Oldschool Hard

FUCK THIS GAME’S LOGIC IN ITS FUCKING FUCK.

Some things are much better in the nostalgic haze of your memory than they are in your current reality. A few years back I won a small competition to do with a Transformers game coming out on PS2. I won the game, a t-shirt with an autobots logo, and a DVD box set of the first season of the TV series, which I had loved as a kid. The game was middling, and I still wear the t-shirt, but after dropping in one of the DVDs to refuel my memory banks, I wished I hadn’t. While the TV series probably got better when they started to make more money, I hesitate to get any more DVDs to try and work this out. This particular DVD was full of a bunch of cheap japanimation, where many scenes are completely static except for moving mouths. It was, in a word, awful. And my 5-year-old self had thought it was the BEST. THING. EVARRRRRRR. It’s why I recommend revisiting any games you used to love as a kid with caution, because some age well, but others are very much of a time and place that you are no longer a part of.

Sure, I rag on new games a lot, but I will admit that a lot of the changes made to games over the years have been for the better. A lot of games point the way to where you need to go, with varying degrees of subtlety. Dead Space was a particularly good example of how to implement this – you only got a prompt when you asked for it, and it was done in a way in keeping with the total user interface, where health and weapon charges were shown in game on your character, rather than as part of a HUD. Even with games that don’t always push you towards a goal, like a ‘sandbox’ game, you have the freedom to walk around and think, in a positive way, “what do I do now?”, because there’s so many things you can do. With a lot of older games, you get one way to go, and if you can’t figure it out, it’s more like scratching your head, and going “what do I do now?” You’d have to wait for the damn Nintendo Power or somehow come across it through complete luck in the midst of flailing around wildly.

The single example I remember most clearly is in Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, where at a certain point, to get any further in the game, you have kneel before a wall while holding the right crystal, before a fucking tornado sweeps you away to where you need to go. I’d love to say that I worked that out myself, but that was a definite example of needing to wait for the guide. You also needed to equip a different orb later in the game to get through a lake without drowning. There is, as far as I’m aware, only one cryptic in-game explanation for either of these, other than that the crystals exist.

Then there is the whole litany of examples from adventure games. I loved and still enjoy (although with less frequency than I used to) adventure games, both text-based and point and click, with moments like the insult sword-fighting in The Secret of Monkey Island still being etched my memory:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”
“How appropriate, you fight like a cow.”

However, some of the puzzle logic involved only made any sort of sense in the hindsight of having tried combining everything in your inventory, just to see what the game designers would let you combine. Note to everyone: the only person whose mind works exactly like yours is you. Further note to adventure game designers: this means that logic puzzles based on threads that are only connected together in your logic are FUCKING STUPID. Also fucking stupid: having to play ‘guess the verb’ with a text parser. I give an exception to the Douglas Adams Infocom games, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, because these are intentionally absurd and frustrating. It’s post-modern, people, post-MODERNNNNNNN!

Some other specific examples of What Do I Do Now: The amount of absolutely necessary to advance ‘secrets’ in Milon’s Secret Castle. Having to guess the right order to do the bosses in to make the game manageable in every Mega Man game. The mazes in the original Metal Gear. The…no, fuck this. I’m angry now. Bad memories. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

Image cribbed from MeriStation.

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If you’ve seen this screen before, you probably used the Konami code.

If you’ve played games like Shinobi on PS2, or the Ninja Gaiden series on the 360 (ninjas, why’s it always gotta be ninjas?), you know what hard feels like. The margin for error is slim. The game is unforgiving. The difficulty level goes from ‘hard’ to ‘harder’ to ‘rock hard’ to ‘Superman’s dick’, and will never auto-adjust – you need to get better, the game won’t make itself easier for you.

These games stand out now largely because they’re so rare. Sure, many games on the top difficulty setting(s) are hard, but if you want to get through the game and see the sights, you have a choice. WHEN I WERE A LAD, walking 10 miles a day to and from school, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot, these type of games didn’t stand out: they were the norm. They were Nintendo Hard.

Bottomless pits. Limited lives. Limited continues. No regenerating health. No pointers to guide you to where you need to go – only lots of guesswork – “What the hell do I do now?” instead of “Hmm, what should I do next?” – Like Simon’s Quest with its completely obtuse ‘select the right crystal and then kneel in the right spot’ mechanic. Obtuse is okay in an adventure game where the point of the game is to solve puzzles, not in an action-adventure game where the point of the game is ACTION and ADVENTURE.

Possibly the ultimate Nintendo Hard game is Contra/Probotector. Everything that isn’t a powerup wants to kill you, inadvertantly grabbing a powerup can turn a good gun into a crappy one, and unless you’ve played it so much you could do it in your sleep, good luck trying to beat it without the Konami code.

Some other examples? A Boy and his Blob. Instant death drops, guesswork on how to use items to affect things that are screens away, limited jellybeans, and having no explanation of what each jellybean does until you use them. The worst part is, David Crane said he originally wanted to make it harder and only give you the exact number of jellybeans needed to complete the game.

