I’ve been playing a lot of Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV today. Highly recommended if you’re looking for some pretty tough platformer action. I’m not really the world’s most enthusiastic platformer-player, myself, but I think that VVVVVV and Time Fcuk are two of the more fun games I’ve played in the last year or so.

What’s particularly intriguing about both games is how unapologetic they can be about difficulty. VVVVVV is especially harsh on that front. There’s a rather constant barrage of death as you try to learn the shape of the levels. A lot of the time you literally have to die in order to map out an area so as to know what to do the next time.

And of course, like Time Fcuk with its dimension shifting, there’s a focus on using one particular mechanic (a kind of reversible gravity) in a great number of ways. I really like the idea that you play with a single aspect of the game and multiply it out to check the ramifications. A lot of great games work that way. Portal springs to mind.

Because Far Cry 2 is one of those open games where you have to exercise a whole bunch of investigative thought and careful planning, I restarted my game with the aid of a walkthrough. The immediate popular response to this kind of thing is to label it as a form of cheating, and it maybe it is, for what it’s worth. However, I don’t think it’s worth all that much.

Specifically, I’ve quite enjoyed the process of receiving my instructions from the walkthrough and carrying them out. There’s even a strange whiff of authenticity in the process – the idea that I’m a mercenary who receives specific instructions as to what my ‘handler’ (the walkthrough author) wants me to do. In the game I follow instructions, after all, just not instructions so exact. On the balance, I’m enjoying the experience of doing what I’m told and reaping the rewards, it’s nice.

A further benefit, again related to authenticity, is that if I follow the instructions in the walk-through, it tends to yield a more ‘realistic-looking’ game in output. Knowing how to sneak around an enemy camp rather than stumble around being shot at makes me feel more satisfied with the representations of the game.

One clear fact, damning for many, is that it makes the game less challenging. Frankly, I don’t always have the time to be challenged.

Because I have no other games to play (thanks, bus strike!) I fired up Bioshock yet again this evening. The only real remaining point of interest I had, having already finished it twice, was the distinction that might be made when you play it in the “Hard mode.” So, I staunchly ground my way through the introductory stuff until I ran into the first splicers (the bad guys and gals).

So, the base distinction appears to be that you have to hit their head more times with the wrench than previously. Their deployment throughout the level I was playing looked to be identical with Easy mode, and their behaviour looked the same too. So, they just had much, much harder heads, so to speak.

All this entails, if you’re determined to use the wrench as I have tended to be, is the need for the “crowbar dance” that is popular in Half-Life 2 when fighting the zombies: zip in, whack!, dodge back from retaliation, zip in, whack!, …

This is interesting, I think, because a game like Bioshock almost dictates that this would be the difficulty measure. The game is so nicely art-directed and “just so” that they wouldn’t have wanted to change anything about the actual behaviour or positioning of the enemies. So all they were left with was additional layers of steel plating in their skulls. Fair enough.