/vr/ - Retro Games

There were always whiny entitled bitches, they were just rightfully filtered out of video games.
Nowadays video games are too mainstream so they just release movie games and accuse games with gameplay as being outdated, mysoginistic and "too game-y"

What do you call re-using the same assets over and over again after a certain point in the game to the point where everything feels like it's randomly generated

>>6999763
The final boss of Ninja Gaiden sending you all the fucking way back to 6-1 regardless of how many lives you had was absolutely artificial lengthening

>>6999772
Soul.

>>6999776
Git gud.

>>6999763
It basically just means difficulty done poorly, but that's subjective. Personally I find a game that just makes you rely on getting lucky to progress or makes it so you can't possibly beat it on your first time through because there was a hidden gap you have to jump over or something to be "artificial difficulty". When your actual skill at playing the game isn't as important then it just feels like it's wasting my time.

>>6999785
I read that it was a bug they found and instead of fixing it they just went "leave it in it makes the game even more hardcore lol". Wasn't even something that was planned and intentional, seems more like an excuse to just not fix it. Just felt annoying though, maybe it made it harder but it also just made it feel less enjoyable to play.

>>6999763
How is this topic unique to retro games?

>>6999763
>or are zoomers just crybabies?
this is the answer to every question

>>6999897
People usually say the problem was more prevalent during 4th gen and earlier though obviously it can happen at any point.

>>6999904
There's no shame in admitting you posted on the wrong board man.

Speaking of shitloads of fuck - can anyone repost that picture of AVGN with girl with the boob pressed against him? I need it for a meme *cough*

>>6999916
GTFO my thread, coomer scum.

>>6999916
there you go, you better make a good meme

Having to beat Ghosts and Goblins twice to see the ending is a very blatant example of artificial length. Artificial difficulty, I think, is something like the last boss of House of the Dead 3, where he's not THAT hard, but he has so much HP he takes like 5 minutes of nonstop shooting to kill so you're bound to die multiple times against him unless you've played through the game enough time to memorize all of his patterns.

>>6999938
Thanks anon, this is the one I was looking for though. I found it by searching text on warosu.

>>6999763
It's a thing but I find it to be the exception, not the rule. There are some games that are absolutely unfair in difficulty and rely on luck or RNG bullshit to amp up difficulty without any kind of skill building or memorization of the game tactics.

>>6999938
>>7000074
>no hoverhand
AVGN is the only game related shit I watch since its early days on GameTrailers. I always attributed it to my superior taste, but turns out it may also have to do with the fact that he's not a soiboy. I've never seen a gamer on video that's not a soiboy.

>>6999763
Most NES games have artificial difficulty, while surprisingly Gameboy games don’t. Is it because GB games would not be rented? Perhaps.

>the rental meme lives on
You guys really need to stop listening to youtubers who make shit up.

>>7000171
Except you could rent them.

>>7000202
From Blockbuster and other major rental chains? Because the idea of console games being difficult was that you wouldn’t be able to beat it in a rental or two so it would make more sense to just buy it. Game boy games cost $20 to $30 max. SNES game were twice as expensive.

>>7000184
This “meme” was explained by devs, including the creators of Lion King on SNES. They were told to make the second level with the ostriches more difficult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p02AeVUvTm8

>>7000324
https://www.ebay.com/itm/GameBoy-Color-Blockbuster-Rental-Case-with-Berry-Gameboy-Color-/333490662821

>>6999763
Of course. You need look no further than the vast quantity of japanese games that had their difficulty jacked to the moon by western localization studios at the behest of the (((publishers))).

>>7000381
Fake news

>>6999763
It's not a thing, as an older zoomie on the boundary of being a millenial I appreciate that the sensibilities of the times have changed. Back in your day help hotlines and strategy guides were a big part of the experience and a big source of revenue to companies, and you couldn't just play whatever you like so games were designed to have a lot of memorisation and difficulty so you'd get your 'money's worth' as it were. Since the PSX days games have gotten more and more cinematic with less actual gameplay and more padding (few exceptions here and there but still), so modern games are by their nature much easier. A zoomer brought up on retro games will probably not give a shit about this topic but people trying to get into it will probably play a game for 10 minutes and give up.

>>7000171
A lot of straight NES ports to Gameboy are a lot harder, like Empire Strikes Back, Double Dragon or Nemesis to list a few. Castlevania the Adventure is much shorter but much harder than Castlevania 1.

>>6999763
There is such a thing as artificial difficulty in certain contexts, however, it is very commonly a misused term to describe things that are "too hard for my comfort zone".

>>6999763
There are a lot of real and bad way to pad a game's length, but artificial difficulty is just nonsense. Of course the difficulty is artificial, everything about video games is artificial.

