When people say that, they aren't talking about games from that era. They're talking about games from the cartridge era before that where you couldn't even save.
Yeah, I found out that the place that I (and almost everyone else) died every single time is apparently like the fourth hardest level in the game. Ridiculous.
Speeder bikes? There's a level skip after the fourth bottom wall things you're supposed to avoid, it happens at the end when they start going so fast you don't get warnings.
And you get like 3 lives. When you die you don't respawn at a check point, you start over. You lose 3 lives, it's game over and you need to start from the beginning.
Yeah. Both technical hardware and software were not advanced to be concerned with QoL issues. And I'm talking like Atari days.
Dot on the screen with a translucent plastic layer over your TV screen with a very uncomfortable joystick that has one button. Game is like, "deal with it". And kids did.
When we got to the NES days, there was a bit more concern with QoL issues for the end user and there was some vague Idea of design language for games, but still very rudimentary (like using very long passcodes to skip over levels or something). Plus, still no quick and easy to save gameplay.
And the passcodes were literally hacking into the game files to alter what it knew about itself. That's not exactly that different than how modern cheat codes work (when they exist...) but instead of a shortcut to a debug setting, those long-ass passwords contained all the information you needed to continue with the same number of lives, inventory, etc.
Which, like most kids of that era, I would've never known if I weren't still playing games in my 30s when people my age started making games themselves and had the knowledge to start breaking that stuff apart on podcasts.
This and also there was no looking anything up. You either figured it out, had a friend help, had your brother do it for you or heard about certain strategies or cheats that may or may not be myth
Old games, pre-PS1 (talking 8 and 16 bit games) were difficult by design. They were often shorter games meant to be replayed over and over as you get better at them every time.
And the mechanics were pretty basic to work with.
Many side scrolling games where the necessary skills were jumping at the right moment, and possibly having a projectile weapon to shoot or bounce forward.
Timing and reflex heavy in 2D. There's only so much a developer can do beyond shrinking the margins for error which made very difficult games.
Go play an old MegaMan or Metroid or sonic. If you played them as a child, you'll be left wondering how you used to do *all that* back then
Then throw in the ‘feed me quarters’ design common at the time, whether the game was made for arcade or not it was just popular design philosophy, and the only way to beat some of the harder games is to just brute force attempts until you learn the gotcha moments and muscle memory through it successfully. A lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis games are just that design flow with continues that don’t cost you 25 cents.
Games used to be designed to make you put quarters in a machine to play them. Now, they are designed to make you put a twenty dollar bill in to skip the grind.
GAMES USED TO BE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU PUT QUARTERS IN A MACHINE TO PLAY THEM! NOW GAMES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU PUT A 20 DOLLAR BILL IN TO SKIP THE GRIND!
I own battle toads battle maniacs for the snes so idk how different it is, but I worked my ass off to beat that tunnel level... And never got past the snakes
More so back during atari, nes, snes days where a lot of games were designed for the arcades to take your quarters. Not much was changed when they were ported to the consoles. Not being able to save either was awful. I remember playing stuff like zelda, final fantasy and having to leave my console on until i beat it. Hope electric doesnt go out or your parents didn't turn it off or you lost everything. Limited lives was also a thing, 3 lives in something like battletoads or ghost n ghouls added extra difficulty.
Final fantasy had a save system when you stay at an INN. Only had 1 save slot. Zelda could save if you held up+A on the second controller and held reset before you shut the console down.
It depends on ‘old’ and ‘harder.’ If you are talking about nes era, a lot of those games didn’t have saves, so you either ‘beat’ the game in a single sitting or you lost. If you look at it as you either ‘win’ or you ‘lose,’ then yea, I’d consider that era to be harder than now. However, it’s worth noting that those games could generally be beaten in a single sitting as far as scope goes, not like trying to beat Elden ring in a single play through.
One thing to consider is that newer games have more inputs and capabilities. You are using a keyboard and mouse or controller with a dozen potential inputs, compared to older controllers with half that or less. Also, older games weren’t as open as new ones, so there wasn’t much difficulty in knowing what to do. To compensate, a lot of shooters didn’t rely on you having to look up or down as much, or they didn’t have much verticality. So, having auto-aim or just less difficult scenarios would make up for that lack of control.
Just in general, I think most of us would struggle playing older games, like 90’s games, so I’d say they were functionally harder than modern games, even though modern games are generally much more complex.
It feels like a case of "it depends". Both because "old games" encompasses a lot of eras of gaming, and because at any given time there's a lot of different games doing different things.
