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?
Sort of relevant, I had a friend who was really into super smash brothers (brawl, I think). Talked a lot about the competitive scene, different moves and tactics etc. He didn’t have a Wii or Switch though, we were all pretty broke.
Anyway, some money came buy and he was able to grab a Switch and SSB finally. Super keen.
And then he just kinda sucked at. It was pretty sad, he almost immediately stopped being excited about it and the Switch, which he had bought new, was barely used a couple of months later. I was kinda worried about him because he wasn’t mentally in a good place before that and talking about SSB seemed like an outlet for him (none of us in the mutual group played or cared about the game).
This was a while ago, he’s doing much better now
Smash Brothers is one of those games where you think you’re good casually but it has such high skill cielings that even other casual players can curb stomp you. It depends so heavily on what sort of games you played growing up. (Assuming you don’t out in effort to practice I mean.) I (used to) be able to reliably win against my wife because she never played anything growing up, but my friends that played a lot of fighting games growing up easily beat me.
I feel like I had this experience repeatedly in RTSes. I don’t think I quite had the same dive as my friend did, but still