You didn't exactly make it very clear that it was a joke, to be fair. And you put that joke in a section that ALREADY bashed old games and said they suck, which already would've made people defensive. That joke was definitely a bad idea, man.
I actually broke out laughing when you said its not because of your lack of skill its because of boredom. Are you telling us that? Or are you telling yourself that?
I just realized what you are: a game journalist. Someone who will fault a game for the way it punishes you for sucking at said game. I'm honestly surprised you didnt bitch about having to climb back up a vertical climb after falling in shovel knight.
Huh. Though, I might as well add, there's an interesting counterpoint to this, in that there is some evocative emotion/feel in the parts of old games that are treated as "jank" or "obsolete" that get loss in the March Of Progress-driven view of the medium, as best exemplified by Liz Ryerson's very recent article on Thief: medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-stairway-to-the-unconscious-thief-the-dark-project-20-years-later-6bd1f92783e9 And, while I disagree A LOT with Ryerson, on a lot of things, I can't help but feel she has a point here. A lot of very good things got lost in games desire to be Modern and Respectable, and I think that's worth criticizing.
The glitching pixels was due to the NES having a max amount of sprites that could be animated at any one time. Making them flicker meant that you could have more animated characters on screen and render them in alternating frames.
@Rooflesoft Games Right, so developers would alternate which sprites appeared on the screen by flickering them. This would allow them to bypass what would otherwise be a terrible limitation and put more objects "on-screen". So flickering is actually a sign of ingenuity and polish on the developers part. Not the other way around, Snowman.
He had to praise a modern difficult game or rabid NES tards would've filled the comments with "you just suck, git gud". Which was a pointless effort since they did so anyways, most of them probably didn't even watch the video
If he didnt watch the video he wouldn't know Shovel knight was in it a lot. Also he mainly focused on complaining about lives which is something not unique to NES games at all and didnt begin with NES games at all, as well as praising Shovel knight for ideas it got from Megaman.
Rayman Origins is one of those extremely hard games where it starts off east with plenty of checkpoints but slowly spaces those checkpoints out and makes it harder, it's one of my favorite games of all time
Man ray man origins was one of the first games I ever got 100% in. I had to get to the land of the livid dead. And then I did and it’s like the game (which by this point was already difficult) just suddenly flipped the table and grabbed me by the collar. But the payout... oh man. I love that game. Legends came close to replicating it but something was missing... still.
@@dragonpixel1809 if I remember correctly I believe it was a combination E.T the Atari version of pacman and and the company itself being left within the dust (as in sales) what I believe happened is those two anal entrees E.T and pacman People began to have something called "standards" and so when Atari kept publishing the same quality of games less and less people kept buying them and eventually no one in their right minds wanted anything to do Atari and so in a half assed attempt to bring up sales they made the Atari 5200 which I'm pretty sure you know how bad that console is and what drove Atari deeper down its own garage. Now I'm not too sure if all of that is correct but I strictly remember that it had to do with e.t and pacman (the Atari version)
I regard Castlevania as one of the NES games that have aged the best. It's really hard but short and overcome-able. You have three lives, but all that happens when you lose them is that you have to restart the level. As long as you have lives you restart at the checkpoints. The reason that everyone hates the medusa heads isn't that they're badly designed, it's that they're the first enemies that teach you that you need patience and plan your actions in this game. And that's frustrating when the game so far had been pretty much hit and run.
*Games don't age, you do.* The problem with retro games is that you need to put yourself in a mindset of somebody who would've played them long ago. So you will need patience, expect that games will require mastery, and don't expect instant gratification - because you won't get any. All fun has to be worked hard for.
@@mistertagomago7974 I realized so myself when I was writing it. But then again, Dark Souls was praised for bringing old school mentality back to modern games. :) Is Dark Souls the Castlevania of modern games? ;)
One thing you neglected to mention about NES games that I feel makes a difference- you can often earn extra lives through finding secrets or score. This turns lives into a resource management system rather than a set number of tries, and NES games were often balanced around that. Is it worth it to farm a live or two to prevent a game over? Do you need to find all the secrets to get further, or is it better to not waste lives trying to find them? Lives and checkpoints on the NES encouraged mastery of a section that I just don't feel modern games do, and it feels disingenuous to describe them as a limited continue system when often, finding ways to generate more lives was an entertaining risk vs reward decision.
You know what that is actually a good point, or like knowing where the hidden wall chicken is in Castlevania, like if you know all those secrets you'll do much better
@@snomangaming Exactly! How many NES games had 1ups in plain sight, but requiring a risky play to acquire them? At an early point in your mastery of the game it may not be worth going for these lives, as you'll die trying to grab them, but once a player develops in skill, they become much more attractive and allow the player to progress further. The player asks themselves, is it worth the risk? Should I go for it? THAT is a strength of a lives system; optional challenge for meaningful reward.
@Melvin Lopez oh yeah, and don't forget, those could corrupt due to various issues, so I completely understand why ps1 and saving wasn't used often if at all... the same doesn't apply to ps2, as at that point it was common to have at least 2, 1 of which were backups/ games you rarely played. And then we get to the xbox 360... oh yeah, that had memory cards. Talk about redundant.
"Glitching pixels and lag" was the result of the limits of the NES hardware, not a polish issue. Don't forget most of the NES's actual chips were 1970s tech or based on 1970s tech, and the NES itself wasn't even designed to run Super Mario Bros or Mega Man, it was designed to run nearly-arcade-perfect Donkey Kong. If you didn't want glitching sprites or slowdown in your NES game, there were four options: 1) Use background tiles whenever possible. Pretty much all of the best NES developers, including Nintendo, abused background tiles in ways Nintendo hadn't originally intended. 2) Use different hardware. e.g. wait a few years and make a game for Turbo Grafx 16 or Amiga instead. Sure hope you don't need to pay bills until then! 3) Jump through hoops to make sure the few sprites you do use don't overlap horizontally. e.g. make sure some sprites don't move vertically at all. 4) Give up and live with it. A lot of developers went for option 4.
@@ByGeorge846 seriously. That was the exact point I paused the video to see the comments. "Games released with so little polish"!? Of course, this guy wasn't even alive back then so he's got no point of reference.
@Chad Not NES trying to flicker sprites, the flickering is programmed to the game. NES just doesn't show the last sprites if there are too many per scanline, so games had to have a feature to detect that and cycle which ones will be shown.
Mega ManFan123 nah it’s a relevant wooosh. IG doesn’t know what the guy was thinking when he made the comment. No-one can accurately read minds from UA-cam comments.
Loui Javier he didn’t make it clear that he got the joke, hence the woooshing is relevant. I try to put a joking tone into my joke replys, even if they have a serious tone and are on a joke comment, they are usually corrections, or are to Woooshable comments. One of my replies are definitely woooshable, yet didn’t get noticed because there was already a wooosh in the chain, or more so a massive wooosh chain. Gotta be careful on this platform man.
2:02 I'd like to point out that there *is* a somewhat justifiable reason for many NES games functioning like arcade games despite the lack of coin feeding, and that's game length. Limited technology only allowed for so much space, which is why games can be completed in less than an hour with enough skill. On top of that, games were often just as expensive as they are today, if not even more, before all the inflation that's occurred since then, so developers really needed to pad out the play time with punishing elements. This doesn't change that these are bad design philosophies, but developers had to work with what they were given at the time. Anyway, a modern game that I'd argue has captured the old-school difficulty without adopting outdated design is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. The platforming challenges are hard, but never unfair, as the game drip-feeds players the mechanics across a stage before throwing them all together for a final test of skill. Lives are incorporated, but the game provides so many of them that it takes a sufficient lack of skill to actually run out of them -- that and it's basically necessary for the co-op, as lives are shared. It also has the bonus levels that offer no checkpoints, as well as Hard Mode, which allows no partner, no checkpoints, no help items, and only one hit, allowing players craving that punishing difficulty to indulge in it. It's a master of its craft.
I remember borderline speedrunning Mega Man 2 in around 35 minutes as a kid to show off, or running Contra without the Konami code and playing through the game 3 or 4 times on a single life to show friends that Contra was possible without cheats. I got a feeling of accomplishment from beating games everyone said were hard. Some games like Blaster Master and Metroid suffer from a lack of in-game maps (especially since both have a TON of backtracking and nothing really tells you what items do until you start messing around; I love Blaster Master Zero on Switch, though...it fixes most of the design issues with the NES game) I feel like a lot of modern games are "invest 15 hours into playing our interactive movie and nothing really stands in your way." A cool premise like Prototype was ruined by the game being so friggin' easy.
As I understand it, many games were also developed with the rental market in mind. You could rent a game for, what, I guess a week? (I have no experience renting anything) but that wasn't likely enough to let you beat it, and it might just make you thirsty for more, leading you to buy the game instead, which meant more money in both the pockets of the video store and the game company.
The game technology issue excuse would work, if it weren't for games like Mario Bros. 3 and Legend of Zelda that were good games, gratifying experiences and definitely worth the price, all without resorting to cheap tactics to artificially increase the playtime. Most of the time the real reason was that making games with sufficient playtime was hard and artificially lengthening it with unfair deaths and limited lives was easy. And whether or not hardware issues *were* the issue they definitely aren't an issue now, so bringing back outdated NES era concepts for the sake of it like some gamers ask for makes no sense
The games were hard not because they were trying to emulate arcade, but because they were short. Imagine spending $50 on castlevania and beating it in under an hour.
Yeah, it struck me as very odd this wasn't mentioned. It was implied to just be an overlooked holdover from arcade-era days, which struck me as wrong and made me think the same thing.
True that's why the comparison with Shovel Knight isn't really fair, that's a long game. I actually think Contra would be worse if it had unlimited continues.
@Ningen It's not 'artificial' difficulty. It'd be artificial difficulty if it didn't require skill - but this way, it requires *mastery* of the early stages. This is opposite of artificial difficulty.
Mega Man is definitely, in most cases, a master class in the sort of modern-day challenging design you spoke of. Barring the first game, which of course commits the inexcusable sin of making an item that can be confused for being optional, required to even beat the game, in a particularly nastily designed section that in some versions of the game, render progression impossible if it runs out, Mega Man tends very frequently to introduce a stage gimmick or mechanic in a safe environment where you can't be killed by it. Magnet Man's stage in Mega Man 3 mixes the ever-present disappearing blocks of previous games with a new wall-magnet mechanic dragging you off of them if you get too close, but the first two of these are in a safe environment where you aren't penalized for falling, but the third introduces a bottomless pit to the equation, suddenly raising the stakes and testing how well you react to this new magnet mechanic. Or, a more resourceful player, depending on when they arrive at Magnet Man's stage, may already have the Rush Jet, which they can use to bypass this challenge entirely, rendering it moot. Mega Man is full of potential options for a player to explore and that's what can make them so infinitely replayable. One of my favorite things to do is practicing a stage with savestates, stating at each new screen and making multiple runs with different weapons and items at my disposal, trying to develop the perfect "How do I best deal with this?" strategy.
Don't forget that one wily stage in MM2 that has a boss that requires pretty much a full load of Crash Bombs to defeat, so that if you attempt it once and fail you practically have to kill yourself repeatedly until you game over and replay the entire stage. MM2 is probably IMO the best Mega Man game overall, but that particular case is just plain stupid design.
Charge man in MM5 without any items is complete BS. Also 3 of the 4 starting bosses of MM7 are made completely trivial if you have any other weapon than Mega Buster
Bubble bobble. Hard to beat in one sitting but every stage had a code so you could always pick up where you left off. Multiple endings. One of the greatest games of all time.
The arcade version sent you back to the beginning after you lost all your lives. It's the one I usually play though because of the graphics and sound quality.
But to be fair, the flicker can be avoided by using good game design. The flicker is caused by too many sprites in one horizontal lines, so if the game designers just avoid this, the problem won't occur. However, this most likely was very difficult to replicate consistently in a game, and so coming full circle, the flicker was indeed a hardware limitation. You're welcome for wasting your time reading this just to tell you what has already been said. :)
I played and beat castlevania 1 for the first time recently and can say it is an incredibly tightly designed game, there is a moment just before the fight against death where you have to move forwards, fight the axe throwing knight dudes and avoid medusa heads at the same time and its actually thrilling Its life system is excellent, you get 3 tries to make it through the stage where you get to restart from a checkpoint otherwise you go back to the start of the stage but the stages are reasonably short The final boss though is the ultimate test because dracula can only actually move and shoot He is really predictable but also quite hard to fight, but you get the unbroken rythm and finally win and its amazing Also i would disagree with you about committed jump arcs because castlevania 1 is designed around them very well You have a very specific toolset designed exactly for the job I played through 1,2,3,4, and rondo of blood and id say 1 is probably in the running for best becase its so much tighter than 3 and 4. though rondo of blood is probably my favourite, the fact that it competes so well with its successors has to say something
Just beat Castlevania 1 for the first time recently too, and my Lord that lead up to Death is brutal. Probably took me the longest of any part of the game, except maybe Dracula himself. Overall I'd say the game feels pretty fair, only questionable thing is being able to die after killing the boss (which happened to me against Death at least once) but even that I could see making an argument for. Great game. Overall I prefer 4, but mostly for the atmosphere and the extended length. (Still need to play Rondo). Btw, I'm guessing from your post you prefer classic Vania to the exploration ones?
I only played rondo about a month ago, not got around to the explory ones but i am a big post super metroid metroid fan 4 was great fun, my favourite bit of 4 is the boss rush leading up to death because its high challenge but really easy to try again Also the music is great, just dont think its quite as good as rondo I think im used to the dying after bosses thing from mega man 1, i get how it annoys people but its never really bothered me because i dont consider it a win until you lose control of the character
@@alexlee4154 yeah Metroid is my favorite series (and Super is my favorite game), but for Castlevania I prefer the classic style. If you haven't played it I recommend Bloodstained Curse of the Moon. Great spiritual successor to Castlevania 3.
Mega Man, they did the isolation techniques for almost ever enemy, very few random enemies most trigger when your near them, game over only made you replay the stage but you keep all the beaten ones and power ups. Etc
Most classic games enemies demand the attention of players and patience and rushing well get you a game over you need to pay attention 'case most old games are like 1 or 2 hour long so rushing is pointless.
My thoughts as well! That segment of Gutsman's stage with the conveyor platforms shown near thr start of the video is a prime example. First the player is shown how the platform folds away when passing over a gap in the track, next you need to jump when it happens for your platform, then you need to jump down to the bottom platform and avoid its folding as well. Granted, MM1 _is_ easily the most 'NES hard' of the NES series, but that's likely due to the developers not yet having having polished the MM formula (e.g. it still has traits from arcade games, like the totally pointless score system), which would be pretty much crystallized in the very next installment.
Issues: 1: Sprite flickering was actually a solution to a hardware issue. Each sprite was 8 pixels horizontally and 8 or 16 pixels vertically. If there were more then 8 sprites on the scanline, the 9th sprite and onward will not draw. So devs would alternate the sprite priority every frame, which caused the sprite flickering. 2. You warped to world 8 you cheater. No wonder it was hard, you skipped passed 6 1/2 worlds.
What you call "Glitchy pixels" and "lack of polish" are actually limited sprites that the memory allowed. These were actually pretty clever tricks, if you had X limit, and wished to show X times 2, you had to "flicker" between them each frame. Wish games these days were that optimized.
Clever or not, it doesn't change the fact that they are still flickering, and it does still look pretty wonky. It's basically compromising one aspect for another after all Can't really blame him for saying they look bad, since the reasoning behind the flicker doesn't change how it looks Also since this is compromising graphics for the sake of performance and not so much optimizing code, the modern equivalent of this would basically be removing polygons and shaders until everything looks like a Nintendo 64 character. The coding is where most games need the optimization, reducing texture resolution and polycount is easy in comparison, it's just most people have decided they'd prefer their games look a little better at the cost of them not being able to run on 20 year old PCs
@@starrysock ok, im sorry, i get what you are trying to say, but you are flat out wrong, no amount of "coding magic" can fix these problems, because it is HARDWARE ISSUES! there was litterally nothing you could do to optimize code to stop flicker, as its how the nes was BUILT, what you are saying is like saying "you could have made gameboy games look better, just add color!" (and no, game boy color dosn't count cause its new hardware, not "coding magic") also, they DO remove polygons and shadders until things look like n64 characters, even the n64 did it! its called level of detail, or LOD. if things are far enough away from the camera to not matter as much, they switch to lower polygon versions to save rendering power, and lets not forget that lowering graphics to make up for lack of hardware has been a pc staple since the beginning of time. even doom let you play in a tiny window to allow even proto-potatos play. the only way to push past a hardware limitation would be to include hardware on the cartrage, (its now the snes got 3d out star fox) but as one can assume including a graphics card with every game is not the most cost effective thing in the world.
@@Slash0mega I think you've misread my comment. Again, doesn't matter why these sprites are flickering, you can say it looks bad and still be valid. You can call the gameboy being monochrome ugly too, because again, your impressions of something don't change because of the justification behind it. That doesn't mean the justification isn't valid either, but I can still say McDonal's food tastes crappy even though the crappy ingredients also allow it to cost next to nothing in exchange The second part of my comment is exclusively referencing modern games too. Mauricio said that he wishes modern games were this optimized, so I said the equivalent is "removing polygons and shaders" in general, not just at far distances, because in NES games it's not just unimportant objects that flicker. Also the thing with PC graphic settings are that there's only so much you can practically do with them. Old N64 games are built around things like low poly terrain and no physics simulations, so using a standard slider like you would for decreasing texture resolution only works up to a point. After that you run into issues like missing polygons, unreadable textures, etc, and extra work has to be put in just to accommodate for that. However, most people who enjoy playing games have at least somewhat decent computers, so it's not worth the effort when that development time could be better put to use elsewhere. Ultimately that doesn't matter though, because that's not what I was talking about. My point is that most people generally prefer games to look decent rather than majorly compromising graphics to get there, so after a certain point, optimization has to come from elsewhere
@@starrysock perhaps, its just to me the second half of your comment read "they should have just optimized the code instead of reducing graphics." side note, they do the reduce graphics for the whole game on modern games too, but you point of "it will upset the the consumer" stands strong if you remember the whole watchdogs fiasco.
I agree, some of the tricks back then were really clever. Specially if you think that you needed to fit the entire game in less than 1 MB, and could just resolve to 2 kB of RAM! Without the limitations, programs are actually getting bigger than they need to nowadays, so it's funny: the more you go forward with technology the more resources you will need to do the exact same thing, so you still seem to meet the same limits. It's insane how disproportionate the tech advancement has to be just so that we can actually see an improvement in how the program feels.
Something to note is that Shovel Knight & Hollow Knights punishments add variety to play, Shovel Knight adding another risk/reward system with gold placements and Hollow Knight with a potentially annoying enemy in some situations. Makes dying not just repeating the same thing over but better this time.
Well that got more attention than I thought it wou--- no comments or input? Aw was looking forward to that. Also DAMN saw some of the comments section. As a fellow designer more used to games reminiscent of the 80s-90s rather than the games that inspired them, I'll have to agree with most of the points simply for the reason that annoying a player isnt a good thing. Sure you can tolerate that part of the game and still enjoy it, but you can't say that annoyance was contributing to the fun you had while playing it. Satisfying as it may be to beat such a game, something I like saying from the veins of Alan Watts: *Games are not a Journey.* You play games, you dont work games. It's not supposed to feel like a job that where you feel great when you get to the weekend. Games are supposed to be playful, the act of playing should be fun in itself. Bit of a controversial belief. Maybe that'll get some discussion rolling idk.
@@Eshiay Now have this thought: what if I want to go on a journey? What if rather than leisurely read and stuff my face with wine in Athens, I'd fight for my life and conquer victory in Sparta? I guess it's easier to say some games just aren't for everyone. Not everyone sees adversity the same, and people are diverse in their values and beliefs.