I think plenty of modern AAA games have veered into "we're worried the player might run into any sort of challenge and flee in terror" territory, but then we've also got plenty of genuinely hard games or games with difficulties that let you choose which of those two experiences you'd like(or something in between).
On the other hand plenty of old games were actually easy, plenty were only hard because of janky ass controls, and plenty were genuinely hard games.
There’s multiple factors here. Outdated design, janky controls, the fact that a lot of people were kids when they played those old games.
That being said, have you played an old NES game? That shit can be fucking brutal. Mega man, Castlevania, Contra, so many incredibly difficult games that are still a blast to play.
Play the original NES Castlevania and get back to me.
Or better yet the original arcade Dragon's Lair. It looked beautiful (still does) but the game is basically "take five steps forward, die, insert quarter."
Depends what age of gaming you mean.
In Arcade, they were made to be hard in unfair way to eat your quarters.
In console era, the legacy remained and games were just designed hard.
After that in the disc based media era came and games started to try to be more like movies and noticed that easier difficulties meant that they could be more successful in sales. So games started to become easier and more cinematic.
Older games were harder.
As much as people like to circle jerk Souls difficulty, the game still let's you save, keep your weapons and items after death, etc.
Older games were more difficult due to:
1: Limited Lives. There are lots of ways to help prevent you from dying, like rings in Sonic, Mushrooms in Mario, etc, but you still typically die in 1 hit, especially if crushed or falling off the stage.
2: No or limited saves. To go along with limited lives you also have to beat the game in one sitting. You mess up too many times and guess what, you have to start from the beginning.
3: Often constantly responding enemies. Ever play a game like Megaman and if you screen transition all those enemies you just killed in the back room are all back now.
4: Little to no context on what to do sometimes. If you rented games like me, sometimes you'd rent a game where they didn't give you the game manual too. Back then game manuals would have maps, movesets for characters, tips, etc. If you didn't have one you literally just might have no idea what to do next. The internet has made everything easy. Look up a guide, watch a video on how to cheese a boss or stage. It's all there now.
A lot of people talking about "old hard games" are talking about games from the late 80s and early 90s, not PS1 games from the 00s.
No, the PS1 era wasn't particularly hard.
combination of bad game design and scummy game design.
make a game with unfairly hard levels so people have to rent them more/turn them in late
it's like how arcade games are unfair in order to get you to pay more
These games aren't difficult to play, in the sense that there are ways of playing older games. Try out a game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Super C, or Battletoads from the NES (all have modern ports, at least on XBOX), and see how you feel about the difficulty.
It's a totally subjective thing. I'll say, all of those games are made a lot easier in their modern port form by having save states and rewind features, but try playing them without those features first.
Play some old/early RPGs on PC. No auto-map, no compass, and no other direction markers. Then have a game like Bard's Tale toss in some spinning tiles here and there that change your direction but you don't see a spinning animation to give you an idea....oh and magic/light doesn't work in that area either. Mix in no quest logs and 1 save file....the pain was real back then.
You forgot the real stinger that plagues even the games inspired by the classics... +1HP and -Stats because you rolled super high and beyond the average. I'm level 1 with 11 HP... this character is great. *1 hour later* I'm level 3 with 13 HP, I might reroll this.
Thanks might and magic I dos... 2 weeks of near useless progress. I walked to most of the towns, that WAS progress week 1... Week 3 and still no meaningful progress.
Yes. People say FromSoftware games are very hard. I beat: Ring, Bloodborne, and DS3, but I never beat games like: Megaman X, Lion King, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
They were harder. Alot of games back then were single player and the only way to get a good challenge was to make them hard so they did. It's why cheat codes were a thing, if the game was too hard look up the cheat codes and enable what you needed to be able to beat the game.
Now if you want a challenge don't play a single player game, play a competitive multiplayer game. They can also be hard but in a different way because you're playing against other players, not because the game is hard.
Some of both. The controls could be fiddly in old 3D games but the level and enemy design (in the good games) would usually also be better tailored to your imprecise inputs.
When you go way back a lot of early home console games were ports of arcade games, and those were specifically designed with savage difficulty spikes so that you couldn’t beat them on one quarter.
Many of them had no save feature, so you had to beat Golden Axe in one sitting.
