Those readers paying attention to the forum know that controversy has re-erupted over FarSight's tuning process for the tables in TPA and its effects on the difficulty of the tables. I took a rather indifferent stance on the issue the first time it came up, since the tables were only moderately easier and still had some challenging parts, most notably reaching RBION's Atlantis and MM's Battle for the Kingdom wizard modes.
Then Scared Stiff and especially Twilight Zone came out and were substantially easier than the real tables - in TZ's case, to the point where people completely unfamiliar with the table were reaching Lost in the Zone after just a few games. So I came up with a modest proposal, which I've been defending since along with a second front that opened up in the TZ forum here, that would use an intermediate step in what I believe to be FarSight's tuning workflow to create a "hard mode" table without causing a massive burden on FarSight's development team.
The pros and cons of this proposal are discussed at length in the links above; feel free to click on them and read all about it. What I want to discuss here is some of the meta about the proposal, specifically, why does it matter that the game is too easy? Why does difficulty matter? And who does this Sean DonCarlos person think he is anyway, that he would tell FarSight (and indirectly, Roger Sharpe!) how hard to make the tables?
Let's take care of the elitist jerk angle first: Yes, I am an intermediate-level player of real tables. I am not a Josh Sharpe or a Bowen Kerins or a Cayle George. I will not be playing in A Division at PAPA this year, or next year, or probably the year after that (hey, I'm allowed to dream!). My high scores, such as they are, on both TPA and real tables are available for public viewing here; they're not going to inspire fear in anyone, but they are enough to demonstrate that I didn't start playing yesterday.
I'm considerably better at TPA but by no means on top of the world...I have no 11 billion on RBION and you can see plainly I do not do very well on the older tables. What I do have, and why I've written so many of the strategy threads, is knowledge of what to do on a table, even if I don't have the consistency or endurance myself to always capitalize on that knowledge. The TZ strategy guide apparently has tripled a few people's high scores; I don't know of any better proof of effectiveness than that. So it's established that I know what I'm talking about.
Even so, I've not told FarSight to do anything. I've suggested to FarSight that they consider adding a harder-difficulty mode to the existing game, and explained why I think this would be a particularly attractive way to address the issue.
Verily! So much for all that. (An apple-shaped cookie to those who get the reference.) So why does all this matter, anyway? Why spill so many electrons over the issue? What would a higher difficulty mode do for players that TPA doesn't do now?
Probably first among the reasons is a sense of accomplishment and progression in skill...and I don't mean just an 360 achievement or a PS3 trophy. I mean the whole process of embarking on a quest to subdue a table and learning the skills necessary to do so. There is something of a Moby Dick quality here; a beginner deciding he's going to take on one of the hardest machines available to him and get to its wizard mode, within six months, is about as big a white whale as anyone at my level has a right to chase. I'm sure some of the regulars were thinking "he's going to burn out and give up on this", and the thought did occur to me many times. But I drained and cursed and tilted and persevered and recovered and learned and eventually reached Lost in the Zone. And as described here, the memory of the DMD ticking off the features of Lost in the Zone one by one, with the light show and the sound buildup and the sheer overwhelming insanity of it all, will remain with me as one of my best moments for as long as I play pinball.
By contrast, while completing the real Scared Stiff's Stiff-o-Meter and entering Monster Multiball for the first time was certainly exciting, it was not a religious experience for me. Why not? Because the real Scared Stiff is significantly easier than the real Twilight Zone. You don't have to work for it as much, so you don't value it as much once you have it.
More generally, this feature is missing from a lot of today's video games, not just pinball simulations. Most "achievements" fall into three categories: things you'd do in the course of the game anyway, simple things repeated some number of times ranging from annoying to God-awful, or somewhat odd things that you'd never think to do unless you read an achievement guide for that game and followed its instructions. And the game itself is usually on some sort of rails, you generally do what the game asks you to do, in the order it asks you to do it. Some of the games may take a step in the right direction by including an optional "superboss" or some extra-hard DLC, but this is usually an afterthought.
I remember as a child spending night after night on one particular level of the NES version of Lemmings (Mayhem 19, for those interested). It took six months of playing for me to finally get all the Lemmings in that damned ship or whatever the hell that monochromatic triangle-shaped goal was supposed to represent. But I was really, really happy once I finally got it...and the remaining 6 levels were not a problem. I remember once taking a copy of Final Fantasy VI and modifying it to make it about 5 times harder...but harder in an interesting way. The enemies did not just get a flat boost to their HP, their AI (at least as much as a 37-byte script can be considered to be an "AI") was improved so that you could not just over-level and ride roughshod through the game. I have a puzzle game (Adventures of Lolo III) that I replaced with my own puzzles, but I now have forgotten the solution to one of them and so am unable to finish my own game. It will submit, one day...but I'm too distracted by pinball at the moment.
It's this experience that is mostly missing from modern games. To be honest, I'm not really sure the present generation would be well-suited for it; I can't really see the instant gratification crowd putting in 1000 games on Twilight Zone for a 45-second wizard mode, no matter how good those 45 seconds might be. But more importantly, the few people who would be interested in really tough games that reward perseverance and the development of skill, be it pinball or something else, are having a hard time finding that experience.
The other reason for having a harder-difficulty mode, much more easily explained, is that one of the stated objectives of TPA is to preserve the tables for future generations. Regardless of whether you buy that or just think it's a convenient appeal for the kickstarters, an accurate preservation would also accurately replicate the fact that pinball tables were and are difficult games. Yes, they are not generally employed to part arcadegoers from their quarters anymore; most machines these days are in or heading to private collections and their coin slots' usefulness has long since passed. But if you're going to call TPA a preservation effort, than the difficulty of the tables needs to be preserved in at least one mode, as much as the current state of video game tech will allow.
