cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
I’ve actually begun a quest to go back and finish all the games I didn’t play / didn’t finish from the past. NES, SNES, N64, and PSX. To my surprise, I’m actually enjoying some of these games much more than I did as a kid.
The gameplay is quite simple but it’s really well executed. There are a lot of games that just try to do one or two interesting things and then explore how far they can go with that. Nowadays, games seem to take more of a “kitchen sink” approach which tends toward some features being much better developed than others, and first-order-optimal strategies abound.
Sure, there are also plenty of retro-inspired games (like UFO 50), but I view those as a return to the design principles of old, rather than a refutation of them.
That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.
But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.
Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.
Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.
Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks your ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.
Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.
There definitely are seriously janky and just plain bad games for all systems in the past. The difference is that there is a much higher proportion of good games from that era due to the smaller number of games overall.
There were 675 games released for the NES in North America during its lifespan. If you take the top 100 games you’d find that most are good games worth revisiting and many are great games considered widely to be classics.
On the other hand, well over 10,000 games are released on Steam every year since 2021. How many of those have you even heard of, let alone could you say are worth playing?
Sure, it’s not fair at all to blame the developers of great games coming out today for all of the slop and endless clones they have nothing to do with. But discovery is a huge problem now and it’s only getting worse!
For context, the NES library was actively curated by Nintendo, that’s what their “seal of quality” was about. There were a few bootlegs, but unless you had a niche for that bootleg (see that Bible game) I suspect the complexity and cost of developing for the NES heavily discouraged bootlegs.
I think we gain more than we lose by the lower barrier to game development and publishing, quality indie games can get much more traction (unfortunately many do get buried in the slop) and games with niche marginalized audiences are more able to exist and find that audience now. YouTubers have been a big source of finding indie games for me, and sometimes recommendations from people on social media. I guess I have the opposite problem - I’ve got so much stuff on my wishlist and owned game backlog that I want to play that I’d probably have to spend the next decade of my life just playing games to get through them all.
The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.
Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.
That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.
In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.
I disagree. I’d much rather play FF1 than play the latest FF game. Modern Final Fantasy games are way too easy for my taste. They’re more like movies with a load of very soft mechanics, with all the sharp edges sanded off.
That’s really common across the board. I know a lot of people love modern Soulslike games but I much prefer the fast, crunchy combat of a game like Zelda II over the smooth, floaty, anticipation-based controls of Dark Souls.
There’s a lot of other comparisons like this. The original Metroid is very rough, lonely, and lacks an automap which makes it easy to get lost. Later games in the series surround you with helpers that eliminate all sense of isolation and bombard you with hints and automaps that make it impossible to lose your way.
Lots of modern players would call these systems “objectively better” and I won’t contradict their preference, I only deny the objectivity of it. As I see it, many of these improvements are actually tradeoffs. Many modern players, for example, hate getting lost. Well I like getting lost and a lot of modern games simply won’t let me! I like getting stuck in games and having to do serious problem solving to figure it out. Many modern gamers get impatient and give up on games like that. They might even call it excruciating, as you do.
Anyway, none of this is intended to convince you to be a retro gamer like me. You love what you love and hate what you hate. I just hope it’s a little bit clearer why folks like me have all this nostalgia, as depicted in the comic.
I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.
But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.
So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.
I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.