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.

Share this post:

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.

Share this post: