I can’t say I agree with this. I’m of the opinion that the goal of games should be to give me experiences I have never had before. Tell stories, present novel interactions and utilize the unique qualities of new media to make a point.

I have played a few games where extreme difficulty was a selling point. Shiren the Wanderer immediately pops into my mind. Any game that deletes your save file when you die is pretty damn brutal… but at the same time it was presented in a way that made sense and wasn’t frustrating. If you died in that game, it wasn’t because you failed to anticipate a twitch reaction or needed to trial-and-error through an engineered scenario. You died because you, the player, made a mistake. Your logic was faulty, or you did not fully consider the situation. And your punishment was starting over from the very beginning. After that happens once: you have learned something.

Ninja Gainden II seems to be a different breed of difficulty. Try, try, try again. I think I would appreciate it more if it chose to address the role of punishment in modern games rather than difficulty. As it stands, the punishment is having to do the same thing over and over again. What is the reward? Avoiding the punishment, maybe?

I think you are right on in your assumption that nostalgia and difficulty are directly linked in this medium. I think of it more like a movement, like Neo-Impressionism or Fauvism. A characteristic of the NES/Master System days was the difficulty. That was something that we can channel in modern games. Ninja Gaiden II is one way to do it. What are some others?

It would seem that “an ode to masochism” would be your interpretation of the “Old Philosophy”. I partially agree.

Should not the goal of games be to develop into more complex, more demanding experiences? Why do we allow ourselves to be sold the same thing over and over again, just with updated graphics? Why does “difficult” never come into the equation as a positive attribute? Why bother attempting to simulate real life (see: first person shooters) if they’re going to be easy just so they can tell a story in what essentially amounts to one big interactive cutscene? If you’re going to create a game that “simulates” war, why is it so easy to take on the entire world by yourself?

I suspect that the answers to these questions are the reason why I’m a little annoyed at where the attention lies with regard to the growth and sudden popularity of the medium.

I partially agree because there is a point where a game just becomes too difficult to be enjoyable – and Ninja Gaiden II crosses that line a few times. So there is an obvious need for balance. However, what I’m finding is that the decline of the “40 hour game” and the ascent of the movement that makes accessibility paramount (Nintendo has built their entire business upon it) is skewing the direction of the medium.

One of the reasons I drew the connection between “nostalgia” and “difficulty” is because they should be considered together when discussing games that were clearly influenced by an earlier age. It seems that gamers just want the nostalgia but none of the difficulty. Except that’s part of what made the game so appealing in the first place. They had to provide a challenge, because there was nothing else to them. And if only resentment was harbored towards these games, none of us would be playing video games anymore. So not acknowledging that aspect comes across as some aging hipster fondly remembering his glory days. It’s why the re-releases on XBox Live Arcade are so popular. For example, why does Space Invaders Extreme have co-op? The original game was pure twitch; it was you versus the machine. By adding in a useless feature like that, the original design intent is broken. It becomes some kind of party favour. Yes, let us fight waves of aliens together!

I just have so much respect for Itagaki’s approach to Ninja Gaiden II. By the end of the game, it is full of so much self-awareness towards its difficulty that you can’t help but sit there and repeat boss battles or difficult sections over and over and over to defend your worthiness to play this game. It brought me back to those days of throwing controllers and screaming at televisions. It revisited that part of our collective video game consciousness that maybe we’re afraid to acknowledge. Instead, we just want to remember the fun parts. Like jumping on mushrooms. Not dying 10 times trying to time that leap across the chasm.

With regard to your aside: it’s Gamespot. I’m not even going to get into that right now.

I think I’m at an age now where I don’t have time for games that “demand” anything of me. I don’t want to waste hours stuck in a death loop or trying to get past a certain boss. I did that when I was a kid because I was poor and I only got a new game every year or so… if it was difficult, I forced myself to stick with it because I had nothing else to play. Quite often such difficulty was a result of sloppy programming or to inflate a game’s lifespan (in my opinion).

I can appreciate Ninja Gaiden II as an ode to masochism, but I think the sort of audience that would enjoy such an exercise is very, very small.

An aside: “Least Improved Sequel” seems sort of ridiculous. If a game was successful enough to warrant a sequel, why would a developer want to screw up the sequel by changing things?