-FFFUCK! I missed the jump again!
Depending on what type of
game this is there are multiple possible outcomes as to what happens next. But
if it’s an old-school game, I can sure as hell tell which outcome is most
likely. And that’s that you won’t be getting to the conclusion of your quest
without throwing at least half an
hour of your life out the window. And if it’s me in this situation, then that
half an hour won’t come until I muddle through a few minutes of muffled
profanity, or alternatively just up and quit. Maybe I’ll come back, but maybe I
won’t.
I don’t want to point
any fingers, but the first half of this sentence is a bold-faced lie.
The issue of difficulty
in video games is so wide-ranging I could never cover all of it in one article,
so today I’m just going to talk to you about difficulty in old-school and retro
games, and my problems with them. It should also be noted that, as with pretty
much everything on this blog, this is going to be my opinion, not an objective
treatise that all games must follow by decree of King Genericide. You may
disagree with my views on what constitutes good difficulty balancing in games,
and that’s okay. Just head on down to the comments below the article and we can
discuss the issues calmly and in detail like rational human beings. Given that
this is the internet, I know this approach may cause shock and dismay, but bear
with me for a bit.
So being born at around
the same time as the Super Nintendo, I didn’t have much experience with that
older class of gaming as a kid. My first home console was a Nintendo 64, which
raised me on 3D, more exploration focused games that I’ve already talked about wanting more of. However, despite the fact that I didn’t grow up
with that era, I play a lot of video games. Everyone has a different definition
of what a ‘hardcore’ gamer is, so I’m not going to get into whether or not I
qualify for that pointless title, but I’ve played several hundred games (hell I
own over 300) and have beaten a not-insignificant portion of them.
I’m interested in the industry as a whole and have made it a point to go back
and play some older ‘classic’ games via various means like download services.
The point is, I may not have grown up with retro games, but I’ve played a lot
of them.
I have not, however, liked all of them.
You can’t handle all
this incredible subtlety I’m throwing at you.
You see, when I play a
lot of games from those bygone eras, I tend to come up with some common
problems. These problems can tell you a lot on where I stand on how video games
should preferably be balanced difficulty wise. They also explain why despite
wanting to like a lot of old games, I end up wishing that I had physical
cartridges so I could have something to set fire to. So enough intro, let’s
just go through some things I hate about old games one-by-one and explain why.
Where to Go
Though this is a problem
in all sorts of different games, it’s one that’s definitely more noticeable
in older games. In fact, game developers may have sometimes gone too far in the
other direction in recent years, but my problems with new games is a different article. This problem is relatively
simple, and also easier to fix than some others: The game doesn’t tell the
player where to go when they need to.
Now, the qualifier “when
they need to” is an important one. What with my love of exploration and
non-linear gameplay, I am by no way saying that I don’t like it when a game
lets you loose without a ton of instruction, or gives you a big world to work
with. No, this problem stems from when there aren’t any good cues of
what to do even if you’re looking for
them. It’s a combination of an open format combined with the game not giving a
clear enough indication of what you do to progress. A Guide Dang It moment, essentially.
…Though no video game
maze can get you as lost as a link to TV Tropes.
This can stem from a
number of sub-problems, actually. Bad directions in a game could come from a
lack of them, due to plonking a player down in the middle of nowhere without
telling them anything, though again this is usually the least pressing problem.
It could also stem from the available hints not being clear, whether from bad
translations or bad writing in general. I’m sure everyone has been annoyed by a
fetch quest here and there where an arcane hint is supposed to be like a clever
riddle for the player to unravel but ends up being an unintelligible mess of
bad writing that everyone just checks the internet to solve. But the final
portion of this problem, which is probably the most common in old games, is the
one that annoys me most of all: secrets that are necessary to progress.
There are all sorts of
examples of this, but here are a few specific ones. In the original Metroid there were some walls that
looked exactly like all other walls, yet you could pass through these walls.
And some items that you needed to
complete the game were hidden behind these trick walls. The old Legend of Zelda games had similar
problems with bomb-able walls. If walls are cracked or give some other type of
indicator that you can break them with a bomb, that’s fine. But later on in
these games you can find a plethora of normal-looking walls that you can and
sometimes have to break through in
order to progress. I was playing through one of the last dungeons of Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening not
too far back and not only was there a switch I needed to hit in a hidden room,
not only did you need to bomb a wall that wasn’t cracked, but said room didn’t appear on the map. Moments like
this, where it feels like the game is cheating (probably to artificially
lengthen playing time) really frustrate me.
Look at this map of
the final dungeon in the original Legend of Zelda. Every single cracked door
way is a wall that had to be bombed. That’s 18 walls in this single dungeon alone. Plenty of them didn’t have
cracked appearances, either.
