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

[tehroc]

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

You can't put the blame on the d-pad, look at fighting games, try playing SSF4 on the analog stick and you'll get smashed into the ground. Also no Tomb Raider 2 was just difficult since they added saves so every jump was a leap of faith.

 

[tahrey]

There were plenty of good sticks around but the ones that came with most machines were easily broken and a bit vague in my experience;

Oh man, you do NOT use the stick that the system was sold with. They're like the headphones that come with a personal stereo (anything from the tape walkman down to the latest ipod) or the ink carts preinstalled in a printer. They're for demo and backup use only. Same as the mouse that was supplied with my ST... yeah... ok... it moved the pointer... but if you had any brains you swapped it out pretty quick.

I suppose some credit has to go to the console makers for supplying half-decent pads as pack-in items, but then they were platforms where far less upgrading and modding was possible (or even encouraged), so if you included a naff controller, people may well jump ship instead of replacing it. There were probably better replacements even so (particularly arcade sticks for use with fighters, or alternatives to the questionable first-gen PSX one), but I've not seen many, and our 3rd party dual shock was definitely lower quality.

But even in the mid eighties I remember everything, bar one fantastic arcade style stick, being pretty naff particularly the BBC's thing. But again I should qualify I was pretty young, perhaps you simply had a better view of things than me.

If you were around for the BBC micro, whilst being "pretty young", we're probably about equal age (recently failed at stopping a rediscovered Master-128 at work from going in the back of a rubbish truck - I stuck a post-it on saying "DO NOT TRASH", went to the bog, came back and some twat had thrown it. Probably crushed before I even flushed. Shame, full Cub monitor, Epson printer etc setup, fully working, just rotting in a cupboard for a decade plus. I've never really had chance to have a proper go on one other than in school labs where if you were lucky there might be some unsupervised time to bash an old listing into it).

I wasn't quite meaning to go THAT far back in fact; I more know OF that time than directly experiencing it. (Heck, the beeb even HAD a 1st-party stick? News to me) ... Had a brush with the A800 (awful VCS style thing), Speccy (keyboard only, but it apparently had some legendary plug-ins like the Competition Pro), and then we got an ST at the very cusp of the 90s. Which was supplied with a couple of decent Cheetah ones, and we had several different types down the years. Some floppy rubbish, some fantastically precise.

Got a mini stick with a dpad around somewhere for an old sega machine it spent much of it's life with the stick out, good for fighting games and the odd simulation mind .

Iiiiinteresting. I wasn't even convinced that it'd stay in that well!
Largely wondering about it because they were compatible with the Atari, so could be used as some strange third-way input.

OK, now you're tripping. I want five examples of games that started on home consoles and then ended up in the arcades.

Okay, bad wording on my part. Publisher focus was on Arcade style games, they were proven business and rapidly developing new game types. Of course different and slower games were around and people buying them showed that games could be something other than a quick blast; a lot of those game are much loved classics. The NES era had plenty of these ( I quite liked the NES version of elite it had some enhancements from my BBC disc copy and even a tutorial).

Fair enough. Though I suppose what I also forgot would be the ur-example in this case: Final Fantasy...
I suppose the publisher focus would probably be because - very little development cost (port it as much as possible, then start downgrading things), big name that can be easily marketed. Bash it out quick and on the cheap, sell it hard, roll in the money.
They didn't have that good a reputation as I remember. Original titles were much preferred amongst the... discerning gamer :-D And you went to the arcade to play the actual arcade games. (I think one of the very few that came out quite well was Bomberman? As well as Gauntlet, Star Wars, Super Sprint, and anything to do with Bub & Bob. All quite simple games, of course!)

Of course there are still games around that are just fun thing to pick up and play, and rightly so who can deny the value of fun? However we have games that are engaging and interesting without necessarily being fun, I like to believe they are an interactive computer based art-form.

