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Why were many 90's games that were cleary designed for children so hard?
- Thread starter iidesuyo
- Start date
sure, watch this video, yes i know the title says Sonic, but that's because the dev did the same for Sonic 3D blast and explains the Mickey Mania situation.
The easiest way to do it in MM was in the auto scrolling wheel table section in "The Mad Doctor", you could spam marbles to make the game spawn too many sprites sending you to the level warp screen.
Everyone already said it, artificial length of a game. It was an accepted practice in the age where arcades still ruled the streets, and created some grueling and excellent games from it. I was young at the time, but I do remember everyone just accepting that a certain level of skill was needed if you were the person beating all the games. These days it just represents time investments.
Beerman462
Member
Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
I'd argue that difficulty doesn't really "cover up" the length of a game, nor is it artificial. If you plug in Castlevania and it takes you eight hours to complete the game, it was genuinely an eight-hour long game - it doesn't really matter that an experienced player can power through the game in thirty minutes.
Not to defend poor games like Lion King and Toy Story - but making games condensed and challenging wasn't always a cynical move, nor was it something developers couldn't do because they hadn't figured out how to make more expansive games yet.
Shitty design.
Mickey Mania is a sort of demo they made for Fantasia came out. The hitboxes are especially bad. It had plently of neat cartoons as stages.
Jungle Book is something I couldn't get past the second stage.
TinTin games had that bloody timer lol.
However worst of it all is Hercules (GB). The controls suck.
Mickey Mania is a sort of demo they made for Fantasia came out. The hitboxes are especially bad. It had plently of neat cartoons as stages.
Jungle Book is something I couldn't get past the second stage.
TinTin games had that bloody timer lol.
However worst of it all is Hercules (GB). The controls suck.
GoldenCrow
Member
The Lion King and Toy Story weren't hard. They were pretty damn easy compared to everything else at the time. Kid Chameleon had 100 levels with no saving or passwords, I only beat the final boss due to the cheat to get to it from the first zone and that took me more tries than the amount of times I died in any of the modern Ninja Gaiden games.
Actually I don't think that was a problem. My cousin and I would play Altered Beast and World of Illusion over and over again, and it was fun.
Better than being killed in the same level of the same game because our skills had reached their limits.
Wow, this is a great video. Thanks for sharing!
D.Lo
Member
Western designed ones (for kids or adults) often had crappy mechanics, like bad hit detection, stiff and/or laggy controls, slippery physics and badly designed levels. They were hard because they were badly designed, 'unfair' hard games. Comes from the non-professional hobby coder tradition of Spectrum/C64 era where 1-2 people made a game and it got published and distributed for cheap on a tape.
Japanese designed cartoon games were probably not 'for kids' they were 'for everyone' much like Mario. Because Japan had a more mature industry that knew all ages would be interested in eg Disney stuff. That said, some of them may have been hard too, but usually in a more clever way, not crap controls.
Japanese designed cartoon games were probably not 'for kids' they were 'for everyone' much like Mario. Because Japan had a more mature industry that knew all ages would be interested in eg Disney stuff. That said, some of them may have been hard too, but usually in a more clever way, not crap controls.
Yeah ... and some of those happen till this day.
Like they artifically lenghten a game and sell you a way to make it shorter
Lots of game still have lives and scores that does not need either.
And the famous steam refund fear in indie games is basically the renting one
D.Lo
Member
Oh wow to people try to get refunds on games they beat?
almostjuliuscaesar
Member
basically
daTRUballin
Member
I just got done with my playthrough of Rayman 2: The Great Escape on the N64, and even though the game is mostly easy, that final boss fight was one of the hardest Ive ever experienced. Fuck that battle. It probably took me about 3 hours to beat it and it was stressful as all hell. How were any kids meant to beat something like that?!?! ._.
EDIT:
Not all Western developed games were badly designed to the point of being hard. The Donkey Kong Country series for example was very, very tough and wasnt badly designed and wasnt considered a bad series. DKC2 is notoriously hard as nails in particular.
EDIT:
Not all Western developed games were badly designed to the point of being hard. The Donkey Kong Country series for example was very, very tough and wasnt badly designed and wasnt considered a bad series. DKC2 is notoriously hard as nails in particular.
Fluffhead14
Member
been playing DKC2 on SNESmini. game is kicking my ass in sections. at least 4-5 game overs.
fucking love it though!
fucking love it though!
toastyToast
Member
I beat those games fine as a youngster. You done got soft OP
D.Lo
Member
Of course not all, Rare/Ultimate were always a good example of an exception. But a much higher percentage were.
Evil John Locke
Member
Yeah, gotta love the back-in-my-day responses though.
You beat Fantasia? You have my fullest respect.
Hippopuncher12
Member
Because we weren't little bitches.
But really it was probably to make the games seem longer.
But really it was probably to make the games seem longer.
this is false, many games were excessively hard and some broken due to poor quality control. Mega man X has never been a very hard game anyways.
SolidSnakex
Member
I get what you're saying, but in some cases they were definitely used to artificially lengthen a game. Since the OP mentioned it, Beethoven's 2nd is a great example of this. It has 4 chapters and two levels per chapter. The current speedrun holder can complete the game in just under 5m. And that's without any glitching. Just rushing through every level since each level can be completed in seconds. The length of the game is entirely built around it being difficult.
In the book Joystick Nation, JC Herz talks about a kids' game that was playtested so long that the testers kept saying it was too easy and to make it harder, so the devs did, and when it came out it was absolutely brutal and parents were returning it in droves the day after Christmas because the kids couldn't play it. I believe it was from Sega. Has it ever been revealed which game that was? I've always had a suspicion it was Mickey Mania.
