Yeah I was never into arcade games as a kid. I realized right away that they were made to be difficult for that reason, so it felt like they were not worth it.
But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, were often difficult too. There was often no tutorials even. You just started playing and figured things out. I remember feeling like I had all the time in the world back then. As an adult, I often feel my time is limited and I should be doing something useful with it.
Well there’s a few things for early at home games, for one the instruction booklets were actually worth a damn, often containing the story, tutorial, and more. Also, size was at much more of a premium, so since instruction manuals were a thing, it was considered a waste to have all of that stuff in the game itself. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s the general idea.
Much as I lament the loss of good instruction manuals, it’s understandable why they went away in light of why they were necessary before.
Yeah the best manual I ever read was for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunship_(video_game), it was amazing. A thick manual explaining so much about the military helicopter and how it worked. Was thrilling to read as a kid.
I don’t remember the graphics being so bad though…:) But it’s pretty shit by today’s standards.
For PC in 1986, those are pretty good graphics. Arcades were where the best graphics were back then.
I swear I probably spent like 2 solid weeks after school just running into walls in the Water Temple because I couldn’t figure it out. And I used to 100% like everything I played. You’d find out every secret, every cheat, and spend hours. Especially once things like GTA came out, just hours and hours of doing functionally nothing. Fuck even games I didn’t really even like I was an expert in. These days, I’m lucky to get a few hours a week on a game, and I rarely finish anything that’s not exactly the type of game I’m extremely into, and 100% is a thing that basically never happens anymore.
