Chris and I are currently floating in that limbo that exists between huge gaming projects. We recently finished Puzzle Quest, which had been our main mission for quite a few weeks, and now the question is: what’s next? What game are we going to push to the top of the queue, and dedicate all our spare time to, until it’s finished? This is a pretty major decision, so to procrastinate, we decided to go back to PixelJunk Monsters. We put in a lot of time with PJM awhile ago, but got distracted when Pinata came out. We figured that finishing PixelJunk wouldn’t take too long, giving us just enough time to decide what game to turn our conquering ambitions on next. Turns out, PJM is a much larger time-sink than we originally anticipated.

Quick review for those who haven’t played: PixelJunk Monsters is a tactical defense game, where you build different kinds of towers to protect your village from waves of enemies. Each enemy has inherent weaknesses and strengths, and you build your towers accordingly. You build towers using money that is dropped by monsters you kill, and you upgrade their capabilities by either spending gems (also dropped by monsters), or by dancing in front of them.  Because nothing says range upgrade like dancing.  You can also choose to save your gems to buy the capability to make new, more powerful types of towers.  Your village contains 20 pygmy-esque sprites who you have to protect from the bad guys. Each time an enemy breaks through your defenses, he takes one of your villagers out, and the goal is to survive all of the assault waves without losing all of your people. There, you’re all caught up now.

When we started playing PixelJunk Monsters, there was no difficulty option avaiable, but they’ve since added the choice to play on either Casual, Normal, or Hard-Core. Our usual MO is to play games on the intermediate difficulty, and the Normal setting in PJM is consistent with the game’s difficulty before there were other options, so it seemed the logical choice. We’d technically already been playing on “normal”, and having a good time of it, so that was our choice for continuing. Since we picked up where we left off on the weekend, we haven’t yet managed to pass a level. I now see why they instituted the difficulty choice in the first place. PJM is really, really hard. Last night, Chris was MIA, so I decided to give it a try on Casual, just to see the difference. The disparity between the two difficulties is staggering. On Normal, we’ve put in about 7 hours of solid effort at cracking the level we’re stuck on, never getting close to winning. On Casual, I breezed through it on my first try, only losing one of my little minions, and only then because I accidentally sold a tower instead of upgrading it (has that ever happened to you? argh!).

I am perfectly willing to accept when a game is too hard, but I also don’t like when a game is too easy. I wouldn’t mind playing on the Casual setting if it provided any sort of challenge. I don’t want to smoke a level on the first try, but neither do I want to have to watch online videos of someone else beating it in order to succeed.

I’m kind of hoping they either beef up the Casual difficulty on a future patch, or add a new choice that falls somewhere between Casual and Normal. I actually tried re-playing some of the early levels on Hard-Core, and honestly didn’t find it anymore challenging than playing on Normal. Granted, my proficiency at the game has increased since I originally played the intro stages, but when Normal is so much harder than Casual, I should have at least noticed the difference between Hard-Core and Normal.

In other PixelJunk related news, we finally caved and bought PixelJunk Eden over the weekend, because it was on sale for $5. So next time I want to not understand what’s going on, I can pick that up again.

Ah, PixelJunk Monsters…such a great game, such a terrible title.  At first, I completely ignored the game, thinking it was for babies.  My mistake, it’s actually for masochists.

I have a lot of fun when I play it, though the odd expletive does slip (scream) out of my mouth when we are so close to finishing a level and then a wave comes through and destroys what remains of our town.  The normal difficulty is a little ridiculous, as Julie pointed out, although the overly easy casual is helpful if you just want to breeze through the game.

Julie is also correct in pointing out that we played the level “Medium 3” for 7 hours and couldn’t pass it.  It is slightly maddening.  With this setback coming on the heels of Mega Man 9 kicking my ass, I may never play another downloaded game again.  It’s on to a disc based game from here!