By David Futrelle
I regret to inform you that the gamers are at it again. Or at least that subset of gamers who have somehow convinced themselves that finishing games on the hardest possible mode is an accomplishment as momentous as say, curing cancer or rescuing a litter of puppies from the 15th floor of a skyscraper in your underwear, or something.
What’s got the gamers’ manties in a bunch this time? Well, it tutns out that several games journalists have suggested that maybe the ninja vs. samurai game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, released last month, would be a bit more fun and accessible if it had an easy mode.
You’d think that someone had banned them from eating chicken tenders for life.
Gamebros have long preached about the evils of easy mode, but something about suggesting that a deliberately difficult game like Sekiro should have an option for those who don’t want to end up punching a hole through their monitor in frustration was too much for these sensitive — sorry, I mean, EXTREMELY TOUGH –gamer souls to bear
And then there was this masterpiece of angry gamer pomposity:
Some of the angry gamers (like, for example, Mr. Fetusberry himself) denied they were “gatekeeping” their hobby. But others did their best impression of a mean bouncer.
Others don’t mind letting the “weaklings” play, but only if they end up getting properly emasculated for choosing easy mode.
It’s worth remembering that these guys — and most of those yelling the loudest about this are indeed guys — are basing their self-assessments as “non-pussies” and “non-weaklings” om their prowess at a game that involves sitting at their computer hitting keys real fast.
Wow, guys, you’ve proved that you’re so obsessed with video games that you’re willing to grind through difficult game missions over and over again until you get good enough to beat it. Ten year olds can do this.
But these guys have convinced themselves that playing a ninja game has somehow made them the equivalent of an actual ninja.
What makes their complaints even more pathetic is that adding an easy mode to Sekiro wouldn’t stop them from playing the harder modes that these guys love so much. It would just make the game more accessible to a wider range of players.
How fragile must your masculinity be if you feel threatened by someone else enjoying a game that you like but with a little bit of the difficulty dialed back? WHO FUCKING CARES?
Some people play games in order to master them, to beat the final boss on the hardest difficulty setting; other people like to play to relax.
I’m in the second camp. And so, while I’ve been playing video games, off and on, for nearly three decades, I basically still kind of suck at them, despite devoting many hundreds of hours to some of my favorite games — generally the sort of open-world games that allow the maximum amount of just goofing off. I almost always play games on easy mode at first, at least until I get the hang of them. Sometimes I stick with easy mode because, well, I just don’t feel like dealing with a lot of frustration. I paid for the game, shouldn’t I get to enjoy it how I want to? Oh, and I was kind of addicted to the Candy Crush games for a little while.
Are you really not a real gamer, as “Gorilla Channel” inventor @pixelatedboat sarcastically suggested on Twitter, “unless you treat gaming as a horrible, joyless job you don’t get paid for.”
Seriously, if the mostly casual way I play video games, sitting by myself or with a friend in the privacy of my own apartment, offends you as a gamer, might I suggest that you maybe just shut the fuck up about it? What fucking difference does it make to you how I or any other “weakling” gamer plays a game.
I mean, Jesus Christ, dudes. Get a grip on yourselves.
H/T to Shitty Gamer Takes on Twitter, who highlighted that tweet about “weaklings” needing to go back to mobile games and got me heading down this whole rabbithole.
UPDATE: I added the tweet from Fetusberry; thanks to kupo in the comments!
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OT: What the fuck? https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax
I know, I know, Republicans want to make sure it remains difficult to do your taxes because that way people will keep hating taxes.
On-topic: Really not a gamer, except for some old-school things. I suppose Lemmings actually is sort of violent, but it can also be incredibly calming. Likewise Chip’s Challenge, if you can find an old enough PC for it to actually play on. I’ve never found a way to get it to work on a 64-bit machine, even trying various emulators.
Note that both these games start incredibly easily and then become fiendish.
@Robert
Indeed, I find the collective fear of cooties in the video game industry endlessly frustrating. If everything in the game isn’t grey/brown, all gritty and helmed by a muscular brodude, we get anime fetish dolls or vapid bimbos with more bare skin than personality, and to paraphrase the Bikini Armor Battle Damage tumblr, oftentimes it’s not even trying to actually be sexy, all the jiggle physics and stripper outfits are really just there to reassure insecure boys that no matter how strong fighters the female characters are otherwise, it’s still made for dudes and women aren’t welcome.
