Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games

Over at Gamasutra, the ever-handy John Harris has just delivered ‘Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games’, the first in a series of, yes, list articles - but list articles that find some interesting angles and provide concrete design lessons for game professionals. Or that’s the idea!
As he notes in the intro: “Certainly, difficulty in a video game must be handled carefully. Nothing attracts the ire of those fickle game bloggers quite like them getting their asses handed to them by a game. And it is possible to make a game arbitrarily difficult without too much effort.”
I won’t give away the full contents of the list (which already made front page on Digg and hopelessly broke our site briefly as a result), but here’s a salient disclaimer: “Take note, although some of the hardest games ever made are on this list, it is by no means a list of […]

Original post by editors@gamesetwatch.com (simonc) and software by Elliott Back