Modern Day Gamers = NOOBZ !!!!!!!1!!!!11!1½

[Deathtanz Mantisk]

[incohorent rant]
Finished reading some news article about a new super mario bros on Wii. They're adding some damn help guide into the game, so when you die enough times in a stage, it tosses in Luigi and he runs the level through once, finding the secrets and whatever, so you know how to do it.

WUT?

I find this whole thing just sad and pathetic. How many days did I spend as a kid playing SMB3 and dying over and over again thanks to time limit in that sodding coin castle? How many times did a single curse-word slip out of my mouth and my mom shut the console in anger? How many tears did I shed until I found out how to finish that blasted level? There were no internets to go to and find help. There certainly were no Luigis coming out to show me what to do. You played it, bitter as hell, and you beat it, and you felt like a REAL MAN! Ok, maybe not, but you felt good about finally getting it done.

And it's not just that. Take BioShock for example. I played it recently enough (until my stupid Vista-infested laptop refused to let me any further due to me entering a room with nothing in sight but black and no way to get out, graphix fail game fail I fail), and knowing that the game is essentially System Shock 2's steampunk offspring, I was simply overwhelmed with disappointment at the utter lack of challenge. The day I tried harderd difficulties on System Shock 2, the game started, I ran through all the crap to get my chara to the space ship, was shocked of the hp bar with a max hp of 12 and the sight of every upgrade costing 4 times as much as they did in easy... And as soon as I entered the first room with an enemy, this dude ZOOMS IN AND WHACKS ME DEAD WITH ONE STRIKE. It was like the game suddenly pulled over infront of me with a van, four 8-foot tall bodybuilders came out of the back, beat me with baseball bats and golf clubs and left. Game over, kid. Start over and try that again. That was difficulty! In BioShock it's like "oh you died. No worries! RESURRECTION IS FREE!!". Uh, yay?

Or how about Portal? Great game, sure, but once again, the difficulty is nothing to be impressed about. Most of the game is just enter room, look around, figure it out at first sight, get it over with. There were no hours spent thinking and cursing. Just a few screw-ups at a tricky little bit, but nothing that would get you properly stuck. I thought it was a puzzle-game? I hardly saw anything worth calling a "puzzle". Old macintosh my dad had had real puzzle-games, most of which's names have escaped me, but consisted of some 100 levels of pure impossible. I got past like no more than 3 levels in this one 2D portal-like-game where you teleport around a stage trying to get to the end.

Or ES4, Oblivion. Compared to Morrowind's difficulty, the game's a joke! The enemies are scaling, so you never walk into a cave with your lvl1 chara only to be greeted by an orc in full iron one-shotting you with a two-handed hammer (as in Morrowind). Need to go the other side of the world? Click the place on map and there you are. Wtf?

Today's games are too easy. If it's a good game, you play it and you get frustrated, but you beat it. I'm far more easy to be disappointed by something being way too easy than I am at it being too hard. Especially when I have something to compare it to. I never beat the yellow devil in Megaman 1, you know. I recall a game over galore in Ice Man's stage when I kept falling through some of the platforms in one of the areas. Far more annoying considering that I kept dying compared to that room before where the disappearing blocks kept me stuck for hours, since at least there I was just stuck instead of dying over and over. Or were there spikes at the bottom of those? Not sure. Either way, after hundreds of attempts, Iäd finally reach Ice Man and go on to wipe my with his fur-coat.

Further examples: I played Breath of Fire 2 through recently, and the game consisted of nothing but random encounters in every area every 2 steps where you'd face monsters that wiped half your party out in one move. No FFX-type "grind crazy till you do 99999 dmg and kill the last boss and everything else in one hit!". No FFIX-type bosses that consist of you just trying to steal from it while it does nothing but waste it's turns on pathetic attacks that don't damage you at all, until you one-shot the boss with your beefed up black mage. In classic RPG's, you die. You die and you die until you're as dead as dead can be. You start over and you die again. Then you go spend another 20 hours leveling up your dudes, come back, kill that damn pounce who was killing you earlier, only to find a tougher monster in the next room that again one-hit-kills everyone in your party. FF6 fanatic tower, for another example. Masses of floors of absolute murder, no save points, nothing. You can only cast magic, and most of the enemies have reflect or are immune to every element. You died, and you died alot. You get to the top, you find a boss, you die again. You finally beat the boss, only to realize that it casts Ultima as a final attack and you die. No crap about save-points placed 2 meters inbetween. You just died left and right. Furthermore, there were no walkthroughs all over the interwebs which I would consult as soon as I spent 5 mins not knowing where to go. BoF2 was essentially a game where you NEVER have ANY clue what to do. You're supposed to go to some corner of a continent you were at ages ago, enter a cave, whack a fence with one of you're character's staff. Right. It's just that NO ONE says you're supposed to go there, and you didn't even know that the chara can break the fence when you press X. You could never do that before. It's not mentioned anywhere. You don't know you're supposed to have that chara along there. You just realize it at some point by accident, stare at the screen for hours with your mouth open, and progress in the game.