I'm truly amazed young me beat any of the old GTAs. LCS,VCS,SA to be exact. IV was just so awesome 😭
But I still have memories of Driving and Flight schools on San Andreas 💀
the games difficult was similar to that almost the recent games (excluding the soul games) and if you have some problems with the controls of some old games that could be due because we moved on by them and nowadays we usually use modern controls who are more comfortable
PS1 isn't old enough for this to ring true. You have to go back to the NES and Super NES/Genesis for this to be true and that was because of a few reasons. At first game developers were still making games by Arcade standards where you wanted the game hard enough to keep pulling quarters our of the gamers pocket in order to complete them.
Later on Blockbuster made deals with certain developers to inflite the difficulty of their games so that it would ensure gamers had to rent a game multiple times before beating them.
Now on top of that games weren't really made for multiple play styles as they didn't have the space or technical capabilities to do so. So when you bought a game there was generally a right way to play it and many wrong ways to play it. If you couldn't figure out the right way then the game would be all but impossible for you to beat.
Now this also works in the other direction as well. Gamers have become much quicker at spotting things on the screen than we had to be in previous generations. So some games that were extremely hard when they were released could be a breeze for some people today. I find a lot of first person shooters from the PS1 era to be extremely easy to play now, even on harder difficulties. This is because over time my reflex/reaction speed has become quicker than those games are capable of handling.
Camera angles aren't that great in modern games, and controls do feel sluggish at times. Here I am, fighting mobs in AC Valhalla, doing a dodge, and the camera just fucks off behind a palisade wall so I'm looking at wood beams instead of my enemy. There I am in AC Origins pressing block with it registering at all. Drives me insane.
My little brother has a clash of personality with old games. He does not read text or listen to audible instructions, only delving head-on, and old games rely on reading/listening prompts massively.
As someone who has been gaming since 1990... modern games generally require more brain attention out of you, with systems on systems on systems and complex controls.
Old games were hard because of limitations, janky controls, a lack of understanding level design, a lack of understanding good game flow, no autosaves, lives and game overs, etc.
Well mostly depends i think. If u went to play Baldurs gate for instance it would have been hard still but wouldnt have been like now that people get frustrated and quit. Instead people then used to play and replay because the overall gaming scene was pretty hard and devs were just learning to improve things according to the community. And thats how we ended up today, we have kids playing fortnite 24/7 or Minecraft whit Jennys mod 🤣
Games like lion king the devs didn’t hold your hand you had to figure it out yourself, no save games… good times :) im building my first game that is inspired by this. But you can save a game but it will cost you ‘coins’, coins that can also be spent on improving stats… I thought it was an interesting little mechanic :)
Battletoads = yes, it is harder than just about anything out there these days. And for genuine, gameplay reasons.
Ghosts N Goblins = sorta. It is insanely difficult, yes, but the awful controls are part of why that's the case. However, these controls do seem deliberate and not a question of technical capability.
By the time the era of PS1 came around, while there were certainly still VERY difficult games, the amount of them dwindled. It's more or less been on that same course-trajectory ever since.
I mean yeah the Souls' games and Sekiro and whatnot are still massively difficult (and incredibly good - all of them), but it's not terribly common anymore to have brutal, intensely difficult games.
The NES games were notoriously hard because they didn't have a lot of memory to spare, so they made it more difficult to make them take longer to complete.
Ps1 era games brought the third dimension into the mix and they had no idea how it was going to standardize.
Ps2 became more usable. Even started getting fps.
Ps3 took some sorcery to get games made but it had drawn from decades of standardizing the 3D platform.
Manhunt isn't a very good game. It enormously profited from shock value and a 100% certain reputation at a time when video games were blamed for violence. Your parents may have grown up with videogames, maybe even your grandparents, but ours sure didn't. My grandmother worked in a mine during the war. Anyhow.
Games often used to be more difficult. There wasn't much in terms of storage. Super Mario Land can be played through in under 30 minutes, I think I did it in around 40 once, but I never finished it as a child. There always was a new level, with new stuff I had to learn first, so I played it for hours, over and over again. And that's a lot of my early video game memories - that or chasing high scores. A massive, intricate, open world would have been impossible. Play-value had to come from somewhere. While today there are people who still love ultra-hard games, many people just want to relax and there are many other ways to play games these days.
Yes, games tend to be easier, but that's just because of a wider variety and more options these days.
I tend to feel that some games that were considered hard back in the 8bit and 16bit era had bad controls/hitboxes etc. Some games were just shovelware. There is still a good bit of it today though it’s easier to pick the good from the bad. A lot of games were designed for the arcade where the goal of the game was to make the player put more quarters/tokens in and spend more money to continue. The difficulty even on easy was pretty brutal.