Flickering graphics on NES were a programming hack to add more sprites on the screen than the hardware could handle. That's not an example of bad programming or a lack of polish, it's an example of pushing the hardware to the absolute limit successfully.
Flickering was also a bit less of an issue on CRT screens which always did that anyway and the result could be much, much worse on VHS tapes so people were used to it. Sinking money into fixing something most people wouldn't notice anyway is thrown away money.
@@goldfish6525 Yeah, it sucks, but did you not read the comment. It's because of the hardware it had to flicker. So, yes it's "successful", otherwise there wouldn't be as much sprites on screen.
@@nobby5492 well designed? Not really. Like the part where you fall down and those yellow lasers try to kill you? That's not fair or well designed at all since it's jusr trial and error
Part of the appeal of lives systems for me is that they mean you have to get consistent with playing the whole game well, or at least a decent part of the game before you can actually beat it. To me this is more fun than just spamming infinite checkpoints/savestates at a brick wall until you happen to clear it once and then move on to the next brick wall, never having to think about earlier parts of the game ever again. Sure, modern games that use lives systems should make an effort to make collecting lives actually meaningful, and provide the player with some ways to make each playthrough of previous sections different from the last, but to dismiss lives systems as inherently outdated is just kinda dumb imo.
100% agree with you. It's much more intense and satisfying this way. It means that you have to actually improve at the game, not just grind the same section again and again. When you play this way, it's way more fun, especially when a game is deep enough so you can find new stuff in earlier stages and even warps, alternative routes or power-ups to make the problematic section easier. When he told he used savestates to beat SMB3 I shook my head.
I think lives create that same problem. The player just throws their lives at every new level, while starting from the beginning when they run out, then having more lives to throw at the level.
By the time I was able to beat Ninja Gaiden, the only level where I lost any lives was the last one. In one afternoon, my noob ass was forged into an always forward dashing ninja speedrunning machine, and I don't even speedrun games. Can't have that with modern checkpoints.
When you breeze through levels that felt impossible before with no added advantage except experience, that's a kind of thrill you don't get in modern games.
Maybe he misheard or misinterpreted his wife. Or maybe his wife never saved as a kid (I don't know how it works, since I never played Spyro). But he relied on that information and put it in a video. Without fact-checking. And without research.
@@Senordisastermaster (Reignited saves automatically across all three games.) In the original Spyro, you can save whenever you rescue a dragon. Standing on a dragon marker initiates a prompt to save, and you can do this with any dragon you rescue. Spyro 2 and 3 automatically save when you enter or exit a level. None of the games make you start over if you lose all your lives if you don't have a memory card.
Well, Fortnite doesn't actually "restart". Each time a match begins, you're pitted against different players with different strategies, and your starting location is different. So the whole "walk of shame" aspect doesn't exist in Fortnite.
Some of the games of nes were designed to emulate arcades but the difficulty thing in lots of games wasn't artificial difficulty but artificial lengthening
@@thegrayghost1786 artificial difficulty is when you limit the player by increasing or decreasing stats. The levels in say super mario were genuinely difficult but because of the life system you were sent back to the start which artificially lengthened the game. Artificial difficulty would be if you had to bonk goomba 50 times instead of once to kill them
@@devastatheseeker9967 I disagree with your definition. I define it as when instead of offering a fair challenge, the game will introduce mechanics designed to annoy the player and kill them. Health sponging is one method, but another example is like in Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden where they'll have a bunch of tight platforming sections with bottemless pits and a shit ton of enemies designed to specifically knock the player into the pits with the atrocious knock back mechanic. Games designed as well as Mario aren't abundant on the NES. Most games are designed to be hard as shit to pad out the game.
@@thegrayghost1786 yes but they're legitimately hard. It's not like a boss where you're forced to chip away at a gigantic health pool and only die because it takes you out in one shot. The ancient dragon in dark souls 2 is a prime example of artificial difficulty. One of the easiest bosses in the game but because it has such a huge health pool and does insane damage it makes it "hard" that's artificial difficulty. Yes castlevania and such do have tight jumps and stuff but that's more so a test of skill, hence it not being artificially difficult. Artificial difficulty is when you're faced with an obstacle that isn't difficult but is made difficult via numbers
@@devastatheseeker9967 No, that isn't legitimate difficulty. Placing enemies in bs locations to knock you into an instakill pit when the controls are so stiff is not legitimately difficulty.
I think Balloon Fight has fair challenge. The enemies are as limited in movement as you are, and you can choose to kill them off when they're weak, or wait for them to get their balloons back so you can pop them for more points, the fish only appears when you get too close to the water, and the stars are one hit kills but they always move the same way and you can see when and where they're going to appear before they can kill you. But it's Balloon Fight. Your only reward is points.
Nothing wrong with points, games were very arcade like back then. I love balloon fight, I can get pretty far but I've never actually beaten it. Games don't need to be super technical or in depth to be fun, playing a game like that basically shows what I mean.
Ok but if you’re going to put ducktales, castlevania, and mega man next to the words “bad game design” you’re just asking for hate Not hating just saying lots of people will get mad
i like at 7:57 he says it's funny that games were released with this little polish. as opposed to games now which are released half done and the other half is released as an expensive DLC or very large updates(betrhseda). Or "Big Rigs:Over The Hill Racing"
@@hideofreakingkojima5457 yeah i meant to clarify a little bit more. The NES could only do so much with an 8 bit processor and just a few Megabits for game size. Companies like bethseda have no excuse for crippling glitches. In Fallout 3( which is my favorite of the bunch) has the most bizarre glitches. In one play through all the non-human enemies were deathclaws. In another, my characters arms disappeared and everything became hostile towards me
I particularly like it how he complains about "glitching graphics" and complaining that the developers need to fix this before release, but what he was showing was sprite flicker due to a hardware limitation. It was an expected and accepted artifact of the 8-bit era, they were doing the best with what they were given.
Other parts of megaman is brilliant. In that they give you something easy first, and then later you get the same thing but in a harder version. I never noticed it as a child, but it was really advanced game design back then where they wanted the players to gradually learn and take on challenges when you had some experience.
That "flicker" is better explained in the development of Micro Mages: the NES can only have a certain number of sprites on screen. To render more, they cycled through each one.
I think "bad" game design isn't really fair here. "Dated" is the word you're looking for. A lot of these games are not good by todays standards, but the difference between an outright bad game and a dated game is that if you get you mind out of the headspace of comparing it to games made after 30 years of trial and error have occurd these games can still be a lot of fun. Hell, the Megaman games are still considered classics, and for good reason.
I was gonna say the same thing. Not only are they not bad game design, they may be better game design than today's. Just the music alone and the creative nature of all those games are head and shoulders above many from today. How many post apocalyptic games do we have now? Military shooters? Zombies? It's the same shit. Also hard to name a game with memorable music these days.
@@THE_BEAR_JEW Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Rayman: Legends, Dark Souls, and we can continue on and so forth. Those orchestral pieces aren't 8-bit ass clouds calling themselves music either. It's not hard to have good OST's at all.
Like... I love the Good/Bad Game Design series but I do feel like you maybe put a HUGE emphasis on platformers and puzzle games. Which - I get it - you like those games - that's good.... But I wouldn't mind seeing your takes on a wider variety of games. What makes good/bad game design in say - RPGs? Or Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-like Farm Sims? What do you think makes a good or bad game design in casual games? Or other types of sim games? Or battle royales (with or without cheese)? Or combat games? This series is amazing... But it has so much potential to cover a much wider breadth of game design and you can kind of only cover platformers so much before you're just rehashing content.
@@kitmakin289 If he doesn't like them and hasn't played them much he might feel that he doesn't have the right experience to talk meaningfully about them (rightfully I would add). I'd prefer him talking with knowledge than a half-assed attempt at something he is not comfortable with.
I can't speak for him (because i'm not him) but i assume that he uses these examples because that's what he's familiar with. Maybe he just doesn't have as much expertise in RPG's 'n stuff as he does in what he does
Fluffy and Harrin you both have great points and I do acknowledge that - but if that's the case - maybe he could expand what he plays? Or invite those who have more experience with those other genres on the show to talk WITH him about what would be classed as good or bad game design in these areas? As it is - he has a great way of presenting his arguments and good structure so it would be really great if he could expand his content here. I know that he prefers the rage-game, platforming, puzzle genre which is fine - but he has a sense for general game design as well (like when he speaks about good sound engineering and use of colour) so slightly more branching out like that could also be good.
Nintendo’s quality control, despite some of its annoyances, at least made it so NES games were possible to beat, even those that were “NES hard”. I remember some pre-NES games being impossible to beat.
@@KuroNoTenno it meant a lot if you place it in the context of the videogame crash right before the NES. The quality control made sure games actually worked on the systems, which wasn't a given in the years before the crash
There are questionable NES games, silver surfer, Battletoads saga , Ninja Gaiden Trilogy , DuckTales, and first TMNT , , , "here 8year old kid , play one of these games and defeat it in less than 4 days "
I believe they were, however; Getting Over It is specifically designed to bring out that feeling, and that's what made it so popular... also, it was pretty M E T A
Getting Over it was supposed to make you rage quit, it is designed to make you supper angry, from the bad controls, to the voiceover that makes fun of you, it is supposed to test your patience, it's a rage game, you chose to play them that way
Doesn't make any sense. What "It's supposed to be" doesn't change what it actually is at the end of the day. If you'll grant and factor in the target audience and culture of people watching UA-camrs make funny faces and noises then you can grant level selecting cheat codes for old games. Yes it's an evil. Whether it's a necessary evil with a goal in mind is another question.
@@FernieCanto same here. I absolutely despise the first metroid, its kind of amazing it was liked enough that it got sequels, although given that super metroid was one of them, I'd say its worth it
The first Legend of Zelda on the 8 bit NES was fair. You had a map to navigate, clues to find secrets, we're introduced to new abilities progressively, and all enemies with predictable patterns. It was a well rounded game that just took time, skill, resource management and a little knowledge.
It's biggest flaws is the translation of the clues, which makes them extremely vague, then again as a kid I barely knew English and certainly not Japaneese. Especially in Zelda II, I had to use a dictionary for the word "fellow" (yes, it was before internet)
@@isaiahmillard9014 it inspired dozens and dozens of games... What the hell are you even talking about? That doesnt mean it was the first game to do these things, but it was the first to do them all right. It was just a hard act to follow.
@@isaiahmillard9014 those 2 games came out the same year. One isn't derivative of the other. Zelda is definitely the more accessible of the 2. Its completely understandable that more people would have picked it up. Crystalis is a fantastic game that only recently started getting the praise it deserves, but you can't even pretend that it doesn't take ques from the zelda series, along with games like dragon warrior. I'm not sure why you'd be upset about this. Zelda is a great game, whether you like it or not.
I remember beating Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Castlevania I and III when I was 9. I was a goddess among my friends at school. Beating old school NES games was a thrill. They had to be hard because otherwise you'd be dropping $50 on a game that you could otherwise beat in under 2 hours. It was also a way to get people renting games repeatedly ("I didn't beat it last week, so I'll try it again!").
@@simoncobian2816 Its almost like NES games was respecting your time and skill you put into them and modern games does not because you just finish them and forget. RIGHT SNOWMAN? HOWS THERE FINISHING DARK SOULS FOR YOU? I BET YOU LEARN A LOT FROM PLAYING IT AND YOU DIDNT HEAVY PUSH FROM BONFIRE TO BONFIRE IN HEAVY ARMOR AND SHIELD LIKE A SCRUB!!!!
"It's all about not having any setbacks and just forward progress. Except I also don't want too many checkpoints, because then it doesn't feel like I accomplished anything. But I also prefer save states. Also none of that matters and it's actually all about enemy placement and I have no idea what I'm talking about."
He would save state at the beginning of a level but probably not in the middle so he still had a checkpoint but not to many so he actually felt like he acomplished something... you should really think about what you say before writing it and just assuming he contridicts himself.
He does say that the higher challenges should be more optional (and just beating the game should be a moderate challenge without bullshit moments), like the checkpoints in SK or collecting in some other games.
These days, more and more games are being designed with accessibility in mind. This includes more save points, such as being able to save at will on the overworld map(s) in Super Mario Bros games. Design for accessibility, but have extraneous challenges in the game for the more skilled players. Also, don't insult players who need this assistance by calling your assist mode something like "chicken hat".
Old school battle royale game (that runs in web browser) can have "checkpoint" by offering you a starting bonus if you win or survive long enough in the last round. Giving that you can't matchmaking in a web based battle royale (aka if you lose, you will have to wait for the next round to start), winning really matters, rather than just being able to take a screenshot. Such idea probably won't work in "modern" matchmaking style battle royale that well because winning and losing count are just a number, and there's not a lot you can lose anyway because you can just start another round painlessly.
7:54 man that's super unfair to developers of back then. Those "glitchy" sprites aren't really glitchy -- the programmers had to actually make them cycle in terms of visibility in order to be able to show that many things on screen at once. (Well, clearly not "at once", but you get it.) It's one thing to say that the games look ugly today, but to say they were unpolished, even though you concede they were under technical limitations, is selling the work of these people way short.
Hotline Miami is the first example that pops to mind. It was brutal. Had the perfect amount of punishment that built up tension, stakes and provided accomplishment.
In contrast, Hotline Miami 2 is full of enemies who shoot you from offscreen or through windows, and most of the rooms take ages to clear due to their size and how easily it is to mess up. Sometimes bigger isn't always better.
The randomization of weapons also makes the restarts unique, which is kind of cool. It also avoids the feeling of needing luck as certain weapons (such as enemy weapons) are consistent, so while there is some randomness, you don't need to rely on the randomness to help you.
The blinking sprites were due to technical limitations. The console could only display a set number of sprites on the screen at the same time, but if you skip some frames on their rendering, you could display other sprites while they're off and so on.
Just because it's a console limitation doesn't mean it's pleasant to have in your game. I don't mind NES games as much as this uploader does, but the flickering sprites can't be defended as part of the charm. It is objectively a flaw.
@Zuon84 What matters a more about a game, it's complexity by being able to go past console limitations or _now having blinking sprites_ (which in my opinion I like about NES games, I don't know why.)
@@marclurr Well, I never blamed Nintendo for anything, but at the time of the NES' release, we already had 16 bit video game hardware in the arcades. Saying that better hardware didn't exist in 1985 is simply untrue. Whether or not it was affordable to the home consumer is a completely different story.
@@Zuon94 are you sure you wanna compare the nes hardware to an actual arcade machine?!!! are you insane?!!!! do you know the difference in hardware cost?! not to mention that with an arcade machine you could play ONE game(unless it was a neo-geo, which had some weird giant cartridges) and with the nes you have hundreds to choose from....
@@sabin97 I already brought up that price is not part of this argument in my previous comment. "The hardware did not exist" is the point I am arguing, and this is objectively false. Adding more restrictions to what "counts" in this argument is simply backpedaling.
Gotta love having to play the same game twice to get the true ending in Ghosts n Goblins. What a creative way to extend the length and difficulty of a game.
@@danielbueno8474 Yup. It's kinda crazy to remember that there was once a time when Capcom used to give Megaman some special treatment. Megaman shouldn't have been a thing since the first game on the NES didn't sell well, but they decided to make a Megaman 2 and it became a huge success. And after that, Capcom put Megaman on a pedestal for many years until around the 2000's when they made way too many Megaman games.
"there's a reason why the konami code came into existence" yeah it was meant to be a SECRET code that helped the game devs test out any bugs by getting into the game further much easier, and what benefits do these games have of wasting your time? it doesn't make any sense
And that's totally why they left it in and why it wasn't kept secret and everyone knew about it anyway? It started as a debug, sure, but so did a lot of cheat codes going all the way through the N64/PS1 era. Games in that era wasted time to make the game seem a lot longer or more challenging than it was, which clearly and unfortunately worked because people don't remember the bad game design. You save a lot of design hours and work within hardware limitations if you make a game so unfairly difficult that it takes ten times as long as it should to complete it if it were designed well. They also did it as a holdover from Arcade games because home consoles were still new. All people knew about video games were designing for arcade cabinets, where the objective from a designers perspective was making sure that they'll lose and have to try again and balancing it with making the game fun enough that they will come back to try again anyway.
Why would you warp whistle and save state your first playthrough of SMB3? Just play the game and you get rewarded with tons of powerups and extra lives. You also skipped the progressive difficulty built into the game. Using it as an example of game design when you didn't bother to experience any of what the game teaches through playing it is a disservice. I beat it when I was four years old. You can do better. Unless the whole purpose of this video was to game the algorithm by getting us all to interact with it through comments and dislikes.
Not my first time playing, I've played it many times. Just never beat it. You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I actually said it has a good balance of challenge and leniency, but I guess you heard what you want to hear
@@snomangaming Right but it seems like you doubled back when you mentioned save stating on current iterations in the interest of time so you could circumvent replaying particularly tricky or arduous stages. I understand that sentiment but SMB3 is a weak example when examining games on console full of jank, especially when the two stages in the given example are literally designed to be the most difficult in the entire game and you're playing deprived of all the extra lives and powerups the rest of the game gives you. It feels like you did that to yourself on purpose just for the sake of the point you're trying to make. After rewatching the video, another issue of contention I have is when discussing how primitive games just emulated the arcade quarter dump design but without the quarters you state that "no money is involved." Money was still involved. SMB3 cost the equivalent of nearly $100 when it was released. I'll fully agree that if I picked up SMB3 for 5 bucks on virtual console and I couldn't get past 8-2 I might just drop it and never play again. But for $100, I'm going to try again if I lose. Jokes about quarter sinks and Fortnite aside, SMB3 was a designed game. It was made to be replayed because even back then no one was going to pay that kind of money for 3-4 hours of entertainment. The lives system in SMB3 might be artificial difficulty sure, but every time you go through the levels there's usually some hidden secrets to find that will increase your chances at the end. There's definitely more to be said about how the value proposition weighs into game design. Anyway thanks for your reply. If you were gaming me for algorithm points than you win because I subbed.
Nah I totally feel you on that. If there's one thing that the comments have brought up it's about how short the games are without their difficulty. I still stand by that doesn't mean that they're well designed, but you're correct about extra lives and secrets and whatnot. SMB3 is one of the easier NES games I talk about so that's probably where all the hate came from. I try to be concise in my videos but sometimes that leads to miscommunication of my points. Thanks for watching :)
@@snomangaming Sorry if I was a bit abrasive at first. I should have better considered your position of having to be both concise and relative in the function of a youtube video. To be honest I never thought that I'd get a creator reply on a video with nearly 2,500 comments. Also the topic of the changes that have occurred in the value proposition's impact on video game design over the past 5 decades from coin-op to F2P could easily be a Master's thesis so I don't know what I expected. Cheers dude, can't wait for your next video even if I might not agree with it.
It is like the reviewer here has no idea about hardware limitations and cost of production. The fact that some of these old games are playable at all is due to very good design and hard work. Try to program in bits and see how difficult it can be.
