Is there a list on the internet where people rate the difficulty of each NES game? I.e. a list where "Contra" is rated as quite difficult, but fair, "Ninja Gaiden" as frustratingly and unfairly difficult and "Kirby's Adventure" as easy.
(Preferrably with a filter option.)
A lot of people have tried, but it's virtually impossible to compile such a list. There are so many factors to take into account, such as the reasons for why the games are "difficult", the skillset required to beat them (puzzles, strategy, action, reaction times, memorization?), and just individual experience with each game.
Also, what do you measure the difficulty up against? Beating the game? Or beating the game on one credit? Or an average of the overall difficulty of all stages? I'd say Castlevania is retardedly easy if you can just keep continuing until you beat the game, but doing it without using continues definitely takes practice. And what if all the stages in a game is really easy, but the final boss is completely hard?
More to the point, Ninja Gaiden might be "frustratingly difficult" the first time you play it, but every subsequent playthrough should be fairly easy compared to many other, much harder NES games. I've never game over'ed that game since the first 1CC I did, and comparably, pretty much every shoot'em up for the system is much, much harder. I'd say even Gremlins 2 is a lot harder, because I can't beat that, and I have no problems beating Contra og NG. But surely, other people would claim Gremlins 2 is among the easiest games for the system? A lot of NES games get a reputation from people trying them for a few minutes and then dismissing them, but I'd say the truly difficult games are the ones that still put up a tough fight even though you've spent days with them.
Look at Super Mario Bros. also. If you're used to platform games, it's an extremely easy game. Not as easy as Kirby, but not far from either. However, if you've never played a lot of platform games, it can be deviously difficult. The running mechanic and inertia in all of Mario's moves take a long time to get accustomed with. The game might not be difficult, but learning the controls is a metagame in itself.
Sorry for not giving you a clear answer.
The only way to get a solid list is for a single person to play all of the games and give his/her thought on how they compare. Maybe TMR could help?
Not that i'm aware of - planning on something?
I wonder how bucky o'hare would be placed on that list. Would there be a category for "games that repeatedly throws you think-fast curveballs at an uneven pace to substitute real difficulty which will be enormously frustrating at first, but super easy once you've memorized them/figured out how to cheese every boss"? - because it's unfair like ninja gaiden, but not hard like ninja gaiden.
I feel completely the opposite about Bucky O'hare. It's easier than Ninja Gaiden, but much more unfair, and ridiculously unbalanced.
I think Bucky is another good example. I completed the game without using continues on my second playthrough, but used a billion on my first. The second playthrough was still horribly messy, and the only reason I beat it was due to the absurd amount of extra lives the game throws in your direction. So does that mean the game is still "really hard", or are the extra lives enough to alleviate that difficulty, since I still beat the game?
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I feel completely the opposite about Bucky O'hare. It's easier than Ninja Gaiden, but much more unfair, and ridiculously unbalanced.
Wait... That's not the opposite - that's exactly what i wrote
Oh and yeah, those extra lives are just a sock put into the leak. Easy to get most of the time, so it's just mitigating the underlying mess of a design.
Edit: On the topic of databasing difficulty. What if you did not measure the input of users, but the width of relations? Okay so this many players who rated game a as easy, but fair also rated game b average difficulty, averagely fair. You rated game a as easy but fair too, so you might be interested in knowing what people thought of game b.
Exactly, and a lot of games do that. But extra lives should be factored in when judging the difficulty of a game.
I disagree completely that Ninja Gaiden is unfair, though.
It's a super tight well designed game. One of the NES generation's master strokes. However the idea of when a game feels "unfair" is definitely another factor that makes it hard to judge wether a game is genuinely "difficult", or just poorly designed.
And then we have Holy Diver....
I guess it's a bit too easy to percieve something as unfair if you haven't yet figured it out. Both ninja gaiden and castlevania get a lot of that. Medusa heads aren't unfair - you just have to take your time and study the rythm.
Yes Ninja Gaiden is very consistent without any random factors AFAIK, so I think it's very fair. Although I have never 1CC'd any Ninja Gaiden game, I think it's much easier than Contra. But I'm pretty bad at shooting games in general and have played far more Ninja Gaiden than Contra.
That's usually the common factor. It's easy for me to write off a lot of games as harder than Ninja Gaiden, but if I haven't spent at least a couple of days trying to get through them, it's not really a valid opinion. Did anyone ever beat Battle Formula (Super Spy Hunter outside of Japan)? I can't even beat the second stage in that game, and believe me, I tried. It's rarely touted as one of the harder NES games though, but it's definitely very good!
I think I've played a bit more of Ninja Gaiden than Contra, but I'd actually say Contra is much easier. Both NES Contras are relatively easy to learn, and as long as you can keep holding on to your spread shot, you're golden. Contra 3 is much more challenging.
Ninja Gaiden is definitely a very challenging game, and I can imagine the final boss especially pulling out a few hairs until you figure him out. I wouldn't say it's absurdly frustrating though, as it's very consistent and once you figure out some good patterns for getting through each challenge, it's quite easy to get right. It's one of those games you gotta be patient with.
Yeah so it's very hard to judge difficulty fairly since you probably don't remember how much practice you had with a game you played since you where a child. And other things like having played other games in the genre also affects how much practice you need with a game to get good at it.
Ninja Gaiden 1 is fairly medium difficult until the final level (after the Bloody Malth boss fight) where the difficulty suddenly spikes. But yeah it's still very consistent and relies much on memorization and reflexes. Rockman and Castlevania games are like that too.
In games like RPGs however the random factor is a big part of the game and wouldn't really work without it, so it's not so much about the game being unfair. Speedrunners looks for ways to manipulate the random generation though so they can make as consistent playthroughs as possible. These games must also be very hard to judge in a fair way.
Using a quantitative method like having a kind of difficulty voting system is probably the most accurate way.
A RPG will typically be judged as "difficult" if it requires a lot of grinding. In something like Dragon Quest, where grinding is the only genuine way to solve these problems (aside from speedrun-like abuse of game mechanics), I think that actually makes sense. DQ2/DW2 is generally considered the hardest of the series by a long shot.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
planning on something?
No. I just wanted to check how other people rate the difficuly of certain games.
The reason why I consider "Ninja Gaiden" frustrating:
Firstly, it constantly throws enemies at you that are already supposed to be dead.
Secondly, in many places you basically have to
memorize what will come along your way. Not skill, but fore-knowledge.
And yes, the game is only average-hard until world 6. But even though I practiced that level on an emulator, I could still not beat it when I played it on the NES for real again some months later.
"Contra" is difficult in a different way.
It might be less forgiving than "Ninja Gaiden" with one hitpoint and only five or so continues. But it's not an unfair kind of difficulty.
It requires good eye-hand coordination, but it doesn't really require memorization. Everything that's presented to you is pretty fair. And things that appear continuously, like bullets, appear in a logical pattern and not in an almost-bug-like way where the enemy is spawned again the moment you defeat him or he reaches the screen border becuase the x coordinate is a byte value instead of int.
If often lost at "Contra", but unlike with "Ninja Gaiden", it was never a situation where I became angry.
With "Castlevania" it's only the stiff movement. Yes, Medusa heads by themselves are not really unfair. But if the floor of level 5 is cluttered with Medusa heads, knights and axes and you only have this primitive kind of jump, it can gets frustrating as well.
"Mega Man 1" (I haven't played the others) is pretty average in difficulty. The only really difficult thing is the Yellow Devil, but other than that, I would rate this game only slightly above or even equal to "Super Mario Bros.", but not even close to "Contra", "Castlevania" or "Ninja Gaiden".
Is "Mega Man 1" actually considered difficult (apart from the Yellow Devil)?
By the way, how would you rate "Journey to Silius", "Rush'n Attack", "Joe & Mac" (NES version) and "Vice - Project Doom" in relation to the above-mentioned games?
Sumez wrote:
A RPG will typically be judged as "difficult" if it requires a lot of grinding. In something like Dragon Quest, where grinding is the only genuine way to solve these problems (aside from speedrun-like abuse of game mechanics), I think that actually makes sense. DQ2/DW2 is generally considered the hardest of the series by a long shot.
Grinding is technically easy in the sense that no special skill is required, it's just terribly boring and not fun. Dragon Quest games, especially the NES ones but also the later ones, are horribly grindy and requires you to do each dungeon 4 times in order to have a chance to progress for example. DQ1 is even worse, basically the game is just grinding, if you cheat to start with best level and equipment the game is beatable in 10 minutes.
I can understand that bearing the annoyance of such grinding is "hard", or that trying to continue even though you might be slightly underlevelled makes the game "harder", however, grinding is not much of a challenge by itself, just an annoyance.
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If often lost at "Contra", but unlike with "Ninja Gaiden", it was never a situation where I became angry.
I agree. The Stage 4 boss in Contra is the only part which comes close to being "frustrating", and that's only because those homing bubbles are so hard to defeat. Ninja Gaiden on the other hand looks like it's all glitched up, enemy respawning is fine if you go back and forth
at least one pixel, but NG will throw the enemy at you
even if you don't go back at all sometimes.
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Is "Mega Man 1" actually considered difficult (apart from the Yellow Devil)?
Not really, but the erratic platforms in Ice Man's stage are a problem too. It's more glitchy than anything else, the rest of the game being predictable.
Am I the only one who find SMB difficult ? I mean there's only a single hit point, and the movement control is so erratic, I hate it. I prefer heroes running at constant speed, I hate how Mario accelerate and decelerates so slowly. I probably didn't get much further than world 2-4 or something. However in SMB3 it's much more easier for some reason, this is the only Mario game where I really went far (although I don't think I've beaten it).
DRW wrote:
By the way, how would you rate "Journey to Silius", "Rush'n Attack", "Joe & Mac" (NES version) and "Vice - Project Doom" in relation to the above-mentioned games?
Rush'n'Attack is the only game of those i had as a kid. Despite (thanks to?) being quite simple in its design, i'd rate its difficulty as pretty fair, pretty hard and close to perfect in escalation as far as the levels go. Some boss fights are just time wasters (1st and 3rd level provides no continuing challenge after the 1st time you play it).
One major flaw though: the combined climb and jump button (d-pad up) sometimes get you stuck and killed in the heat of the moment. It'd been much better off with a castlevania scheme, except there's no perfectly clean solution how you would lie down and use your subweapon in that case. Some workaround would need to be had, like pressing down instead for up or something.
Informally, there's two difficulty settings: One which moves you back a bit, and one which lets your restart on the spot you died without interruption (2 player mode, let one player die. Or play as 2 players).
I don't remember if i actually ever beat the last boss or if i just watched somebody else do it.
Contra and Ninja Gaiden are very similar in both how fair/unfair they are, and the amount of memorization "required". Neither game will kill you for not knowing what's to come, but both benefit highly from it. As such I consider both fair games that get noticably easier with practice despite starting out difficult. Contra is definitely much more lenient in how you can afford to solve an obstacle though, which not only makes it easier, but is probably also why you perceive it as being "more fair".
DRW wrote:
"Mega Man 1" (I haven't played the others) is pretty average in difficulty. The only really difficult thing is the Yellow Devil, but other than that, I would rate this game only slightly above or even equal to "Super Mario Bros.", but not even close to "Contra", "Castlevania" or "Ninja Gaiden".
Is "Mega Man 1" actually considered difficult (apart from the Yellow Devil)?
Meta Man 1 is definitely the hardest of the NES Mega Man games. I think it's sort of unevenly balanced, with the Yellow Devil definitely being a spike (but mostly because of how long that fight drags on), and the Mega Man clone basically requiring you to "know the trick" (a few different tricks will work).
People tend to consider the Mega Man games "very hard", but I believe this is once again definitely based on a combination of prejudice and just generally not being willing to put the effort into actually beating them. Most Mega Man bosses will defeat you until you learn their patterns, but after that's it's pretty smooth sailing. I'd say Castlevania 1 and 3, all Ninja Gaidens, and even Contra are definitely harder. "average" is a good estimate on your part.
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By the way, how would you rate "Journey to Silius", "Rush'n Attack", "Joe & Mac" (NES version) and "Vice - Project Doom" in relation to the above-mentioned games?
I consider all of these games harder than any of the games we've mentioned continously in this thread - and yeah, again it's mostly due to me not putting enough effort into actually learning them. I feel that a game like Silius I can probably beat with a bit of training, but it does feel pretty tough when you come into it knowing nothing. Vice Project Doom has a bit of the same, but it's very specific spots in the game that seem like spikes to me.
Rush'n Attack is just ungodly unforgiving.
Bregalad wrote:
Am I the only one who find SMB difficult ? I mean there's only a single hit point, and the movement control is so erratic, I hate it. I prefer heroes running at constant speed, I hate how Mario accelerate and decelerates so slowly. I probably didn't get much further than world 2-4 or something. However in SMB3 it's much more easier for some reason, this is the only Mario game where I really went far (although I don't think I've beaten it).
Taking the games stage by stage, and not taking your additional resources (extra lives, powerup storage on the world map, etc.) into account, SMB3 is definitely much harder than SMB. Some of the stages are really genuinely challenging in a way no stage in SMB comes even close to.
SMB might be harder to make a 100% run through, due to SMB3 giving you so many of the aforementioned items that you can afford to die over and over again before running out of lives, and easily cheat your way through any stage giving you problems. But looking at just the stage design, there are many harder obstacles around.
I'd throw both games in the "easy" category though.
Nintendo expected kids to play these games and didn't want them to get stuck and give up.
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Rush'n Attack is just ungodly unforgiving.
It certainly puts up a fight, but there are strategies which makes it fair in my eyes:
Often when there's too much heat, there's also a safe spot to retreat to (another elevation level, hanging from stairs).
Heat can cool off. Basically, it heats up because you've got two spawn modes:
-The cycling spawn pattern left and right, which is continuing.
-Scroll-triggered spawning
-Time these patterns (requires some preknowledge but sometimes intuition should work) so they sync up in a manner that's easy (as opposed to the deadly jumper stacked on runner combo, for example).
-Some type of enemies will follow you up/down stairs, those are easy pickings.
-If you can't time spawning or pick them off one at a time, try to retreat to a safe spot. Once the scroll-triggered anemies has run off screen, you wait for a pocket to reenter whatever path you need to move forwards.
-Runners can always be jumped over
-Jumpers can always be ran under
-There's ample space where snipers and grenadiers can't reach you.
All that said, RnA is a bit like Castlevania I and III in that it's more about positioning, rythm and timing, and less about speed, physics calculation and reaction (SMB1). I don't think these two categories can be wholly on the same difficulty scale because they require different skill sets, beyond what i'd call general platforming skills.
Two games I think we can't afford to forget in a discussion about challenging NES games:
1. Batman. SunSoft's first Batman is a pretty typical NES action platformer with an average challenge level. Most stages will kick your ass at first, but you'll eventually learn how to tackle them, and which enemies are better to run from, rather than fight.
But then there's the final boss. I have never been able to beat him. Not ever.
I have spent countless lives, continues even, getting to him and just gotten my ass handed to me over and over. I've read guides and watched videos, I have an idea of how to do it, but I have never been able to pull it off. Maybe if I "get the trick" (sort of like finding the rhythm with the second phase of the NG1 final boss I guess) I will consider the game simple enough, but as of now this battle alone makes me consider Batman a really hard game.
2. Battletoads - one of the games you'll see mentioned most often when people talk about difficult NES games. And yeah, this game is really difficult. I think there's a common misconception though, started by AVGN, that this is due to the Turbo Tunnel, the third stage of the game. But as anyone that has spent time with the game will know, that level isn't particularly hard. In fact, once you start to remember what obstacles are gonna show up ahead of time, it's even one of the easiest in the game.
But Battletoads is a good example of one of those games that gets extremely challenging simply due to how long it is. Almost every new stage throws a completely new mechanic at you that it expects you to learn and master before you can move on to the next stage that just repeats the process over again. And then a little over halfway into the game you get to Volkmire's Inferno. Another autoscroller that pretty much requires you to remember a sequence of walls coming your way so you can know ahead of time where you need to be to dodge them. No friendly warnings like you get on the Turbo Tunnel.
This is by itself not a particularly difficult challenge, as you can just memorize them all. But this is just one small part of a big game with 12 long stages. I want to love the game, but I hate this part. Any individual stage could probably be considered easy to average with a little practice, but as a full game, it's definitely tough.
Sumez wrote:
Two games I think we can't afford to forget in a discussion about challenging NES games:
1. Batman. SunSoft's first Batman is a pretty typical NES action platformer with an average challenge level. Most stages will kick your ass at first, but you'll eventually learn how to tackle them, and which enemies are better to run from, rather than fight.
But then there's the final boss. I have never been able to beat him. Not ever.
2. Battletoads - one of the games you'll see mentioned most often when people talk about difficult NES games. And yeah, this game is really difficult. I think there's a common misconception though, started by AVGN, that this is due to the Turbo Tunnel, the third stage of the game. But as anyone that has spent time with the game will know, that level isn't particularly hard. In fact, once you start to remember what obstacles are gonna show up ahead of time, it's even one of the easiest in the game.
But Battletoads is a good example of one of those games that gets extremely challenging simply due to how long it is.....
I have to completely agree with you on both of these. We spent ages as kids fighting the joker OVER and OVER and OVER again. Great game. And battletoads -- definitely. The turbo tunnel is nothing compared the vast depth of anger that that game produces.
The other one that never gets mentioned is Snake Rattle n Roll. It starts off super easy, but the last 3 stages are pull-your-hair-out difficult. And I've never in my life beaten final moon battle (without save state cheating on an emulator). It's one of only a couple games that I owned as a kid but could never beat.