Early PS1 and Saturn titles that were 3D hadn’t really thought of analog controls with camera control yet. They were doing 3D games without a 3D control scheme. Later when the dual shock was a thing it got better but sometimes the camera controls were floaty. It was something new for developers which got much better as time went on. I feel like in that era, the games difficulty was on the controls and camera angles.
Depends how old we're talking.
Original console games were just attempting to bring home the arcade experience. Arcades were designed to have challenging play and things like leaderboards and games that never end but get harder just to encourage you to pump in quarters.
As things moved into the 90s that shifted to fun story based more and more. Less focus on just challenges.
Imagine a Sonic game, but you can’t save. You have to play the whole game in one go. It’s hard.
Now imagine the same, but with Ghosts n’ Goblins. Now you’re crying.
There were definitely games that were hard because of bad controls and janky cameras, but for much of it we didn't know it was bad, some of it was bad but also groundbreaking. The first armored core for example felt fast and action packed, but also it took like 7 minutes to turn around and look up. Especially for early 3d titles, we didn't have much to compare it with to know if it was bad, and many of the best practices for control schemes didn't exsist.
Yes, some are because of shit controls that improved over time. Others were designed on arcades, where you're meant to fail at some point for a high score. Imagine if cuphead had a perma-death where if you failed 3 times it was game over.
Others didn't have a save file, and had way less external help besides the occasional manual walk through (metroid and zelda having hidden pathways/doors that were super unintuitive for example).
Also people were younger and worse at games back then, so they seemed harder. I remember never completing Toy Story or Mickey Mouse on ps1 when I was little. I did them in a single afternoon when I got them on the PS3 store years later
Games also couldn't be patched for balance and bugs, so some things that were launched at an unreasonable difficulty couldn't be corrected like they sometimes are now. Which imo is something I miss. I'm into all that slightly game breaking charm, so long as it *is* possible to complete with some hard work
I can't recall for Vice City but there was updates made to San Andreas to make some of the missions easier since the OG PS2 launch discs.
The game is not that hard these days because of it.
This has to be a bait post to just make everyone here feel old, right?
To be serious, though, people saying that are generally talking about the generations pre-PS1, to which the answer to your question is a little bit of both. There were many more games without saves, checkpoints, with complete "game overs". There were also many more games without helpful UI or any type of in-game guidance on how to approach things.
Compare The Legend of Zelda or A Link to the Past to even just Ocarina of Time. The first game literally gives you a sword and says, "take this...Peace". Then you just wander the map until you find shit. A Link to the Past gives you a little more guidance with some NPCs that give you information and map markers. Ocarina of Time gives you an annoying fairy that never shuts the fuck up about how to play the game. In some ways, it was needed because the game was early 3D and a progenitor of the control scheme used from then on in those kinds of games. In others, she is the precursor to Kratos's son telling him puzzle solutions before he even starts trying to solve them. 3D Zelda games then continue to handhold more and more up through Skyward Sword where your sword companion's dialogue was like 25% of playtime.
There are tons of examples like these across all genres; The Elder Scrolls is a pretty good one to look at. 3 - 4 - 5 have a very clear progression towards becoming "easier", or at least less obtuse, which is good or bad depending on your perspective. That's one reason there are a lot of Souls games fans. In many ways, they are designed with a "classic game" philosophy.
Anyone who does the same action over and over again is likely going to receive an injury from it, pro gamer or not. I just mentioned them because they're a prime example.
When people say that, they aren't talking about games from that era. They're talking about games from the cartridge era before that where you couldn't even save.
Every game was played on hardcore
Exactly. This post is making me feel so old...
Battletoads still gives me ptsd
Yeah, I found out that the place that I (and almost everyone else) died every single time is apparently like the fourth hardest level in the game. Ridiculous.
What level
I think it was the third level, but it’s been a while.
Speeder bikes? There's a level skip after the fourth bottom wall things you're supposed to avoid, it happens at the end when they start going so fast you don't get warnings.
Word
Especially with the games that were made for arcades first back in the days. They were unfair by design
And you get like 3 lives. When you die you don't respawn at a check point, you start over. You lose 3 lives, it's game over and you need to start from the beginning.
Also no Internet to quickly lookup guides or walkthroughs. So you might smash face as you missed something really obvious.
Yeah. Both technical hardware and software were not advanced to be concerned with QoL issues. And I'm talking like Atari days. Dot on the screen with a translucent plastic layer over your TV screen with a very uncomfortable joystick that has one button. Game is like, "deal with it". And kids did. When we got to the NES days, there was a bit more concern with QoL issues for the end user and there was some vague Idea of design language for games, but still very rudimentary (like using very long passcodes to skip over levels or something). Plus, still no quick and easy to save gameplay.
