Because the idea that every game needs to be a dick measuring contest is retarded, and as far as I’m concerned you’re a dinosaur babysitting a relic made of old stereotypes if you think otherwise.  Yeah I’m looking at you, pal, and I don’t care about your 59,045,765 gamerscore that says how hardcore you are, because I don’t play games for the approval of others, I play games to have fun, and sometimes a game is best enjoyed when it’s simply fun, and engaging, and not every game does, or should, require controller throwing frustration to accomplish that.

The Super Guide will show you how to go from left to right... if you really need it.

When I mentioned the idea for this editorial to a friend, one of his first thoughts was to ask my opinion about Nintendo’s oft ridiculed Play Assist feature.  I can’t really speak to that since I’ve never played a game using that feature, but I can say maybe Nintendo doesn’t have a terrible idea.  It may be not the best way to go about it, but you know what I do like?  I like that when I get stuck in Uncharted 2, I don’t have to run off to GameFaqs and look up a solution because the game will give me progressively better hints about how to accomplish the task at hand based on how I’m doing.  If I can’t figure out how to get to that next point after a bit, it’ll suggest I look somewhere, and if I still don’t get it, it’ll give me a better hint, and all the while I get to experiment and have a little fun and not feel like an idiot OR a cheat.

We may not always like to admit it, but we’re not all great at all the genres we like to play.  If we’re being honest, we’re not always great at every game even in genres we do like and play a lot.  I’m a pretty great Halo player, but for some reason Half Life 2 (and its episodic content) doesn’t seem to fit all that well with my play style, so why should I beat myself up and slog through the game when I can notch it down a bit and get the same experience, and more importantly enjoyment?  I have a feeling a lot of gamers my age are faced with similar obstacles but have this idea that if they play on ‘easy’ they are doing it wrong or something.  Just on this site’s very forums I’ve seen people complain how rough they’re having it getting through a certain game and I can’t help but ask “why don’t you just switch to easy?  Why beat yourself up?”  Isn’t gaming supposed to be, I dunno, fun or something?

I think the problem, at least with gamers our age, is that we grew up when games were very often, and very simply, about bragging rights.  You checked your quarter on the arcade table for your turn to go for top score, because games in their early stages were built around competition and high scores and that was it, but are most games today really like that?  Does it really do you any good to beat your head against a wall to beat a game like Killzone 2 or God of War III on a difficulty level that frustrates you?  What does it get you?

There's nothing else to this game but challenge.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some games that are made for the challenge.  The whole point of a game such as Ninja Gaiden 2 is becoming the ultimate ninja and beating the hell out of everything you see, and doing it with style and grace, and there’s no way to adjust the difficulty and make that a plausible or enjoyable goal.  Ninja Gaiden 2 really has nothing else going for it but the challenge, it’s the key aspect of the gameplay.  Multiplayer games obviously keep that sense of competition and challenge alive, and if you really want to test your manhood, you can always join a Modern Warfare 2 or Bad Company 2 multiplayer lobby.  That, in my opinion, is where the challenge of gaming should reside in today’s games.  Many single player games today are far more story driven, the experience that matters is not in some arbitrary challenge but in the interactive medium that gaming has only recently offered to any appreciable extent.  I don’t think anyone would appreciate your completion of Heavy Rain on a harder setting.

Great for blasting aliens, not so much in conversation.

Worst of all, he’s boring.  It’d be better if he just didn’t talk at all, then I could go about my business without pretending to care what he had to say.  But he talks, and interrupts me, but he has nothing interesting to say, and he’s typical of 90% of game protagonists out there today – boring, faceless things who want me to pay attention to them, but have nothing really to add.  I’m pretty sure Master Chief is like 78% of women on the planet.  He’d be like 100% of women if he bitched about me taking out the trash or showering ever day.

You know who gets my attention, though?  Kratos.  That dude is scary, he’s human (kinda), but most importantly he’s actually got something to say, he’s gonna make an impact on your experience and by the time you’re done with that Spartan freak you’ll have a strong opinion about him one way or another.  So why aren’t more characters like him?  Why are developers so often content to feed us nameless, faceless, meaningless characters we couldn’t care less about?  My best guess, in between fantasizing about what Halo looks like in a REALLY short skirt, is that too many developers like to play it safe, they’d rather give you something to feel ‘meh’ about than take a chance of alienating you altogether.  I don’t like this.

Because it sucks.

