NICE!

My highest average APM is 40. :( And I still lost.
I know about APM and build orders and basic stuff but I have yet to learn on how to scouting well. :( That's how I lost my last match because I didn't realized that my opponent was building the attack squad right next to my base. :(

Woe is me. :( My scouting ability is questionable.

I can read and react okay its just keeping up with the screen that falters.

It's accurate. I think it's even true in sports video games. It's obviously true in most every other genre.

Yeah, I loved the starcraft campaign. I'm not much of one for multiplayer, but I played through the campaign three times. Games can be done right these days, like starcraft or the witcher, it's just that few companies bother. I love the comic though :) very true for most :)


Edit: Actually, speaking of starcraft, this makes me think of the lost viking minigame, when I finally got the score I needed for the gold achievement my face was literally just like that :)

I know what you mean, that's why head shots have always been extremely important for me. No matter what the difficulty, any regular (human) enemy should be killable with 1-3 bullets to the face. If not, the game is poo and I will most likely not play it. Difficulty should be able to be ramped up without making enemies sponges.

Call of Duty has been fairly satisfactory. I hate the trend that they represent in gaming, but I had a blast playing through some of those campaigns and MW2, for example, has an extremely well polished gameplay on Veteran difficulty.

Yeah, I've been getting into the STALKER games. I've been enjoying them. Enemies don't take a lot of damage but neither do you.

I've been doing a replay of Unreal Gold, and man, I'd forgotten how crafty those freaking Skaarj are. I think the only other enemy AI that I've actually respected is the AI from Deus Ex (their comically awful field of vision notwithstanding). The AI in XIII wasn't so bad either, at times.

This.

Would be funny if it wasn't so true :(

Practice and get that up to a hundred, then you'll be able to do much better. :p
Because the AI in Unreal is not scripted, and the AI in CoD is scripted. Unreal's AI are given full freedom to do whatever they need to kill you. CoD's AI are given full animations and looks, they need to good look, "realistic", and believe-able on your first play-through.

Of course, once you replay the CoD campaing, you'll realize that the AI isn't really that much involved in the decision process itself, but instead just a script telling it to stand like this, after five seconds to rush at that corner, throw a bomb in that room, and similar crap.

There were some unreasonably hard computer games in 1994, but there were also many, many games that were not designed by overcompensating idiots. I'm not sure I can come up with enough examples to support the claim that this was a general trend in computer games (except maybe among early roleplaying games), but even if it was, it was starting to wane by the mid-90s. Lots of games had selectable difficulty levels that would max out the frustration meter, but then, so do games today.

The image is mostly relevant to console action games of the late 80s and early 90s, many of which were misguidedly designed much like coin-operated arcade games - there was only an hour or so of actual content, but they were outrageously difficult. With the Playstation on the horizon, this too was starting to fade by 1994.

I like challenging and even difficult games. I do not like games that waste my time. If the game wastes my time, I will toss it and play something else instead. Thanks to the ease of bargain hunting in today's digital distribution scene, I'm spoiled for choice.

I usually select instantly the hardest difficulty, because I'm afraid otherwise I will complete the game too fast. One exception to this rule was Doom, the hardest gameplay mode where enemies would continuously respawn was simply unfair because my ammo would not respawn the same way. Also it made it impossible to play the game the way I wanted, ie. proceeding slowly and carefully checking every place and secret.

Generally speaking, I prefer games that don't have different difficulty levels, because then I can be pretty sure that the hardest levels are not made impossibly hard, with the note "Gee, maybe you should just play it on easier level then?". I think Interstate '76 was quite hard in a good way, and didn't have different difficulty levels.

Example about bad implemention of difficulty: Wing Commander 4. The harder missions were simply frustrating, and had more to do with luck than with skill and experience. I'd play the same mission 30 times without making any progress in it, and then boom suddenly I would pass it just because three Kilrathi ships decided to collide and blew up that time, making rest of the mission breeze. Gee, thanks, doesn't feel like I really achieved anything there, but at least I'm not stuck in that same mission anymore (but the next one).

Example of good implementation: Star Wars (and maybe Tie Fighter also). I think it was an insanely difficult game, especially the mission pack(s). BUT, unlike in WC4, I still felt that I was always making some progress with each mission replay, always making a bit closer to the goal, and finally reaching it. Thus, while insanely hard, it was still not as frustrating and pointless as Wing Commander 4. The only complaint in Star Wars was that part of the difficulty was that at first you didn't know what to expect later in the mission, but on replays you knew some vital enemy ship would appear at point X at time Y, so you knew to hurry there in time. That is kind of cheating in a way, knowing beforehand what "surprises" will come during the mission.

Another example of good implementation: Magic Carpet. Yes, many of the levels are insanely hard and you have no option to save in-game, but the good news is that generally speaking the longer you survive in a mission, the easier it gets. So the hardest part of each level is usually in the very beginning of the level. No need to replay so much unlike in some games where at the very end of the mission there's some insanely hard encounter and you have to replay the boring parts over and over again.

Then there's of course the old-skool RPGs from mostly 80s, but there the "difficulty" was usually just tediousness, like no automap or quest log, ie. you had to either write notes and draw maps unless you had a super memory. Ultima 3, Bard's Tale 2, Dungeon Master etc.

everyone knows ads>people...
thats why they stopped making games for hardcore gamers..