A Week In Comments

I’m having this conversation all over the place, recently, but… why am I the only one who remembers that games used punishing difficulty only to mask repetition and lack of content?

Being a kid of the 80s it’s so clear to me that games have done nothing but improve, that difficulty was an unintended byproduct of having to force repetition as a means to pad length and that many old games were more often played using cheats than not.

I’ve made this comparison elsewhere, but I like it, I think it’s appropriate: When Renaissance artists tried to emulate Roman and Greek art they did not realize the original sculptures were painted on top of the marble, so they just pushed it further to have unpainted marble sculptures that conveyed what they wanted.

It’s the same with modern ultrahardcore games. Most, like IWBTG or Super Meat Boy push the envelope way beyond what old games dared to do because apparently nobody remembers that nobody was playing Contra without the Konami Code and we had all memorized the level select code for every game in our collections. Cheats have disappeared and now when you’re stuck in a game, you’re stuck. Period. No Game Genie to come to your help.

So other options are implemented. Sometimes, if the game is more about narrative or visual setpieces, the difficulty can be toned down. Others, you put more handholding or just a “play this bit for me” option. Which, by the way, we used to do all the time. I’ve both been to friend’s houses to beat sections they couldn’t, and I had friends come over to do it for me. The phrase “want me to do this bit?” was very frequent, and it was often taken as a condescending pun… until you realized the thing was beyond you and you caved.

This has simply replaced your big brother by DK’s big brother. Same principle.

So can we all stop being snooty about it and lying to ourselves about how brave and skilled and resolute we were as kids, powering through games that stump grown men in the 21st century? It’s a complete fabrication.

Why?

Because War…War never changes…

Man, that was a lot of work just to make a pun

PCのフランチャイズは、コンソールへの移植、再度Googleは日本語に英語とバック変換を使用しのようなものです。

PC franchise, the console port, again like Google is using a back translation into English and Japanese.