Recently my friends and I have gone back and played the classic Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, more specifically, the terrorist hunt mode. For those who are unaware, terrorist hunt is where you and your teammates must kill all the AI controlled terrorists in a map, where normally there are around 30 – 50 enemies, and on realistic difficulty, they kill you almost instantly. Tactical gameplay and coordination ensues. Even when playing the game normally, winning a terrorist hunt game on realistic is hard. So what happens when you try to make it harder?
Enter James Bond mode.
This is where you play the game with no armour, no grenades, and only using a silenced pistol as your weapon, to try and mimic 007’s attire and equipment respectively. Now this makes the game harder in a number of ways. First off, no armour means you die even faster, you are basically a walking piece of tofu with a sign on you saying “Kill me!”. Secondly, no grenades, this is fairly self explanatory, as with the armour.
Finally, the silenced pistol. This alters the game in a number of ways in itself. You deal less damage, so if you aren’t getting headshots, you are basically shooting bee-bee pellets at the terrorists. Also, it makes the game much more stealth focused. The addition of the silencer means you can pick off enemies and their buddies remain completely unaware. Coming up against enemies who don’t know you are there is so much fun, often you can clear whole rooms without alerting a single one.
So to sum up, you die super quick, and the only way you can kill enemies is a pistol that you more-or-less have to score headshots with.
Needless to say, the game becomes far more difficult. But boy is it fun. Those tense moments where you are outnumbered and you have to be deadly accurate and careful or die are common and what make this so much fun, on top of all the stealth kills. Playing through the map knowing that a botched shot or a badly time reload can be the end of you makes the whole experience that much more exhilarating.
However as clever as I felt coming up with James Bond mode in the moment, player set challenges in games are no new invention. Indeed, I’m sure James Bond mode has been devised by someone before I ever thought of it. One example I can think of is the Nuzlocke Challenge in Pokemon games. This involves a number of rules and parameters that you as the player must self enforce to make the game more difficult. For example, one of the rules is that if one of your Pokemon faints, it dies, to simulate that you have to release it into the wild. Normally you could just heal it back up, but in this, one unlucky critical hit or a bad call and suddenly one of your main Pokemon could be gone, so this makes each battle a lot more intense now that there is something more to lose than a little bit of money.
But the Nuzlocke Challenge is only one challenge, out of many. the great thing about them is that you are the one who must enforce these rules. You can add new rules, remove rules you think might ruin the experience, and really custom tailor a challenge to make it easier, harder or more fun. Even more, you can create your own challenge from scratch.
Challenging yourself in games can be a fun and rewarding experience, so I imlore you to give it a go, even it’s just bumping up the difficulty are little bit. Most of all though, I implore you to have fun, because otherwise what’s the point 🙂
But I’m just one person, I would love to hear from you, are there any games you like to play through with added challenges imposed? If so, what do you do to make it more difficult and/or fun? Let me know in the comments section, if you enjoyed this post, be sure to give it a like, and follow me for more stuff like this regularly. Until the next post, stay beautiful 🙂
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