/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7213052]

>be 38 year old with 20 year old nephew
>nephew says he'll play some NES games to give us some stuff to talk about and bond over
>okcool.jpg
>overall he likes NES games and thinks they're fun, but says it's bullshit that so many of them had limited Continues (or no Continues at all) and that you'd restart the whole game if you lost all your lives
>I keep a facade of civility, but I was, and am, incredibly annoyed
I'm sick to the soul of this 21st century meme that finite lives and continues are a bad thing. I just... god. Being punished for losing is NOT A BAD THING. If you get a Game Over on the final boss, you either decide it's not worth the time investment to try again, or you get back on the saddle and give things another try. I know that kids today are emotionally weaker than when I was a child myself during the 80s and 90s, so that doesn't help matters, but even people older than me are pushing this "limited continues were always a bad idea" bullshit.

[Anonymous No.7213064]

>>7213052
The problem is old games are designed around limited lives/continues. If you give unlimited attempts it's like playing arcade games on MAME - there is zero incentive to get good because you can just brute force your way through and the experience is ruined because of it.

[Anonymous No.7213072]

>>7213064
Exactly. Frankly, I think all genres except RPGs (which honestly shouldn't exist to begin with because they go against everything videogames are supposed to be) should have limited lives, continues, and no passwords or saves.

[Anonymous No.7213089]

The way people look at games changed over time. Before, games were seen as a challenge, and you were expected to get good at a game by playing it over and over. A game where you didn't die your first playthrough was seen as a bad game.
Now, if you die in a game, it's treated as though it's the game's fault you died, and death penalties are almost strictly unheard of. You die and just restart at your last save, which thanks to quick saves means you lose only a few minutes of progress.
Honestly, this outlook really ruins game design. Before, a game would be lengthened by its difficulty. People complain about this, but what winds up happening with modern games is that they're lengthened through adding a ton of monotonous, copy and paste filler content. Instead of having tough fights, you have all these quests and side quests that amount to little more than mindless busywork with no stakes attached. Personally, I'd rather spend 50 hours getting good at a difficult game than spend 50 hours doing boring, repetitive tasks over and over.

[Anonymous No.7213097]

>>7213052
Funny that you use Megaman, a series with unlimited continues where if you die, you really don't lose anything and can just retry the level (or go do another one and come back to it later, or farm out E tanks or whatever).

[Anonymous No.7213105]

>>7213097
I love Megaman, but the unlimited continues are an unforgivable black mark on an otherwise impeccable series. It was also one of the first games ever to include them.

[Anonymous No.7213114]

guess you could say those games didn't age well
games should save every level and have checkpoints where necessary
this is why Mario: Lost Levels is better than Mario 1

[Anonymous No.7213119]

>>7213105
Then just don't use continues or limit yourself to a few, faggot

[Anonymous No.7213125]

>>7213052
Back then games were only 20 minutes long, you only had a handful of them, and games were designed to not be finished in a single rental. Now games are 40 hours long and there are a million of them available for free. I don't know why you're so surprised.

[Anonymous No.7213127]

The difference is that people his age grew up with much easier access to more games, so they arent used to spending that much time replaying content in one game.

Imo having to restart a level is reasonable, but having to go all the way back to the beginning of the game is just bullshit to make it take longer. You beat those levels fair & square.

[Anonymous No.7213130]

>>7213064
>If you give unlimited attempts it's like playing arcade games on MAME - there is zero incentive to get good
Poor example. Arcade games you continue exactly where you die most of the time. NES games either send you back to a check point when you die, or restart the whole level. You can't quarter feed your way through them, you actually have to get good to finish a level or boss.

[Anonymous No.7213132]

once again, Mario gets it right. You game over you're sent back to the beginning of the world, you lose progress but not hours worth of it, and you're still stuck butting your head against the very hardest part of the game if you're on the last world.

Worst is Ninja Gaiden. Game over anywhere in World 6 before the boss? You start at World 6. Die (not even game over) on the final boss? Sent back to fucking 5-1. Ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.7213135]

>>7213052
The game over system works for short stuff like Castlevania that you can bang out in under 25 minutes but some NES games could be almost an hour long or even moreso, losing all progress just falls apart as a design choice for most longer games.

