The actual trope: A game radically changes on easy mode, either by cutting substantial parts out or actually making fun of the player in-game. Common misuses: The easy difficulty names have mocking names like "I'm too young to die" (the description says these belong on Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels) This game has an easy mode Easy mode is easy I'm posting this here because (1) is common enough and understandable enough that it might merit a redefinition. It's even possible that "game makes fun of you for picking easy mode" and "game witholds stuff on easy mode" should be two different things, with the latter possibly being foldable into Hard Mode Perks as "Harder Game Equals More Game" or something. The other two are probably the sort of thing that will have to be periodically deleted as long as there are people who will post anything that vaguely resembles the page title. I haven't gone trawling the wiki at large. Instead I just picked through everything up to "First Person Shooters" (or around one-third of the page) and here are the specific examples I already have: Properly Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels, or otherwise makes fun of you for picking Easy but doesn't technically fit the trope: While these don't fit as currently defined, it seems to me that this indicates a problem with the definition. In Lollipop Chainsaw, the image for the easiest difficulty setting is... a chicken. If you select Easy on God Hand, Gene will mock you by saying, "What, you want me to hold your hand?" In the game itself, Easy mode restricts the in-game difficulty meter to the two lowest levels, so players will only earn low rewards on the enemies they kill. Also [in some Mortal Kombat game], selecting tournament difficulty would have Shao Khan laughing evilly. Selecting the easiest/shortest tournament would have him say "You make me laugh" in a condescending tone. There is a Game Boy Color Shrek game called Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown, in which selecting the difficulty uses Donkey's head as a cursor. If you select easy mode, he will stick his tongue out at you and even on medium, he will not look impressed. In a related phenomenon, the tutorial for the easier control scheme in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND is less the usual tutorial interspersed with insults from Rachel, and more insults from Rachel interspersed with a tutorial. Wolfenstein 3 D and its sequel showed the protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz's face next to the difficulty selector, with increasingly fierce expressions as the difficulties got harder. The easiest mode, "Can I play, Daddy?", shows him wearing a baby's bonnet and sucking a pacifier. The second easiest mode isn't much kinder: "Please don't hurt me." It shows him looking scared. This mocking naming of difficulty levels would continue through the Doom series ("I'm Too Young To Die" and "Hey, Not Too Rough") and Heretic ("Thou Needest a Wet Nurse" and "Yellowbellies-R-Us"). The PS 1 version of Doom just states it outright. 'I'm Too Young to Die' is now named 'I am a Wimp'. Mortal Kombat 3's difficulty selection on the PC included "Wuss" in place of the easy option. Rise Of The Triad insults you for the two lowest difficulty settings. One of the possible names for the lowest one is "I am a chew toy" with a picture of a doll in a dog's mouth, while the second-lowest is "Will of iron, knees of jello," with a picture depicting a dollop of smelted iron on a cube of jello. Easy Mode Exists: The Onimusha series also offered Easy Mode after three deaths. Easy Mode is Different From Other Game Modes: Spider Man on the Playstation has a Kid Mode (or the "Easy mode that's so easy it's no fun" mode). The Official New Zealand Playstation Magazine issue #40 page 102 gives this lovely gem: —>Fight like a Baby — Kid Mode is a quick way to ruin the game. Avoid it. It bypasses several of the puzzles and trickier bits and it will even complete parts of the game for you. Honest to god in the beginning of the game when you foil a bank robbery, the bank robbers set a bomb. After you take them out you have to solve the problem of how to keep the bomb from destroying the bank. On Easy, Spider-Man says "I need to put this bomb in a safe place". He really emphasized "safe". Guess where you're supposed to put the bomb. In Orcs Must Die, if you decide to play on the easiest difficulty, you will only be able to earn two skulls, the thing you use to upgrade your traps, for finishing a level, instead of a maximum of five on the harder difficulties. Some Lucas Arts adventure games such as the Monkey Island series offered a Lite mode which had fewer puzzles and shorter length. It's really not worth playing these no matter how bad you are at adventure games because you aren't getting the full experience: in this case, playing the Easy mode is its own punishment. Monkey Island 2 Le Chucks Revenge labeled the two modes and gave each a subtitle; Easy mode was "I've never played an adventure game before, I'm scared", and if you chose this mode, most of the puzzles were solved for you, making for a very unsatisfying experience (In addition, the Lite mode was advertised on the back of the game box as being geared towards video game reviewers). The Curse Of Monkey Island, by contrast, had regular (Being a Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure) and Mega Monkey (Being a Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure, But with More Puzzles) modes. Regular was a complete and satisfying game experience; Mega Monkey added puzzles to the normal mode for people looking for a greater challenge. In Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 console games and Trilogy, your reward for winning was determined by your level. Other Questionable Things Many of Which I've Already Deleted: Not a game mode Kings Quest VI Heir Today Gone Tomorrow has two possible routes to the endgame, a long one and a short one. Taking the short one locks you out of several sidequests and has a much more bittersweet denouement. Cassima even wistfully laments all the things Alexander didn't do because he took the short path. Properly No Fair Cheating: The NES Battle Toads, if you actually managed to beat it, would call you out for taking the easy way out if you used the level select cheat. —> Dark Queen: We might be evil, but at least we don't cheat! Not a game mode: In Yu Gi Oh: Stairway to the Destined Duel, if you lose 5 times in a row, you unlock Mokuba as a duelist, and he's laughably easy. Note that your starter deck is usually pretty bad, so unless you buy the real life cards or look the codes up on the internet and enter them, you will lose. A lot. Which was probably the point. Easy Mode is Secretly Hard Mode? The number of laps on a race in Fatal Racing is difficulty dependent. Girlie mode has this below 5 laps for all of the first two cups. Two problems come from this: first, the AI is NOT restricted by the acceleration and braking stats of the car they drive (which means the slowest car can pass you from 16th place on the first lap), and second, the 8th course of the first two cups is nigh-unwinnable on Girlie mode, and most of the other tracks are difficult to get decent placement on, requiring a near-perfect performance on all 8 tracks in championship mode to win. The final slap in the face? The third cup is only unlockable on Impossible or DEATH difficulties - by clearing BOTH cups before it on that difficulty! Somehow an example about Easy Mode not existing: Payday The Heist: You can only select easy mode on the first two levels. edited 13th Feb '14 9:13:11 PM by ChadM
Locking.
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