Teens React to NES (Super Mario Bros & Punch Out!)

[Jon-Erich]

torok said:

Jon-Erich said:

I can forgive the ignorance. That doesn't bother me. If you were never exposed to something, then it's hard to get used to it. However, the fact that some of these kids know about games and play on the new consoles is disturbing because that says something. It says that games today do not challenge players enough. It also says that games today hold your hand too much. How is it that a more complext game in full 3D provides less of a challenege than a more intuitive and simplistic 2D game? Also, how can you not figure out how to master controls on a controller that contains four buttons and a d-pad wirhout reading instructions (also assuming that the game's controls aren't shit)? 

This is real problem. Back when I was a kid, actually beating a game was a huge reward. I rarely ever got to see an ending of a videogame. This is because most games were extremely difficult. It had to be this way because developers couldn't make long games that weren't RPG's due to technical shortcomings. However, the brutal difficulty of games improved hand-eye cordination and made us better gamers. SInce we had to master our games, that also meant that we kept them for a while. This is something publishers and developers should take note of. If they don't want second hand sales of their games, then they should learn to make something that's compelling and that the player would want to pick up again and again, not sometihng you would beat in a weekend and never want to touch again or something that focuses on story over gameplay, which makes play not want to play it again when the game's done.

 

I think demanding people are good at games they never played it's a bit of a stretch. And Mario NES jump physics is a bit too fast, he falls way faster than on most modern games so it's actually easy to miss the jump and fall right in the front of a goomba.

Games aren't necessarily easier today. First, there is competitive multiplayer. Every FPS out there will put you in matches with insanely good guys that will play their best and humiliate you. The second point is that games are easier because they are bigger. In old consoles, you had limited space for your games:

- NES: 500kb

- SMS: 500kb (1MB for Brazilian SMS)

- Genesis and SNES: I'm not sure, but I think biggest cartridges would be around 4 to 6 MB.

So games had to be short. And nobody would like to pay for a game and finish it in an hour. So games were hard to give you more playtime. Most games could be finished in 1 or 2 hours because most of them didn't had a battery to save the game and that meant you had to be able to finish it in a single session. Games nowadays are criticized if they have 8 hours and a lot of them reach dozens or hundreds of hours. If they were as hard as the 1 hour NES games that took months to finish, what would we do? Finish Skyrim in 30 years? You need to balance what you are doing, it's meant to be fun, not torturing.

I'm not even saying they should be good at it. But if I could play Mario with very little difficulty when I was five, then there's no excuse for these teenagers not being able to do it other than the fact that modern games do very little to challenge players.

And yes, games are DEFINITELY easier today, MUCH easier. And while they are longer today, also keep in mind that most games are actually shorter than they were 10-15 years ago. Yes, there is multiplayer, which is fine but there's also a problem with that. Too many games are becoming too reliant on multiplayer to the point where some franchises like Resident are forcing multiplayer on us.

Look, I'm not saying every game needs to be as difficult as Ninja Gaiden. In fact, I would prefer than not happen. After more than 20 years, I still can't beat Ninja Gaiden. Still, when I was a kid, there was a sense of victory, a great satisfaction when I would overcome something extremely difficult. It wasn't torture to remember the layout of each level and to time an attack just right. It was a discipline. We wanted to get better at the game. We wanted to master the game. The difficulty didn't make back away from the game. It made us want to play it even more. That type of motivation needs to come back.