>>7000381
Right but increased difficulty is different from the meaningless buzzword that is artificial difficulty. Sometimes the harder western version is an improvement.

>>7001219
It is by definition artificial difficulty. The original developers decided X was how they wished the balance to be. Some kike comes in and demands X + 5 to draw out rentals. It doesn't get more artificial and cynical than that.

>>7001239
It's all by definition artificial difficulty. The game and everything in it is man made. The monsters you're killing are all primitive artificial intelligences. The western publishers might have bad motives and they might do a bad job, but difficulty is just difficulty.

Zoomers are always crybabies.

>>6999763
>>6999776
>lengthening
It's funny that zoomers complain about this while their shit video games are 60+ hours long because most of the content is cutscenes and quick time sequences.
Zoomer video games aren't even video games — they're just movies that require an input every several minutes.

>>6999763
>Is artificial difficulty/lengthening an actual thing
We literally have proof of games being made harder for no other reason to stop people from beating games on a weekend and you're asking this.

Happened in arcade games as well. I know that Sunset Riders arcade removed a 1up from at least one of the stages. I also believe they stopped you from getting a 1up for perfecting bonus stages.

>>6999763
It is a thing. In the very early history of video games, the most popular games were ports of arcade games. Arcade games, of course, have artificial difficulty and lengthening in order to suck as many quarters out of the consumer as possible. Many of the early game designers were still thinking in this mentality even though they weren't necessarily making arcade games.

This attitude started to shift around the NES era, where there are plenty of games that are just fine.

>>7001284
>We literally have proof of games being made harder for no other reason to stop people from beating games on a weekend
Okay, where's the proof? Yeah, publishers have asked for games to be more difficult sometimes, but that's because the American market demanded hard video games. The harder a (good) video game was, the more enthusiasm it would generate. You might not remember this because you're a fucking autistic loser with no friends, but we'd never discuss easy games with our friends. It would be the difficult games we'd talk about and enjoy playing.
If the market liked easy games, they would have made them easy. People liked hard games, so they made them hard. It has nothing to do with "muh artificial difficulty and weekend rentals."

>>7001284
If I remember right, they removed the 1up from Chief Scalpem's stage and the two score-based extends you can earn. The lives you start with are all you get. But artificial difficulty is still just a buzzword that means nothing.

>>7000184
But it's true though. Japan seethed hard about American rental laws.

>>7001293
>Japan seethed hard about American rental laws
I don't know if they seethed, but the chinks definitely coped hard when the dilating nintoddlers from Burgerland wanted artificially difficult mayors in their artificially lengthened scotformers.

>>7001174
>Back in your day help hotlines and strategy guides were a big part of the experience
Nobody I knew during the NES era used either of these. I also never heard a kid complain about difficulty. It was probably a tiny minority of nerdy inept proto-zoomers that used guides and hotlines

>>6999776
Making your way back to the bossfight and finding out that you don't have to refight the parts you already killed was super satisfying, though.

>>7000381
And most of those games are just gimped down ports of Arcade games that had a much better difficulty balance since kids would just play something better if it sucked.

It's like Judging pacman based on it's Atari 2600 port.

>>6999763
In a ton of RPG's it is. They force you to grind in a good number just to make progress. But that's just as true of old ones as new ones, it's not a problem exclusive to the Retro era.

>>7001293
Nintendo seethed at rentals and tried to stop it from being a thing anywhere. Sega embraced it and worked with Blockbuster.

>>6999785
Why stop at 6-1? Why not just send you back to the beginning of the game?

>>7001527
That would be an improvement

>>7001527
That's what should happen when you run out of lives.

>>7001337
>mayors
You mean governors

>>7001291
>You might not remember this because you're a fucking autistic loser with no friends, but we'd never discuss easy games with our friends.
I might not remember it because I wasn't a normalfag like you, sorry. Now get the fuck out of my board.

>>7001291
>but we'd never discuss easy games with our friends.
This is some hardcore LARPing. How old are you?

>>7002506
>Arcade gaming with a group isn't retro, gaming alone in your room is.

>>7002552
nobody played rpgs back in the day.

>>6999763
Artificial difficulty is dying to things you can't possibly avoid. As long as you can dodge it, it's fair.

>>6999763
>Is artificial difficulty/lengthening an actual thing
Yes
>or are zoomers just crybabies?
Also Yes.
It's both actually.

>>6999763
>artificial difficulty
That’s exactly what video games are

>>7001404
Newer games are nowhere close in terms of grinding scale where after completing a section in some NES rpgs you would suddenly find yourself 10 levels short of where the game would like you to be with nothing in-between the previous part and the newfound high level enemies to grind on.

