i have discovered why we remember older games to be so hard

[shootthebandit]

i found alot of my old PS1 games and decided to load up tomb raider II i always remember it being hard and my dad had to help me when i was a kid. But know that im 18 must be over 10 years since i last played i realised WHY it was so hard....... directional buttons!!! its not much of a revelation but trying to avoid some bigass boulders when turning around takes so much effort, we are so lucky that we know have thumbsticks those directional buttons are just annoying. they just dont give the same control as a thumbstick, those traps would be so easy to avoid if the game implimented the thumbstick

 

[Savagezion]

Eh, I grew up up on D-Pads.(Well, technically I first started with crappy Atari joysticks) You could get analogue controllers on PS1. That wasn't what made games hard back in the day for me personally. It was limited lives and continues and no ability to save. Go back and play Contra or Ninja Gaiden 1 on NES. X-men on Sega. There is a long list really.

 

[Eduku]

Or it could be the fact that you were 10 years younger?

I've tried a few games recently. That I remember being nearly impossible as a kid.

Now... not so much.

Yeah, I've played some games recently that I played as a kid and thought 'how did I struggle with this?'

 

[Hippobatman]

Yes, as the above posters have said;

We we're little children. Our small minds weren't coordinated enough to pull off the dick moves older games did. And yes, games were harder before, for various reasons.

I struggled with Star Tropics on the NES when I was a kid, and now it's a breeze (someone tell me you've played the game!). [sub]And it's more fun than ever![/sub]

 

[CK76]

Because there were games I spent years and never got half way through! Battletoads...go on, play it, tell me when you beat it.

 

[shootthebandit]

Or it could be the fact that you were 10 years younger?

I've tried a few games recently. That I remember being nearly impossible as a kid.

Now... not so much.

yeah i was ten years younger but when i played today i couldnt get my head around the directional keys, i suppose itll comeback to me

 

[Sacman]

yeah a combo of bad controls and the fact that most 8 year olds were crap at games...

 

[Kuchinawa212]

I thought it was less play testing means it was more prone to 'unwinnable' points. Or they prove you can make a certain jump by measuring it by pixels, but not testing if it's easy or not

 

[LitleWaffle]

Nope, that wasn't what made old games hard. Do you know what made old games hard? The fact that they were REALLY FUCKING HARD!

*High Fives*

OT:Ummmm... Try Earthbound again. The controls don't matter as its a turn based game, but is it hard? HELL YEAH!!!

 

[teqrevisited]

The D-pad had nothing to do with it. The example, TR2, was mostly a puzzle mind-fuck with gun-toting Italians thrown in. I'd put it down to being younger. I remember not knowing how to swim properly and failing hard at the torch room in Palace Midas. They didn't get much easier over time, but I was able to figure out where I was going wrong.

 

[Nieroshai]

i found alot of my old PS1 games and decided to load up tomb raider II i always remember it being hard and my dad had to help me when i was a kid. But know that im 18 must be over 10 years since i last played i realised WHY it was so hard....... directional buttons!!! its not much of a revelation but trying to avoid some bigass boulders when turning around takes so much effort, we are so lucky that we know have thumbsticks those directional buttons are just annoying. they just dont give the same control as a thumbstick, those traps would be so easy to avoid if the game implimented the thumbstick

Moving with Lara is like riding a motorcycle indoors. You can go pretty fast in a straight line, but try turning from a standstill. I've played games with better sensitivity on a D-pad. Resident Evil did this too, with turning being akin to backing up a truck. The gamecube version did it too, and it had 2 analog sticks!

 

[Nieroshai]

Games were harder for one reason: Rentals.
In Japan, you couldn't rent games back then(Can you now? I dunno). So easier games wer just bought. But in the US you could rent games, so all you'd have to do was rent the game for a weekend and be done with that, cutting into the game company's profits.
Solution? Make the games so hard there's no way to beat them in a single weekend. Either the kid has to keep renting, or get the game to play it whenever. You'll find the Japanese version of any given NES or SNES game is much easier than the NTSC version. Take Ninja Gaiden. On the Famicom it's easy, just another platformer. On the NES it's a NIGHTMARE!

 

[shootthebandit]

yeah the movement when stationary was awkward. considering there are some feindish traps it doesnt help your situation

 

[omega 616]

Also, the first tomb raider level was a *****, it was kind of "if you can beat this level you can play the game" initiation level.

But yes, directional buttons is just false advertisement, diagonals are the worst though.

SF4 with directional buttons is tricky, to me atleast.

 

[Cynical skeptic]

It wasn't so much the directional buttons as the control schemes. Up = walk, fine. Down = walk backwards, dandy. Left/right = rotate (counter)clockwise, this is where everything gets fucked.

Thumbsticks hitting big was more or less a coincidence with developers realizing that control scheme was completely and utterly worthless. But garbage like resident evil just HAD to keep using it and just HAD to keep getting bukkaked with awards, meaning that utterly moronic control scheme HAD to last because every game just HAD to use it.

D-pads were pretty much just thumb controlled wasd. Just for a long time, "strafe/move left/right" was a completely foreign concept to console developers. When properly bound (rotate = top shoulder buttons), they were actually superior to thumbsticks.

Also, fixed camera angles did fuck everything up for the non-fixed games.

 

[RowdyRodimus]

Yes, as the above posters have said;

We we're little children. Our small minds weren't coordinated enough to pull off the dick moves older games did. And yes, games were harder before, for various reasons.

I struggled with Star Tropics on the NES when I was a kid, and now it's a breeze (someone tell me you've played the game!). [sub]And it's more fun than ever![/sub]

I played it recently (had extra points on the Wii and since they decided not to release anything good on WiiWare or VC for the forseeable future, I got a couple of NES games) and I still say Zorda's Revenge is better in every way.

OT: Older games were made to be harder so they lasted longer. We didn't have DLC or online MP to make them longer so they made the games harder. Add to that people didn;t get as many games back then (in the NES era, if you knew someone with 20 games they were a god) and you appreciated the fake lengthening of them.