Sumez wrote:
Contra and Ninja Gaiden are very similar in both how fair/unfair they are, and the amount of memorization "required".
I disagree.
"Ninja Gaiden" has stuff like:
A bunch of gaps with enemies on them that you have to slice as you run along. If you stop, they will gang up on you and you will die.
A bird that flies towards you when you climb up stairs. You need to know that you have to continue climbing and the bird will miss you. Otherwise, it will hit you.
A boss where the intended method of evading his projectile is basically impossible during normal gameplay, so your only tactic is attacking him and hoping that his energy bar gets emptied before yours.
A small platform with a guy with a machine gun on it. I tried so many times to time the jump right until I saw in a video that you can simply let yourself fall and get on the platform just fine.
A huge gap with platforms that barely take you over the gap and then you have to time your jump exactly, otherwise a single bird will knock you into the gap.
Three opponents coming out of nowhere shortly before the last boss' door. If you don't know this ahead, they
will hit you.
I've seen none of these cheap tricks in "Contra". If this game only had infinite continues, it would be great. But I tend to get bored if I have to restart a game too much.
Sumez wrote:
Meta Man 1 is definitely the hardest of the NES Mega Man games.
Interesting. The Yellow Devil is of course the big exception, but everything else was pretty average for me. I made it to the Yellow Devil in my first ever run. (With continues of course.) Then I tried him on an emulator. Later, I beat the game easily.
I wasn't able to use that same attempt on "Ninja Gaiden": I practiced that last level over and over. Next time I did a real playthrough: I didn't get any further than in my very first playthrough.
Regarding "Mega Man": Even that clone is not so hard. Sometimes you can defeat him by just shooting your standard weapon. If you want to be sure, use the fire weapon. This way, he will get hit as soon as he gets close to you.
"Mega Man" is also the reason why I thought: "Maybe games like "Contra" and "Ninja Gaiden" aren't so hard after all and people are just whiny." Noope. They are difficult. "Mega Man" is not to me.
Sumez wrote:
I consider all of these games harder than any of the games we've mentioned continously in this thread
Even "Vice - Project Doom"? I was under the assumption that this will not be one of those Nintendo-hard games, but more in the average difficulty category.
I'd really like to be able to beat "Rush'n Attack". Yes, it's less advanced than later Konami titles, but I love the atmosphere.
Most NES games have you fight aliens, robots or monsters. But it's pretty rare that you have a side-scroller where you have to fight against actual "real life" opponents. "Cross Fire" is similar, but in this case, it's a terrorist organization somewhere in the future.
I like it that in "Rush'n Attack", you actually fight against the Soviet Army in the 80s.
I'm not sure what you people mean by unfair? Ninja Gaiden is unfair because it respawns enemies? That's just part of the mechanics and can be prepared for (although it can still be frustrating). It's unfair because it requires memorization? I think about any hard action game requires quite a bit of memorization and preknowledge that can only be gained by practising a lot.
Megaman games can be hard to get into until you find the boss that is easy to beat with the Rockbuster. The rest is just memorizing patterns and figuring out weakness weapons. I think the only really hard part in Megaman 1 is the end where you need to fight both Iceman and Fireman before Dr Wily. Both these bosses have a pattern that's really hard to beat without taking damage. The Yellow Devil however is extremely predictable and can easily be beaten every time after you have memorized his pattern which has zero randomization.
Batman? I could never beat this game as a kid when I borrowed it from friends. It has some very hard wall jumping timing that got me every time. I want to beat this game someday though.
Yeah Battletoads is one of the hardest games to NES because of a combination of the facts that it's long, you have limited continues and many levels (especially all the racing levels) requires a lot of memorization and quick reflexes.
I also had Snake Rattle n' Roll as a kid and have yet to beat it. The only time I beat it was when a friend came over with a Game Genie. We used cheats like unlimited with lives and mega jumping. It was still hard to beat the moon level. I got to see all the last levels and the ending but I can't say I've beaten it.
Ghosts n' Goblins is hard and unfair because of the random factor of many things like the Red Arremers' patterns. The arcade version requires you to hold a button when pushing start when the continue countdown is counting, and the Famicom version requires a cheat code to continue. I don't think I ever beaten stage 5 without continuing. Usually I don't get past level 3 though, I think it's possibly the hardest level in the game due to tons of Red Arremers.
Rush n' Attack yeah it's more about good timing than quick reflexes and memorization. I think it doesn't really get hard until in the end, but as a kid I thought it was very hard.
And finally Mario, probably the action game series I've played the most. I love the slow acceleration and physics, I think it's what defines a Mario game and it probably played a big role in making Mario extremely famous.
Sumez wrote:
Most stages will kick your ass at first, but you'll eventually learn how to tackle them
In Batman, how do you tackle the toad man and tank? I like batman because of the graphics and the great movement scheme, but these guys make me not choose batman when i arrange time to play through a game.
DRW wrote:
I like it that in "Rush'n Attack", you actually fight against the Soviet Army in the 80s.
Just 2 guys invading a country, killing off a whole military base, blowing up an atom bomb... armed with a knife.
Yeah it's great. To this day it's a favourite go-to.
pokun wrote:
Ghosts n' Goblins
I can't stand it. For me it's the definition of frustration. I remember i borrowed it and was able to beat it in a weekend (one time, not twice in a row as instructed to - i just turned it off). But was it fun to beat? Not too much, it felt a bit like a chore. So it's not as difficult as it is frustrating. There's games i haven't beat which i'd gladly play over and over, and then there's this sort of punishment of a game.
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Meta Man 1 is definitely the hardest of the NES Mega Man games
Are you crazy ? In my opinion it's the 2nd easiest, Mega Man 2 being the only one easier than the original. The Yellow Devil and Ice Man's platform being the only real difficulties of the game. The rest is just a walk-through, basically, unless you add restrictions such as not using boss'es weakness, but then it's another talk.
In most of the later Mega Man games, hitting a boss with the buster removes a single hit point, and with the weakness it removes 2 or maybe 3 hit points. With Mega Man 1, you can kill most bosses with only 3-4 hits of their weakness. For example Ice Man's attack can't be avoided (technically maybe it can but it's very difficult), but it doesn't matter because you can kill him very easily before his first attack hits you. On later Mega Man games such a kamikaze strategy would be unthinkable. Same for Elec Man, he moves extremely fast and has an almost unavoidable attack, but he's so weak to the cutter that I never bother even trying to evade him, I just spam cutters to kill him quickly.
Boss battles in Mega Man and Mega Man 2 are just a speed contest, if you're faster you win. From Mega Man 3 on, it's much harder, you need to actually avoid the attacks and counter attack at proper time, or else the boss will reflect your attacks. The stages grew typically a bit longer too, increasing the penalty for loosing. I'd say Mega Man 4 is the hardest.
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Regarding "Mega Man": Even that clone is not so hard.
The doppelgänger is pathetically easy. Just stay with the buster, shoot, never move nor jump, and you can beat him in a matter of second. You might get hit once or twice but who cares, he takes damage more quickly than you.
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[Battletoads] is by itself not a particularly difficult challenge, as you can just memorize them all.
I'm fairly sure the rockets in Volksmire's Inferno acts randomly, and they're annoying to avoid. The fireballs, also acting randomly, can be avoided by simply staying at the very bottom of the screen and never moving (unless it's the other way around, I don't remember). But then it's more exploiting a bug in the game than actually beating the game. (Just like relying on the select glitch to beat the yellow devil in Mega Man 1).
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until I saw in a video
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I've read guides and watched videos
This wasn't an option when the NES was mainstream, and it also still wasn't an option in the 2000s when it saw its first significant revival. Yes, technically you could shoot gameplay on a VHS and distribute it, but I don't think this was common.
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Just 2 guys invading a country, killing off a whole military base, blowing up an atom bomb... armed with a knife.
Pretty standard video game stuff
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it's not as difficult as it is frustrating.
But then it's difficult to stay calm and not explode in anger and not smash your controller into the TV.
Especially when you're still a kid/teenager.
Although Megaman 2 is probably the easiest game in the series, it might be the hardest to 1cc. This is all because of the Boobeam Trap boss that doesn't allow you to make a mistake with the crash bombs.
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In most of the later Mega Man games, hitting a boss with the buster removes a single hit point, and with the weakness it removes 2 or maybe 3 hit points. With Mega Man 1, you can kill most bosses with only 3-4 hits of their weakness. For example Ice Man's attack can't be avoided (technically maybe it can but it's very difficult), but it doesn't matter because you can kill him very easily before his first attack hits you. On later Mega Man games such a kamikaze strategy would be unthinkable. Same for Elec Man, he moves extremely fast and has an almost unavoidable attack, but he's so weak to the cutter that I never bother even trying to evade him, I just spam cutters to kill him quickly.
Sure the bosses platings are weaker than in later games but so are Megaman's. Elecman can beat you in maybe 2 or 3 shots, and if you are low on energy you can't beat him using kamikaze methods. Even worse are Iceman and Fireman that are very hard to dodge and you have to beat them both right before the final boss.
The NES version of Ghosts 'n Goblins is ported by Micronics, a team that's notorious for making horrible versions of popular games. The arcade game is great, but the NES one is not. I love the original, but I can't stand this one.
DRW wrote:
A bunch of gaps with enemies on them that you have to slice as you run along. If you stop, they will gang up on you and you will die.
No, this happens if you try to go back. Ninja Gaiden is a game that encourages (and rewards) aggressive forward pushing, and punishing attempts at retreating. This makes it a harder game, but in no way does it make it unfair or dependent on memorization.
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A boss where the intended method of evading his projectile is basically impossible during normal gameplay, so your only tactic is attacking him and hoping that his energy bar gets emptied before yours.
That one is pretty stupid. All the bosses in NG1 are terrible except from the final boss which is excellent. At least the game has the courtesy to always refill your health before that fight that you mention.
The rest of the things you mention are just examples of challenges in the game. I don't see how any of them can be perceived as unfair.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
In Batman, how do you tackle the toad man and tank? I like batman because of the graphics and the great movement scheme, but these guys make me not choose batman when i arrange time to play through a game.
Depending on their position on the stage, I will either cheese them from afar, or try to dodge their attacks and just book it.
Bregalad wrote:
This wasn't an option when the NES was mainstream, and it also still wasn't an option in the 2000s when it saw its first significant revival. Yes, technically you could shoot gameplay on a VHS and distribute it, but I don't think this was common.
We've had this discussion before. Back then, magazines would always provide sections with tips for various sections of games, especially specials on how to beat final bosses were popular, and mailboxes where kids would ask the editors about specific problems in various games. And then of course you'd have real like friends with the same games you could exchange strategies with. It definitely wasn't as easy as going on YouTube, but it was fun and I miss it!
Even then though, I think when judging the difficulty of a game today, every tool we have at our disposal should be taken into account! Anything else will just be a weird handicap.
Pokun wrote:
Although Megaman 2 is probably the easiest game in the series, it might be the hardest to 1cc. This is all because of the Boobeam Trap boss that doesn't allow you to make a mistake with the crash bombs.
Even if you make this easy-to-make mistake, you can still just farm crash bomb energy on your next life. It's extremely tedious, but it's not difficult.
DRW wrote:
A boss where the intended method of evading his projectile is basically impossible during normal gameplay, so your only tactic is attacking him and hoping that his energy bar gets emptied before yours.
I guess you're talking about Malth? I never knew there was an "intended method" to avoid the projectiles, what is it?
Btw, here's my approach for judging "how hard" a classic style video game is. I'd say it's some sort of combination between how much time I need to spend with the game to be able to 1CC it (compared to my current "general skill level", not when I was a kid and only had played 3 games before), and how consistently I'll continue to be able to do it afterwards. Other people might have other standards, but I think if you judge a game based on how many time it allows you to continue you're kinda cheating yourself. It totally depends on what type of game it is though (I don't care about a 1CC in StarTropics)
Some examples, from various platforms, just to give a perspective regarding the "difficult" games on the NES. Some people might take longer to beat Contra for example, but the same people would probably spend longer on GnG too, so it still works relatively speaking:
* Kirby as OP pointed out, is a perfect example of a very easy game on the NES. I think anyone should be able to beat the game just by starting it up and then fool around until you somehow find yourself at the end. You can take multiple hits, and will find health pickups around every corner. The game allows you to try again and again until you're through, and almost every enemy will give you an ability that allows you to wreck all other enemies. Great and super fun game, but zero challenge.
* Contra took me around a day. Picking it up one day, playing around with the Konami code until I got an idea of which powerups to get, where the enemies were placed etc., followed up by a 1CC the following day. As long as I'm not terribly out of practice, I'll easily be able to loop this game multiple times whenever I pick it up. Despite being somewhat challenging, it's always fun to pick up and play as a "casual" game.
* Ninja Gaiden took me at least two or three days, probably a good weekend. I started out a couple of sessions where I just kept continuing until I'd brute forced my way through. Following that I'd pick up an emulator and practice the second Jacquio form until I felt I could do it consistently. After that, it was just a question of getting a run where I didn't waste too many lives. Definitely harder than Contra, but not the hopeless effort that a lot of people make it out to be.
* Ghouls 'n Ghosts (arcade version). Famous for being a very difficult game, but I'd say this is only compared to the typical console game - for an arcade game, it's actually among the easier games out there. Playing it on/off for a week after I got the PCB I managed to get a pretty convincing 1CC. I already had some experience with the game beforehand though, having credit fed through it before on the PS1 port, and played around with the MegaDrive version a few times. Easy for an arcade game, but definitely harder than most of the stuff you'll find on NES. And I definitely wouldn't be able to 1CC it consistently without a lot more practice.
I know people who have beaten this game with just a couple of days of practice, but I'm still proud of my feat.
* Rainbow Islands (arcade, again). Now we're getting into the big league! Beating this game took me around one and a half year from the point I started playing it "seriously". Of course it's difficult to compare directly to the NES games I mentioned, since I've obviously been going for long periods without playing the game, probably a month or more at several occasions. I did this before even getting the arcade PCB myself, so most of my practice was done at the local arcade or a friend's place, but I'd still say that getting through it took some genuine effort over a very long period of time. Even today, when starting a run of the game, there's probably only a 1/10 chance I'll be able to beat the game at best. Most of my runs will end on Island 9 (the Darius levels).
With one possible exception (TGM2 master mode) I'd consider this the hardest game I have ever beaten, so it's a good standard for me to use when comparing the difficulty of other games. I'd love to play an NES game that's able to provide me with a challenge on this level, but even picking up the most difficult games on the system, I doubt any of them would be able to also feel as fair, well designed, and fun to play as Rainbow Islands still does to me.
Battletoads might scratch that itch a bit, but I have a hard time believing it will take me more than a year to get through.
Maybe a week?
Are later Dance Dance Revolution games harder than Rainbow Islands? To "clear" those requires a AA (93%) grade on songs' "hard" step charts, followed by a very fast boss song (600 or more steps in 90 seconds) played with inverted scrolling and no recover, and a second boss song played on battery with 1 HP so that any step less accurate than "Great" counts as an immediate fail. And since Dance Dance Revolution SuperNOVA, these boss songs have included BPM gimmicks, so you have to memorize them.
Sumez wrote:
The NES version of Ghosts 'n Goblins is ported by Micronics, a team that's notorious for making horrible versions of popular games. The arcade game is great, but the NES one is not. I love the original, but I can't stand this one.
.
That's the thing with Ghosts n Gobins -- it's hard, yes. But more bad than hard. If you sit down and make an effort to play through and beat it, you can do it. It's frustrating, but possible. But it's more that you'll want to quit from it being terrible.
Quote:
A boss where the intended method of evading his projectile is basically impossible during normal gameplay, so your only tactic is attacking him and hoping that his energy bar gets emptied before yours.
Yeah, that's cheesy. But we figured it out pretty quickly as kids. That was always a fairly standard thing to try on any hard boss back in the day. He definitely wasn't the first boss fight where the best strategy was just to spam him and not bother dodging. So I didn't find it to be that odd.
What about Blaster Master? That's another one where the game is pretty easy other than 2 bosses which are just crazy hard. (unless maybe I just haven't figured out the trick to them? I mean the crab on level 5 and the final boss combo)
tepples wrote:
Are later Dance Dance Revolution games harder than Rainbow Islands?
This touches on one of my initial issues. Some games require completely different skillsets than others. That's also why I left TGM out of the equation - Tetris is a good example of a game that doesn't overlap much with other types. You can easily be an incredible Tetris player but have no skill in traditional action games, and very much vice versa as well. TGM2 took me almost two years to conquer on Master mode, from the point when I started actually playing Tetris for score/winning. I think Tetris as a general concept could be considered one of the hardest games ever due to how insanely high the skill level can potential be, even for people who have been playing it non stop their entire life. But there are many individual challenges in many Tetris games that are absurdly easy for anyone with some skills to beat. At this point I could easily beat TGM2 rather consistently - it's the "riding a bike" kind of skill.
I think similar points are valid for many other unique types of games, such as rhythm games, or even shooters.
As a game designer, I have no idea how hard my own games are.
I consider myself a lousy gamer, yet I can run through my ninja game with barely taking a hit. And I've had several people tell me it was a "hard" game. As compared to what? You really have to work to beat Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden. I would rank my game as mild compared to those, and they were popular, which makes me think they were an expected level of difficulty.
Games were expected to be hard. If you beat it in under a week it was lame/boring.
Sumez wrote:
I think Tetris as a general concept could be considered one of the hardest games ever due to how insanely high the skill level can potential be, even for people who have been playing it non stop their entire life. But there are many individual challenges in many Tetris games that are absurdly easy for anyone with some skills to beat.
