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> My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387 https://howlongtobeat.com/ga

> My first SNES games, Super Mario World, is a 5 hours long game, 9 if you are going to 100% it https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387 https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9387 That is is you have already mastered games. It takes years to get good enough to beat those games in the time those sites says, if you have already spent years playing games then yes you play through those games quickly. For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. At that time games were made arcade hard, they weren't meant for kids to beat, they were meant to provide a long lasting challenge so you can try over and over. https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9371 https://howlongtobeat.com/game/9371 Edit: > And I did beat it back then. Not a super complicated game. Yes, SNES games were significantly easier than NES games in general. I beat the SNES games earlier than the NES games even though I had the NES games for longer, games becoming easier was a long process and SNES was a step in that direction. There were still SNES games that were hard and few managed to beat, but it wasn't the norm at that point.

ryandrake 3y ago
> For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. We had so much time, though so it wasn't a big deal how hard and tedious a game was. As a bored teenager, dropping 100 hours on a video game in 2-3 weeks was nothing. There was nothing else to do. Trying and failing at a game over and over felt entertaining. I'm closing in on my 50s, and gaming is just different now. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious. Games that I remember as fun are now just time consuming and frustrating, rather than entertaining. Platformers where you needed surgical precision to land on just the right brick or you're back to the beginning of the level: irritating and very quickly my brain starts telling me: "This is not worth it." RPGs where you spend most of your time grinding between bosses who (randomly) either kill your party or go down without much of a fight, my brain says: "This is definitely not as entertaining as I remember it." And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now...
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious. Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there. And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now... I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.
omoikane 3y ago
> https://howlongtobeat.com/ https://howlongtobeat.com/ The completion times seem generally lower than I expected. I wonder if there is a selection bias, as in most users who submitted stats are people are pretty good at games. Or maybe for classic games, it's recording replay times from people who have already beat it years ago, as opposed to first runs through the game. (It's the first time I have heard of this site, so I looked up stats for the most recent game I completed, and it said I was 4 times slower than the median and only 3 minutes faster than the slowest time ever. This is true for most games I sampled so I am just bad at games.)

ryandrake 3y ago

> For example, that site lists Super Mario Bros as a 2 hour game. Do you think me as a kid beat that game in 2 hours? No, of course not, I spent hundreds of hours playing it in total and never beat it. We had so much time, though so it wasn't a big deal how hard and tedious a game was. As a bored teenager, dropping 100 hours on a video game in 2-3 weeks was nothing. There was nothing else to do. Trying and failing at a game over and over felt entertaining. I'm closing in on my 50s, and gaming is just different now. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious. Games that I remember as fun are now just time consuming and frustrating, rather than entertaining. Platformers where you needed surgical precision to land on just the right brick or you're back to the beginning of the level: irritating and very quickly my brain starts telling me: "This is not worth it." RPGs where you spend most of your time grinding between bosses who (randomly) either kill your party or go down without much of a fight, my brain says: "This is definitely not as entertaining as I remember it." And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now...

JohnBooty 3y ago
Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc. I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life and time is precious. Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there. And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how otherwise productive I could be being right now... I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.

omoikane 3y ago

> https://howlongtobeat.com/ https://howlongtobeat.com/ The completion times seem generally lower than I expected. I wonder if there is a selection bias, as in most users who submitted stats are people are pretty good at games. Or maybe for classic games, it's recording replay times from people who have already beat it years ago, as opposed to first runs through the game. (It's the first time I have heard of this site, so I looked up stats for the most recent game I completed, and it said I was 4 times slower than the median and only 3 minutes faster than the slowest time ever. This is true for most games I sampled so I am just bad at games.)