People hate arcade-style games, or all retro gaming is Zelda

[WelshMegalodon]

This blog post might be perfect fit for OP's mood.

While that article is indeed deeply flawed (as if anyone considers Tatsujin Oh a "casual" game), it does suggest something I've wondered about in the past, which is exactly how aware the console scene is of the home computer scene, and vice versa. Final Fantasy II is often bashed for its unconventional leveling system, but - as the CRPG Addict pointed out - Dungeon Master did something similar the year before and is widely regarded as an influential classic. (Of course, the leveling system was far from the only thing wrong with FFII.) Likewise, I've seen fairly popular Amiga titles like Lotus 2 (and of course, The Last Ninja and Shadow of the Beast) being received rather poorly by console gamers.

Many good things

The idea that "modern" gamers fail to see the value of difficulty (as you have defined it) rather than just hating it outright is incredibly tempting, though (as others in this thread and others have pointed out) it doesn't appear to gel with the amount of relatively high-level play found in certain multiplayer online games today.

Non-interactive narratives are a net detriment to the medium. Ocarina of Time was made worse by it. Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 is made worse by making you sit through 20 minutes of nothing before you get to murder your first slime.

A bit of atmosphere and world-building doesn't hurt as long as it supplements the gameplay rather than replacing it.

Just do what makes you happy.

I listen to "gamers" spout bullshit all the time.

Know what? I manage the sides of the screen. Don't stand there, dumb ass.
I memorized the map. I don't walk into pits.
I get out first time--every time. Maybe you suck at video games.
I find the icons I need and use my powers. There's too many pits and too little power for trail and error.
I only hunt two phone pieces and Elliott gets the last one. Why work harder? Gather Reeses Pieces and use them.

You suck at the game and you're doing it wrong, but you decided that Seanbaby knows best. Fuck that.

There's all kiinds of games. Play what you like.

I love them all. Even "bad" ones.

E.T. for the 2600 is indeed the poster child for a game that isn't as hard (or terrible) as people make it out to be.

Just wondering: was the

Spoiler

kneel with the red crystal at the wall

thing something people managed to figure out by themselves back in the day?

I haven't played it, but I seem to recall having heard something about the blue crystal being used in a similar manner and how that was supposed to have tipped you off.

Is this the whine about modern games thread? Count me in!

I had hoped for something a bit more nuanced than that, but it does seem to have gone in that direction. At least we're getting a good discussion out of it.

Some posts in this thread raise some really good points, and I agree with most of it. People today have a very different view on what a video game is, even people who have played classic video games for the past 30 years. Just recently I had a long discussion trying to argue why quicksaving does nothing to improve old games on the NES Classic, while people were claiming that it is pretty much necessary, as adults they don't have a lot of time to keep replaying the same stages over and over.

I doubt I have to explain to people in here why that feature removes almost everything that games like Mega Man and Contra are designed around. This is the same impression that gives people a general idea that the "lives" system is outdated, even retroactively in classic video games built around it. People see games like something you play from the beginning to the end to see it all. Not like a challenge that you have to beat.

What I consider most interesting in this debate is how people's view on classic arcade or 8bit titles has changed throughout time in order to compare them to what's currently coming out. I never heard the term "NES hard" until ten or so years ago, and the concept that every NES game is super hard was pretty new to me. While games like Mega Man are challenging enough that you have to put your mind to it and practice some of the more complicated bosses, they are definitely not their own category of hard! When I heard that the first Super Mario Bros. was "NES hard" I had no idea how to react. I doubt anyone who grew up with that game would consider it even the tiniest bit difficult. But I guess if you grew up with instant respawning, trying any game that requires you to jump to survive a bottomless pit would come across as "hard"...

Well put, though I'm not sure defining all of gaming as a "challenge that you have to beat" is the best way to go about it. Games like Rockman and Contra are certainly designed that way, but can the same be said for, say, Galaxy Force II? Durandal seems to disapprove of games that involve being a demigod in a sandbox, but it isn't an invalid form of gaming, merely a different genre from what was on most consoles back in the day.

