@zelyre said:
@bananasfoster: I think I was 12 or 13 when Link to the Past came out, and I don't remember having any trouble beating it. Maybe the GIANT GLOWING YELLOW AURAS in every game along with FLASHING BREAD CRUMBS and NPCs that constantly yell "GET TO THE DOOR" have broken new gamers abilities to play older games that were designed for players to hit walls so that a 2 hour game lasted a long time.
Or... we just don't remember talking to the kids on the bus about video games. Or watching Game Pro TV or Video Power or reading Nintendo Power front to back and back to front. Or reading manuals. Or the Nintendo hotline. Or Kevin Savage.
I think us older folk did play these games differently, but we weren't game wizards knowing exactly which bush to stand under in Super Mario 3 to get the warp whistle. We were just exposed to those sorts of gameplay tips differently than gamers are today. Think of the first time you played Street Fighter 2.
We weren't throwing mad fireballs until you saw some other kid do it, and you freaked out, wide eyed, and went "How'd you do that!?" followed by 90 seconds of hadokens going back and forth. Now, a game would show you how to do it in a 30 second, unskippable cutscene that looped until you successfully perform that trick move.
You are right that we did have the "kid internet" for tips on how to beat Simon's Quest or The Legend of Zelda. But I think you are over-playing the amount of help those games required. I certainly never used guides as a kid growing up. The only guide I ever looked at was the NES Final Fantasy guide, which I read before I got to play the game because I wanted it before i had access to play it.
The biggest change in gaming, in my opinion, doesn't come from actual games, it comes from expectations. Being stuck in a game didn't used to be as big a deal as it is now because gamers weren't trained to play from tentpole to tentpole. A perfect example of this is Bioshock, Halo and almost any narrative-driven modern game. The third act in these games suck because they are broken. In a traditional gaming setup, the third act should be the hardest part of the game. It's where you use all the skills you have learned in order to fight the last bad guy who should be the hardest boss in the game. Traditional storytelling structure, though, puts the heroes rising and falling struggles squarely in the second act. As as a result, as you are barrelling toward the conclusion of the story, increased difficultly just becomes frustrating, because it's keeping you from the resolution of the story. When you are 2 minutes away from a major plot reveal, the last thing you want to be doing is fighting a super-hard boss that keeps you from advancing the plot.
So in short, games used to have to focus on moment to moment fun instead of relying on story payoffs to drive interest. This trained players not to be as frustrated when the game isn't advancing a story, because there was no story to advance. Or, rather, the game WAS the story.
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