Well ... yeah ... was kind of my point that there was this sort of thing waybackwhen also. Check out the things that Jeff Minter made for a start. Enough light synths that are sort-of gamey, but also sort of an art package, or sort of an experiment and meditation-aid. Still pretty much a toy though (unless you can claim some health benefit rising from use of, e.g. Trip a Tron). But there was Sentinel and its ilk which had an early claim to interactive, virtual world puzzlers as some kind of art installation as much as a play challenge.
I also just today discovered "Bolo", which appears to be a 2D, BBC-originated, (early 90s) Apple Mac refined crossover between Minecraft and all those super-detailed-Risk type of games my dad used to play. Launched in like '93. Not so much game as collaborative military strategy trainer.... that must be doing something very right as people are still playing it.

And of course there was always Robugs, and Life.

The difference between a sculpture and a hand made toy is simply who it's intended for.

Yes, I was kind of thinking after the previous post ... reducing it all to the level of "no practical purpose" then ends up with games in the same category as film ... and art ... maybe even music (debatable!). Which is probably where they belong. There can even be a certain art to playing a card game, so why shouldn't computer "toys" be in that set?
(Hell, off the top of my head I'd happily drop SSX into the art category)
Except the examples of each which DO teach you things, but then they become educational materials and that's a whole different box

As for the prince of wales - I may just take the trip from Lampeter to see what they've got.

Weeeeeelllllllllll I wouldn't make a special trip. Nip in, if you're in the area. There's a Galaxian table - unplugged every night, so the high scores clear. A pool table that's still better value even after massive inflation. One of those horrible stand-up video quiz things. A "smart" jukebox which now has Lady Gaga far to high up it's "most played" list (friend I was with decided it would be fun to torture the rest of us; I've still got bits of Fame Monster rattling round my head 2 months later...), oh and course a bar with some decent ales, a saloon and a dining room. Surf shop next door, camp site the other side, and, across the road, the Celtic Sea behind a huge sea wall made out of pebbles.

It's a good place if you're spending a week nearby. If you're setting out from home, particularly one in a different county, well ... it's just another pub. Though it does leave you well-placed to scoot along to St Daves and get yourself some truly excellent icecream.

Must say I never experienced that. Maybe I had a "fixed" version?

All DOS versions of UFO:enemy unknown have the bug, even the steam dos version still isn't fixed as it's the 1.4 version. The windows version was fixed but the sound got borked a little.

Nope, it was definitely the DOS one. Days of fiddling the Autoexec to free up enough conventional memory and all that BS, of textured-vector VGA graphics looking quite advanced. Pretty hard, though we could usually manage to get 2-3 hours into it. Maybe we WERE just crap at it. But even I managed to complete Red Alert and I didn't hear anyone complain that was too easy...

Most other games have specialised skill sets you can only gain from playing those sorts of games from platforming twitch skills to FPS control they have their own internal language even teh most puzzle based platformer need good reactions. Strategy games are just complex logic puzzles, examine the patterns and wrack your brain for a solution to solve it.
I dis'ed RTS's because replaying a campaign is really dull it's almost always the same as last time and it's very difficult to learn anything new if you limit yourself they often become dull rush tactic games.

I must respectfully disagree. The first group trains your reflexes and your fingers; the FPS is a mix of physical and mental. The strategy games train your mind. Logic puzzles, resource management and the like just aren't so easy or intuitive for some people, and a similar process can be undergone there as for someone with slow reactions getting better at a twitch game. And I would hope most RTS campaigns are made by someone with the imagination and skill to encourage - if not force - you to exercise a range of strategic plans (to take examples from C&C2) from zerg rush, to pincer attack, sniping, stealth, in-and-out air strikes, lone infiltrator, keeping your base safe whilst building a superweapon to get around your opponent's otherwise invincible defences, carefully metering out very limited and non replenishable man-and-firepower resources, etc. All scenarios I can remember just in the flow of conciousness from a game I probably haven't played for ten years...

I mean, if your experience of it is multiplayer Starcraft, I can understand, but there is more to it than just that. Haven't you ever had to resort to running over infantrymen with a harvester to clinch the final victory?

