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Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy specifically calls this out. It's brutally difficult from the jump, and his narration talks about how videogames used to ask

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy specifically calls this out. It's brutally difficult from the jump, and his narration talks about how videogames used to ask a lot of their user. They were unforgiving challenges with no guarantee of obvious success. My brain instantly flashed over to TMNT on the NES and just how hard that and Battletoads were. If you haven't played Getting Over It, it's a tremendous meditation on failure, and Bennett's narrations as you struggle are brilliant from a philosophical standpoint. He talks about how the challenge and failure and difficult ARE the point for a certain class of gamer and how that's the game he wanted to build. For another take, Super Hexagon provides that same "this is impossible but I'm getting closer to possible and that feels good."

skhr0680 5y ago
I think it's unfair to actual games to call Battletoads a challenge. It's a trial and error puzzle with more in common with kaizo rom hacks. Battletoads and Double Dragon, basically the same thing but with a human-friendly difficulty curve, almost feels like an apology from the developers.
aledalgrande 5y ago
I remember another proof of that: MKIII. Second hardest level made me swear so much I'm probably excommunicated in multiple religions. I had to build muscle memory to even have a chance, on my Sega Mega Drive II controller. And for the Fatalities, the timespan and combination of keys (that you had to discover yourself or find in some obscure gaming zines) was so hard it was an achievement to do one.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  MK2 was notorious for the CPU reading player inputs, so cheesing it was necessary to even have a chance.
novok 5y ago
There are also a lot of games out there that are just bad and difficult for the wrong time wasting reasons, and there is also a ton of selection compared to back then. Kids are probably showing rational behavior in picking the 'best' experiences. Old NES games and such were hard either to get more quarters out of you in an arcade and because they didn't have much space to program games, so they made them hard to increase the play time and 'satisfaction' feeling. Also when I was a kid, early childhood I just couldn't really play the harder games, late childhood I could play the hard games. When they're just too hard you stop playing. Also different kids have different strengths and they will gravitate to games that play to their strengths. I have below the mean reaction times so I just did bad in reaction time platformers and eventually gravitated towards games that weren't hard because of reaction times, like RPGs, strategy games, installing linux on my computer and troubleshooting it and what not. There are also new 'hard' games out there that demand a lot out of their players, and be careful if your kid gets obsessed about them. Like many esports games.

skhr0680 5y ago

I think it's unfair to actual games to call Battletoads a challenge. It's a trial and error puzzle with more in common with kaizo rom hacks. Battletoads and Double Dragon, basically the same thing but with a human-friendly difficulty curve, almost feels like an apology from the developers.

aledalgrande 5y ago

I remember another proof of that: MKIII. Second hardest level made me swear so much I'm probably excommunicated in multiple religions. I had to build muscle memory to even have a chance, on my Sega Mega Drive II controller. And for the Fatalities, the timespan and combination of keys (that you had to discover yourself or find in some obscure gaming zines) was so hard it was an achievement to do one.

skhr0680 5y ago
MK2 was notorious for the CPU reading player inputs, so cheesing it was necessary to even have a chance.

novok 5y ago

There are also a lot of games out there that are just bad and difficult for the wrong time wasting reasons, and there is also a ton of selection compared to back then. Kids are probably showing rational behavior in picking the 'best' experiences. Old NES games and such were hard either to get more quarters out of you in an arcade and because they didn't have much space to program games, so they made them hard to increase the play time and 'satisfaction' feeling. Also when I was a kid, early childhood I just couldn't really play the harder games, late childhood I could play the hard games. When they're just too hard you stop playing. Also different kids have different strengths and they will gravitate to games that play to their strengths. I have below the mean reaction times so I just did bad in reaction time platformers and eventually gravitated towards games that weren't hard because of reaction times, like RPGs, strategy games, installing linux on my computer and troubleshooting it and what not. There are also new 'hard' games out there that demand a lot out of their players, and be careful if your kid gets obsessed about them. Like many esports games.