see that’s a weird line I always try to walk with encouraging people to play punch above their skill level. I don’t want anyone to feel bad for playing easier games, I’d rather make them want to explore harder stuff because there’s a lot of joy and satisfaction in it. Positive reinforcement stuff. Like hey! Look at how neat the kinaesthetics of getting through this obstacle course feel. Despite that I tend to get at least one friend very angry any time I talk about it because I guess it’s perceived as really elitist.
See, I did this a while back, purely to satisfy a curiosity. As a kid I’d always hit a wall at 4-1 or so and never continued. This time around I learned where warps were, and only used them after having played the levels they skipped. Endgame includes a weird surreal infinite maze and try to sneak past a bowser throwing constant hammers left an imprint on me. Really surprisingly white knuckle moment.
Yeah, let me re-clarify that when I refer to NES games being hard, I’m actually referring to gamer culture’s dumb worship of these old games and the boy’s club associations of that. I think NES games are just fine a lot of the time, even generous in the popular cases. The closer I would examine what makes a “hard” game, the less I would be able to consider it hard, because I’d already learned it.
There’s been a huge shift in what’s considered “normal” (or even “good”) mainstream game design in the past few decades. Asking the player to practice levels multiple times – hell, to play levels more than once – in order to win the game is “bad form.” Breaking that rule, combined with skillful use of RPG mechanics to allow players to “brute force” their way past problem areas, is what created the whole “everything that challenges me is inspired by Dark Souls” meme. The only modern, mainstream games that encourage practice and personal betterment are competitive multiplayer games like Overwatch, and even most of that format is finding success thru creating feedback loops of rewards (and rewarding players for sheer amount of time played, or money spent, even without any skill improvement).
A Good Videogame isn’t a 2-hour, tops experience you practice until you can complete it in a sitting (or before you run out of quarters), and generations of players and developers would think these experiences were “not fun” or “dated.”
idk, the NES has a legacy of people having played it as a kid and having games they absolutely could not move foward in. the marginalization of this approach with every succeeding console and the lasting effect of having beaten oneself against a game for ages and never conquered it as a young impressionable make the notion quite reasonable in my opinion. pc games being harder isn’t generally relevant because PC games inhabited an entirely different culture, and a PC wasn’t solely for playing games.
consider the very common circumstance of having an NES and a single game, and being unable to progress. contrast this with owning or having access to a computer, with all its various capabilities. a game is just one arm of the many-limbed applications of computing, and thus the stakes of one game’s cruelty or opacity are much lower. these connotations are rather implicit to the entire idea of a computer, so even as a child, i did not associate the brutally difficult but relatively uninviting e.g. flintsones game for apple][ with e.g. mega man’s vanishing block platforming sections.
if you have an NES and just mega man, well. mega man, by contrast with apple2 flintstones, is an inviting game that demands your attention and commitment in a way few pc games were capable of, especially considering the difference in context between sitting in front of a television and sitting in front of a computer. not to mention the target demographics of each! having and failing to conquer a game that demands conquering as much as mega man does feels like a weighty consideration in a way that the probably objectively far more intimidating elite for bbc micro does not.
the vanishing block platforming sections are still the parts that ruin my playthrough of every mega man game.
this is all maybe off the mark tho, i’m typing from work and probably haven’t given this as much thought as it deserves
I think a higher percentage of NES games have “challenge the player” as a main design goal, and I think that’s where the “NES games are hard” sentiment comes from. Many modern games emphasize story telling or world building or immersion, and mechanical challenge is either something they’re not interested in or it’s more of an afterthought.
Not to say those are mutually exclusive, just that there’s been a shift in intention.
I don’t think I ever personally beat SMB but watched my dad do so when I was young, and sort of experienced the same thing vicariously. The final levels in that game are pretty wild.
Right, now that it’s so much easier to get games for cheap, the people who really care about mechanical precision and aren’t focusing on “a tastefully designed universe” play shit like Osu! which is just the experience of a hostile pen calibration tool while watching an AMV. (Osu is pretty fun.) If you want an interesting universe AND tough dexterity and learning tests, well, that sucks, get ready to have Dark Souls recommended at you.
HOLY WATER. Holy water is cruise control for every CV1 boss except Dracula’s first form. Yes, even the Phantom Bat, you can catch it on the stairs, but it’s not like that’s a hard boss anyway, and usage for Medusa and especially the mummies is obvious.
But drop Holy Water right where Death lands as soon as you get into the room and he’ll land on the flame and freeze and won’t even materialize any scythes. Same for Frank & Igor, the timing is a bit harder but get it right and you freeze them before Igor even launches, though even then you can hit a Frank eye level block and the flames will hit him and Igor just as he hops off. Worst case scenario Igor does get loose but your holy water is still freezing/hurting Frank which leaves you a lot more free to deal with Igor. As said Drac’s first form is no good, but that form isn’t really bad, his second form it won’t hurt him unless it arcs across his face, but the flames still freezes him in place which makes things a whole lot easier.
I think the common experience of having played a NES game a fair bit and never completed it has mostly to do with lack of savefiles. The password systems saw little use I think (I have never even heard of anybody actually writing out the Megaman dots on graph paper). People turned off the console when they get tired of playing, which could be for difficulty or other reasons.
Are you kidding, I did the hell out of this. As a child, the idea of losing Progress was a waking nightmare. But then, I was a PC kid, where saving was king.
Yeah, holy water is both the key and almost a game breaker. With Death, though, you still have a brief window at the start of the fight before the scythes begin and he moves away. The most recently available holy water is also a while back, so if you die once trying to kill him, you lose it and can’t retrieve it until you hit the continue screen.
cv1 is a masterpiece