5 ms·

It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a

It always stuck with me when announcing the Virtual Console on Wii U that Satoru Iwata said it perfectly "It can be fun to relive your childhood but just for a little while". It is fun to look back but we tend to forgive a lot of things that kind of sucked. It is like how some people who live through Hurricanes and then a decade later speak about how fun it was coming together even though it was just horrible. Memories can be deceiving. "When you wear rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags" - Bojack Horseman

ianai 3y ago
Definitely, I always felt just a tinge of bad for how awful I was at the original Super Mario brothers. The NES and SNES games. After playing them on the classic consoles as an adult I realized they were just unforgiving and let my youthful self forgive that. I’ve done much better on the newer Mario games. SMB3 though really does shine.
- userbinator 3y ago
  There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard
  - AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it. But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw it, turned the game off, and played something else. These days every game is made with the intention that it can and should be beaten, which is part of why there's so much needless padding in games to stretch them out beyond the 40-hour mark and make the player feel like they're getting "value" for their money.
    - phone8675309 3y ago
      Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.
      - ianai 3y ago
        I think all of those games were offered as arcade boxes. Plus you have to figure the audience then was in that sort of mindset. Very good point. My 4-5 year old self can relax at last.
      - goosedragons 3y ago
        Sometimes they were also made harder so it couldn't be beaten on a rental encouraging you to buy the game.
    - treeman79 3y ago
      I remember saving for months to buy each game. Would get 1 for birthday and Christmas. So a new game maybe every 3 months on average. 3 months on the same game and you get good at it. Do this several times and you need a hard game to not just finish it an hour.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  Super Mario Bros 3 is the BEST Mario, imo
argiopetech 3y ago
For what it's worth, as a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are always fun before (laughing as people panic buy, watching the track, wondering if it will turn at the last moment or unexpectedly linger on top of you), during (admiring the wind/rain, wondering if we'll have to run the generator this year), and after (marvelling at the damage, having a good excuse to run the chainsaw, wondering when we can stop running the generator); and that's not even considering how much fun road trips can be when you have to evacuate. OTOH, maybe I'm just weird.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  They're fun right up until you lose your house, or someone you know dies.
  - ngcc_hk 3y ago
    It could be just a stage of denial as in the 5 stages. Or it could go deeper and as the world around us always change, by event we cannot determine and affect us totally … like say death and we have several possible path Subject - actively deal with it - actively not deal with it - inactively deal with it - inactively not deal with it Ignore us as subject - let others deal with it - … Many religions and life philosophies are around this for, well, death.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    Death is sad, but it comes to us all one way or the other. Death by hurricane can be mostly avoided by leaving for significant storms and direct hits, but I know several folks who have had very close calls (e.g., tree fell through the roof and clobbered the bed while they were eating dinner) even in light, non-hurricane storms. Losing the house sucks, but that's why we carry insurance. Any Florida house worth its salt (a unfortunately dwindling percentage due to significant development in recent years) is CBC and isn't likely to take significant damage unless you lose the roof or take a direct hit from a tree or tornado. Not to refute your (accurate) statement, just to offer my perspective.
- splitstud 3y ago
  [dead]
ihateyouall123 3y ago
[dead]
jamesgeck0 3y ago
That Iwata quote kind of rubs me the wrong way, especially with Nintendo and Sony releasing extremely flawed emulators in the past. On top of games designed for CRT TVs often not looking as good on modern screens, we have emulators introducing low FPS and jerkiness (Sony PSone Classic) or making games look worse by rendering certain scenes without fog (Switch Online N64). With commercial emulation of early 3D consoles especially, you often just aren't getting an accurate representation of what the games were actually like. (Although credit where credit is due, Nintendo's recent Game Boy Advance releases ship in one of most accurate GBA emulators around.)
- goosedragons 3y ago
  What's funny is they both had much better emulators in the past. The PS3/PSP/Vita PS1 emulator is pretty good, ditto the Wii's N64 emulator. The Wii U's was a step back, so was the Switch's although they've worked on it.

