I've never really had that problem per say.

I guess I'm one of those gamers who can play almost any genre.

Whenever I don't finish a game, it's due to a lack of interest.

If a challenge makes me stop, it's because I didn't find it (or the foreseen remainder of the game) fun enough to bother overcoming it.

Some challenges just take longer than others to overcome and sometimes, it's not worth the time spent overcoming it.

I think the same can probably be said about the op's situation for Mirror's Edge. Clearly, the jumping challenge didn't generate enough interest for him to spend the time overcoming it.

Good point, but I think there is a big difference between a proper challange and the fact that your character is dying a lot on a trial and error basis.

I don't want my main character to die, or to be incapacitated. That's how I play. I restart or reload savegames until I manage to do so without my character dying. Even if the game wants me to work with that, even has some design and effort put into the fact that you can be revived or ressurected or something.
I like difficult games, I would go so far to say that I need difficult games, but the challenges has to be appropriate for my level of skill (or skillset).

Did you crack the game in anyway ? i heard mirror's edge has a copy protection where if the game is tampered you wont be able to complete a jump , just like batman was

Nope, but sadly I used that stupid Steam version. Sometimes there is no need to crack something if you can get it for "pay what you want" price

When I feel surviving is more about luck (ie. retrying as many times the same thing until you get lucky), than me actually getting better with the game. Two such (old) games come instantly to mind:

- Some of the hardest missions in Wing Commander 4 (when playing it in the hardest difficulty level)

- Some of the hardest encounters in the original Baldur's Gate, TotSC expansion (like the werewolves' island); again when cranking up the difficulty level.

As for Mirror's Edge, its controls were a bit harder for me to learn than I am used to in my action games, but a few hints from me (I recently finished the game):

- I think mouse + keyboard is a better control method for that game than gamepad, albeit the latter can be pretty good too. But when you are jumping in a hurry and have only a split second to change your heading before you jump, mouse is much better. Even though it has very little shooting, it is still a first person game. If you decide to use kb+mouse, it may be a good idea to disconnect any gamepads, as otherwise the game expects you to use it, and instructs all the moves with gamepad controls, not mouse/kb.

- Play the tutorial several times. Especially pay attention to how to make the "run along a wall" and "jump towards a wall, make a 180 degree turn and kick yourself up from the wall" moves, after you master them your life will be much easier. And I think you actually need both moves at some points to advance at all.

- Now that I remember... Make sure your controls work fine, that you are indeed able to make all the moves. If you can finish the tutorial, it should be ok. I recall there is some glitch in the game that at first I was unable to perform the sliding and "jump over an obstacle while running" moves, I think. There was some fix to that, I don't recall what...

- Practice a lot how to disarm an enemy. It is merely about timing, but when you get good at it, zig zagging towards a shooting enemy and then stealing their weapon becomes pretty easy. Unless there are many of them around at the same spot.

I was frustrated by Mirror's Edge only when I had a several weeks of hiatus from playing it, and forgot the controls. But replaying the tutorial a few times fixed that. I think I will replay the game at some point in a higher diffifulty (which was unlocked by the first playthrough), even though the game is quite linear.

As I mentioned, I think there is some real glitch in the game that a couple of the moves don't sometimes work, even with the original uncracked version (I played the Steam version). But I found some fix for it too, I think I mentioned it sometime here also...

Anyway, I think if you are able to finish the tutorial, the controls probably work fine. I noticed the problem as I suddenly couldn't pass certain part of the tutorial, I think I was supposed to make a running jump over an obstacle. Also sliding didn't work, my character would just stop and kneel down whenever I tried a running slide.

I've been wondering this too.

Dark Souls is a good example of limiting checkpoints, saves and restarts.

But I could not imagine trying to get through Spec Ops: The Line or the CoD games without the generous checkpoints those shooters provide.

Perhaps it has something to do with the length of the level or the tediousness of the situation. Developers have been implementing the penalty systems in their game pretty well so far that I haven't had too many complaints.

I wouldn't compare older games like Castlevania or Mega Man - they forced the concept of memorizing patterns to extend their longevity and compensate for lack of substance.

don't blame the game for you sucking at it.

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He's not necessarily complaining but rather asking if the lighter death penalties in games nowadays might be ruining the experience by robbing players of challenge which many older games used to have.

Yes and no, imho.

Yes, because for me, finishing a game today doesn't feel like an acomplishement at all. When my games were punishing me for failing, a success tasted so much better.

At the same time, many of the gamers don't have that time and patience as I do.

It's the question of what the games nowadays are focused on. New games tend to favor story and movielike experience and a lot of older games had a pretty simple story but took a long time to finish because they were filled with nonsense and frustrating difficulty. So i don't have any problems with games getting a little easier and more story driven rather than forcing players into needles grind or going through frustratingly hard parts of the game that just aren't necessary.

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ha ha...I was just thinking....the older you get the less patience you have. Nowadays I couldn't play even a quarter of the stuff I used to love.

I also think games have changed in a manner where the size, scope and content of the game is demanding more frequent checkpoints - a lot of modern games feature too much to see and do to extend the length of their campaigns by making the player have to repeat long segments of game over and over.

Ugh, I remember that jump as well. Pixel-perfect jumps in a nearly-continuous three-dimensional world just doesn't work. Those jumps are supposed to be exhilarating for being close calls, but it's entirely possible to fake that without ruining the illusion or the difficulty of the game.

I found the bones crunching to be sickening - a first for me in video games - and after clumsily running through the first level and getting performance issues on the second level, I gave up and decided to play the game some other time. I think that was four years ago.

The game is great in concept, but those long jumps need to go in their current form.

To answer the question more broadly, being poor at a game can certainly be a downer. To use a wide but specific example, playing in a group in an MMO and feeling like you're not carrying your weight or watching a buddy pull off an amazing stunt while you feel like you can't even maintain a basic rotation properly is certainly something that will accumulate into a negative for the game.

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Yeah, this too. Some game like Max Payne 3 are pretty much interactive movies. I couldn't bare to have to keep sitting through five minute long segments of FMV over and over.

Generous checkpoints and a skip button make Payne a lot easier to bare than it would have been if released in the nineties.

This is a very important point. These days, I rarely play a game explicitly for the challenge - sure, sometimes I crank up the difficulty a bit, but generally I'm more interested in seeing everything that the game has to offer, and consider it a plus if the game is carefully tuned in terms of difficulty.

About the "slide and vault moves not working in Mirror's Edge with the keyboard" which I also encountered, I think it was this one:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1315119 I think it was the same for me, the gamepad configuration had "inverted" option enabled, which for some reason broke the keyboard controls, making at least those two moves impossible.