Steven wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 6:27 am
I sometimes see people say this sort of thing online and it pisses me off and makes me think it's just an excuse for being bad, but then I think of stuff like Geese, Rugal, Parace L'sia, Inbachi, and the entirety of games like Same! Same! Same! 1P.
I've only been playing arcade games semi-seriously for about a year and half now and I don't have that many arcade 1CCs, so I don't know. What do
you think?
My opinion...(apologies to previous posters who will think I am shamelessly ignoring their relevant comments).
There should be an interview with an SNK developer from their pre-Neo Geo days on shmups scanlations or whatever the website is called (BIL, please save me with a link!). I am pretty sure that he described how they were getting really worried on some title not being difficult enough that people would insert coins every two minutes or so. If you have patience, you could also find online images of company flyers that promise operators games difficult enough to warrant players pumping credits at a brisk pace. My uncle had an arcade and often ranked up the difficulty of games as soon as the average time for a play would go beyond five minutes. So, yes, I played a lot of arcade games at higher difficulty levels than default (e.g. my uncle maxed out
King of Dragon's difficulty because there were people 1-cc'ing it after 4 days or so...bad news for business).
Fun fact: the
Falsificare crowd at some point (2006, 2007) spent copious amounts of time claiming that my uncle would do that on my request, so that I could get higher scores via higher difficulty (i.e. I was a clairvoyant at 11, in 1991, planning my
falsificare shenanigans 15 years in advance). That was...interesting, in the British sense of the word (and I guess they still keep making these claims, early in their own '50s).
So yes, there has been an initial period in arcade gaming history which programmers had to pursue brutal design philosophies imposed by evil capitalism on an emergent market (...and I think that Jehu points out that it is
sub-optimal). I would go on and say that some programmers were more oriented towards proposing a fair though remarkably hard challenge to players (BIL will probably mention IREM interviews here), whereas others were content with "dodge this, dude" simpler approaches to design (lack of psychology/business background knowledge?). The medium was young, so I guess that programmers had to explore and evaluate design philosophies by checking what would sell in the arcade (e.g. 'yes, people will insert coins every two minutes and also set the cab on fire after the sixth coin. Back to the drawing board').
Over time, younger generations of programmers should have developed some working knowledge of design philosophies that work for everyone (operators and players), so we might say that the "stealing-quarters" part might have become more nuanced. Some US versions of Konami games nevertheless make me believe that some markets required players to pump coins in, full stop, at any age/stage (or: please try to play
The Simpsons US vs.
The Simpsons JP, and tell me if you notice any differences in difficulty).
I have no idea if an arcade market exists now and how does it work (but Dan76's post is telling). Still, I guess that programmers making arcade games these days might have learnt something in their "design philosophy" classes (i.e. there are "videogame programming" degrees around the world: some users here
teach in them) or from their older colleagues (i.e. old glories from the '80s should now be senior management in their '60s, and may say things such as "re-design this level from scratch, it would have been too difficult in the '80s!"). Maybe they don't, and the current philosophy has been reduced to "pay every X minutes" (again, Dan76's post is telling). I'd even throw in a "Japanese vs. non-Japanese arcade games and philosophies", but I actually have only some experience with '80s Atari games, so it's better if I leave the topic aside.
After all, capitalism works on separating money from their owners, especially if they are fat and dumb (again, please note the Konami US games case). Depending on the single specific game and the skills of the single specific player, the theft part might be more or less successful, more or less occurring early in the game, and so on. Arcade videogames exploded more or less in the 1980s, and a brief look at a history wiki tells us that capitalism was soaring in the 1980s (in tandem with getting heavily fist-fucked by corporations and governments, for the joy of the poor masses waiting for emancipation).
I mean: Rugal was not the first enemy/team in
KOF'94, was it? If you can reach him on one credit, you should have played for at least half an hour with pocket change as a price. That's not too shabby, so SNK programmers decided that kids had to pump coins trying to beat the magnificent bastard at least once. My own subjective experience (01/09/1994, my uncle's arcade, 10.10 pm, almost 14 years of age) was that I reached Rugal for the first time at the 12th attempt in grand total, and then pumped 11 credits only to get my ass handed down every time, snap at the game and trigger my uncle's appearance behind me just saying: "Touch the cab and I will rip your arms away. How do you plan on playing VGs without arms, uh? Feet and dick?" (no, I didn't defecate in my pants but I was close to it. My uncle was and still is scary). Thieving designers creating bollocks levels/enemies may still lurk around: they probably failed "level design 1.01" and/or their bosses said "we need more money now! More irrational challenges, pronto!".
Still reading?
Of course I did beat Rugal at some later stage, and ended up learning how to consistently 1-CC the game with all teams. Luckily, my uncle also knew well that the main source of income from the game was in the VS. mode and the casual players, for obvious reasons. So, no difficulty increase. More in general, there was no financial issue for him in having a few skilled players at the arcade (say, 2-3% out of all customers...once he mentioned this percentage range, which probably corresponded to no more than 20 people getting 1-CC's). Programmers and companies, though, had to guarantee that arcade owners could perform legalised thievery from customers in relatively subtle forms. I don't
believe that other forms of entertainment work differently, under a capitalist economy.
A final plea for forgiveness after writing all this nonsense: If you wanted a less long-winded and much more simplistic answer, you could have just checked in with "modern videogame journalist #23.X", or something. I am all for the TL;DR posts that try to make a nuanced point via sometimes convoluted passages. You didn't say that we had a word limit, did you?
OK, OK.
So yes, arcade games are designed to steal your money, but if and only if you approach them in a completely clueless way. Or: they were designed to do a lot of different things. So, don't obsess over one aspect at the cost of ignoring everything else, which might sound like the most outstandingly banal suggestion ever. Be a smartie and figure out how to steal enjoyment out of them. It would have driven the programmers (of the time) and arcade owners (of today) crazy, especially when they resorted to dodgy methods to win at all costs (e.g. ramping up the difficulty, designing shitty levels, you name it). It's just playing a game about games, after all.
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
The general public enjoy all kinds of weak shit I've zero interest in. \(˘w˘)/
Maybe they played it like Jerry's NES Rygar review... you know, absorbing enemy attacks with your character's face? That doesn't work, you'll get buttfucked into next Christmas. You want to use your i-frames and good spacing, like in the arcade Rygar!
He once said he'd have made NG about an hour long tops, if they'd have let him. 