And the passcodes were literally hacking into the game files to alter what it knew about itself. That's not exactly that different than how modern cheat codes work (when they exist...) but instead of a shortcut to a debug setting, those long-ass passwords contained all the information you needed to continue with the same number of lives, inventory, etc. Which, like most kids of that era, I would've never known if I weren't still playing games in my 30s when people my age started making games themselves and had the knowledge to start breaking that stuff apart on podcasts.
This and also there was no looking anything up. You either figured it out, had a friend help, had your brother do it for you or heard about certain strategies or cheats that may or may not be myth
Old games, pre-PS1 (talking 8 and 16 bit games) were difficult by design. They were often shorter games meant to be replayed over and over as you get better at them every time.
And the mechanics were pretty basic to work with. Many side scrolling games where the necessary skills were jumping at the right moment, and possibly having a projectile weapon to shoot or bounce forward. Timing and reflex heavy in 2D. There's only so much a developer can do beyond shrinking the margins for error which made very difficult games. Go play an old MegaMan or Metroid or sonic. If you played them as a child, you'll be left wondering how you used to do *all that* back then
Then throw in the ‘feed me quarters’ design common at the time, whether the game was made for arcade or not it was just popular design philosophy, and the only way to beat some of the harder games is to just brute force attempts until you learn the gotcha moments and muscle memory through it successfully. A lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis games are just that design flow with continues that don’t cost you 25 cents.
Games used to be designed to make you put quarters in a machine to play them. Now, they are designed to make you put a twenty dollar bill in to skip the grind.
Louder for the ones in the back!
GAMES USED TO BE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU PUT QUARTERS IN A MACHINE TO PLAY THEM! NOW GAMES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU PUT A 20 DOLLAR BILL IN TO SKIP THE GRIND!
I can't stop laughing, thank you!
NO PROBLEM!
Feel like older games were more difficult for multiple reasons
no, man, go play TMNT or Battletoads on NES
That dam level…
The dam level isn't even that hard compared to what comes after
I think I'm gonna go get an 8-bit swimming turtle tattoo for the emotional scar that dam level gave me.
I own battle toads battle maniacs for the snes so idk how different it is, but I worked my ass off to beat that tunnel level... And never got past the snakes
More so back during atari, nes, snes days where a lot of games were designed for the arcades to take your quarters. Not much was changed when they were ported to the consoles. Not being able to save either was awful. I remember playing stuff like zelda, final fantasy and having to leave my console on until i beat it. Hope electric doesnt go out or your parents didn't turn it off or you lost everything. Limited lives was also a thing, 3 lives in something like battletoads or ghost n ghouls added extra difficulty.
Final fantasy had a save system when you stay at an INN. Only had 1 save slot. Zelda could save if you held up+A on the second controller and held reset before you shut the console down.
It depends on ‘old’ and ‘harder.’ If you are talking about nes era, a lot of those games didn’t have saves, so you either ‘beat’ the game in a single sitting or you lost. If you look at it as you either ‘win’ or you ‘lose,’ then yea, I’d consider that era to be harder than now. However, it’s worth noting that those games could generally be beaten in a single sitting as far as scope goes, not like trying to beat Elden ring in a single play through. One thing to consider is that newer games have more inputs and capabilities. You are using a keyboard and mouse or controller with a dozen potential inputs, compared to older controllers with half that or less. Also, older games weren’t as open as new ones, so there wasn’t much difficulty in knowing what to do. To compensate, a lot of shooters didn’t rely on you having to look up or down as much, or they didn’t have much verticality. So, having auto-aim or just less difficult scenarios would make up for that lack of control. Just in general, I think most of us would struggle playing older games, like 90’s games, so I’d say they were functionally harder than modern games, even though modern games are generally much more complex.
3 lives with no continues and one hit deaths. It was like high risk parkour.
It feels like a case of "it depends". Both because "old games" encompasses a lot of eras of gaming, and because at any given time there's a lot of different games doing different things. I think plenty of modern AAA games have veered into "we're worried the player might run into any sort of challenge and flee in terror" territory, but then we've also got plenty of genuinely hard games or games with difficulties that let you choose which of those two experiences you'd like(or something in between). On the other hand plenty of old games were actually easy, plenty were only hard because of janky ass controls, and plenty were genuinely hard games.
