Guardian.co.uk: If you're a natural gamer, the sort that can pull-off a clean headshot from 500m while jumping over a moving obstacle, this blog post isn't for you. Suffice to say, even though I write about games for a living, I'm not in that category. Yet, for some reason, unfathomable to my conscious mind, I'm currently going through Call of Duty IV in Veteran mode. Last night, I was so enraged by my inability to navigate a Middle Eastern alleyway swarming with enemy troops, I smashed my Xbox 360 controller against the floor and broke it. I haven't done that since Tekken 2.
So what is the allure of the Hard mode?
I suppose there are obvious answers - the desire to test yourself, the fact that you often get double the Achievement points for completing a game at its highest setting... I'm not sure if these explain it completely. I'm halfway through CoDIV on Veteran and it's been a grinding chore. I don't necessarily feel that I'm achieving anything by progressing because every combat choke-point takes me at least 20 re-starts to beat. It's the sort of stuttering, pointless progress that, in real-life, war historians would tut at.
Is this fun? Is addiction fun? I don't know.