How could they be so stupid. In case of doubt, implement an Easy/Normal/Hard Mode.
D.Lo
Member
I actually really disliked selectable difficulty in games. How to know which was the one that it was designed around? Metal Gear Solid and Devil May Cry 3 for example were tuned for what was called 'Easy' in the western releases.
I always prefer games that have internally balanced difficulty selection by scaling up difficulty as you progress, and offering seasoned players a challenge in later and/or optional levels. Easy to pick up, difficult to master. As opposed to having a hard mode where enemies just take more hits, its so cheap.
It's actually one of the reasons Goldeneye was so exceptional, it had three difficulties, but all three difficulty settings were completely re-done and re-balanced, so you could play through the game three times and have three separate experiences.
Probably this.
Though the weird thing is that going back to them now as an adult the good ones don't feel designed for children at all. The plethora of fair, but challenging NES games seems like they were designed specifically for a teenage-young adult enthusiast crowd that wasn't a primary target demographic at the time.
I think the real answer is just that the industry was young and there were a lot of systems not in place then that we have now.
Development and design have come a long way, its important to remember that many of the studios for the first few generation of consoles were new, Young, and inexperienced.
Development and design have come a long way, its important to remember that many of the studios for the first few generation of consoles were new, Young, and inexperienced.
Another reason I heard from devs was that, at least in the NES days, tested the games the programmed themselves, making tweaks as the went along. Eventually the games would be too easy for them so they'd jack up the difficulty. All that testing threw off their frame of reference for the difficulty!
30 minutes to 1 hour to be exact!
Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
You missed my point. Difficulty is not any more "artificial" than any other aspect of a game (stage layouts, player toolset / mechanics, enemy design, visuals, audio, etc).
If you play Ninja Gaiden and it takes you six hours to beat, then it was a six-hour long game. That's it. A skilled player can beat it in twenty minutes or less, yes, but the experience of playing Ninja Gaiden is about learning how to make your character successfully interact with their layouts, enemies, and bosses so that you don't get sent back and have to repeat stages. That experience is not "artificial" or invalidated because it is technically possible to beat the game very quickly if you know what you're doing - the process of learning how to play the game properly (which is irrevocably intertwined with the game's level of difficulty) is the content of Ninja Gaiden.
To be clear, I agree that 1) many games were challenging because developers and publishers didn't want players exhausting their games quickly and being bored with them (although there is not anything inherently wrong with this) and 2) there were a lot of bad games back then that were also hard (SNES Toy Story, The Lion King, maybe Beethoven's 2nd). My point is that people frequently frame the difficulty of old games as some kind of crutch, which is a misunderstanding - why people can say "Castlevania only makes the player repeat stages so they don't beat it in twenty minutes" without understanding the value behind being made to repeat stages on death, "Ninja Gaiden's content is artificially gated behind its difficulty" while not understanding that that difficulty is also content, and so on.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
So we would appreciate ease and comfort when it is appropriate rather than rely on it.
Yeah that game was really hard. I really liked the concept of it though.
NES Battletoads has to top my hard list though.
Goddamn that game was difficult. I did eventually beat super,battletoads, but the nes one I think I only got past the speeder bikes once or twice.
Edit: more on topic. I remember playing the shit out of chip and dales rescue rangers as a kid. I eventually was able to beat it, probably one of my proudest gaming achievements to this day, even though it would surely destroy me now.
I think the biggest problem with old games is many of them were hard AND sucked, this is especially true on NES where many many games played in a very rudimentary way, with bad controls, physics that made the character feel crappy to move around, and unfair level design.
Cave Johnson
Member
To be honest, I never noticed the difficulty. It was hard, yes. But I felt that it was a natural learning experience rather than frustration. I noticed I was far better in playing Sonic, Mario, Tenchu (god damn this game was addictive as fucking hell), Tomb Raider, Resident Evil like one would play Batman: Arkham Asylum back in the day.
Coming back to replay those titles today, it felt different, foreign even, as I was accustomed to the lazy game design of this generation. Even playing classic Tomb Raider (A game which I loved and still proficient though not as good as before), still gives me the sense of "otherness" that I can't beat out of my mind.
I wish I could go back to my mindset back in that era, where I was truly immersed in the game.
Coming back to replay those titles today, it felt different, foreign even, as I was accustomed to the lazy game design of this generation. Even playing classic Tomb Raider (A game which I loved and still proficient though not as good as before), still gives me the sense of "otherness" that I can't beat out of my mind.
I wish I could go back to my mindset back in that era, where I was truly immersed in the game.
Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
Then you can sub like Rocket Knight Adventures or Contra: Hard Corps into my post instead. The reasons games like that were difficult are roughly the same whether you're talking about the NES era or the SNES / Genesis era.
s_mirage
Member
To be fair, some of them aren't that bad. Either earlier this year or late last year I put some effort into the Lion King. Over a couple of days I went from awful at it to being able to effortlessly finish the game on its hardest difficulty. I've had a similar experience with Toy Story recently, though that has some difficulty spikes.
The games were hard, but they rewarded repeat play and learning the levels. I remember playing some horribly difficult and unfair games back then, games I wouldn't have the patience for now, but I was glad of that as I only got a console game infrequently. Those games had to last.
The games were hard, but they rewarded repeat play and learning the levels. I remember playing some horribly difficult and unfair games back then, games I wouldn't have the patience for now, but I was glad of that as I only got a console game infrequently. Those games had to last.
KyanMehwulfe
Member
If you can't win, don't play. NO FEAR.