Battletoads. A friend and I used to play this at least 2 weekends a month for about 2 years. I think the furthest we ever got was level 5, and as far as I know that wasn’t even halfway through the game.

Bionic Commando warms you up nicely with a reasonable difficulty curve, then SKULLFUCKS you towards the end of the game. Double Dragon with no continues and no way to get more lives (being able to beat up on your mate to win the affections of the girl was awesome, though), and Double Dragon III, which looked more ‘modern’ (at the time), but was even harder and a lot less fun. Double Dragon II was at least relatively merciful.

Metroid – what’s a map? Shadowgate, where instant death is the norm and you can be killed just by looking at things. Any of the Simpsons NES games, particularly Bart vs. The Space Mutants, with their floaty controls combined with the need for pixel-perfect jumps. Mega Man, especially if you don’t know the ‘right’ order in which to do the levels. Castlevania. (The original) Super Mario Bros. 2/The Lost Levels. The original Ninja Gaiden series. Zelda II. Milon’s Secret Castle. Robowarrior. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Punch-out. Gradius. And these are just the most famous examples – there’s plenty more Nintendo Hard NES games.

There’s often very little separating the best of these type of games from the worst of these type of games. Really, the only difference is that the best of these games don’t feel arbitrary. When you die, it’s because you made a mistake that you could recognise, not because the random number generator made a bullet fly at you in such a way that avoiding it was impossible. Playing these games does feel good in a certain way, though. Some might call it a feeling of accomplishment, I call it a similar feeling to when you beat your head against a wall repeatedly and then stop.

If you’re silly enough to still like Nintendo Hard games, a modern version of them worth a try is I Wanna Be The Guy. Image ripped from from Games Radar and tweaked to my satisfaction.

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“What other things?” I hear you ask with bated breath. Well.

Things like the ‘having to wait for the hint book’ thing I mentioned in the last post: what the fuck was that all about? Sure, you can still buy a guide, and for complex games, pictures might be handy, but at least now there’s alternatives. Also, ridiculously arbitrary game rules were everywhere. Limited lives and continues based on an arcade (remember those?) game paradigm. Bottomless pits. Bullets flying from out of nowhere. Uneven difficulty curves (not that that has been completely eliminated, but I’ll get to that.) Bullet hell – I’m still not a fan of either horizontal or vertical scrolling ship shmups to this day. If that precludes me from entry to the UK, spiritual home of the shmup, so be it.

Now I sit in comfort in my loungeroom when I want to game, playing on a wireless, force feedback controller, in high definition, on a 50” widescreen. Or alternatively in front of my computer running approximately 120 times faster than computers back when I first started gaming, in raw gigahertz terms, and several factors more once graphical and other capabilities are taken into account. If I want a new game, I can download it at broadband speed, paying using my credit card. I don’t even have to put on pants. I don’t have to beg my parents and then go down to the store. I can use the same broadband connection to play a multiplayer game at any time of the day or night, and don’t have to worry about my friends being grounded, or having homework to do, or having to go to Grandma’s.

New games have bigger budgets, wider scope, better graphics and sound. The potential for more depth and the ability to add new content into a gameworld I love without needing a whole new game or having to wait years for a sequel (unless you’re Valve, Left4Dead 2 notwithstanding.) If I’m stuck in a game, and generally games are now designed so that that’s fairly rare, I can get on the internet and have the solution in a matter of seconds. Games, like computers, are cheaper – games were 70-100 AUD in 1990, were 70-100 AUD in 1995, except for a few outliers with extra chips and such in the cartridges, and are 70-100 AUD now and, thanks to the wonders of inflation, in real terms that’s a lot less. By most objective measures, new games are bigger, brighter, and better, at a cheaper price.

And yet, new games are often not subjectively better. Big budget games often lack creativity. While there’s perhaps more genres commercially available than ever, each genre gets flogged to death (WW2, anyone?) And there’s a lack of those little things like ‘just one more go’ x-factor – it certainly still exists, in browser games and little downloadables like Puzzle Quest and N+, but it’s not often in the AAA forefront. It can at least be argued that the mistakes made in the early days of video games were made out of naiveity, the personal quirks of programmers in single-coder games, or the lack of prior experience. New games don’t have that luxury. They may not make the same mistakes, but they make mistakes just the same.

I’m not some crusty curmudgeon (well, I am, but not about games) clinging to the superiority of 8-bit against the barbarian invaders that are new games, don’t get me wrong. These last couple of months alone there was Scribblenauts, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Borderlands that I enjoyed, and I’m yet to get to Forza 3, Uncharted 2, Tropico 3, Brutal Legend and Dragon Age: Origins, among others. There’s plenty of good stuff coming out. But nothing is perfect. I may not know everything about games, but I have a long enough history to see the evolution of mistakes. I’m not negative about games; I love games. This is why I have to ask – why can’t we learn from history?

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