All the platformers I used to think were easy are now super hard, and all the RPG and RTS games are now much easier.
I have a soft spot for platformers, I grew up on Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank…🥹
I grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog and Battletoads. The former is OK, the latter is absolutely impossible now even though I finished it on the Mega Drive when I was like… 12.
Battletoads // Double Dragon is like, notoriously near impossibly hard. I think its level/stage 4 where shit goes from ‘moderately challenging’ to ‘fuck you, die.’
… 7 year old me did not fully understand that.
Near 37 year old me now does understand that, and also chooses to abstain from that level of masochism.
One really wild thing about watching a lot of like, weird retro game review type channels, is me realizing that quite a lot of games I got frustrated with as a kid?
They’re often just literally broken in multiple ways, or require a level of timing and precision that just actually is near impossible for a human to achieve.
Oh yeah, lets make whole subsets of games that require milisecond input precision, with some of the shittiest controllers ever designed.
… Anybody else remember the old Mario Party mini games that featured you rapidly moving the control stick in circles?
Not only does that destroy an N64 controller, it was also widespread that people would just hold the main stem of the controller with one hand, basically palm the stick with the other hand… you can do faster circles that way, but it will also chew through your hand’s skin and give you blisters.
… Thats why those kinds of minigames don’t exist in any Mario Party game beyond I think 2.
Me finding out Silver Surfer was a stupid-hard game 20 years after beating it:
Can’t relate, haven’t/never played it 😞 in this case I was just replaying Lord of the Rings Return of the King on the PS2, that one level called “Palantir of Saruman”, used to find it so easy until I realised I was doing it on Easy mode, hence I made the meme 😅
Some games are just too massive. I don’t usually use step by step guides but I use maps heavily. It’s just not fun to waste time looking for an obscure item.
And I think games have a lot more customizable difficulty these days instead of just one level. Which is a good thing as it makes them more accessible.
When i started gaming 2 player vs was common, but i had 2 brothers. We used to play where the loser passes the controller and the winner stops on. Competition got fucking fierce. By the time xbox live came around we were so far ahead of the skill curve it was unreal.
If only streaming was a thing then, we’d have cleaned up.
