/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5175973
Not him but the term artificial difficulty is legit and it goes back a decade before reddit was established.

The guns in festers quest (and it's sister game. blaster master) are a perfect example of this. The games are not that difficult if your weapons were function but they are very very poorly designed. Possibly the most poorly implemented "powerup" in vdieo game hsitory.

The first massive flaw is the "right handed gunner" problem. The gun is severely offset to the right of your chararacter and when you are walking up/north in a narrow corridor you literally cannot shoot at enemies in front of you if they are even slightly to the left of center. All your shots will pass them on the right, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The next massive flaw was the wave or spiral patterns of the projectiles, and how if even on part of your projectile touched a sidewall your entire barrage of projectiles would be suddenly erased. your entire attack had to be clear of both walls or it would be nullified, but since projectiles didn't shoot straight that means you can't shoot at all when in narrow corridors unless your gun was at a specific pwoerup level. Only certain gun powerups were functional and shot straight, and if you accidentally picked up a powerup at a bad time and switched to the next terrible gun it was pretty much death or you had to leave the area.

I seem to recall the detrimental powerup items also don't ever vanish after they drop so they end up becoming obstacles that block your path and sometimes you have no choice but to walk over them to advance.

Dying in the game meant returning to the very start of the game too. So not only do the mechanics fucking cheat you and kill you frequently, any death means more or less restarting the entire game. This was a blatant case of artificial difficulty and it came about from developers who simply gave no fucks to fix the flaws.