There are certain rules in game design that, most people would agree, should not be broken. For example, the game should be fair.

What games are there that violate such fundamental rules on purpose?

Here are some I can think of:

Syobon Action: This game will kill you in unexpected ways. Jump over a pipe? Enemy just flew up and killed you. Go in a pipe? The pipe just blasted off and you died. Jump over a pit? Oops, there was an invisible coin block.

Eryi's Action: Similar to Syobon Action, except that this game is a commercial product (with a 2-stage demo).

Progress Quest: Generally, in a game, the player's input affects the game in some way. Not here! (I actually consider this game to be a 0-player game because of this.)

Any other interesting examples?

While I agree that the game should be fair, this is not a fundamental rule. :P Video games and gaming as we know it now owe everything to the arcades I grew up with and most of those games were deliberately designed to be extremely UNFAIR, so as to keep people coming back and dumping in quarters. Granted this may be a stretch, but without unfair games, who knows if gaming is the phenomenon it is today.

The Stanley Parable is an obvious example. Also the next game by the same people, but I forget what it's called.

Beginner's Guide?

There's also I Wanna Be The Guy:
http://kayin.moe/iwbtg/

This is very true, and it's not limited to arcade games, even though the concept does stem from there. Many games for home computers and consoles in the 80s were conversions of arcade games, and so had the same somewhat insane difficulty levels even though you didn't have to put quarters in your own machine. Given that such was the standard of the day, many games that weren't arcade conversions still had the same hard difficulty level.

I've seen several interesting YouTube videos where modern teenagers are given old games to play. They usually find it an extremely difficult and frustrating experience. Yup, pretty sure that's it.

the witcher broke rules with regards to game difficulty and progression. it didn't adhere to the box other rpgs from bioware and blizzard did.

I think this is where a lot of hate on its combat system comes from. if people weren't smacked around by it so hard, they might not have cared about its flaws so much.

I was theorizing on the Legends of Eisenwald thread that the game purposely dishes out bigger rewards for roleplaying a conniving bastard. As one of the in-game characters basically puts it, ‘there’s nothing honourable about being a landless hobo.’ I’d like to think it’s true because it would complement the Game of Thrones-like setting perfectly, despite being a big no-no in terms of design. These days it seems we’re quite dependent on balance and all sides of the moral spectrum yielding equal rewards, each choice as valid as the other.

Dark Seed

Not old school, just bad school. To express it politely, the game design is complete and utter bovine excrement with dead ends and too many logic fails even for a 90s point & click adventure. The H.R. Giger art design and creepy atmosphere are cool but that's the only positive thing here. Fortunately, the designer stopped making games after this one. He supposedly had a nervous breakdown while making Dark Seed.

There are many unfair games around....pweehh most of the action games for C-64 or Amiga.
2 games are worth to remember: Another World and Dragons Lair.
They were try and die games....remember the right second or..GAME OVER.
New games try to sell this as *old school* feature

Fairness is mostly in the interpretation. What some see as unfair others will see as part of the challenge.
It all depends on how much you really like the game, it sets the bias you have.

'Rules of game design' = whatever is typical or the standard for that genre.This changes with time.
Things like open-worldness and re-generative health once broke the rules of game design at one time.
Today open-worldness has become the new standard more or less, and linearity the rule-breaking design.

To make a tangible contribution to this thread:
The rewind function in racing games was introduced by Evolution GT released by Milestone in 2006.
It was not introduced by Codemasters in their Grid game...which is inaccurately claimed.

Eryi's Action

Throw every (un)expectable difficulty at the player.

Spoiler Alert

Plays in reverse.

Here are a few other ones I can think of:

SaGa 1 (a.k.a, Final Fantasy Legend): Typically, in an RPG, the stronger you are, the more work it is to get even stronger. (In a typical RPG, this is done with increasing XP requirements to level up.) Not so in this game. For Espers (Mutants), having high stats does not cause stat growth to slow down, and for Humans, that holds true for non-HP stats. In fact, late game, it takes just a few battles to get enough money to raise one of a new human's stats to 99 or higher.

Disgaea series: Two things here. One is that tricks that other games might consider exploits (like moving a character so she can participate in a team attack, then cancelling the move after the attack) are specifically intended. This gets even more ridiculous when it comes to item duplication, first appearing in Disgaea 3, not being fixed in Disgaea 4, and Disgaea 5 introducing an obviously intentional way of doing this. The other is the same one found in SaGa 1; some of the methods of raising stats do not encounter diminishing returns; the most spectacular example of this is reincarnation in Disgaea Dimension 2, where you get a growth correction (bonus) to your stat growth that grows quadratically with the number of times you reincarnate. (In other words, the more times you reincarnate, the bigger the boost for the next time you reincarnate.)

Wizardry 4: This game is nasty in many ways. Some enemies can end your game outright, and important items can sometimes break when used. To make matters worse, if you don't have an item before a certain point, the game becomes unwinnable; fortunately, the game actually gives a clear warning before hand. The game actually expects you to take full advantage of the save/load feature. (One clue is that the game provides 8 save slots, which is a lot for a game stored on floppy disks.)

Might and Magic 2: There is one point where you need to retrieve an item, and the only way to take it out of the area it appears in is what most players would consider an exploit.

My problem is with games that have "artificial difficulty" gameplay.

Meaning that the developer made the game difficult for the sake of difficulty.

One example would be Volgarr the Viking.

No checkpoints, no save options, if you get killed by a surprise attack you have the start from the beginning of the level.

What the BS ?

Then you have bloodborne and dark souls. Only masochists would enjoy such games in my opinion where you die over and over and over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z6wByiH0Mk

look at his reaction at 8:10 and after.


Games are supposed to be fun NOT frustrating.