You're right about the first thing you write. I don't think anyone disagrees that classic arcade design was 100% dictated by the business model.hamfighterx wrote: Not necessarily "bad design" or "unfair", but it's definitely a reason WHY a lot of arcade shooters were designed the way they were, and is worth recognizing. It usually wasn't because devs thought that was the best possible choice from a design perspective, it was quite literally dictated by the business due to arcade operators being more concerned with profitability than gameplay. It's quite impressive that many of these games were still extremely fun despite the restrictions placed on the devs to make the game hard enough that average credit time wasn't too long. You really have to make a compelling game to get people to keep making the decision to pay one more credit to get to that next stage, or to practice and sharpen their skills. And it's totally understandable that people who are nostalgic for these kinds of games enjoy seeing more of them, with similar difficulty, just because that's what they are used to and grew to love.
But saying the games were enjoyable despite this, and filing people's love to it as nostalgia and habit is completely disregarding all the quality elements to challenging design that people love. When the truth is that people resonated with arcade games because they loved being challenged and continuously pushing their own boundaries as their skills improve. And because a game that tries to make the player stop playing after a minute of gameplay is bound by a pretty tight restriction of making that minute enjoyable as hell.
This at least we can agree on. It's an old subject and I feel like I've already repeatedly shared my opinions on it to death over the past 20 years - in short I think you can maintain the exact same core mechanical design that dictates the arcade challenge, while also packaging it in a way that doesn't necessarily phrase it as "credits" and "continues", but design a framework that feels much more approachable to new and inexperienced players - and it's kind of baffling how few games still do that. I think just slapping an easy mode on there like M2 does feels more like a cheap cop-out, and not really the ideal approach. DeathSmiles's in-game rank selection was a pretty good idea though, and slightly touches on what I think is ideal - building these features into the game's framework itself, rather than making it cold-ass menu options.But it's also a little insane to me to limit your audience by steadfastly clinging to being intentionally unforgiving as the only way and just telling potential new players to "git gud". ESPECIALLY when you're no longer trying to make money primarily by selling to arcade operators who want a constant flow of credits to the machine.
