What is the most hardcore single player game format you can enjoy?

[Puukko]

If the game gives me the opportunity, I save scum even when I know it may lead to the whole experience being cheapened. Thus while being able to save anytime does enable playing at a more lax pace, I do prefer games that place restrictions on this and those games tend to be more memorable as a result. The obvious Dark Souls reference aside, I recently played FF8 modded, which only enables saving at save spots. Due to the deadly random encounters, even after defeating a tough boss, I had to be on my toes until I could save - bad RNG and failing to escape before wiping was a small but real threat. If I was emulating, I'd just save state immediately after victory.

I think I'm adaptable, but I do have some requirements I very rarely breach;

- I want a game to have a beginning and an end, with progress being kept and me being able to reap long term rewards - I want to achieve closure by 'completing' the game. Thus, I don't play roguelikes or games without long-term goals and rewards.

- I want to be able to use every tool at my disposal and have good reason to do so. In other words, the game needs to be difficult enough, or have other sufficient rewards to make me want to invest in using all of its mechanics. I don't do self-imposed challenges or otherwise limit myself to introduce difficulty when the game fails to provide it.

So far I have never been interested in ironman runs, perhaps in part due to my insistence on long-term continuity.

 

[laclongquan]

If you want to control gamers from exploit saving, you gotta wave carrot under their nose, not stick. Cause we fucking hate sticks.

What carrot? Bonus for virgin run and losing that bonus if you reload within a short time frame, like under 20 minutes. Put a time seed in each save, and compare current time to that to see if you need to remove the bonus for that save.

 

[Sensuki]

Sensuki wasn't your IE gameplay style max savescum (to the point that Anthony Davis blew a gasket over it )?

He got angry at me about something, but I don't remember what it was.

I do lean more towards save-scummer than rest-spammer though. I prefer to ace the gameplay than to do average-poor in a fight and then just rest off the damage. I think there's more to gain from re-doing something and figuring out how to do it better. I guess that also ties into player skill, rather than character skill.

 

[Melmoth]

The idea of the hardcore game has degenerated so badly that when someone points it out with cold logic people complain that they can't walk their dog and get the mail.

intensity of fun, fun of intensity. i guess being stirred into lethargy is all the rage among corpses these days. impressive formalism Licorice however, as usual BLOBERT is the true dialectian here

 

[markec]

I remember on C64 playing a survival horror game called Project Firestart, I replayed it countless times before finishing the game without saving. You couldn't save in the game which really made the game very intense.

To be fair only much later did I learn that there was a save option, limited to I think 5 save points per game.

Personally I actually think the game was made better by not saving as it made the game much more tense, but luckily the game itself was not that long.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Truly hardcore mode gamer - I just spent 40 bucks on this game, and I'm only giving myself one life. If I die, I die. Broken scripts, failed collision, beaten to death by a low level enemy, it matters not. The first time I die is like real life - you can only do it once. Then I'll uninstall the game and put it away and never play it again.

I actually tried that with a game or two back in the 90s. But that was retarded so I stopped and learned to embrace the load/save.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Truly hardcore mode gamer - I just spent 40 bucks on this game, and I'm only giving myself one life. If I die, I die. Broken scripts, failed collision, beaten to death by a low level enemy, it matters not. The first time I die is like real life - you can only do it once. Then I'll uninstall the game and put it away and never play it again.

I actually tried that with a game or two back in the 90s. But that was retarded so I stopped and learned to embrace the load/save.

I believe years ago someone made a game that would delete itself if the player died. Don’t remember what it was called.

EDIT: Sub Mission: A Matter of Life and Death, for the Apple II. Adventure game with character permadeath that intentionally saved over the original disk.

 

[Hercule Parrot]

If only someone had managed to surreptitiously insert that code into Fallout 3 before its release.