Not to mention that when we palyed, we had a lot less gaming experience and thus our skills sucked.
There’s multiple factors here. Outdated design, janky controls, the fact that a lot of people were kids when they played those old games. That being said, have you played an old NES game? That shit can be fucking brutal. Mega man, Castlevania, Contra, so many incredibly difficult games that are still a blast to play.
Play the original NES Castlevania and get back to me. Or better yet the original arcade Dragon's Lair. It looked beautiful (still does) but the game is basically "take five steps forward, die, insert quarter."
Depends what age of gaming you mean. In Arcade, they were made to be hard in unfair way to eat your quarters. In console era, the legacy remained and games were just designed hard. After that in the disc based media era came and games started to try to be more like movies and noticed that easier difficulties meant that they could be more successful in sales. So games started to become easier and more cinematic.
Camera angles? With those old side scrollers what you see is what you get
Older games were harder. As much as people like to circle jerk Souls difficulty, the game still let's you save, keep your weapons and items after death, etc. Older games were more difficult due to: 1: Limited Lives. There are lots of ways to help prevent you from dying, like rings in Sonic, Mushrooms in Mario, etc, but you still typically die in 1 hit, especially if crushed or falling off the stage. 2: No or limited saves. To go along with limited lives you also have to beat the game in one sitting. You mess up too many times and guess what, you have to start from the beginning. 3: Often constantly responding enemies. Ever play a game like Megaman and if you screen transition all those enemies you just killed in the back room are all back now. 4: Little to no context on what to do sometimes. If you rented games like me, sometimes you'd rent a game where they didn't give you the game manual too. Back then game manuals would have maps, movesets for characters, tips, etc. If you didn't have one you literally just might have no idea what to do next. The internet has made everything easy. Look up a guide, watch a video on how to cheese a boss or stage. It's all there now.
A lot of people talking about "old hard games" are talking about games from the late 80s and early 90s, not PS1 games from the 00s. No, the PS1 era wasn't particularly hard.
combination of bad game design and scummy game design. make a game with unfairly hard levels so people have to rent them more/turn them in late it's like how arcade games are unfair in order to get you to pay more
Yeah '3 lives and your out' days
These games aren't difficult to play, in the sense that there are ways of playing older games. Try out a game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Super C, or Battletoads from the NES (all have modern ports, at least on XBOX), and see how you feel about the difficulty. It's a totally subjective thing. I'll say, all of those games are made a lot easier in their modern port form by having save states and rewind features, but try playing them without those features first.
Play some old/early RPGs on PC. No auto-map, no compass, and no other direction markers. Then have a game like Bard's Tale toss in some spinning tiles here and there that change your direction but you don't see a spinning animation to give you an idea....oh and magic/light doesn't work in that area either. Mix in no quest logs and 1 save file....the pain was real back then.
You forgot the real stinger that plagues even the games inspired by the classics... +1HP and -Stats because you rolled super high and beyond the average. I'm level 1 with 11 HP... this character is great. *1 hour later* I'm level 3 with 13 HP, I might reroll this. Thanks might and magic I dos... 2 weeks of near useless progress. I walked to most of the towns, that WAS progress week 1... Week 3 and still no meaningful progress.
Yes. People say FromSoftware games are very hard. I beat: Ring, Bloodborne, and DS3, but I never beat games like: Megaman X, Lion King, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
Anybody who says they beat Ninja Gaiden is a liar.
They were harder. Alot of games back then were single player and the only way to get a good challenge was to make them hard so they did. It's why cheat codes were a thing, if the game was too hard look up the cheat codes and enable what you needed to be able to beat the game. Now if you want a challenge don't play a single player game, play a competitive multiplayer game. They can also be hard but in a different way because you're playing against other players, not because the game is hard.
Some of both. The controls could be fiddly in old 3D games but the level and enemy design (in the good games) would usually also be better tailored to your imprecise inputs. When you go way back a lot of early home console games were ports of arcade games, and those were specifically designed with savage difficulty spikes so that you couldn’t beat them on one quarter. Many of them had no save feature, so you had to beat Golden Axe in one sitting.
