Introduction
A lot of games are pretty casual nowadays. They don’t make assumptions about your skill level and they lead your hand down the path. But you can only do that for so long without getting sick of it. Hi folks, it’s Zaid Ikram, and today on Aura Riot, 10 games that got tired of noobs.
Casual Gaming Critique
Starting with number 10, it’s ‘High on Life.’ At the start, games these days tend to be pretty forgiving. Even though games nowadays don’t typically insult the player. Souls games don’t straight-up tell you to give up; they don’t demoralize players right out of the gate. But when you’ve got a comedy game like ‘High on Life,’ they’re allowed to paint outside the lines a little. A lot of modern games assume that you have an incredibly fragile ego and do everything possible to massage it. And yeah, they’re not wrong. A lot of us can be pretty brittle and sensitive at times.
But ‘High on Life’ basically tells you to get your head out of your ass. During the opening minutes, you get a gun, and the game tells you how to fire it, but if you just run around without firing a single shot, the game will notice. “Do you not know what button to press? Just keep hitting buttons, triggers, all of them. One of them’s going to make me shoot. Try pressing anything. Go, not smash them all. Is this your first game?” At first, it starts pleading with you to please start shooting. Just press a button, anything, before getting fed up and asking if this is your first effing game.
If you press pause, he gets more irate and just calls you an idiot. That’s not the only time he goes off on you, either. If you take too long using his alt-fire, he’ll get annoyed as well. It’s hard to imagine anyone not knowing how to shoot in an FPS game, but I guess every game is someone’s first. “Alright, you’re having some trouble. That’s fine, listen, just keep trying until you get it. You know, I’m going to be patient, ’cause it’s my cool glob shot. Oh crap, try again. Come on, do you need any help aiming?”
Challenging the Novice
And number nine is ‘The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.’ Here’s a case where noob behavior is somewhat justified. In ‘Skyward Sword,’ at least in the original Wii version, sword things were controlled by the Wiimote. Up until this point, not much finesse was required to defeat your enemies. Just swing wildly and problem solved. So, when you reach the boss, this guy Ghirahim, it could be a bit of a brick wall of difficulty for people unable or unwilling to understand the motion controls.
The trick with this guy is that he holds out his hand, and if you attack normally, he’ll grab your sword, toss it aside, and then taunt you by saying, in so many words, that you are a novice who is just flailing around. Which, up until this point in the game, has been fine. It’s kind of a wake-up call battle, and for most people, it’s probably the toughest fight in the game. To hit this guy, you need to bait him into holding his hand out and then attack from a different angle. You need to fully grasp the motion controls to have any chance of winning. Stick to noob tactics, and he will embarrass you every time.
Mocking the Incompetent
At number eight is ‘Spider-Man,’ the 2002 video game. Treyarch’s Spider-Man games have their highs and lows, with an absolute highlight of Bruce Campbell’s ‘Evil Dead’ fame as the narrator tour guide. His sadistic delivery made even the most basic tutorial entertaining. And while he’s kind of making fun of you the entire tutorial, there’s one part in particular where he goes hard. This is the part of the tutorial where you’re meant to fight an enemy. This guy’s meant to be the ultimate pushover, but it’s possible to die somehow.
And if you do, Bruce goes for the jugular. Describing it doesn’t do it justice; you just have to hear it. This is what he says when you lose this fight: “Oh, okay. Well, you just got pounded by the weakest enemy in the entire game. That’s not something you’re going to want to brag about. All right, now luckily for you, you can practice here until guys like this are just speed bumps on the way to bigger bad guys. Of course, if you suck, you’ll just stay here forever. I mean, if it wasn’t for Bruce Campbell, I don’t know how big of a deal it would be.
But it is Bruce Campbell, coming from him. This is devastating. But frankly, if you did lose to this guy, you kind of do deserve it. You almost have to be trying to lose to lose to this guy. Now, this doohickey is the height meter, not to be confused with the width meter. It lets you know how much higher or lower you are from the next objective. Now, you are the little red dot, and your target is blue. So now’s your chance to self-test for color blindness.