You know, like the
infinite spin and other "world" rules that The Tetris Company has been enforcing on most products since 2001.
I'm ridin' spinners, I'm ridin' spinners, they don't stop(Are you on HardDrop.com?)
As a game designer it's an especially tough subject.
A lot of games got away with being difficult because it was the trend of the time, and being able to beat them gave people some bragging rights and a sense of satisfaction. Release a new game like Ninja Gaiden 3(US) today, and people are gonna give up less than halfway in. Once a game has a footing and people respect it, they will try to beat it, even today. But if the game doesn't have anyone playing it, it's just gonna get passed over.
Release a game that's much easier than NG3, and people are gonna just play it through and then move on to something else. They might judge it on how fun it was to experience, how cool the graphics or music are, but without a solid challenge few are going to care much about the core gameplay. It's a catch 22 situation, kinda.
In my opinion, if you want to make a game with the same qualities as the best action classics of the NES era, you gotta understand how to reel in the players, in a way that was hardly even necessary back in those days. You gotta give people an honest chance to get through the game without necessarily being particularly great at it. Maybe build in a continue system that allows people to get through the game and get some satisfaction out of it, but once they have done that, they can play it on a higher difficulty level, or go for additional challenges such as
saving all the humans, or
beating the game with less than a specific number of continues, in order to get to the final stage, or the real final boss or something like that. Tease them with something extra if they are cool enough dudes to beat the real challenge. But first you gotta prove to them that the game is actually good.
tepples wrote:
Don't get me started on infinite rotations.
Guideline games can be decent vs-games, but without the time pressure, a central aspect of the puzzle game is completely gone.
I have a HD user, but I don't find the forum discussions that interesting. I was active on Tetrisconcept for a short while, though.
So what explains I Wanna Be The Guy, Dwarf Fortress, and Dark Souls series, games that have gained a following because they're hard?
Dark Souls is not popular because it's hard. That series has a lot of qualities, which are mostly related to its challenging gameplay, but not exclusively.
It did take a while to get a following though. Demon's Souls was unoriginally unreleased in Europe until it became a sleeper hit due to several reviewers having discovered the qualities of the game.
You can definitely gain popularity through challenging gameplay, but it makes getting a foothold that much harder. For an indie developer without marketing dollars, even more so.
Pokun wrote:
I'm not sure what you people mean by unfair? Ninja Gaiden is unfair because it respawns enemies? That's just part of the mechanics and can be prepared for (although it can still be frustrating). It's unfair because it requires memorization? I think about any hard action game requires quite a bit of memorization and preknowledge that can only be gained by practising a lot.
It's about the way these enemies appear. You have to know in advance what awaits you to avoid them.
Take this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIcOjUaf5P8&t=18m27sIf you wait to let the bird pass, it will hit you.
You have to know that not stopping and continuing to climb will put you into a position where you avoid it by a close margin. This is unfair because it requires pre-knowledge. You cannot know that the bird won't hit you if you keep on moving towards it.
Or this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIcOjUaf5P8&t=31mAs soon as you jump, there appears a bat. Not before, but as soon as you jump. So, you have to slash it during the jump.
Immediately afterwards, there comes a bird. If you stay still to attack it, it will hit you. You have to reach the ground and kill it there.
You have no chance if you don't already know this or if you don't have this sub weapon that the guy in the video is using.
Stuff like that doesn't appear in "Contra".
FrankenGraphics wrote:
DRW wrote:
I like it that in "Rush'n Attack", you actually fight against the Soviet Army in the 80s.
Just 2 guys invading a country, killing off a whole military base, blowing up an atom bomb... armed with a knife.
Yeah, a gun would have fit better in this scenario.
Sumez wrote:
The rest of the things you mention are just examples of challenges in the game. I don't see how any of them can be perceived as unfair.
By comparing it directly to the way "Contra" handles stuff.
thefox wrote:
DRW wrote:
A boss where the intended method of evading his projectile is basically impossible during normal gameplay, so your only tactic is attacking him and hoping that his energy bar gets emptied before yours.
I guess you're talking about Malth? I never knew there was an "intended method" to avoid the projectiles, what is it?
Use the platform on the right to jump over the projectiles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4s3IHceAhYI tried it. I didn't manage to do it during a real playthrough.
DRW wrote:
Take this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIcOjUaf5P8&t=18m27sIf you wait to let the bird pass, it will hit you.
You have to know that not stopping and continuing to climb will put you into a position where you avoid it by a close margin. This is unfair because it requires pre-knowledge. You cannot know that the bird won't hit you if you keep on moving towards it.
No. You can stop and let the bird pass, climb up and wait for it to pass again. The fact that the game has an awesome flow that allows you to continue up doesn't mean you have to make use of it.
Quote:
Or this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIcOjUaf5P8&t=31mAs soon as you jump, there appears a bat. Not before, but as soon as you jump. So, you have to slash it during the jump.
Immediately afterwards, there comes a bird. If you stay still to attack it, it will hit you. You have to reach the ground and kill it there.
You have no chance if you don't already know this or if you don't have this sub weapon that the guy in the video is using.
If you just jump ahead, you'll automatically jump over that bat. If you make it this far in the game you know to be prepared for anything that will appear, especially birds flying right at you. If they are at a height that will allow them to hurt you, a slash will be able to kill them too - your sword has a short hitbox, but it's very tall.
Quote:
Stuff like that doesn't appear in "Contra".
The tanks on the snow level that will crush you if you let them live for too long will probably kill anyone the first time they see them, as they would normally play defensively and try to dodge the attacks. That's a mistake you only make once.
I agree that Ninja Gaiden probably has more places that are much more likely to kill you the first time you see them because you aren't prepared for what is coming, but I don't think that justifies calling the game unfair. I never felt cheated by the game the first time I played it. Instead I learned from my mistakes and improved on my next attempt. There are much, much worse games on the NES.
Yeah Ninja Gaiden definitely has a lot of required memorization. But that's just part of the training you need to do to beat it. Not many hard action games can be finished on your first try unless you have extreme reflexes and get familiar with the controls extremely fast.
I'm surprised Sumez thinks the arcade version of Ghost and Goblins is easy for an arcade game but Rainbow Island is hard. I've spent countless hours for them both (although for Rainbow Island I've played the PC Engine version, but from what I can see in Mame it's pretty much identical to the arcade) and I'd say they both have quite normal difficulty for arcade games and Ghost and Goblins is harder with its random patterns that I just don't know how to counter. Rainbow Island is hard because the controls is a bit funny, and the bosses are very fast compared to the main character requiring very precise timing. Having played Bubble Bobble probably helps a lot though. I guess this comes back to personal experiences again.
But yeah Ghosts and Goblins for NES is only incredibly hard because they retained the arcade difficulty in a home console port. For an arcade game it's just damn hard.
For an arcade game that actually got harder after porting to a home console, check out the PC Engine (HuCard) version of Altered Beast.
DRW wrote:
FrankenGraphics wrote:
DRW wrote:
I like it that in "Rush'n Attack", you actually fight against the Soviet Army in the 80s.
Just 2 guys invading a country, killing off a whole military base, blowing up an atom bomb... armed with a knife.
Yeah, a gun would have fit better in this scenario.
Wouldn't had been as fun though.
But yeah I mean even Solid Snake can at least steal weapons from his enemies so he can fight tougher opponents. In Rush n Attack and Green Beret you only steal an occasional bazooka or grenade to blow up some things and then you continue to mostly use your knife even against the rocket.
Pokun wrote:
I'm surprised Sumez thinks the arcade version of Ghost and Goblins is easy for an arcade game but Rainbow Island is hard. I've spent countless hours for them both (although for Rainbow Island I've played the PC Engine version, but from what I can see in Mame it's pretty much identical to the arcade) and I'd say they both have quite normal difficulty for arcade games and Ghost and Goblins is harder with its random patterns that I just don't know how to counter. Rainbow Island is hard because the controls is a bit funny, and the bosses are very fast compared to the main character requiring very precise timing. Having played Bubble Bobble probably helps a lot though. I guess this comes back to personal experiences again.
Just for the record, I said Ghouls n Ghosts, which IMO is a much better, but also easier game.
I'd say both are in the "easier" end though, compared to the usual relentless onslaught of arcade gaming.
Also, I'm talking about beating the games here. Did you beat Rainbow Islands? (if not, I recommend going for it) It's not a particularly hard game to start out with, compared to Ghouls whose very first stage is probably its hardest, too. But around island 6 (robot island) it starts picking up and becomes constantly threatening, and that's where I start losing lives. It's a
long game too, usually lasting over an hour for the "true ending", compared to both GnG games which both consists of two similar loops of a relatively short game, and yet still only runs you 30 minutes at worst.