I sigh every time I hear the old "lives are artificial difficulty" because that doesn;t make sense. Of course there is something to be said about replaying the same levels multiple times otherwise we wouldn't have the games to that do so with infinite lives. I'm not talking about NES games specifically, but I'm thinking back as a kid playing something like Tearaway Thomas or Gynoug, there is a real thrill being able to play earlier stages better than you were able to before. Getting to the end of level 7 with 4 lives where last time you only had 3? there's a real sense of weight to that. Even in more recent times playing Ducktales Remastered, I adore Extreme mode. I've never actually been able to beat it but each attempt has been exhilarating since every hit matters. The issue is about what is being measured, in the lower difficulties the game sort of reverts everyone to an equal playing field regardless of skill. If you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth or you trounced them, all that matters is "you did it" so the box has been checked off the list. Now my counter example of the exact opposite is Super Meat Boy. Everyone loves Super Meat Boy and I do enjoy the game, but I get bored of it really really quickly. When scale of rewards is diminished, the game becomes a case of "keep playing until you're perfect". Plus if you want to call replaying bits "artificial" then that applies here too surely. If a level consists of "5 jumps" and I keep dying on the 4th and 5th, then why make me do the first 3 jumps every time i die? what exactly is the scale of this issue? if it's a question of playing through 5 seconds of progress 2000 times or playing through 2500 seconds of progress 4 times, I choose the latter (generally speaking of course)
@Maurice Smith I don't think older games with lives system were "better" per se but I hate how it's dismissed straight up just cause the games that are made today aren't designed around them... for example I love JRPGs and fighting super optional bosses, and those games wouldn't work with a lives system in the same way
He likes super meat boy that's why it doesn't matter, you really had to learn a game to beat it. I can still pick up and play Castlevania 3 and get rather far because I can remember how to play it. Why? because I played the heck out it to really understand enemy placement and how to time jumps etc. I remember enjoying the new tomb raider reboot series but I can't really recall it that much because I never had a challenge, beat it and moved on.
Well I mean for starters, it's not mutually exclusive. A game like Super Meat Boy could easily have lives implemented and it would be even more difficult, probably more frustrating. Games can also push you to the limit without having lives at all, look at F-Zero GX for example. Beating that one on Very Hard was my favorite gaming achievement of all time, because all that mattered was "I did it". I wanted to keep going because on each chapter I could jump right back in, play the level, learn it, etc. etc. Just imagining the game having a lives system, pushing me back to the 1st level for dying too much gives me shivers. The original Battletoads on NES is easily in my top 10 games of all time but I fully admit that the lives/continues system is a major deterrent from mastering it. It's pretty basic: I want to master the game, and that means practice. When it takes ages to practice Clinger Winger, the second last level of the game, when I have to spend so long just getting there and then only having so many shots before going back to the beginning, it's a major turn off. I know the rest of the game, I've mastered it up to that point, I just want to cut to the chase and try again but I can't. When I first beat Battletoads I used save states. I would save a state at the beginning of each level and play it over and over again not just until I beat it, but until I could beat it without dying. If this makes me a filthy cheater I guess I'm a filthy cheater.
I get where you're coming from, and agree with a lot you say. But I also think a concept such as lives can provide an extra dimension to a game. In Megaman games for example, you're often put to a choice: will you take the riskier route for an extra life? And if you die the first time taking that route, will you try again to break even or cut your losses short? Matter of opinion I guess. I don't think there is a universal standard that games have to adopt.
Right. I essentially agree with his points, but by his logic, games like Spelunky are terrible experiences because they don't "play fair." And true, I don't think Spelunky is fair, but that's the point--it's not trying to be.
The only thing I didn't like about the lives system in Mega Man was that you could start a Stage with no extra lives. The game should've made sure that you always had a minimum of at least 2 lives upon entering a Stage. Other than that, the lives system was awesome in the original Mega Man games. It made each Stage its own mini-challenge to conquer which all together added up to a nice cohesive whole.
@@zanyraccoon6361 I would just walk into a new level at 0 lives and die. There was no penalty at all for continuing other than time, which made the game with 3 lives tough but fair along with like the 5 - 10 minute level design.
@@zanyraccoon6361 What was also nice about lives was they helped influenced one of the best aspects of mega man's designs: the selectable bosses. Losing lives and being taken to a menu with Continue or Stage Select helped give you a choice in either trying a stage you might be sick of, or moving on to something else, which helps keep the player from turning the game off and to keep going.
This video is all over the place. He calls the flicker in old nes games "lack of polish" when it was lack of hardware. If gives credit to the souls format of picking up resources if you die, losing them if you die twice to shovel knight and not dark souls and he gives shovel knights credit for teaching without teaching when many nes games introduced that mechanism.
Upon retrospect, a big flaw this video has is lumping all NES games with this kind of design: alongside ignoring the NES games that did things right, the problem with this is that this kind of game design would not go away for quite a few more generations. We got a ton of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafix, Gameboy, Nintendo 64, Playstation, and even Gameboy Advance and Playstation 2 games that subscribed to this kind of brutal and unfair game design. It really wouldn't be until the generation of the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 when common usage of these games died out completely. To only call out the NES for this seems very unfair.
@@TheToyTendoGamerNo it wouldn't, it would have made the video more informed. He's looked at the good sides of games in bad game design before you know. Plus my point of Snoman lumping NES games togethers stands, he himself changed the title of the video in response to the criticism of fans.
My problem with this video is that you seem to be implying that there is one right way to go about things, when in my opinion I like a lot of the things you say are wrong, like in having to restart the level from the beginning, you have to beat challenges that you've already beaten which can get annoying, but it also becomes a reminder of your progression, it makes you look back and see how much better you've become, which gives you the motivation to overcome the next challenge. But I dunno… just some of my thoughts.
Yeah I actually had those same thoughts. I recently played through Castlevania Rondo of Blood and that's what happened. I died a lot but liked how I was getting better and finding more efficient ways to beat the levels. It was a good time. And when I played through it a second time I felt like a badass cause I was blasting through the levels that were giving me such a hard time.
@@ados1280 Yeah, I mean it's just a matter of what kind of game you like, any rules that apply to one kind of game don't necessarily apply to another, and then sometimes breaking the rules is what makes a game fun.
i'm super torn on a lot of this, because i agree with where this is coming from but don't agree with a lot of what you've said the "lack of polish" thing... lots of games did kinda just get shipped out the door, but that flickering is a hardware limitation of 8 sprites per line, so it needs to cycle between drawing them in an effort to keep them all visible. sometimes this just can't be helped, especially in sports games where there are a lot of players, each one occupying 4 8x8 sprite tiles. it adds up fast. lag is related to that. while some game engines were undoubtedly faster and managed resources, it's not like things today by a longshot and i feel like critiquing these points is a huge misstep. i also noticed you've given hearts to a ton of comments that just blanket-agree with you but none that point this out - which is specific, mentioned in many comments, and probably important information because you were factually wrong about why it happens. i think it's probably fair to make the correction easily noticed? disagree with the demonization of lives and being set back to the start of a game entirely, especially for games where score is a key focus - and don't tell me score isn't a valid design in 2018, either, hahaha! forcing the player back forces improvement which increases score. this is especially common in STGs (or shmups if you will) and regarded as a teaching mechanism. Shovel Knight does a wonderful job of teaching you things before they got balls-out with them, totally. but so does like. i dunno, Mega Man 5. NES games were doing this fairly well by the time we were shifting focus to the SNES. same thing goes for the color-coded enemies. hell, you showed an early game that does this - Metroid - several times as an example of bad design. the game's aged like absolute tat, but this seems terrifically ignorant did you actually play through mario 3? or just warp straight to the end and call it hard? because the game does ramp up to that difficulty, and it's no wonder it would be immediately hard enough to need save states. also not sure calling out arcade games as having that single purpose design-wise is a good move. play more arcade games, learn about their history! there's a lot of brilliant design there that you may not be aware of, and it's likely the place "rank" was birthed - rank being the method of changing the game's difficulty in real time based on the player's skill. meaning newer players will likely see more of the game, and experienced players will be challenged from the start.
It's like how in Space Invaders the increased speed of enemies as more of them died was not meant to be a feature. It was simply that the engine needing to animate fewer sprites was able to complete the task faster thereby increasing the speed. The original Metroid, I don't know, a lot of it looks copy pasted. I criticized it pretty hard even when it was new for the fact that it was so hard to tell where you were and where you had and hadn't been that you could get turned around very easily. Super Metroid on the other hand is game design masterclass, perfect use of teaching without teaching, unique areas and level layouts that maybe had a platform you can't reach but the doorway on top of it is so incredibly ornate that you can't forget it, so you instantly think to come back once you get a power up that lets you jump higher. THEN, once you really learn to play you realize that often those power ups were never needed to get anywhere. The game included all the tricks and mechanics you would ever need to go anywhere at virtually any time without breaking the game. You can even do the bosses in reverse order though the difficulty is extreme.
I love how 99% of the comments point to the hardware not being good at the time to criticize the video while the youtuber himself did talk about hardware limitations causing most of the problems in old games. And for those saying the vid looks like a shovel knight ad, it’s really just that the game is a well-known and great tribute to NES games; it perfectly fits in here.
@@theSato What? Screen flickering, a limited colour choice and that nonsense was defenetly Hardware limitation. And not being able to safe to an extend as well (in wich case they could have implemented the Password thing). An overly punishing experience, that might let you loose all your progress or at least a lot of it and cheap Deaths, wich most NES Games had plenty, were NOT Hardware limitations. That is simply bad game design. Yeah yeah, first "real" Homeconsoles (Atari and co were before, but those games were extremely simplistic), so they didn't have all that experience and knowledge we have today. So I'm defenetly not mad. And after all, if you leave out those Downsides, those were still incredibly good games. But being old and the first doesn't make you immune to critic. Just learn from the past. What made those games good. And what did suck. Leave out the "what did suck" part, remove the hardware limitations and you got great games for today. I'm currently playing the Messenger. Fantastic game. It can be pretty damn hard, but it is ALLWAYS fair. When I screw up (wich I do very, very often), it was almost allways clearly my own fault. And I don't have to replay XXXXXXXXXXXXX again to come to the part were I failed, just to die again and redo that shit again.
"Have you sat down and played NES games lately?" Yes. I like them. The golden age era of arcades have some of my favorite games ever made. Many of them had brilliant risk-reward structures. I also think your whole "adults have less time to waste" argument doesn't hold water. I'm a lot better at video games than I was when I was a kid. Most of these games are an hour or two long while games today can average 20 to 60 or even hundreds of hours depending on the game. If I don't have time to play through Mega Man then I certainly don't have time to play through the next big modern AAA game. The only thing I agree on is limited game overs in console games, but most of the best games of the era didn't have them. I love Shovel Knight as much as the next guy but the best games of the era did most of the things you were mentioned with much of its game design ripped straight from Mega Man. The best games in that series always teach you the mechanics in isolation, they have lives but the levels are short and continues are infinite. I don't think there's one right way of doing things as long as the challenge presented to you is fair. I don't think every game should be like Shovel Knight, because that would get pretty boring.
I'm a 22 year guy, from a non-wealthy family on a non-rich country of all things, so my first contact with games was with a Polystation. For example, I played this year super mario bros. 3 for the first time. I have a big complain about that game: Bob-ombs were black so in some levels they were almost invisible. That's all about the negatives. First of all, i have a huge feeling sonic the hedgehog was inspired by the P-Meter from this game, and is a great game desing in how it rewards good players with a fluid movement trough a level while punishing bad ones by making them lose powerups. The item system is somehow BETTER than the available in New Super Mario Bros. games; you can sleep hammer bros, skip levels, hammers to open new paths and a limited number of P-wings if you're struggling with something (Like the parabeetles level or the second level with the angry sun). Is also one of the few games who ACTUALLY BENEFIT from the classic 1-UP system, because it's used as a way to reward exploration and finding secrets, good timing when finishing the level or in toad houses, and oh men I really loved the hammer suit and how strong it is to compensate its rarity. In general this should be a video not about good or bad design, but more about the obstacles while designing NES games and how they were tackled, with both great and awful results. OF COURSE some designs are somewhat dated, but most of them are due to lack of tools to do something better. Games like Megaman already had a great philosophy on design, like showing basic mechanics in a safe room and then using that for the level or using code as a replacement of save files, while others just put unfair difficulty without teaching you anything like battletoads. But well, game design of the NES, SNES and Genesis also had different philosophy because of a different public, a mentality of competition and making you able to overcome difficulties, instead of treathing everyone as a winner (which personally i despise).
Sonic The Hedgehog did difficulty well. It had lives, but a forgiving mechanic for damage in the form of rings. Also, people had fewer games back then so Sonic was designed to be rewarding to replay. People often complain about sonic having enemies and springs that trip you up if you go too fast. This was to reward memorization. The creators imagined people replaying the games and remembering were all the traps were and getting faster and faster. It was designed to be easier and easier each time you played through. This made having to reply levels less of a grind and more of a learning experience.
If I need to state a personal example, Punch-Out has the difficulty in it's core mechanisms and man how is it satisfying to understand and triumph of each fighter!
"It piles a walk of shame onto your player, making you go through the easy levels you already conquered" Showed Mega Man 2, which had unlimited continues, a few seconds earlier If you're going to talk about how a game punishes you for being bad at it, don't show a game which has a password screen and doesn't reset your progress. If you run out of lives on Mega Man 2, the worst that happens is that you go back to the start of the level. Also, can you really say you beat Mario 3 when you just skipped to the end and used save states? Don't say a game is hard if you both skip to the end (which jumps over the difficulty curve) and use save states (which nullifies the difficulty anyway)
It depends on when save states are used, to be fair. If they're used at the start of a level before you do anything, that's fine, but if it's done in the middle of a level after every tough jump, then that's just not bothering to learn consistency
Dude, I suck at Castlevania, Contra, Punchout, and many more. But it’s the difficulty I think that make video games of the past more worthwhile to beat.
I'm surprised by the comments. He even said yes, some NES games are good, and I don't think he meant the rest were just completely bad in every way. Not every game is a Megaman or Mario or Zelda, and I distinctly remember most NES games having very stiff controls and committed jumps that caused me a lot of frustration. I could SEE what I needed and wanted to do, but it's already too late, I didn't plan that jump out seconds in advance, so I have to redo the entire god-knows-how-much. I also hated the nondirectional, tiny dagger attacks that made it extremely difficult to actually hit anything without being hit. "Git gud" only goes so far, when the control is only barely in my hands anyways. I'll take Megaman Zero control over NES Megamans any day. Responsive as hell! I'd also take SNES's Super Ghouls n Ghosts' double jumping to be able to somewhat correct your written-in-stone jumps over NES's Ghosts n Goblins' single jump that still leaves you completely unable to control where you're going. Different people enjoy different kinds of challenges I suppose, but for me, planning every move out so far in advance and not being able to react to things when I can clearly see and react fast enough, but the game won't let me input anything anymore, that's definitely not my preference. I also find it odd that you can turn and shoot/move quickly, but it's just jumps that bind you on a set irreversible course (often to your doom, with 2 hits to death and pits that don't line up without proper foresight). And in case anybody is thinking it, no it's not more realistic. Realistic would be being able to jump precisely the amount you wanted, not leaping over your target and off a cliff because any jump has to be a preset distance. Allowing some amount of air control is how we adjust for that and let people move they way they intended to.
@@jonathanaguirre6508 "He even said yes, some NES games are good..." Because he's lampshading. He knows that the very first thing will bring up as a counter argument is the dozens of examples of good NES game design that does not fit into his personal definition of "bad game design" so he's pre-empting that with a weak-sauce admission that this does not apply to *all* games... just most... ...he then proceeds to misrepresent the few actual examples he uses, for his weak argument, as if he has already addressed people's counterpoints. And here's the thing, and I said it somewhere else: you're not entitled a victory. Games can be hard *by design*, and you not having the skill to beat them is not a valid knock against that, it just means you're not good enough to beat it, and have to a) get better at the game by practicing or b) learn to live with it. It's a game.
Honestly though, developers sticking to color and musical limitations makes a game in an NES style so much more impressive. Plus, when games say they're, "8 bit," I expect them to ACTUALLY be close to 8 bit.
Limitations actually enhance creativity. Ever try to write an article where you can choose your own topic? The amount of possibilities can be overwhelming
New games claiming to be 8 or 16 bit almost always disappoint me. The color palettes and limitations of old systems necessitated a lot of creativity, which isn't completely gone nowadays, but it is more boring to look at.
This may be a bit of a controversial take, but I think Zelda 2 was pretty smart about its difficulty. Even close to the endgame it was only a few minutes to get back to where you were if you got a game over, and you didn't lose any "flag" progress, only "spatial" progress. Especially since just losing a life only sent you back to the beginning of the room you died in, it was possible to get extra lives (though they were limited), and you had your spells to carefully ration out to get to that next point of progression. In a way, the progression of Zelda 2 was very Souls-like. The "bonfires" are the upgrades you get that stick with you when you get a Game Over, so once you pick them up it's "safe to die", as it were. After that, it's just a matter of getting used to the combat and the game becomes very fun to tensely traipse through. Also, the hardest part of the game, the Great Palace, has its own Game Over checkpoint, so you don't need to go through Death Valley again.
As I see it Zelda 2 only have two big downsides. It's too hard to figure out where to go next in the overworld without a walkthrough, and it requires too much grinding for lives just to get through Death Valley. Even if you plan that out there's too much grinding. But with a walkthrough it's a very fun game and still challenging. :)
@@Henkz85 There's kind of a trick to Death Valley that makes it not quite so hellish-- _take your time._ If you get into an encounter with the eye monsters (moas? something like that), you can hang around on the platform you start out on, kill the Moas that are there, and then make the jumps. Basically, make sure it's safe before you jump, and when you see another Moa, get to safe ground as quickly as possible to take it out. The starting platform and just outside the tunnels with the lizards are good spots.
@@Henkz85 When I recently played it on 3DS VC (without using safe states, mind you), I didn't have trouble with either of those myself, and my only prior experience with it was seeing a Let's Play around ~~5-7 Years earlier. I knew a few things still, but mostly had to figure stuff out myself. The only thing I missed was the Magic Upgrade hidden on Maze Island. I think King's Tomb in the Graveyard and the Hidden Town of Kasuto also took me a while, but I never had to grind or look anything up.
The very last stage is hell and I've never beaten it, but everything else was very manageable, yes even Death Mountain, and without the healing thingy at that. However, for the last stage, the game makes an exception and you start from there when you hit "continue", so even if I've never succeeded I won't throw any "bad game design because too difficult" labels at Zelda II. I'd like a Zelda II-2, too. Closest thing we have is Adventure Time: Hey Ice King Why'd You Steal Our Garbage on 3DS
@@ThePoltergust5000 I never had problem with the eyes, as you say, patience is all you need. The lizards were my problem. You can use magic to kill them easily, but if you let that be the standard solution you'll run out magic fast. I tried to be patient with them too but figured that my chances was roughly the same if I just rushed it. I've beaten the game three times and usually arrive at the castle with about 1-3 lives left. :P
Dear Snowman the blinking in pixels is something limited by the NES and similar machines. that has noting to do with bad game design but is a forced limitation from 8 bit era. it can be worked around, but it limits the options on NES games strongly. Watch this to learn more, and about 3 minutes 3 seconds in, they explain why NES games is blinking. ua-cam.com/video/QaIoW1aL9GE/v-deo.html Also some newer games is not even using a true 8 bit or 16 bit formula, they only imitate the 8 or 16 bit, and then a few actually code in the limitations that a classic NES game had
There was also only so much you could fit on a cartridge as well. If the games were too forgiving or easy to master, you'd be done with them an hour after you bought it. And it's easy to say you wouldn't waste your time with these titles today when there's an over-saturation of options, but that wasn't true in the 80s and 90s. This was it. Go watch some speedruns of old NES games. They're all 20-30 minutes long.
Snowman: a good example of a retro homage is Shovel Knight. *Proceeds to mention all the stuff Shovel Knight got from Mega Man, despite showing a lot of disdain for Mega Man up to this point*
The "come back to the beginning" thing was due to the games being waaaaay shorter than today. The first Super Mario Bros with save states/continues would suck for example!
Well, I don't have much time to play, so I'd prefer not replaying the same thing over and over. The length of the game doesn't matter too much, just that I don't want to redo something I've succeeded. I've played through the first Super Mario Bros with heavy save state use. It's short, but that's fine.
