s because you didn’t dodge fast enough, or because you didn’t use the right tools for the job. Maybe it’s because you’re just not good enough.

Those are all fixable things. You can try and try again, and eventually, you will overcome the challenge. That wasn’t true in the original Battletoads, which relied on you making split-second choices on level 12, an hour and a half after you’d last died in exactly the same place.

Getting good is the aim of any new experience. That’s true for any game on any console, because when you’re starting out even the easiest of games can feel like a challenge. We can all forget that sometimes.

Older games were fairly simple affairs. You jumped, you moved left and right. There might even have been an actual attack if you were lucky, rather than just a jump in the enemy’s general direction.

But as they’ve developed, the challenge has developed as well. At least, that’s the hope.

Challenge of the Tomb Raider

What is the aim of a difficult game? I asked myself that earlier while I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Yup, it’s another one of those rants.

For those of you desperate for an update on my platinum challenge, here it is: I’m in the final straights. I have all the collectibles, I have all but one of the combat trophies. This is in the bag, except for finishing it on the highest difficulty.

It isn’t hard in the slightest. The enemies feel about the same to kill as they did on the lower settings. Climbing feels slightly more deadly, if only because there’s much less indication of where it is you’re supposed to jump. That’s challenging, but it’s not impossible.

The hardest part of this effort is the lack of save points. If you die, you’ll be taken back to your last manual save, which you can only make at camps checkered throughout the world.

So it’s not unusual to die from some nonsense glitch or, worse, by a random piranha attack, and have to repeat up to 30 minutes of the game.

This is a new type of challenge, somewhere in between the retro difficult and something from From. This is endurance against the game itself.

That neatly brings us back around to Battletoads, and to a little game called Brunch Club.

Battletoads Reborn

Battletoads is back, and despite all the concern from people who aren’t going to play it anyway, it’s bloody good fun. If you have Gamepass, give it a bash – it’s well worth it.

Battletoads is in the unique position of being famously thought of as one of the most difficult games of all time. The reboot isn’t impossible, but it is challenging, and my hat goes off to the developers for managing that tightrope walk spectacularly.

They’ve used 30 years of progress in video games to create a game that isn’t unfair, but it is difficult. If you muck up, it’s probably on you. The combat feels tight, but it’s easy to lose concentration and die.

But most of all it’s fun. It’s the kind of challenge, unlike Tomb Raider, that isn’t just you against the game. And when you overcome something you struggle at, you feel much better for it.

Brunch Club is the opposite of that. It’s physics-based and the difficulty comes from hoping the game does what you want it to. These are popular recently, with the likes of Goat Simulator leading the charge.

But is it fun? Is it fun when your fry-up is destroyed randomly and there’s nothing you can do about it? For some yes, but not for me.

Conclusion

There are many types of difficulty, but not all of them are created equally. Sometimes it’s the difficulty of overcoming sadistic level design, sometimes it’s the challenge of beating that boss through practice and a change of pace. Occasionally it’s just down to luck and an improvement in hand-eye co-ordination. All too often, the game relies on challenging your endurance, on making you put up with its flaws as a means of getting you to put down the controller and walk away.

As we go into a new generation and enemy AI hopefully improves, I hope developers look again at what it means to make a game challenging. Unlike those summer days long ago, we all have more options, less time and less patience.