“Sudden catastrophic character development”
In which we talk about really hard video games and why we like (or don’t like) them. We also discuss why some games are harder than others and why that’s sometimes a valid design decision.
In this episode:
- War of the Worlds: Goliath
- The Oregon Trail
- Battletoads
- Super Meat Boy
- I Wanna Be the Guy
- Metroid: Zero Mission
- Metroid: Fusion
- Super Metroid
- Monster Party (the source of the “watch us dance!” zombies)
- Metal Gear: Solid
- Jeff Vogel – Spiderweb Software
- Gone Home
- Dragon Age: Origins – Slink’s Slightly Skewed “RAVAge” Mod
- Bastion
- Transistor
- Final Fantasy Tactics
- Octodad
- QWOP
- Surgeon Simulator
- Dark Souls
- Vagrant Story
- Diablo II
- The Dune video game
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure
- Dark Seed
- The Longest Journey
- Monkey Island
- SkiFree
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- Air Fortress
- Star Control II
- Bucky O’Hare
- Gradius
- Legend of the Mystical Ninja
- Wing Commander: Privateer
- Star Wars: TIE Fighter
- Emerald Weapon (from Final Fantasy VII)
- Master of Orion
- Galactic Civilizations
I’m so glad you posted this! I’ve been wanting to hear what you guys talked about for a while. 😀
One thing I don’t think was mentioned was that a lot of video game design theory was centered around coin-op, where increasing difficulty was a part of the business model. Even into the 8bit nintendo era, games that weren’t coin-op to start with used the affordances of a coin-op game.
I’m a little upset that you had a conversation about hard video games with James and he didn’t mention MoneySeize.