Do Quarter Munchers Actually Exist?

[ACSeraph]

OK, so I've taken an interest in learning some arcade games outside of the shmup genre, but it has me thinking about the dreaded quarter muchers we always heard about as kids.

I think its entirely possible that due to either shitty or malevolent design there are some games that are borderline impossible to clear on a credit, but how common is this really? I certainly don't want to invest a lot of time in a game that is truly bullshit in its design. But I'm not at all afraid of steep challenges. I think people have a tendancy to quickly label something a quarter muncher because its too hard for them and they don't want to/know how to learn to approach the game.

So then, do quarter munchers exist? If so how common is it? Can you give some examples of games to avoid?

Any genre including shmups can be considered for this topic, but this is only considering default settings. Obviously most arcade games can be pretty bullshit if the operator jacks up the difficulty.

[Hagane]

To me a game can only be considered a quarter muncher if clearing it doesn't depend on your skills but on luck or there's no actual valid strategy to clear it consistently. I can't really think of any game like that really. There might be games like Daimakaimura which have genuinely unfair things (like completely fucking you over if you happen to pick the wrong power up), but even that game can be cleared consistently.

I think it's more what you speak of: people not putting enough effort to figure things out and quickly dismissing a game because they can't bother to think of a way to beat it. Beat'em ups are perhaps the most common target of such way of thinking, even though they are perfectly fair games once you have a grasp on the basics.

[Ed Oscuro]

I think beat-em-ups are a fair target for this criticism if it takes a lot of practice to figure out the weak spots. Also, the recent discussion about the insane enemy damage in Armored Warriors was amusing.

But it seems to me that many players just do dumb things, like stand next to a stunned boss, and are surprised when something bad happens as a result. There's plenty you can't blame on the game.

Anyway, I'd say a game munches quarters if it takes a reasonable person making a good effort many failures to learn. Beat-em-ups are simply a bit more opaque than shmups, where it's almost always completely transparent if you are in danger. You can tell if a ship is going to get hit by a bullet with only two frames. On the other hand, in many beat-em-ups you have to get very close to an enemy and you have to learn that behavior. There isn't anything inherently wrong with this, though, and plenty of modern games have tried to solve this "problem" by becoming mind-numbingly easy to play in order to overcome the apparent frustration of having to actually observe enemies.

[Pretas]

Off the top of my head, Crime Fighters 1, NARC, Gauntlet, Pit Fighter, Guardians of the Hood, King of the Monsters 2, and most 2D light gun games are examples that can be classified as true quarter munchers. (Sadly, many of them are beat-em-ups.) Overall, quarter munching design is more prevalent in Western games than Japanese games, and JPN arcade games were not infrequently modified for their US versions to make them less fair, or to allow players to buy extra health mid-game - Konami being the guiltiest offender of this.

The Super Spy is an odd case. It's definitely a quarter muncher if you're trying for a 1CC, and there's a miniboss fight that spells certain doom if you don't have enough health going in. However, the game was intended to be played with a Neo-Geo memory card to save your progress.

Double Dragon 3 (Arcade) is the sleaziest quarter muncher I've seen. On the very first screen, you can enter a "Weapon Shop" to buy extra lives, moves, health and powerups for a coin each. It encourages you to pump enough money in at the beginning to make the entire game a cakewalk.

[Marble]

The short answer is yes, but most of them are western releases.

You don't have that 'weapon shop' crap in the Japanese version of Double Dragon III.

[boagman]

I would *definitely* say they exist, since some are just plain designed that way. Looking at something as blatantly blunt/honest as Gauntlet, there's no other way to define it other than "quarter muncher", in that no matter how you play it, you lose. There isn't enough health to be had in that game to allow the game to be played, even for a moderate amount of time, on a single quarter. Of course, that was back in the 1980s.

Want a more recent incarnation? You got it: "Target: Terror" by Raw Thrills was released within the last decade, and it's what I consider to be a categorically *unfair* quarter muncher. No matter how skilled a player/shot you are, after X amount of playing time, the machine offs you lickety-split in whatever fashion it deems necessary to make you deposit more cash. I've personally experienced the machine kill off a player with 4 lives left in less than 20 seconds, after they'd been played with precision, skill, and ability for more than 3 minutes solid, only getting tagged one time (5 lives per credit on this machine). It's all monitored and allotted.