By the way, all of the early Wizardry titles allowed for save scumming and consequently the 1980s equivalent of instant respawn, provided you had enough disks. This individual would have me believe that it was a fairly common practice for the genre. It doesn't belong in an arcade-style title, of course, but the mechanic itself isn't inherently offensive. I think Kanon gave you something like 50+ save slots to let you see all the endings.

[WelshMegalodon]

So we've established, as we have in the past, that the expectations for what constitutes a video game have changed drastically and that, in spite of the skill bar for certain modern genres being quite high, the arcade-style approach has fallen out of style due to the inability of the "modern" gamer to appreciate the value of what Durandal means by "difficulty".

These explain why shmups are such a niche genre, but perhaps not so much how they came to be that way. If, contrary to what Mr. "Exclusionary Gaming" claims, computer games did not in fact kill this style of play... what did?

It sure as hell wasn't 3D, because 3D arcade games kicked ass and no one in their right mind would cite FPS as a genre that's stayed faithful to its roots. Nor was it the rise of slow-paced, open-ended gaming (because we've had that) or narrative in games (because we've had that too).

And what's up with "Nintendo Hard", anyway? Sometimes I wonder whether NES-era gamers aren't conflating the arcade-style approach with the inability of their childhood selves to discern good games from bad. Like if they had been older back then they would have played Falcon 3.0 or something.

[ZacharyB]

I believe that people are just incredibly self-absorbed and will do anything to marginalize tastes that aren't representative of their own. The reason anyone would employ a sobriquet like "Nintendo Hard" in the first place is to say "not my hard," like the difficulty isn't worth it somehow, because it's specifically "Nintendo". They say things like that so that they can rationalize why they shouldn't be paid attention to, because they're different.

Most of the people alive (and playing video games) today did not grow up with the style of challenge that we grew up with. I am definitely not a skilled video game player, but I do not see any reason to distinguish difficulties as "old" and "new". They are trying to keep their own culture homogenous. Every kind of human prejudice works like this.

[BIL]

"Nintendo Hard" would ideally refer to binary, hollow, memorise to win game design. I can see the merit. That stuff did and does exist. Unfortunately scrubs on the internet tend to conflate it with marginally demanding games that have fisted them for being poor players. There's a whole cottage industry built around such nostalgising victim support groups (AVGN et al). Check out the Contra episode, where a humble ceiling flare skullfucks our heroes into the grave because they think it'll get tired of activating if they just keep jumping into it. As is frequently the case, that's not Nintendo Hard, that's Darwin Hard.

[BryanM]

Genre lifecycles peak and die. That's just how it goes. Happens to everything; DIKU clones have pretty much died off completely now after The Old Republic flopped. Nothing substantially new will really catch fire until they finally introduce realish Ai as a feature.

I've personally put over 100 hours into Dangun Feveron. I technically have the ability to clear any stage without losing a single life, but have never been able to accomplish such in a consecutive gauntlet. My best run was washing out by the stage 4 boss; the most I can ever even dream of accomplishing is dying to some random fluke fuckup in the middle of stage 5.

I'm not a gosu pro like some of you guys are, but I'm not a flipper child. I can push the fooking buttons using my human fingers. These kind of arcade games weren't designed to be beaten by human beings.

>100 hours. 5 stages. >20 hours a stage. Those damn things are an in-volatile part of my brain now. Spawn patterns. The line on the screen where the regenerating turrets stop regenerating. That funky beat that can't be stopped. You have to really, really like a game to put this much into it.

Which means if you don't like a single thing about an arcade style game, it's not gonna be something worth $20. Mushihimesama Futrai: I personally dislike stage 2. I absolutely loathe stage 3. I'll never put into this game a quarter of the time I did DF. Which is a shame - I absolutely love stage 4 and really like stage 5.

Super Mario World is a fundamentally very different reward structure. You beat a stage, the game rewards you with a new stage. But no matter how I might try - Dangun Feveron will never reward me with a new stage, ever.

(AVGN et al)

Friday the 13th is a uniquely bad game!

The only thing worse than being bad at Friday the 13th is being good at Friday the 13th.

A game that gets worse the better you get at it. It's like an inverse of what a great game is supposed to be.

