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Games 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 cabine
by Natsu 4y ago
Games 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?