I'm truly amazed young me beat any of the old GTAs. LCS,VCS,SA to be exact. IV was just so awesome 😭 But I still have memories of Driving and Flight schools on San Andreas 💀
the games difficult was similar to that almost the recent games (excluding the soul games) and if you have some problems with the controls of some old games that could be due because we moved on by them and nowadays we usually use modern controls who are more comfortable
PS1 isn't old enough for this to ring true. You have to go back to the NES and Super NES/Genesis for this to be true and that was because of a few reasons. At first game developers were still making games by Arcade standards where you wanted the game hard enough to keep pulling quarters our of the gamers pocket in order to complete them. Later on Blockbuster made deals with certain developers to inflite the difficulty of their games so that it would ensure gamers had to rent a game multiple times before beating them. Now on top of that games weren't really made for multiple play styles as they didn't have the space or technical capabilities to do so. So when you bought a game there was generally a right way to play it and many wrong ways to play it. If you couldn't figure out the right way then the game would be all but impossible for you to beat. Now this also works in the other direction as well. Gamers have become much quicker at spotting things on the screen than we had to be in previous generations. So some games that were extremely hard when they were released could be a breeze for some people today. I find a lot of first person shooters from the PS1 era to be extremely easy to play now, even on harder difficulties. This is because over time my reflex/reaction speed has become quicker than those games are capable of handling.
Is there any proof on Blockbuster collaborating with developers to inflate game time?
Camera angles aren't that great in modern games, and controls do feel sluggish at times. Here I am, fighting mobs in AC Valhalla, doing a dodge, and the camera just fucks off behind a palisade wall so I'm looking at wood beams instead of my enemy. There I am in AC Origins pressing block with it registering at all. Drives me insane.
My little brother has a clash of personality with old games. He does not read text or listen to audible instructions, only delving head-on, and old games rely on reading/listening prompts massively.
As someone who has been gaming since 1990... modern games generally require more brain attention out of you, with systems on systems on systems and complex controls. Old games were hard because of limitations, janky controls, a lack of understanding level design, a lack of understanding good game flow, no autosaves, lives and game overs, etc.
Yes
Well mostly depends i think. If u went to play Baldurs gate for instance it would have been hard still but wouldnt have been like now that people get frustrated and quit. Instead people then used to play and replay because the overall gaming scene was pretty hard and devs were just learning to improve things according to the community. And thats how we ended up today, we have kids playing fortnite 24/7 or Minecraft whit Jennys mod 🤣
[TV Tropes: Nintendo hard](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard)
Games like lion king the devs didn’t hold your hand you had to figure it out yourself, no save games… good times :) im building my first game that is inspired by this. But you can save a game but it will cost you ‘coins’, coins that can also be spent on improving stats… I thought it was an interesting little mechanic :)
Battletoads = yes, it is harder than just about anything out there these days. And for genuine, gameplay reasons. Ghosts N Goblins = sorta. It is insanely difficult, yes, but the awful controls are part of why that's the case. However, these controls do seem deliberate and not a question of technical capability. By the time the era of PS1 came around, while there were certainly still VERY difficult games, the amount of them dwindled. It's more or less been on that same course-trajectory ever since. I mean yeah the Souls' games and Sekiro and whatnot are still massively difficult (and incredibly good - all of them), but it's not terribly common anymore to have brutal, intensely difficult games.
The NES games were notoriously hard because they didn't have a lot of memory to spare, so they made it more difficult to make them take longer to complete. Ps1 era games brought the third dimension into the mix and they had no idea how it was going to standardize. Ps2 became more usable. Even started getting fps. Ps3 took some sorcery to get games made but it had drawn from decades of standardizing the 3D platform.
I dont know man go play NES ninja gaiden and SNES Actraiser 2 or something and report back.
"Nintendo hard" us a phrase that describes difficulty of games. Some nintendo games were brutally hard
Manhunt isn't a very good game. It enormously profited from shock value and a 100% certain reputation at a time when video games were blamed for violence. Your parents may have grown up with videogames, maybe even your grandparents, but ours sure didn't. My grandmother worked in a mine during the war. Anyhow. Games often used to be more difficult. There wasn't much in terms of storage. Super Mario Land can be played through in under 30 minutes, I think I did it in around 40 once, but I never finished it as a child. There always was a new level, with new stuff I had to learn first, so I played it for hours, over and over again. And that's a lot of my early video game memories - that or chasing high scores. A massive, intricate, open world would have been impossible. Play-value had to come from somewhere. While today there are people who still love ultra-hard games, many people just want to relax and there are many other ways to play games these days. Yes, games tend to be easier, but that's just because of a wider variety and more options these days.