I gained most from x-com during an attempt to beat it with none lethal weapons and proxy grenades; the game played out very differently than most previous attempts but it was still possible to beat.

Wow. That really DOES sound "super easy". Enough for the main objective to become nothing more than a means to an end in an example of unintentional metagaming.

I think that post is more than long enough.

Agreed

 

[Nomanslander]

The PS1 era isn't when games were known for their difficulty, that era goes to the NES' days, and there's really two reasons for it. For one, a lot of games were being ported over from the arcade system which was built around lives and continues, since arcades were a business of where you had to pay for every chance to play, the difficulty was ramped up for profit.

And secondly, games were a lot shorter back then. If you're to watch a full play through by an expert, you would have seen a game like Ninja Gaiden that's notorious for it's difficulty beaten in under 30 mins. Data storage was short with those old cartridge base games, so to get more out of it the difficulty had to be extreme to prevent players from beating the game in under an hour, getting bored, and returning it the next day.

 

[Unrulyhandbag]

(Heck, the beeb even HAD a 1st-party stick? News to me)

Official Acorn game controller - utter shite my little brother literally snapped on in half (up the stick, not separating the two vertical halves) with his six year old mitts while playing centipede. Truly terrible direction sensing and they had absolutely no resistance, you can even see in that picture that they just flop towards the front of the unit. Added to that they just plain hurt the hands.

Got a mini stick with a dpad around somewhere for an old sega machine it spent much of it's life with the stick out, good for fighting games and the odd simulation mind .

Iiiiinteresting. I wasn't even convinced that it'd stay in that well!
Largely wondering about it because they were compatible with the Atari, so could be used as some strange third-way input.

Yeah, the one I have is surprisingly hard to get out once it's back in the pad it's got white stress marks on it so a bit wary of treating it hard these days, starting to use emulators for stuff now with a couple of systems dying and peripherals looking worse for wear.

Nope, it was definitely the DOS one. Days of fiddling the Autoexec to free up enough conventional memory and all that BS, of textured-vector VGA graphics looking quite advanced. Pretty hard, though we could usually manage to get 2-3 hours into it. Maybe we WERE just crap at it. But even I managed to complete Red Alert and I didn't hear anyone complain that was too easy...

x-com wiki's bug page [http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Known_Bugs] near the bottom under other bugs. I have three different copies and they all display it.

zerg rush, to pincer attack, sniping, stealth, in-and-out air strikes, lone infiltrator, keeping your base safe whilst building a superweapon to get around your opponent's otherwise invincible defences, carefully metering out very limited and non replenishable man-and-firepower resources, etc. All scenarios I can remember just in the flow of conciousness from a game I probably haven't played for ten years... Haven't you ever had to resort to running over infantrymen with a harvester to clinch the final victory?

I dunno, of course I've been reduced to runnning down the last wave of grunts but it just felt a bit mechanical to me RTS's leave me feeling that its obvious what to do next and even if it fails I have a given amount of gambits left, no real engagement. once a missions done it just feels 'solved'. The only C&C I enjoyed was Tiberian sun and honestly I couldn't tell you why (loved Total Annihilation and Ground Control mind).

In multiplayer it's whole different story, some players are astoundingly good but mostly they are using formulaic tactics, "if enemy rushes with this unit bring in 5 or more of these to counter"; I just like to be able to examine the threat and try something new, RTS's don't often give me that . I guess that's why I get hammered in even semi-serious competitive play so kudos to others for their skills.

Wow. That really DOES sound "super easy". Enough for the main objective to become nothing more than a means to an end in an example of unintentional metagaming.

After the first failure I was going to finish that scenario. If you remove using psionics as an option then the final fight is almost impossible and the game isn't just hard but a true war of attrition. I was chuffed to bits when I finally beat it.

 

[ryo02]

I think I started gaming when the transition between the D-Pad at joysticks began. I remember when games offered both methods to control. I also remember finding the joysticks more difficult to use. Weird, huh?

