so, I've been playing my switch at work a bunch this week, and I have been playing all the OG mario games in the all stars pack on the SNES emulator. and holy shit these games are hard. like they start so fucking easy, but then the games are like oh? you think you're hot shit? and just throw the most bullshit gotchas to kill you out of nowhere that you have no clue of unless you died there before or have played this game before.
so, boomers, how the fuck did you beat these games when you were like 9 in 1987 or w/e. there's no way kids were expected to beat this shit right? have I just been raised on participation trophy ass zoomer games from the late 90s and early 2000s???
Just a shitload of reattempts and very gradual memorizing. You have to understand that we didn't have the luxury of switching out to a different game and try something less frustrating so the only thing you could do is try, try again
It's this one. You got maybe one game a year and you played it to death and showed your friends
You didn't. Games of that era were based on arcade games. Arcade games want you to lose so you spend more quarters. Also, games had very limited storage space. To stretch the play time they made the games punishingly hard so you'd have to play the same levels over and over. They gave you limited lives for the same reason.
The way to beat them is to memorize every detail of every level then beat your head against it til you git gud.
Honestly gaming has advanced so fucking much since then.
It's a holdover from arcade cabinets, game over/[insert coin] increases difficulty to a ridiculous degree. I remember Abe's Odyssey blowing my mind with infinite lives lol
git good
Or you didn't and just replayed the first few levels a coupple times then made a lego dinosaur
just pretend like it's your only game and play over and over until you get so frustrated you scream and your parents threaten to take it away so you learn to scream into pillows or just rage in silence and just play over and over until you finally beat the game.
and that's how you learn really cool habits for emotionally closing off that come in handy in your personal relationships.
Love me 'ard games, love me chiptunes, 'ate in app purchases
Simple as
It's because most of them were originally arcade games, where the aim was to make kids put in all their money. Best way to do that was make it hard as fuck, and give them limited lives.
I am a zoomer, and I remember people complaining about Ninja Gaiden back in the early aughts. Also, have you tried to 100% Burnout 3: Takedown? I got that game in about 05 or 06, and I only managed to get hold medals on every event last year, and that was after a few serious attempts. That game is no joke.
Burnout 3 was my favorite game as a kid. I made it all the way thru the campaign until i was supposed to race an f1 on a curvy, busy highway
I rage quit after trying to beat that level for i dont know how many days
Honestly, I know exactly the one you're on about. It was a preview race and the car was the Circuit Racer, or something like that. I think the map was Coastal Highway? I don't know, but that was a nightmare.
There was another race on that same track but in reverse, and using a Sports Coupé, that was even worse. It took solid days of playing it to get gold, and by the end I was only improving by fractions of a second each time. Some of the Crash maps were rock hard as well.
Lol, a boomer would have been at least 21 when the first Mario came out comrade. I'm sure some played them but the OG Marios are more of a GenX/Millenial thing.
Real honest truth: the internet and streaming wasn't a thing yet so if you were a middle to upper class kid with limited social skills or friends and/or you lived in an area where the idea of going outside was an absolute nightmare your choices were:
-Television...where there probably wasn't anything good on and you've worn out all your damn VHS tapes already.
-A Book.
-Some hobby or past time like painting or modeling kits.
-A videogame you could kinda just grind away at and lose yourself in.
In that environment...you kinda necessarily had to default adopt a speedrunners mindset a bit. Boredom was the enemy....and grinding away at a game helped you sorta zone out. Do it anything enough and eventually you'll git gud.
The answer not mentioned is something that doesn't exist anymore: the rental market. You could rent games just like video tapes. Not being able to beat it easily within the week you had the rental meant you would probably rent it again, leading to a longer shelf live and a happier video rental owner. Ecco the Dolphin's final level was literally made with this in mind.
With bigass guide books like this . Some games were impossible to beat without their aid and there were no other resources to turn to. Super helpful and well laid out too. Also cheat codes (like the legendary up-up-down-down-left-right, etc) propagated through school yards. Later on, stuff like Game Genie got popular. I think around the tail end of the SNES era was when the web was becoming mainstream so everyone could just go on AOL or whatever and find tips and cheats.
These kinds of games essentially force you to "speedrun." You have to repeat them enough that you get very good at the execution of each specific section of the game. It's rewarding to some people, frustrating to others. Sometimes both. If you like it you like it.