In conclusion, nowadays games are far too kind on the player. Now it's as if no game dev had the balls to do anything with even the slightest clue of a challenge, due to the dreaded consolotards not being able to deal with anything that requires effort. Everything has to be so bloody easy. If there's anything to brag about in being a gamer these days, it's the fact that you don't belong to the fresh sissy generation. I beat Ice Man's stage. YOU HEAR?
[/incohorent rant]

Apologies for stupidity. :p

[VileMKII]

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!

Their really making just a simple runthough to show the fatass wasteful children of American how to beat a [MAJOR CURSE WORD] stage? This is simple and utter blasphemy! I just recently beat SMB3, and as thy Mantisk mentioned it's a beast of a game. Did I need a green hated man to run through it and show me how to dodge the lasers that fly from the boswer statues. Did I need my in-game brother to run/jump through the fortress stages in world 8? NO! I sat and played that game like hell for several year when I was board and I finally beat it like two weeks ago. I'm still yet to beat the first mario game, and I know I'm not going to go looking at how to beat it so I can say i did. This is a total outrage, how the hell are todays kids going to enjoy megaman if capcom keeps making them like they did MM9, which was somewhat challenging.

[Silver Stryker]

Oh man, lol. Since I was planning to get this game, I can easily see how things'll go down:

Me: F*k, this level's retarded--

Luigi: WEE GE--

Me: STFU and GTFO!!! I go-I GOT THIS!!


lolz

But I agree with the ranting. SMB3 wasn't as hard as it was fun IMO, but peeps shouldn't need any guidance like this. That's what those strategy guides I've never heard of until only a few years ago are for.(the only one I ever gotten was for Wind Waker, and I didn't even use it.) I mean, really. I think were were just getting out of Japan thinking we're weak- gamers, and now our building reputation is being tarnished!(and by "We," I mean the rest of the world.)

[Miguel]

Would it inspire veteran's rage if I accused you of just being jealous of today's gamers because they don't need super-human patience and military-level tactics to beat a game?

Take, for example, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for the NES.
It is, almost certainly, the hardest Zelda game with it's unique combat system and upgrading elements leaving you at the start of the game with a toothpick instead of a sword. I, to this day, have not beaten it, but I do respect it for making you learn to fight it's way.
That said, however, I'm not likely to ever go back to it for three reasons.

Number One: Worst lives system ever
You only get three lives at the start of the game and if you collect a one-up, it's gone for good. It never re-spawns, even if you get a game over.

Number Two: Worst leveling system ever
Each time you get enough EXP for a lvl up, the game offers to let you upgrade one stat. Which stat the EXP is invested in is completely out of your control. If it offers a magic upgrade, but you'd rather have more health, then tough turd-nails, you have to collect enough EXP for two upgrades before that's on offer.
Add to this the fact that at each upgrade, the required EXP goes up by about 100 points, and at each game over your accumulated EXP just disappears. No cave where it's spawned as P-Bags you can quest for, no respawn of P-Bags you collected that went to waste, it's all just deleted with no way to get it back.

Number Three: Severely broken combat
Get this: You have little health to start with, even if you max it out it's still really low, and enemies do too much damage.
Your only defense? A shield that either covers you chest or feet depending on whether your ducking or not. There's no option to hold it over your head, you can't get a bigger one, you've just got to always be facing the enemy's attacks and be guarding at the correct height. This means you're going to be burning through those three lives and losing all your EXP pretty often.

Also, when you get a game over, not only do you lose your EXP, but you're sent right back to the beginning of the game, which means a fair chunk of the time spent on this game will be spent just fighting your way back to where you were before. That sound like fun times to you? [sarcasm]'Cause it does to me.[/sarcasm]

Beating a game as hard as that means very little, since all you'll really get for your troubles is a poorly-translated cutscene and an uninspired 'Princess falls for her rescuer' ending. You don't get any money or job qualifications, you don't get a gift certificate for the local brothel, not even a crappy little trading card. All you get is the bragging rights of having conquered a masochistic bit of soft-ware about four years older then you.

