Video Games Were Harder Back in the Day!


Orion4874

Mega GP Mania
Joined
May 17, 2009
Messages
1,426
Age
50
Location
North Brunswick, New Jersey
Given the mathematical difficulty of these games that's covered in the article, it's now even more interesting to me how the general fall of difficulty in video games seems to have coincided with widely-reported lowering of standards in the education system, and the rise of an entitlement-society that values status more than skill, and which by and large does not focus on the latter or even outright scorns the pursuit of it.


That said, I consider many of the games cited there to be quite easy - what would their findings be with the Mega Man series?
grin.gif
 
If anything video games are harder now, simply because they're not as interesting. In fact, they can get boring and most of them are a chore to play. Nothing much this generation holds my interest, unless it's Fallout.
 
If anything video games are harder now, simply because they're not as interesting. In fact, they can get boring and most of them are a chore to play. Nothing much this generation holds my interest, unless it's Fallout.
Oh, I know what you mean, but that's an entirely different type of difficulty in playing them (or trying to), I think. :p
 
Games today i might click the continue button a couple times,


Games back in the day i would often be pumping more 20p's into the slot within a matter of minutes.


I think definitely harder back in the day.


Some shooters in particular would have you put your money in and literally just end your credit in a matter of seconds in a screen full up of bullets, leaving you to load more 20p's to catch the continue countdown.


Modern games i find let you survive longer.


or, i couldve just been pretty lame at some games in those days, lets not rule that option out eh.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
tell me about it, im sure there were times when i was young when i would have taken a quid from my nan - who used to take me to the arcades on the coast - only to beg for another one within 60 seconds.


And i more often than not got it, bless her
 
Hardest old skool arcade game evur?


I remember Star Wars ROTJ used to rinse my credit. Insert coin, go, hit tree, die, repeat.


Also Hard Driving, I used to get cussed by my old man on that one, he'd watch me put a quid in, drive real slow for a bit, crash, die, ask for another quid.


Had to progress though, and that takes additional quids eh. He never understood.
 
Hellfire was a pretty hard shoot'em up.


Gynoug (wings of wor) too.


Of course Ghouls'n ghosts.


And many others ^^, especially arcade games.
 
Well, I remember it took me a while to get all Levels (including secrets) of Super Mario World, whereas playing New Super Mario Bros on DS was a breeze.


Finding all secret levels was no challenge at all.
 
i think difficulty has come down as a part of the luxury of game space memory.


originally with most games you were thrown right in the mix and expected to build up your skills in the game by overcoming the initial and prolonged difficult obstacles. now we tend to have 2 or even 3 hours of beginner introduction where the learning curve starts low and builds up slowly. you are shown the weapons, shown the different moves and it probably takes up a good few 100MB. this kind of issue hasn't really happened with fighters or shooters since with fighters they could just tweak the AIs and they are both well suited to arcade environments where making things super easy for a few hours probably isn't the best way to make a load of money!


i still think some gaming difficulty is there but its a delicate balance. there are some games i wouldn't have kept pressing through with the high initial difficulty level. and there are some modern games that are still very difficult, i mean i still cant get past that damned sand bird on super mario sunshine after a good few years. games like dark souls also show some move towards difficulty, though its obvious that a lower difficulty might make some games more accessible to a wider market. then there are the games that are just so poorly made that they become difficult, which does seem to happen more often than not.


definitely interesting though!
 
The study doesn't say that the game are hard. It says that it's hard to compute a solution for this game. It'll be very difficult to program an algorithm that will finish the game.


It doesn't mean it's hard for a human to do it. Compare to the travelling salesman problem: you have a list of places you need to go to, and you want to spend as little time as possible travelling. There's no simple algorithm to solve this problem, but any human with half a brain and access to a map can do a pretty good job at it.


And it doesn't mean more recent games are easier. I suspect that most recent games are NP-complete as well.
 
I think culture is a big part of game evolution. I wouldnt actually know but I always had the feeling games used to be made by teenage boys sitting around in closets when not sitting around in someones basement playing pen and paper rpgs. A game were you walk foward in a nice quiet peacuful forest then suddenly KABAAM you die from a dragon swallowing you hole whos head popped out of nowere, thats the kind of humor and imagination I would expect from such devs. And for me its sometimes tempting to do such things, I used to make Duke Nukem 3D maps for ex, my second best map was a series of deathtraps were a new player would no doubt be suprised resulting in countless deaths over and over again walking into trap after trap and having to figure out the solution by trial and error usualy cos of very unforgiving timelimits before unavoidable death.


