Omnitopic: Difficulty

(The imaginatively named Omnitopic is our attempt at community; bow before the might of community, petty mortals! It is a collection of posts circling around a specific topic, floating like a boxer and stinging like a nail through the forearm. It is a combination of opinions into a collection of packages.)

The month of May makes me think of flowers, showers and absurdly difficult games.

What makes a game difficult? There’s no central criteria. Difficulty comes in many forms. Some of these forms are as hard as trying to beat Mega Man 2 as a five year old. Others are games you positively cannot get into, that you try and try to enjoy and eventually find your way in to a new favorite. Some are complicated and arcane, not especially challenging but presenting a difficult front to keep out casual gamers.

And others? Others are just plain easy.

Difficulty in games is a heady topic, one which has spawned countless casual vs. hardcore debates, heated rants, and broken controllers. So this makes it a fantastic pick to revive our long dormant collaborative post series, dead since last May, because it’s a topic with so many avenues of access. Easy and hard are just one of many: complexity, obtuseness, and intense player communities are definite options, and even ones I haven’t thought of in my very limited wisdom.

We will be posting our responses as the month goes along, but we also want to open it up to the community, too. So! Here’s the deal. We’re going to open up the Omnitopic to you, the readers. Submit your own responses to the Omnitopic this month to us via email at nightmaremode AT gmail.com, and the best response will not only get published, but the author will also get his or her choice from the following games via Steam: Capsized, Yar’s Revenge or Anomaly: Warzone Earth. The only stipulations are that you are not currently a writer at Nightmare Mode, and that the entry is at least 3 paragraphs long.

So good hunting, everyone, and don’t let the difficulty get you down.