Garcian Smith said:
Just because a game is long doesn't mean it's not "casual." The Sims is the epitome of a "casual game," and you can play a single game of that longer than many "hardcore" games. What made Zelda appeal to the expanded audience - and a trait that it shares with The Sims - is that it's accessible, and that it's easy to fit into casual play schedules. The latter is largely due to the save system, while the former owes itself to the NES' simple control scheme and the fact that combat only requires a couple of buttons that each do the same thing. The "high score = hardcore" phenomenon is by no means universal, true. The "hardcore" nature of arcade games stems largely from the competitive culture surrounding them at the time - though their largely inaccessible nature, by way of their high-score-oriented achievement mentality and long required play sessions, also plays a large part. Tapper had no such connotations. The notion that save games came into existence due to power outages, rather than as a disruptive market strategy designed to reel in new gamers, is also ridiculous, and doesn't give nearly enough credit to Nintendo's inventive marketing. I don't know what would lead you to believe that, as the latter assertion seems far more logical and far more in line with Nintendo's business strategies at the time. Re, the anecdotal evidence concerning your family: The plural of "anecdote" is not "data." People were complaining about NES games' difficulty - relative to arcade games? Care to point me to some such accounts, or are you just pulling all of this out of your ass? "Going from point A to point B" was a simplistic description, but if you want to play semantics, what I meant to say was that the new NES games were progression-based, as opposed to achievement-based. That is to say, they still had achievements, but the achievements involved reaching a certain point of progression, as opposed to the more arbitrary achievement of beating your high score or what-have-you. I don't know where you got that I'm European - I've lived in the mid-Atlantic US my entire life. I don't think that our experiences would be that different. |
Let me ask you this, then, on the topic of the use/reason for save games on the NES - How many Game Development Conference sessions have you sat in on, roundtable Q & A sessions, or even bought the audio recorded sessions from GDC in recent years? When you hear the logics of what saved games were about from the engineering side, you really can't doubt them. There is this side you suggest, about it allowing people to consume the game slowly over time. Yet, there is a whole technical side to the main usage. It was taken right from the floppy disk concept - back up data.
Sadly, you revert to childish terms like "pulling this out of your ass", which discredits you and prevents any enjoyment of discussing this with you much further. Notice that I didn't find the need to question nor suggest that you are fabricating details when you loosely said that people shunned the NES as casual. You've not backed that up with documentable accounts. Pot, meet kettle. As for my backup, I've witnessed it, I've seen the older gamers tire of the arcade, but not ready to allocate the time required of many NES games.
Your definition of casual and hardcore seems quite off. The Sims and Zelda are on the samel "casual" level? I guess by that standard, World of Warcraft is a casual game? After all, its just clicking a few buttons - a trained monkey can do that. Halo must also be casual, aim and shoot, not so hard.
The Sims is like playing with Barbie dolls using a computer. I really can't understand how you are contradicting yourself, as you say arcade gamers are/were "core", when all they did is the same basic motion over and over again over a long period of time. So you say dedicating time to a NES game is casual, but dedicating time to an arcade game is "core", even though there's more depth behind the NES games we are discussing. You seem to be chasing your own tail.
