The Doctor wrote:The punishing type of difficulty can work well, but only if improving your performance in the earlier parts of the game (or level) will give you advantages in the later parts. Contra is a great example of this at work. You always respawn where you die, so if you are able to play well in the early parts of the game and build up a stockpile of lives you can tank your way through the later levels that are giving you difficulty.
Punishing difficulty does work in Mega Man when it's a level of attrition with regards to your health or special weapon energy (for example an enemy gauntlet), but when the deaths are instant kill you can't improve your performance. You either pass them or you don't. And once you do pass them it's a waste of time to play those sections of the level again.
tl;dr - Punishing difficulty needs to be about attrition. Instant death doesn't work with punishing difficulty.
You make some good points. I was actually only taking instant death (or games in which one hit from *anything* kills you, *and* sends you back to the last checkpoint) into account when I said that; I wasn't even considering the more attrition-based gaming. In that case, yes, that can work.
As an example, take the first Metroid Prime. The early period of the Phazon Mines have quite a reputation for how long it is between the save point near the entrance, and the next one you'll encounter. During that time, you find yourself dealing with a lot of new types of enemies, some tricky puzzles, and at least two mini-bosses. But because you're given leeway (due to being able to have quite a bit of energy and ammo), and you're given ample opportunity to learn how to deal with such threats... well, it's still daunting, but it's not like making a single mistake will completely end your run and force you to start over. It also comes late enough into a decently lengthy game that you've had plenty of practice with all the game's mechanics.
In some of the more notoriously difficult games -- and I'll use Super Meat Boy as an example -- it's pretty much *expected* that you'll be killed the first few times that you encounter a new obstacle before you figure out how it works. But since Super Meat Boy's stages are generally short, respawning is completely instant, and there are no lives to worry about, the end result is often that the game actually ends up *easier*, or at least *more accessible*, than something like Megaman Unlimited (or in many, *many* of the Super Mario World hacks or SMBX games raocow has LP'd over the years), which can be just as fiendish with its traps, and seemingly still expects you to die early and often, but the penalties for doing so are considerably harsher. *That* is where I feel the line between "fair" and "bullshit" has been crossed.
