My unsolicited love letter to the makers of Demon's Souls

You magnificent bastards, I hope your children are sold into slavery and / or featured in clown-related pornography on the Internet. Demon's Souls is a spectacular throwback to the Nintendo games of the 80's which would punch you in the balls with no warning or possibility of respecting you in the morning, and does not give a fuck if you are OK with that.

The first clue(s) you will receive about this is that
a) there is no option to select the difficulty. This game assumes that you are a Bad Motherfucker, or it will happily turn you into paste.
or
b) you will die during the training level.
Death is only but so much of a problem in Demon's Souls, and you will get used to that state of being. You can play the levels while dead, with the minor impediment of losing half of your health bar.
I am a fan of challenging games, I have several MegaMan collections, I thoroughly enjoyed Maximo, and my go-to weapon in Resident Evil is the knife. I can enjoy playing titles like Halo or Super Mario Galaxy and experiencing things like "regenerating health", "save points", and "extra lives". But. Some of Us think of Samuel Johnson and smile: "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." Or, as I think of it: "If you do not throw yourself into the meat-grinder, how do you know if you are tough enough to survive it?"

The original NES had a plethora of games like this, concepts such as 'game balance' not being invented until the mid 90's. Renting a random game would virtually guarantee that you would be crushed mercilessly and have your patience tried like Job. Lest we forget, the second Super Mario Brothers game had 1-UP mushrooms that would instantly kill you. Contra required a cheat code to complete. If you ran out of ammunition for Bubble Lead, Dr. Wily would dickslap your mother, etc.

Which is part of the "itch" I feel these days when playing modern games. It's too easy to load a save state, or re-start the level, or get power-ups and steamroll anything in your way. Once in a While, you need a game that says "No." and then says "Fuck You, very Bad Things are in your future. You will Know what Hard means, because you are about to be ruined."