I remember playing demos for an rc helicopter game and another demo cant remember the name but you had to catch monkies. and I just thought ahhh their crap I need a d-pad ... now though cant live without em heh.

 

[No_Remainders]

Deus Ex, ten years old, is still as hard as it was in the old days.

I'm pretty sure it's just the standard of difficulty has lowered. In fairness, playing, let's say, Halo: Reach on Legendary is nothing compared to when I played Halo: Combat Evolved on Legendary. It's gotten so much easier (I've only got two more missions on Reach to do on my own and I'll get a nice 225 (I think?) gamerscore, like it matters. I just want to see the look on my friend's face when I show him the epic win that is me finishing the Reach campaign on my own.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Actually I imagine what made many older games hard (and by "older", I mean NES era), was that many of them were ports of games designed for amusement arcades where near game breaking difficulty was required to wring you for quarters. Also the save feature for consoles hadn't been fully developed yet and implemented yet, so 'Game Over' meant starting all the way back at the beginning of the game.

 

[Lyx]

I think that depends a lot on the period of videogames. People tend to just throw all "old games" (which always means games older than 8 years, no matter what the age of the post is) in one big category and act as if they were all the same.

They weren't. Games between 1980-1985 were different to games from 1985-1990. Games from 1990-1997 in turn to games from 1997-2010 (notice how the "periods" constantly become longer). And thats not even taking the platform into account (console games for example attracted a different audience than computer games).

Why that matters to the topic: Games from 1980-1985 for example were often quite unique, but VERY short - even shorter than nowadays games. They often were direct ports from arcades, with the game having just one to three "levels" and that was it. There really wasn't much game content, so to make the player take longer to consume the content, they ramped the difficulty up, so that to beat one of the levels back then, it took you longer than to beat 3 levels of a nowadays game. On the one hand, that was a really cheap and lazy way to extend playtime - on the other hand, it meant that each level had to be replayable enough, because players would be doing that A LOT.

That period was followed in 1985-1990 that were much longer and had much more content - yet, the difficulty was only reduced slightly, resulting in perhaps the game with the longest playtime in gaming-history until today. So, it really matters what kind of games you look at - they weren't all the same.

 

[irequirefood]

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 definitely this. Replaying the first Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games, and 100%ing both in a day each surprised me, as I used to struggle to even finish CB when I was like 6.
I wonder why games seemed to have gotten so much easier now that we have 3D. Whenever I try older 8-bit games I get smashed. I'm looking at you Megaman 2 >.>

Edit: And by get smashed, I mean playing on an emulator and resisting the use of save states...

 

[Talon_Skywarp]

Everything on old games wanted to kill you.

Grass blades, flying knives, birds, dogs, cows, air, water, spikes, people, everything wanted you dead.

Then add lives
1 hit kills



Thank god gaming moved on

 

[KindOfnElf]

But older games ARE harder. Like... Tomb Raider series. Even today, The Last Revelation is a challenge with all the puzzles and jumps. Yeah, some are easier because of the controllers but still... plus, I agree that older and experienced makes a big difference.

 

[Serenegoose]

I'm fairly sure even now that Shogun is by far the most difficult total war game, and it's the oldest and first. Mind, it's not as old as the 'old games' most people are on about.

Dune 2 on the megadrive was pretty damned tough because you could only select one unit at a time, and really it's probably unclear graphics and a poor interface that causes a lot of difficulties in these older games.

 

[Veldt Falsetto]

Yeah, no games have just gotten easier, thats why.

 

[tahrey]

Official Acorn game controller - utter shite my little brother literally snapped on in half (up the stick, not separating the two vertical halves) with his six year old mitts while playing centipede. Truly terrible direction sensing and they had absolutely no resistance, you can even see in that picture that they just flop towards the front of the unit. Added to that they just plain hurt the hands.