[Anonymous No.7213140]

>>7213105
As a kid, I always felt the Megaman games were fair enough for having unlimited continues plus a password system, because the levels and bosses themselves usually proved enough of a challenge on their own, especially once you hit the Wily stages.
But yeah, the Megaman games are pretty easy thanks to saves, continues, and e-tanks. They aren't Kirby easy, but not too far off.

[Anonymous No.7213141]

>>7213135
Even Castlevania has unlimited continues.

[Anonymous No.7213142]

>>7213132
It's 6-1 rather than 5-1, but yes, that was extremely malicious and cruel.

PS. Battletoads should have had unlimited continues. It would have been a perfectly good game if it did. Fight me.

[Anonymous No.7213153]

>>7213142
I actually feel like good fair games like Castlevania, Megaman, and Mario need unlimited continues but absolute bullshit games like Battletoads and Ghosts N Goblins should have limited continues just to piss you off even further.

[Anonymous No.7213154]

>>7213153
Baka.

[Anonymous No.7213163]

>>7213130
True but it's more in the sense of being a 10 year old kid with 4 quarters and having to get good at the game vs being able to just press a button on MAME to get another go.

[Anonymous No.7213171]

Challenging games with limited lives/continues gave me the mental foundation that adults need to succeed in life. Getting your ass kicked by a game Is a very humbling experience, it completely destroyed any "I'm a special unique snowflake that is amazing at everything" type feelings that I had. I learned that I'm not the best and to be the best requires lots and lots of practice, critical thinking and the will to endure constant failure. Peoples egos nowadays are absolutely massive yet fragile as glass and they have no accomplishments whatsoever to justify such an ego. They've done nothing their whole lives and are complete nobodies yet inside their own mind they are world famous celebrities whom the entire world revolves around. People like this drown quickly once they enter the real adult world and don't have the mentality required to save themselves. I'm extremely grateful for growing up during the 3rd, 4th and 5th gen of gaming, without constantly getting my teeth kicked in by extremely difficult games there's a very high chance that I would have ended up like the kind of people I just mentioned.

[Anonymous No.7213182]

>>7213171
I agree Marble Madness on the SEGA Master System should be required reading in school

[Anonymous No.7213189]

>>7213142
>PS. Battletoads should have had unlimited continues. It would have been a perfectly good game if it did. Fight me.
Yeah, there's a lot of challenging games with unlimited continues, like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania.
I'd trade the warps in Battletoads for unlimited continues.

[Anonymous No.7213227]

>>7213052
>I keep a facade of civility, but I was, and am, incredibly annoyed
hahahahahaha it's ok OP, you'll live

[Anonymous No.7213256]

>>7213052
>I'm sick to the soul of this 21st century meme that finite lives and continues are a bad thing. I just... god. Being punished for losing is NOT A BAD THING. If you
Oh wow. You're so cool and hardcore retro. I want to be just like you when I grow up.If how kids want to play games really bothers you it sounds like you're an emotionally weak child in the 20s.
>even people older than me are pushing this "limited continues were always a bad idea" bullshit.
Nah. That's just your personal strawman to help you cope. But there's a grain of truth there. I'm a lot older than you and have 1CCd many games, yet I try to devote a few hours every month to training old games to add unlimited continues so zoomies can enjoy them. I suppose I could spend that time crying on the internet about how kids play with their toys, but my dad didn't raise a whiny little bitch.

[Anonymous No.7213260]

>>7213052
Your nephew is an idiot, don't get me wrong, but holy shit you're pathetic for getting so mad

[Anonymous No.7213379]

op how the hell are you mad at this? sounds like you're the whiny kid here

[Anonymous No.7213407]

>>7213052
it's almost like you were supposed to enjoy the challenge of getting good at the game instead of being entitled to beat it on your first playthrough and then forget it even exists....