But if you want to find games that aren’t about sports, sports cars or fighting, I strongly recommend looking at the point and click adventure game genre. I got into the genre (and even started making my own games in it) exactly because the devs weren’t afraid to make games that didn’t revolve around constipated musclemen in dour environments and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that point and click games doesn’t cater to brodudes and everyone wrongly thinking that the genre has been dead since the 90’s.
I strongly recommend trying Syberia and The Longest Journey, which while old, still hold up great and are great classics, but for a more modern example, Technobabylon is a great cyberpunk game that even has a playable transgender character!
Chips challenge totally works using DOS box, rabid rabbit! Or at least, it did a few years ago, I definitely played it! XD Windows 7 64 bit, if that helps at all.
OMG also jezzball! Who remembers it? You can play that online!
Oh boy, and hugo’s house of horrors? IIRC, you can buy that from the original maker, for like 10$ for the whole thing. Super cool!
So like, Sekiro’s descended from a now pretty long line of games by Fromsoftware that includes, most prominently, Dark Souls. Ain’t played it yet cos monies but I’ll grab it second-hand or something when I get an opportunity.
Look, here’s my bragging rights : I’ve played each and every single one of those games for hundreds of hours each, obsessively so, with many different character builds and strategies. I made an exception to my distaste for pvp because I simply had to fend off the bastard invaders, and I actually took down most of the motherfuckers. I’ve destroyed each and every boss multiple times, on various NG difficulties, with or without help, and often as a helper myself. I’m a fucking jolly co-operator and I will utterly destroy whatever stands between you and the next bonfire, and I’ll look fucking fantastic while I do it.
I also died a whole damn lot while learning, and then a whole damn lot more. I’m prolly gonna die a whole damn lot more, actually I might die a buncha times tomorrow if I’m feeling up to it.
I got the “git gud” part fuckin’ done and on point since 2010. Since that’s the only thing that matters to motherfuckers, then that’s my credentials.
And I’ve believed since 2010 that those games need an easy mode.
@banananana dakry
You’ve hit the nail on the head!
I even have an old comic of mine on the design process for these types:
There are fellow Chip’s Challenge fans here!?
I was obsessed with that game in the 90’s! I too have been trouble finding a way to play it. I miss it so much. The makers of that game really should make a modified game that can play on newer computers, smartphones and tablets available. I would totally pay for it.
It’s so deceptively easy at first, but those higher levels are some of the hardest game levels I’ve ever played. Some of them I never managed to beat. I had to look up passwords to skip the levels. And for such a simple game, a variety of skills had to be used depending on the level. Patience, strategy, speed, memory. All sorts of things.
I don’t know what DOS box is because there’s a limit to my computer savvyness, but I might just have to look into it.
I tend to play browser-based games myself and have gotten hooked on various and sundry escape-room games, most of which are from Japan for some reason. Jayisgames.net is a good jumping-off point, though quite a few of the older games they have linked to have stopped working either through Flash or Firefox upgrades (and sadly, a great many of the Tesshi-E Mild Escape games were left fallow when the site upgraded, as they didn’t have the time for mass conversion from Flash to OpenGL).
How many Minecraft players would be interested in playing with others from here? all this talk about video games has me wanting to re-open my minecraft realm.
I’m freaking obsessed with the Gears of War series. I have played the original three so many times and the remaster too. Got no.4 waiting for my HDD to free up 60GB. And they are the very stereotype of gritty, brown, dudebro meathead shooty bang bang games (and I am a 44 year old woman! I have action figures of Marcus and Dom on my bedside table). Also they are glorious fun to play, the characters are funny and interesting, it has a lot of very emotional moments baked in and the story is done well. And they have multiple difficulty levels. I learned2play on Casual mode, then because I am obsessed with achievements, was motivated to ratchet the difficulty up to Hardcore then Insane. So I believe having an Easy/Casual mode is very important.
