Gamers have it easy nowadays: even in fantasy worlds (ahem, Witcher 3), our horses can gallop on auto-pilot, following a SatNav style line to our destination. Puzzles are becoming a thing of the past too, telling you to pull this switch, or having your character make nudge-nudge-hit-you-over-the-head comments like "Hmmm, looks like I can slide that statue across the floor". Danger and player agency are all but gone from today's videogame blockbuster, and while it might encourage completion, it comes at a cost to the gaming experience. But things weren't always like this. While the games of today are overprotective mothers, sheltering us and feeding us into gaming obesity, the games of old were like the cold, disciplinarian father who made you call him 'sir' and left belt-buckle welts when you didn't pay enough attention. It's not like they set out to be that way though; it was just a sign of the times. Older games made us work hard for their respect, and challenged our minds in ways that seem unthinkable today. Which is precisely why older generation gamers sneer at the blurring of hardcore and casual players: you've all got it too bloody easy. And here are the best of these games; great games you may have loved many moons ago, but would drag you through the dirt and make you suffer if you went back to them today.
10. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
The first three games in the Resident Evil canon were well known for their stiff, awkward gameplay and bizarre puzzles, but it's the third game in the series that took this to the most mind-bending extremes. Like its predecessors, Nemesis had sclerotic tank controls (making turning around to shoot a zombie shambling towards you from 30 feet away a genuinely nail-biting experience), as well as limited ammo supplies, save points and health. It was awkward, sometimes barely possible, and as a result utterly terrifying. Then there were the puzzles, with the water sample puzzle being the pick of the lot. Here, you had to adjust the wave ranges on a water control panel to recreate the graph in the 'Sample' section (pictured). There are almost no clues on how to solve this, and for some reason the wave ranges on the panel fall like Tetris blocks if there is no block in the panel below. Inexplicably, I was more capable of completing this, and other, Resi puzzles when I was a good-for-nothing teenager than I am today.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
