Games should always be balanced to be doable and enjoyable at their highest difficulty. This approach requires the player to master all tools available to him, choose the appropriate strategies, and hone his skills and reflexes (in games where they matter) in order to win. Optional lower difficulties can always be added later to "make the game more accessible"; basically to not make the mythical casual gamer run for the hills 5 minutes into the game.

Wing Commander III exemplifies this principle immaculately. Fool that I was, I'd played it many times below its real challenge level, and admittedly it was fun to shoot at a leisurely flying Dralthi who turned in long slow arcs, countermeasuring the odd missile, and occasionally sending in the wingman to attack, this mainly to demonstrate that I indeed was the venerable Wing Commander.

The real game starts at nothing less than Nightmare, though. I just finished a playthrough, and it makes you feel like you truly are the hero fighting grim odds in a losing war. At first, it seems nearly impossible to even hit a Darket, enemies fight smart and dodge while you're trying to shoot them, while maneuvering behind you to blast you to kingdom come if ignored, and pepper you with missiles.

Yet this makes you grow. You learn to put more system power into shields when fighting smaller craft and more into weapons for the bigger game. You learn when to honorably trade frontal energy blasts and when to discreetly Mcfly out of harm's way. You get the epiphany to autoslide towards one Darket who will keep evading, while turning the front of your craft with all its deadly gun mounts towards the other who will charge in to attack, and blast him away. You learn to bait enemy attacks by cutting your engines. You start paying attention to how your wingman is doing, and taunting his attackers if there seem to be too many. You mash E the nanosecond the missile alert starts flashing on your screen. You deftly autoslide around Vaktoths and Pakhtani, guns blazing. Your aim becomes deadly.

Still, every moment is a battle for survival, climaxing in the perhaps most emotional mission you ever fly. You know, the one before which Rachel urges you to vent somehow, and for heaven's sake not to wait until you get into the cockpit. Fate, naturally, would have other plans. As waves upon waves of Kilrathi hit my radar, shields, armor and systems, Hobbes was doing even worse, requesting to withdraw. I wanted to grant his request, I truly did, but at that moment fear struck me. We were fighting four Dralthi in total, and while I could maybe hope to best two of them at a time, I wouldn't stand a chance against four fast, highly maneuverable, heavily armored and shielded fighters. Like a coward I ignored his pleas, hoping we would somehow make it through. Then finally I could no longer bear seeing him getting battered by his assailants over and over; there was no sense in both of us dying out there. Like a true heroic Wing Commander I made the call, watched Hobbes make his retreat, and braced myself for certain death as the cat fighters' huge wings clouded the stars and made for my barely operational fighter with an 80% damaged shields system. I afterburned right into their midst, blasting away, and saw an angry monstrous feline on my vidcom complaining that he had been cheated of his victory. Looking at my radar, two of the red dots were gone. By some miracle, two of them had crashed into each other. That still left two, with my ship in bad shape. I dodged as much as I could, and suicidally turned right into one just as he finished his attack run. I saw an opening where I'd believed to be none. The face of a surprised Keanu flashed before my eyes, saying "I know how to fight Dralthi." Adrenaline surging, I defeated one while having 1 bar of non-recharging shields up, pumped all of my power into auto repair, leaving only the engines, and afterburned behind the last one until my shields were back. I picked him off, only to be greeted by a jump-in of an entire new wing of Dralthi. With an insane smile on my face I flew right at them, and fought both like I've never fought before, and like there was an angel watching over me.

Wing Commander III is a masterpiece. Wing Commander IV's highest difficulty was balanced by a disinterested monkey mashing a faulty banana on a dying keyboard, continuously hitting the "MORE MISSILES! MISSILES FASTER! MISSILES KILL YOU!" option over and over. I'd like to write more about that, but I happen to be wearing crosshair glasses to see where the cursor is, and they cracked right at the crosshair.

(WC:IV is a great game and I love it; just don't play above "Hard" or a you'll get 1shot by a banana)

*edit:typo*

I take it all back. I hate this game.

Baby I've been here before
I've seen this ship and I've walked her floor
I used to live content before I knew you
And I've seen your setting on the menu screen
And winning is not a Victory seen
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Yes, fuck my life, I did it. Wing Commander IV can be done on nightmare. I suggest you assume I'm lying and never try. There are not many times I feel so insulted by a game that I spit at the screen, but it may have happened once or twice during this playthrough. Chris Roberts deserves to be put into a locked room with WC IV on nightmare in it and have a flight helmet put onto his head with Tom Wilson standing behind him. Then, on every death, Tom Wilson would patronizingly knock on his helmet with a mocking expression conveying what a chump poor Chris is.

WC IV on nightmare is no longer a Wing Commander. The insulting difficulty completely breaks the rhythm of the game, along with much of its atmosphere, as your supposedly elite wingmen turn into a sorry bunch of pushovers who get taken out almost instantly by every run of the mill opponent, with Maniac turning into mr. Ejecto. You, on the other hand, will die die die die die die die die DIE. Nightmare switches the genre to an arduous puzzle game in which you will play the same mission for six hours, go to sleep, then get it right on the 3rd attempt the following day.
You do learn how to do things better, which is inevitable, as you'll have to do everything pretty near perfectly. Do not be deceived, however; there is no enjoyable gradual progression of skills and tactics. There is only cold empty death in space, and your miserable tantalizing struggle against it. It's impossible, it's random, it's unfair; it feels like you finally did something that has a 4% chance of working and takes 20 minutes per try, only to have one of the last two opponents crash his ship into yours. If you are mad enough to endure it all you get no ecstatic victory yell feeling at the end, only a cold and broken relief that it's finally over.

Wing Commander III on nightmare forces you to master the game, and you do. If given the choice of being transposed into the WC universe as Colonel Blair at the start of WCIII, with one life and the difficulty on nightmare, I'd do it. I feel I've gotten good enough to at least have a shot of making it all the way. Given the same choice for WC4, I'd hit whoever was offering it in the face with a baseball bat. Or stay on the farm in Nephele Prime and try to fix the damn aquifier pump.