I can believe that. They look pretty awful. I never could understand the "scalextric throttle" type where you held a needlessly chunky base then tried to control the game with some flimsy nubbin sticking out of the top. Pretty sure that a friend had a later interpretation of the same thing (microswitched at least, but still not exactly solid) where we ended up breaking the stick clean off, like a kid snapping the thumbstick on a cheap RC car transmitter.
Flat, solid base with sucker cups and a nice big lollipop or fighter jet (ribbed for your pleasure!) type stick coming out of it, with either a couple of clicky buttons on the base, or a trigger-and-hat combi on top of the stick itself... much better.

Yeah, the one I have is surprisingly hard to get out once it's back in the pad it's got white stress marks on it so a bit wary of treating it hard these days, starting to use emulators for stuff now with a couple of systems dying and peripherals looking worse for wear.

Problem I have with emulators is it's quite easy to lose them on hard disks
My mastersystem is a bit more of a tripping hazard. Do hope its unexpectedly protracted stay in the garage (and the atari's, in a cupboard since assaulted with plaster dust) hasn't ruined it too badly.

x-com wiki's bug page [http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Known_Bugs] near the bottom under other bugs. I have three different copies and they all display it.

Eh, I'll take it on trust. Not like I'm going to be firing it back up any time soon. Works best as a team thing really - make joint decisions in the strategy part, then each take a soldier (or subgroup) each for the isometrics. Good way of having collab multiplayer before the internet was either affordable, interesting or useful.

I dunno, of course I've been reduced to runnning down the last wave of grunts but it just felt a bit mechanical to me RTS's leave me feeling that its obvious what to do next and even if it fails I have a given amount of gambits left, no real engagement. once a missions done it just feels 'solved'.

Sounds like maybe you were just too goddamn good at them to get much enjoyment! Kind of like my grandad... he's so good at scrabble that he finds it depressingly dull and boring. If you're always going to win, then there's no challenge, and no real game.

I guess that's why I get hammered in even semi-serious competitive play so kudos to others for their skills.

Then again .... hmm. Dunno.
But if it ain't your thing, it ain't your thing.


Others: (I may have to re-edit this)

The "catching monkeys" was surely Ape Escape.

Hear hear for "not all games over 8 years old are the same retro thing". Just the same way that all music, film etc over 10 years old is far from the same. But the n00bs will still keep making that mistake until someone comes and schools them... Raised on a diet of my parents' own far-reaching tastes, as well as the radio hits, I think I died a little on hearing a 10-yrs-younger cousin saying she doesn't listen to anything more than a couple years old because it's all the same awful crap. Like, my 3rd ever CD (early 90s) was something from '85, and the 4th a selection of hits from another band spanning back to the 70s... and if you don't look any further back, well, you miss Elvis for a start. Corny choice maybe, but come on now...
I mean, even within those eras themselves, there was a massive diversity, and the leaps in processing power, memory, load speed and graphics/sound were at LEAST as fundamental from '82 thru '93 as the following 11 years. Well, except maybe the coming of 3D accelerators and optical disks; everything else has just been so much refinement on the same theme. There's not a big mental leap from Turbo Esprit or Resolution 101 to Driver et al, Wolfenstein to Doom 3, Mercenary/Damocles to... shit, I don't think there is anything comparable (not because there can't be, just because no-one's done anything like that for a while). But the latter gave you a whole, 3D rendered solar system to explore in realtime. In like 1991. Mario Bros 3 on the NES it most certainly ain't.

Serenegoose: Dune 2 on the Megadrive was hard for the exact same reason Cannon Fodder and Lemmings were infuriatingly difficult on that and similar platforms - you're trying to control something designed for a mouse interface (D2 being an Amiga/PC title primarily) with an 8-way DPad. It will only end in tears. Hence stuff like the semi-abortive SNES mouse...

Talon_Skywarp: Allow me to introduce you to a little thing called I Wanna Be The Guy...
("everything kills you" is a time honoured platformer tradition, it's not a bad thing. it just hones your sense of self preservation, and a hope that, at least, the powerups aren't fatal)