Although I have enjoyed finally gitting gud at Dark Souls I think I’d have tried the games sooner if they hadn’t engendered such a toxic mindset around them that these tweets show so dispiritingly well.
It’s an emulator for playing DOS games on a modern OS. It’s also free. You should check it out.
Oooh! Free? I like the sound of that! I’m on a shitty little notebook with no memory, so it’s probably going to have to wait until I get around to buying a decent laptop, but I will definitely check it out.
Just putting this riiiight here:
It’s from a few years ago, but still holds pretty true.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewziegler/can-you-identify-the-video-game-by-its-generic-whi
Does anybody have any good Walking Simulator games to rec? I like games where I can just explore a world, without too much tension. Are there any real world exploration games like different cities?
Undertail is amazing. I loved it so much I bought the sound track. Multiple endings and you can choose not to fight any of the enimies.
In terms of non-actiony games I really love visual novels. … Granted among my favorites is Danganronpa and that certainly isn’t a series to go with if you’re not cool with blood and gore. Even if it is bright-pink gore.
Though past few days I’ve been going really heavy on the Harvest Moon 64. Wish I could find something akin to it and Back to Nature but a new experience, the newer Story of Seasons games and Stardew Valley don’t really do it for me.
@TheKND – Thank you for the Shrouded Isle recommendation. I am excited I can play it on my Switch. ?
Ahh, the good ol’ days where developers had to make the game artificially hard to cover up the fact that there was only so much game they could put on a cartridge.
Almost as good as the days when you’d go to the arcade and play the really hard games designed to take all your quarters because they were artificially hard to milk your parent’s wallet.
I had a GameShark for the PS1 and PS2 and I do not care about the sad lil’ babies and their wahhhing. (The gameshark was the only way I could get the little Tom the Toonami guy in Sly Cooper 2 as a distraction tool, and that was cool as heck and it was an awesome tool.)
I honestly think that they feel as though everyone has to struggle with bullshit difficulties just so they can feel superior that they did a thing better than someone who, say, doesn’t have the reflexes necessary to play a game like Dark Souls.
It’s like if someone were allowed to succeed, they feel like their success (despite being at a higher difficulty or whathaveyou), would be somehow made even more worthless.
Either that, or they’d have to get better at the game to keep up with people who now have access to such things.
Ooooooorrrrrrr, they’d be too tempted to use it themselves, and that’s why there’s such a backlash against the idea. It’s tempting, thus the Gamer™ doth protest too much.
All of this is so fucking true. These chuds don’t love games, they just wallow in misery and hate, and want everyone to be as miserable as they are.
To paraphrase Legally Blonde: “Video games give you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people don’t be gatekeeping brats on the Internet.”
I’m gonna back Kupo and say there’s a whoooooole fuckton of genres and games you’re missing out on.
I could give some specific recommendations, but what kind of games are you into? Like, what kind of games have you played, or things you like in a game, etc?
I can also HIGHLY reccomend the website itch.io, which is a website where indy devs can post their games, and a lot of them are free, so the only real thing you’d lose is your time when you try them out. You can also play a lot of them in your browser, so there’s also not a need to download things if you don’t want to.
They also frequently have game jams, where indy devs can try their hand at making a game around a theme, within a very short timespan. They recently had one themed around vampires (to celebrate the announcement of VtM: Bloodlines 2), which looks awesome.
Seriously, dig around the indy scene Robert, there’s so much good shit there.
Also, re: Minecraft. For those of us mod junkies out there, I used to have a light modpack and some friends who have all ghosted me. I definitely would like to scrap the old world and modpack for a new one. Feel free to hit me up on Discord (cheesynougats#3826)
Ooh, yes, Jezzball. I shudder to think how many hours I wasted on that back in the day. Probably not as many as on Minesweeper, but still.
I’m trying to remember what the furthest I got on Chip’s Challenge (without cheating by looking up the access codes) was. I think my old backup laptop on which it was able to play still has it, but I might have clicked “Start a new game,” and that erases your advance if you haven’t noted down the code. I could wear I’d tried to play it with DosBox on my new machine and that it didn’t work, but always worth trying again.