[Anonymous No.7213432]

>>7213052
people hate to lose progress, simple as that
For me, super meat boy (not retro) did it right. Infinite lives, challenging short stages, progress always saved

[Anonymous No.7213435]

>>7213052
Man, don't be a child struggling for the muh gaymin credebiletah. Your nephew is trying to communicate and you're so annoyed by the little things like that? God, it's pathetic.
Back then gamedesign was literally non-existent and games short af because of technical limitations so develops took a bunch of poor decisions like limited continues that is completely gone today. That's okay that things change and become different for better or worse. Don't be a crybaby because of someone not doing something the way you like.

[Anonymous No.7213453]

The real bullshit from back then is not being able to save.

[Anonymous No.7213509]

there is so much stuff out there to play now, nobody wants to stay on an old game for more than a week or two, if that. unless the game is an mmo, or 'open world,' most people will shun difficult games and only want to beat them and move onto the next. they didnt grow up like us

[Anonymous No.7213516]

>>7213052
I'm 36, grew up on NES games, and I agree with your nephew. In any case, all he said was that it was bullshit, not that they were bad games or anything, so need to get so upset.

[Anonymous No.7213528]

>>7213052
the real problem isn't the limited lives or even continues(even though I do think limited continues are kinda obnoxious), it's that a lot of old games have some really aggravating ways of achieving their difficulty usually through either bad platforming design or badly designed enemies

also one reason why games got easier over time that people overlook is the fact that more and more the people developing the games were people who had actually grown up as gamers and thus had a better grasp of what was actually fun about games and the kind of challenge that was enjoyable and what was bullshit designed to waste time/quarters

>>7213132
that is true about many Nintendo 1st Party games(once they stopped trying to 1:1 emulate the Arcade experience*) that they tend to be a lot better about that sort of thing than many of their contemporaries

*which took a long time for a lot of developers to realize

[Anonymous No.7213540]

I 'member when challenge used to be a selling point for games in general

[Anonymous No.7213548]

>>7213141
The original version even had saves

[Anonymous No.7213558]

>progress
The true progress is in your heart.

[Anonymous No.7213565]

>>7213052
I don't know if I've just casualized myself with new games but I honest feel a lot these days that lives and continues are just padding because the game has little content.

Look at something like Mario Odyssey, unlimited lives. Nothing is taken away by giving Mario unlimited attempts and even promotes exploration or trying risky tricks for bigger payoff because you're often places right before you die.
No one wants to die in a game and have to redo over half an hour's work which you already find easy just because you game over'd, especially if your final loss was a cheap death. Neither do they want to try something risky because they may lose one of their precious lives.

[Anonymous No.7213603]

>>7213565
>redo work which you already find easy
People always say this on this topic but in my experience there's usually plenty of room for mastery left

[Anonymous No.7213604]

How come people love memorizing rhythm games to perfection but hate practicing/memorizing levels in other games? Is it just a different set of people?

[Anonymous No.7213630]

>>7213604
Different people and different games I think.

[Anonymous No.7213637]

>>7213132
>>7213142
I'm almost convinced that dying on the final boss sending you back to the beginning of the Act was a programming mistake unless I get proof that it was a deliberate design choice.

[Anonymous No.7213668]

>>7213052
finite lives were just a borrow mechanic from arcades. in reality it makes no sense for home consoles. finite lives is to suck quarters out of you in the arcades. finite lives at home is to frustrate the player and extend playtime so mommy and daddy don't have to parent their autistic child.

[Anonymous No.7213672]

>>7213052
The game you posted doesn't even have limited continues. Lives or punishing checkpoints, yeah, I can get that, but limited continues for anything but a score attack game was rental core horseshit.

[Anonymous No.7213683]

>>7213052
Just be glad he's playing good games before his time.

True hell is getting a woman to play anything fun at all and it's just point and clicks, puzzle games, and hyper casual sims all the time because they can't into realtime mechanics and adversity. Maybe they'll humor you and play something co-op where they quarter ass it, you carry them, and they learn nothing.

[Anonymous No.7213689]

>>7213604
>2 minute sessions start to finish vs tons of easy content then your personal wall with no continues or no way to power up if you fuck up
I wonder.