[qmish]

Considering how in many stgs first stages are already hard enough and later stages are harder than hard and latest stages are "just die already"

I would like having a shmup which has like 10 stages with difficulty of DOJ's ST1, 8 stages with difficulty of ST2, 6 stages with difficulty of ST3, 4 stages a-la ST4 etc. (or vice versa - 4 easy stages, 8 medium stages, 10 hard stages etc.) Each stage being really different in layouts, enemies etc., not just rearranges of placements...

Now, how would you organize such huge pile? Maybe like DBCS, where you have many different chapters in CS mode, each of those chapters are like one typical arcade playthrough in amount of sublevels/time needed.

So you "1cc'ing" each chapter and than get access to new chapters, each is like new stg.

[Sumez]

Is this the whine about modern games thread? Count me in!

I had hoped for something a bit more nuanced than that, but it does seem to have gone in that direction. At least we're getting a good discussion out of it.

I hope my sarcasm wasn't lost on you.
Obviously, I play a lot of modern games, still buying many new games as they are released, just like most other people on this forum.

That said, of course there is an issue here to address, and I think it is definitely interesting to discuss and dissect the way "retro games" are perceived, and often completely misunderstood, in today's gaming media and communities.

[Sumez]

In the best of TV Tropes fashion, EVERY GAME EVER is "Nintendo hard" no matter how easy it is, because it's probably hard to some people out there, so they had to divide the examples up into several subpages by genre

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard

[Sumez]

Considering how in many stgs first stages are already hard enough and later stages are harder than hard and latest stages are "just die already"

I would like having a shmup which has like 10 stages with difficulty of DOJ's ST1, 8 stages with difficulty of ST2, 6 stages with difficulty of ST3, 4 stages a-la ST4 etc. (or vice versa - 4 easy stages, 8 medium stages, 10 hard stages etc.) Each stage being really different in layouts, enemies etc., not just rearranges of placements...

Now, how would you organize such huge pile? Maybe like DBCS, where you have many different chapters in CS mode, each of those chapters are like one typical arcade playthrough in amount of sublevels/time needed.

So you "1cc'ing" each chapter and than get access to new chapters, each is like new stg.

This is usually how "hard games" work nowadays. Offer the player a sense of progression while still maintaining truly well designed and challenging sections. Think roguelikes like Spelunky which allows you to unlock shortcuts, or the Souls games which are built on tons of uniquely difficult sections but never punish the player for failing, allowing them to slowly chip away at the game until it is conquered.
And for the real hardcore gamers, you could still go for all 10 stages in one big 1CC. I actually like your idea.
edit: Oh your idea featured 28 stages. That's a little much

[d0s]

If you're lucky enough to have an arcade with real games still in it close to you spend some time people watching to see some shit. The vast majority of people who even profess to like these games credit feed through them and play with no skill or even the desire for skill. It's seriously amazing to see people miss the point so much, even if you're not a superplayer the fun comes from seeing how high a score you personally can achieve or how long you can survive, not watch the game unfold like a cartoon you pay a quarter for every 30 seconds. I'm not saying that everyone who claims to be a fan of retro/arcade games has to get gud and be at some level of skill, or even compete with others' scores, just test your own goddamn limits!

[atheistgod1999]

In the best of TV Tropes fashion, EVERY GAME EVER is "Nintendo hard" no matter how easy it is, because it's probably hard to some people out there, so they had to divide the examples up into several subpages by genre

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard

Compared to other games in the series, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is this

[qmish]

^come on, it's usual flaws of every wiki-style sites.

Don't punch tvtropes too hard. It's amazing portal.

[Sumez]

I love TV Tropes.

But some times things just become a little too subjective.

[qmish]

Usually fansites where limited number of people make content are more truthful than wiki-style ones, yeah.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah TV Tropes is actually pretty decent for getting a quick overview of the premise, tone, and style of a work without really risking spoilers or doing a ton of googling for reviews. I occasionally give pages on there a brief skim for manga and games I'm considering reading and playing, etc.

Their always up-beat and positive attitude is somewhat endearingly dorky too. It's like listening to your little brother gush about how awesome his favorite Saturday morning cartoon is.

[BIL]

I've personally put over 100 hours into Dangun Feveron. I technically have the ability to clear any stage without losing a single life, but have never been able to accomplish such in a consecutive gauntlet. My best run was washing out by the stage 4 boss; the most I can ever even dream of accomplishing is dying to some random fluke fuckup in the middle of stage 5.