I didn't say RI is harder than other arcade games, but it's one of very few arcade games I've actually beaten on one credit, and the hardest one I have personally done. So yeah, I'd say a game that I've spent over a year on is definitely much harder than one that took me a week.
But like you said it probably comes down to personal experiences as well.
Quote:
But yeah Ghosts and Goblins for NES is only incredibly hard because they retained the arcade difficulty in a home console port. For an arcade game it's just damn hard.
I actually think the NES game is even harder than the arcade game. Though I guess it's likely someone who's more accustomed to the NES port will think the opposite.
Oops
Ghouls n Ghosts? That's Daimakaimura? Sorry I haven't played that nearly as much and can't really judge it. I thought you where talking about the original game.
Yes I've beaten Rainbow Island for PC Engine long ago (doesn't cost any coins to credit feed). The port is pretty much arcade perfect although it has loading times because it's a CD-ROM
2 game (a bit annoying when you reach the goal in every level and the game freezes for a brief time to load up the fanfare music from the CD). And also I just remembered that it allows saving to the internal BRAM while the arcade game probably needs to be beaten in one go. It's an incredible long game for an arcade game especially to get the real ending.
Quote:
I actually think the NES game is even harder than the arcade game. Though I guess it's likely someone who's more accustomed to the NES port will think the opposite.
I've played both Makaimura quite a bit, but I played the arcade version the most. For the Famicom version I probably never beaten the third level without continues (didn't know about the continue cheat in the Famicom version for a long time). I'm not sure which is harder though, I think they are quite equal. The arcade version has more difficulty adjustments using dip switches, and even the easiest setting doesn't seem to be much easier than the Famicom or NES versions though.
I'm glad everyone here realizes how relatively easy the Mega Man games are. The only real hard part of Mega Man 1 is the Yellow Devil, which you can cheat your way through anyway, and the only real hard part of Mega Man 2 is the disappearing platforms on Heat Man's stage, which you can just use item #2 to cross. Mega Man 3 by far presents the hardest challenge of resisting the urge to turn off the game when you have to do the Doc Robot stages.
Contra and Super C really aren't that hard either; they're probably the only "hard" NES games that I've cleared without using a continue. However, I'm also pretty good at run and gun games, having beaten Metal Slug using only one continue, and beaten Gun Force II without loosing a life, although admittedly, it's piss-easy for an arcade game due to how overpowered you are.
I didn't find Castlevania that difficult, other than the long corridor on stage 5 and the Grim Reaper that is neigh impossible to beat without the power up that lets you throw multiple projectiles in quick succession; the final boss was really underwhelming in comparison. I never beat Castlevania III due to having other games I wanted to play instead. I'll get back to it some day.
gauauu wrote:
That's the thing with Ghosts n Gobins -- it's hard, yes. But more bad than hard. If you sit down and make an effort to play through and beat it, you can do it. It's frustrating, but possible. But it's more that you'll want to quit from it being terrible.
I got through the first loop, but I wasn't going to torture myself to do the second. The only reason I beat it in the first place is just so I could say I beat it. I've never played Ghouls and Ghosts, but Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a massive improvement over this game.
Ninja Gaiden isn't that difficult until the last level; I never actually beat it because I got tired of having to do the last level over and over again after continuing from dying at the last boss. I don't own Ninja Gaiden II or III, so I can't comment on them, but I know Ninja Gaiden III has limited continues...
Speaking of limited continues, screw Battletoads. Anyone who complains about the Turbo Tunnel (James Rolfe) clearly hasn't seen the later stages in the game, which are far worse. I haven't beaten this either, and I'll be damned if I ever.
Did anyone mention Punch Out? I actually got all the way to Mr. Sandman on my LCD TV before I learned about display lag and pulled my CRT out of the garage. I should really try it again, seeing that half of the challenge in this game is reflexes.
Sumez wrote:
Dark Souls is not popular because it's hard. That series has a lot of qualities, which are mostly related to its challenging gameplay, but not exclusively.It did take a while to get a following though. Demon's Souls was unoriginally unreleased in Europe until it became a sleeper hit due to several reviewers having discovered the qualities of the game.You can definitely gain popularity through challenging gameplay, but it makes getting a foothold that much harder. For an indie developer without marketing dollars, even more so.
Is Dark Souls even that difficult? I've heard the game is full of beginner's traps, but that it's a one and done sort of deal, not that you have to memorize routes through anything or develops complex strategies. With difficulty in games, I think that it's best for game sales when a game is difficult enough for the average person to brag about how they beat it, but not so difficult that it kicks their ass hard enough that they can't. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that Dark Souls falls under the former. F-Zero GX is probably the last absurdly difficult game that I know of.
Also, not the NES, but I thought I might show you guys the ultimate in unforeseeable death in a videogame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh73ngqxttE#t=17m15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh73ngqxttE#t=18m32s
Espozo wrote:
Did anyone mention Punch Out? I actually got all the way to Mr. Sandman on my LCD TV before I learned about display lag and pulled my CRT out of the garage. I should really try it again, seeing that half of the challenge in this game is reflexes.
This was one of the first games I've had in my collection (the Mike Tyson version). And it took several years to finally get to Mike Tyson and eventually beat him.
Then I bought the Classic Series for some reason and, to my surprise, managed to beat the entire game from Glass Joe to Mr. Dream in one sitting without losing.
Speaking of reflexes, anyone beat Rolling Thunder?
Man, I thought I was well-adjusted after completing Battletoads. But that game also keeps you on edge.
Bregalad wrote:
Quote:
it's not as difficult as it is frustrating.
But then it's difficult to stay calm and not explode in anger and not smash your controller into the TV.
Especially when you're still a kid/teenager.
Would Back to the Future II & III fall into this category?
What about games that rely on sheer guessing? Milon's Secret Castle, Tower of Druaga, Shadowgate
Ikari Warriors is up there. Asking TMR does seem like the best way.
Sumez wrote:
Two games I think we can't afford to forget in a discussion about challenging NES games:
1. Batman. SunSoft's first Batman is a pretty typical NES action platformer with an average challenge level. Most stages will kick your ass at first, but you'll eventually learn how to tackle them, and which enemies are better to run from, rather than fight.
But then there's the final boss. I have never been able to beat him. Not ever.
I have spent countless lives, continues even, getting to him and just gotten my ass handed to me over and over. I've read guides and watched videos, I have an idea of how to do it, but I have never been able to pull it off. Maybe if I "get the trick" (sort of like finding the rhythm with the second phase of the NG1 final boss I guess) I will consider the game simple enough, but as of now this battle alone makes me consider Batman a really hard game.
It is a rhythm. In Batman, any enemy in iframes cannot hurt you with its body. Correct rhythm makes you invincible against an enemy. Batman's punch can be thrown out too fast, given that it has a windup, so pure mashing is incorrect. The security robot (the two boxes) is a better boss to practice this against.
The "easy" way of beating The Joker is to
1. stay in his body while continually, rhythmically punching him while
2. jumping and adjusting to follow him as he backs up (as you cannot walk mid-punch)
3. without letting him reach an edge such that he runs away and gets you back beyond the minimum range of the Joker Gun (which, unlike everything else in the game, deals 3 damage, ouch)
4. and timing some of your jump-moves to dodge the lightning he summons, though you can take a few of these…
5. for almost a minute.
Not impossible, but very hard. Took me a few hours to get the first time.
Pokun wrote:
Oops Ghouls n Ghosts? That's Daimakaimura?
Yes. I guess I should point that out too, as I was specifically playing Daimakaimura. The US version of Ghouls is made severely easier.
Quote:
Yes I've beaten Rainbow Island for PC Engine long ago (doesn't cost any coins to credit feed).
Sure it doesn't cost any money, but how can you judge a game's difficulty when you credit feed? Especially in a game where enemies stay dead even after you continue.
The list I made describing the difference between the difficulties in each game specifically deals with one credit clears, as you can't really compare anything else - if I were allowed to credit feed Daimakaimura, I would have beaten that game in less than a day. I'm not gonna tell people how to play their games, but I think it should be obvious to everyone that if there is no actual consequence to making a mistake and losing a life, it's impossible to judge how difficult a game is.
By that logic every single arcade shooter is the easiest game ever made.
However, Rainbow Islands doesn't allow continuing after the first 6 islands, so if the PC Engine version is arcade perfect, that's still a really good job.
Espozo wrote:
Mega Man 3 by far presents the hardest challenge of resisting the urge to turn off the game when you have to do the Doc Robot stages.
Why would you want to turn off the game at the best part?
Sumez wrote:
Espozo wrote:
Mega Man 3 by far presents the hardest challenge of resisting the urge to turn off the game when you have to do the Doc Robot stages.
Why would you want to turn off the game at the best part?
They're not that bad by themselves, but I've already visited a variation of each stage before. After I've defeated all the Robot Masters in Mega Man game, I just want to go straight to Wily's Castle and be done with it.