[Anonymous No.7213703]

>>7213089
I'd earn my A from the 1969 teacher.

[Anonymous No.7213705]

The joy in games that require you to beat the whole thing in a row with few mistakes and force you to start over from the beginning when you fail comes from:
1) The satisfaction of completely mastering an entire game.
2) The tension caused by having to earn attempts at the later parts of the game, knowing that making mistakes will require you to go back and earn another attempt.
3) The mystique of the later levels that you don’t get to see as often as the earlier levels.

A properly designed game of this type is generally expected to have these qualities:
A) The game rewards becoming better and better at the earlier levels of the game as you are forced to replay them to earn attempts at the later levels. Mastery of earlier levels should leave you with more lives remaining, grant extra lives from score or pickups, grant power-ups from pickups, etc. so that the better you get at the early levels, the more equipped you become to handle later levels. This continued discovery of what each level offers feels good.
B) The difficulty of most of the individual challenges is not super high, so that achieving the ability to perform every challenge in the game in a row with few mistakes is doable for an average player.
C) The game is short enough that mastering the entire thing is doable for an average player and isn’t too exhausting to do in one playthrough. (Generally less than an hour.)

[Anonymous No.7213801]

>>7213052
>>I keep a facade of civility, but I was, and am, incredibly annoyed
>I know that kids today are emotionally weaker than when I was a child myself during the 80s and 90s
nothing says adult emotional strength more than crying to strangers online because your sibling's son enjoyed your dying hobby wrong.

[Anonymous No.7213827]

>>7213637
It actually was a programming mistake, but they decided to keep it in because they felt it gave the final act a unique flavor.

[Pr?nc?ss Sevenleaf No.7213845]

>>7213089
The kid in the first panel grew up to become the parents in the second panel, so I don't know, maybe our takeway from this cartoon should be that grading systems are authoritarian bullshit to begin with.

[Anonymous No.7213904]

>>7213845

yeah, no. The kid in the first panel merely belongs to the same generation as the parents of the first panel, and thats all we get from this cartoon without more context.

but go on with your brilliant, non authoritarian method of verifying academic comprehension and cognition that is absent of some kind of metric interpretation, that also doesn't result in a poorly socialized spoiled brat child, and irresponsible parents that are not participating in their kids schooling.

[Anonymous No.7213909]

>>7213904
School isn't nearly as important as you make it out to be, kys

[Anonymous No.7213994]

>>7213827
The cope in this post is super cringey, my take away is that the poster is a colossal faggot

[Anonymous No.7213995]

>>7213909

scathing.

and I didn't make a single value statement about school, so clearly reading comprehension isn't high on your natural talents list. Maybe there's a place you can go where they can help you with that.

[Anonymous No.7214030]

>>7213052
>I'm sick to the soul of this 21st century meme that finite lives and continues are a bad thing.
NES games often have bullshit enemy placement and shit that forces you to play the level several times until you "know" them, thats artificial difficulty.
Play a NES game with inf. lives cheat and 90% of them become a joke.

Im not saying I disagree with you, but I fully understand new generations not liking that.

[Anonymous No.7214038]

>>7213052
Your nephew was always going to find some Achilles Heel that allowed him to disregard older culture. It was really nice of him to play some games just to feel closer to you. Maybe you guys should just talk about good music in NES games.

[Anonymous No.7214049]

>>7213052
From someone who grew up playing Battletoads on the NES, yes, most of it was actually bullshit.
I grew up with games I had for literally all my life and I never got past certain levels.
The first TMNT, for example. It had the mechanics to be a super cool game, except you get through the water level, you're gonna have one turtle with 1/4th life and then it's always game over.
Take the second and third TMNT games on the NES. You do have a game over screen, but the game's ending screen isn't impossible to produce.
So yeah, give your nephew a few good examples of games that are not impossible and he'll eventually like them.

[Anonymous No.7214054]

>>7213052
Super difficulty and repetition is a vestigial aspect of games inherited from the arcade, where it was necessary for arcade owners to make money. We are so far removed from that now. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying repetition to the scale of most NES games. I don’t, and I grew up with that generation.

