Comment on Yeah, but...

1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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

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  • 1984@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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 not worth it.

    But games at home, at my commodore 64 or Amiga, we’re 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.

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    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      it didn’t help if you were in (eg) the uk where games cost £1 a go, rather than 25c. Which was nearly $2 in 1992, so 8x as expensive

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    • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The real scams were games with countdown timers that went down constantly unless you were able to get a lucky object. Notably, Gauntlet. You had to keep putting in quarters or you would die even if you were really good.

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  • 520@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • teamevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I still have my Nintendo power guide book for all the super Mario Bros, The legend of Zelda 1, link, all the mega Man games… And a few others. I also have two original NES systems, a super Nintendo, N64, PS2, and a Wii.

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      • 520@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Oh yeah! Forgot about that stuff lol

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  • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, I was surprised when I first started watching longplays and discovered that most 80s - 90s games took 20-30 minutes to beat if you knew what you were doing.

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  • Orbituary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Dragon Slayer.

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• CowsLookLikeMaps@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Gamers these days!

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• UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I meannnn I’m old, but easy games like Kirby were such a treat, it’s no surprise things went the way they did.

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• GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That is the most boomer shit I have ever heard. Games were difficult because the rental market was huge.

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  • samus12345@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Arcade games were difficult because they were the microtransactions of the day, and console games were difficult because that’s how you made a simple game last longer.

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  • panchzila@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Game developers didn’t profit from rents.

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    • teamevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The publishers did.

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      • panchzila@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Not as much as if there was no rental business. It was bad for them, Nintendo even tried to stop blockbuster from renting their games. They weren’t designing games thinking about the rentals.

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• Slow@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t know, but perhaps in america, in addition to the original consoles from Nintendo, no-name consoles were sold?

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  • rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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    • abfarid@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It was a Dendy, wasn’t it?

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      • rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Of course it was

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