I'd say that the first example is more fair to the player than the second...at least with the first example, you know what you're paying for. The second is far more deceptive.

[Sinful]

To me a game can only be considered a quarter muncher if clearing it doesn't depend on your skills but on luck or there's no actual valid strategy to clear it consistently.

This is around the lines I was thinking too.

I think beat-em-ups are a fair target for this criticism if it takes a lot of practice to figure out the weak spots.

lol, this was exactly what I was thinking too. Particulary Final Fight (can this even be cleared on 1cc or close to it?). As it always seems way cheaper to me then the SoR games. But it's not the only reason I prefer it over SoR... but I still I to try harder to learn FF for a more fair comparison. .... Actually, all Capcom beat'em ups (at least in the mold of FF/after FF came out) seem on the cheap side. But again, I really don't know for sure since I haven't bothered playing their beat'em ups enough to get any good... And I still prefer this over making games too easy.

The short answer is yes, but most of them are western releases.

Do you mean maybe the removing of checkpoints in some STGs? Where in a Japanese Shmups you if forces you to learn to play on 1cc, the US just wants your money till the end & not your skill... Not sure if I'm making sense? (I usually prefer checkpoints and/or whatever the original release is).

[AntiFritz]

What about dragons lair?

[hermit crab]

A lot of multiplayer games like TMNT were designed for quarter munching. You die but your friends keep playing the game... what are you gonna do, go home? No, you'll enter another one. Also I never heard of no 1CC bs before MAME, would only play that way if the beginning was so fun you wanted to play it again with your next credit. And I remember reading an interview of some Japanese (shmup?) dev, who was questioned about a ridiculously hard game and he just said that back then people didn't think 1CC was some kind of only way to play, so I wasn't alone. Wish I could remember who it was, I remember he wanted to do a tank game but "those don't sell" and wasn't allowed to. The interview might have been on hg101.

[KAI]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qause0z-9tM‎

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Overall, quarter munching design is more prevalent in Western games than Japanese games, and JPN arcade games were not infrequently modified for their US versions to make them less fair, or to allow players to buy extra health mid-game - Konami being the guiltiest offender of this.

Metamorphic Force is an otherwise good game that got turned into this. The European version changes the healthbar to a Gauntlet-style life drain, health items recover way less... and the American version adds on to that way higher difficulty (bosses have much more difficult versions of their attacks, there's a boss rush at stage 5 where you have to fight the old bosses in PAIRS, yeah good luck 1CCing that shit).

The Super Spy is an odd case. It's definitely a quarter muncher if you're trying for a 1CC, and there's a miniboss fight that spells certain doom if you don't have enough health going in. However, the game was intended to be played with a Neo-Geo memory card to save your progress.

Super Spy can be 1CC'd apparently, it's just a case of knowing what rooms not to enter because there's some unnecessary fights to avoid.

Looking at something as blatantly blunt/honest as Gauntlet, there's no other way to define it other than "quarter muncher", in that no matter how you play it, you lose. There isn't enough health to be had in that game to allow the game to be played, even for a moderate amount of time, on a single quarter.

Unless you're crazy good at the game. But most of this run consists of being hair-raisingly low on health, so yeah, Gauntlet doesn't like to play nice. It's not a 1CC either, despite being 2 hours long (does Gauntlet even end at some point?).

[Acid King]

I contemplated starting this exact thread a few days ago. It'd be nice to have a list of known/suspected quarter eaters on hand to reference when looking for something new to play or buy. It was actually the beat 'em up thread that got me considering it, as it got me playing some old ones in MAME, specifically the Neo Geo titles. It does seem like there are a number of games where it seems impossible to avoid taking damage regularly and I wonder how much of that is just the games not aging well and feeling loose/sloppy as a result or that I'm not playing conservatively enough. It's easy to forget that there are games where you can't just plow through a crowd of baddies by mashing the attack button, going from Sengoku 3 to Robo Army was a shock to the system, and you really have to approach the game methodically, one brief enemy/wave at a time.

[Skykid]

This is a no-brainer. All arcade games are designed to be quarter munchers, that's the nature of the business, drumming up money for the operator and cementing your brand as profitable.

The question is simply one of good and bad games; good being those that will challenge you for your cash, but are ultimately fair and learnable, and 1ccable. Bad being those that are almost purposely broken or ridiculously tough that are only designed to net coins and have no intention of offering an experience that can be conquered with reasonable practice.

