Use the pipe, Luke!
Yeah … don’t needle around carefully jumping onto one block then spend half an hour positioning yourself right to the edge to give yourself enough room to run and jump … You have to learn to make a full on run over the pipe, just touch the far edge, land on the far block still running at full speed and time your jump at the last possible moment … It’s a skill that takes months to achieve … I know because I spent an entire summer one year doing that.
That was the thing about old games, they weren’t worried about being difficult sometimes. Gamers were happy to get a challenge.
I don’t know, but perhaps in america, in addition to the original consoles from Nintendo, no-name consoles were sold?
In post-USSR countries, those were definitely more prevalent. I had one of the “off brand” consoles and a bunch of cartridges, some without casing, even. Also had that light gun thing that you could point at a TV screen for the duck hunt game
The old old games - the arcade games - were made difficult on purpose to farm coins for continues, in fact. Then with video games, publishers gradually started flipping it over to encourage players to complete their games and buy new ones
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.
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.
Making the game harder also made a smaller game last longer. If you remove the difficulty factor of lots of most old games, either by tweaking it or mastering it, then it becomes possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes.
Kinda. Publishers often found arcade difficulty spikes useful in home console games because it would mask how little content there was. Super Mario Bros could be beaten in an hour or two by most people if the lives system didn’t send you all the way back to the beginning of the game when you ran out.
I remember buying a book with the secrets of Super Mario Bros (and other NES) games typed backwards so you had to use a mirror to know how to warp from 1-2 to 4-2 to get to 8-1.
I doubt I’d have finished…but I’ve got a TG-16 I can’t beat anything on.
That is the most boomer shit I have ever heard. Games were difficult because the rental market was huge.
But they sure did by selling extra copies, plus if the game was good we’d buy it. I’m convinced the TG-16 never took off because they didn’t let places rent games.
Plus game rentals made owning a console more attractive and that means perhaps more potential sales for all games you’ve produced.
Short view you’re right, long view I think rentals helped the industry much more than hurt it back then.
I played a playstation on a similar tv. No one thought about it at the time, but such a screen is not suitable for looking at at close range.
I spent an entire summer playing Atari. An entire month beating Pac-Man. I leave my kids alone.
A big difference between then and now is the portable nature and ubiquity of the devices.
Back then you didn’t take your NES to bed and keep playing it, or play Sega on the toilet, or Atari at the dinner table.
The devices are in every space of our lives now.
Maybe you are forgetting about the Sega Genesis Nomad and the fact that the gameboy was effectively a handheld NES?
TBF were talking about the 90s but still
Yeah I had the original B&W Gameboy and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
Yeah I had one and the battery life was not great, so you could not use it in all of those places unless you were rich and had an endless supply of AA batteries. I had the original B&W Gameboy and the added magnifier / light combo that took even more batteries.
It was good for a couple hours on one set of 4 AA batteries if I recall correctly. We did have rechargables back then but they were Ni-Cad and they sucked, took forever to recharge.
Remember how I played Bounty Bob without knowing that if you jumped straight up, ju could start a side-jump any time you were in the air (by wiggling left or right), making livel 23 finishable…
That one tile you had to walk on, I spent so much time trying to jump in the craziest patterns to get to it with no success of course 😅
I played probably around 100 hours of “a boy and his blob” on the gameboy. Never finished it, never understood it, couldn’t read english (not that it would’ve helped but i didn’t know) never even finished the first level if it even has levels.
