I don't think you can rule out continues. 1cc isn't an appropriate measure of difficulty because very few people will invest the time to become skilled enough to 1cc a game. We have to look at how the average player will approach a game. If a game allows unlimited continues and restarts you right where you died, that was a decision on the part of the developer or publisher to make the game more accessible and EASIER TO BEAT. If a game has 3 continues and uses checkpoints, then they clearly intend you to play the game differently.
In the former example, the developer is OK with you spamming continues to get to the end of the game. That's perfectly OK with them and is a valid play style. In the latter example, the developers clearly want you to have to get better at the game in order to reap the reward of forward progress.
Twaddle. Many games allow you to change the difficulty to an easier setting (Magical Chase even defaults to 'breezy'), so why not use the easy setting to measure difficulty? The option wouldn't exist if the dev didn't want you to use it!
The question then becomes, how different are the difficulty options? I mean, if "Easy" is just Normal but with more credits, it could still be very hard... it depends entirely on the game.
While the former play style may allow someone to beat a game without technically getting very good at it, it still does, ultimately, render the game easier to beat.
Isn't that what I said? I've little interest in ranking games solely on how easy they are to clear by any means necessary (credit spam, slow-mo, etc.) but would rather see them ranked on how they play.
But how hard a game is to finish is, for most people, the most important and relevant question about a games' difficulty. How hard a game is to master is something else entirely, only for the hardcore. This list is not intended to be only for the hardcore, I believe, so how hard a game is to finish is the most important question.
You can't rate the challenge level of a game in an artificial bubble, which is what the 1cc proposal effectively does.
My reasoning is no more arbitrary than your own.
No, that's not true at all. Judging games by how they are makes sense. You, however, are saying that games should be judged (in difficulty) not by how they are, but by how you feel they ideally should be played. That's quite arbitrary compared to simply judging them by how they were designed, and looking at how hard it is to complete each game. Now, having notes saying "this game lets you continue where you died infinitely so it'll be quite easy to beat but is hard to master" is quite reasonable. In a list of "how hard is each game to beat?", listing stuff like that would be a good idea. But "how hard is it to finish" should be the primary question, I think.
Really, the problem is that there are multiple elements to difficulty. Is what matters the most how hard a game is to finish, or is it how hard the game is to master? Clearly the two are very different things, and result in very different lists. Maybe just make two lists, one for each of those two variants?
The 1cc reference doesn't literally mean, "rank them on how difficult they are to 1cc". It's just the kind of frame of mind to have while judging these games. Basically, judge the overall gameplay difficulty. If a game is moderately difficult right up to the final boss, who is impossible, then that game is of moderate difficulty.
I don't understand... if the final boss is really hard, how could that not make the game overall quite difficult? If you're looking at the whole game, you're including the final boss fight too...