Anyone who thinks Final Fight's last two stages weren't designed to squeeze the living hell out of the average punter's pocket doesn't have all their dogs barking. Doesn't ruin the game, just dulls its shine slightly.

[Drum]

There are games that are definitely - and admittedly - designed to fuck you up the ass that meet all of Hagane's standards for fairness, so I don't think that's complete.
Games that spring traps on you that can realistcally *only* be avoided by players who know it's coming - because they've failed it once already - are a form of quarter muncher, albeit a less obnoxious form than some. The original arcade version Contra does a real dick maneuver with the exploding bridge on stage 1 that simply can't realistically be avoided unless you died on it once (or happened to watch the attract mode, which I grant is a pretty big clue). The bridge explosion doesn't kill you in the NES version, which is pretty telling I'd say.
Strictly speaking, games like this can be beaten on one quarter - provided you have already dumped a lot of quarters into them.
These sorts of games are a little different from games that are simply very difficult but don't lead the player into inevitable failures, and different again from games where failure is inevitable on practically every playthrough.
So I'd say there are different tiers here.

[Ed Oscuro]

The original arcade version Contra does a real dick maneuver with the exploding bridge on stage 1 that simply can't realistically be avoided unless you died on it once (or happened to watch the attract mode, which I grant is a pretty big clue).

I have the same problem with the slope run in the original Strider.

[KAI]

Most of non-jap arcades are quarter munchers.

[Mischief Maker]

Would you consider Magic Sword to be a quarter-muncher, since health is constantly draining?

[Zerst]

Gauntlet has been mastered to the point where a couple people have played it for over 24 hours, and then given up with thousands and thousands of health waiting to tick down in order to enter their initials.

Definitely agree on Metamorphic Force's bullshit. The worst part about the life tick is that normally in the JP version only knockdown hits cause you to take damage, and light hits just stun you. Well in the US version, knockdowns take off a ton of health, and light hits take off a small amount. There is a section in the third stage of the game where a ton of little bugs come out and swarm you long enough for a bigger guy to possibly knock you down. You're stunlocked if they get you unless you get enough of them dead to make a gap in their conga line to recover. Well, they do full damage and can one shot you from full health in the US version. (It is a super fun game regardless of this).

Honorable mention to Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon. Normally in beatemups there's a hidden stage timer of roughly five minutes to stop players from stalling too much. The stages are just slightly long enough in PSSM that even a medium-skilled player is near-guaranteed to time out during the (already brutal) boss fights. You have to speedrun the hell out of each stage and beat the bosses fast as shit in order to not die to timeout. (It is a super fun game regardless of this).

[BryanM]

does Gauntlet even end at some point?

The original loops a finite number of rooms.

Personally I'd have gone the Pitfall route, randomly generated rooms with fixed seeds. But meh.

King of the Monsters 2

I'm still shocked and embittered about its grappling system. A "mash buttons!" indicator when mashing buttons does absolutely nothing.

So evil. So Japanese.

[SuperDeadite]

LaserDisk games. I love Timegal, but the time freeze parts are 100% guessing until you know the proper answer.

[GaijinPunch]

Gauntlet has been mastered to the point where a couple people have played it for over 24 hours, and then given up with thousands and thousands of health waiting to tick down in order to enter their initials.

One a single credit?
I always thought all the Atari games were all about making friends w/ the loser that worked at the arcade.

EDIT: Googling around, I found a thing were Atari was worried about 4-strangers playing a game together, although in theory it meant 4x the income. I read somewhere that Data East made the first simultaneous 2-player game, but I drink a lot.

[Hagane]

I think beat-em-ups are a fair target for this criticism if it takes a lot of practice to figure out the weak spots. Also, the recent discussion about the insane enemy damage in Armored Warriors was amusing.

They aren't, though. Most people just charge at enemies without any thought for strategy and positioning, get point blank from the front and mash attack, then cry cheap when that kills them. Dunno what "figuring weak spots" means since no Capcom beat'em up I played requires that. Beat'em ups are perfectly fair, one of the most accessible arcade genres. As long as you think a bit, that is.

[hermit crab]

I always thought all the Atari games were all about making friends w/ the loser that worked at the arcade.

