We've all been there. Hands gripping the controller tightly, beads of sweat running down your forehead, mouth contorted in a grimice of pain and confusion, while on the screen in front of you the "Game Over" panel is about to rear it's ugly head once again. Frustrated, you throw the controller down, turn off the damn system and shake your head. Once again your self-esteem has deteriorated to the point of giving up.

Remember these games? Although fewer and further between now, they still exist. Those mind-numbingly hard games that leave you broken, bruised, and battered on the floor. The kind of games that have such a steep learning curve that multiple deaths within the first ten seconds of a level are a normality and, quite often, a game breaker. Why a game breaker? Because only the strong willed can survive a game beating you over, and over, and over again without shattering their ego before getting good enough to advance.



Let's take, for example, Guitar Hero. Now here's a game that's instantly (well, mostly) accessable to everyone who plays it. On Easy and Medium, even the most semi-gamer gamer can play along and feel a great sense of accomplishment on most songs. It's a satisfying feeling thinking you're good at a game, and so the next logical step is to move up to the next difficulty level, right? It can't be that much harder than the level you're playing, right? That orange button that's been teasing me with it's proximity to my blue button can't be that much further to reach with my pinky, right?

Wrong. The orange button, for the unexperienced, will own your soul and haunt your dreams. The orange button is responsible for a million gamers crying out at the same time. The orange button is the reason there was a two year gap between me playing Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2. I was so frustrated, so unbelievably frustrated by the jump in difficulty between medium and hard, that I absolutely lost faith in myself at GH, and gave up on the series for awhile. Fast forward two years and four more games later (RB,RB2, GH3, GHWT), and with all the practice and playthrough's I can run around on Expert with the semi-best of them. But how many "casual" gamers have the drive to do this? How many have the time, patience, and perserverance to push on past the heartbreaking frustration that is the orange button?


Not as easy at it looks most of the time

How about a game that doesn't require that much manual dexterity, but will still frustrate you to the point of depression? Well, a good recent example is the Ninja Gaiden games. While not requiring as much memorization as the originals, the Ninja Gaiden games came with the difficulty of knowing when and how to attack, knowing when and how to defend, and knowing that yes, you are going to get your ass kicked sooner or later. It doesn't matter how good you think you are, how good you actually are, or any combination of the two, you will get your ass handed to you sometime in a Ninja Gaiden game. The difference being that some people can handle it, and some will put the game down never to pick it back up again. Speaking of which, I haven't played NG2 since it red-ringed my last 360. That's right, NG2 is so hard it will red-ring your xbox. Well, maybe not.

There's many and more games that have frustrated me to no end. Some I finish, some I don't. I keep them around though, so when the moment's right I can pick them back up and attempt to convince myself I'm better than I used to be. Which most often ends up being the case. But there are those games out there that make me feel so demeaned and used and broken that everytime I play them, I die a little inside. And for every new Prince of Persia, or Bioshock, that won't let you die, there's still an Ikaruga and TMNT(NES) out there that helps you remember that maybe you aren't as good as you think you are.