[Anonymous No.7214131]

>>7213052
33 yo here. What happened back in the day is you were breezing through a game only to get to an actually hard part and blow all your lives on it, then you'd need to restart the whole thing and play through all the boring parts yet again, before you can go back to gitting gud at the hard part. If this isn't padding I don't know what is, finite lives were cancer. Checkpoints should always be permanent (at least per console reset cycle) but spaced far enough apart to still provide meaningful challenge and punishment.

You're a massive sperg for getting mad at your nephew btw.

[Anonymous No.7214143]

>>7213052
There was never a problem with having unlimited continues, especially if the game takes more than a hour to play at a decent pace from the start to the finish. Death penalties are a must though.
If the game is really good, you will learn to 1CC it at some point either way.

[Anonymous No.7214195]

>>7213125
>you only had a handful of them
imagine believing this mindless bullshit? lmao.
>>7213064
>it's like playing arcade games on MAME
except not all arcade games function this way, and arcade industry is built around one thing: getting coins out of pockets. it's easy to look at how things are with MAME, try living in the period of time when you paid money to play these games and tell us all about how there's zero incentive.

[Anonymous No.7214197]

>>7214143
>you will learn to 1CC it at some point either way
yeah sadly on this board: anyone claiming 1CC without video proof goes into the trash. those are the kinds of fantasy stories best saved for /b/.

[Anonymous No.7214218]

>>7213072
>RPGs (which honestly shouldn't exist to begin with because they go against everything videogames are supposed to be)

lol fuck off you absolute retard

[Anonymous No.7214224]

Modern gamers feel like they are entitled to see the ending to their games. In retro gaming, people bought games with the understanding that they may not be able to beat it.

[Anonymous No.7214242]

>>7213127
This million times. You can always impose challange on yourself if you want to

[Anonymous No.7214274]

>>7213052
Stop obsessing over your siblings' children and have some of your own then, faggot.

[Anonymous No.7214281]

>>7213089
The amount of fucking zoom
>A game where you didn't die your first playthrough was seen as a bad game.
Nigger shut your dumbass up. Your game had to be way easier than that to be seen as bad.

[Anonymous No.7214285]

It's cute seeing all the HARDCORE RETRO GAYMING niggers cite some example of a really hard game only to find out its Japanese version was easier.

Also, playing hard games is not a skill. Being good at video games is not a skill. OP it sounds like your nephew sees games as bullshit, good for him.

[Anonymous No.7214582]

>>7213994
Did you quote the wrong person?

[Anonymous No.7214585]

>>7214582
Yeah, sorry. Was meant for the psycho tranny.

[Anonymous No.7214740]

>>7213052
>you either decide it's not worth the time investment to try again

That's what your nephew did and you sperged

[Anonymous No.7214863]

Doesn't matter to me if a game has limited continues, or no continues. I'll cheat if I have to in order to finish a game and see all the content. If I then decide I enjoy the game, I'll play it for real.

But I won't bust my balls over a game I don't really like to begin with just to impress the internet, which, by the way, will never be impressed.

[Anonymous No.7214908]

>>7213089
>You die and just restart at your last save, which thanks to quick saves means you lose only a few minutes of progress.
my older brother (he is 31) doesn't undeestand this.
we've been playing the resident evil games these past weeks on our ps3. now we're playing the ones that have multiplayer mode (re5, revelations 2, re6)
you have no idea the tantrum he throws and how fucking red of anger he gets when we lose... yeah, we lose and we go back to 5 mins back checkpoint, but he is so mentally ill he doesn't understand this. the more he loses, the angrier he gets and he starts rushing things and thus getting ourselves killed more times
and he is goddamm obssesed with emblems and trasures shit

fuck him ever since a kid i couldnt even play games with him in peace knowing he got ourselves in trouble cuz of the screaming and autistic fights. as my mind is clearer and i am not mentally ill as he is, i was always the better player: patience, self-control, capacity to analyze obstacules, capacity to actually learn new tricks instead of spamming hadoukens and jump kicks and uppercuts. he always got mad i beat him in our genesis mortal kombat, or ps2's fifas and budokai tenkaichi 3
i was literally afraid to play with (worse, against) him as a kid fuck

not even with 5 mins checkpoints and lots of annoying hints and tutorials are enough to make the games easier for mentally ill people

[Anonymous No.7214912]

>>7214740
There's an important distinction, anon: it's okay to give up, but you do not criticize the game or whine in the process. "I don't feel like doing this" is okay. "I don't feel like doing this, and the game is also unfair" absolutely is not. My nephew crossed the line and entered the latter's territory.

