Recently, when I've had a some spare time, I've been picking up my PS3 controller and having another bash at Dark Souls. The games name is synonymous with difficulty and when you mention it to other gamers you can tell by their pained expression that they've played it and ultimately loved it, or, got so frustrated with it they've thrown their controller through the telly. Dark Souls has a reputation for a high learning curve and YOU WILL DIE... ALOT... OFTEN but such is the nature of this game, if games were easy to defeat would we still be willing to part with our hard earned wedge for them??? I've seen games where people have paid £40, completed them the same day, and then traded them in or simply never played them again, where is the fun, where is the challenge??? This is part of the reason that I play games on Hard difficulty, to make them last longer... if I'm investing that much money in something I want it to last, I want it to make me frustrated but at the same time I want it to show me that it's not stupidly difficult and that progressing is more about skill than luck so that when I do eventually get past Boss X after the 137th attempt I feel that sense of achievement for a job well done.
So, did this yearning for games with a steep learning curve start with Dark Souls? No.
It started way back in 1990 when as a young boy of 12 years old, my parents and I had taken a trip to Ross Records in North End, Portsmouth. This was quite an event for me at the time as it took nearly an hour in the car from where I lived and parking was always difficult on Fratton Road but this was the only shop to trade in used consoles and games in my local area at this time. Considering the infrequency with which we made this trip I always tried to make these journeys count, scouring the racks of pre-owned Sega Megadrive and Sega Mastersystem games (the Mastersystem was mine whilst the Megadrive was my parents but they let my sister and I play it so technically it was ours and my parents knew it but they just wouldn't admit it) for those elusive bargains and games that would last until we made the journey again. Then one day I saw a box that promised everything I was looking for (and was interested in at the time, remember I was 12 and hadn't discovered girls yet) - knights, demons, and the undead all wrapped up in platformy goodness and, luckily for me, they hadn't introduced age restrictions on games yet so there were no issues with me buying it... so I did. I took it home and immediately slotted the cartridge into my (I mean my parents) Megadrive, picked up the controller, pressed Start, watched the intro, and then died. Not literally of course, that would mean I'm typing this from beyond the grave and haunting you by means of the internet and we all know that's full of cats and not ghosts, my character, Arthur, died. I tried again, got a little further, died again. Lather, rinse, repeat... this went on for several hours, passing the initial stage, getting past the guillotines, onto the wind stage with those irritating flying reaper things. Eventually I saw the first boss, a giant green one-eyed monster who held his head with one hand and... you guessed it... I died. Considering there were 6 stages in this game, limited continues, and a two hit and you die health system, this was a pattern that continued for some time but I was hooked. I did eventually defeat the game and it consistently remains one of my favourite games to play because it's so easy to pick up and get in to but seriously difficult to master.
So, if anyone wonders why I love Dark Souls, and why I play games on Hard mode, they can thank Capcom for getting me hooked on near impossible games at such a young age.