Ribbing in Death Messages
At number seven is ‘Styx: Shards of Darkness,’ a 2017 stealth game that’s pretty decent as far as these things go, as long as you’re willing to put up with Styx and his alleged humor. Most of the jokes are not going to elicit much more than a groan, but his best bits are probably the death messages. Every time you die, Styx pops up on the screen to bust your balls about getting killed again. Sort of like the Arkham games, but instead with Batman popping up and telling you to stop sucking, And while most of the ribbing is pretty gentle, there are some pretty good lines buried in there.
Like, “Did you stream that? I want a percentage on your best Goblin death compilation.” Most of them operate on that level, but the one where he says that he’s not going to tell anybody that you turned down the difficulty, stings a bit. This isn’t an easy game, so you’ll see these screens more than a few times. Depending on who you are, you might find them kind of funny, or you might hate them. At least the game lets you turn them off in the settings if you do get sick of Styx.
Teaching the Inexperienced
And number six is ‘Chrono Trigger.’ Do you remember Gato, of course, the singing robot who’s got metal joints? Beat him up and earn 15 silver points? Of course, you do; he’s the combat tutorial. And losing to this guy is very, very hard, if not practically impossible. He’s extremely easy; literally, all you have to do is press the attack button a few times and he goes down. He’s so easy, I assumed it was impossible to lose to him. I couldn’t even find any evidence online of someone losing to him, but it is possible. The only way anyone could see this is by trying to lose or by being the biggest RPG noob imaginable. You have to sit there not touching the controls for minutes at a time. So when he does beat you, the inevitable put-down is pretty vicious. He might as well just give you some green eggs and ham; it’s that much of a taunt.
Insulting the Struggling
At number five is ‘Splosion Man.’ 2009’s ‘Splosion Man’ was one of the first big Xbox Live exclusives and one of the many games on the platform that helped kick off the indie game boom that’s still going strong today. The concept here is very simple: you’re a man who explodes, and you’ve got to get through a series of difficult platformer levels, sort of like a 3D Super Meat Boy with a triple jump. This game can be pretty rough.
They included a way to help out players who are struggling, and this being 2009, they did it in the most insulting way possible. If you die a bunch of times on a single level, you’ll get the option to take the “way of the coward,” which lets you just skip to the next level. The way they do that is bad enough, but when you start the level, ‘Splosion Man’ is decked out in a pink tutu, just to make it explicitly clear what the game thinks of you. They lay on the insults pretty thick if you need any help at all, but it’s a lot more funny than it is frustrating.
Legal Blunders and Verbal Jabs
And number four is ‘Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.’ These games are visual novels, but the courtroom aspect does give you some room to screw things up sometimes. Usually, the game is pretty forgiving when you make the wrong choice or use the wrong piece of evidence during a case. But sometimes the gloves come off, or maybe they just didn’t fit in the first place, in which case you must quit.
Sometimes a bad choice leads to a devastating double penalty that saps like 90% of your health, but other times, all the game needs to do is hit you with a particularly cutting verbal barb for you to turn off your switch or close your DS in disgrace. One of the most brutal put-downs comes extremely early in the games, during the tutorial, the first turnabout. The judge starts by asking you a few extremely basic questions, like who is the defendant, who is the victim, what is the cause of death, you know, the most absolutely basic information, like stuff the lawyer would need to know going into the case.
And when I say need to know, I mean, like, would probably know this stuff long before getting anywhere near a courtroom. Like, even in the wacky world of Ace Attorney where anything goes in the courtroom, you at least need to know basics. If you’re not paying attention at all, you might be dumb enough to select the wrong cause of death, like the opening clearly shows the victim bleeding from the head, and you can choose “strangled” as the cause of death.