>>6999938
handsome man behind the nerd! the blond guy. see him?

>>7000330
explain

>>6999763
yes

>>6999763
there's lots of ways it happened, though limited lives/continues is probably one of the most annoying common ones(especially for Continues, there's no good justification for limited continues)

>>7003603
>there's no good justification for making it possible to lose the game

>>7003729
Correct. 'Game Over' is shit game design that has no place outside arcades.

>>6999767
okay boomer.

>>6999763
Artificial difficulty/lengthening is an actual thing, but it appears a lot more in modern games than in old games. Also, most zoomers are crybabies

>>7004001
Right. The game over screen should be replaced with a picture of the dead main character with the text
"Congratulations! You win in your own SPECIAL way!"

You sound like a rich kid who's parents would buy professional athletes to play games with that they would intentionally lose.

>>7004150
A good fail state punishes the player, but doesn't necessitate a full restart. Dark Souls 2 does this better than nearly every game. First, you drop your excess experience where you died. Next, your max health decreases by a stacking 10%, to a maximum of 50% each death, and can only be restored via a limited item. If you die before retrieving your excess experience, it's gone forever, yet your soul memory (total experience acquired, whether or not you spent it) is still boosted, despite you not getting the chance to use that experience to advance your character, meaning you are now permanently behind the curve on PVP matchmaking.

Combine all of that together, and that's pretty fucking punishing, but at no point is your game bricked and requiring a full restart. That's what good design looks like. That's actually much more brutal than most "ultra hard" gen 3-4 arcade ports where you can just brute force credit feed your way past the game over screen with continues.

Almost like retro games aren't that hard compared to modern offerings :^)

>>7004165
Dark souls is a significantly longer game that uses online servers and hardware memory to keep track of your progress and discourage cheating

Arcade ports from 30 years ago are 90 minutes long and inconvienience the player by less than 90 minutes of time for giving them a full game over.
The games are also designed to be replayed countless times and design the first level to have multiple paths and opportunities to stock up lives.

>>7004218
>Arcade ports from 30 years ago are 90 minutes long
I'd argue they're much closer to 20 minutes of content on average.
>The games are also designed to be replayed countless times
I'd much rather sink my teeth into a long, highly replayable game than grind the same 20 minutes of primitive content until I memorize enough to do it in one go. I don't see the value of arcade shit in the slightest. It's telling that when gen 5 hit and the average game started having a lot of content, arcades in the west started rapidly drying up.

>>7004165
Almost wanted to get that gaem but it should be the other way getting 10%+ when dying.

>>7000074

>>7004165
Literal children regularly beat Souls games. They only look hard because every other big budget game these days is baby tier.

>>7004421
Literal children regularly beat games from the 80s, and 90s. The games are made for children. What's your point?

>>7004165
>Almost like retro games aren't that hard compared to modern offerings :^)
> :^)
have a guess how i know you were born after 2010 and never stepped into an arcade
>just brute force credit feed your way past the game over screen with continues.
yes, but those games have most often have requirements for getting high scores, finding bonuses and actually completely the fucker properly. you can slam coins into it forever, doesn't mean you've beaten it. shitloads of shoot em ups like that.

>>7004165
>Almost like retro games aren't that hard compared to modern offerings :^)
> :^)
have a guess how i know you were born after 2010 and never stepped into an arcade
>just brute force credit feed your way past the game over screen with continues.
yes, but those games have most often have requirements for getting high scores, finding bonuses and actually completing the fucker properly. you can slam coins into it forever, doesn't mean you've beaten it. shitloads of shoot em ups like that.

>>7004475
>have a guess how i know you were born after 2010 and never stepped into an arcade
You're over two decades off, but hey, I'll humor you. How do you know I'm less than 10 years old?

>>7004492
two decades off. close enough for an old cunt like me.

>>7004494
Time to put you out to pasture, gramps.

>>7004453
They don't get arcade 1CCs too often, though, because those are, by and large, genuinely difficult games where you can properly lose.

>>7004541
There's no such thing as a true 1cc though.

Here's a good example of artificial difficulty. In Zombies Ate My Neighbors, your life is gauged by how many neighbors you can prevent from getting killed by monsters (you start with 10 and your count carries between levels, so you have to keep at least one alive to not die). Then you've got the fucking werewolves. Some of the neighbors have a timer when the levels begins. If the timer runs out, they transform into werewolves and count as dead. You have no way of knowing which levels they're in, which neighbors you need to grab before they can transform until you get to them, or how much time you have. And the timer is strict as fuck for most of them. You usually have to equip a speed boost item and fucking b-line to them, ignoring everything else until they're taken care of. And in later levels, you just can't get to them in time so it's impossible to keep them alive unless you abuse the SNES' sprite limit by filling the screen with enemies to stop them being able to transform. Unless you've memorized exactly where they all are, these fuckers will end up getting rid of the vast majority of your neighbors in any given playthrough. Fuck them.