[Anonymous No.7214917]

>>7214908
back to topic

i think the thresd topic answer is that we, the people of the 21th century, specially the past decade, no longer have time to sit and focus playing videogames like kids back then used to. now ee have many distractions, we have fucking internet and a whole soulless industry that grew with it. social medias, competition, the fact that now everybody is a professional critic, etc
nobody has the time to play games the comfy way anymore, like it was fucking supposed to. they play them for trends, to show off, etc

[Anonymous No.7214928]

>>7213052
Don't worry man not all zoomers are retarded

[Anonymous No.7214941]

>>7214912
>he crossed the line and criticized video games

Are you going to kill his dog now? That would be letting him off easy

[Anonymous No.7214961]

>>7214912
Seek help

[Anonymous No.7214963]

>>7214218
>playing easy to program 3D maze simulators with 20 sequels is big-brained

[Anonymous No.7214980]

>>7214912
Uuuh you can totally stop playing a game and criticize it. Holy shit anon, it's a video game it's really not a big deal.

[Anonymous No.7214994]

As someone who is unfortunately a zoomer too I can say that the big issue is that, as mentioned earlier itt, kids now aren't used to dedicating all their time to one (relatively short) game for a long period of time that isn't an online thing. We have access to absolutely everything, and with the internet there's really not much in the way of trying shit out and discovering games via trial and error.

Really just depends how you've grown up. Had few games growing up and my family Dell was an old machine so could only emulate up to SNES reliably, I don't really play anything made in the last 10 years as it just doesn't align with my tastes mostly and still dedicate a shitton of time to getting good at or beating a game at a time. Easy to generalise people, my driving instructor was a guy in his late 30s who played lots of games but never beat a single one according to him

[Anonymous No.7214997]

>>7214285
>boomers yelling at zoomers to take games more seriously
That's the last thing these little faggots need when they're spending real money on in game items and gambling garbage. Teach them the difference between arcade machines and the stupidity of putting money into a game you already own.

[Anonymous No.7215013]

>>7214912
>My nephew crossed the line and entered the latter's territory
>over a NES game
Sounds like you're emotionally weaker than your nephew. Pathetic.

[Anonymous No.7215021]

>>7213052
When you look at some of the playthroughs for those old games they only have about an hour of actual gameplay

38 year old me just doesn't have the time or patience to keep playing the same things over and over to 'git gud'.

[Anonymous No.7215024]

>be 35 year old
>abuse rewind to beat bullshit retro games
how does that make you feel?

[Anonymous No.7215026]

>>7214131
This is the most correct post in this thread

[Anonymous No.7215427]

Having limited chances stifles development. The reason why you learn to overcome obstacles in games by trying over and over but give up after failing once in real life is simply the numbers of attempts available. It stands to reason then that no child should be exposed to harsh penalties in video games, because that will literally stunt them for life. Try, fail, try again. Failure is not the end of the world, but it might seem to you, because you played only shitty games with no continues.

[Anonymous No.7215481]

>>7213089
It's not that games have changed but there are more varieties of games now and arcade yet challenges are no longer the most mainstream understood type.

[Anonymous No.7215485]

>>7213052
39 year old here, your nephew is right. Games without continues where you have to start from the beginning again are way too frustrating. There's a reason they've been phased out.

[Anonymous No.7215494]

>>7213142
Doesn’t Genesis Battletoads (which is also based on the easier Japanese version) have unlimited continues?

[Anonymous No.7215504]

>>7213565
>Look at something like Mario Odyssey, unlimited lives. Nothing is taken away by giving Mario unlimited attempts and even promotes exploration or trying risky tricks for bigger payoff because you're often places right before you die.

