Game difficulty

  I'm running through an old game on the hardest difficulty again, Killzone 3 this time, in the run up to not playing any new games until Christmas. It isn't too bad with one of two harder sections that take several tries to get right.

  When I'm doing this kind of thing I go read the game message boards and see how other people found it. You always get the people who go "that was too easy, they need to make it harder". Most of the time they are simply bragging, games nowadays have a way of making them easy enough for most people otherwise the game maker severely limits themselves in the audience they can get to buy their game. However it is gratifying to know that the vast majority of comments about what parts were hard etc align with what I find when playing games on the hardest level. This latest one isn't too bad if you take your time (yay for regenerating health) with one or two sections that there simply isn't enough cover to hide behind. Fortunately for me there are no real annoying sections that have some form of artificial time limit. Being forced to play a game in a certain amount of time ruins the fun for me. I like game that let me play at my own pace.

  What am I saying here? That I still have skills despite my age? Probably :) . Still it is amazing how many games nowadays where the normal difficulty really isn't that difficult so that the vast majority of people can finish the game on the standard difficulty (seriously, the stats companies get on games now that there are online stat tracking has shown fewer than 15% of people finish a game sometimes). It used to be there was no difficulty setting and the game was the game. You do get that a bit still (hello Demon's Souls and Dark Souls) but not often.

  Now if you will excuse me I need to think about what game to do on the hardest setting next once I finish this one. I'm close, probably 70 to 80 percent done now.