>>7004106
No, it is not okay, zoomer.

>>6999776
It is pretty bullshit.

>>7004545
I hope your reasoning isn't something retarded like "because you need a lot of credits to reach that skill level."

>>7004710
That's just regular old bullshit. It's not "artificial difficulty" any more than any other challenge is.

>>7004710
That's called replay incentive, if you'll notice ZAMN is a very arcadey game that you replay to try and do better and get farther each time.

>>7004792
It's artificial because it's a transparent way of making sure you stop getting the extra lives from having all 10 neighbors alive at the end of each round. They just added a goddamn kill button that automatically gets rid of your neighbors if you haven't played the level before.

>>7004947
It's cheap. It's bullshit. It's not any more artificial than anything else in a video game, because "artificial" means "man-made."

>>7004239
>I'd argue they're 20 minutes of content.
THEN WHY DO YOU CARE IF YOU START FROM THE BEGINNING OR NOT!?

>>6999938
>>7000074

"Hey, you're the angry nerd guy! My boyfriend watches you. Can I get a picture?"

"Well, sure! Anything for a fan. I'm James. I'd be happy to sign anything if you'd li--"

"Just do the funny face"

>>7004964
For the same reason I didn't enjoy those awful choose your own adventure goosebumps books from the mid 90s as a kid either. I have absolutely no interest in being thrown back to the beginning over and over until I've memorized the correct path.

>>7005024
And because you appearantly lack the attention span needed to both read the words on the book and visualize what they're describing.

Do you use savestates on Musedash? Those levels can get pretty long. I'd hate for you to have to start a song over from the beginning.

I'd say artificial difficulty is when, no matter how skilled a person is, no matter how godlike his reflexes are or how accurate his timing is or how well informed he is on strategy or how naturally talented he is, the person cannot beat the game without dying.

Take Touhou for example, I don't think it's possible to beat it in Lunatic mode without dying, but finishing easy or normal mode without dying on your first try is possible even if you've never played it.

Or how I finished Chrono Trigger dying exactly twice times ( once against some Mu, the other when Lavos uses his ultimate physical attack ) , although I fought and lost against Spekkio a lot of times to develop a strategy, I never needed to grind or anything.

Artificial lengthening is real, just ask your dad.

>>7004975
keep seething

>>7005134
I'm just making light of the fact that he makes the same face in every picture because he's been reduced to a gimmick of his own design, nothing more, nothing less

>>7004723
yeah it is, boomer.

>>7005058
>Take Touhou for example, I don't think it's possible to beat it in Lunatic mode without dying, but finishing easy or normal mode without dying on your first try is possible even if you've never played it.
Most if not all Touhou games have been no-missed on lunatic.

>>7005024
Then these old games really aren't for you, because the whole point is the mastery of the levels of the game and completing them in a cohesive sitting. These aren't like 21st century games where the point is to get the levels "out of the way" in order to get to the "real experience", the levels are the experience.

>>6999763
Yes because you used to have to pay a quarter to play so they would add shit to kill you but that is super easy to bypass if you know its coming. High scores and continues were also just quarter harvesting mechanics. That being said i like highscores and wish they would come back.

>>7005160
he got rich and a kino retro setup out of it, cant really blame him, i'm pretty sure thats winning

>he got married to bitch of a sjw so there's that

>>7005730
you're the one getting angry over a game's difficulty though It's not okay, zoomer.

>>6999763
It's a real thing, the problem is in the pre-playstation era (nintendo, sega, etc) they had to make things artificially difficult because you'd beat a game in like an hour or two at most.
Castlevania is a good example.

Now days there is no excuse unless you're making an arcade style game.

>>7006061
Castlevania has unlimited continues. Death's RNG scythes can be a bitch but it's still possible to beat him. There's no artificial difficulty there.

>>7006065
He'll either backpedal and say he was talking about 2 or 3, or dig deeper and say the jumping was artificial difficulty.

>>7006065
I hate that fucker.

>>7006065
The fishmen on loop 2 stage 4 are seriously bullshit. The giant bats at the start of stage 6 are pretty dubious too.

>>7006061
>they had to make things artificially difficult because you'd beat a game in like an hour or two at most.
Difficult. Just regular difficult. They made them difficult so that you could extract well more than an hour worth of enjoyment out of an hour-long game.

>>6999763
Cringe