You mean the guy that's living the dream, who bitter people that hate their own lives consider a loser?

[Zerst]

Gauntlet has been mastered to the point where a couple people have played it for over 24 hours, and then given up with thousands and thousands of health waiting to tick down in order to enter their initials.

One a single credit?

Dwayne Richard did it a bunch back in the 80s, apparently. And in an effort to re-practice to go for 48hours (there was a surge about 2-3 years ago of people playing endlessly looping arcade games trying to go for 48 in the TG scene), he played it for 16 hours as a warm-up in 2010. The video is unfortunately gone, but I personally watched a lot of the stream as he was playing.

http://www.justin.tv/drdreaddr/b/262333827
http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/foru ... l#msg32339

[Ed Oscuro]

Out of curiosity, who amongst us who plays a lot of beltscrollers plays a lot of the English-language ROM versions? Keep in mind that MAME has the "World" revision by default, and a lot of these seem to be more difficult than the Japanese version. And the U.S. versions, distributed in the region where I assume the term "quarter muncher" originated, are often worse than even those in terms of damage adjustments. So there is the question of the historical perspective here.

I think beat-em-ups are a fair target for this criticism if it takes a lot of practice to figure out the weak spots. Also, the recent discussion about the insane enemy damage in Armored Warriors was amusing.

They aren't, though. Most people just charge at enemies without any thought for strategy and positioning, get point blank from the front and mash attack, then cry cheap when that kills them. Dunno what "figuring weak spots" means since no Capcom beat'em up I played requires that. Beat'em ups are perfectly fair, one of the most accessible arcade genres. As long as you think a bit, that is.

Substitute "strategy and positioning" for "weak spots;" these are really equivalent terms. Yes, it's actually more complicated than a "weak spot" (or "safe spot") because it's not just being in the right place, but also being there at the right time, and also hitting the right button combo at that time. That's a lot to ask of most folks.

Many enemies in these games have a small range of motions, but any unique differences in how they act between different behaviors will have to be learned. I assume some games are better about this than others, but raising the "you have universal beltscrolling skills to deal with this" card doesn't fully account for the confusing effect different behaviors can have - there can be just one enemy that sticks out and confuses the player.

So if somebody fails one of those elements, they are going to take damage and have to try again. Add in a tendency to keep trying the same thing because it's a learned behavior and then you have a strong impediment to progress. I realize that it's not right to expect all games to be excellent, hand-holding training devices on what they want to do, but a complicated type of game like this needs to make clear what's required to survive if it wants mass appeal. At least for a home port this could be done without compromising the core game. In the arcades, it's harder, I'm sure.

The people who dismiss the importance of reflexes and accuracy are on another planet from many players, who are just as aware (but more troubled by) the progression curve: If your success rate per stage is only 1/3, you're only surviving two stages 1/9 of the time, and three stages 1/27th of the time - of course that only holds true if you really are just flailing, but there is still a fraction of the time even an average player with good skills might screw up (bad reflexes or dexterity can be a cause) and so that survival curve (surviving even 5/6 of the time per stage gets you to around 50% survival through three stages) still can be significant. Maybe it's just my equipment, but button combos tend to throw me for a loop. I simply have tons of trouble with the simple forward-down-back-forward type combos in Portrait of Ruin so I ignore those. That's another aspect to this; I think that for many people the good of being able to execute complex maneuvers and then chain them together is outweighed by their feelings of frustration with a complex input scheme, when that happens.

[Obiwanshinobi]

One quarter-munching trait is co-op in certain games where you return to a checkpoint after death in singleplayer, yet respawn immediately in co-op. In those games the presence of 2nd player alone, regardless of their skill, might be enough to haul you through obstacles you're not ready to overcome solitarily.
I don't mean games just easier in co-op (such as Guardian Force). I mean situations when co-op alters the rules.

[Nana]

Isn't the final boss of one of the Magical Drop games supposed to be literally impossible on one credit? I'd say that counts.

[Hagane]

Out of curiosity, who amongst us who plays a lot of beltscrollers plays a lot of the English-language ROM versions?

Shadow Over Mystara, Alien vs. Predator and The Punisher don't seem to have any differences regarding difficulty between regions. I prefer Japanese Punisher because for some reason in the US version they removed the flame effect from his flying kick, making things a bit confusing. Armored Warriors doesn't seem to be any different.

