I have been playing Gears of War 2 with a friend for hours each evening at Insane difficulty. Considering that I have done this with Halo 3 and other games I have begun to draw upon some interesting observations.

Consider how one may make the experience more challenging. We got the simple ways of boosting the health of enemies, boosting weapon damage, making you weaker, doing less damage etc.

And then consider how you sit for half an hour, emptying clip after clip of an assault rifle into a couple of Covenant Brutes, you get to notice that any fuck up your side will mangle you. Also, any glitch and bug, any fuck up on the side of the designers need will also kill you. And this presents a a second level of difficulty of - you are handicapped, the enemy boosted to Godlike levels, and now you are also fighting every little miss, every little lazy bit of code the programmers left untouched during debug and play testing.

This puts you, as a gamer at some disadvantage, apart from the chosen handicap. And what can you do to amend this? Well nothing apart from filing bug reports and complain. It can also serve as a better way to judge the character of game and how robust it actually is.

Regardless, though, I howl like god damn banshee when a grub spawns beside me and procedures to kill me by mere touching.