Yeah, it sucks, and there’s really no reason for it.  If you’re not going to bother developing your main character, why not go the Valve route and make them mostly nameless/faceless?  I have no idea what Gordon Freeman thinks of the situations he’s put in because, well, he’s supposed to be me and when I’m playing I’m supposed to be him.  Kudos to Valve for making me an MIT physicist, by the way, $60 was a lot cheaper and easier than having to be rich or, you know, smart (two things I lack in abundance).

Playing as Gordon, or Chell in Portal, gives me the opportunity to place my own persona into the character I am playing.  Whatever is supposed to be felt I get to feel myself, because there’s no stupid male bimbo in the way.  Can you say the same when you’re playing as Bender in Gears of War?  Er, I mean Marcus Fenix, but wouldn’t you rather play as Bender?  At least that guy is interesting and talks about fun stuff, like booze and hookers, two of my favorite things.

Hello, ladies. You know these muscles aren't just for show.

It really is time that developers got savvy to the idea that we maybe don’t want third rate heroes getting in the way of our first rate gameplay.  I’d love to sit here and rattle off a list of games marred by poor protagonists, but you know the score; you play games, too.  Who wants a Marcus or a Chief or a Hale when we can have a Kratos or a Solid Snake?  Why bother trying at all when companies such as Valve and Infinity Ward have proven so well that you can create the atmosphere you want without muddling things with a shitty, middling quasi hero?

At the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, when Snake puts the gun in his mouth, I was genuinely concerned for the fate of his character.  When Chief gets lost in space at the end of Halo 3, the best I could muster in terms of caring was hoping Cortana didn’t nag him into a murder suicide.  I had to create a fantasy just to get closure.  There are so many great examples of both empathetic characters and brilliant avatars in gaming, I’ll never feel content with developers who are so lazy as to simply fit me with yet another empty, heavy gun.

Just a few years ago, the idea of smaller, cheaper, downloadable games on consoles was just a speck in the eye of some clever developer, but these days some of the best games a guy can spend time with aren’t the big competitive FPS games like Modern Warfare 2, or even online MMO games such as World of Warcraft, but the kinds of games that more actively foster the social networking revolution that is taking over the internet.  There are 70 million people playing Farmville on Facebook, and while I’m not one of them, I am a level 387 mob boss in Mafia Wars.  More and more, gaming is used as a means of social interaction, a way of connecting with people, and most of the big budget games don’t do this on any real, tangible level.  Sure, you can hop into a room with 17 other guys in Modern Warfare 2 and blast each other in the face, and it’s a good time, but are you really connecting with the people you’re shooting while also looking for care packages and trying to hold a position?  Probably not.  Games such as Gears of War and Halo offer online cooperative modes, but you’re playing with one other guy, and you’re both usually too busy pulling off headshots to really socialize in any meaningful way.

Take Catan, by contrast – it’s a digital version of the classic board game that supports up to 4 players in a turn based environment, and while it requires strategy and encourages competition,  it also fosters the kind of social interaction that people are looking for these days in every aspect of their life, not just gaming.  You plot your strategy, trade amongst your competition, and then make your move.  Afterwards, you actually get to engage your friends as they take their turn, just as you would in real life.

Catan is not the only game of its kind to appear on Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network.  Uno, Carcasonne, and more have all made their way into the digital universe and offer the same kind of family fun of board games through the internet.  Downloadable games are quickly replacing the traditional board game and bringing along with that expansion a greater opportunity to engage others in a social manner.

Speaking of family fun, as a father of a toddler I’ve recently found much more worth in the games on PSN and XBLA than I ever did on those networks’ respective platforms.   I love Gears of War, Halo, God of War and all the big titles, but nothing thrills my son more than guiding pretty petals through beautiful landscapes in Flower or guiding snarky fish through a sea of mermaids and sharks in Feeding Frenzy.  A lot of downloadable games, by nature, are simpler and easier to grasp, and therefore much more accessible to children while still retaining many of the qualities that appeal to us adults.  As such, they make for great bonding experiences where a parent can use gaming to connect with their children and pass along their hobby through games that parents would actually want their kids to play.  As the industry, and its consumers, mature it becomes harder and harder to find quality big budget titles that bridge the gap the way, but many downloadable titles offer that old school charm that drew us in as kids, which we now get to share with our children.  As an active member of our forums it’s easy to see that I’m not the only one raising a little gamer of my own, these days it’s common practice, and for my money there’s no better place to start than the bite sized gaming that many downloadable titles offer.