Cheap Deaths
Of all the frustrations
people have with old-school video games or indeed games in general, this is the
one that most often gets voiced. Anyone who has played games for a significant
span of time has surely felt that one moment where their demise felt simply unfair. The type of moment where the fun
you were having overcoming a challenge feels cheapened, because you realize now
that the challenges don’t always have to be fair and when you fail it isn’t
always your fault. The type of moment where you curse the game designers name
and prepare an effigy of them to send dark spirits from the darkest abyss to
haunt them mercilessly for the injustice they’ve brought upon you.
Perhaps that last part is
just me.
This is totally an
appropriate reaction for that archery mini-game being too hard.
Cheap deaths are
obviously an unavoidable part of video games, because game designers aren’t
perfect and there will be times when
they don’t balance things properly or make some mistake that results in failure
due to no fault of your own. However, a few problems arise when discussing cheap
deaths that make it very hard to tell when they’re valid. Cheap deaths can
occur from countless different sources, and thus are more or less impossible to
generalize. Not only that, but the cry that something is ‘cheap’ is, due to
human nature, often leveled at plenty of things that are perfectly (or at least
sufficiently) fair and balanced. It’s hard to distinguish between complaints of
those who let their emotions get the better of them and people with legitimate
complaints. This problem is aggravated by the fact that everyone has different
standards and skill levels, which increasingly blurs the line between a game
that’s simply very hard and one that is legitimately unfair.
This is even worse
with multiplayer games, where it’s only rarely that mutual consensus can be reached.
However, though there are
exceptions to every rule and it may be hard to determine cheap deaths on a
case-by-case basis, we can come up with a vague definition of cheap deaths that
more or less fits most of them. Generally, I’d say that a cheap death is a one
that is caused by something the player could not have prepared for and/or had to
know about in advance to avoid. To a lesser extent, cheap deaths are caused
when a player could have avoided something,
but it was much harder without prior knowledge, the player was not sufficiently
prepared for it, and/or it was disproportionately difficult for the current
context.
There are examples of the
lesser type of cheap deaths everywhere, though they can be particularly
plentiful in old-school games. Things like enemies coming from an unexpected
place very quickly, or one level being really hard (instant death pits and
spikes are a particularly egregious offender for this) even though later levels
are notably easier. Random elements are also an example of this, like say if
the attacks of a boss aren’t predictable and sometimes are impossible to avoid
based on positioning. You pretty much never see the ‘pure’ examples of cheap
deaths from the first definition, those that are literally impossible to avoid. But,
even though they are still rare, they’re certainly more common in older games.
I don’t play many
old-school adventure games (I generally only play retro games that are renowned
for being good) and so I haven’t experienced much of this personally, but it
seems clear that they were some of the worst about truly cheap deaths. You’d
encounter situations where something completely illogical could kill you, perhaps
even as blunt as going down the wrong path or opening the wrong door, where
random chance or trial and error are your only defense against this terrible
type of game design. Even worse were slow-burn errors. Some of the more inferior
adventure games of the past could have things that would kill you if you didn’t
have a certain item that you had to pick
up earlier in the game. Combined with the infamously shaky logic of some
old adventure games, this led to deaths that were not only arbitrary but meant
you had to repeat large parts of the game, if not the whole thing, over again. This
segues nicely into my next point…
The Death Penalty
This is the big one. The
other issues are certainly problems that detract from the overall experience of
a game, but this is the part of old school games that I most commonly have a problem
with, sometimes to the extent that I can’t finish them. Its problems with how
these games handle death. Not narrative-wise, but how they handle failure and
penalties for it.
For example, in some
games failure might as well be the goal.
In any game based on
challenges, you’re going to have to have a possibility of failure, because if
you don’t then it doesn’t matter how well the player does and the tension will
evaporate along with player’s interest. Games have all sorts of different ways
of dealing with this, but they almost all eventually come down to penalties
of time before you can resume playing as you did before failure. And generally
speaking, old school games have much more punishing penalties when it comes to
death, sometimes even having the player start over at the beginning of the
entire game when they fail.
So why were old games so
bad about this? Did they just hate their audience and want them to suffer?
Potentially, but in actuality there were a number of reasons that they took
such a harsh stance on penalties. One of them was that saved games were much
less common in the olden days, so plenty of games weren’t capable of letting
you pick up where you left off, with some lacking even a password system.
Another reason was that there was much less game to go around. One of the
reason games like Super Mario Bros
and Legend of Zelda were so popular
back in the day, though there are plenty of other reasons, was they contained a
large amount of content that wasn’t repeated ad nauseam. More common at the
time was the type of game that might literally only have several different
screens of gameplay before all content was used up, and in order to make the
player feel like they got their money’s worth game designers stretched their
limited content out further with high levels of difficulty.
No there isn’t more after this! What d’you think this
is, one a’ them fancy-schmancy multi-screen
games?
This low amount of
content and high amount of difficulty was particularly common with arcade games,
a breed of games that had a third motivation for difficulty: to get your money.
