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[Jigsaah]

Ninja Gaiden Black doesn’t have them either, it’s the og Ninja Gaiden locked to the original XBOX.

are you serious? Is it backwards compatible?

Edit: just checked, it's not. Fuck I'm already on Chapter 4 of my playthrough. SO what...am I left with ROMs? Or hooking up my OG Xbox? What a pain.

 

[DarkestHour]

The value proposition for games back then were based on challenge. If you made a game that had a hefty challenge (but a gradual learning curve) then you'd have a hit game that everyone would want to play. It's why Super Mario Bros gets progressively more difficult as you advance in levels - but the idea is that you learn to play better as you advance. Games were literally marketed on how difficult they were.



NES games in particular were mostly modeling themselves off of what was popular in arcades. Arcade games were meant to be challenging because the more often you'd die / have to restart, the more money you'd have to pump into it and the more money the machine was worth to arcade owners.

Well said. Additionally, the NES couldn't make the interactive movies that many games today now are.

 

[wondermega]

NES games were never "that hard," it makes my blood boil a little when people complain about Ninja Gaiden or Batman or TMNT being absurdly difficult - they were not games you could just blaze through guns (or swords) blazing, they required careful thought and mastery of the game's mechanics, memorization of the patterns, etc. That stuff might sound like a drag today, but back in the day "it was how games were" and it was actually super fun when balanced properly, such is the case with the games I mentioned. (Also, maybe less so TNMNT but those games had very well refined mechanics, so it was a joy just to hang out in those games and do anything!) And then, if you got far in those games, it was genuinely rewarding - all that more so if you saw the end. It was a badge of pride amongst your gamer buddies if you could say you handed some of those games their ass! It is something that modern gamers playing those games with save states will never be able to appreciate - and I am not taking it away from them, just like you can simply watch the game on youtube and "See the thing the whole way through," but you are definitely not going to get the same satisfaction of surviving that gauntlet if you don't play the game the way it was originally intended. For many reasons, that's simply not compatible with how games are today I suppose (and that's totally fine!)

With games like Super Mario (8bit games), it was great that they did have the warps in lieu of a legit save - if you wanted to see the entirety of the game (and you'd generally want to, as it was so packed with surprises and creativity) you could simply play through in one go over time. But if you just wanted to pick up and get to a middle or later stage, once you learned where the warps was then THAT was your "save state" I guess. Not as elegant as a password or better yet a battery, but it was satisfying for what it was at the time.

 

[Gameplaylover]

Games were really expensive back then, mostly very short and there were no f2p games. So they made them hard. I still own Mike Tyson's Punch Out and i beat it as a kid. Tried it again a few years ago and got my ass handed to me by Super Macho Man. Many games were doable with enough practice, you could call them Nintendo's Dark Souls: Learn the patterns and start again.

The most unfair game i ever played was Battle Toads. Couldn't even beat Level 3 no matter how hard i tried. And that game had 12 levels.

 

[Y0ssarian]

How does one get 'filtered'?

 

[HYDE]

are you serious? Is it backwards compatible?

Edit: just checked, it's not. Fuck I'm already on Chapter 4 of my playthrough. SO what...am I left with ROMs? Or hooking up my OG Xbox? What a pain.

Tecmo needs to bring NES NG123 & SNES NG Trilogy to current gen. It sucks…

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

back in the day "it was how games were" and it was actually super fun when balanced properly, such is the case with the games I mentioned. (Also, maybe less so TNMNT but those games had very well refined mechanics, so it was a joy just to hang out in those games and do anything!)

I can’t put Ninja Gaiden in the same basket as TMNT. Maybe TMNT is slightly less responsive, but the level design counterbalances this and makes the game much less deliberately punishing than NG. No bottomless pits alone makes all the difference, as most of the ridiculous difficulty of NG comes from the combo of respawning enemies + recoil on impact + bottomless pits everywhere. I think TMNT is the most accessible of the games you’ve mentioned. I beat TMNT several times (I think I was 10yo when I beat it for the first time) and I was so surprised when, years after, I found out that apparently most kids gave up at the dam. NG with no savestates, tho? Not even 25 years later.

 

[*Nightwing]

I get more distilled rather than filtered when playing NES games

Always found N64 better for filtering with the added expansion packs.

 

[KungFucius]

people used to rent games..
you don't want people to beat a game fast when they are renting .

I beat about 30 NES games on rental, maybe more. You could plow through them. I remember keeping my NES on for a weekend to beat Ninja Gaiden. I don't see why companies would design their games around the rental economy. They wanted people to buy them outright, not rent then buy. I took renting to beat as a challenge. I hated not beating or having to rent again.

 

[German Hops]

Op your gonna have to explain to us Gen Xers what the context of the word filtered means for you kids these day?

How does one get 'filtered'?

When a gamer encounters a game so hard, that it is impossible for one to succeed in it.
This might be due to the games overt difficulty, or usually, the gamers' inherent inabilities.
In this case, the impotence of the gamer acts as a filter, preventing him/her from advancing in said game to any significant degree.

By any metric one could use, it is fair to say that one has been filtered.

 

[Vangellis]

Access to the internet has made games easier as well as games holding your hand. Nothing like booting up a game to sit through some lame ass tutorial. If you are stuck these days you hit a wiki. 8-bit-16bit era you were fucked lol. I remember writing a letter to SEGA for dungeon maps for Phantasy Star when I was a little kid.

 

[Lunarorbit]

Mike Tyson's Punch Out wasn't hard as much as it was cheap. That game straight up cheated. But the way Tyson was KO'ing fools I guess it was kind of realistic.

so many NES games were just brutal

Cheap is an excellent adjective to describe some nes and snes games. You'd get the slow down on the screen, pixels start to spaz out on you, and next thing you know you have to start gradius over again.

At least if a game was cheap you could maybe beat it but shit like landing an f-16 in top gun was absolute bull shit.

 

[ReBurn]

Cheap is an excellent adjective to describe some nes and snes games. You'd get the slow down on the screen, pixels start to spaz out on you, and next thing you know you have to start gradius over again.

At least if a game was cheap you could maybe beat it but shit like landing an f-16 in top gun was absolute bull shit.

I imagine a lot of it came down to lack of memory and program space to allow better intelligence in bosses. So they just had to make them cheap to get the difficulty level they wanted.

 

[Spukc]

I beat about 30 NES games on rental, maybe more. You could plow through them. I remember keeping my NES on for a weekend to beat Ninja Gaiden. I don't see why companies would design their games around the rental economy. They wanted people to buy them outright, not rent then buy. I took renting to beat as a challenge. I hated not beating or having to rent again.

They made contra harder in US because of rentals

 

[Syphon Filter]

Zelda 2 has to be the hardest game ever, it's the first game I literally quit and never played it again lol.