In the gaming world there are usually 3 types of hard. Hard by purpose, hard by mode and hard by flaws.

Hard by purpose: A good example of a game like this would be Contra. By this I mean that these games are hard and are just really hard for the purpose of making the game more epic or rewarding. I for one like this in a downloadable game or something but in a full-blown $60 game getting stuck is a lot harder to swallow.

Hard by mode: This is probably the best way for a game to be hard. When you start a game you can choose 'Easy, Medium or Hard' or variants of such. The titles SHOULD be explanitory. A game like Ikaruga is not hard by mode because when you choose medium, its freakin' hard! Another problem with using this is when Hard mode has to be unlocked, yes, I do understand not wanting someone to just jump into a very hard mode while not knowing what to do but, really, unlockables in and of itself are bad, but when you make someone work to make the game more exciting then you have a problem.

Hard by Flaws: This is OBVIOUSLY the one designers should definitely avoid. A game that's hard by flaws is a game that has such poor controls, hit detection and especially camera is usually what makes a terrible game.

I kind of thought of this list after finishing Assault Heroes, the last level of that game is a MAJOR let down and is plagued by camera issues such as the camera not moving as fast as you are making it a lot harder. Now, I like Assault Heroes a lot but it was a very annoying issue. I also noticed that I am prone to buying very difficult XBLA games such as Alien Hominid and Ikaruga so I just decided to write this.