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People don't appreciate how hard old games are. Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy as well but consistently I fi
by noobermin 4y ago
People don't appreciate how hard old games are. Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy as well but consistently I find old games much more difficult than modern ones.
The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.
- dmitriid 4y ago> The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held. No, "every gamer" doesn't expect that. The industry pivoted to these (frankly infuriating) tutorials because the term "gamers" now encompass a much larger number of people. Including those who only play very, very casually. And there are many games that are extremely challenging and brutal.
- Natsu 4y agoGames were brutally hard back then because they wanted you to spend more quarters. And they did have tutorials, either written on the side of the arcade cabinet, or via the main screen showing a little bit of game play to give you the idea of what you were doing. And those games were simple enough that seeing a few seconds of play was enough to explain pretty much the entire game, whereas now many games have entire wikis (DF, Stardew, etc.) because there are tons of things to keep track of, whether that be how to make soap or when you can catch a squid.
- rightbyte 4y agoMost NES games were silly hard too though. Not just arcade wanting your quarters.
- probably_wrong 4y agoI believe the difficulty has more to do with what the market looked like. Once you bought a game, it would have to last you a long time - even if there were other games around, you could only afford so many before your allowance ran out.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoFurthermore, they were very limited in terms of how much content they could fit on a cartridge. So what content they did put in had to last.
- Natsu 4y agoYeah, but they got steadily easier as time progressed. I remember when people started complaining that games were "too easy" after that, because RPGs went from games like Ultima or Wizardry where you might have to keep your own detailed maps and notes, to having the game do almost all of that for you, giving you waypoints, quest journals, etc.
- vintermann 4y agoIt's ironic that they call it "Nintendo hard". Because Nintendo were early to realize that hey, people aren't actually putting pennies per play into our consoles, we can give players stuff like codes to save their progress, maybe we'll even win over some kids who don't enjoy doing the same thing over and over.
- oneoff786 4y agoA lot of the “brutally hard” games were just bad with crude RNG that created unavoidable or not predictable behaviors though. Most games that are regarded as good were pretty more reasonable. Modern games want to give you progress at every step, but the reward for high skill tends to be much higher and there are more extreme difficulties.
- Natsu 4y agoIt's funny you say that because in some of the more beloved games like Pac-Man, the ghosts follow definite patterns to the point where you can learn a route through a level such that the ghosts will never catch you.
- spacemadness 4y agoYes, exactly. Do you really want every RPG to be harder than Dark Souls where you die every minute so the non existent cabinet can steal another quarter? It’s a silly argument that ignores context completely. I love the hell out of Robotron, but do I want every game to be that way regardless of genre?
- rightbyte 4y agoYe the difference is insane ... Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it? As an adult I managed to finnish Sonic 2 after trying like 4 times. I could only pass one level in Mega Man. The difficulty level were really hard core. And no easy mode either.
- sethammons 4y agoI beat SMB3 and MegaMan 2 as a kid several times. I can't make progress in Dark Souls :(
- justsomehnguy 4y agoKids has the benefit of the brain being in active learning phase. They notice the things (often subconsciously) what the adult brain misses or need more repetition or just shown slowly.
- philliphaydon 4y agoI sunk many many 10s or 100s of hours into games like Shining Force, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Illusions of Gaia, etc. Now I get bored of games after a few hours :(
- ekianjo 4y ago> Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it? Of course we did. We also didn't have hundreds of games to play at the same time.
- CyanBird 4y agoCorrect, yeh, this is a matter of both a captive audience and the situation that a family might be able to purchase two or three games a year tops, so the games that they were able to acquire needed to have that difficulty in order to make sure that the players would not blaze through the content too quickly while at the same time ensuring that the hefty challenge was enough to entertain them for as long possible This is why rts games from my perspective will not return as we used to know them, they relied on that captive audience side of things, which faded away during the early 00's
- kubb 4y agoDo you always play on the highest difficulty? Do you play challenging single player games or competitive games? If so, and you're not satisfied, then you can always load up Super Mario on your Switch and spend most of your time replaying the same portion of the game before you get to the part that you don't have muscle memory for yet.
- Semaphor 4y ago> Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy First I’m hearing of that. I usually see the difficulty chasers complaining that modern games are easy, never the old ones.
- ekianjo 4y ago> The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held. nothing even remotely new. That was already the case since the Playstation 1 days. It's just become worse since then, but that has happened as soon as video games went mainstream because you had to make the bunch of uneducated people want to play games.
- 9dev 4y agoOh please, that’s just plain old elitism. Let me guess, the internet stopped being cool once it became accessible to ordinary people, uneducated cretins trying to act all lordly, not like the filthy peasants they are? Who don’t have such a highly refined taste just as yours, and skill sharpened through years of serious gaming? I’m so glad it doesn’t belong to people like you anymore.
- ekianjo 4y ago> Let me guess, the internet stopped being cool once it became accessible to ordinary people, uneducated cretins trying to act all lordly I'm sorry if you are hurt by actual facts. People who played video games in the early 80-90s where either kids on the NES or other 8 bits systems or college graduates on microcomputers and early PCs. The Playstation was really the first format that opened up the market to a lot more people. Oh and you are the one who added "cretins" to uneducated. Nice strawman.
- morelisp 4y ago> The Playstation was really the first format that opened up the market to a lot more people. The absolute courage to write this in a thread about Atari, man.
- Grazester 4y agoI rather not play a game for hours just to get to a part that I cannot get past because I didn't do something in a previous section of the game(Resident Evil Code Veronica).
- Avshalom 4y agoPeople expect tutorial levels because nothing has a manual anymore games have a dozen buttons two sticks a d pad and half of them have multiple actions mapped to them.
- bigbillheck 4y agoOld arcade games had the tutorials on the idle screens.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- evo_9 4y agoTrue, games like Robotron: 2084 and Space Dungeon are on another level difficulty-wise. Great games, too.
- joezydeco 4y agoIt wasn't discovered until recently but Robotron will actually ratchet down the difficulty level, silently, if it sees that the player is struggling on the first wave.
- evo_9 4y agoCan you share a link going into this? My college roommate dissessembled the ROM and examined it extensively. We played on Level 10 constantly and had friends over (with the machine set to Level 10 - default was 3, 'normal' arcade difficulty was 5). The level never seemed to be easier when we had non-'pros' over (we routinly exceed 2.5 million even on Level 10). My roommate went on to work at Bally Williams directly under Eugene Jarvis (who wrote Defender, Stargate and Robotron, amoung others), who I met at my buddies wedding. Anyway, this is news to me, and likely my buddy that dissembled the rom off the arcade machine. My friend went on to write the engine for World Crusin; if you hold down the view 1 and 3 button at the same time it will bring up the thank you page on the arcade machine; my name is the second on the page. Funny side note: the reason my room-mate got onto Eugene's team was because Eugene saw him playing Robotron at lunch on the company machine. After watching him he approached him and they became fast friends. Eugene told him he'd never seen anyone play at the level my roommate demonstrated; that's when he mentioned we played on Level 10 and typically exceed 2million. He was shocked.
- pimlottc 4y agoActually, Super Mario Bros does have a tutorial - it's baked right into the level design. The opening map was specifically designed to ease the player into the world and expose gameplay elements and mechanics gradually, giving them a chance to learn at their own place. It's not explicitly called as a tutorial - there's not even any text - but it still functions as one. https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a17251/super-marios-bros-world-1-1-explained/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a17251/super...
- zzo38computer 4y agoI think many modern computer games are too easy, and I don't like forced tutorial levels (or many of the other forced explanations, sometimes they have). Including good documentation to explain the game rules, is a good idea.