10 Video Games That Secretly Punish You For Playing Well

One of the most basic expectations of modern video games is that, if you beat a game on a higher difficulty setting, you'll also unlock all the rewards and achievements associated with beating it on lower difficulties too.

But go back about 20 years and gaming wasn't quite so respectful of the player's time, as is evidenced by the earlier entries into the Guitar Hero franchise. 

In order to access all the unlockable guitars in the first two games, you'd need to beat each game on Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert difficulties separately.

The same also applies to achievements in Guitar Hero II - the 'cheevs for beating the game weren't stackable, and so clearing it on Hard or Expert didn't automatically pop the ones for Easy and Normal.

And given how painfully boring the easier Guitar Hero difficulties are, that represented a lot of wasted time for capable players who still wanted to unlock everything the game had to offer.

Thankfully, Guitar Hero III finally made achievements stackable, eliminating all that snoozy busy-work.