When it came to arcade games, how much a person paid depended on how many times
they failed, because most of them had you pay for each chance one by one. A try
until you die model, so to speak. And this meant that if the player failed
often, the game made more money as they pumped in quarters to continue. This is
another type of game that hasn’t bothered me much, because arcades have been in
decline since around when I was born and I haven’t played at them too much. But
it’s worth mentioning even if you don’t partake of arcades because their prevalence
probably influenced the common design philosophy of the day. And that
philosophy, sadly, was that your game had to be difficult, even if it didn’t
always do so fairly.
Unfortunately, the big
penalties for death can really spoil my enjoyment of games I find perfectly
fine otherwise. Take for example Mega
Man 9, which isn’t an old video game but is done in the exact same style of
some older games and thus still counts. I thought this was a good game, with
the tight controls and excellent
music you’d expect from a Mega Man game. The game starts out with 8 robot
masters whose stages you can beat in any order, though each robot gives you a
new weapon that is good against another in a sort of rock-paper-scissors
configuration. These stages are hard, and it took me quite some time to beat
them. Nonetheless, I ultimately persevered and beat their stages, and from then
on when I replayed them I could generally beat them in just a few minutes. They
were hard, but short enough that I could accept them and get through them.
But after all 8 robot
masters you unlock Dr. Wily’s castle, a series of 4 stages. The first 3 are the
hardest stages in the whole game, each with their own unique boss at the end.
The fourth and final stage is merely all 8 previous robot master bosses in a
row, followed by a final (multi-stage) fight with Dr. Wily. This all sounds
pretty difficult, but if the difficulty of the stages were the only problem I’m
sure I could endure it and come out on top. There’s one thing I haven’t
mentioned, however. And that is that you have to beat all 4 stages, bosses and
all, in a row; as in one sitting, without running out of lives. This final
sequence being structured like this is a staple of most Mega Man games, a
tradition they’ve kept for years.
I still think it is completely asinine.
Your castle is a
stupid butt that is also dumb.
I once got up to the
final stage of this sequence, but I never beat it, I don’t think I
ever will, and this conclusion has given the whole game a sour aftertaste in my
mouth. There are a plethora of instant death spikes and pits in these final stages, but their difficulty on their
own would have been more or less acceptable to me in isolation, one stage at a time. But as it stands, to make it back to
the part I died at last time I’ll have to go through something like half an
hour of fairly difficult gameplay without screwing up. The vast majority of my
time playing the game would be spent not
figuring out challenges and overcoming them but doing the same thing over and over again just to reach that challenge! And all
other pros and cons of the game aside, this type of thing is, to my mind, an objectively
bad game design approach to take.
And sadly this sours not just
Mega Man 9 but all sorts of old school games for me. I’ve never beaten Super
Mario Bros because whenever I run out of lives my entire playthrough of the
game is forfeit. I disliked Zelda 2
not because of its side-scrolling platforming and RPG elements breaking
tradition (platformers and RPGs are arguably my favorite genres of game), but
because of its completely out of place lives system, instant death pits and
difficulty in general making playing the game near the end a chore due to how
much I’d have to slog back through uninteresting portions.
Though these assholes
didn’t help. Remind me to do a more complete review of Zelda 2 at some point,
because I really wanted to like it
more than I did thanks to its difficulty.
To contrast this, let’s
take a more recent gaming title, Super
Meat Boy. Though certainly not a perfect game, Super Meat Boy is an
excellent example of doing difficulty vs. death penalty right as far as I’m
concerned. You see, Super Meat Boy is a difficult game. A horribly, brutally difficult game. However, I
still find it fairly playable and enjoyable due to a couple factors. One is
that the game controls very well, but that’s not really the one I wanted to
bring up. The other is how the game handles you dying. When you die in Super
Meat Boy, it only takes at most a single second before the stage restarts. It’s
actually kind of common for me to occasionally run forward to my death when the stage
restarts because the respawn happens so quickly. In addition, the
stages are very, very short. There are hundreds of them, but on average I’d say
they’re only about something like 15-20 seconds long. And so you’re never
losing much by failing, and therefore can’t get too frustrated about things,
and consequently are much more likely to keep going until you succeed.
I’m not saying all games
have to have lightning quick respawn times, or stages that are gone in the blink of an
eye. In fact, I most definitely don’t
want every game to be like that. However, the absurd level of penalty for death
that old school games maintained is something I simply can’t deal with past a
certain point; and it’s a real shame that so many great games are in my opinion
hindered by this ugly type of difficulty.
So that’s what I have to
say on old-school difficulty in games. There are plenty of more things to
discuss on the broader topic of game difficulty in general, but I’ll keep the topic limited for this article. Obviously given the amount of love for some of the
games/types of games I’ve mentioned there will be some people who disagree with what I've said. Again,
feel free to comment about it below, just so long as you keep it civil…and don’t try and tell me I just suck.
Too late! C’mon guys,
let’s all point and laugh at this scrub who can’t beat Mega Man 9.
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