Maybe I’m just better at games than I was, but it seems to me that most modern games aren’t inherently difficult as such, it’s just a case of learning the game’s “tricks”. If I really want a challenge I play something like N, which at times is good old-fashioned borderline-too-frustrating-to-play difficult.

You think people who get the sense of accomplishment while playing a game have self-esteem issues? I get a sense of accomplishment from all sorts of trivial things like taking out the trash. I don’t think I have a low self-esteem, though.

Anyway, my original point is that the automatic difficulty adjustment is hardly an ideal solution, because I want the game to give me a set challenge. In Ikaruga, Oblivion or, say, Max Payne, I don’t have that choice. The game is there to hold my hand no matter what I do. Quicksaving however, is a choice.

I guess the trouble with automatic difficulty is that once it’s implemented in the game, it’s really hard to disable it. It would still work with Max Payne’s painkillers, but I think Oblivion would need major restructuring, since the game adjusts so many things, like what enemies you meet and items you get.

RE4 did saving pretty much perfectly without quicksaves. You always got a restart point when entering a room, plus sometimes between phases of the current battle. And you usually had access to the last typewriter without respawns.

Hmm, Half Life 2 had both quicksaves and save points.

Advance Wars DS (I don’t know about GB ones) makes you finish the campaign in normal mode before it opens up the hard version — but in the hard version, you get to choose your outrageously overpowered Commanding Officer, so maybe it isn’t harder after all?

Being old and slow and having a limited amount of time to play does give you a different perspective on the notion of “difficulty” and “accomplishment” with respect to video games. I guess my sense of self-esteem is at this point too well developed for it to get a kick in the pants because I “beat” Deathspank 2: Bloodsport on Hard.

All that being said, I don’t see why the game can’t be adjustable with save anywhere for me and not adjustable with one savepoint per entire chapter for you. Except that it’s software, and that sort of thing never works out for software.

BTW, if a game is good enough, I’ll play it on hard. I did that for RE4 (twice) and also for the Halo games. Most games are not good enough for that though.

I consider most games challenges to overcome. I love the sense of achievement I get when winning a tough game. And for me, the game has to be challenging and fair. I don’t care much about seeing the plot to the end usually, since games are hardly masterpieces in that regard.

Automatic difficulty adjustment works well for your point of view, but it’s an absolute abomination to me. All sense of accomplishment flies out of the window if I know the game bent over backwards to let me win. It’s pretty hard to feel anything except disappointment if the final battle turns out to be a triumph over small inconveniences.

I had one particularly horrible experience. Ikaruga, a shmup of rather brutal difficulty level, has a difficulty adjustment of sorts. Basically, when you keep failing, the game starts to give you more continues to use. In the end it gives you infinite continues. When you die in Ikaruga, you don’t end up at the start of the level, you start again from where you die. So, when you have infinite continues, you don’t have to play at all. You’ll win Ikaruga by waiting until you reach the end. You can’t turn this adjustment off, by the way, so to get to the challenge, you need to resort to all sorts of trickery. Deleting save games, always quitting on continue, that sort of thing.

By the way, Resident Evil 4 has three difficulty levels in Europe, two in the US. But like in most Capcom games, the Professional difficulty level only opens up after completing the main game. I’ve never understood why.

The best example I can think of was Metal Arms on the Xbox. I really liked the game, but only got to the 10th level or so because it took me so many tries just to pass the levels. And now it sits on my shelf collecting dust…

The problem is that I lost my gaming cherry to Mega Man, where a good 90% of the game was getting hit until you recognized the pattern and could move on to the next pattern. The idea of having the pattern change on me because I died a couple times is incredibly disturbing – how can I say that I beat the game if it just changed to become easier?

Of course, I would have no complaints with an optional self-correcting difficulty system.