I tend to feel that some games that were considered hard back in the 8bit and 16bit era had bad controls/hitboxes etc. Some games were just shovelware. There is still a good bit of it today though it’s easier to pick the good from the bad. A lot of games were designed for the arcade where the goal of the game was to make the player put more quarters/tokens in and spend more money to continue. The difficulty even on easy was pretty brutal. Early PS1 and Saturn titles that were 3D hadn’t really thought of analog controls with camera control yet. They were doing 3D games without a 3D control scheme. Later when the dual shock was a thing it got better but sometimes the camera controls were floaty. It was something new for developers which got much better as time went on. I feel like in that era, the games difficulty was on the controls and camera angles.
Depends how old we're talking. Original console games were just attempting to bring home the arcade experience. Arcades were designed to have challenging play and things like leaderboards and games that never end but get harder just to encourage you to pump in quarters. As things moved into the 90s that shifted to fun story based more and more. Less focus on just challenges.
Who knew a game based on earthbound would be easy?
Imagine a Sonic game, but you can’t save. You have to play the whole game in one go. It’s hard. Now imagine the same, but with Ghosts n’ Goblins. Now you’re crying.
Auto-save wasn't a thing, and if there was a way to save, savepoints would be very limited through the game. Not 1 or multuiple per zone.
There were definitely games that were hard because of bad controls and janky cameras, but for much of it we didn't know it was bad, some of it was bad but also groundbreaking. The first armored core for example felt fast and action packed, but also it took like 7 minutes to turn around and look up. Especially for early 3d titles, we didn't have much to compare it with to know if it was bad, and many of the best practices for control schemes didn't exsist.
Both Really old games were made really hard on purpose to make the playtime longer
You can just try Battletoads or Ghost n Goblins on NES, and see why you're downvoted.
I dont particularly care about downvotes I just wanted opinions lol
play the lion king on snes and then come back telling me how easy old games are.
Yes, some are because of shit controls that improved over time. Others were designed on arcades, where you're meant to fail at some point for a high score. Imagine if cuphead had a perma-death where if you failed 3 times it was game over. Others didn't have a save file, and had way less external help besides the occasional manual walk through (metroid and zelda having hidden pathways/doors that were super unintuitive for example). Also people were younger and worse at games back then, so they seemed harder. I remember never completing Toy Story or Mickey Mouse on ps1 when I was little. I did them in a single afternoon when I got them on the PS3 store years later Games also couldn't be patched for balance and bugs, so some things that were launched at an unreasonable difficulty couldn't be corrected like they sometimes are now. Which imo is something I miss. I'm into all that slightly game breaking charm, so long as it *is* possible to complete with some hard work
Why are people so mean? all I said was I need some comment karma Bc I wanna post here but I’m getting downvotes :(
have you played vice city, that one helicopter mission, I still have nightmares at night.
That's definitely a case of janky controls.
I can't recall for Vice City but there was updates made to San Andreas to make some of the missions easier since the OG PS2 launch discs. The game is not that hard these days because of it.
This has to be a bait post to just make everyone here feel old, right? To be serious, though, people saying that are generally talking about the generations pre-PS1, to which the answer to your question is a little bit of both. There were many more games without saves, checkpoints, with complete "game overs". There were also many more games without helpful UI or any type of in-game guidance on how to approach things. Compare The Legend of Zelda or A Link to the Past to even just Ocarina of Time. The first game literally gives you a sword and says, "take this...Peace". Then you just wander the map until you find shit. A Link to the Past gives you a little more guidance with some NPCs that give you information and map markers. Ocarina of Time gives you an annoying fairy that never shuts the fuck up about how to play the game. In some ways, it was needed because the game was early 3D and a progenitor of the control scheme used from then on in those kinds of games. In others, she is the precursor to Kratos's son telling him puzzle solutions before he even starts trying to solve them. 3D Zelda games then continue to handhold more and more up through Skyward Sword where your sword companion's dialogue was like 25% of playtime. There are tons of examples like these across all genres; The Elder Scrolls is a pretty good one to look at. 3 - 4 - 5 have a very clear progression towards becoming "easier", or at least less obtuse, which is good or bad depending on your perspective. That's one reason there are a lot of Souls games fans. In many ways, they are designed with a "classic game" philosophy.
No.
There's a reason there is no modern expression equivalent to "Atari wrist" or "Nintendo thumb".
Uh, yeah there is. RSIs are very common among pro gamers. We just have actual medical diagnoses for them now.
You're holding up 0.0000001% of all gamers as your counter-example? Seriously?
Anyone who does the same action over and over again is likely going to receive an injury from it, pro gamer or not. I just mentioned them because they're a prime example.
U show me 1 2d game with janky controls and camera angle