So there I am, a crack SAS paratrooper in the second world war, fighting for the triumph of good over evil behind enemy lines. I’ve got rifles and explosives, grenades, binoculars, all the gadgets a man could want. And I’ve been through the training. I’m pretty deadly. Except for one thing: mysteriously, my training featured no instruction at all in unarmed combat. I need to take out an enemy silently: can I strangle, choke, punch or otherwise render him unconscious with my bare hands? Can I hell. I am, apparently, incapable of even trying. I could use a knife, but a bloodstained uniform is no good as a disguise. So, absurdly, I have to make myself known to the enemy, hoping that he will surrender. Tricky business. Cue much quicksaving and reloading. Sigh. So much for being hidden and dangerous. Visible and dangerous? Sure. Hidden and impotent.

It’s moments like this that make you think: Why should I bother? Hidden & Dangerous 2, for all its terrific atmosphere and ergonomically pleasing system of giving orders to your troops, just refuses to give you adequate tools to do the job. No stealthy knockout move; moreover, no way to shoot out lights. It’s like Goldeneye, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell never happened. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to complain of these absences, in the way it would be unreasonable to complain that Soul Calibur 2 doesn’t let you use a machine-gun to mow down those pesky Berserkers in the dungeons. Because Hidden and Dangerous 2 trades on an illusion of realism, it can be criticised on those same grounds. The innumerable non-functional, painted-on doors in the environments are predictably irritating, but the absurd limitation of stealthy possibilities is nearly fatal, making a mockery of the game’s name.

By not allowing an obvious and well-tested core component of stealth gameplay, Hidden & Dangerous 2 makes itself more difficult. Now, to complain about the game in this way might invite derision: there is, after all, a whiff of stale-sweated machismo about discussions of difficulty in videogames, an intimation that if you ever find a game too hard you are simply not “hardcore” enough. Why can’t I just take H&D2 on its own terms and beat it? Because I regard this species of difficulty as arbitrary. It’s like being asked to dig a grave with a teaspoon: no interesting challenge results.

The answer is that I would finish H&D2 if I could be bothered. The fact that I can’t be bothered is not because I am a jaded old hack, but because videogames these days, competing for my leisure time with films, music, chess and so on, have to *make* me be bothered. Advance Wars 2 gets pretty hard, but I finished it; ditto Halo on Legendary: however tough the going got, it was always a spectacularly exciting experience. But too many contemporary games are too difficult in illogical or just uninteresting ways. And for various psychological and commercial reasons, I believe some of those ways are now past their sell-by date.

Primary among them is forced memorisation, a traditional demand of the “old-skool” videogame: memorise attack-wave patterns, memorise the location of guards, memorise crumbly platforms, and so on. Many indisputably great games have been engineered around this paradigm: R-Type, Prince of Persia, etc. But now that videogames seek the rewards of a mass market in order to justify their stratospheric development costs, I don’t think they can rely on this paradigm much longer. The average adult occasional gamer is simply not willing to put in the time and effort required to memorise one arbitrary videogame system. And why should he?

It’s different when you’re 12, but when you’re grown up there are all sorts of interesting things you could be learning instead. Personally I would like to memorise more French words, and various lines of the Sozin-Velimirovic attack in the Sicilian Defence. You might want to memorise a Linkin Park guitar riff, or some Shakespeare soliloquies. Whatever. With all these competing demands on our synaptic connections, is anybody but the most happy hardcore willing to memorise the behaviour of clumps of pixels? If Viewtiful Joe were one iota less staggeringly beautiful, I would probably have given up on it for this very reason: its old-skool by-rote gameplay is pretty unforgiving. The one place where memorisation is still justified is in the racing and driving genres, and that is because memorisation of racetracks or snowboarding courses is central to the activity being simulated. (F-Zero GX: you’re worth it.)

To evolve, videogames are going to have to somehow solve this problem of providing a challenge while not alienating the occasional consumer. Adaptive difficulty levels are nice in theory, but rarely well implemented, often boiling down to making you do the same tedious shit but with more medipacks. Perhaps the priority of difficulty levels should be more often reversed: “Easy” mode should be the default design basis, with extra challenges added for the more adventurous. But the more imaginative solution is to make the gameworld so compelling and versatile that there is something for everyone. GTA: Vice City is a quite superb example, a true crossover game that is credible to the core videogaming audience while also attracting a lot of new gamers, selling who knows how many PS2s by itself.

Now doubtless a lot of these new owners got stuck by mission 6 and spent the rest of the time just doing what the hell they wanted in dayglo Miami: ambulance missions, fun with radio-controlled cars, baseball bat killing sprees. And that’s just fine. Maybe more videogames should offer something other than a goal-oriented progression from start to finish: after all, this linear, story-based approach, cribbed from films and novels, is not obviously the only one available to an interactive medium. The sandbox analogy for videogames is perhaps over-used, but it makes a lot of sense: provide a play area that is welcoming to all. Some people will want to sit quietly in a corner building incredibly intricate sandcastles; others will just want to roll around and have a laugh. If you can make both things possible, you’ll probably have a smash hit.

It is true, however, that quest games are always likely to need a beginning and an end to the quest, and the joy of exploring and progressing through strange new worlds is doubtless to be further refined and expanded. I just have three requests: give me the right tools to do the job, allow me to react rather than always have to rely on knowledge gained through failure, and make it fun along the way.