The real easy mode is looking up stuff on the 'net. It might be subtle at first, maybe you just looked up something when you were genuinely stuck, but before you know it you’re just looking up stuff because you’re impatient or don’t want to take notes yourself.
Though I guess there’s games that are mostly about getting the timing right. Like I don’t think the internet helps much with beating the early Super Mario sidescrollers. Also, depending on the game a lot of the info you find might be outdated; games that are/were in early access for a long time are especially bad for this.
Oh yeah.
Back in the (dial up) day, amongst the neighborhood kids?
If you looked up a GameFAQs guide to a game, if you had to do that, to beat it?
You were cheating.
Only possibly acceptable if it was a game with an onbnoxious amount of hidden collectable type items, and you were just now doing a full completionist run.
Nowadays, you’d have to basically make a whole lot of your game procedurally generated, to get back to that kind of a paradigm, (hence the existence of roguelites, i suppose) but yeah its absolutely totally normalized now that just looking up a guide or a playthrough is totally acceptable, whereas pre-mass-internet-adoption, doing that was largely seen as cheating.
Personally, I never cared about the cheating aspect, I was never particularly good at gaming and I’d definitely prefer cheating over not finishing a game or trying to bruteforce whatever I’m stuck on for 10 hours. The issue is that looking up stuff casually like many people (including me) do today has a high risk of reducing the fun for no real reason. And I feel like games today tend to be easier and less grindy than they used to be in the dial-up days, too, so there’s also less reason to look anything up in the first place.
Ah ok ok, yes, what you’ve said is all true as well, removing the sort of comepetive aspect and just focusing on a single person playing a game as an experience.
Absolutely yes, in general, nowadays, most single player games are simpler, easier, power fantasies, as opposed to legitimate challenges.
While I do not miss the bullshit ‘difficulty’ of grinding, healthbar sponges… I do not like the actual lower amount of tactical/technical complexity and risk/rewark of a lot of modern AAA games.
Its possible for gameplay itself to be actually complex and engaging, instead of having essentially a metagame of stat min maxxing wrapped around it, for that to be the ‘more important game’… basically to compensate for the actual shallowness/repetition of the rest of the gameplay.
But, most people seem to prefer a dopamime stream, over a challenge of both intellect and dexterity.
And also yes, even without comparing your skill at or experience in a game to others… yeah, if looking at a game guide is basically the same as having substantial portions of a movie or book spoiled for you… yeah, that’s a problem for any kind of game with a narrative structure that weaves into its gameplay as well.
If you can’t be surprised in any real, impactful, shattering kind of way, its not a very compelling experience, at least in my opinion.
Its more like a movie you walk through, as opposed to watch.
Some games are just too massive. I don’t usually use step by step guides but I use maps heavily. It’s just not fun to waste time looking for an obscure item.
And I think games have a lot more customizable difficulty these days instead of just one level. Which is a good thing as it makes them more accessible.
When i started gaming 2 player vs was common, but i had 2 brothers. We used to play where the loser passes the controller and the winner stops on. Competition got fucking fierce. By the time xbox live came around we were so far ahead of the skill curve it was unreal.
If only streaming was a thing then, we’d have cleaned up.
All the platformers I used to think were easy are now super hard, and all the RPG and RTS games are now much easier.
I have a soft spot for platformers, I grew up on Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank…🥹
I grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog and Battletoads. The former is OK, the latter is absolutely impossible now even though I finished it on the Mega Drive when I was like… 12.
Battletoads // Double Dragon is like, notoriously near impossibly hard. I think its level/stage 4 where shit goes from ‘moderately challenging’ to ‘fuck you, die.’
… 7 year old me did not fully understand that.
Near 37 year old me now does understand that, and also chooses to abstain from that level of masochism.
One really wild thing about watching a lot of like, weird retro game review type channels, is me realizing that quite a lot of games I got frustrated with as a kid?
They’re often just literally broken in multiple ways, or require a level of timing and precision that just actually is near impossible for a human to achieve.
Oh yeah, lets make whole subsets of games that require milisecond input precision, with some of the shittiest controllers ever designed.
… Anybody else remember the old Mario Party mini games that featured you rapidly moving the control stick in circles?
Not only does that destroy an N64 controller, it was also widespread that people would just hold the main stem of the controller with one hand, basically palm the stick with the other hand… you can do faster circles that way, but it will also chew through your hand’s skin and give you blisters.
… Thats why those kinds of minigames don’t exist in any Mario Party game beyond I think 2.
Me finding out Silver Surfer was a stupid-hard game 20 years after beating it:
Can’t relate, haven’t/never played it 😞 in this case I was just replaying Lord of the Rings Return of the King on the PS2, that one level called “Palantir of Saruman”, used to find it so easy until I realised I was doing it on Easy mode, hence I made the meme 😅
I didn’t finish it as a kid, but I got through the first circuit of worlds in KH 1 fairly easy. I picked the game up again last summer so I could finish it and play through the whole series, and 19 year old me was borderline in tears on some of those boss fights. I was on normal mode. Thankfully I was playing Remix, so I didn’t have to hear every boss speech 40 times
(“Ee oo, not Clayton!”), but it still felt bad man.One day I’ll go through the games again and fight the secret bosses on hard, but thinking about the amount of grinding it’ll take makes me cry internally and curl into a ball.
That Clayton fight was also the reason I celebrated skippable cutscenes in FM. I picked it up again myself just for funsies, and I thought, “Hey. You’ve been doing some souls-likes and souls-lites. You can handle Kingdom Hearts of all things” before starting on Proud mode…
Sigh at least it’s not “Get up on the hydra’s back!” from 2. But unfortunately, I am a completions so still quite the grind. It will be worth it though. Right…?
I don’t know much about Kingdom Hearts (I hope that’s what you’re talking about). I don’t usually like RPG/Strategy stuff but it’s fascinating still.
Keep up the good grind, I’m sure it’ll be worth it 😅 plus you get all that good old nostalgia factor with it replaying it all over again.
Yup, KH = Kingdom Hearts. It’s more typical smack your enemies to death action, not turn-based. I think the only one that truly could be seen as a strategy game would be the card based side game, but that one is also still real time battle, not turn based.
Anyway, I’ve got a huge backlog of other games I gotta get through, so I probably won’t be replaying them anytime soon. But when I do, I will gladly relish in wiping the floor with Sephiroth and the lot 😌
just gotta git gud soon
