I know I'm going to feel every one of my twenty-eight years in saying this, but I remember the good old days of games where it was you against the developer, pitting your skills against their game and seeing how far you'd get before you had to give up. 

Years on and we're inundated with player tailoring and by that I don't mean dressing like a plumber when playing a Mario game or donning zip-fronted knitwear with a gimp mask while playing LittleBIGPlanet.  No, I mean game features that range from as simple an idea as easy, medium and hard difficulty settings, to the innumerable options you'll find in the latest Tomb Raider game, the industry seems to be trying to make their offerings all things to all people.

But does it really work?

Let's find out, shall we...

 

 
 
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge was among the first (if not the first) adventure game to feature an easy mode.  Monkey Lite, it was called and it missed out a good portion of the game.  Being a fan of the series, I remember playing it 'properly' to begin with and actually getting more stuck playing the 'lite' version because I was expecting to be doing something that I now couldn't do.  "Well, how am I meant to... Oh, it's already there."  It was quite disorienting.



The true gaming classics, though, didn't have difficulty settings.  No game featuring Mario or Sonic as protagonists had difficulty settings, prior to 2001's Sonic Adventure 2 at least (and Mario has yet to give the player control over the difficulty of his games) and these are game giants.  So what's gone wrong, if you can call it wrong?  Before, games started off easy and became more difficult with each passing stage, the intention being to force the player to continually adapt and be met with new challenges.  Sure, these new challenges probably consisted of slightly differently-coloured twelve-pixel sprites that might, instead of just walking, jump occasionally, but this is hardly the point.  For that, you'll have to wait a couple more paragraphs.

Okay, fast forward seventeen billion years and it's 2008.  Tomb Raider Underwear comes out in November and boasts the most player tailoring seen in a game of its type.  Let us recall that the Tomb Raider series hasn't actually had any difficulty levels until Legend, the seventh game.  Crystal Dynamics, keen to make their mark on this iconic franchise, made Lara's movements more fluid, smooth, impressive and unfortunately caused the game to become more than a little too linear for fans' liking.  And, if you aimed at animals, big, red circles would appear.  That never happened before.  Also, she held on to ledges automatically!  And if you stand around wondering what to do for too long, things will glint at you, or Lara will actually say, "If I can pull that over, it'll land on my foot and I can finally take my boot off" or similar.



Anniversary gave you the option to turn hints, automatic grab and other such helping hands off, but the reticules were still there and it was still all too easy.  Underworld, however will offer a whole host of options.  Are you after a shooter or a puzzler?  If it's the former, then you can ask Lara to solve all the puzzles for you.  She doesn't do them for you, but she does tell you precisely what to do, leaving you free to shoot the shit out of the local probably-endangered fauna.  What if you'd prefer a puzzler and don't want to be bothered by all those animals?  Well, you make them easy-peasy to kill and receive no assistance with the puzzles. 

But what did the developer actually have in mind?  What would be so bad about going back to the good old days where you started off with your dual pistols and people or animals only took four shots to kill, then later you'd pick up a shotgun and your enemies had become tougher and took four shotgun shots to kill and so on?  What was so wrong with that?  Personally, I'm bored with selecting different difficulties (though I must admit to generally opting for 'easy' and having the same enemies all the way through, taking the same amount of damage each time.  It feels as though gameplay now relies too heavily on boss battles and storyline that nothing really much pushes gamers forward.  Of course, there are a whole host of happy exceptions to this rule.  Oblivion, GTA III+ and Half-Life² to name three...

If you're going to put elements of the game under the control of the player, then surely it should be total control.  Bundle an easy-to-use level editor or, better still...