@Jedi Questmaster What is the "Classic Series"? I assume you mean the "NES Classic Edition", but I have no idea why you'd buy that.
Sumez wrote:
By that logic every single arcade shooter is the easiest game ever made.
Unless we're talking about R-Type, R-Type II, Raiden in single player, and a few others. R-Type really abuses this by having a checkpoint on the second to last stage that is borderline impossible to get through without powerups, which it doesn't give you. (It took me several consecutive hours just to get to the next checkpoint, but I was so incredibly frustrated that there's no way I was playing my best.) R-Type II is just difficult as hell all around, and I actually gave up on beating it whereas I at least scraped by with R-Type and Raiden.
The problems with checkpoints in shooters is exactly that - specific points in the game where recoveries are almost impossible. In some Gradius games you might just throw your run down the drain if you die even once.
To be fair, the first time you die in a shooter without checkpoints, it is really hard to get a footing again due to the same issue of not having power ups. I wouldn't say that irrecoverable checkpoints are something that has to exist in a checkpoint shooter; the example I gave feels like a deliberate attempt to get the player to drain their money to get past the checkpoint because of how close to the end of the game it is. R-Type 3 is one checkpoint shooter where I don't feel there are any checkpoints that are too brutally difficult, as the game hands you power ups like crazy. The only checkpoint that really got me frustrated is the checkpoint before the stage 4 boss, where you only get one speed up so you have trouble dodging it, and only one attack power up that is useless anyway, because only one power up in R-Type just serves to give you a shield, but every attack from this boss will go through it. The final level has a few spots that are very difficult with enemies that have way too much health that swarm all over the screen, but you can charge the Hyper Wave Beam to kill most of them, get to the next checkpoint, and then die immediately after because the Hyper Wave Beam still needs to cool down.
Here is a video of the checkpoint that I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMZUtIhDKVsI did that bullshit without auto fire?
I see, you restart from the same spot in the arcade version of Rainbow Island even after a Game Over. Credit feeding Rainbow Island to PC Engine isn't any different from playing any other console action game with unlimited continues. Dying once is no difference from the arcade version, but getting a Game Over means you return to the title screen and when you start again you will have to do the world over again from the beginning (which is also saved to Backup RAM).
I checked Rainbow Island (old version) in Mame and it seems to have much more dip switch settings like life stock, bonus life score and bigger number of difficulty settings. The PC Engine version on the other hand only has two settings: Diamond Mystery (enable/disable) and Difficulty (easy/hard). So even if it's considered pretty much arcade perfect in terms of gameplay, there certainly are differences between the two, although they are necessary differences for arcade and console platforms respectively.
Yeah, Salamander is a good example of a shooter without checkpoints where recoveries are still near impossible many places. The two don't have to go hand in hand, but they tend to.
Pokun wrote:
Credit feeding Rainbow Island to PC Engine isn't any different from playing any other console action game with unlimited continues.
Which obviously also doesn't serve to give any indication of how "difficult" said game is.
Ninja Gaiden is easy if you don't care how many continues you're using.
Espozo wrote:
@Jedi Questmaster What is the "Classic Series"? I assume you mean the "NES Classic Edition", but I have no idea why you'd buy that.
I'm talking about this:
https://gamefaqs.akamaized.net/box/1/9/ ... _front.jpg
Sumez wrote:
Pokun wrote:
Credit feeding Rainbow Island to PC Engine isn't any different from playing any other console action game with unlimited continues.
Which obviously also doesn't serve to give any indication of how "difficult" said game is.
Ninja Gaiden is easy if you don't care how many continues you're using.
Why not? It's not like an arcade game where you can credit feed past every level with no consequences from Continuing except that you have to pay coins, you have to redo the level, or worse, world every time you Game Over so you can't get past a certain point until you clear it without Game Overing. The harder a game is, the longer time it will take to beat, and if the game is too hard for your skill you can't beat it at all unless you somehow fluke it. That's how you practice for a 1cc in the first place. Adding arbitrary rules to a game like finishing in one life is just a common way to make a game harder and not everyone are doing that.
Well, because beating 40 stages without running out of lives is much,
much harder than beating 4?
If we're using that logic, I'd agree that Rainbow Islands is a pretty easy game. But so is Ghouls n Ghosts, Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania 3, all of which offer infinite continues. None of those games should take you more than a couple of hours to credit feed through.
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Adding arbitrary rules to a game like finishing in one life is just a common way to make a game harder and not everyone are doing that.
A one-life-clear is an arbitrary rule - a one-credit-clear is not. It's how these games were designed. If not, why else would the game even make a difference between lives and continues? Why should you go for the extends?
Sumez wrote:
Which obviously also doesn't serve to give any indication of how "difficult" said game is.
Ninja Gaiden is easy if you don't care how many continues you're using.
There is a lot of games I could never beat, no matter how many continue I'd use. Ninja Gaiden is one of them.
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hy else would the game even make a difference between lives and continues? Why should you go for the extends?
For one thing, in a game like CV3, you get to get a clean start from the beginning of the level if you gameover, whereas a life will take you back to the closest checkpoint. This mechanic remedies difficulties that may arise from starting from a check point somewhat, so you don't get stuck if the checkpoint proves to be too hard. Between a continous streak, a lose-life and a game over, your powerups and subweapons will vary, and so it plays a role in varying the game from playthrough to playthrough (until you're good enough not to lose a life); especially encounters with bosses, which is a counterpoint to the concievable argument "well, why didn't they just design fair checkpoints?". (I think they are pretty fair in CV3, even if tough in some spots)
But mostly, i think it's more or less just a residue from arcade norms. Like the points system. Noone plays castlevania 3 for points. If they did, you could cheese it for example by throwing holy water at the continous waves of zombies at stage 1 (get double and tripple kill bonus points , get an extra life, time runs out or if you want to you can get to the boss in time).
So points are just merely a way to provide 1ups. It works sort of like a level up mechanism, except you're rewarded with retries.
CV3 took one step away from arcadeyness compared to CV1 by omitting the secret treasures. I thought it was a neat feature, if a little superfluous. Just something you can do to entertain yourself with. It had worked even better if it shown a secret treasure percentage at the end, because that would have added a separate skill layer - can you get all secret treasures in one continue?
That approach to abusing continues is exactly what makes it difficult to estimate a game's difficulty.
Espozo asked earlier if Dark Souls is even "that difficult", which is a tough question to answer. Cause it's a very lenient game that doesn't punish death, but will eternally respawn you at the last checkpoint you activated. Once you level up, or find any item, there's no way it can be taken away from you again, so there is never any consequence to dying, you can keep trying over and over again. And considering the sheer length of the game, I think that's pretty fortunate. The entire difficulty of the game comes from each moment-to-moment challenge - reaching the next checkpoint, or beating the boss you just reached, etc. So the game doesn't really feel difficult, as each of these challenges are very short, and can be overcome by anyone by trying enough times.
But take a game like R-Type, which Espozo is obviously very familiar with, famous for being very difficult. But I bet that if anyone sat down and played it the same way, if they were able to always load their progress and continue from where they left off, and could keep using more credits, and retry every boss as much as they like, as you would in a Souls game, each challenge would probably be overcome a lot faster than it would in Dark Souls. So which is the harder game?
If you are allowed to continue indefinitely - how do you even measure the game's difficulty? If it's technically impossible to lose the game, what merits succes? And what about games that limit your number of continues? Is that something that makes a game "harder"?
I think the personal/subjective experience of difficulty would then be measurable by the number of continues or lives lost the first time you manage to beat the game.
Battle Kid 1 & 2 measure how many times you've died. It's a sensible new-school scorekeeping, and getting as low as possible is desireable, but it's also a measurement of how difficult any individual player found the game.
Then again, some games can be very death intense (Knytt stories comes to mind) and still feel easy.
Games can have very different learning curves. A game like Castlevania can be very difficult to get into, but is relatively easy to learn, meanwhile a bullethell shoot'em up can take you years to get a good feeling for. On a more simple level, there could be important gameplay elements that you didn't understand at first (subweapon multipliers in Castlevania is very easy for people to miss out on), or just control mechanics that take some getting used to.
I don't think you should ever judge the difficulty of anything based on your first acquaintance with it.
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subweapon multipliers in Castlevania is very easy for people to miss out on
When i got CV3, the first thing i did was read through the manual, as part of the whole christmas magic. I think i tended to do that with whatever game i got my hands on. So there's no chance i'd miss the significance of the double/tripple tablets. But for someone playing these games alone for the first time today, that experience might be different like you described.
And yeah, it has a very specific control feature set. Little things like the pause of movement if jumping to a platform lower than the one you started on, to the fixed jump length guided by the 16x16 blocks, the firm change between moving and not moving... If you come from a fast, fluent and slippy-sloppy thing like SMB, that's probably going to have an impact on your first couple of plays.
