User blog comment:Tullis/Absentia/@comment-158596-20100227034858

At a conservative estimate, I generally expect to fight a battle about five times before I get it right and it can be extremely annoying. Being able to reload the mission separate from your savegames is a bit of a life saver on Insanity, at least I've found it to be.

But yes. You do get to feel smug after you beat that battle on Insanity (and we've all got one. Mine was the Collector ship: bloody Harbinger. Though respeccing to give myself Reave, along with Miranda and Zaeed, settled his nonsense.)

It's interesting. My boss said that Nightmare setting was the way to play Dragon Age, which is partly why I tried ME2 on Insanity. I recommended he give ME2 a try on a higher difficulty setting for the reasons I detailed above, and he said it changed the pace of the game a great deal, which then has a knock-on effect on the storytelling.

On the other hand, I prefer to play God of War on Easy mode. Not because I'm a wimp (that's beside the point) but because the GoW games are just so damned pretty and epic and everything else you want in your big Greek saga, I don't want to be distracted from the awesome scenery and feeling like a badass, because a harpy is biting my nose off. Different strokes for different games.