Its certanly fun for a dev to make such things, I had a HUGE grin on my face during the entire construction of that map.


Would I have made such gameplay for a commercial game? Perhaps, but I wouldnt dare to sell it for more then pennies, and I would expect nomore then 10 people buying it, and 8 returning it along with a STRONGLY worded letter.


And it is certanly not the kind of games I enjoy playing myself! I tend to hate difficult games, but there are exceptions, I guess there always is.


Todays buissnessmen in the industry seem to be mostly in the buissness of making money rather then the buissness of making games, and they talk about ways of increasing profit rather then laughing at the ingenious deathtrap they just invented...


My dad played a lot of Zelda 1 on the NES, it was difficult but he could manage it, if he had played my deathtrap map on DN3D he would have died, not smiled, left the computer and never have thaught twice about the game ever again Im quite sure of it.


Also back in the days you had a controller with 2 buttons on it, today theres what? 20-237 or so. That in itself increases the difficulty, I hate when games tell me what buttons to press, but then when I played some slightly modern fps on PC I often go through large parts of the game without doing something like a special ducking move or whatever cos theres so many buttons I forget what they do...


I think the industry of buissness men are trying their best to make games sell as many copies as possible and thats why games are the way they are now, holding peoples hand and being easy and non frustrating and instead trying to wow people with cinematic scenes that look like hollywood movies or something.


I think instead of 1000 people working 6 years to put out one single game that playes movie sequences for 4 hour and then declare THE END and roll a 20 minutes credits list, I think those 1000 people should make like 200 games of different types, but then the already overflowing market would be even more overflowed.


I dont know, even though I like easy games I dont like the games of today, I want more control, I dont want to be told were to go and what to do, I wanna do things my way. I want the graphics to look like videogames rather then colorless hollywood warmovies, in old videogames you had patterns after the pixelresolution and such, you had strong colors, it used to be a marketing slogan how many colors a game could present on a single screen, all of that is gone now.
 
In many cases when games can't be said to have become easier, as such, they have become shorter. Either that or I play faster (maybe time has sped up, independently of me), the end result being the single player experience often feels like bad value for money.


Some genres have experienced a 'dumbing down' - Tomb Raider is a case in point. TR1 had a satisfying hardness/longevity balance. TR2 ramped up both. TR3 tipped the hardness (read:unfairness) balance quite a bit, then they lost the plot for a few years and returned with the hardness and longevity discarded entirely, with a dose of the dreaded 'quicktime events' thrown in to offend the seasoned player.


I imagine part of the logic must be that players like to 'win' consistently, and that if they aren't the ones paying for the games, they don't feel cheated when it's too easy. They just start pestering their paying parents for the sequel.
 
The old Arcade Games were built with the goal that the player loose. Easy to check because they just have no real "end". You play 'till you loose, thats it. Pretty interesting MAME history files I've read. :) "Marble Madness" was the first Arcade game you actualy could win. It had an real end.


But also Console Games were much harder back then, of course there you already could win. I still have no Idea how I ever managed to play through Alex Kidd in Miracle World on Master System. This game get's really hard at the end and you have maybe 4 or 5 lives in the entire game, no saves, no password, no energy bar, you die and that's it. I guess I couldn't play it again, it took ages and endless tries to make it through. I have not nearly the nerves or patience to do this again.
 
If you grew up in the one-hit-and-your-dead era of video gaming then you likely would find games easier today.


Many of our games required near perfect performance to beat and if you died even once you often could no longer finish the game as all your power-ups were gone.


Space Harrier comes to mind, after a certain point if you die just press reset. No point in going on unless your learning or you have no intentions of actually finishing the game.


Many of the games today hold your hand and guide you through, bleh! No tutorials in Rygar.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The study doesn't say that the game are hard. It says that it's hard to compute a solution for this game. It'll be very difficult to program an algorithm that will finish the game.


It doesn't mean it's hard for a human to do it. Compare to the travelling salesman problem: you have a list of places you need to go to, and you want to spend as little time as possible travelling. There's no simple algorithm to solve this problem, but any human with half a brain and access to a map can do a pretty good job at it.


And it doesn't mean more recent games are easier. I suspect that most recent games are NP-complete as well.

Glad to see someone responding to this actually knows what NP-Hard means ;p


What's important to note is that the problem is for generalizations of the games, where the maps are changed arbitrarily. The problem seems to be motivated by an interest in generating ideal speedruns. An interesting conclusion is that Zelda 2 was one of the games they found which is not NP-Hard (as compared to the others in the series), which is amusing (given the context of this thread anyway) since many consider it the most difficult game in the series.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top