maybe thats where i'm going wrong.

@MK

I'd never bother even trying that.  Single player one-on-one fighters are the absolute worst for cheapness/unfairness.  Get thrown by M Bison with enough energy left to survive the throw?  No you didn't, you lose.  Computer character moves seemed to suck an extra 15% out of the last knockings of an energy bar.

When I was a kid, car games like outrun stumped me. 

I always thought that a good car game meant you would have to acellerate and go as fast as possible throughout. This was why i didn't complete Outrun in the arcade. 

Would anyone agree that games seem to have less bosses these days? I remember going to arcades and seeing a boss at the end of EVERY level in every game.

Halo on Normal is a bit rubbish. Heroic pretty much essential for decent gameplay. Thinkers like Braid are always welcome, and the slow ramp up of Mario always impresses.

Im struggling to think of any games bar Halo I like on hard.

Some games have hard mode when its pointless, others get it right by having no hard mode - see GTAV as one example.0

Has the old Japanese/PAL difficulty tweaking been mentioned so far?  I can't remember which way it tended to go off the top of my head.  Normal modes were shifted to Easy modes and whatnot.  Rocket Knight Adventures, loads of others.

I seem to remember there was a game that was meant to be easier on PAL just because it had to run at a lower frame rate and was therefore slower.

Problem with shmups is that bullet-hell is such a niche that devs are only really catering for the hardcore now, who increasingly want moremoremorebulletohello.

Same for the harder bms stuff - who the fuck plays anything lower than an 8 in that? Not many, I reckon.

I mean, what % of players could actually clear Mushi Ultra, or a 6** bms song? Fuck all, I'd wager.

I used to think I could clear / do any game on any diff if I just cracked at it long enough. Not the case with the above examples. Gettin' old. Bms in particular I find physically grueling, let alone difficult to keep up with.

Trials and Meat Boy hit the right level for me in recent times, as someone else mentioned. Then again, what if Trials is still going in 15+ years time? Possible a similar sitch?.. dedicated following, all pretty decent at the game anyway, scrap the lower diffs, get to the meat of Hard+ earlier?

Meh, I'm waffling here really.

I would like a return to hard platformers though, and proper ranking systems in things. This 'everyone levels up and we have fun' bullshit is, well, bullshit. Teach dem kids early, life ain't fair! Some other fucker *will* beat you. Get used to it.

If you're presenting a pure gymnastic challenge like Meat Boy, instant reloads are pretty much mandatory.

For something with a bit more interest in measured visual narrative and progress, you can be a bit slacker, albeit that you have to somehow work the respawn/extra lives mechanic into the fiction.

I like adaptive difficulty and various tricks to make you feel like more of a hero but they don't work for everything. A change in a memory based shmup will make it harder, even if it's less things trying to kill you.

Good rubber banding should make you fell like you're constantly in the thick of it and you just snatched victory in the last second. Burnout does this well but you're more likely to lose by taking a wrong turn early on. The AI stays with you, slows down when you crash, speeds up when you boost, then surges a little a few hundred metres from the end eases off in the last 100m or so. Class.

Halo does something sweet where the last few pixels of health is worth about the same as quarter of your bar so you often feel like you just scraped thru.

SMB2 JPN aka Lost Levels was enjoyable, as was the Special World Courses in SMW.

I didn't get on with the controls in Meat Boy - but I'm using a cheapo control pad on my PC. May go back to it and try keyboard.

I had no problem with the presentation of Meat Boy, quite liked it in fact, but I did have to overlook almost every visual aspect of Ms.'Splosion Man because I enjoyed the mechanics so much.

The recent rise of indie roguelikes is partly a reaction to the general ease of mainstream gaming these days I rekkon.

FTL.

FTL, yar. Teleglitch is also good.