While some of the things you said were true, and I can tell your INTENTIONS are good, this logic just doesn't really apply to old NES games. The reason they set you back so far were twofold: for one, renting games was a BIG business back then, and they didn't want people to beat it in a weekend rental - they wanted people to buy the game and really sink their teeth into it. And for two, they wanted to extend the playtime of someone who DID buy it as much as possible - so when they beat the game, its not a feeling of "ah, well, dunno if that 2 hours was worth $50.." but rather "damn, this was quite an arduous adventure and I got a ton of playtime, I feel like I really overcame this monster" Considering just how limited storage space and general tech was at the time, making really long experiences out of pretty much any game you mentioned (e.g. Mario 3) pretty much required some amount of this "bad" game design (or stuff like dragon quest/final fantasy endless amounts of grinding, but that's a whole different kind of bad that wastes the player's time even more.) Sorry but, this was a weak video from you.
Additionally, when you showed off sprite flicker on Tecmo Super Bowl and said "its hard to believe games released with so little polish" .. you kinda just further discredit the point you're trying to make. The sprite flicker is a limitation of the NES from having that many sprites on screen, on those lines - the alternative is intense amounts of slowdown, no programming magic can really overcome that (and if it can, its certainly not an issue of Tecmo Super Bowl being 'unpolished' - its the most polished football game on the system lol)
Colour coded enemies aren't a new thing. I remember seeing them back in the mid/early 90's in Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. Pretty sure they were even introduced earlier than that in other games as well. Also, just because a game is hard, doesn't mean it's bad. Sometimes it's a case of learning the levels, the enemy placements, earning lives and not dying. You also have to keep in mind that games back then were kind of meant to be played differently. Yeah sure, there was a time limit of how long you could play before you parents wanted to watch the news on TV, but that just meant that you (and I hate to say it) get good or use that experience for next time you played. Now, some of those games were quite tough on purpose as they were sometimes arcade ports (formally designed to make money). Some were tough, designed for a player with a higher skill level. And yes, some were tough due to bad design. There were also a lot of technical limitations back then that prevented things like checkpoints or saves. Sometimes it was cheaper for a company to make a game without a battery save or smaller memory capacity. Everything adds up in the end and I believe that sometimes, it's us gamers that rise to the challenge of passing a difficult game regardless of whether or not the design is bad, simply because we can. Be it for bragging rights, or just because we don't want to be defeated.
Having to memorize levels does make a game bad. A game should properly telegraph enemies and other dangers, not require you to be psychic. Failing over and over because something is unavoidable without prior knowledge is not fun. If you die it should be your fault, not because the game screwed you.
Malus Just stating that memorizing patterns, levels etc makes a bad game design doesn’t make it so. If you’re not gonna use all tools at your disposal then all you have is reaction tests and immediate puzzle solving. Misuse of patterns and memorization from simple to complex can be a thing but it does not mean it cannot be used well because you don’t like it. It’s like saying that any challenge must be fair within the context of a game, that usually being an evil character wanting to kill the hero and using every edge they can get, but then what makes the enemy evil? Also, what’s fair? Something fair to you might be unfair to someone with naturally low reaction times or boring to someone with naturally higher reaction times. This kind of logic ends up catering to the lowest common denominator who wants to experience a virtual “story”, not be challenged.
The Legend of Zelda used color coded enemies. As for difficulty, I don't think memorizing a level is bad design, or has to be. Same thing with enemy placement. Enemies that randomly can appear, and take out a player without warning, those are bad. Now, if that same randomness goes on, but can be avoided by the players, hypothetically like Authur being able to hop on a platform far enough off the ground, that the random zombies popping up from right underneath won't insta kill. Something like that would be just fine. And another thing, lots of throwback games have advantages older consoles couldn't provide. Comparing those doesn't do either appropriate argument.
It's something deliberately put into the game to skip a hard part or a part you have already played. Saying that he can't use something put in by the developers on purpose would be like saying that you aren't allowed to use (x) character or move in a fighting game.
@@john7354 There's no problem with doing that at all. The issue is that he formed his opinion on the game in a run where he skipped most of it. Does someone have a reasonable opinion of MegaMan X by plugging in a continue code and going straight to Sigma and bashing him to death with save states?
I wouldn't be surprised if he's already seen a few playthroughs of the game before he decided to do his playthrough. You don't always need to play a game to be able to form an accurate opinion of it.
I made a full comment on it before, but I'll paste it here to enumerate the myriad problems in this video: "As a matter of fact I HAVE played NES games lately. I still play them all the bloody time. And I have to say, your criticisms are pretty ridiculous. -Lives: If you play badly, you get punished. If you play worse, you get punished MORE. Is that really a hard concept to understand? Let me come up with an analogy: Say you're taking a quiz with 5 questions. You get punished a little if you get one answer wrong, a lot if you get two questions wrong, and you have to do the entire quiz over again if you get three questions wrong. By your estimation, you should be allowed infinite guesses on the quiz until you get it right. -Committed jump arcs: Funny you show Castlevania here, because that is a perfect example of a game that is entirely NOT luck and ALL planning. There is a reason Castlevania makes for incredibly consistent speed runs. Because when you get good at the game, it's incredibly rare to be screwed by RNG. Yes, bats and Medusa heads FEEL like bad luck, but they're actually usually VERY intelligently placed if you stop and think about it, and are 100% of the time avoidable if you're not blundering forward randomly. -Visuals: No. Just no. Casablanca and Citizen Kane aren't bad movies because they look "old and gross." Just no. I'm not even humoring this one. I'm not accepting criticisms of games lacking technology that didn't even exist in an economic form yet. -(Lack of) color-coating: Hello? You played a clip of ZELDA toward the start of the video. Its sequel does the same thing. Other examples are Metroid, Castlevania 2, and Super Mario Bros."
It's easy to write off the difficulty of these games if you didn't experience them when they were new and don't understand the context of how they were experienced. In the NES era video games were very expensive, around $100 when adjusted for inflation. Most people weren't buying every single new game that came out, especially not kids, who were the primary audience for those games. You might get one new game on your birthday and one at Christmas, and you would play them all year long. Imagine if you got a brand new game on your birthday and you beat it in a couple of days like most of the games today - that money just went down the toilet and you just have to hope you'll get a new one soon. It's easy to just load up a game on an emulator, play it for two seconds, then decide it's too hard and move on to the next one. Players at the time didn't have that luxury - you had the games that you had, and you got your time and money's worth out of them. Video game design used to be about maximizing value for the consumer, now it's about maximizing profit for the publisher. If you spend too much time on Game A, you're less likely to go out and spend money on Game B when it comes out next month, so you need to see everything in the game as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next shiny new thing that you'll inevitably forget about when the next shiny new thing comes out, ad infinitum...
"It was harder to see what was coming because of the lack of widescreen" Uhh... And make the already small sprites on screen even smaller on an already blurry screen?
This was my first experience with this challenge, and I was completely surprised by your great production values mixed with your poor ideas here. I was waiting for you to explain how games like Ducktales and Castlevania were bad, but it looks like the main arguments your were making was that NES games are too hard for the wrong reasons and they would be better if you didn’t have to restart as much. Oh, they’re ugly too. Your complaint about SMB3 and about how you would’ve not finished the game without save states due to boredom we’re what completely lost me. I am sorry that you cannot enjoy older games due to they’re more archaic design, but there’s a lot to love is so many of them if you go beyond the “if I die I gotta start over” hang up.
I actually like lives for shorter games. They force the player to master the early parts of a game before beating it, and can add in interesting resource management.
Say what you will, but punch out is an amazing game and genuinely fun. I think it shows that the Wii game changed pretty much nothing, difficulty and all, and it’s one of the best games on the Wii
Damn, the thumbnail was click bait and I feel for it. I thought a good argument was going to be made not, “This game is designed badly because it didn’t hold my hand.”
I think that hard must be cuphead hard with infinite lives but still being hard .I think the most balanced game is shovel Knight . It's hard and death is bad because you lose money which is precious to buy new upgrades but it's still really far because you can restart every level without those stupid lives . Just a masterpiece in this regard.
In a funny way this video shows me how a head of the curve Nintendo was at "game design", they started to migrate the arcade style design pretty quickly on the bigger titles fairly early compared to the other developers on the system
I'm sad that most youtubers ignore Japan-only NES games when they speak of NES. There were tons of great games, especially during late NES cycle, in 1991-1994. Games like Ninja Cat and Moon Crystal. Late NES games were much more forviging than early NES games. Most today NES-looking indie games don't satisfy me visually, because they don't use that awesome crispy 90's anime style late NES games had. I feel so sad when i see a game that looks like "Yes, finally a pixel game that looks exactly like what i want to see in pixel games!", and then i see portraits which are not the style i like. Ah yes, i play NES games for visuals. I'm an Old-school Graphics-lover. So many modern pixel art games are not as visually pleasing as Game Boy Advance titles such as Minish Cap and Sword of Mana. Even NES games were so beautiful, games like Battletoads and Double Dragon, Moon Crystal and Ninja Gaiden 3. However people choose blocky style that doesn't look like something that would come out in 80's or 90's... While i do love Shovel Knight... visually it doesn't look like something that would be made back then. Back then there were different visual and aesthethical trends. People mostly forget about it when they want to draw something "In 90's anime style"...
7:53 That's a mouser. Although arguably, you'll only know what that was representing if you were from that era, which by hearing that they're "old and gross" doesn't seem you're from so I'll let that pass. Dang kids. lol
To be fair the first TMNT game was developed in roughly a time before the cartoon really took off, and it was indeed the first piece of TMNT media for Japan. They probably based their design how they looked in the comics, which explains why they look so old. Hey, you're that guy who does custom NES labels on Nintendo Age!
@@FinalLuigi True, even though the game came out a few years after the first showing, it may've been development longer so they'd had to have based them from the comics. Although, I would still say the mousers looked pretty much the same as they did in the cartoons. I wouldn't go as far to say that they're old-looking, and that's maybe because I'm old, but... "weird" is probably a better term. lol :P And oh yeah, hey! Are you a member there? Yeah, I stopped doing label art for a while, at least on that one NES label thread. I do some art stuff for Second Dimension now, mostly cover/manual/label art, as well as probably some graphics help from time to time.
@@BouncekDeLemos The characters are largely based from the cartoon iterations (ie, April was white in the game when she was black in the comic), but it's feasible they had to work with the comic for some ideas, like the giant flies or flaming men. I don't know anything about the game unfortunately, only that Ebert was strangely obsessed with this game years ago. And Yeah, I used to go on the forum, not so much these days though.
@@FinalLuigi Ah, I see. So it was a bit of a hodge-podge of two different series. Makes sense due to it coming out roughly around the same time. Pretty interesting! It's cool meeting other NA members. If you ever need any quick Photoshop work done, drop me a line on Nintnendoage, I'm always there. :)
Beating a game without dying too many times was the challenge and makes victory feel like a greater accomplishment. When the game has what we can perceive as a "fair" difficulty, satisfaction from victory in said game is proportional to relative risk and time investment. That is to say: The longer we spend with a game and the more difficult we think it is, the more satisfying it is when we beat it. Making it so you can just replay a level over and over lowers our perceived risk as we play with the knowledge of a safety net. The knock-on effect being that we don't really have to master the controls, the gameplay isn't as intense, victory isn't as much an accomplishment. It kind of goes without saying that limited lives was a mechanic designed to artificially inflate play-time but the benefits of limited lives shouldn't be overlooked or just called antiquated, IMO more games today should have limited lives or at least punish the player more when failing.
The most important idea in this video though is that there are two kinds of death. 1. Man I was just a couple pixels short of that narrow safe area, maybe if I restart the level and go to that corner instead... (real difficulty) 2. God damn it all, the zombie literally spawned under my feet with no warning or way to escape on the last level, now I have to start the whole game over (the cheap death he's complaining about here)
@@pferreira1983 that's a massively overgeneralised statement. Is the difficulty in Kirby's Adventure not fair? in Super Mario Bros? Not only are those games not unfair but most would agree they're not difficult games in the slightest.
I think Binding of Isaac really captures that ‘old school difficulty’ feeling. Whenever you die, you have to restart your run, but you get to keep any unlocks and any long-term progress. It’s a difficult game, but all of the rules are laid out and enforced clearly. It is a very rare occurrence for me to feel like a death was unfair.
The End is Nigh is so good. I also did not complete the 8 bit levels, they were a nice bonus but like actual NES games the frustration level was high. I think the roguelites have captured the challenge essence well, Enter the gungeon in particular is brutal, and unforgiving until you master the skills, but each run allows you to unlock more progressively working towards both story and making the challenge easier through new weapons and abilities.
It's honestly amazing how well so many NES games hold up. Sure, limitations like data read/write speeds meant things like modern checkpointing were typically impossible, but it seems odd to compare new games to old ones while ignoring how new tech (emulation, save states, etc) renders so much of the complaints about those older games moot. A more fair comparison would be if you equalized the failure state for both the new and old titles (ex: die 3 times and you have to restart from scratch for both).
Did people think I was actually serious about Fortnite? C'mon...
You didn't exactly make it very clear that it was a joke, to be fair. And you put that joke in a section that ALREADY bashed old games and said they suck, which already would've made people defensive. That joke was definitely a bad idea, man.
I actually broke out laughing when you said its not because of your lack of skill its because of boredom. Are you telling us that? Or are you telling yourself that?
I just realized what you are: a game journalist. Someone who will fault a game for the way it punishes you for sucking at said game. I'm honestly surprised you didnt bitch about having to climb back up a vertical climb after falling in shovel knight.
Huh. Though, I might as well add, there's an interesting counterpoint to this, in that there is some evocative emotion/feel in the parts of old games that are treated as "jank" or "obsolete" that get loss in the March Of Progress-driven view of the medium, as best exemplified by Liz Ryerson's very recent article on Thief: medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-stairway-to-the-unconscious-thief-the-dark-project-20-years-later-6bd1f92783e9
And, while I disagree A LOT with Ryerson, on a lot of things, I can't help but feel she has a point here. A lot of very good things got lost in games desire to be Modern and Respectable, and I think that's worth criticizing.
Man, apparently people here really can't take a joke.
The glitching pixels was due to the NES having a max amount of sprites that could be animated at any one time. Making them flicker meant that you could have more animated characters on screen and render them in alternating frames.
Modern gamers be like...
Came down to make this statement. Glad to see others out there keeping the knowledge alive.
I never even noticed the flicker when I was a kid, it might as well have been non-existant. I was too busy enjoying the kick ass games
NES rules you're a butthead
@@PlasticCogLiquid probably has to do with playing on a CRT instead of emulation. The hardware of the CRT hid a lot of the flaws in the graphics.
The flicker in these old games was not a glitch from lack of polish. It was the result of hardware limitations.
Yeah...and RF modulation and composite video. Not quite the rock solid pixels of today.
Yeah, but more due to hardware limits
I think the flashing was smart as hell
@Rooflesoft Games Right, so developers would alternate which sprites appeared on the screen by flickering them. This would allow them to bypass what would otherwise be a terrible limitation and put more objects "on-screen".
So flickering is actually a sign of ingenuity and polish on the developers part. Not the other way around, Snowman.
The sprites flash and disapear so they could display more sprites than usual
Did I just watch an ad for Shovel Knight?
Zyon I certainly hope so!
My issues with this video aside Shovel Knight is great tbf.
Same
He had to praise a modern difficult game or rabid NES tards would've filled the comments with "you just suck, git gud". Which was a pointless effort since they did so anyways, most of them probably didn't even watch the video
If he didnt watch the video he wouldn't know Shovel knight was in it a lot. Also he mainly focused on complaining about lives which is something not unique to NES games at all and didnt begin with NES games at all, as well as praising Shovel knight for ideas it got from Megaman.
Rayman Origins is one of those extremely hard games where it starts off east with plenty of checkpoints but slowly spaces those checkpoints out and makes it harder, it's one of my favorite games of all time
Man ray man origins was one of the first games I ever got 100% in. I had to get to the land of the livid dead. And then I did and it’s like the game (which by this point was already difficult) just suddenly flipped the table and grabbed me by the collar. But the payout... oh man. I love that game. Legends came close to replicating it but something was missing... still.
Incredible game, gotta be close to the greatest 2d platformer ever
@@AnimatedTerror Ikr, Legends wasn’t even close as good as origins
@@astor_25 yeah...Legends destroys Origins
Rayman Origins is such an underrated masterpiece
Before NES, we had the Atari 2600. A dot shooting another dot with a smaller dot. The NES blew my mind when I first saw it.
Too bad they drove their company straight to hell...
@@whatintarnation9217 nintendo or atari?
@@xxsupersayen34xxnoe33 atari
What happend to atari i heard of the old e.t game being garbage but apart from that what happend?
@@dragonpixel1809 if I remember correctly I believe it was a combination E.T the Atari version of pacman and and the company itself being left within the dust (as in sales) what I believe happened is those two anal entrees E.T and pacman People began to have something called "standards" and so when Atari kept publishing the same quality of games less and less people kept buying them and eventually no one in their right minds wanted anything to do Atari and so in a half assed attempt to bring up sales they made the Atari 5200 which I'm pretty sure you know how bad that console is and what drove Atari deeper down its own garage. Now I'm not too sure if all of that is correct but I strictly remember that it had to do with e.t and pacman (the Atari version)
I regard Castlevania as one of the NES games that have aged the best. It's really hard but short and overcome-able. You have three lives, but all that happens when you lose them is that you have to restart the level. As long as you have lives you restart at the checkpoints. The reason that everyone hates the medusa heads isn't that they're badly designed, it's that they're the first enemies that teach you that you need patience and plan your actions in this game. And that's frustrating when the game so far had been pretty much hit and run.
I agree, of the many NES games, I regard Castlevania and Punch out as some of the best
Castlevania 3 is the best Castlevania. I enjoy replaying it a lot.
*Games don't age, you do.* The problem with retro games is that you need to put yourself in a mindset of somebody who would've played them long ago. So you will need patience, expect that games will require mastery, and don't expect instant gratification - because you won't get any. All fun has to be worked hard for.
You just described Dark Souls which is one of the most popular and well known games of this decade.
@@mistertagomago7974 I realized so myself when I was writing it. But then again, Dark Souls was praised for bringing old school mentality back to modern games. :)
Is Dark Souls the Castlevania of modern games? ;)
One thing you neglected to mention about NES games that I feel makes a difference- you can often earn extra lives through finding secrets or score. This turns lives into a resource management system rather than a set number of tries, and NES games were often balanced around that. Is it worth it to farm a live or two to prevent a game over? Do you need to find all the secrets to get further, or is it better to not waste lives trying to find them? Lives and checkpoints on the NES encouraged mastery of a section that I just don't feel modern games do, and it feels disingenuous to describe them as a limited continue system when often, finding ways to generate more lives was an entertaining risk vs reward decision.
You know what that is actually a good point, or like knowing where the hidden wall chicken is in Castlevania, like if you know all those secrets you'll do much better
@@snomangaming Exactly! How many NES games had 1ups in plain sight, but requiring a risky play to acquire them? At an early point in your mastery of the game it may not be worth going for these lives, as you'll die trying to grab them, but once a player develops in skill, they become much more attractive and allow the player to progress further. The player asks themselves, is it worth the risk? Should I go for it? THAT is a strength of a lives system; optional challenge for meaningful reward.
Dying at 0 lives in spyro sends you back to your last save not the beginning
@Melvin Lopez oh yeah, and don't forget, those could corrupt due to various issues, so I completely understand why ps1 and saving wasn't used often if at all... the same doesn't apply to ps2, as at that point it was common to have at least 2, 1 of which were backups/ games you rarely played. And then we get to the xbox 360... oh yeah, that had memory cards. Talk about redundant.
"Glitching pixels and lag" was the result of the limits of the NES hardware, not a polish issue. Don't forget most of the NES's actual chips were 1970s tech or based on 1970s tech, and the NES itself wasn't even designed to run Super Mario Bros or Mega Man, it was designed to run nearly-arcade-perfect Donkey Kong. If you didn't want glitching sprites or slowdown in your NES game, there were four options:
1) Use background tiles whenever possible. Pretty much all of the best NES developers, including Nintendo, abused background tiles in ways Nintendo hadn't originally intended.
