CP3S said:
zombie84 said:
I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games.
Exactly. Back in the N64/PSX days, I remember one of my friends watching his youngest brother playing some 64 plat-former game he played constantly and still sucked at. My friend sighed like a warbler and made a comment about how the poor kid is never going to be good at video games because he had just missed the 2D era and was stuck finding some silly 3D game we found ridiculously easy overly hard.
Didn't think much about it at the time, but he pretty much his the nail on the head. This was probably back in 1997 or 8.
I didn't realize it would make me suck at games too, though. Bought Mega Man 9 for the 360 a few years ago, have played it for hours, and have still never managed to beat a single boss. I was playing those games back when I was in first grade (I seem to recall a phase where I ran around the playground during recess with a blue sock on one arm making annoying pew pew sounds as I shot my friends), and was fairly decent at them.
This is going to make me sound a bit out of touch, but up until a few years ago I hadn't played a game system since about 2001. Never owned a PS2, never owned an X-box, never owned a PS3 or 360. If I was hanging out with friends I'd play some multiplayer like Halo or Marvel vs Capcom or Guitar Hero, but up until about two years ago I never really sat down and played anything on my own after I lost interest in the PS1 around 2001 or so.
Well, a close friend moved in with me, and he works in game design. He owns about every console ever made from 1995-present, so by extension that meant that I did too. So I started puttering around with his X-box, PS2 and PS3 and catching up with a lot of the games I missed out on.
I beat every single one of them. Quickly. And it was pretty easy.
Everything from Return to Wolfenstein, Oddworld: Strangers Wrath, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, Brutal Legend, whatever game it was that I picked up, within about two weeks I was done. Beat the game. My friend/roommate is about 6 years younger than me, and grew up in the 32-bit era mainly. He always talks about "finishing" a game, as though it's inevitable if you just keep playing it, like how a movie is. You "finish" movies, but when I was growing up you "beat" a game, it was a struggle against a challenging opponent. It was cool to see the ending of just about every game that I tried playing once I got into the modern consoles, but back in the day that was a real treat, a privledge. When I was growing up I only beat a handful of games. Still have no clue what the ending to Mario 2 looks like. I got close a few times, and haven't tried again in a long while, but the point is the game beat me, and it's not even that hard of a game. But I noticed that starting with PS1, I beat most games I owned except RPGs or things like Resident Evil (i've come this close to beating the first three but gave up. I have the save files, but I doubt I will remember what to do or where to go).
EDIT
I will say one of the more challenging games I played was the Xbox Shinobi game. It's the one game that I played, liked, but found too difficult to beat. I probably could have if I stuck at it. Everyone was like, "oh, this game is good but it's really, really hard," but to me it just seemed normal. At least I think it was the Shinobi game. Whatever it was, it was good and I should probably take a second crack at it to see if I can beat it.