I play a game to enjoy myself. If there's no fun game mechanic to experiment with like Kirby Super Star Ultra or no cast of characters I can care about like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, or even at least a concept so cheesy you can't help but giggle at it like Pepsiman, then I'll be having none of that, thank you very much.

But I do agree that the game showing the player how to beat it and where the secrets are is bullshit.

[VileMKII]

the sad thing is, most american's are better than the jap's at games.

[Chaos Tank]

Press A to save the gaming industry!

[viruszero]

I heard that a similar sort of feature was going to be implemented for most of the Rev's games... See here.

And I think that Nintendo should be kicked for it. That just makes the games too easy. Sure people want to have fun, but some challenge is required otherwise it just isn't fun anymore. Half the fun is overcoming the obstacles.
I SEVERELY hope that the other companies think that this idea is utter foolishness and avoid it like the plague. (I dunno if it will happen like that, but I can hope right?)

And does Nintendo really need to do this? I mean isn't youtube and gamefaqs enough for players with less than adequate skills/patience? Far be it for them to have some determination...

I've not played Bioshock nor ES4 yet, so I can't judge on them. But having played Morrowind, I can attest to the level of dificulty. Some enemies are just insanely cheap.

Though Mantisk, you might like Prototype... I found that game takes a massive hike in difficulty about mission 8 or 9 of 28. (Enemies start swarming you more, they do more damage, knock you back, hit you with missiles and generally shove death upon you like rarely seen before.)
Or Fallout 3 may be something of interest, as it's difficulty is rather adequate. On normal you quite often encounter foes with superior weaponry or the advantage and you will be pressed to survive. (Especially in Point Lookout... Those dang tribals ignore your armor rating.)

[Deathtanz Mantisk]

Oct 17, 2009 20:44:55 GMT 2 Miguel said:

Would it inspire veteran's rage if I accused you of just being jealous of today's gamers because they don't need super-human patience and military-level tactics to beat a game?

Now excuse me and my recently accused jealousy, but I would consider the development of said military-level tactics something to wear as a trophy rather than anything to feel particularly unsatisfied about!
Morrowind being a fine example at this: after a dozen of times consisting of loading the newest autosave and trying different approaches at that damned orc with his hammer, I figured a way to rob some 20k gold early on and go pay some pilferer in the mages guild to enchant an amulet with some 100fire dmg and 100health drain massive-radius click-repeatedly-to-spam spell of absolute doom, which I cleverly named the Amulet of Most Veritable Peril, and ran on to that orc to roast, bomb, blast, burn, maim and murder the snot out of him and his sorry hammer. And the handful of slaves in the vicinity whom I originally came to free, but the glee of mindless massacre and OMG success far outweighted any rewards that were to be received from rescuing them.

Patience is a different story, though. I could name quite a number of games I tossed to the trash can in frustration, but usually came back to later to try again with added persistence. Often with matching results. IE that doggon' yellow devil.

Oct 17, 2009 20:45:40 GMT 2 VileMKII said:

the sad thing is, most american's are better than the jap's at games.

Ever heard of Starcraft? ;o

[Chaos Tank]

Ninja Gaiden. Game makes you cry like a girl, makes you want to whip your controller at a wall but its to amazing you just keep coming back again and again for more agony. Love that game so much, and this is coming from the guy who hates ninjas most on this site.

[viruszero]

Dante Must Die. Hear those words and tremble at the prospect of mission 18. (Every boss in the game, hardest difficulty, for you 2-3 hits = death, for them... nuclear armageddon is but a mere scratch on their miles of health bar.)

Hmm, I wonder which is tougher, Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden.

I've played DMC before, but not Ninja Gaiden... So I dunno. But maybe there actually are more games out there that have quite a difficulty level than previously thought?

Or maybe, it's not that the new games are too easy, we're just too good? Having completed the various conquests of yesteryear games, we have been imbued with greater skill and ability than these new gamers who are yet to experience the crushing defeats doled out with merciless rapture by game designers.

[Miguel]

Mantisk, you're pretty much proving my point. Super-dee-duper hard games are no fun because all you're given for a reward if you conquer them is the satisfaction of conquering them, unless you're psychotic, in which case it's better for you to blow off steam on the orcs and their heathenistic, not-on-fire hammers then on actual people.

No, Virus, I'm pretty sure it's the games that are getting easier. I still have trouble beating Ganon in A Link To The Past even though I've done it four times already, but neither of Ganny's forms have managed to kill me even once in Ocarina of Time.