2) Use different hardware. e.g. wait a few years and make a game for Turbo Grafx 16 or Amiga instead. Sure hope you don't need to pay bills until then!
3) Jump through hoops to make sure the few sprites you do use don't overlap horizontally. e.g. make sure some sprites don't move vertically at all.
4) Give up and live with it.
A lot of developers went for option 4.
I'm not sure this guy is aware that these games were developed in the 80's. He doesn't even understand that game design =/= game programming.
@@ByGeorge846 I'm sorry, what?
@@ByGeorge846 seriously. That was the exact point I paused the video to see the comments. "Games released with so little polish"!? Of course, this guy wasn't even alive back then so he's got no point of reference.
yeah, that part alone made me think that he doesn't know what he's talking about
@Chad Not NES trying to flicker sprites, the flickering is programmed to the game. NES just doesn't show the last sprites if there are too many per scanline, so games had to have a feature to detect that and cycle which ones will be shown.
Snowman Gamig:There's no way Mario Games like these would happen today
Mario Maker: Hold my beer
Mega ManFan123 nah it’s a relevant wooosh.
IG doesn’t know what the guy was thinking when he made the comment.
No-one can accurately read minds from UA-cam comments.
Frost Glader
No, it isn’t.
The game currently is mostly crappy troll levels when playing online, however some levels are creative, making it hard
Loui Javier he didn’t make it clear that he got the joke, hence the woooshing is relevant.
I try to put a joking tone into my joke replys, even if they have a serious tone and are on a joke comment, they are usually corrections, or are to Woooshable comments.
One of my replies are definitely woooshable, yet didn’t get noticed because there was already a wooosh in the chain, or more so a massive wooosh chain.
Gotta be careful on this platform man.
TWO!!!
2:02 I'd like to point out that there *is* a somewhat justifiable reason for many NES games functioning like arcade games despite the lack of coin feeding, and that's game length. Limited technology only allowed for so much space, which is why games can be completed in less than an hour with enough skill. On top of that, games were often just as expensive as they are today, if not even more, before all the inflation that's occurred since then, so developers really needed to pad out the play time with punishing elements. This doesn't change that these are bad design philosophies, but developers had to work with what they were given at the time.
Anyway, a modern game that I'd argue has captured the old-school difficulty without adopting outdated design is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. The platforming challenges are hard, but never unfair, as the game drip-feeds players the mechanics across a stage before throwing them all together for a final test of skill. Lives are incorporated, but the game provides so many of them that it takes a sufficient lack of skill to actually run out of them -- that and it's basically necessary for the co-op, as lives are shared. It also has the bonus levels that offer no checkpoints, as well as Hard Mode, which allows no partner, no checkpoints, no help items, and only one hit, allowing players craving that punishing difficulty to indulge in it. It's a master of its craft.
I remember borderline speedrunning Mega Man 2 in around 35 minutes as a kid to show off, or running Contra without the Konami code and playing through the game 3 or 4 times on a single life to show friends that Contra was possible without cheats. I got a feeling of accomplishment from beating games everyone said were hard. Some games like Blaster Master and Metroid suffer from a lack of in-game maps (especially since both have a TON of backtracking and nothing really tells you what items do until you start messing around; I love Blaster Master Zero on Switch, though...it fixes most of the design issues with the NES game) I feel like a lot of modern games are "invest 15 hours into playing our interactive movie and nothing really stands in your way." A cool premise like Prototype was ruined by the game being so friggin' easy.
As I understand it, many games were also developed with the rental market in mind. You could rent a game for, what, I guess a week? (I have no experience renting anything) but that wasn't likely enough to let you beat it, and it might just make you thirsty for more, leading you to buy the game instead, which meant more money in both the pockets of the video store and the game company.
I find that all Donkey Kong Country games have a perfect difficulty curve.
The game technology issue excuse would work, if it weren't for games like Mario Bros. 3 and Legend of Zelda that were good games, gratifying experiences and definitely worth the price, all without resorting to cheap tactics to artificially increase the playtime. Most of the time the real reason was that making games with sufficient playtime was hard and artificially lengthening it with unfair deaths and limited lives was easy. And whether or not hardware issues *were* the issue they definitely aren't an issue now, so bringing back outdated NES era concepts for the sake of it like some gamers ask for makes no sense
@@Kraigon42 I thought the gaming industry hated the rental market and even tried to have legislation passed prohibiting the renting of games...
Wait, so you're telling me a 30 year old game is going to look like a 30 year old game?
Many people can't understand that until you say it to them
yeah. basicly.
Caption.Panic 98 you missed the point
funny how if you take one minute to actually watch the video, he says that lol
It's like
Roses are red
Information is a fact
UTI is the infection of the urinary tract
The games were hard not because they were trying to emulate arcade, but because they were short. Imagine spending $50 on castlevania and beating it in under an hour.
is that really an excuse? (also you can beat Castlevania in under an hour)
and don't forget rental store
Yeah, it struck me as very odd this wasn't mentioned. It was implied to just be an overlooked holdover from arcade-era days, which struck me as wrong and made me think the same thing.
True that's why the comparison with Shovel Knight isn't really fair, that's a long game.
I actually think Contra would be worse if it had unlimited continues.
@Ningen It's not 'artificial' difficulty. It'd be artificial difficulty if it didn't require skill - but this way, it requires *mastery* of the early stages. This is opposite of artificial difficulty.
Mega Man is definitely, in most cases, a master class in the sort of modern-day challenging design you spoke of. Barring the first game, which of course commits the inexcusable sin of making an item that can be confused for being optional, required to even beat the game, in a particularly nastily designed section that in some versions of the game, render progression impossible if it runs out, Mega Man tends very frequently to introduce a stage gimmick or mechanic in a safe environment where you can't be killed by it. Magnet Man's stage in Mega Man 3 mixes the ever-present disappearing blocks of previous games with a new wall-magnet mechanic dragging you off of them if you get too close, but the first two of these are in a safe environment where you aren't penalized for falling, but the third introduces a bottomless pit to the equation, suddenly raising the stakes and testing how well you react to this new magnet mechanic. Or, a more resourceful player, depending on when they arrive at Magnet Man's stage, may already have the Rush Jet, which they can use to bypass this challenge entirely, rendering it moot. Mega Man is full of potential options for a player to explore and that's what can make them so infinitely replayable. One of my favorite things to do is practicing a stage with savestates, stating at each new screen and making multiple runs with different weapons and items at my disposal, trying to develop the perfect "How do I best deal with this?" strategy.
Mega Man is definetly a great game. Except MM2.I still hate how random and poorly designed some bosses like Quick Man and Air Man are.
Also don't forget some of the bs wily bosses, security system from mm 2 is like the bed of chaos' great great grandfather.
Also, the enemies can get unfocused and too diverse, like everyone's favorite enemy, the hotheads that only appear twice.
Don't forget that one wily stage in MM2 that has a boss that requires pretty much a full load of Crash Bombs to defeat, so that if you attempt it once and fail you practically have to kill yourself repeatedly until you game over and replay the entire stage. MM2 is probably IMO the best Mega Man game overall, but that particular case is just plain stupid design.
Charge man in MM5 without any items is complete BS.
Also 3 of the 4 starting bosses of MM7 are made completely trivial if you have any other weapon than Mega Buster
Bubble bobble. Hard to beat in one sitting but every stage had a code so you could always pick up where you left off. Multiple endings. One of the greatest games of all time.
The arcade version sent you back to the beginning after you lost all your lives. It's the one I usually play though because of the graphics and sound quality.
Those aren't "glitching pixels" in the way of Bethesda glitches. It's a fundamental NES limitation.
No, it's the same thing. Bethesda glitches are just fundamental Bethesda limitations.
@@SimpleAmadeus Naw thats just Bethesda rushing out one product after the next. Isn't that right Skyrim "remaster"
@Adrián B.V. Bethesda does
and so does Bamco if we're taking about dark souls remastered
But to be fair, the flicker can be avoided by using good game design. The flicker is caused by too many sprites in one horizontal lines, so if the game designers just avoid this, the problem won't occur. However, this most likely was very difficult to replicate consistently in a game, and so coming full circle, the flicker was indeed a hardware limitation. You're welcome for wasting your time reading this just to tell you what has already been said. :)
I played and beat castlevania 1 for the first time recently and can say it is an incredibly tightly designed game, there is a moment just before the fight against death where you have to move forwards, fight the axe throwing knight dudes and avoid medusa heads at the same time and its actually thrilling
Its life system is excellent, you get 3 tries to make it through the stage where you get to restart from a checkpoint otherwise you go back to the start of the stage but the stages are reasonably short
The final boss though is the ultimate test because dracula can only actually move and shoot
He is really predictable but also quite hard to fight, but you get the unbroken rythm and finally win and its amazing
Also i would disagree with you about committed jump arcs because castlevania 1 is designed around them very well
You have a very specific toolset designed exactly for the job
I played through 1,2,3,4, and rondo of blood and id say 1 is probably in the running for best becase its so much tighter than 3 and 4. though rondo of blood is probably my favourite, the fact that it competes so well with its successors has to say something
Just beat Castlevania 1 for the first time recently too, and my Lord that lead up to Death is brutal. Probably took me the longest of any part of the game, except maybe Dracula himself. Overall I'd say the game feels pretty fair, only questionable thing is being able to die after killing the boss (which happened to me against Death at least once) but even that I could see making an argument for. Great game. Overall I prefer 4, but mostly for the atmosphere and the extended length. (Still need to play Rondo). Btw, I'm guessing from your post you prefer classic Vania to the exploration ones?
I only played rondo about a month ago, not got around to the explory ones but i am a big post super metroid metroid fan
4 was great fun, my favourite bit of 4 is the boss rush leading up to death because its high challenge but really easy to try again
Also the music is great, just dont think its quite as good as rondo
I think im used to the dying after bosses thing from mega man 1, i get how it annoys people but its never really bothered me because i dont consider it a win until you lose control of the character
@@alexlee4154 yeah Metroid is my favorite series (and Super is my favorite game), but for Castlevania I prefer the classic style.
If you haven't played it I recommend Bloodstained Curse of the Moon. Great spiritual successor to Castlevania 3.
@@booski1865
Ill write it down
Simon Belmot is so slow that it hurts
Imagine having a series on game design and calling Sprite flickering a “Glitch.”
Mega Man, they did the isolation techniques for almost ever enemy, very few random enemies most trigger when your near them, game over only made you replay the stage but you keep all the beaten ones and power ups. Etc
Most classic games enemies demand the attention of players and patience
and rushing well get you a game over you need to pay attention 'case most old games are like 1 or 2 hour long so rushing is pointless.
My thoughts as well! That segment of Gutsman's stage with the conveyor platforms shown near thr start of the video is a prime example. First the player is shown how the platform folds away when passing over a gap in the track, next you need to jump when it happens for your platform, then you need to jump down to the bottom platform and avoid its folding as well.
Granted, MM1 _is_ easily the most 'NES hard' of the NES series, but that's likely due to the developers not yet having having polished the MM formula (e.g. it still has traits from arcade games, like the totally pointless score system), which would be pretty much crystallized in the very next installment.
Plus, the levels are pretty short, a game over feels more like a slap on the wrist to me.
Except for enemies that jump up at you out of pits and ALWAYS knock you into them. Those things can fuck off.
Issues:
1: Sprite flickering was actually a solution to a hardware issue. Each sprite was 8 pixels horizontally and 8 or 16 pixels vertically. If there were more then 8 sprites on the scanline, the 9th sprite and onward will not draw. So devs would alternate the sprite priority every frame, which caused the sprite flickering.
2. You warped to world 8 you cheater. No wonder it was hard, you skipped passed 6 1/2 worlds.
And _how long is SMB3?_
He actually beat smb3 before, so, yeah, that point was mute, plus he said it was fun
@@spongebobplushiestuff8612 Yeah he said it was really hard but fair he was praising SMB3
Bruh warping is not a cheat code. Is a route that game let you pick.
What you call "Glitchy pixels" and "lack of polish" are actually limited sprites that the memory allowed. These were actually pretty clever tricks, if you had X limit, and wished to show X times 2, you had to "flicker" between them each frame.
Wish games these days were that optimized.
Clever or not, it doesn't change the fact that they are still flickering, and it does still look pretty wonky. It's basically compromising one aspect for another after all
Can't really blame him for saying they look bad, since the reasoning behind the flicker doesn't change how it looks
Also since this is compromising graphics for the sake of performance and not so much optimizing code, the modern equivalent of this would basically be removing polygons and shaders until everything looks like a Nintendo 64 character. The coding is where most games need the optimization, reducing texture resolution and polycount is easy in comparison, it's just most people have decided they'd prefer their games look a little better at the cost of them not being able to run on 20 year old PCs
@@starrysock ok, im sorry, i get what you are trying to say, but you are flat out wrong, no amount of "coding magic" can fix these problems, because it is HARDWARE ISSUES!
there was litterally nothing you could do to optimize code to stop flicker, as its how the nes was BUILT, what you are saying is like saying "you could have made gameboy games look better, just add color!" (and no, game boy color dosn't count cause its new hardware, not "coding magic")
also, they DO remove polygons and shadders until things look like n64 characters, even the n64 did it! its called level of detail, or LOD. if things are far enough away from the camera to not matter as much, they switch to lower polygon versions to save rendering power,
and lets not forget that lowering graphics to make up for lack of hardware has been a pc staple since the beginning of time. even doom let you play in a tiny window to allow even proto-potatos play.
the only way to push past a hardware limitation would be to include hardware on the cartrage, (its now the snes got 3d out star fox) but as one can assume including a graphics card with every game is not the most cost effective thing in the world.
@@Slash0mega I think you've misread my comment.
Again, doesn't matter why these sprites are flickering, you can say it looks bad and still be valid. You can call the gameboy being monochrome ugly too, because again, your impressions of something don't change because of the justification behind it. That doesn't mean the justification isn't valid either, but I can still say McDonal's food tastes crappy even though the crappy ingredients also allow it to cost next to nothing in exchange
The second part of my comment is exclusively referencing modern games too. Mauricio said that he wishes modern games were this optimized, so I said the equivalent is "removing polygons and shaders" in general, not just at far distances, because in NES games it's not just unimportant objects that flicker.
Also the thing with PC graphic settings are that there's only so much you can practically do with them. Old N64 games are built around things like low poly terrain and no physics simulations, so using a standard slider like you would for decreasing texture resolution only works up to a point. After that you run into issues like missing polygons, unreadable textures, etc, and extra work has to be put in just to accommodate for that. However, most people who enjoy playing games have at least somewhat decent computers, so it's not worth the effort when that development time could be better put to use elsewhere.
Ultimately that doesn't matter though, because that's not what I was talking about. My point is that most people generally prefer games to look decent rather than majorly compromising graphics to get there, so after a certain point, optimization has to come from elsewhere
@@starrysock perhaps, its just to me the second half of your comment read "they should have just optimized the code instead of reducing graphics."
side note, they do the reduce graphics for the whole game on modern games too, but you point of "it will upset the the consumer" stands strong if you remember the whole watchdogs fiasco.
I agree, some of the tricks back then were really clever. Specially if you think that you needed to fit the entire game in less than 1 MB, and could just resolve to 2 kB of RAM!
Without the limitations, programs are actually getting bigger than they need to nowadays, so it's funny: the more you go forward with technology the more resources you will need to do the exact same thing, so you still seem to meet the same limits. It's insane how disproportionate the tech advancement has to be just so that we can actually see an improvement in how the program feels.
Something to note is that Shovel Knight & Hollow Knights punishments add variety to play, Shovel Knight adding another risk/reward system with gold placements and Hollow Knight with a potentially annoying enemy in some situations. Makes dying not just repeating the same thing over but better this time.
Well that got more attention than I thought it wou--- no comments or input? Aw was looking forward to that.
Also DAMN saw some of the comments section. As a fellow designer more used to games reminiscent of the 80s-90s rather than the games that inspired them, I'll have to agree with most of the points simply for the reason that annoying a player isnt a good thing. Sure you can tolerate that part of the game and still enjoy it, but you can't say that annoyance was contributing to the fun you had while playing it. Satisfying as it may be to beat such a game, something I like saying from the veins of Alan Watts: *Games are not a Journey.* You play games, you dont work games. It's not supposed to feel like a job that where you feel great when you get to the weekend. Games are supposed to be playful, the act of playing should be fun in itself.
Bit of a controversial belief. Maybe that'll get some discussion rolling idk.
@@Eshiay Now have this thought: what if I want to go on a journey? What if rather than leisurely read and stuff my face with wine in Athens, I'd fight for my life and conquer victory in Sparta? I guess it's easier to say some games just aren't for everyone. Not everyone sees adversity the same, and people are diverse in their values and beliefs.
Flickering graphics on NES were a programming hack to add more sprites on the screen than the hardware could handle. That's not an example of bad programming or a lack of polish, it's an example of pushing the hardware to the absolute limit successfully.
Flickering was also a bit less of an issue on CRT screens which always did that anyway and the result could be much, much worse on VHS tapes so people were used to it. Sinking money into fixing something most people wouldn't notice anyway is thrown away money.
Yes because making everything on screen disappear and reappear every 2 seconds is "successful".
MrLowVolt yeah cause everybody wants to see flickering opponents. OUTSTANDING!
@@goldfish6525 Yeah, it sucks, but did you not read the comment. It's because of the hardware it had to flicker. So, yes it's "successful", otherwise there wouldn't be as much sprites on screen.
@@korinoriz
It's not like it's a good thing that had to happen.
heres a rough chart of every comment
100% : the flicker in the old game wasnt a lack of polish, it was hardware limitations.
0% :
Deus also that mega man games are well designed and aren’t as bad as other nes games
Shift Dash he didn’t say they were bad
@@nobby5492 well designed? Not really. Like the part where you fall down and those yellow lasers try to kill you? That's not fair or well designed at all since it's jusr trial and error
@@nobby5492 mega man 1 is horribly designed.
you forgot the 5% r3 tards commenting on how the comment section percentage consist on
Part of the appeal of lives systems for me is that they mean you have to get consistent with playing the whole game well, or at least a decent part of the game before you can actually beat it. To me this is more fun than just spamming infinite checkpoints/savestates at a brick wall until you happen to clear it once and then move on to the next brick wall, never having to think about earlier parts of the game ever again.
Sure, modern games that use lives systems should make an effort to make collecting lives actually meaningful, and provide the player with some ways to make each playthrough of previous sections different from the last, but to dismiss lives systems as inherently outdated is just kinda dumb imo.
100% agree with you. It's much more intense and satisfying this way. It means that you have to actually improve at the game, not just grind the same section again and again. When you play this way, it's way more fun, especially when a game is deep enough so you can find new stuff in earlier stages and even warps, alternative routes or power-ups to make the problematic section easier. When he told he used savestates to beat SMB3 I shook my head.
I think lives create that same problem. The player just throws their lives at every new level, while starting from the beginning when they run out, then having more lives to throw at the level.
By the time I was able to beat Ninja Gaiden, the only level where I lost any lives was the last one. In one afternoon, my noob ass was forged into an always forward dashing ninja speedrunning machine, and I don't even speedrun games. Can't have that with modern checkpoints.
Agreed, I think the real problem is a lot of games misuse life systems.
When you breeze through levels that felt impossible before with no added advantage except experience, that's a kind of thrill you don't get in modern games.
Dude, even the original Spyro had saves. Several PS1 games did, so I'm not sure what kind of games your wife is remembering.
And there were some that had passwords as an extra method of saving. I own two of those, Crash 1 and Croc 1.
Maybe he misheard or misinterpreted his wife. Or maybe his wife never saved as a kid (I don't know how it works, since I never played Spyro).
But he relied on that information and put it in a video. Without fact-checking. And without research.
@@Senordisastermaster (Reignited saves automatically across all three games.) In the original Spyro, you can save whenever you rescue a dragon. Standing on a dragon marker initiates a prompt to save, and you can do this with any dragon you rescue.
