So I was watching a few youtubes and remembered how the vast majority (of like the ten) nes games me and my sister had were hard as all hell. I loved to play Little Nemo and Street Fighter 2010 but I am pretty sure I never made it past the third level of either. Let alone infamously hard games like The Lion King.
Which got me thinking. Basically every game for the past 20 years has been designed around instant gratification and being accessible. We outright had to make a new concept “hard but fair” to account for games like Dark Souls that are designed to be difficult but beatable as opposed to putting you in a death spiral if you hesitate too long on a hard jump (hello Ninja Gaiden).
So do the younger folk even have a concept of a “favorite game” where you likely never experienced more than fifteen minutes worth of content?
I wasn’t expecting to call myself young but I guess I never did experience any games that were just brutal though I did get into gaming a bit later in life. The earliest game I played was Warcraft 3 and the main campaign was easy enough, some custom maps were harder but nothing really hard so 20 years ago games weren’t really harder. The hardest thing in any game I have experienced in about 20 years of gaming was Midir with a magic build in dark souls 3 which I never did beat.