The judge completely demolishes you with his comeback: “If you wish to hang yourself, Mr. Wright, you’re welcome to, but not inside my courtroom.” Ouch. The judge is usually portrayed as an easily swayed dullard, so for him to just put you on blast like that is, I mean, maybe you don’t expect anything at this point ’cause you haven’t been playing the game very long during the tutorial. But if you know him, it’s unexpected. Deserve it, though. If you can’t get that basic question right, what hope do you have in this game?
Deceptive Guidance
And number three is ‘Braid,’ a puzzler from 2008, a very popular game, another featured Xbox Arcade game that’s synonymous with that early indie game scene. For better or worse, the game is great. Not every game that gets tired of noobs is joking around; sometimes they’re completely dead serious. The interesting thing about this one is that this example doesn’t come from the game itself but rather the game’s official website, which is, by the way, down. But you can easily access it via the Wayback Machine if you do so wish.
There you can find a helpful page for the official ‘Braid’ walkthrough and cheats, which I’m sure sounded helpful to any noobs out there, but it is bait. And yes, it does switch things up, a classic bait-and-switch move. Yes, the first page plays it straight and describes exactly how to get the trivially easy first puzzle piece. But if you click the link to part two, the whole thing just falls apart. It’s just a big message about how you shouldn’t use a guide, which comes off as very sanctimonious. I get encouraging people to play the game as intended, but I don’t think this is helping. Any self-respecting noob is just going to want to use a guide even more now; that’s how noobs work.
Humiliating Resurrections
And number two is ‘The Messenger.’ This game does something similar to Styx, let’s say, but for whatever reason, it just comes off so much more cutting when it gives you those death messages. Here, the gimmick is that when you die, this little demon named Quarble appears to revive you. He’s not doing this out of the kindness of his heart, though. After bringing you back to life, he follows you around and steals any time shards that you might have, which is, by the way, the currency in this game. Every time you summon him, he makes some little quip about how you died. But unlike Styx, many of the messages only appear if you die a certain way.
Like if you get killed by spikes, he says, “Pro tip: avoid the spikes.” Sensible advice, if not a little obvious, perhaps insultingly so. If you get hit by a projectile, he says, Oh, come on, that was an easy dodge. Are you playing with mittens on?” Some of the messages cut just a little too close, though, like this one that says, “If someone’s watching, you can pretend there was input lag.” There’s even a series of messages where if you die a couple of times in a row, he says that you might as well give the controller to him because he’s doing everything. Thanks, Quarble. You might be sick of me as a noob, but I think you have a stupid name, Quarble.
No Mercy for Novices
And finally, at number one is ‘Ninja Gaiden Black’s’ “Ninja Dog” difficulty. This game suffers no noobs. If you want to play ‘Ninja Gaiden Black,’ you’ve got to be good. Many tough games work like that, but this one goes a step further by making not just the first level very difficult; it straight-up insults you when you die enough. For players starting, dying five or six times in the first level is probably pretty common, especially if you’re not used to playing action games. And if you do, the game offers a new easier difficulty called “Ninja Dog.”
If that’s all that happened, it wouldn’t be so bad. But if you select this difficulty, there’s an entire cutscene where you get insulted by an NPC and are forced to wear a purple ribbon for the rest of the game so everyone knows that you’re playing on easy. “Master Ryu, or should I say, young Ninja Duu Hayabusa, it seems I have greatly overestimated you. Oh well, we have no choice but to proceed. I will support you in every way that I can. Don’t be overconfident; just do what I say and perform your duties as competently as you can. You must complete your task without fail.”
These guys just really want you to suffer, regardless of the difficulty level. Either you’re getting killed constantly, or you’re being embarrassed by the game. Of course, getting made fun of a little and getting a little bow is a small price to pay for making the game easier, but it seems like the devs don’t want to put in the option for an easier difficulty. Probably wasn’t their intention, or I don’t know, maybe they just thought this was funny. It could be either way. It is funny to be fair.