This. Anyway Mario has had effectively unlimited lives since Super Mario World. How could anyone ever get a Game Over in that game once you know you can return to (and leave!) levels you have beaten and finding a Yoshi egg if you have Yoshi already gives you a 1 up?

[Anonymous No.7215582]

>>7214224
It's kind of funny put that way, because despite this entitlement, going by achievement percentages in modern games, only a small selection of people seem to actually see them through to the end.

[Anonymous No.7215672]

>>7213140
When I became a 20 year old virgin, I stopped using E-tanks.

[Anonymous No.7215730]

¿What about Shovel Knight? If you die, you wager 25% of all your money, and you have to beat the stage while trying to get it back from whichever dangerous place it fell. Unlimited lives. I sometimes find it fair and challenging, while sometimes also being mindnumbingly forgiving, paradoxically.

[Anonymous No.7215805]

>>7214242
>You can always impose challange on yourself if you want to
It's not actually that simple, because the game design itself is different.
A game designed with saving/locking in progress after every level or every sub-section of a level is less likely to be designed to deliver on A, B, C in >>7213705, so while you can obviously make up your own arbitrary challenges in any game (“beat every stage in Super Meat Boy in a row with no more than three deaths total”) it’s less likely for that experience to be enjoyable because it wasn’t designed to be played that way.

[Anonymous No.7215819]

>>7213604
There are people who do. They're called speedrunners and they're some of the most autistic people alive.

[Anonymous No.7215823]

>>7215805
Except half the time games with limited continues were originally designed with unlimited continues or even saves in mind.

[Anonymous No.7215849]

It's a big reason I've never beaten Ninja Turtles on the NES. The early parts are a slog to get through, while the later levels are hard as shit. Wading through the first half hour of the game just to try the later levels again just isn't worth the time investment.

[Anonymous No.7215937]

theres so many games out there today
why would you subject your family to the shitty ones

it's not like that games exist where the death mechanic was integrated into the game
even fucking dark souls is better because it starts you off at a bonfire

[Anonymous No.7216136]

>>7213528
>also one reason why games got easier over time that people overlook is the fact that more and more the people developing the games were people who had actually grown up as gamers and thus had a better grasp of what was actually fun about games and the kind of challenge that was enjoyable and what was bullshit designed to waste time/quarters

Probably the best take, IMO.

A common thing in old games was to have "challenge" sections that are entirely based on an annoying and/or poorly implemented mechanic. It's easy to look at modern people's reactions to those challenges and say "bah, kids these days just hate difficulty!", but the reality is that it's just not fun to awkwardly control your character and do dumb and difficult things.

An example of the difference in old game design and modern game design can be seen in Kaizo-type games. In those games, level design (and engine design, for original games) is by lifelong gamers. The key is that regardless of the games being hard/fair/etc., there is a huge emphasis on making every challenge feel fluid and fun. Even if these games cranked up the "artificial" difficulty with lives/continues, they'd generally be fun and worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.7216806]

>>7214912
>he crossed the line and didn't like what youtube told me to like

[Anonymous No.7216992]

>>7213052
I agree that limited continues are a bad idea, then and now. It's just a waste of my time.

[Anonymous No.7217000]

>>7213052
I have some young relatives, if you put on a game for them and they die a couple of time they just put it down and don't want to play again.

I know that if old games let you continue or had unlimited continues I would have just grinded the games for a couple of days and then wanted another one.

The old games usually give you an easy level to start with so you can get a couple of minutes before getting to hard bit.

I think the last 10 years or so designing levels became a lot easier. Level too small? copy and paste a few times and badda bing budda boom now you have a 100 km square level.

>>7213089
If legend of zelda was released today it would have have to be some 100 hour epic that takes 2 hours to cross the map of else people would say it lacks content.

>>7213142
The new battletoads is a pretty good game, it makes you restart but im playing on hard

[Anonymous No.7217005]

>>7213052
>be in 30s also
>grew up with nes
>only ever beat Zelda
>didn't own any jrpgs or would have beat them too
>never played arcade games, too stressful
>can't even put more qaurters in
Why torture yourself?

