/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8547007
Most people typically only got one or two games and that was it for a while. So when you're a kid with nothing better to do you grind it out endlessly until you can do it. Or use cheats codes.

No one ever beats that stuff easily on the first couple of tries, it comes from replaying the game countless times and knowing inside and out. Older games tend to be the more you put in, the more you get out.

>>8547007
when I was a kid I didn't beat that sort of arcade-style game and didn't even know anyone who did
we only beat them with cheat codes or game genie, and I just kind of thought of that as normal
'course part of the problem is we mostly played rentals and didn't have any one game for long
I did know a kid who got really good at Super Mari Bros. though

>>8547007
I was in kindergarten in 88 when i played this in 88. I could get to Medusa sometimes. However, I could one life contra and smb reliably at that time and tried to do one each daily for a while until my grandma made me stop.

>>8547013
>Most people typically only got one or two games and that was it for a while.
This is correct. You got 1-2 new games(if you were lucky and didn't get some crappy Tiger Electronics crap instead) for your b-day and again for christmas. Then those were your new games to last you the rest of the year. So you had about 3-6 months to invest in the new games before the next batch might arrive. Most people give up on a hard part of a game these days after a short while of being stuck, or a few days at most. We did too, but we came back to the game since it's still a new game for us. And you've already been playing everything else you had for a year, two years, three years, etc. You gonna play the game you haven't beaten, or playthrough and beat that game you've already played to death?

>>8547007
Getting good at clearing the hallway before Death without taking a lot of damage helps, and the Cross makes the fight a lot easier. Tripleshot Holy Water is the easy cheesy method, but if you aren't experienced and know how to harvest the multishot items, you may not have it going into the fight. Singleshot Cross and Doubleshot Cross are good at doing damage and helping clear the screen of the scythes.

NES games are pretty short due to the limited space, so they had to artificially pad them out with difficulty. Castlevania is only something like 25 minutes long so it would be over quickly if it wasn't balls hard.

>>8547007
One thing that surprised me the most when getting back into playing retro, to experience my favorites from childhood, is that all of them were under an hour long to beat on average, I never beat them as a child, so I thought they were these massive and impossible tasks, but no, some of them were 15 minutes long, it made me feel ridiculous for never completing any of them, until I realized that this was the whole point of them, so I didn't have to feel bad for it, and then I beat them, and now that I'm more familiar with them all, I can comfortably beat them in minutes, or an hour.

You see, buying video games has always been expensive, if you adjust retro prices with inflation you'll see that they were even more expensive than now, and even today prices are tough, with US$70 likely becoming the future standard. The way prices are justified nowadays is with tons of content, campaigns that last for many hours, and it's all possible thanks to current hardware and media, back then developers could only do so much, but they needed to make it so you didn't beat it too easily, so they made it really hard, and many times had no passwords and continues.

>>8548394
These complaints don’t make sense because the alternative doesn’t make sense. Why would you make a game you can walk straight through in 20 minutes? Would a bigger game with no difficulty be inherently superior? At what point is the level of difficulty acceptable to you?
Castlevania isn’t even on the difficult side for this type of game.

>>8548506
correct. watch some Youtube playthroughs of NES games and you'll see how short they actually are.

>>8548506
>The way prices are justified nowadays is with tons of content, campaigns that last for many hours
Is there inherent value in length? Is game content a commodity with a market value?

>>8548508
Indeed, when I saw how short something like, for example, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six was, about 15 minutes, I was speechless, the idea that something I could never beat as a kid was actually so short all along just shocked me.

>>8548518
I personally dislike it, the very reason I've been enjoying my return to the retro scene is the size, now of course it's not the only reason, but I like the idea of these short adventures that are tough, and you have to master them to get to the end, it was all about if you'd be able to beat it or not, instead of being a certainty. However, nowadays it's common to see people bashing new releases when they're short, so it's clear that this is what most customers want, so companies try to do it.

>>8548394
>they had to artificially pad them out with difficulty
now they pad games with padding

yay

>>8548508
>Castlevania (NES) Full Playthrough + All Secrets
>29 minutes long

>>8548562
>5 hours of running down corridors
>1.5 hours of cinematics
>2 hours of backtracking
>4 hours of collecting rare items
There’s your modern equivalent.

Metroid is an hour and 31 minutes, by NES standards that's quite long.

>>8548508
Mega Man 1 is 42 minutes. My best time beating it was about an hour and 25 minutes.

I honestly like the short length of retro video games, mostly 8-Bit and 16-Bit, because while they were usually between 15 minutes to 1 hour long, you never did it in your first sitting, I mean, it's not impossible, but rare, because they were difficult and a lot of the time you wouldn't know what to do and how to proceed, so you did get a lot of playtime, even if it was replaying the same stages, you didn't do it the same way, you'd progressively get better in the earlier stages, while always trying to find new strategies and approaches to the later stages where you'd usually lose in.

All of this journey would eventually lead to the point where you'd have mastered the run, and every time you pick up this title again in the future you'll be able to beat it in one sitting, and it feels fun, mastering something which used to give you so much trouble, seeing yourself breezing through it, I mean, everytime you're bored and have an hour to spare you know that you can pick it up, and won't have to drop it off in the middle and finish it later, you'll probably finish it in that spare hour, they make for condensed, but complete experiences that don't overstay their welcome at all.