Older gamers, do you feel like kids today are missing out on an aspect of challenge, reward, and mystery to video games during the late 80s and early 90s before the internet was in every home? And the only source of tips and help were magazine publications and word of mouth.
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No. I’m from that era and I don’t miss being frustrated.
Nah, but I do feel kids are missing the thrill of finding the newest Nintendo Power or Computer Gaming World, or PCGamer from the store magazine section and reading on the upcoming games, play with the demo disc included, or just enjoying the articles.
There’s definitely a Mew under that truck…
Negative.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I for one miss the monthly gaming magazines. I read them for maps, for tips and tricks, for the previews of the new games coming out, for all the cool artwork that was scattered throughout (and the early Nes comics in Nintendo Power). With the internet we can access all that so easily, but there is just something about the formatting of today’s medium (wikis, Youtube videos, FAQs) that just don’t have the same appeal to visual senses that the old magazines had.
Nintendo Power literally told you how to do everything for some games. I’m not sure how that’s any different. The only difference is you don’t pay for it anymore.
I always loved finding these and reading them while my mom shopped when I was little. It was always nice looking in the back for cheats and/or guides for a game I mightve been stuck on. Happened frequently renting games like Mega Man and shit from the NES days.
Thanks for the nostalgia!
And don’t forget the overpriced game guides just in case you really wanted to figure it all out.
Keep in mind we also had Game Genies back then that allowed players to explicitly cheat. It’s the only way I ever saw the last level of Battletoads.
I guess I miss some of that a little, but I still remember the first time I looked up help online for a video game. It was for Final Fantasy VI(3 on the SNES then) and I found a full game walkthrough. And it had everything, where every treasure was, which espers to use to get the best stats, boss strategies and even exploits like using Vanish/Doom. For me at least it really made the game that much more fun having access to all of that.
I guess it’s pretty inaccurate to the game, but what a badass depiction of Simon Belmont?
I usually dislike the first hour of most games because they nanny guide you every stupid little click and explain constantly even when there’s nothing difficult to learn. I miss the challenge you used to get with games like tomb raider or Turok.
I remember Zelda 2 taking me almost a solid year to beat!
Not the answer to your question, but growing up in the 80s and 90s I sure am glad I witnessed the world before computers took over. I feel it is a blessing for me to have that perspective, it’s for some reason re assuring and comforting to have those memories.
Showing up to neighbors houses I barely knew and asking to watch them play Nintendo was definitely a thing I would do.
The word of mouth part of it was fun, before achievements, twitch etc. Just that one friend that knows all this arcane knowledge about some game, where to find Easter eggs etc.
Like Missingno was this insane exploit, where you hear about it, say no way that works, then try it and have your mind blown. Nowadays bugs are fixed, knowledge is spread instantly, and secrets aren’t well kept in games. 🤷
Totally! I used to love the top 100 games…the up and coming…and the maps. Loved GamePro, NPower, and EGM
I used to go to K-mart and read all the magazines at the shelf, I’d bring a notebook for codes. I also had a deal with the local used bookstore that if any videogame themed books came in I’d have first choice.
Definitely. Nowadays if something is too difficult for them, they just mod it. That’s cheating, no matter how you slice it. Giving yourself the advantage through means not in the game. Cheating used to be a cardinal sin to real gamers. Not talking game genie or cheat codes, everyone messed with those but they knew the victory achieved using them was a farce. I was ashamed to use them and wouldn’t out of fear of being called a cheater. But many “Continue?” countdowns and sore fingers later I’m still better than all my friends. Losing builds character, it humbles you. If you win every time, you never have to improve. Kids these days are so fragile the thought of them playing without mods and possibly losing, gives them anxiety. The feeling of playing as hard as you can and barely winning by the skin of your teeth, but you fuckin earned every part of it. That dopamine reward is pretty amazing. Sorry bout the rant, but that pic got me nostalgic and also feeling bad for the kids these days. Everything is so easily accessible they don’t even think about how much confidence and self respect they can have by putting in hard work and doing it on their own. Idk, but I definitely remember having to tape my Final Fantasy 7 strategy guide back together so I wouldn’t get the pages mixed up. I wore that thing out.
i miss the Nintendo power and game informer magazines.
At risk of sound like an ol’ boomer, I think it’s like that. I miss a lot games in the fashion of Monkey Island or Broken Sword, where you need to think a lot to solve puzzles and situations. Without internet it was kind of lapidary. I remember being stuck in games for weeks
It’s more complicated than that. “Challenge” is not a linear spectrum.
Back in the arcade and Atari era, games presented challenge based predominently on **execution**. It was all a giant test at how good you were at pressing buttons, how fast your fingers and eyes were. Higher quality pattern matching was rare, which is why Tetris was a phenomenon.
