HH86 is exceptionally well made! Tim contacted me and was really kind to give me a steam key for it. This is what I told him at the time:
"I played it a bit, until gameover. The game is great, I had no idea! Very funny and the programming is top notch, I'm really impressed.
The graphics are very creative and unusual, congrats on that
Great character animation too"
This is something I told Macbee about it:
Me: "I've played it, I thought it was really well made. Got a gameover because I didn't know a few rules/tricks. I just watched Brad Smith playing it so I'm going to try it again later. There are some very nice parallax effects in the cavern."
"Macbee: "Yeah, there's lots of moves, I thought that was great too"
Me: "Tepples programs so well"
I promised Tim to try the game again but I guess I forgot about it with xmas and new years etc. I have now replayed it twice while writing this. I will add that the OST is also very nice.
For criticism, the first thing that made me look for a "what do I do now video", was that you need to jump to destroy the wall inside the room at the first minutes of the game. I understand there was a previous instance where there was a need to destroy a wall, but since it only had happened once, I think it wasn't yet established that the player is expected to break walls at dead ends. It's something that's hard for developers to notice ("of course the player has to break the wall"). The other thing is that I didn't know you could double jump.
So, as to not derail this thread into a HH86 discussion and keeping it in topic but still making a comparison, I think the thing is, these companies used to make the "same game" over and over. They didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the game design, they made one game after the other and implemented slightly new/better ideas in the next game. I think maybe that's what's missing. It's not so much that they had a full time job to make one game, it's that that was their career. They made countless games, sometimes just 3 months apart. It's particullarly apparent in interviews when they don't recall much about making games we consider now masterpieces, because for them, it was just
tuesday. The games were masterpieces because through iteration they honed the game design of it.
For example, in HH86 I couldn't understand how to attack the golem boss in the cavern without getting hit. I couldn't beat him. I am probably missing something, but what it feels like is that the boss doesn't exactly fit the player's moveset as an appropriate opponent. So is it just "NES hard"? This may be a deeper discussion about expectations: should a NES game designed today be designed for today's audience or as something that could have been released back then? But I don't think it's the case, really. I can discover old NES games that I had never played before and still love and beat them, the last one being Konami's Rollergames. Nothing in that game left me wondering "how do I do this" or "what's going on". The game is not easy, but it is simple and direct, and still a lot of fun.
One thing to note is I might be biased into classic game designs. If I hadn't played a lot of Konami beat-em-up games before playing Rollergames I might not have enjoyed it as much. Maybe it felt familiar because of that. I can't be sure. All I know is that as a game designer I know that I'm prey to developer's point of view pitfalls so I try to put my games into test sessions whenever I can (so far managed to get too few of those). Because I haven't been making the same game for years, my game has problems communicating how I expect it to be played. It's definitely not easy to make something different. So I feel bad for criticising because what you guys did is
totally awesome. I'm trying to put into perspective how we can all move forward.