Then Scared Stiff and especially Twilight Zone came out and were substantially easier than the real tables - in TZ's case, to the point where people completely unfamiliar with the table were reaching Lost in the Zone after just a few games. So I came up with a modest proposal, which I've been defending since along with a second front that opened up in the TZ forum here, that would use an intermediate step in what I believe to be FarSight's tuning workflow to create a "hard mode" table without causing a massive burden on FarSight's development team.
The pros and cons of this proposal are discussed at length in the links above; feel free to click on them and read all about it. What I want to discuss here is some of the meta about the proposal, specifically, why does it matter that the game is too easy? Why does difficulty matter? And who does this Sean DonCarlos person think he is anyway, that he would tell FarSight (and indirectly, Roger Sharpe!) how hard to make the tables?
Let's take care of the elitist jerk angle first: Yes, I am an intermediate-level player of real tables. I am not a Josh Sharpe or a Bowen Kerins or a Cayle George. I will not be playing in A Division at PAPA this year, or next year, or probably the year after that (hey, I'm allowed to dream!). My high scores, such as they are, on both TPA and real tables are available for public viewing here; they're not going to inspire fear in anyone, but they are enough to demonstrate that I didn't start playing yesterday.
I'm considerably better at TPA but by no means on top of the world...I have no 11 billion on RBION and you can see plainly I do not do very well on the older tables. What I do have, and why I've written so many of the strategy threads, is knowledge of what to do on a table, even if I don't have the consistency or endurance myself to always capitalize on that knowledge. The TZ strategy guide apparently has tripled a few people's high scores; I don't know of any better proof of effectiveness than that. So it's established that I know what I'm talking about.
Even so, I've not told FarSight to do anything. I've suggested to FarSight that they consider adding a harder-difficulty mode to the existing game, and explained why I think this would be a particularly attractive way to address the issue.
Verily! So much for all that. (An apple-shaped cookie to those who get the reference.) So why does all this matter, anyway? Why spill so many electrons over the issue? What would a higher difficulty mode do for players that TPA doesn't do now?
Probably first among the reasons is a sense of accomplishment and progression in skill...and I don't mean just an 360 achievement or a PS3 trophy. I mean the whole process of embarking on a quest to subdue a table and learning the skills necessary to do so. There is something of a Moby Dick quality here; a beginner deciding he's going to take on one of the hardest machines available to him and get to its wizard mode, within six months, is about as big a white whale as anyone at my level has a right to chase. I'm sure some of the regulars were thinking "he's going to burn out and give up on this", and the thought did occur to me many times. But I drained and cursed and tilted and persevered and recovered and learned and eventually reached Lost in the Zone. And as described here, the memory of the DMD ticking off the features of Lost in the Zone one by one, with the light show and the sound buildup and the sheer overwhelming insanity of it all, will remain with me as one of my best moments for as long as I play pinball.
By contrast, while completing the real Scared Stiff's Stiff-o-Meter and entering Monster Multiball for the first time was certainly exciting, it was not a religious experience for me. Why not? Because the real Scared Stiff is significantly easier than the real Twilight Zone. You don't have to work for it as much, so you don't value it as much once you have it.
More generally, this feature is missing from a lot of today's video games, not just pinball simulations. Most "achievements" fall into three categories: things you'd do in the course of the game anyway, simple things repeated some number of times ranging from annoying to God-awful, or somewhat odd things that you'd never think to do unless you read an achievement guide for that game and followed its instructions. And the game itself is usually on some sort of rails, you generally do what the game asks you to do, in the order it asks you to do it. Some of the games may take a step in the right direction by including an optional "superboss" or some extra-hard DLC, but this is usually an afterthought.
I remember as a child spending night after night on one particular level of the NES version of Lemmings (Mayhem 19, for those interested). It took six months of playing for me to finally get all the Lemmings in that damned ship or whatever the hell that monochromatic triangle-shaped goal was supposed to represent. But I was really, really happy once I finally got it...and the remaining 6 levels were not a problem. I remember once taking a copy of Final Fantasy VI and modifying it to make it about 5 times harder...but harder in an interesting way. The enemies did not just get a flat boost to their HP, their AI (at least as much as a 37-byte script can be considered to be an "AI") was improved so that you could not just over-level and ride roughshod through the game. I have a puzzle game (Adventures of Lolo III) that I replaced with my own puzzles, but I now have forgotten the solution to one of them and so am unable to finish my own game. It will submit, one day...but I'm too distracted by pinball at the moment.
It's this experience that is mostly missing from modern games. To be honest, I'm not really sure the present generation would be well-suited for it; I can't really see the instant gratification crowd putting in 1000 games on Twilight Zone for a 45-second wizard mode, no matter how good those 45 seconds might be. But more importantly, the few people who would be interested in really tough games that reward perseverance and the development of skill, be it pinball or something else, are having a hard time finding that experience.
The other reason for having a harder-difficulty mode, much more easily explained, is that one of the stated objectives of TPA is to preserve the tables for future generations. Regardless of whether you buy that or just think it's a convenient appeal for the kickstarters, an accurate preservation would also accurately replicate the fact that pinball tables were and are difficult games. Yes, they are not generally employed to part arcadegoers from their quarters anymore; most machines these days are in or heading to private collections and their coin slots' usefulness has long since passed. But if you're going to call TPA a preservation effort, than the difficulty of the tables needs to be preserved in at least one mode, as much as the current state of video game tech will allow.