Nintendo was a paradigm shift. They fused milder execution tests with **exploration** based gameplay, previously only seen in a dedicated experiences like Ultima, King’s Quest, or classic text-based adventures. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Kirby, all were built on a huge exploration pillar. They were much easier than their predecessors in terms of execution, but were rich with secrets. (Here exploration might mean a literal map, but it could also be mechanics or some other abstract possibility space.)
This–and this was intentional–effected a *social component* to these games. Your friends would tell you secrets. You’d find a secret, and tell your friends. You convince more friends to get the game, both so they can find secrets for you and you can gain social capital by sharing your secrets. A lot of NES secrets in these games feel “unfair”, because no *one* person is supposed to find them all.
SNES era sequels are much more enjoyable because Nintendo (and rivals) developed design patterns and visual presentations around an iterated ethos of “Okay fine, a really clever player should be capable of finding every secret on their own.” But the gist was still the same, and in Pokemon’s case explicitly baked into the gameplay and product SKUs.
———-
Across the last 25 years, we’ve seen another paradigm shift. Just as Nintendo+friends pushed a transition from **execution gameplay** to **exploration gameplay**, modern publishers have gradually pushed a transition from exploration to what I call **”consumption gameplay”**, games that have very rapid loops, guided objectives, low resistance, and deliver a reliable X hours of visual spectacle.
Another developer friend of mine calls this “designing for reviewers”–optimizing for someone who doesn’t actually want to play the game (but is being forced/paid to) to consume it as *painlessly as possible*.
The spirit of exploration is far from dead–those games are not just still being made, but tend to be the ones winning all the awards. There is more exploration in BotW’s left pinkie than the entirety of Zelda 1. I don’t feel like anyone raised on modern Nintendo games, Terraria, GTA, Eldin Ring, Witcher 3, etc. is missing anything fundamental–even if they will experience that exploration (and games in general) in a different cultural and social lens.
But those who experience modern games as a conveyor belt of waypoints and cutscenes, yes. It’s missing the point to call it a matter of “difficulty” or “challenge”, as it’s a fundamental question of how the player is permitted/expected to interact with the medium + express themselves within it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Not just in terms of console games, but playing without access to gamefaqs, or googling to find a solution. Hell, even when loads of people got online there was still a lot of mystery.
For example: When Sonic the Hedgehog came out and everyone was trying to run it fast, no one in my neighborhood noticed that if you had more than 50 rings and ran through the finish, there was a giant ring with a bonus stage. AND that bonus stage felt like a fever dream. “No dude. You’ve not running around, you stay in a ball and have to… I don’t know, get through this weird pinball looking game.”
Then, you find there’s a chaos emerald in the secret stage. A secret, within a secret. After that first one, when it said “see if you can collect all the chaos emeralds!” I spent hours gathering them up. Trying to get them in the first seven stages and become Super Sonic!
Then in 2, the big rings were gone, but now, stars spun around the lamppost check points. It was more obvious/straight forward to get the Emeralds and unlock Super Sonic. I spent weeks finding the optimal path through the first two stages, to get all the lampposts and bonus level so I couple be Super Sonic the whole game.
Years later I became obsessed with the hidden levels of Hondo in Action Half-life. Again, early internet days, so you couldn’t watch a guide on youtube. I died so many times with friends trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do. It was magic.
You can’t really do that sort of, secret by obscurity anymore. Plus, hiding stuff in a game is very difficult. As a developer you WANT folks to get the most out of your game. You don’t want to force a player to hump walls spamming the use key. When you make games now, you want players to find stuff. You don’t want to spend a million dollars on something only a handful of people are going to experience. Add that most games have millions of players, you can’t hide anything any more. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.
As one of those older gamers:
The kind of challenge in those NES games *sucked*. Repeat the same content over and over until you can do it with your eyes closed, three failures sends you all the way back to the start of the game—I’m glad we’re rid of that bullshit.
It is kind of unfortunate that spoilers are everywhere though.
Going out to the video store on Friday to rent a new game. Being excited by the box art you pick something out. Bring it home only to find out the game is borderline unplayable trash lol. Such disappointment, guess we play Streets of Rage or Contra again haha
It was a blessing and a curse. A blessing that we were unaware of what was good or bad so we took a chance. Sometimes the above did not happen and we found a true gem. All you really had were some blurbs in a magazine you picked up while mom was grocery shopping so you made a guess as to whether something would be good or not. You had to wait until the game was out and maybe you already found out if it was good or not before you saw a review and you didn’t have any videos to go by. Such a different time
Writing down a 20 digit code in my Nintendo notebook to “save” and “reload” a level was incredible
I refuse to believe anyone beat Dark Souls and Elden Ring without looking up anything.