Spyro 2 and 3 automatically save when you enter or exit a level. None of the games make you start over if you lose all your lives if you don't have a memory card.
I’m pretty sure his wife is talking about NES/SNES/Genesis games. I thought it was kinda obvious......
@@dapperfan44 my assumption is that his wife didn't have a PS1 memory card
fortnite restarts a game if you lose in battle royale
fortnite is bad game design confirmed
Fortnite=nes game
@@jordengg3629 That's some technical achievement.
Well, Fortnite doesn't actually "restart". Each time a match begins, you're pitted against different players with different strategies, and your starting location is different. So the whole "walk of shame" aspect doesn't exist in Fortnite.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter chillll it was a joke
@@esayan04 I don't think you realize how serious this is. Have you ever tried to spread Fortnite on toast?
“Bethesda ain’t got nothin on this!” - Fallout 76 would beg to differ.
Some of the games of nes were designed to emulate arcades but the difficulty thing in lots of games wasn't artificial difficulty but artificial lengthening
Artificial lengthening by using artificial difficulty.
@@thegrayghost1786 artificial difficulty is when you limit the player by increasing or decreasing stats. The levels in say super mario were genuinely difficult but because of the life system you were sent back to the start which artificially lengthened the game. Artificial difficulty would be if you had to bonk goomba 50 times instead of once to kill them
@@devastatheseeker9967 I disagree with your definition. I define it as when instead of offering a fair challenge, the game will introduce mechanics designed to annoy the player and kill them. Health sponging is one method, but another example is like in Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden where they'll have a bunch of tight platforming sections with bottemless pits and a shit ton of enemies designed to specifically knock the player into the pits with the atrocious knock back mechanic. Games designed as well as Mario aren't abundant on the NES. Most games are designed to be hard as shit to pad out the game.
@@thegrayghost1786 yes but they're legitimately hard. It's not like a boss where you're forced to chip away at a gigantic health pool and only die because it takes you out in one shot. The ancient dragon in dark souls 2 is a prime example of artificial difficulty. One of the easiest bosses in the game but because it has such a huge health pool and does insane damage it makes it "hard" that's artificial difficulty. Yes castlevania and such do have tight jumps and stuff but that's more so a test of skill, hence it not being artificially difficult. Artificial difficulty is when you're faced with an obstacle that isn't difficult but is made difficult via numbers
@@devastatheseeker9967 No, that isn't legitimate difficulty. Placing enemies in bs locations to knock you into an instakill pit when the controls are so stiff is not legitimately difficulty.
1:22 *"So let me state my FECES upfront."*
When the guy admits he's talking shit.
I think Balloon Fight has fair challenge. The enemies are as limited in movement as you are, and you can choose to kill them off when they're weak, or wait for them to get their balloons back so you can pop them for more points, the fish only appears when you get too close to the water, and the stars are one hit kills but they always move the same way and you can see when and where they're going to appear before they can kill you.
But it's Balloon Fight. Your only reward is points.
Nothing wrong with points, games were very arcade like back then. I love balloon fight, I can get pretty far but I've never actually beaten it. Games don't need to be super technical or in depth to be fun, playing a game like that basically shows what I mean.
Having zero nostalgia for the NES, Balloon Fight is actually one of the handful of games I can enjoy today
Ok but if you’re going to put ducktales, castlevania, and mega man next to the words “bad game design” you’re just asking for hate
Not hating just saying lots of people will get mad
Not from me, i never liked those games....or the cartoon ducktales.
@@cassandraking6603 blasphemy!
Agreed
what point in the video does he say those are bad games?
@@gangstasteve5753 he doesn’t, but he put those games right next to the words “bad game design” on the thumbnail
This dude seriously used save states to beat Super Mario Bros. 3
Luka Bucar laughs in Speedruner language
He's allowed
Hes allowed but its hardly what id call a hard game. Its pretty easy to rack up a ton of lives.
This right here. Saving the princess in SMB3 through save state use is the participation trophy of video games.
@@randomguy6679he's a bitch. Literal children used to beat that game
i like at 7:57 he says it's funny that games were released with this little polish. as opposed to games now which are released half done and the other half is released as an expensive DLC or very large updates(betrhseda). Or "Big Rigs:Over The Hill Racing"
It's not the amount of polish of the game, it's simply the limitations of the NES.
@@hideofreakingkojima5457 yeah i meant to clarify a little bit more. The NES could only do so much with an 8 bit processor and just a few Megabits for game size. Companies like bethseda have no excuse for crippling glitches.
In Fallout 3( which is my favorite of the bunch) has the most bizarre glitches. In one play through all the non-human enemies were deathclaws. In another, my characters arms disappeared and everything became hostile towards me
@@absolutez3r019 I never understood why people think those glitches were considered "indearing", especially the ones that ruins your progress.
I particularly like it how he complains about "glitching graphics" and complaining that the developers need to fix this before release, but what he was showing was sprite flicker due to a hardware limitation. It was an expected and accepted artifact of the 8-bit era, they were doing the best with what they were given.
All examples were more polish than Fallout 76.
I admit, sometimes Megaman is a bit cheap.
But nothing will ever make me stop enjoying it.
Other parts of megaman is brilliant. In that they give you something easy first, and then later you get the same thing but in a harder version. I never noticed it as a child, but it was really advanced game design back then where they wanted the players to gradually learn and take on challenges when you had some experience.
MM2 and MM3 are still the greatest games of all time.
Is it just me or is mega mans controls actually shit?
@@stal2496 nah mate ur the only one who thinks that
@@caramelsunface k
That "flicker" is better explained in the development of Micro Mages: the NES can only have a certain number of sprites on screen. To render more, they cycled through each one.
I think "bad" game design isn't really fair here. "Dated" is the word you're looking for. A lot of these games are not good by todays standards, but the difference between an outright bad game and a dated game is that if you get you mind out of the headspace of comparing it to games made after 30 years of trial and error have occurd these games can still be a lot of fun. Hell, the Megaman games are still considered classics, and for good reason.
Yes. This.
I was gonna say the same thing.
Not only are they not bad game design, they may be better game design than today's. Just the music alone and the creative nature of all those games are head and shoulders above many from today.
How many post apocalyptic games do we have now? Military shooters? Zombies? It's the same shit. Also hard to name a game with memorable music these days.
@@THE_BEAR_JEW Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Rayman: Legends, Dark Souls, and we can continue on and so forth. Those orchestral pieces aren't 8-bit ass clouds calling themselves music either. It's not hard to have good OST's at all.
he did mention that they also had good game design. he was just focusing on the bad parts
True. It's not like they had the technology or memory space to add saves to Mario and shit.
Like... I love the Good/Bad Game Design series but I do feel like you maybe put a HUGE emphasis on platformers and puzzle games. Which - I get it - you like those games - that's good.... But I wouldn't mind seeing your takes on a wider variety of games. What makes good/bad game design in say - RPGs? Or Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-like Farm Sims? What do you think makes a good or bad game design in casual games? Or other types of sim games? Or battle royales (with or without cheese)? Or combat games? This series is amazing... But it has so much potential to cover a much wider breadth of game design and you can kind of only cover platformers so much before you're just rehashing content.
I like playing bullet-hells and fighters
Basically brain games
@@david2618 And that's fine. Just saying.... Including maybe all? Multiple genres?
@@kitmakin289 If he doesn't like them and hasn't played them much he might feel that he doesn't have the right experience to talk meaningfully about them (rightfully I would add). I'd prefer him talking with knowledge than a half-assed attempt at something he is not comfortable with.
I can't speak for him (because i'm not him) but i assume that he uses these examples because that's what he's familiar with. Maybe he just doesn't have as much expertise in RPG's 'n stuff as he does in what he does
Fluffy and Harrin you both have great points and I do acknowledge that - but if that's the case - maybe he could expand what he plays? Or invite those who have more experience with those other genres on the show to talk WITH him about what would be classed as good or bad game design in these areas? As it is - he has a great way of presenting his arguments and good structure so it would be really great if he could expand his content here. I know that he prefers the rage-game, platforming, puzzle genre which is fine - but he has a sense for general game design as well (like when he speaks about good sound engineering and use of colour) so slightly more branching out like that could also be good.
Nintendo’s quality control, despite some of its annoyances, at least made it so NES games were possible to beat, even those that were “NES hard”. I remember some pre-NES games being impossible to beat.
Too bad said quality control didn't mean shit, when it came to actual quality of a game.
@@KuroNoTenno it meant a lot if you place it in the context of the videogame crash right before the NES. The quality control made sure games actually worked on the systems, which wasn't a given in the years before the crash
@@bartelvandervelden9894 Yeah, the problem is that they still put it on garbage.
Silver Surfer(NES) disagrees
There are questionable NES games, silver surfer, Battletoads saga , Ninja Gaiden Trilogy , DuckTales, and first TMNT , , , "here 8year old kid , play one of these games and defeat it in less than 4 days "
"Hey, I have beaten Super Mario Bros 3 with the warp whistle" good job, much research, such knowledge
@CAWF Network looool
@CAWF Network "Is BEttER SavE ProGrEss ThaN LosIng It DUuUHuh"
Snowman
@CAWF Network I beat it with save states too, kinda. I didn't save scum, I saved it only when I quit playing.
It's kinda funny that it's the SNES version and he still used save states, but I guess this is the average modern gamer for ya.
Using a wistle is like, using the konami code, just stock up on lives by collecting coins at a world 7 castle using a P-switch.
Wait, weren't these the reasons you were prasing getting over it?
I believe they were, however; Getting Over It is specifically designed to bring out that feeling, and that's what made it so popular...
also, it was pretty M E T A
Getting Over it was supposed to make you rage quit, it is designed to make you supper angry, from the bad controls, to the voiceover that makes fun of you, it is supposed to test your patience, it's a rage game, you chose to play them that way
Doesn't make any sense. What "It's supposed to be" doesn't change what it actually is at the end of the day.
If you'll grant and factor in the target audience and culture of people watching UA-camrs make funny faces and noises then you can grant level selecting cheat codes for old games. Yes it's an evil. Whether it's a necessary evil with a goal in mind is another question.
@@silkworm2595 So games that troll you are just genuinely bad instead of being good game design? You must be very enlightened.
@@XrayTheMyth23 No. Read again.
I disagree with a lot of things in this video
but yeah, the zombies in ghosts n goblins are bullshit
actually, there's a lot of bullshit in that game
also yeah, metroid was pretty fucked up too
@@alecrutz956 Metroid was very unpleasant to play. Super Metroid, now, *that* is a masterpiece.
@@FernieCanto same here. I absolutely despise the first metroid, its kind of amazing it was liked enough that it got sequels, although given that super metroid was one of them, I'd say its worth it
The first Legend of Zelda on the 8 bit NES was fair. You had a map to navigate, clues to find secrets, we're introduced to new abilities progressively, and all enemies with predictable patterns. It was a well rounded game that just took time, skill, resource management and a little knowledge.
It's biggest flaws is the translation of the clues, which makes them extremely vague, then again as a kid I barely knew English and certainly not Japaneese. Especially in Zelda II, I had to use a dictionary for the word "fellow" (yes, it was before internet)
@@isaiahmillard9014 it inspired dozens and dozens of games...
What the hell are you even talking about?
That doesnt mean it was the first game to do these things, but it was the first to do them all right.
It was just a hard act to follow.
@@isaiahmillard9014 those 2 games came out the same year. One isn't derivative of the other. Zelda is definitely the more accessible of the 2. Its completely understandable that more people would have picked it up. Crystalis is a fantastic game that only recently started getting the praise it deserves, but you can't even pretend that it doesn't take ques from the zelda series, along with games like dragon warrior. I'm not sure why you'd be upset about this. Zelda is a great game, whether you like it or not.
7:56 the NES has a sprite limit, these “glitching pixels” were necessary to have a full field of players.
Thanks dude I couldn't read the other hundred comments saying that same
@@leonardo9259
Don’t get frustrated by UA-cam comments
@@beanietasticday this was 2 years ago, thats 80 years on internet time
I remember beating Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Castlevania I and III when I was 9. I was a goddess among my friends at school. Beating old school NES games was a thrill. They had to be hard because otherwise you'd be dropping $50 on a game that you could otherwise beat in under 2 hours. It was also a way to get people renting games repeatedly ("I didn't beat it last week, so I'll try it again!").
It's funny how I'll remember many things from the old games, but the modern stuff is just forgotten. It could be age and all that
@@simoncobian2816 Its almost like NES games was respecting your time and skill you put into them and modern games does not because you just finish them and forget.
RIGHT SNOWMAN? HOWS THERE FINISHING DARK SOULS FOR YOU? I BET YOU LEARN A LOT FROM PLAYING IT AND YOU DIDNT HEAVY PUSH FROM BONFIRE TO BONFIRE IN HEAVY ARMOR AND SHIELD LIKE A SCRUB!!!!
"It's all about not having any setbacks and just forward progress. Except I also don't want too many checkpoints, because then it doesn't feel like I accomplished anything. But I also prefer save states. Also none of that matters and it's actually all about enemy placement and I have no idea what I'm talking about."
He would save state at the beginning of a level but probably not in the middle so he still had a checkpoint but not to many so he actually felt like he acomplished something... you should really think about what you say before writing it and just assuming he contridicts himself.
He does say that the higher challenges should be more optional (and just beating the game should be a moderate challenge without bullshit moments), like the checkpoints in SK or collecting in some other games.
These days, more and more games are being designed with accessibility in mind. This includes more save points, such as being able to save at will on the overworld map(s) in Super Mario Bros games. Design for accessibility, but have extraneous challenges in the game for the more skilled players. Also, don't insult players who need this assistance by calling your assist mode something like "chicken hat".
Oh yeah how he DARES exposing diferent points to argue
Zeldagigafan Are you referring to MGS5?
bro i cant believe you like fortnite, it doesn't even have checkpoints!
Old school battle royale game (that runs in web browser) can have "checkpoint" by offering you a starting bonus if you win or survive long enough in the last round. Giving that you can't matchmaking in a web based battle royale (aka if you lose, you will have to wait for the next round to start), winning really matters, rather than just being able to take a screenshot.
Such idea probably won't work in "modern" matchmaking style battle royale that well because winning and losing count are just a number, and there's not a lot you can lose anyway because you can just start another round painlessly.
*that is the joke*
@@FlameRat_YehLon r/woooosh
I'm pretty sure that's actually one of the most legit Fortnite criticisms. Everyone just calls it "garbage" to make themselves feel better.
@Iriako Ishikawa is it though? Like, it's not a bad game, it's just obscenely popular
I warped straight to world 8
Skill arc: imma bout to end this whole mans career
7:54 man that's super unfair to developers of back then. Those "glitchy" sprites aren't really glitchy -- the programmers had to actually make them cycle in terms of visibility in order to be able to show that many things on screen at once. (Well, clearly not "at once", but you get it.) It's one thing to say that the games look ugly today, but to say they were unpolished, even though you concede they were under technical limitations, is selling the work of these people way short.
Hotline Miami is the first example that pops to mind. It was brutal. Had the perfect amount of punishment that built up tension, stakes and provided accomplishment.
In contrast, Hotline Miami 2 is full of enemies who shoot you from offscreen or through windows, and most of the rooms take ages to clear due to their size and how easily it is to mess up. Sometimes bigger isn't always better.
@@MandrakeHorse Exactly how I felt about it, I couldn't even finish it, got too frustrated at the level design.
The randomization of weapons also makes the restarts unique, which is kind of cool. It also avoids the feeling of needing luck as certain weapons (such as enemy weapons) are consistent, so while there is some randomness, you don't need to rely on the randomness to help you.
@@MandrakeHorse Tip 1: Play faster.
Tip 2: Play fucking faster.
@@SoulGameStudio hey didnt expect to see you here! I love your game
The blinking sprites were due to technical limitations. The console could only display a set number of sprites on the screen at the same time, but if you skip some frames on their rendering, you could display other sprites while they're off and so on.
Just because it's a console limitation doesn't mean it's pleasant to have in your game. I don't mind NES games as much as this uploader does, but the flickering sprites can't be defended as part of the charm. It is objectively a flaw.
@Zuon84
What matters a more about a game, it's complexity by being able to go past console limitations or _now having blinking sprites_ (which in my opinion I like about NES games, I don't know why.)
@@marclurr Well, I never blamed Nintendo for anything, but at the time of the NES' release, we already had 16 bit video game hardware in the arcades. Saying that better hardware didn't exist in 1985 is simply untrue. Whether or not it was affordable to the home consumer is a completely different story.
@@Zuon94
are you sure you wanna compare the nes hardware to an actual arcade machine?!!!
are you insane?!!!! do you know the difference in hardware cost?!
not to mention that with an arcade machine you could play ONE game(unless it was a neo-geo, which had some weird giant cartridges) and with the nes you have hundreds to choose from....
@@sabin97 I already brought up that price is not part of this argument in my previous comment. "The hardware did not exist" is the point I am arguing, and this is objectively false. Adding more restrictions to what "counts" in this argument is simply backpedaling.
Gotta love having to play the same game twice to get the true ending in Ghosts n Goblins. What a creative way to extend the length and difficulty of a game.
>bad game design
>megaman
What.
Burntfires22 yea, sure. So garbage Capcom built an empire because of it, and it is considered one of the most beloved gaming franchises in history.
Because it's old duh, anything old is instantly bad because fat millenial hipster said so.
@@danielbueno8474 Yup. It's kinda crazy to remember that there was once a time when Capcom used to give Megaman some special treatment. Megaman shouldn't have been a thing since the first game on the NES didn't sell well, but they decided to make a Megaman 2 and it became a huge success. And after that, Capcom put Megaman on a pedestal for many years until around the 2000's when they made way too many Megaman games.
You going to go into detail, or just leave it at that? You didn't prove your point at all. The video didn't either.
@Burntfires22 SoybOy cannot beat Mega Man...so it's garbage^^ 😅 😆
"there's a reason why the konami code came into existence"
yeah it was meant to be a SECRET code that helped the game devs test out any bugs by getting into the game further much easier, and what benefits do these games have of wasting your time? it doesn't make any sense
And they decided to keep it in.
And that's totally why they left it in and why it wasn't kept secret and everyone knew about it anyway?
It started as a debug, sure, but so did a lot of cheat codes going all the way through the N64/PS1 era. Games in that era wasted time to make the game seem a lot longer or more challenging than it was, which clearly and unfortunately worked because people don't remember the bad game design. You save a lot of design hours and work within hardware limitations if you make a game so unfairly difficult that it takes ten times as long as it should to complete it if it were designed well.
They also did it as a holdover from Arcade games because home consoles were still new. All people knew about video games were designing for arcade cabinets, where the objective from a designers perspective was making sure that they'll lose and have to try again and balancing it with making the game fun enough that they will come back to try again anyway.
Why would you warp whistle and save state your first playthrough of SMB3? Just play the game and you get rewarded with tons of powerups and extra lives. You also skipped the progressive difficulty built into the game. Using it as an example of game design when you didn't bother to experience any of what the game teaches through playing it is a disservice. I beat it when I was four years old. You can do better.
Unless the whole purpose of this video was to game the algorithm by getting us all to interact with it through comments and dislikes.
Not my first time playing, I've played it many times. Just never beat it. You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I actually said it has a good balance of challenge and leniency, but I guess you heard what you want to hear
@@snomangaming Right but it seems like you doubled back when you mentioned save stating on current iterations in the interest of time so you could circumvent replaying particularly tricky or arduous stages. I understand that sentiment but SMB3 is a weak example when examining games on console full of jank, especially when the two stages in the given example are literally designed to be the most difficult in the entire game and you're playing deprived of all the extra lives and powerups the rest of the game gives you. It feels like you did that to yourself on purpose just for the sake of the point you're trying to make.