Why the difference? Well, his first form in OoT is basically a re-hash of the Pong element of the fourth boss, and on his second you can either roll between his legs or hit him with a Light Arrow and run around to his tail and use a jump attack on him, which is instant double damage, aided further by Z-Targeting.
In LttP, on the other hand, there is no magical arrow-guiding fairy to ensure your shots hit, the only way to do increased sword damage is by charging a spin attack, and before you can stun him you have to light both of the torches.

Does it really sound like the only factor in how difficult those bosses are is player skill?

[Albireo]

I already noticed that the games are getting easier...

But I'd say it was because games were originally for enjoyment, not frustration.

They'll make challenging games from time to time, but they don't want them impossible, or nigh impossible to beat either. It really defeats the purpose of even getting the game.

Why get a game you can't beat?

You may feel great after actually beating it, but you've just wasted 3 years since the game came out, playing it.

New games come out at the same time, you'll start hating that nigh impossible one, and move onto another game, never beating the one you were playing previously.

Look, it's since games aren't for just people who seek a challenge or seek to get ridiculed by the horrible save/life/health/combat system, it's for enjoyment, liesure, the sort of thing you do after a long day at work. But if you're greeted with the sort of game that takes hundreds of hours of practice, you'll be met with frustration and further your stress, and shorten your own life as result, as well as waste more of your life than if you played a much easier game.

Well, of course Luigi doing the stage for you is ridiculous, that actually defeats the purpose of even making the game...

[Deathtanz Mantisk]

Oct 18, 2009 2:51:51 GMT 2 Miguel said:

Does it really sound like the only factor in how difficult those bosses are is player skill?

Probably, because I recall always entering that boss with almost every heart piece gathered and a full stock of red potions in tow, and didn't find it particularly hard. :p

It's not like I'm talking about any kicks-your--repeatedly-with-a-spiked-metal-boot-and-forces-you-to-eat-whats-left-of-it impossible, anyway. I'm quite certain that some utter superpro of everything worth mentioning would waltz in, read some of my grand examples, laugh their off and declare "YOU THINK DAT WAS HARD??? EVER HEARD OF #####????!!!". I never quite like the old nes games that were way too hard for anyone, but there are alot of good games that were somewhat hard, and now whenever I play anything newer, there's hardly the slightest clue of any difficulty anywhere at sight. My short attempt at BioShock pissed me off the most about it, since compared to it's mommy, the game was a laugh. Dying was just an inconvenience, something that you go "oh, whoops, hee hee" and smiled about, since it didn't matter that much if you did die.

Let's say EverQuest as another one of these examples of how making things easier is just, well, irritating in my opinion. Back in 1999, you died, your corpse would be left wherever you died, along with you losing quite a bit of exp (which could mean that you lost like an hour of work you just did, but a cleric could get some of that back for you, but getting a cleric to do that for you was another story...) and you'd start off in your home town, which usually meant hours of running back to it to pick it up. In cases you were in the depths of some dungeon and died, you'd often kiss bitter goodbye to your items since you can't reach it behind all the baddies or you'd try to construct some salvage-team who'd help you reach it. Regardless, it was part of the game that when you died, there were consequences about it that you'd work to go through. Sometimes it was frustarting, slightly, but part of the game. I was far more annoyed by the way the devs kept making it easier and friendlier throughout the years. I don't play the game anymore, but now it's apparently just a matter of "oh I died no worries this guy here summons my corpse back to me instanteniously and this other guy gives back the exp I lost so no worries ha ha". To me it was part of the game to go through alot of crap to get my stuff back when I died. I didn't want to die in the depths of a dungeon since I'd be in serious issues if I did. It was a huge chunk of the gaming experience to be scared of anything and everything in that dungeon, since I had much to lose there. Now it's apparently just "oh, dead, shucks, game goes on". And if I recall, there was some "veteran award" for players who had been around long enough, that gave them a clickable ability that gave back all the lost exp and their corpses if they died. MAKING IT EVEN EASIER.

Dying in a game is a perfect example of what pisses me off about the easy-it-up style now. When I die in a game I think it's supposed to be a scene where I twitch, lean closer to the screen, squeeze the controller violently, shriek something incomprehensible, have problems breathing, and I'd go search the kitchen for some comfort snack. Then it's back there thinking of all the crap I have to go through again to reach the spot where I was earlier. It shouldn't be me just looking at the screen going "oh, whoops, hee hee" and smiling about it, and starting at right where I was a second ago, probably now fully restored and at a place I was on my way to anyway, so it's actually a GOOD THING that I died.

Progress in gaming doesn't have to mean that the games start holding my hand and we happily walk through all the trouble smiles and happiness. If I just wanted to accomplish something with no challenge involved, I'd play solitaire or something and cheat in it to win every time.