Hey, for the Chip’s Challenge fans, you can get it on Steam as well. That’s how I have it. It’s about $5 for 1, 2, and the level editor.
I play until I get frustrated with puzzle games. I remember encountering Chip’s Challenge as a kid, and was gleeful to get my hands on it again.
There are a few you end up forced to fight, but you don’t have to kill any enemies in Undertale at all. It’s one of the best games ever made.
Check out Deltarune as well. It’s free and exceptionally good.
> NS Paint
Well, with the evolution of computers and consoles (in term of capacities – both storage and calculus), more and more games offer possibilities of customization in term of gameplay, even big games.
And sometimes with auto-derision : as an example, in Disgaea 5, you can build the Cheat House (and it is even recommended). And, in my opinion, customization is good, be it in the appearance of the character, the gameplay or the difficulty.
As some of you had already said, difficulty can be a way to mask poor scenarii and/or artificially increase the length of the game.
In strategy games, it is also used to mask poor/weak AI, and it can quickly broke a game and make it either uninteresting or unplayable, and in the worse cases, both. In general, it is done by alloting more resources to AI players, or by providing them stronger units / infinite units, and so on. If that was acceptable in old games (because of the limited capacities of the devices), it is becoming less and less acceptable, giving games using this kind of tricks a lazily developped image.
In the same vein of complaint (from myself, sorry), the behavior of many RPG enemies who/which, in the large majority, always fight to the death. I do not speak of the possibility to spare them like in Undertale or some of the Megami Tensei serie, but some pattern in their AI which make them think that it may be not a good idea to engage a fight with someone who had already beat to pulp 50 of your colleagues, as an example.
And more cooperative games, like in the same way some exist in boardgames, would be neat too. I would gladly play some Arkham Horror on PC with friends. Pandemic already exists in PC version, so why not more ? Or a big RPG (not a MMORPG), with a team of players who are not necessarily in the same zone (of the game) (it may be closer to a multiplayer adventure game than to a RPG, as long as there is a good scenario, i do not mind).
Ah, well, so many possibilites, so little time…
As for non violent games, in addition to the genius Reus, I would say Baba Is You is superb. It’s a puzzle game, who start easy and end *EXTREMELY* hard. It’s also often quite nonsensical ans whimsy to boot.
@Robert
I’m going to throw in my 2 cents and plug The Witness as a gorgeous puzzle game with zero fighting, sports, or cars. My niece, 4 years old, also loves it (though she needs some help steering the character). I do have to add the caveat that it has a stupendously pretentious ending, but tbh it doesn’t impact the game really at all. It’s about the puzzles and the beauty of the visuals, not what could be described as plot.
In particular I love that I can enjoy puzzles that I can identify as Hamiltonian path puzzles, while my niece can also enjoy them with the understanding that they are “follow the dots” puzzles. Truly a game for all ages.
Surviving Mars is a good one. Planet builder – literally – with no combat other than the planet itself and people’s moods. Hell of a learning curve though.
Raft is peaceful too, once you survive the first two or three days. There is some combat – you have a shark to deal with if you want to grab more important resources (and I think giant birds in the update) – but it can easily be avoided by planning. You will die a lot though.
An interesting video has just gone up on YouTube by games industry commenter Jim Sterling on a somewhat related topic. Sterling’s last couple of videos have been extremely critical of a recently-released game, EA/Bioware’s Anthem, writing it off as a derivative, charmless grind seemingly designed more to suck money out of gamers’ pockets than to provide anything remotely approaching entertainment. This most recent video, though, is a response to a Kotaku article concentrating on the development of the game itself, an article which describes congenital management indecision and a culture of overwork at Bioware which resulted in the game that was delivered. Sterling takes Bioware to task for their spinning of overwork and “crunch mode” as “Bioware magic” and their disregard for the physical and mental health of their employees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN1uV57hE_w
(Note: If you’re not familiar with Sterling, he’s pretty NSFW)
A lot of commenters have noted how many of these self-anointed “real gamers” don’t seem to derive much actual pleasure from their gaming. I think it’s pretty evident from this video how deep this toxic macho culture runs– right to the top. The games that are an ordeal to play are an ordeal to make too ☹️.