Controller Smashing Game Difficulties

controller smashing

We all love to be challenged in video games, that is the point of them after all but there is a fine line between a fair challenge and insanity! Some games have the balance perfect where the difficulty is hard but if you die it’s because you screwed up but then there is the other side of the team where they just throw endless enemies with perfect aim that will being out the controller smashing rage in the most calm of gamers. So i dedicate this to all the controllers I have bashed to death over the years!

World at War

World at War was in no way a bad game. The story was pretty good the graphics were the usual cod style and i ran into no bugs in my time playing it but veteran difficulty was a complete kick in the face!

Enemies always throw grenades in games and they are perfectly entitled to it adds some challenge but veteran took this to a whole new level. You could be hidden in a tiny corner protected by a tank and a bunch of boxes and still 4 enemies hidden in trenches across the map would still manage to hit you in the face with 4 grenades. In most situations you wouldn’t have the time to throw back all of the grenades before 1 exploded and killed you and most often if you tried to run to new cover you would be shot. I really have no idea how this made it through QA…unless they intended to put us through this torture.

 

call of duty world at war grenades
call of duty world at war grenades

Sound Shapes

Sound Shapes for the most part was a pretty easy game. When i started playing the game i had a handful of silver trophies for doing absolutely nothing so i assumed that it was going to be a quick and easy platinum. Once the main story path was completed things changed BIG TIME!

Gone were the cute little levels with the catchy tunes now it’s just a ‘I want you to DIE!’ attitude. The Challenges in Death mode were a challenge but some of them were far beyond that. With enough persistence it’s not that hard to complete them all but the process is insanely frustrating since it’s nearly always down to luck, sometimes no matter how well you play there is no way you could have completed it. The challenges are simple but they slap a tight time limit on you which forces you to rush and rushing ALWAYS leads to mistakes.

Demons Souls

Demons Souls is a really special kind of game. There is only 1 difficulty setting…ultra hard. Even the most basic of enemies have the ability to take talk your health bar away in the blink of an eye. Combine the hardy enemies with only a handful of checkpoints in the entire game and the fact that your health bar can only be half full when you have lost your soul (which was 90% of the time for me) the game really is tough.

Demons souls found a very clever way to make the game even harder without being called cheap. Quite often there are traps hidden around levels, most of the time you will be given no clues that the trap is there and will get killed. To counter this they have added the ability to leave messages on the ground that other players online can read so they don’t make the same mistakes again. This was a nice feature but if you played the game offline things have gotten a whole lot harder.

Overall Demons souls is a very good game, while the difficulty was a complete bastard the game itself was very good and well worth playing for anyone who hasn’t.

I Wanna Be The Guy

I Wanna Be The Guy is a game forged in the depths of hell! This game wants you to die and get pissed off. It doesn’t conform to any of the standard laws of gaming. Just when you think you have mastered the pattern of dodging all of the spikes falling from the roof a spike will suddenly ‘fall’ up of the floor and lightning speed and leave nothing but a spattered mess of blood on the screen.

The challenge from the game itself is almost non-existent if you learn off where all the traps are you will get through the game no bother but there are so many traps and they can often be very hard to dodge even you know they are coming that it can be so frustrating. The game does have checkpoints thankfully…but not that many of them, so a death can often mean having to perform a very difficult platforming sequence again.

This is a game made exclusively for the most hardcore speed runners.

 

i wanna be the guy game over
i wanna be the guy game over

Eat Lead

On normal difficulty this game poses very little challenge to anyone who is familiar with shooters but once you up it to the max it gets pretty tough. Enemies are on roids! They take a lot of bullets to go down and are very accurate (Those damn Space Marines), you on the other hand die very quickly and even if you are very accurate the ammo doesn’t last long enough for you to take enough enemies out so you are always having to take the risk of going out of cover for more ammo.

The level design is where this game fails and this is probably the main reason as to why this game is so hard. Enemies are coming at you from all angles and you can’t get enough safe cover anywhere to be able to properly fend them off.

The Force Unleashed

There were several moments playing this game that made me want to give up. There were too many scenes where they were throwing turrets, soldiers and robots at you all at once. Fair enough you have the “force” but that’s not enough especially when you can’t use it on a lot of the larger enemies. With enough persistence you will get through the tough parts only to be thrown into another part just as tough or harder. The game is just wave after wave of enemies.

I lost a controller to this game. R.I.P Controller

 

broken dualshock controller
broken dualshock controller

Another factor contributing to this game being so hard were the boss fights. It’s bad enough fighting dozens of enemies you can always blame yourself for not killing an enemy fast enough but with the boss fights it’s just you and him and in most cases they are hard as hell. 1 boss in particular that was a real challenge was Kazdan Paratus. His attacks did so much damage and yours did hardly any it was just cruel!

 

force unleashed boss fight
force unleashed boss fight

Dead Space 2

Hardcore mode in Dead Space 2 is definitely a contender for the most challenging difficulty in a game ever. I Wanna Be the Guy is hard but at least it has checkpoints. Hardcore mode has no checkpoints if you die then that’s it! If the game were on easy there is a chance you could beat the game without every dying but hardcore also throws harder enemies at you. No matter how good you are at a game 1 distraction or a controller slip can lead to a death and you are back to the start. That alone is enough torture but to slap it on even harder they only allow you to save the game 3 times so you are going to have to complete the game in 3 sittings (or just leave the system on all night).

Anyone who has unlocked the platinum for this game has seriously earned it!

Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem is in the same boat as Eat Lead. The game itself isn’t particularly hard but on the harder difficulty it throws so much at you often in cramped quarters with no cover that it can get quite frustrating. The scene near the start where you have to take down the mother ship is particularly frustrating because you can’t take cover. You have so many screw ups before you die and due to the sheer amount of enemies around and having such poor control of the turret there will be quite a lot of screw ups.

 

duke nukem forever
duke nukem forever

WET

WET was a strange game for me. The game had about 7 difficulty levels so it’s no surprise that 1 of them was a total asshole. On the higher difficulties it’s almost as if your bullets aren’t even hurting the enemies. They don’t react to your shots at all and will continue to attack you. No amount of fancy slides and flips can help you deal with them all when the enemies simply don’t die!

Ninja Gaiden

Ninja Gaiden is a bit like Demons Souls in that it’s frighteningly hard but the game is built so well that it’s always your fault for screwing up. For most of the enemies in the game they can take you out before you notice what’s happening. The only thing you have on your side are rock solid controls but that isn’t enough because the enemies take you out quicker than you can react. In most cases i never have too much trouble with bosses in Ninja Gaiden games they have weak spots and are usually easy to locate but that doesn’t mean they are a complete walk in the park. Normal difficulty will give the average gamer a sore thumb from all the button mashing pop that up a bit higher and you will be needing a warehouse of control pads to keep up with the rate at which they are being smashed at.

 

ninja gaiden game over
ninja gaiden game over

 

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