I must rant on the topic of game unfairness. I recently dug my NES out of the basement and brought it home. My girlfriend and I have been co-oping our way through the Tengen version of Gauntlet [link]. That game is a bitch. But it's more than that. That game is simply unfair to the player in a way that I haven't seen in my recent game experiences. Some examples:

- There is a 1 in 32 chance that when you start the game, none of your passwords will work when you re-enter them. If your password starts with the letter A, it won't work even though the game provided it to you. (Thanks, Bill Thomas, for being insane enough to crack the password system)

- You get to a new level and all of a sudden there's invisible stuff. Invisible stun panels. A few levels later, invisible walls. Then invisible enemies -- it's like the developers were talking about how to make the game more challenging, and some guy said "Why don't we start making everything INVISIBLE!!!"


It's not as fun as it looks.

- At least one of the four characters (Warrior) is probably incapable of completing the game. Playing with this character is like playing Super Mario Bros. using only the A button. Perhaps it is possible, but suicide is a more likely outcome.

- There are several levels where you just have to give up and reset the game. Move the wrong block into a narrow corridor? Reset. And learn to like it.


Question mark denotes where you begin to wonder why you started playing.

- Some of the levels have dozens of exits, but only one will take you to the next level. The others will either take you back to the beginning of the level, or in an even more dickish move, return you to a previous level. Keep in mind that your life continually depletes at the same rate as the game timer, even if you're not getting hit.

- You have to get eight separate parts of a password to beat the game; otherwise you die instantly when you enter the final room. The eight password components are hidden in timed rooms that you are likely to bypass if you play the game in a straightforward manner, and once passed, you cannot backtrack to most of these rooms. Reset. If you miss the first room, get all the others, and make it to level 99, you get to start over. Not just reset and try again from the last password save, but start from scratch.

- So you did all that, you got to the end, and you beat the underwhelming end boss. Head for the exit and -- you die. First, you have to go past the exit and go get some ugly crystal thing that looks like a glitchy enemy, and which you've probably forgotten about by now. THEN you can exit and win.


No, thank you for playing.

I've been trying to think about recent games that are this unabashedly hostile to the player, and I can't come up with any. Do they still make games where not just the enemies, but the developers themselves are against you?

I think the reason for this is that Gauntlet was the consummate quarter-sucker back in the halcyon arcade days of yore. Beating Gauntlet in the arcade cost a hell of a lot more than beating, say, Time Crisis. Imagine four players shoveling quarters into this mechanical hellspawn programmed solely to be an unrelenting, rule-changing jerk. The cost of this one collective act of defiance may have exceeded the purchase price of the console version of the game. And that doesn't even include the price of practice.


Gauntlet speedrun by someone who makes me question my worth as a human.

Today, it can cost just as much to beat the easiest game as it does to beat the most difficult. Not only that, when we buy a game, we expect to be able to finish it. Sure, maybe not on hard mode, but we expect a reasonable shot at seeing the end credits. Completing a game is no longer an act of defiance against a hostile studio of programmer foes bent on our defeat. We just view it in terms of getting our money's worth; any less would be an insult.


Hey. I may be hard, but I'm fair.

Do we gamers lose anything by this mindset? Is that why achievements are so popular -- because beating a game is no longer achievement enough? And if a developer made an unfair -- or, to use my favorite term, "cheap" -- game, would people still buy it?