I’m thinking about the AVGN and how Nintendo makes you pay to play shitty emulator games from like 50 years ago.
Especially for the very old games like atari lol
I will note that: “Games used to be hard as fuck for no reason, but now they’re easier because it turns out people don’t want to feel bad when they play. They like games that give them good feelings.” definitely is generally true, in that you’ll get more game sales. But there absolutely is a market for ‘hard games’. Dark Souls is the obvious jerk, but a lot of indie games with cult followings have that too: Enter the Gungeon, La-Mulana, Spelunky.
And like, yeah, those games will always be niche. But for those who like them, there’s nothing else on the market quite like it.
Here’s what it’s like to play a hard game.
Games changed to easy for a reason. Turns out, when people have some spare time, they don’t want to spend it feeling frustrated and angry.
Nah, that’s just dogshit game, that wasn’t even particularly liked at the time. There are plenty of old, hard games that hold up, even in the adventure genre.
Still, I’m not saying that toning down of difficult is bad by any stretch. It definitely made games more popular. I’m just saying there is a niche audience that likes that.
You can go and read the rest of the articles on that blog. There are a lot of them, going back years, and try to find the good games. They’re few and far between.
And with no internet, how were you supposed to know? The box promised jungle adventure with tigers and gorillas. Not hours of frustration.
I typically prefer fair but challenging games. I really enjoy touhou and super meat boy. I usually only play easier games if they have a good story or atmosphere (Yakuza for example) but I can see what you mean too.
I’m really enjoying that article lol. I love the part where the text gets inverted after an explosion. I have no idea how people were supposed to play those text based adventure games without looking at the source code. Like I can’t type “walk north” it has to be “go north” and I’m supposed to simply intuit that
If you liked that you’ll love this classic from the year 2000 by Old Man Murray. It had a huge impact, and it’s strange, if you read the Wikipedia article about the game it’s the creator playing defense and trying to fob off blame from herself to everyone else.
they weren’t hard for no reason, they were sucking quarters in arcades and spiking difficulty to mess with renting
I’m just quoting the person above me. But as much as you’re right for a lot of games, the same doesn’t really hold true for a lot of early PC games on tape or floppy.
Yeah those types of adventure games were cryptic from a combination of extending playtime, lack of technology to parse sentences, and a lack of understanding on how to explain stuff to players.
The extending playtime one is probably most important. These designers knew how small their games were and put a lot of obstacles in the way to keep players going with it. I played Zork as a kid and it took me weeks to finish. The current world record speedrun is 2 minutes 46 seconds. Zork was considered an enormous game when it came out.