Substitute "strategy and positioning" for "weak spots;" these are really equivalent terms. Yes, it's actually more complicated than a "weak spot" (or "safe spot") because it's not just being in the right place, but also being there at the right time, and also hitting the right button combo at that time. That's a lot to ask of most folks.

They aren't the same at all. Anyone with knowledge on fighting games should know this. Correctly gauging your attack ranges, attacking smartly instead of blindly charging directly from the front, positioning yourself correctly on the screen by taking into account the enemies and their formations is not "finding weak spots". It's not like an STG where you find a flaw in a pattern and you can just stand there safely. And it's not asking a lot, it's just very basic stuff. Sounds complicated, but it's very intuitive.

Many enemies in these games have a small range of motions, but any unique differences in how they act between different behaviors will have to be learned. I assume some games are better about this than others, but raising the "you have universal beltscrolling skills to deal with this" card doesn't fully account for the confusing effect different behaviors can have - there can be just one enemy that sticks out and confuses the player.

Well yeah, that happens in every single game ever. Genres have basic skills that help you greatly even among different titles and belt scrollers are not an exception. These basics will help you see what's actually happening when you lose and let you form strategies, instead of just calling them cheap. Different enemy attacks and formations will require different strategies that you will optimize with time, but basics will let you advance farther, even if not as optimally as you could with more experience in that title in particular.

[Ed Oscuro]

Substitute "strategy and positioning" for "weak spots;" these are really equivalent terms. Yes, it's actually more complicated than a "weak spot" (or "safe spot") because it's not just being in the right place, but also being there at the right time, and also hitting the right button combo at that time. That's a lot to ask of most folks.

They aren't the same at all. Anyone with knowledge on fighting games should know this. Correctly gauging your attack ranges, attacking smartly instead of blindly charging directly from the front, positioning yourself correctly on the screen by taking into account the enemies and their formations is not "finding weak spots". It's not like an STG where you find a flaw in a pattern and you can just stand there safely. And it's not asking a lot, it's just very basic stuff. Sounds complicated, but it's very intuitive.

I'm very disappointed you let the point so fundamentally fly over your head. What you've said is equivalent to what I've said - don't you see where I specifically said it's not like a weak spot in specific ways? You quoted it. Anyway, it's a jumping off point for the discussion. Space and time are related.

Good on you for listing a variety of ways in which beltscrollers are confusing and unintuitive; I couldn't have done it better. I don't think you can automatically assume that even the SFII generation actually was composed of individuals who had a great grasp of the mechanics on average, or that every arcade had a strong scene (either competitive or cooperative in the case of beltscrollers). These are also, I should note, things that these games profit from and seem to require in many cases, while it doesn't take much forethought or planning to jump into a lightgun shooter or a shmup. Basically, I see that you agree with my basic contention - these games are more complicated than many other genres, at the same time that they have essentially no concessions to player training other than your starting health bar and the ability to put in another credit. I'm all for being realistic and using a good gameplay learning approach, but the fact is that these games have to make their case in a world where people don't have a clue. These games, as designed during that arcade era, are simply too extreme for many people. I'm not excusing people, but the fact is that those games have an image problem and you can't shove it all off on players. Few people even make them anymore - but shmups still get made in limited quantities.

Many enemies in these games have a small range of motions, but any unique differences in how they act between different behaviors will have to be learned. I assume some games are better about this than others, but raising the "you have universal beltscrolling skills to deal with this" card doesn't fully account for the confusing effect different behaviors can have - there can be just one enemy that sticks out and confuses the player.

Well yeah, that happens in every single game ever.

Uh, no, it doesn't. Somebody who has never played a shmup can tell what's happening if you show them two frames from the screen. You can't do that with a brawler. All I am saying is that it's not transparent - I don't understand why you want to deny this and make it controversial.

I don't think it's a problem that beltscrollers aren't as transparent; it just seems unavoidable in the design.

[trap15]

these games are more complicated than many other genres, at the same time that they have essentially no concessions to player training other than your starting health bar and the ability to put in another credit.

Welcome to arcade games? Just about every arcade game is like this. Whether you want to consider them all quarter munchers for that reason is your choice. Personally, I think a quarter muncher only exists if the game will randomly, or always force you to place another credit, regardless of the practice or foresight of the player.