ianai 3y ago

Definitely, I always felt just a tinge of bad for how awful I was at the original Super Mario brothers. The NES and SNES games. After playing them on the classic consoles as an adult I realized they were just unforgiving and let my youthful self forgive that. I’ve done much better on the newer Mario games. SMB3 though really does shine.

userbinator 3y ago
There's even a name for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  The difficulty helped hide the fact that you were paying $50 in 1980s money for a game that took approximately an hour to beat. If you could beat it. But I suspect the more common gameplay loop was the one I and my friends encountered: you put the game in, played for 20-35 minutes, got a Game Over. If you were really motivated maybe you tried again and got to Stage 4 instead of Stage 3, but at some point said, screw it, turned the game off, and played something else. These days every game is made with the intention that it can and should be beaten, which is part of why there's so much needless padding in games to stretch them out beyond the 40-hour mark and make the player feel like they're getting "value" for their money.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    Much of this design also feels like a hangover from the arcade days where you wanted players to die cheap deaths so they plugged more quarters into the machine.
    - ianai 3y ago
      I think all of those games were offered as arcade boxes. Plus you have to figure the audience then was in that sort of mindset. Very good point. My 4-5 year old self can relax at last.
    - goosedragons 3y ago
      Sometimes they were also made harder so it couldn't be beaten on a rental encouraging you to buy the game.
  - treeman79 3y ago
    I remember saving for months to buy each game. Would get 1 for birthday and Christmas. So a new game maybe every 3 months on average. 3 months on the same game and you get good at it. Do this several times and you need a hard game to not just finish it an hour.
Zardoz84 3y ago
Super Mario Bros 3 is the BEST Mario, imo

argiopetech 3y ago

For what it's worth, as a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are always fun before (laughing as people panic buy, watching the track, wondering if it will turn at the last moment or unexpectedly linger on top of you), during (admiring the wind/rain, wondering if we'll have to run the generator this year), and after (marvelling at the damage, having a good excuse to run the chainsaw, wondering when we can stop running the generator); and that's not even considering how much fun road trips can be when you have to evacuate. OTOH, maybe I'm just weird.

CydeWeys 3y ago
They're fun right up until you lose your house, or someone you know dies.
- ngcc_hk 3y ago
  It could be just a stage of denial as in the 5 stages. Or it could go deeper and as the world around us always change, by event we cannot determine and affect us totally … like say death and we have several possible path Subject - actively deal with it - actively not deal with it - inactively deal with it - inactively not deal with it Ignore us as subject - let others deal with it - … Many religions and life philosophies are around this for, well, death.
- argiopetech 3y ago
  Death is sad, but it comes to us all one way or the other. Death by hurricane can be mostly avoided by leaving for significant storms and direct hits, but I know several folks who have had very close calls (e.g., tree fell through the roof and clobbered the bed while they were eating dinner) even in light, non-hurricane storms. Losing the house sucks, but that's why we carry insurance. Any Florida house worth its salt (a unfortunately dwindling percentage due to significant development in recent years) is CBC and isn't likely to take significant damage unless you lose the roof or take a direct hit from a tree or tornado. Not to refute your (accurate) statement, just to offer my perspective.
splitstud 3y ago
[dead]

ihateyouall123 3y ago

[dead]

jamesgeck0 3y ago

That Iwata quote kind of rubs me the wrong way, especially with Nintendo and Sony releasing extremely flawed emulators in the past. On top of games designed for CRT TVs often not looking as good on modern screens, we have emulators introducing low FPS and jerkiness (Sony PSone Classic) or making games look worse by rendering certain scenes without fog (Switch Online N64). With commercial emulation of early 3D consoles especially, you often just aren't getting an accurate representation of what the games were actually like. (Although credit where credit is due, Nintendo's recent Game Boy Advance releases ship in one of most accurate GBA emulators around.)

goosedragons 3y ago
What's funny is they both had much better emulators in the past. The PS3/PSP/Vita PS1 emulator is pretty good, ditto the Wii's N64 emulator. The Wii U's was a step back, so was the Switch's although they've worked on it.