After rewatching the video, another issue of contention I have is when discussing how primitive games just emulated the arcade quarter dump design but without the quarters you state that "no money is involved." Money was still involved. SMB3 cost the equivalent of nearly $100 when it was released. I'll fully agree that if I picked up SMB3 for 5 bucks on virtual console and I couldn't get past 8-2 I might just drop it and never play again. But for $100, I'm going to try again if I lose. Jokes about quarter sinks and Fortnite aside, SMB3 was a designed game. It was made to be replayed because even back then no one was going to pay that kind of money for 3-4 hours of entertainment. The lives system in SMB3 might be artificial difficulty sure, but every time you go through the levels there's usually some hidden secrets to find that will increase your chances at the end. There's definitely more to be said about how the value proposition weighs into game design.
Anyway thanks for your reply. If you were gaming me for algorithm points than you win because I subbed.
Nah I totally feel you on that. If there's one thing that the comments have brought up it's about how short the games are without their difficulty. I still stand by that doesn't mean that they're well designed, but you're correct about extra lives and secrets and whatnot. SMB3 is one of the easier NES games I talk about so that's probably where all the hate came from. I try to be concise in my videos but sometimes that leads to miscommunication of my points. Thanks for watching :)
@@snomangaming Sorry if I was a bit abrasive at first. I should have better considered your position of having to be both concise and relative in the function of a youtube video. To be honest I never thought that I'd get a creator reply on a video with nearly 2,500 comments. Also the topic of the changes that have occurred in the value proposition's impact on video game design over the past 5 decades from coin-op to F2P could easily be a Master's thesis so I don't know what I expected.
Cheers dude, can't wait for your next video even if I might not agree with it.
It is like the reviewer here has no idea about hardware limitations and cost of production. The fact that some of these old games are playable at all is due to very good design and hard work. Try to program in bits and see how difficult it can be.
ReadySetGo As a programmer, I can’t even imagine. Mad respect.
Yeah but those are not the main point of the review and he mentions that they're hardware limitations
@@VapeStation5 well said
@@VapeStation5 these are good games, that made the foundation of many games to come and we enjoy today
Dumbass
@@elgatochurro "I disagree with you, dumbass"
I sigh every time I hear the old "lives are artificial difficulty" because that doesn;t make sense. Of course there is something to be said about replaying the same levels multiple times otherwise we wouldn't have the games to that do so with infinite lives. I'm not talking about NES games specifically, but I'm thinking back as a kid playing something like Tearaway Thomas or Gynoug, there is a real thrill being able to play earlier stages better than you were able to before. Getting to the end of level 7 with 4 lives where last time you only had 3? there's a real sense of weight to that.
Even in more recent times playing Ducktales Remastered, I adore Extreme mode. I've never actually been able to beat it but each attempt has been exhilarating since every hit matters. The issue is about what is being measured, in the lower difficulties the game sort of reverts everyone to an equal playing field regardless of skill. If you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth or you trounced them, all that matters is "you did it" so the box has been checked off the list.
Now my counter example of the exact opposite is Super Meat Boy. Everyone loves Super Meat Boy and I do enjoy the game, but I get bored of it really really quickly. When scale of rewards is diminished, the game becomes a case of "keep playing until you're perfect". Plus if you want to call replaying bits "artificial" then that applies here too surely. If a level consists of "5 jumps" and I keep dying on the 4th and 5th, then why make me do the first 3 jumps every time i die? what exactly is the scale of this issue?
if it's a question of playing through 5 seconds of progress 2000 times or playing through 2500 seconds of progress 4 times, I choose the latter (generally speaking of course)
You bring up good points sir.
@@mistertagomago7974 ma'am*
@Maurice Smith I don't think older games with lives system were "better" per se but I hate how it's dismissed straight up just cause the games that are made today aren't designed around them... for example I love JRPGs and fighting super optional bosses, and those games wouldn't work with a lives system in the same way
He likes super meat boy that's why it doesn't matter, you really had to learn a game to beat it. I can still pick up and play Castlevania 3 and get rather far because I can remember how to play it. Why? because I played the heck out it to really understand enemy placement and how to time jumps etc. I remember enjoying the new tomb raider reboot series but I can't really recall it that much because I never had a challenge, beat it and moved on.
Well I mean for starters, it's not mutually exclusive. A game like Super Meat Boy could easily have lives implemented and it would be even more difficult, probably more frustrating. Games can also push you to the limit without having lives at all, look at F-Zero GX for example. Beating that one on Very Hard was my favorite gaming achievement of all time, because all that mattered was "I did it". I wanted to keep going because on each chapter I could jump right back in, play the level, learn it, etc. etc. Just imagining the game having a lives system, pushing me back to the 1st level for dying too much gives me shivers.
The original Battletoads on NES is easily in my top 10 games of all time but I fully admit that the lives/continues system is a major deterrent from mastering it.
It's pretty basic: I want to master the game, and that means practice. When it takes ages to practice Clinger Winger, the second last level of the game, when I have to spend so long just getting there and then only having so many shots before going back to the beginning, it's a major turn off. I know the rest of the game, I've mastered it up to that point, I just want to cut to the chase and try again but I can't.
When I first beat Battletoads I used save states. I would save a state at the beginning of each level and play it over and over again not just until I beat it, but until I could beat it without dying. If this makes me a filthy cheater I guess I'm a filthy cheater.
I get where you're coming from, and agree with a lot you say. But I also think a concept such as lives can provide an extra dimension to a game. In Megaman games for example, you're often put to a choice: will you take the riskier route for an extra life? And if you die the first time taking that route, will you try again to break even or cut your losses short? Matter of opinion I guess. I don't think there is a universal standard that games have to adopt.
Right. I essentially agree with his points, but by his logic, games like Spelunky are terrible experiences because they don't "play fair." And true, I don't think Spelunky is fair, but that's the point--it's not trying to be.
The only thing I didn't like about the lives system in Mega Man was that you could start a Stage with no extra lives. The game should've made sure that you always had a minimum of at least 2 lives upon entering a Stage.
Other than that, the lives system was awesome in the original Mega Man games. It made each Stage its own mini-challenge to conquer which all together added up to a nice cohesive whole.
@@zanyraccoon6361 I would just walk into a new level at 0 lives and die. There was no penalty at all for continuing other than time, which made the game with 3 lives tough but fair along with like the 5 - 10 minute level design.
@@zanyraccoon6361 Mega Man 8's Spare Charger
.
@@zanyraccoon6361 What was also nice about lives was they helped influenced one of the best aspects of mega man's designs: the selectable bosses. Losing lives and being taken to a menu with Continue or Stage Select helped give you a choice in either trying a stage you might be sick of, or moving on to something else, which helps keep the player from turning the game off and to keep going.
"I beat super mario bros 3... i warped straight to world 8."
He did actually beat it legitimately a while back
It's also one of the easiest Mario games
@@josephmarino310 hum are you joking
smb3 is actually pretty hard a lot more late in game
if anything smw is more easy
@@RaphielShiraha64 of the original nes games smb3 is the easiest
@@josephmarino310 >smb3 is the easiest
hum
no
smb 1 is the easiest
This video is all over the place. He calls the flicker in old nes games "lack of polish" when it was lack of hardware. If gives credit to the souls format of picking up resources if you die, losing them if you die twice to shovel knight and not dark souls and he gives shovel knights credit for teaching without teaching when many nes games introduced that mechanism.
Upon retrospect, a big flaw this video has is lumping all NES games with this kind of design: alongside ignoring the NES games that did things right, the problem with this is that this kind of game design would not go away for quite a few more generations. We got a ton of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafix, Gameboy, Nintendo 64, Playstation, and even Gameboy Advance and Playstation 2 games that subscribed to this kind of brutal and unfair game design. It really wouldn't be until the generation of the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 when common usage of these games died out completely. To only call out the NES for this seems very unfair.
Dracomut nOt AlL NeS GaMEs
Literally, your serious? Adding good nes games would defeat the point of the video
@@TheToyTendoGamerNo it wouldn't, it would have made the video more informed. He's looked at the good sides of games in bad game design before you know. Plus my point of Snoman lumping NES games togethers stands, he himself changed the title of the video in response to the criticism of fans.
My problem with this video is that you seem to be implying that there is one right way to go about things, when in my opinion I like a lot of the things you say are wrong, like in having to restart the level from the beginning, you have to beat challenges that you've already beaten which can get annoying, but it also becomes a reminder of your progression, it makes you look back and see how much better you've become, which gives you the motivation to overcome the next challenge.
But I dunno… just some of my thoughts.
Yeah I actually had those same thoughts. I recently played through Castlevania Rondo of Blood and that's what happened. I died a lot but liked how I was getting better and finding more efficient ways to beat the levels. It was a good time. And when I played through it a second time I felt like a badass cause I was blasting through the levels that were giving me such a hard time.
@@ados1280 Yeah, I mean it's just a matter of what kind of game you like, any rules that apply to one kind of game don't necessarily apply to another, and then sometimes breaking the rules is what makes a game fun.
i'm super torn on a lot of this, because i agree with where this is coming from but don't agree with a lot of what you've said
the "lack of polish" thing... lots of games did kinda just get shipped out the door, but that flickering is a hardware limitation of 8 sprites per line, so it needs to cycle between drawing them in an effort to keep them all visible. sometimes this just can't be helped, especially in sports games where there are a lot of players, each one occupying 4 8x8 sprite tiles. it adds up fast. lag is related to that. while some game engines were undoubtedly faster and managed resources, it's not like things today by a longshot and i feel like critiquing these points is a huge misstep. i also noticed you've given hearts to a ton of comments that just blanket-agree with you but none that point this out - which is specific, mentioned in many comments, and probably important information because you were factually wrong about why it happens. i think it's probably fair to make the correction easily noticed?
disagree with the demonization of lives and being set back to the start of a game entirely, especially for games where score is a key focus - and don't tell me score isn't a valid design in 2018, either, hahaha! forcing the player back forces improvement which increases score. this is especially common in STGs (or shmups if you will) and regarded as a teaching mechanism.
Shovel Knight does a wonderful job of teaching you things before they got balls-out with them, totally. but so does like. i dunno, Mega Man 5. NES games were doing this fairly well by the time we were shifting focus to the SNES. same thing goes for the color-coded enemies. hell, you showed an early game that does this - Metroid - several times as an example of bad design. the game's aged like absolute tat, but this seems terrifically ignorant
did you actually play through mario 3? or just warp straight to the end and call it hard? because the game does ramp up to that difficulty, and it's no wonder it would be immediately hard enough to need save states.
also not sure calling out arcade games as having that single purpose design-wise is a good move. play more arcade games, learn about their history! there's a lot of brilliant design there that you may not be aware of, and it's likely the place "rank" was birthed - rank being the method of changing the game's difficulty in real time based on the player's skill. meaning newer players will likely see more of the game, and experienced players will be challenged from the start.
It's like how in Space Invaders the increased speed of enemies as more of them died was not meant to be a feature. It was simply that the engine needing to animate fewer sprites was able to complete the task faster thereby increasing the speed.
The original Metroid, I don't know, a lot of it looks copy pasted. I criticized it pretty hard even when it was new for the fact that it was so hard to tell where you were and where you had and hadn't been that you could get turned around very easily. Super Metroid on the other hand is game design masterclass, perfect use of teaching without teaching, unique areas and level layouts that maybe had a platform you can't reach but the doorway on top of it is so incredibly ornate that you can't forget it, so you instantly think to come back once you get a power up that lets you jump higher. THEN, once you really learn to play you realize that often those power ups were never needed to get anywhere. The game included all the tricks and mechanics you would ever need to go anywhere at virtually any time without breaking the game. You can even do the bosses in reverse order though the difficulty is extreme.
I love how 99% of the comments point to the hardware not being good at the time to criticize the video while the youtuber himself did talk about hardware limitations causing most of the problems in old games. And for those saying the vid looks like a shovel knight ad, it’s really just that the game is a well-known and great tribute to NES games; it perfectly fits in here.
The difference is, Shovel Knight is difficult, but through meticulous level-design and the developers actually give a shit.
watch out, we have the white knight fanboy over here protecting the dude that doesn't know how to express himself. UC
Problem is, you can't say it's "bad game design" when it's "good game design for the hardware"
@@theSato What? Screen flickering, a limited colour choice and that nonsense was defenetly Hardware limitation. And not being able to safe to an extend as well (in wich case they could have implemented the Password thing).
An overly punishing experience, that might let you loose all your progress or at least a lot of it and cheap Deaths, wich most NES Games had plenty, were NOT Hardware limitations. That is simply bad game design. Yeah yeah, first "real" Homeconsoles (Atari and co were before, but those games were extremely simplistic), so they didn't have all that experience and knowledge we have today. So I'm defenetly not mad. And after all, if you leave out those Downsides, those were still incredibly good games. But being old and the first doesn't make you immune to critic.
Just learn from the past. What made those games good. And what did suck. Leave out the "what did suck" part, remove the hardware limitations and you got great games for today.
I'm currently playing the Messenger. Fantastic game. It can be pretty damn hard, but it is ALLWAYS fair. When I screw up (wich I do very, very often), it was almost allways clearly my own fault. And I don't have to replay XXXXXXXXXXXXX again to come to the part were I failed, just to die again and redo that shit again.
@@ECL28E "Meticulous level design" that shamelessly copied NES design, and this fucking hack is saying that it's some sort of revelation.
"Have you sat down and played NES games lately?"
Yes. I like them. The golden age era of arcades have some of my favorite games ever made. Many of them had brilliant risk-reward structures. I also think your whole "adults have less time to waste" argument doesn't hold water. I'm a lot better at video games than I was when I was a kid. Most of these games are an hour or two long while games today can average 20 to 60 or even hundreds of hours depending on the game. If I don't have time to play through Mega Man then I certainly don't have time to play through the next big modern AAA game. The only thing I agree on is limited game overs in console games, but most of the best games of the era didn't have them.
I love Shovel Knight as much as the next guy but the best games of the era did most of the things you were mentioned with much of its game design ripped straight from Mega Man. The best games in that series always teach you the mechanics in isolation, they have lives but the levels are short and continues are infinite.
I don't think there's one right way of doing things as long as the challenge presented to you is fair. I don't think every game should be like Shovel Knight, because that would get pretty boring.
I'm a 22 year guy, from a non-wealthy family on a non-rich country of all things, so my first contact with games was with a Polystation. For example, I played this year super mario bros. 3 for the first time. I have a big complain about that game: Bob-ombs were black so in some levels they were almost invisible. That's all about the negatives.
First of all, i have a huge feeling sonic the hedgehog was inspired by the P-Meter from this game, and is a great game desing in how it rewards good players with a fluid movement trough a level while punishing bad ones by making them lose powerups. The item system is somehow BETTER than the available in New Super Mario Bros. games; you can sleep hammer bros, skip levels, hammers to open new paths and a limited number of P-wings if you're struggling with something (Like the parabeetles level or the second level with the angry sun). Is also one of the few games who ACTUALLY BENEFIT from the classic 1-UP system, because it's used as a way to reward exploration and finding secrets, good timing when finishing the level or in toad houses, and oh men I really loved the hammer suit and how strong it is to compensate its rarity.
In general this should be a video not about good or bad design, but more about the obstacles while designing NES games and how they were tackled, with both great and awful results. OF COURSE some designs are somewhat dated, but most of them are due to lack of tools to do something better. Games like Megaman already had a great philosophy on design, like showing basic mechanics in a safe room and then using that for the level or using code as a replacement of save files, while others just put unfair difficulty without teaching you anything like battletoads. But well, game design of the NES, SNES and Genesis also had different philosophy because of a different public, a mentality of competition and making you able to overcome difficulties, instead of treathing everyone as a winner (which personally i despise).
Sonic The Hedgehog did difficulty well. It had lives, but a forgiving mechanic for damage in the form of rings.
Also, people had fewer games back then so Sonic was designed to be rewarding to replay. People often complain about sonic having enemies and springs that trip you up if you go too fast. This was to reward memorization. The creators imagined people replaying the games and remembering were all the traps were and getting faster and faster. It was designed to be easier and easier each time you played through. This made having to reply levels less of a grind and more of a learning experience.
Sonic unlike Mario got platforming right.
Shovel Knight was THE game to teach me that dificulty can be fun and rewarding if fair
And cup head?
@@johnlawful2272 most of the time, yes.
There's a lot of moments where you take damage because there's no way to anticipate it in Shovel Knight, I thought it was pretty frustrating at times.
MegaMan games did this as well so this is nothing new. MegaMan X also taught players how the game worked on it's very first stage.
If I need to state a personal example, Punch-Out has the difficulty in it's core mechanisms and man how is it satisfying to understand and triumph of each fighter!
"It piles a walk of shame onto your player, making you go through the easy levels you already conquered"
Showed Mega Man 2, which had unlimited continues, a few seconds earlier
If you're going to talk about how a game punishes you for being bad at it, don't show a game which has a password screen and doesn't reset your progress. If you run out of lives on Mega Man 2, the worst that happens is that you go back to the start of the level.
Also, can you really say you beat Mario 3 when you just skipped to the end and used save states? Don't say a game is hard if you both skip to the end (which jumps over the difficulty curve) and use save states (which nullifies the difficulty anyway)
For mario 3 in particular, I'm good with save states. The game's really long (by nes standards) and there's no save function.
It depends on when save states are used, to be fair. If they're used at the start of a level before you do anything, that's fine, but if it's done in the middle of a level after every tough jump, then that's just not bothering to learn consistency
@@alphachrome713 damn, guess dsp wasn't playing sonic 1 right
@@ajaxmaxbitch yeah I’d say that’s about right
@@blackspy8331 but he's the king of retro dood
Dude, I suck at Castlevania, Contra, Punchout, and many more. But it’s the difficulty I think that make video games of the past more worthwhile to beat.
I was actually kind of surprised not to see Celeste mentioned for the opt in b-sides and strawberries.
absolutely! Great example
Or the assist mode, which is really well implemented
If you look up "hell" in the dictionary there's just a picture of the last screen of 7C
Cole Erickson Even more when you remember it DOES show up in the video.
It's just... Never spoken of.
I'm surprised by the comments. He even said yes, some NES games are good, and I don't think he meant the rest were just completely bad in every way. Not every game is a Megaman or Mario or Zelda, and I distinctly remember most NES games having very stiff controls and committed jumps that caused me a lot of frustration. I could SEE what I needed and wanted to do, but it's already too late, I didn't plan that jump out seconds in advance, so I have to redo the entire god-knows-how-much. I also hated the nondirectional, tiny dagger attacks that made it extremely difficult to actually hit anything without being hit. "Git gud" only goes so far, when the control is only barely in my hands anyways. I'll take Megaman Zero control over NES Megamans any day. Responsive as hell!
I'd also take SNES's Super Ghouls n Ghosts' double jumping to be able to somewhat correct your written-in-stone jumps over NES's Ghosts n Goblins' single jump that still leaves you completely unable to control where you're going. Different people enjoy different kinds of challenges I suppose, but for me, planning every move out so far in advance and not being able to react to things when I can clearly see and react fast enough, but the game won't let me input anything anymore, that's definitely not my preference. I also find it odd that you can turn and shoot/move quickly, but it's just jumps that bind you on a set irreversible course (often to your doom, with 2 hits to death and pits that don't line up without proper foresight).
And in case anybody is thinking it, no it's not more realistic. Realistic would be being able to jump precisely the amount you wanted, not leaping over your target and off a cliff because any jump has to be a preset distance. Allowing some amount of air control is how we adjust for that and let people move they way they intended to.
Maybe it's because people misunderstood the thumnail and some of his points
@@jonathanaguirre6508 "He even said yes, some NES games are good..." Because he's lampshading. He knows that the very first thing will bring up as a counter argument is the dozens of examples of good NES game design that does not fit into his personal definition of "bad game design" so he's pre-empting that with a weak-sauce admission that this does not apply to *all* games... just most...