I'm not a gosu pro like some of you guys are, but I'm not a flipper child. I can push the fooking buttons using my human fingers. These kind of arcade games weren't designed to be beaten by human beings.

Not by functional human beings. Gotta keep that pecker up and lay down your soul to the gods rock n' roll. No backstage orgies and ODing on clarky cat at 27 in this scene, though. :[ A scholarly solitude of bread, water and monastic fappin beckons at the end of the line. 3;

Friday the 13th is a uniquely bad game!

The only thing worse than being bad at Friday the 13th is being good at Friday the 13th.

A game that gets worse the better you get at it. It's like an inverse of what a great game is supposed to be.

I really am fond of James and co. - this bit of goony horror always makes me laugh:

Spoiler

Problem is when they depart the nostalgic LJN ballpit (haha yeah, there sure were a lot of bad games lurking about the tape club! Sunny Ds all around!) for "hard gaming" (haha yeah, my ineffectual 7y/0 flipperbaby flailings got shut down hard by Castlevania too! so uh how bout them gas prices?). Suddenly the chummy common ground shrinks away and I'm slinking back here. You can't be a flipperbaby forever. :/

[d0s]

wtf is a flipperbaby

[BIL]

I think it's a poor player or something.

Personally, I just call 'em SHIT-EATIN' SCRUBS

[BryanM]

wtf is a flipperbaby

one who is a bit slow in the head because their parents were brother and sister

or someone whose DNA has turned them into a walrus from sitting in one place for too long

[IrishNinja]

i personally hate the way "arcade-like" for so many has equated the worst of quarter-muncher type behavior, rather than risk/reward balance and a game that opens up & becomes more enjoyable if you spend time learning & improving

[WelshMegalodon]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph ... st-3767742

Imagine a literary critic making the argument that liking books from twenty years ago is a quaint phenomenon best discussed within the framework of nostalgia, or a compensating mechanism for feeling sad while reading more advanced, modern books like Fifty Shades of Grey.

Because this guy is making that argument.

What would happen? He wouldn't be laughed at. The other literary critics would just stare at him without comprehension, or maybe one of them would make a dry chuckle -- "Our esteemed colleague is feeling frisky today, it seems. Well then, what else is on our agenda for tonight? ...Joyce? I thought so." -- and that would be it.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph ... st-3768115

A 20 year old entering a game school this year was born around the time the Playstation, Saturn, and Nintendo 64 hit the market and likely would have grown up with the Playstation 2. No sense of history. Didn't you know that Grand Theft Auto III invented open-world gameplay?

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-di ... -350241449

All these games are copycats of grand theft auto it started open world and always set the standard for open world games its the best that ever was and the best that ever did it.

And finally, one reason indie developers aren't the answer:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph ... st-3753550

If you are interested in having someone take a critical look at old games and evaluate things like their gameplay mechanics and other innards and worth of the storytelling from an objective standpoint and how they compare to today, the crowd that are pushing for critical theory and are still hung up about Roger Ebert not recognizing games as "art" is exactly the wrong crowd to explore it, you'll get them waxing lyrical about the newest Screensavers: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...h ... st-3487501 and explain to you how games shouldn't be fun and Arena is racist and ableist or otherwise "problematic", but will likely not get that much more. What they mean when they say games need to be "art" isn't King's Quest, Ultima, Civilization, X-Com or Monkey Island but Dear Esther, Gone Home and Mountain. Any kind of Gameplay or complexity is most often not regarded as part of the whole but some sort of obstacle to overcome so that we can have "art".

Shades of icycalm, I know, but these folks strike me as being free of any Übermensch-like qualities.

[Ed Oscuro]

Aspirations to be a critic is the mark of being a subhuman. Being in the T2 thread reminded me of this fact.

Seriously, who listens to NPR for the book review lady?

