I have owned Trials HD for about a year or so. Got it discounted on one of those summer sales at XBLA, and I guess I started playing it right away. Got pretty far on it, managing to clear the first four tiers of tracks, and even charting on my XBL friend list on a few of them. Unfortunately, I was promptly discouraged of completing all sets of tracks because of the offhanded rise on the difficulty curve of the last track set, Extreme. I tried as best as I could, but I could only complete the first one.


Got back to it this past week, don't really know why, and started working my ass off on the remaining three tracks. I seem to remember reading somewhere that more than 90% of the people that bought this game never finished all tracks, and now I understand why. All of them are hard, unfair and aggravating. I quickly went from having a good time with a very challenging game to anger towards the developers and frustration at my own shortcomings. After a while, I wasn't even having any fun with it anymore, while I kept going on and on over the same spot trying to do a seemingly impossible jump. I wasn't having fun, but I also was devoid from any other feeling. There was no anger, or frustration anymore. There was nothing inside me.


After more than 2,000 tries, last night I cleared Inferno 2, the last track of the set. I thought I would be pissed off and delete the game immediately after finishing it, insulting the developer team that chose to devote 25% of their time and resources to create those 4 evil nightmares. But I didn't. I couldn't. I was greeted instead with a wave of satisfaction the likes I hadn't felt since beating Demon's Souls.


I got up my seat, smiled, stretched, and watched my 6 year-old daughter clear the beginner set of tracks and start working on the easy ones.


This game is a weird beast.