...he then proceeds to misrepresent the few actual examples he uses, for his weak argument, as if he has already addressed people's counterpoints.
And here's the thing, and I said it somewhere else: you're not entitled a victory. Games can be hard *by design*, and you not having the skill to beat them is not a valid knock against that, it just means you're not good enough to beat it, and have to a) get better at the game by practicing or b) learn to live with it.
It's a game.
Honestly though, developers sticking to color and musical limitations makes a game in an NES style so much more impressive. Plus, when games say they're, "8 bit," I expect them to ACTUALLY be close to 8 bit.
Limitations actually enhance creativity. Ever try to write an article where you can choose your own topic? The amount of possibilities can be overwhelming
New games claiming to be 8 or 16 bit almost always disappoint me. The color palettes and limitations of old systems necessitated a lot of creativity, which isn't completely gone nowadays, but it is more boring to look at.
This may be a bit of a controversial take, but I think Zelda 2 was pretty smart about its difficulty. Even close to the endgame it was only a few minutes to get back to where you were if you got a game over, and you didn't lose any "flag" progress, only "spatial" progress. Especially since just losing a life only sent you back to the beginning of the room you died in, it was possible to get extra lives (though they were limited), and you had your spells to carefully ration out to get to that next point of progression.
In a way, the progression of Zelda 2 was very Souls-like. The "bonfires" are the upgrades you get that stick with you when you get a Game Over, so once you pick them up it's "safe to die", as it were. After that, it's just a matter of getting used to the combat and the game becomes very fun to tensely traipse through. Also, the hardest part of the game, the Great Palace, has its own Game Over checkpoint, so you don't need to go through Death Valley again.
As I see it Zelda 2 only have two big downsides. It's too hard to figure out where to go next in the overworld without a walkthrough, and it requires too much grinding for lives just to get through Death Valley. Even if you plan that out there's too much grinding. But with a walkthrough it's a very fun game and still challenging. :)
@@Henkz85 There's kind of a trick to Death Valley that makes it not quite so hellish-- _take your time._ If you get into an encounter with the eye monsters (moas? something like that), you can hang around on the platform you start out on, kill the Moas that are there, and then make the jumps. Basically, make sure it's safe before you jump, and when you see another Moa, get to safe ground as quickly as possible to take it out. The starting platform and just outside the tunnels with the lizards are good spots.
@@Henkz85 When I recently played it on 3DS VC (without using safe states, mind you), I didn't have trouble with either of those myself, and my only prior experience with it was seeing a Let's Play around ~~5-7 Years earlier. I knew a few things still, but mostly had to figure stuff out myself. The only thing I missed was the Magic Upgrade hidden on Maze Island. I think King's Tomb in the Graveyard and the Hidden Town of Kasuto also took me a while, but I never had to grind or look anything up.
The very last stage is hell and I've never beaten it, but everything else was very manageable, yes even Death Mountain, and without the healing thingy at that. However, for the last stage, the game makes an exception and you start from there when you hit "continue", so even if I've never succeeded I won't throw any "bad game design because too difficult" labels at Zelda II.
I'd like a Zelda II-2, too. Closest thing we have is Adventure Time: Hey Ice King Why'd You Steal Our Garbage on 3DS
@@ThePoltergust5000 I never had problem with the eyes, as you say, patience is all you need. The lizards were my problem. You can use magic to kill them easily, but if you let that be the standard solution you'll run out magic fast. I tried to be patient with them too but figured that my chances was roughly the same if I just rushed it. I've beaten the game three times and usually arrive at the castle with about 1-3 lives left. :P
Dear Snowman the blinking in pixels is something limited by the NES and similar machines. that has noting to do with bad game design but is a forced limitation from 8 bit era. it can be worked around, but it limits the options on NES games strongly.
Watch this to learn more, and about 3 minutes 3 seconds in, they explain why NES games is blinking.
ua-cam.com/video/QaIoW1aL9GE/v-deo.html
Also some newer games is not even using a true 8 bit or 16 bit formula, they only imitate the 8 or 16 bit, and then a few actually code in the limitations that a classic NES game had
There was also only so much you could fit on a cartridge as well. If the games were too forgiving or easy to master, you'd be done with them an hour after you bought it. And it's easy to say you wouldn't waste your time with these titles today when there's an over-saturation of options, but that wasn't true in the 80s and 90s. This was it.
Go watch some speedruns of old NES games. They're all 20-30 minutes long.
Snowman: a good example of a retro homage is Shovel Knight. *Proceeds to mention all the stuff Shovel Knight got from Mega Man, despite showing a lot of disdain for Mega Man up to this point*
Love the old school NES games. They were difficult...part of the appeal though. The simplicity in game design is what made these games so special.
@@lexyk4226 👆
@@lexyk4226 bro you seen this man talking shit to anyone ? Stop fighting against a strawman cuz you suck at video games lol
The "come back to the beginning" thing was due to the games being waaaaay shorter than today. The first Super Mario Bros with save states/continues would suck for example!
Well, I don't have much time to play, so I'd prefer not replaying the same thing over and over. The length of the game doesn't matter too much, just that I don't want to redo something I've succeeded. I've played through the first Super Mario Bros with heavy save state use. It's short, but that's fine.
While some of the things you said were true, and I can tell your INTENTIONS are good, this logic just doesn't really apply to old NES games.
The reason they set you back so far were twofold: for one, renting games was a BIG business back then, and they didn't want people to beat it in a weekend rental - they wanted people to buy the game and really sink their teeth into it.
And for two, they wanted to extend the playtime of someone who DID buy it as much as possible - so when they beat the game, its not a feeling of "ah, well, dunno if that 2 hours was worth $50.." but rather "damn, this was quite an arduous adventure and I got a ton of playtime, I feel like I really overcame this monster"
Considering just how limited storage space and general tech was at the time, making really long experiences out of pretty much any game you mentioned (e.g. Mario 3) pretty much required some amount of this "bad" game design (or stuff like dragon quest/final fantasy endless amounts of grinding, but that's a whole different kind of bad that wastes the player's time even more.)
Sorry but, this was a weak video from you.
Additionally, when you showed off sprite flicker on Tecmo Super Bowl and said "its hard to believe games released with so little polish" .. you kinda just further discredit the point you're trying to make. The sprite flicker is a limitation of the NES from having that many sprites on screen, on those lines - the alternative is intense amounts of slowdown, no programming magic can really overcome that (and if it can, its certainly not an issue of Tecmo Super Bowl being 'unpolished' - its the most polished football game on the system lol)
Yeah he has multiple videos were he criticizes a game for it difficulty and then his points end up being kinda weak.
Colour coded enemies aren't a new thing. I remember seeing them back in the mid/early 90's in Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. Pretty sure they were even introduced earlier than that in other games as well.
Also, just because a game is hard, doesn't mean it's bad. Sometimes it's a case of learning the levels, the enemy placements, earning lives and not dying.
You also have to keep in mind that games back then were kind of meant to be played differently. Yeah sure, there was a time limit of how long you could play before you parents wanted to watch the news on TV, but that just meant that you (and I hate to say it) get good or use that experience for next time you played.
Now, some of those games were quite tough on purpose as they were sometimes arcade ports (formally designed to make money). Some were tough, designed for a player with a higher skill level. And yes, some were tough due to bad design.
There were also a lot of technical limitations back then that prevented things like checkpoints or saves. Sometimes it was cheaper for a company to make a game without a battery save or smaller memory capacity. Everything adds up in the end and I believe that sometimes, it's us gamers that rise to the challenge of passing a difficult game regardless of whether or not the design is bad, simply because we can. Be it for bragging rights, or just because we don't want to be defeated.
Having to memorize levels does make a game bad. A game should properly telegraph enemies and other dangers, not require you to be psychic. Failing over and over because something is unavoidable without prior knowledge is not fun. If you die it should be your fault, not because the game screwed you.
Malus Just stating that memorizing patterns, levels etc makes a bad game design doesn’t make it so. If you’re not gonna use all tools at your disposal then all you have is reaction tests and immediate puzzle solving. Misuse of patterns and memorization from simple to complex can be a thing but it does not mean it cannot be used well because you don’t like it. It’s like saying that any challenge must be fair within the context of a game, that usually being an evil character wanting to kill the hero and using every edge they can get, but then what makes the enemy evil? Also, what’s fair? Something fair to you might be unfair to someone with naturally low reaction times or boring to someone with naturally higher reaction times. This kind of logic ends up catering to the lowest common denominator who wants to experience a virtual “story”, not be challenged.
The Legend of Zelda used color coded enemies.
As for difficulty, I don't think memorizing a level is bad design, or has to be. Same thing with enemy placement. Enemies that randomly can appear, and take out a player without warning, those are bad. Now, if that same randomness goes on, but can be avoided by the players, hypothetically like Authur being able to hop on a platform far enough off the ground, that the random zombies popping up from right underneath won't insta kill. Something like that would be just fine.
And another thing, lots of throwback games have advantages older consoles couldn't provide. Comparing those doesn't do either appropriate argument.
Yeah, even Mario Bros. (1983) had color coded enemies.
Imagine skipping 90% of a game and saying you beat it.
I guess this is why people like pay to win games so much.
There are only a few games saying you beat it means anything in the first place.
@@joelnelson4228 Fair enough. I'll amend my post.
Imagine skipping 90% of a game and then getting paid to have opinions about it.
It's something deliberately put into the game to skip a hard part or a part you have already played. Saying that he can't use something put in by the developers on purpose would be like saying that you aren't allowed to use (x) character or move in a fighting game.
@@john7354 There's no problem with doing that at all. The issue is that he formed his opinion on the game in a run where he skipped most of it. Does someone have a reasonable opinion of MegaMan X by plugging in a continue code and going straight to Sigma and bashing him to death with save states?
I wouldn't be surprised if he's already seen a few playthroughs of the game before he decided to do his playthrough. You don't always need to play a game to be able to form an accurate opinion of it.
0:54 to skip to the actual content of the video. screw squarespace.
Skip to 16:51 if you want to skip all bad parts of the video.
@@Ryusuta LOL
@@Ryusuta That's pretty harsh. I thought it was a solid video overall
I made a full comment on it before, but I'll paste it here to enumerate the myriad problems in this video:
"As a matter of fact I HAVE played NES games lately. I still play them all the bloody time. And I have to say, your criticisms are pretty ridiculous.
-Lives: If you play badly, you get punished. If you play worse, you get punished MORE. Is that really a hard concept to understand? Let me come up with an analogy: Say you're taking a quiz with 5 questions. You get punished a little if you get one answer wrong, a lot if you get two questions wrong, and you have to do the entire quiz over again if you get three questions wrong. By your estimation, you should be allowed infinite guesses on the quiz until you get it right.
-Committed jump arcs: Funny you show Castlevania here, because that is a perfect example of a game that is entirely NOT luck and ALL planning. There is a reason Castlevania makes for incredibly consistent speed runs. Because when you get good at the game, it's incredibly rare to be screwed by RNG. Yes, bats and Medusa heads FEEL like bad luck, but they're actually usually VERY intelligently placed if you stop and think about it, and are 100% of the time avoidable if you're not blundering forward randomly.
-Visuals: No. Just no. Casablanca and Citizen Kane aren't bad movies because they look "old and gross." Just no. I'm not even humoring this one. I'm not accepting criticisms of games lacking technology that didn't even exist in an economic form yet.
-(Lack of) color-coating: Hello? You played a clip of ZELDA toward the start of the video. Its sequel does the same thing. Other examples are Metroid, Castlevania 2, and Super Mario Bros."
@@Ryusuta
Ouch
It's easy to write off the difficulty of these games if you didn't experience them when they were new and don't understand the context of how they were experienced. In the NES era video games were very expensive, around $100 when adjusted for inflation. Most people weren't buying every single new game that came out, especially not kids, who were the primary audience for those games. You might get one new game on your birthday and one at Christmas, and you would play them all year long. Imagine if you got a brand new game on your birthday and you beat it in a couple of days like most of the games today - that money just went down the toilet and you just have to hope you'll get a new one soon. It's easy to just load up a game on an emulator, play it for two seconds, then decide it's too hard and move on to the next one. Players at the time didn't have that luxury - you had the games that you had, and you got your time and money's worth out of them. Video game design used to be about maximizing value for the consumer, now it's about maximizing profit for the publisher. If you spend too much time on Game A, you're less likely to go out and spend money on Game B when it comes out next month, so you need to see everything in the game as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next shiny new thing that you'll inevitably forget about when the next shiny new thing comes out, ad infinitum...
"It was harder to see what was coming because of the lack of widescreen"
Uhh... And make the already small sprites on screen even smaller on an already blurry screen?
Shovel knight did it just fine, idk what youre on about
The cursed Snowman Gaming video.
This was my first experience with this challenge, and I was completely surprised by your great production values mixed with your poor ideas here. I was waiting for you to explain how games like Ducktales and Castlevania were bad, but it looks like the main arguments your were making was that NES games are too hard for the wrong reasons and they would be better if you didn’t have to restart as much. Oh, they’re ugly too. Your complaint about SMB3 and about how you would’ve not finished the game without save states due to boredom we’re what completely lost me. I am sorry that you cannot enjoy older games due to they’re more archaic design, but there’s a lot to love is so many of them if you go beyond the “if I die I gotta start over” hang up.
I actually like lives for shorter games. They force the player to master the early parts of a game before beating it, and can add in interesting resource management.
“Have you played NES games lately? They kinda suck!”
Video closed.
Yeah I couldn't disagree with that line more.
Say what you will, but punch out is an amazing game and genuinely fun. I think it shows that the Wii game changed pretty much nothing, difficulty and all, and it’s one of the best games on the Wii
Damn, the thumbnail was click bait and I feel for it. I thought a good argument was going to be made not, “This game is designed badly because it didn’t hold my hand.”
If that was all you got from the video, then you clearly weren't paying attention.
I think that hard must be cuphead hard with infinite lives but still being hard .I think the most balanced game is shovel Knight . It's hard and death is bad because you lose money which is precious to buy new upgrades but it's still really far because you can restart every level without those stupid lives . Just a masterpiece in this regard.
afonso f
I seriously can't understand what you are saying.
@@Alejandro-er7rp I don't know how to properly write English yet ... Sorry about that
afonso f
Don't worry 'bout it.
@@Alejandro-er7rp Ok it was a good pun
afonso f cuphead is not hard
In a funny way this video shows me how a head of the curve Nintendo was at "game design", they started to migrate the arcade style design pretty quickly on the bigger titles fairly early compared to the other developers on the system
I'm sad that most youtubers ignore Japan-only NES games when they speak of NES. There were tons of great games, especially during late NES cycle, in 1991-1994. Games like Ninja Cat and Moon Crystal. Late NES games were much more forviging than early NES games.
Most today NES-looking indie games don't satisfy me visually, because they don't use that awesome crispy 90's anime style late NES games had. I feel so sad when i see a game that looks like "Yes, finally a pixel game that looks exactly like what i want to see in pixel games!", and then i see portraits which are not the style i like. Ah yes, i play NES games for visuals. I'm an Old-school Graphics-lover. So many modern pixel art games are not as visually pleasing as Game Boy Advance titles such as Minish Cap and Sword of Mana. Even NES games were so beautiful, games like Battletoads and Double Dragon, Moon Crystal and Ninja Gaiden 3. However people choose blocky style that doesn't look like something that would come out in 80's or 90's...
While i do love Shovel Knight... visually it doesn't look like something that would be made back then. Back then there were different visual and aesthethical trends. People mostly forget about it when they want to draw something "In 90's anime style"...
Man, I love Moon Crystal so much. I love the cinematic elements especially. I love Cinematic platformers
This
When he mentioned Mario Bros 3 I cringed while remembering how Nintendo handles the true final levels in modern Mario Bros games.
7:53 That's a mouser. Although arguably, you'll only know what that was representing if you were from that era, which by hearing that they're "old and gross" doesn't seem you're from so I'll let that pass. Dang kids. lol
To be fair the first TMNT game was developed in roughly a time before the cartoon really took off, and it was indeed the first piece of TMNT media for Japan. They probably based their design how they looked in the comics, which explains why they look so old.
Hey, you're that guy who does custom NES labels on Nintendo Age!
@@FinalLuigi True, even though the game came out a few years after the first showing, it may've been development longer so they'd had to have based them from the comics. Although, I would still say the mousers looked pretty much the same as they did in the cartoons. I wouldn't go as far to say that they're old-looking, and that's maybe because I'm old, but... "weird" is probably a better term. lol :P
And oh yeah, hey! Are you a member there? Yeah, I stopped doing label art for a while, at least on that one NES label thread. I do some art stuff for Second Dimension now, mostly cover/manual/label art, as well as probably some graphics help from time to time.
@@BouncekDeLemos The characters are largely based from the cartoon iterations (ie, April was white in the game when she was black in the comic), but it's feasible they had to work with the comic for some ideas, like the giant flies or flaming men. I don't know anything about the game unfortunately, only that Ebert was strangely obsessed with this game years ago.
And Yeah, I used to go on the forum, not so much these days though.
@@FinalLuigi Ah, I see. So it was a bit of a hodge-podge of two different series. Makes sense due to it coming out roughly around the same time. Pretty interesting!
It's cool meeting other NA members. If you ever need any quick Photoshop work done, drop me a line on Nintnendoage, I'm always there. :)
@@FinalLuigi no, April wasn't black in the comic
Beating a game without dying too many times was the challenge and makes victory feel like a greater accomplishment. When the game has what we can perceive as a "fair" difficulty, satisfaction from victory in said game is proportional to relative risk and time investment. That is to say: The longer we spend with a game and the more difficult we think it is, the more satisfying it is when we beat it. Making it so you can just replay a level over and over lowers our perceived risk as we play with the knowledge of a safety net. The knock-on effect being that we don't really have to master the controls, the gameplay isn't as intense, victory isn't as much an accomplishment. It kind of goes without saying that limited lives was a mechanic designed to artificially inflate play-time but the benefits of limited lives shouldn't be overlooked or just called antiquated, IMO more games today should have limited lives or at least punish the player more when failing.
The most important idea in this video though is that there are two kinds of death.
1. Man I was just a couple pixels short of that narrow safe area, maybe if I restart the level and go to that corner instead... (real difficulty)
2. God damn it all, the zombie literally spawned under my feet with no warning or way to escape on the last level, now I have to start the whole game over (the cheap death he's complaining about here)
Difficulty in Nes games was not fair.
@A Gamer Aaron I did think a bit and the games were difficult on purpose which was just one crap point against the Nes in general. Your point?
P Ferreira Why the difficulty in NES games was not fair? Elaborate, please.
@@pferreira1983 that's a massively overgeneralised statement. Is the difficulty in Kirby's Adventure not fair? in Super Mario Bros? Not only are those games not unfair but most would agree they're not difficult games in the slightest.
I think Binding of Isaac really captures that ‘old school difficulty’ feeling. Whenever you die, you have to restart your run, but you get to keep any unlocks and any long-term progress. It’s a difficult game, but all of the rules are laid out and enforced clearly. It is a very rare occurrence for me to feel like a death was unfair.
The End is Nigh is so good. I also did not complete the 8 bit levels, they were a nice bonus but like actual NES games the frustration level was high. I think the roguelites have captured the challenge essence well, Enter the gungeon in particular is brutal, and unforgiving until you master the skills, but each run allows you to unlock more progressively working towards both story and making the challenge easier through new weapons and abilities.
Talking about experience NES games and beating SMB3 from Super Mario All Stars on SNES using saved states, enough said.
It's honestly amazing how well so many NES games hold up. Sure, limitations like data read/write speeds meant things like modern checkpointing were typically impossible, but it seems odd to compare new games to old ones while ignoring how new tech (emulation, save states, etc) renders so much of the complaints about those older games moot. A more fair comparison would be if you equalized the failure state for both the new and old titles (ex: die 3 times and you have to restart from scratch for both).