I’m thinking about the AVGN and how Nintendo makes you pay to play shitty emulator games from like 50 years ago.
Especially for the very old games like atari lol
I’m thinking about the AVGN and how Nintendo makes you pay to play shitty emulator games from like 50 years ago.
Especially for the very old games like atari lol
Ludology has advanced by leaps and bounds since back then. Games today are far better, because we know what people like to do. Games used to be hard as fuck for no reason, but now they're easier because it turns out people don't want to feel bad when they play. They like games that give them good feelings. So work backwards and end up with a game state that gives the player a good feeling instead of a bad feeling.
I will note that: "Games used to be hard as fuck for no reason, but now they’re easier because it turns out people don’t want to feel bad when they play. They like games that give them good feelings." definitely is generally true, in that you'll get more game sales. But there absolutely is a market for 'hard games'. Dark Souls is the obvious jerk, but a lot of indie games with cult followings have that too: Enter the Gungeon, La-Mulana, Spelunky.
And like, yeah, those games will always be niche. But for those who like them, there's nothing else on the market quite like it.
they weren't hard for no reason, they were sucking quarters in arcades and spiking difficulty to mess with renting
I'm just quoting the person above me. But as much as you're right for a lot of games, the same doesn't really hold true for a lot of early PC games on tape or floppy.
Yeah those types of adventure games were cryptic from a combination of extending playtime, lack of technology to parse sentences, and a lack of understanding on how to explain stuff to players.
The extending playtime one is probably most important. These designers knew how small their games were and put a lot of obstacles in the way to keep players going with it. I played Zork as a kid and it took me weeks to finish. The current world record speedrun is 2 minutes 46 seconds. Zork was considered an enormous game when it came out.
In fairness they've managed to get even Morrowind down below 2min 30 these days.
Haha yeah I remember brewing potions to jump halfway across the map and give me high enough stats to one shot Dagoth Ur with a javelin. That game is amazingly broken and I adore it.
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Here's what it's like to play a hard game.
Games changed to easy for a reason. Turns out, when people have some spare time, they don't want to spend it feeling frustrated and angry.
Nah, that's just dogshit game, that wasn't even particularly liked at the time. There are plenty of old, hard games that hold up, even in the adventure genre.
Still, I'm not saying that toning down of difficult is bad by any stretch. It definitely made games more popular. I'm just saying there is a niche audience that likes that.
Yeah, The Longest Journey might still be my favourite game of all time and the puzzles can be quite opaque. (though with Syberia it was probably the last of the great adventure games)
You can go and read the rest of the articles on that blog. There are a lot of them, going back years, and try to find the good games. They're few and far between.
And with no internet, how were you supposed to know? The box promised jungle adventure with tigers and gorillas. Not hours of frustration.
:astronaut-1: same with all pop culture. you remember the good movies/songs/whatever from eras past but not the garbage (which was most of it)
But, that's not really what we're discussing. We're discussing playing retro games, today.
You can look up reviews. You can look up 'best games from the year 1984'.
I'm absolutely not saying 'games were better back then!!!!', I'm saying that the 'retro games' still offer some great games that were never topped, for various reasons (often because that had niche design choices that only appeal to a minority of gamers).
I'm well aware that, as an average, retrogames were overly hard shovelware garbage. But there are still great games throughout those decades.
If you are into that sort of thing, there is an entire Youtube channel dedicated to going through a CD of the Softkey 2000 Shareware Games collection week by week. It's six years old and shows no signs of stopping. They're about halfway through the CD by now.
I typically prefer fair but challenging games. I really enjoy touhou and super meat boy. I usually only play easier games if they have a good story or atmosphere (Yakuza for example) but I can see what you mean too.
I'm really enjoying that article lol. I love the part where the text gets inverted after an explosion. I have no idea how people were supposed to play those text based adventure games without looking at the source code. Like I can't type "walk north" it has to be "go north" and I'm supposed to simply intuit that
If you liked that you'll love this classic from the year 2000 by Old Man Murray. It had a huge impact, and it's strange, if you read the Wikipedia article about the game it's the creator playing defense and trying to fob off blame from herself to everyone else.
I mean in general sure, there's more quality of life stuff in most modern games. There's a lot less cryptic puzzles that make no sense, and a lot fewer situations of getting lost. But you I could say Cookie Clicker and Genshin Impact are the epitome of modern games then, because they offer quick and consistent satisfaction to more people. They hit the nervous system right and keep people playing in ways that games 30 years ago perhaps didn't.
People are different too. A lot of people like hard as fuck games, even if they didn't grow up with them. The popularity of Dark Souls should show that at least. Some people might latch onto how a game like a 2D Castlevania feels. Also most people I meet aren't even into games in general, they're into specific types of games, like there's fighting game communities, there's people who prefer FPS, there are some people I know who only get interested in VR. And so I've met people who only get interested in retro or retro style games.
Also older games had to rely on shit like backtracking to make the game artificially longer and seem bigger. Games still do it but it's an old annoying practice.