I do not miss hard games.

Get ready to die a million times.

I've heard people brag that they beat those freakin' hard Nintendo games like Mike Tyson's Punch Out or they finished Zelda, Mario, or whatever (though nobody I know finished Ninja Gaiden).  I played all those games, but I didn't beat any of them.  Why?  Because they pissed me off so badly, I didn't want to give those games the satisfaction of me sticking to them when they're just being a bitch.  Why should I stick it out if you're just gonna keep F'ing with me over and over again.   Those games also didn't have good check points or save functions, so when you stop playing the game, there's a good chance you'll have to go all the way back to the beginning when you turn it back on.  And those games were not short games.  They took hours and hours of hard work and determination, which I didn't have at all.  But why should I?  So I could see the stupid 5 second ending scene?

Get ready to do the same thing over and over again
for 12 straight hours and no breaks.

There was one Nintendo game I actually sat down all day to finish and the ending was so bad.  Rampage.  That was the most repetitive simple game.  Though it was also one of the first games I know of that seemed to give you unlimited lives, or it was like really difficult to actually die, or maybe I just used a code, I can't remember.  That was another thing about most of those games.  You needed a secret code to have any chance of beating some of them.  Contra was a great game, but who could beat that game without the 30 lives code?  Everyone I know knows the Contra code by heart, because that's how important that damn code was.

I still don't know if the game developers back then really believed kids loved torturing themselves like that or they just didn't know how to get the difficulty settings right.  I also wonder if they still had the arcade game difficulty settings ingrained in their minds, like they had to make the game difficult so people would keep dying and pumping more coins into the machine.  But we BOUGHT the game, there was no reason for them to punish us like that.  There was reason to make it so goddamn hard to finish the game.  If I could find some those people, I would ask them what they were thinking making a game for children impossible to beat.  Was that some kind of life lesson they were trying to teach us?  Were they telling us that sometimes, no matter how hard you try to do something, you'll just never be able to do it?  Were they trying to tell us that if you want to beat Ninja Gaiden, you have to actually train like a real ninja?  I don't know.  I just think they were assholes.

Some people now complain that games are too easy, but personally I love it.  I don't like having to do the same thing over more than 5 times.  I'm a grown man, but my patience level is the same as it was when I was 8.   I was just playing the new 007 Golden Eye Reloaded game for PS3 and I thought I'd put it on hard difficulty to make it a little more interesting because I'm pretty good at FPSs now.  Boy, was that a mistake.  I got to the end boss of the game, but it was so hard getting there, I almost considered taking the game out and breaking it in half.  I've never done that in my life, but I have a friend who did and he really regretted it, so I told myself I would never break a game.

My revenge on a hard game is to just sell it off.  At least you get a little money back for the terrible torture device.  I played against the boss in 007 a few times, and finally I was like "screw this, I'm not finishing this stupid ridiculously hard game, I'll just watch the ending on Youtube."  That's pretty much the main reason I try to finish a game is to see the ending, but I've decided from now on if a game is too hard or takes too long to finish, I'm just gonna get rid of it and check out youtube.  It's not worth me getting stressed out and pissed off over.  I'm a peaceful man.  Thankfully, most games have very reasonable difficulty settings that can also be adjusted, so that's why I can stand playing through an entire game with little stress and still go through a few challenges as well.

How about you?  Do you like a challenge or do you break stuff?