I don't write enough these days and I probably won't keep this up but here's a bunch of stuff that has been bouncing around my head this week.

Sifu and the inevitable return of the DIFFICULTY DISCOURSE.

The discourse decided we need a bit of a warm up to make sure we're match fit for when Elden Ring drops at the end of February, so once again the difficulty chat popped up again around the release of Sloclap's wonderful Sifu. As usual, one side of the debate is stating it is too difficult and weaponizing legitimate accessibility/disability issues to make their point while the other is a bunch of angsty bearded men screaming GIT GUD like they're the first person to ever think to say that. I know, I can smell my own.

I've played a fair bit of it and it is bloody brilliant - a combination of God Hand and Sekiro that requires you to repeat levels and develop a level of mastery of the offensive and defensive systems at your disposal as you embark on your path of vengeance. It's certainly a very challenging game but it has a built-in difficulty adjustment in that when you die you can respawn immediately but you've aged a bit. As you get older, you become more frail but do much more damage. Eventually, you will just die of old age and that's the fail state. You have to go back to the start of the level, where you start at the age you made it to that stage. Want more lives? Go back to a previous level and perform better, learn it, finish it without dying as many times and you'll have a better platform to tackle later stages. You can spend XP points on new moves that make life a little easier and can eventually unlock these permanently, so you could go back to an earlier level with a bunch of extra tools. You can even find items that unlock shortcuts, some almost directly to the boss, so you can circumnavigate the gauntlet of enemies and - potentially - only have to really learn how to beat a boss to finish a level with minimal deaths. It is a pretty smart system.

I'm really trying to figure out what you would gain from Sifu if it was easier. It's certainly no narrative driven blockbuster and, although the visuals are really nice you're not being thrust between breathtaking setpieces like Uncharted or Strider, where you just want to see what happens next. If you had infinite lives it would defeat the point of the whole 'ageing' thing, which is one of the game's unique features. Is it just a want to complete it, to tick it off some arbitrary backlog list? Having a set amount of lives allows you to brute force your way through to an extent but every time you rack up a bunch of deaths on a level, you're making things harder for yourself in the next one - so you have to go back, rinse and repeat. Learn. Improve. It is just like the real life martial arts it is showcasing - no one walks into a dojo on day one and get a black belt just for showing up but I bet those people who put in the time and effort to earn one gained a deep satisfaction from doing so.

I feel that a lot of the issues stem from the fact that repetition and mastery is a bit of an out of fashion spine to build a game around. Most of the big hitters in the current market either push you through a heavily scripted narrative or feature open worlds dotted with hundreds of little things to do, and Sifu is a much shorter game that requires you to repeat levels many, many times with the main goal being your own improvement, rather than some unlockable trinket. We saw this with Returnal last year - similar debate around what the game is offering versus what people seem to want from it.

Some people have said things along the lines of "well, if all a game has going for it is its difficulty/challenge then it isn't a very good game, is it?" and to that I will respectfully say that is a load of bollocks. I'm not sat here saying "all Firewatch offers is a narrative experience so that's not a very good game". One of the very obvious, brilliant things about videogames is that they can be lots of different things and not all of them are designed for everyone. In fact, I'd go as far as saying a lot of my favourite games are games that are fantastic examples of some specific niche. Anyway, I'll see you all in a couple of weeks when we have to deal with half of Twitter screaming about how you can't summon help in Elden Ring.

(Also, here's a video of someone from IGN bossing their way through the very challenging second stage without dying and if THEY can do it, then you certainly can too.)

Direct Hit.

Like a good Royal Rumble, it doesn't matter what has come before or happens after, a good Nintendo Direct is a special thing. You might have barren years where legendary titles like F-Zero and Pilotwings are left on the shelf and you may never see Metroid Prime 4 or Bayonetta 3 for half a decade after original announcement but it doesn't matter when the direct hits just right.

Never look too deep into it, just accept it on face value and enjoy the ride. A good Nintendo Direct is one of the few unanimous pleasures we still have in this whole videogames thing. Don't consider things like development time, cancellations, release windows and cost and just sit back and allow it to knock your cynicism into the bin. We saw...

• A new Wii Sports! (Sort of! They've replaced the iconic Miis with some pretty horrid looking characters and it ships without Golf, which I loved in the original game!)

• FORTY EIGHT classic tracks are being added to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe! (That are all lifted almost directly - art style and all - from the mobile game, so it looks a bit jarring!)

• Remasters of classic SNES era Squaresoft JRPGs LIVE A LIVE and Front Mission 1 and 2! (But the Front Mission games are being done by Forever Entertainment, who did the very ropey at launch Panzer Dragoon remaster and are currently working on the very ropey looking House of the Dead remake!)

• Remastered Klonoa and Klonoa 2! (I have nothing negative to add to this, this is a genuinely wonderful thing to be happening!)

• EarthBound and EarthBound: Beginnings added to Nintendo Switch Online! (Not Mother 3 though! Never Mother 3!)

• The Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is coming to Switch! (Who asked for this??!!)

• No Man's Sky is being released in the Summer! (Honestly, seeing as this can run a bit rough on the big boy consoles, I have no idea how this is going to work on the Switch!)

...and a load of other stuff that didn't really work in the bit above. A new Mario Strikers is an extremely strong announcement as it is genuinely the best arcade style football game - the closest thing around to a real football NFL Blitz or NBA Jam. One of a handful of games ever that has pushed me to the absolute breaking point, where the red mist has completely clouded over you and you're not fully in charge with what is about to be said or be done. VAR is going to have a field day with some of the blatant disregard for the rules of the sport this time around.

Recommendation: Powerslave Exhumed.

Exhumed was one of my favourite Saturn games (and a key part of unlocking DEATH TANK ZWEI). It looked and ran way better than Doom on the console, making it an absolute joy to play and its subtle Metroidvania elements made it a bit more compelling than some of the more basic FPS games of that period. Many years later I played through the PS1 version and spent a fair bit of that time thinking "wow, I really don't remember this game as well as I thought!" Turns out that due to the incredible work Lobotomy Software did on the Saturn version, some of the structures created caused the PS1 version to grind to a standstill, so some levels were changed almost wholesale, as well as some powerups and abilities being dropped.

Much like how last year's Shadowman Remastered stitched unreleased and unfinished parts together to create a more complete, almost 'Director's Cut' of the game, the remaster masters over at Nightdive Studios have Frankensteined the content from both console releases together to make some sort of definitive version and, so far, it is absolutely brilliant. There's no denying it - Bluepoint aren't even in the same league when it comes to remastering classic games as Nightdive. They change too much, often killing the 'vibe' of those original titles. Nightdive Studios always enhance without taking away anything that made those games so beloved in the first place.

This one is a belter though, don't miss it. A fast-paced classic shooter with great level design and a sprinkling of non-linear Metroid-esque exploration wrapped up in a pretty cool ancient Egypt aesthetic. £15, available on pretty much everything, absolutely essential.

OTHER STUFF WORTH A LOOK THIS WEEK IN ONE SENTENCE.

Sifu - Get punched up by a bunch of lads until you're hard enough to punch all of them back without being battered to the point where you can pick up your pension and get on the bus for free.

GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon - Sequel to a 1987 NES adventure game that has you stabbing up a bunch of Yokai in an extremely rad version of Hell, inspired by traditional Japanese woodblock prints.

EarthBound - The best JRPG on the Super Nintendo that isn't called Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger or Live A Live or Bahamut Lagoon or Super Mario RPG.