Bill Coleman: If you make a game too difficult, people will get frustrated trying to play and give up.
Also it matters if the user feels a failure was their "fault" or not. There's easy, and there's making a game difficult in the right way. The reason Tetris is so addictive is that it was possible you could do better by playing again.
When you play a role playing-style game where the opponent is unreasonably powerful, it can get very frustrating. Admittedly, Metroid Prime 2 (and even the first one) falls into this trap. The game was a lot of fun up until the point that I decided I wasn't going to spend 45 minutes trying to beat one boss characters.
Michael James: I also miss games with scores and high-score tables.
I never quite "got" the games where a high score was the goal. It just seemed like a series of numbers to me at the top of the screen. That's just me, though.
by Scott Stevenson — Oct 27
Also it matters if the user feels a failure was their "fault" or not. There's easy, and there's making a game difficult in the right way. The reason Tetris is so addictive is that it was possible you could do better by playing again.
When you play a role playing-style game where the opponent is unreasonably powerful, it can get very frustrating. Admittedly, Metroid Prime 2 (and even the first one) falls into this trap. The game was a lot of fun up until the point that I decided I wasn't going to spend 45 minutes trying to beat one boss characters.
Michael James: I also miss games with scores and high-score tables.
I never quite "got" the games where a high score was the goal. It just seemed like a series of numbers to me at the top of the screen. That's just me, though.