[Anonymous No.7217072]

imagine if you bought a movie and you watched half of it and then the screen blacks out and you get a message saying your not good enough to see the rest

you wouldn't tolerate that, right?

so why would you tolerate it in a game?

[Anonymous No.7217085]

>>7217072
That would be a pretty based movie tbqh.

[Anonymous No.7217112]

>>7217072
>ou wouldn't tolerate that, right?
I absolutely would; sometimes it's a requirement that you have a background of studying certain books before you should permit yourself to reading the later ones in the canon.

[Anonymous No.7217165]

>>7213052
>>7213064
you know only reason they did that because otherwise 2/3 of all nes/arcade games would be literally 5 minutes long or less?

[Anonymous No.7217260]

>>7213052
>>overall he likes NES games and thinks they're fun, but says it's bullshit that so many of them had limited Continues (or no Continues at all) and that you'd restart the whole game if you lost all your lives
He's completely right though.
t. 23 year old zoomer who's beaten the original Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden (up until the last bullshit level) with no save states. I liked these two because they don't boot you back to the title screen when you're out of continues.

[Anonymous No.7217268]

>>7213052
Honestly back in the NES days that's the reason why I liked Simon's Quest more than Castlevania and there are many games I never bothered to beat because by the time I got bored playing the first few stages every time just to get to the new harder stages. It depends on the game and there are some like Super Star Wars I beat many times but it's a bug part of why I gravitated to fighting games and roguelikes.

[Anonymous No.7217820]

>>7213052
Fact is, no one wanted to beat a game the first day they got it. You actually had to get good in order to beat a game back then.

[Anonymous No.7217841]

>>7213052
>nooooooooo it's from my childhood and therefore perfect, you can't have a different opinion

[Anonymous No.7217868]

>>7213637
If I'm remembering correctly one of the devs did an interview and it was actually a purposeful design choice to deter rentals.

[Anonymous No.7217874]

>>7213604
In a rhythm game you get the -exact- same thing every individual time making memorization easy. In games like platformers and beatemups usually there is at least some variation even if predictable in enemy behavior or spawning.
Also in a rhythm game you literally get to just pick what segment you want to do and play it. no working your way back up over the course of 30 minutes to try again after losing all progress.

[Anonymous No.7218014]

>>7217874
>in a rhythm game you literally get to just pick what segment you want to do and play it
That's something I've been wondering about lately; not entirely a /vr/ question I guess but do some rhythm games let you practice any part of a song? The only ones I've played make you start at the beginning always.

[Anonymous No.7218018]

>>7217260
Keep trying on Ninja Gaiden, man. 6-2 and 6-3 really aren't that bad, being kicked back to 6-1 lets you actually practice them so you can easily get through and beat the boss even if you die on a phase.

[Anonymous No.7218370]

>>7213052
>I'm sick to the soul of this 21st century meme that finite lives and continues are a bad thing
Very few games in the 5th gen had limited lives, even back then people were realizing it was a sacred cow from the arcades.

[Anonymous No.7218854]

>>7213064
You're leaning too hard the other way you fag.
If you die, you shouldn't restart all the way back at the start of the game, what are you an assblasting fag? No,
Super Mario 3 had it just right. Fuck up and lose all your lives, when you continue, you restart the WORLD, not the whole game.

[Anonymous No.7219032]

>>7218014
>do some rhythm games let you practice any part of a song?
The home ports of DDR games usually had a practice mode where you could do things like slow the song down or choose to put one small section of it on loop. I assume the other Konami rhythm games of the time period did too, but I don't feel like digging up my imported copy of Pop'n 8 to check.

[Anonymous No.7219252]

>>7219032
>choose to put one small section of it on loop
that's cool

[Anonymous No.7220113]

I've always thought Castlevania was the best example of difficulty done right.
You die? Start at the checkpoint. Lose all your lives? Restart the level. It's punishing while not being complete bullshit.

[Anonymous No.7220129]

>>7213604
Harmonizing button presses with music is a much different experience than an action game.