It would be one thing to enjoy retrogaming. The 1980s to 1990s children may have remembered playing through the NES and the Super NES - though I didn't have a SNES so I ended up playing through emulators only. One thing worth noticing about those old games is the ridiculous difficulty level. Don't believe me? Well, you might want to try retrogaming and see the frustration of trying to beat those old games. I decided to relive them for inspiration and thought so many of them were SO HARD. Yup, a lot of them were that hard to the point of being ridiculous.
So, I thought about a couple of games that I was only able to beat using save states. I decided to replay Tom and Jerry on the NES to finish the game. It's THAT ridiculously difficult without save states and cheats if you ask me! I remembered never being able to get past Tom in the fireplace as an 11-year-old. I could remember how Rainbow Island had those random placements of enemies - one hit and you are O-U-T and you lose one round. Then there was Super Mario World on the Super NES. It's got a lot of ridiculous level designs especially the Star Road's bonus levels can be THAT ANNOYING. Getting a game over was that easy.
The trauma of the arcade difficulty wasn't enough - the difficulty was somewhat brought home. I could think of how some of the games just lack unlimited continues to make it reasonably difficult. One could go on and how at how Megaman X6 "sucks" (and I'm a fan of the game) but those NES and SNES games had so many difficult levels. Captain America and The Avengers on the SNES was so difficult that cheat devices tend to be the best way to finish it. Fortunately, Rainbow Island on the NES had unlimited continues even if you started at the first phase on the island you're currently in.
I think one reason why the developers make the game hard is to artificially increase the length. Most of the games can be finished in an hour or two by an expert player. If not, it could take days or months before one can truly master it. The problem was the LACK OF GAME GUIDES or the Internet. I mean, I had to even surf the Internet to find out how to finish many childhood games. Then another is because of the cheat devices. I think those cheat devices were another reason - they would sell higher if the game difficulty was that high. The cheat devices were advertised frequently.
The difficulty of games, later on, was adjusted. It's like how I could forever tolerate the difficulty of the reboot Mortal Kombat series over the classic games' ridiculous AI. I could talk on and on about how newer games are made more reasonably difficult because cheat devices are no longer sold. It's just fair that cheat devices just stopped - it's because gaming today is achievement-oriented. Now, only if the companies will try to remake some of those games by adjusting the AI or adding new features to make them reasonably difficult to be put in achievement-oriented gameplay.
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