Evne so there's a critical failure in the attitude about fans having not believed the hype: Indeed a lot of old games don't match up with modern stuff, in the eyes of much of the gaming public, and it's offensive to say that player tastes are completely molded by the hype machine. Felipe backs off from claiming that there is a "set" gaming canon as he has to - even if you want to invoke serious academics, there are tons of reputable people who don't give a fuck about anybody but Joyce, or Edogawa Ranpo, etc. and so the notion that somebody isn't competent to comment on games from an era they specialize in because they haven't played ones they can't be arsed about is rather specious thinking. You can make some valid claim that they aren't culturally literate enough, which I suppose is fair except for the fact that everybody has to pick their battles; life's short. When I decide whether a game meets or doesn't meet my expectations, it's reasonable to take the attitude that decision can be made "in a vacuum;" and I could barely express to you how annoyed I get by the "it's okay but other games do it better" trend in games reviews which shows how carelessly invoking random other titles can muddy, not clarify, questions of game design excellence.

[Squire Grooktook]

I will just say that I think that the modern game industry has a lot of new problems in a lot of different areas, even if there are still many excellent games being made.

It was no golden age back in the early 2000's or 80's-90's, sturgeon's law was in full effect and we only remember the winners. But IMO back then 90% of everything was shit. Now 91% of everything is shit. And that extra percent stings.

I'm not even talking about "hardcore" or "arcade-style" games right now. I like and play lots of different types of games, and my console library has still gotten smaller and smaller with each generation. Most "major" developers just don't focus on games that interest me anymore, even if we're talking rpg's or adventure/story driven stuff.

[Ed Oscuro]

In that sense, if somebody wants to talk about why Skyrim is poop, I think you do better to start looking at the larger current gaming landscape. Morrowind's design is still relevant, but Morrowind wasn't Skyrim's competition.

Incidentally I don't think current gen gaming is really all that bad; it's just getting to be too musclebound; there's a lot of shortcuts and borrowings in gaming design just to get things out the door on time, so everything feels similar. After FO3 Skyrim was hardly the manna from heaven that it would have felt like in 2002, for instance.

[qmish]

Morrowind is good for interesting setting with unique atmosphere, but it's very meh if we talk mechanics, interface, combat etc. Skyrim was much more polished up and functional game (well, except for bugs as always) even if it's more "simplistic" and "downgraded". And i might say that best games Bethesda made was their 90s input when their RPGs were more like dungeon crawlers rather than LARP simulators, and Terminator fps games were solid.

[Obscura]

I will just say that I think that the modern game industry has a lot of new problems in a lot of different areas, even if there are still many excellent games being made.

It was no golden age back in the early 2000's or 80's-90's, sturgeon's law was in full effect and we only remember the winners. But IMO back then 90% of everything was shit. Now 91% of everything is shit. And that extra percent stings.

I'm not even talking about "hardcore" or "arcade-style" games right now. I like and play lots of different types of games, and my console library has still gotten smaller and smaller with each generation. Most "major" developers just don't focus on games that interest me anymore, even if we're talking rpg's or adventure/story driven stuff.

The current gen is better than the X360/PS3 gen with respect to game quality, though. Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, The Evil Within, Tales of Zestiria, etc. The only thing we're missing is a really good brawler, and Nier: Automata is coming in just a couple months to fill that gap.

[Ex_Mosquito]

To be fair arcade style games aren't for everyone, they're an acquired taste. In arcade style games for the most part you are harshly punished for your mistakes, often overly so. Grinding the same 20/30min game over weeks/months can feel like a chore, but personally I love it. I feel arcade style game are more like a puzzle to be solved that require creative thinking and accurate execution to overcome, most modern videogame fans just don't find that fun. Unfortunately these days with the advent of technology to make film-like experiences the challenge seems to have taken back seat as to not upset the player and to progress the 'experience' ( re-generating energy and auto-save...wtf) I can understand why they do it, it sells, but for me it doesn't feel like the videogames I loved growing up.

I try not to worry or get upset about it, just get on with life. I have a HUGE back catologe of arcade/16bit games that I want to get good at, far to many that I'll realisticlly have time to fully appreciate.

[charlie chong]

i think a lot of people pretend to like these games just to be cool.. you watch some you tube videos and it's like the guys aren't even using a brain.they just press right and sometimes the jump button until they land on some spikes or hit an enemy then complain about being hit,then they just do the same again and this is on sonic or something

[Marc]

I agree with certain sentiments, but I any believe any rational human being would try and decent fucking ET to prove their point.