While many of these games are ‘bite sized’, relatively speaking, they still pack a lot of punch for the price.  Offhand I can’t think of a downloadable game that retails for more than $15, yet many of them offer plenty of content and replay value far beyond their value, and in this way games such as Shadow Complex or Geometry Wars are much smarter options for gamers on a budget.  Whether you’re a gamer parent or just a gamer on looking to save some scratch because you’re aiming to remodel your kitchen or whatever, there’s so much content in the arcade space that even four ‘expensive’ downloadable games can cost less than the price of a full retail game, and provide an exponentially greater amount of content.

The best part about many of these games is that, in addition to connecting with other people on a deeper level than many full retail games can do and passing on values to younger generations, we’re also getting back to the roots of gaming, to the ‘bowling alley arcade room’ feel that made us gamers in the first place.  I spent hours punching people in the face in Shadow Complex so that I could claim the ‘high score’ on that in Shadow Complex within our forums, and boy did I crow about it.  Most every game these days has leaderboards of some sort, but most of these big budget titles don’t offer the same feel of topping a score and putting naughty letters in the menu like so many downloadable titles do, and that’s because these games by their very nature distill gaming much more into the realm of pure, simple competition.  Sooner or later, no matter what, I’ll top my friend Dustin’s Score Attack score in Afterburner Climax, and nothing will thrill me greater than putting “ASS” as my initials when I do.

That’ll just spur him to top my score once again, and that’s what gaming should be about.  While there’s a place for the big budget blockbuster titles, and as much as I love them, there’s just something about these ‘low budget’ games that makes me want more.  The ‘big three’ are so focused on the bigger picture that they have, in my opinion, forgotten what they can do with smaller, more simple games.  I’d love to see what we might play if MS, Sony and Nintendo focused more on this growing but still niche market, and really expanded it.  I, for one, love the fact that the Big Three have revived so many classic games for us to revisit in new ways, and that’s definitely part of the appeal of the whole XBLA/PSN/WiiWare experience, but in my opinion so much more could and should be done on this front.  Maybe next E3 we’ll see them start focusing on the downloadable market, but I’m not holding my breath just yet.

Author’s Note – We asked our readers to come up with their own list of great downloadable games, and a brief sampling offered up these gems, many of which I either forgot or did not have room to mention, but are worthy of inclusion anyway:

Shadow Complex
Castle Crashers
Noby Noby Boy
Wipeout HD
Shatter
Prince of Persia Classic
Castle Crashers
Space Giraffe
Shadow Complex
Space Invaders Extreme
Geometry Wars 2 Plants vs Zombies
Peggle
Trials 2 SE
Pacman Campionship Edition
Catan
Bomberman
Word Soup
Streets of Fury
I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES IN IT!!!1
Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix.

What are some of your favorite downloadable titles? Post ‘em in the comments or let us know in the forums!

by Maverick

As far as I’m concerned, the DS release of Final Fantasy IV is the hardest RPG I have ever played, with maybe the possible exception of Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3: FES on Hard Mode.

Having long been a Final Fantasy fan, and of FFIV in particular, (though the sixth installment is where my heart truly lies) I picked up the DS remake on day one. I discovered pretty quickly that the difficulty in this game was ratcheted up to eleven. Seriously, this entire game makes the last dungeon of the original Final Fantasy look like a piece of soft, fluffy angel food cake.

Monsters hit hard, and more often. And they’re everywhere. Items are more scarce, and skills are more expensive. Square-Enix has decided that since the fans wanted a tougher game, by God, they were gonna give it to ‘em.

Indeed, Final Fantasy IV has long had a record of being tough. The original Final Fantasy II that North American SNESs had way back when, was a watered down, wimpified version of the original game. Squaresoft had deemed North American audiences to simply not be clever enough to beat the game outright.

Well. I’ve said elsewhere but I’ll say it here, I think this version is the definitive version of the game. It’s got all the content of the original game – more unique skills for each character, a far and away superior script, and somehow even the more boring setpieces of the original have been infused with new life to become contrasted and unique. It’s become a better game than when I first came to it.

But as I’ve said, I’ve owned the game since launch day. Having been a fan of the series and the game for 17 years, I know my way around its environs and its strategies pretty well. But now, in its last dungeon, it has had me stymied for months. I’ve never had this many game overs in a Final Fantasy.

I’ll finish this game, though. Matrix Software has created a great game on Square-Enix’s behalf. But damned if they’re not going to make me work for it.