You're using my mention of the Hard difficulty as a springboard to talk about something totally different? My point was that God of War is not so easy as to cruise through the whole game on the harder difficulties (and if it is then I guess you are very familiar with and good at hack-and-slash games).

> The big thing on most modern games is the frequent auto-checkpointing. This is done to prevent the player from becoming frustrated and walking away, but it saps a critial element of difficulty from the game in that you have to execute a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence, and screwing up anything puts you back at the beginning.

"Executing a series of hard maneuvers all in sequence" is not a good design for a lot of games. It is good for those "match the button pressing to the prompts on the screen" (ala Guitar Hero) and classical platformers, but not for stealth and/or strategy games. It isn't very satisfying for me when it comes to hack-and-slash games, eiher, because it de-emphasizes reaction and adapting to novel situations.

Frequent check-pointing is often a crutch to mask poor gameplay design, but the tedium of having to do a series of perfectly executed actions is often a design that screams "we didn't bother to come up with something really satisfying".

> Modern games are very guilty of the overuse of checkpointing, which can frequently mean that you never lose more than a few seconds of progress. The frustration of doing 98% of a boss fight, flubbing one guard, and having to replay the whole level again is mirrored in the reward you feel when you overcome the challenge; modern games frequently minimize frustration via checkpointing, overly-verbose tutorials, "look here!" neon signs, and the like, all of which reduce both frustration and satisfaction.

No, the frustration is not nearly worth it. Using hours on one level - and the crushing boredom of having to repeat the first 25% of the same god damn level 50 times - does not culminate in some triumphant feeling when everything eventually falls into place. Maybe for something like 10 seconds, but that was hardly worth the frustration. Maybe that's just me, not being a masochist and all.

Games shouldn't try to hold your hand in order to frustrate you - it shouldn't try to hold your hand because it is satisfying to figure things out more by yourself. It will only frustrate you if you are too impatient or if the developers designed the game with poor hinting towards what you should do. And not holding your hands demands better design - or else the frustration is magnified. If you bang your head against the wall for hours, trying every reasonable way (within the confines of the game) to get further ahead, and you only find out about it through reading some FAQ (Or those Nintendo Magazines) that you should balance on the pixel-wide rope, make a jump on the night of the lunar moon and press square - or any other way that doesn't make reasonable intuitive sense within the games universe - that is a failure on the part of the designers, not some "hardcore" feature of the game.

I guess the hard games of old are kinds of badges of honor for some people (having completed them). I guess suburbanites who grew up during the nineties has to have their battle stories, too.