So yeah, you'd need to measure number of deaths on your first playthrough, your second and third and so on to get a curve. And that's still complicated because different "spirit companions" and different routes through the game will vary the difficulty even further. So how could you compare it to another game? I don't think you can, and be exact about it.
I guess you could classify the NES actionvanias as having a medium to medium-low space between the skill required to beat the game and the roof for excellence (supported by in-game mechanics at least. Setting up rules for yourself like discussed above changes it). Sure, there are tricks like using the knockback effect for speed running and short cutting, and you can beat the game without learning how to rythm-time interaction with certain enemies, but there's not much of an upper game, even with CV3:s "expert mode".
I'd be interested in how it'd feel if the holy water didn't have the stun effect, and sypha's spells didn't do as much damage. Maybe tone down the cross/boomerang somehow, too. Perhaps shorter range.
If the game has many paths and choices like Castlevania III, you will just have to try to make an estimation of the average difficulty and how much effort it takes for you. Of course it means you need to have played the game a lot to be able to judge its difficulty fairly. It's not an exact science, and it will still be very much based on personal opinions until you can compile data gathered from many people to make a broader estimation.
I know that some people are very anal about insisting that if you haven't 1cc'd a game you haven't really beaten it. I think you have to distinguish between beating a game to see all levels and the ending and beating with a good score (if a Game Over results in the score resetting) or otherwise avoid abusing things like unlimited continues (as maximizing the score may sometimes be an easy but tedious process). IMHO beating a game normally means you have played the game by its own given rules, if it allows unlimited continues (with consequences) then that is part of its gameplay (there's an important exception here in arcade games that allows continuing without consequences by paying coins to make more money). I don't consider using warps, cheats and bug exploits to count as beating a game normally. You will most likely have to judge games individually though.
Like Bregalad said Ninja Gaiden is a hard game for most people and not many people can beat it in a few days for the first time (unless you play all the time). There are (sometimes quite severe) consequences for Game Overing and you can't beat a level by credit feeding the same way as an arcade game. You have to do the level over and over until you have either mastered it or fluke your way through it, that can't possibly be considered easy.
If I would 1cc every game I've beaten I would probably need to play games as a full time job, I just don't have that kind of time or interest for most games I've beaten. I'm fully satisfied with beating them normally even if I had to use a continue or two. Only games that are very fun to play are worth 1ccing in my opinion.
Finally there are definitely games where there is no real difference between a death and a Game Over. Eggerland series comes to mind. In the first game (MSX) there's at least a score, but in later games life stock is a useless feature that seems to serve no purpose (in some Eggerland games there are some consequences of dying but it's still no different from a Game Over). It's probably just there by convention and the developers just didn't think of removing it. The game is designed so that each level is an individual challenge, 1ccing of course would just be frustrating and wouldn't make sense.
BTW I also used to try to read the manual before I play a new game I got. It didn't always go so well though, and the manual often felt extremely long.
I'm not talking about beating or not beating games. I wouldn't want to spend time on a 1cc unless I really cared about the game.
I'm talking about having some sort of weight to base their perceived difficulty on. Some way to compare them. It's way too lazy to play it once and deem it difficult due to dying multiple times to the same boss (ie. how the Mega Man games tend to get their reputation).
So you would have to played the game quite thoroughly and give an estimation on how much effort it took you to beat it before you can make a fair judgement. If it has several difficulties, modes or paths with varying difficulty you probably have to consider them all or the bulk of them.
To add further to the soup: In battle kid 1 & 2, difficulty settings easy and normal are quite different game experiences (compared to normal/hard, for example).
Normal is like every other difficulty in that if you get hit, you have to retry from the (rather densely populated) latest checkpoint, while easy lets you do two mistakes before that happens, which mean you don't need to be as careful or might even take a hit for strategic reasons. On normal, each room is more of a puzzle you have to solve if you don't make it "naturally" the first time.
In any game, initial reactions might be right - it's just not reliable, and it seems probable the initial reaction is a bit more dependent on personality than a longer experience would be.
Sumez wrote:
But so is Ghouls n Ghosts, Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania 3, all of which offer infinite continues. None of those games should take you more than a couple of hours to credit feed through.
Sumez, I think you have a misinterpretation of what credit feeding is, unless I do. You credit feed through a game like Raiden II where you keep your progress despite dying/running out of lives, unlike Raiden I where every time you die, you are put back to the last checkpoint. Sure, there's often only 30 seconds to a minute of playtime between each checkpoint, but just throwing money at the game won't ensure success.
Bregalad wrote:
Sumez wrote:
Which obviously also doesn't serve to give any indication of how "difficult" said game is.
Ninja Gaiden is easy if you don't care how many continues you're using.
There is a lot of games I could never beat, no matter how many continue I'd use. Ninja Gaiden is one of them.
Exactly.
Sumez wrote:
But take a game like R-Type, which Espozo is obviously very familiar with, famous for being very difficult. But I bet that if anyone sat down and played it the same way, if they were able to always load their progress and continue from where they left off, and could keep using more credits, and retry every boss as much as they like, as you would in a Souls game, each challenge would probably be overcome a lot faster than it would in Dark Souls. So which is the harder game?
R-Type does do this though; you never have to redo the level or the game, and checkpoints are never more than a minute apart.
Again, even though the length of the area after this checkpoint is only about 40 seconds (you can cheese through the boss by getting into a spot it can't hit you and time it out), most people will not be able to get through this no matter how many continues they use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMZUtIhDKVs I actually beat it without auto fire where I had to stay to the right side of the screen at 0m15s to avoid being trapped by all the oncoming ships, which was far more difficult than even what the player has to do in the video. I'm far above the average person in video game skills, (including most self-proclaimed "hardcore gamers") but it took me several hours just to get past the checkpoint, never mind beat the game.
About R-Type, since it's more about pattern memorisation than reflexes,
Hiromasa Iwasaki (who himself was a programmer and director in Hudson soft) mentioned that it's very doable to beat it by practicing and following a "walkthrough". The game logic in the PCE port of the game was designed to be as close to the arcade version as possible, and there was an artist in the development team who was very good in shooting games, so for the attract mode game demos, they settled on recording this player's performance, instead of putting the original arcade ones in, even though this would make the game "less arcade perfect"(Iwasaki mentioned the recover pattern in the Stage 7 demo was exceptionally good). Following these recordings, even the worst player(another artist) in the whole company managed to beat the 1st loop of the game. I think this is an example of a game that is universally agreed to be hard, but could be helped a bit if you have some guides to follow.
Gilbert wrote:
I think this is an example of a game that is universally agreed to be hard, but could be helped a bit if you have some guides to follow.
To be fair, I can't think of a single "hard" game where memorization won't come in handy, although it is definitely safe to say it will help you more here proportionally. Stage 6 of R-Type and Stage 4 of R-Type III especially are examples of blatant memorization, where you'll either be boxed in or just killed immediately if you don't memorize the correct path. I beat both R-Type I and III (couldn't beat R-Type II, f*ck that game
) without a walkthrough, but it was exceptionally difficult. Now though, I can fairly easily beat R-Type I (as long as I don't die at the Stage 7 checkpoint) and can 1CC R-Type III on its first loop (I played it a lot more and it's easier overall). Other very difficult games that I've beaten, I'm not as much better as I was when I first beat them, but to be fair, I probably haven't played them as much. However, while memorization is a big aspect of either game's difficulty, I don't think it's an invalid form of difficulty. In a lot of situations, it's not even obvious what you're supposed to do to survive, so not only do you have to memorize where to go, but you have to create a plan to memorize first. Some of the boss battles on the games do not get much better with memorization though; the stage 4 boss of R-Type III still puts me on edge even though I've seen it 100 times, as I have the hardest time mentally keeping track of both it and the rotating background. (Unrelated to the discussion, but I found out that the Japanese version of R-Type III uses the regular boss theme for the stage 4 miniboss for some reason, just wanted to get that out there.
)
Espozo wrote:
To be fair, I can't think of a single "hard" game where memorization won't come in handy
Anything with pseudorandom number generation (PRNG) as a core part of its gameplay, like
Tetris the Grand Master series. Or roguelikes and the
Diablo series that they inspired.
Oh man yes the R-Type stage 7 checkpoint. I hated that spot, and failed at it. I did beat the game, but I could only do it by restarting and getting through that checkpoint on one life. If I hit that checkpoint I was doomed with no way to go back to the beginning of the level.
It's fairly obvious they put that there as a way for people who are trying to beat the game to spend all their money in vain.
After restarting the game several times after dying at that checkpoint over and over again, I finally said screw it and after several hours, I
somehow dodged those twenty something bullets in that napkin sized area. Repeatedly dying there made me probably the most pissed I've ever been at a video game, which certainly didn't help my performance.
Espozo wrote:
Sumez, I think you have a misinterpretation of what credit feeding is, unless I do. You credit feed through a game like Raiden II where you keep your progress despite dying/running out of lives, unlike Raiden I where every time you die, you are put back to the last checkpoint. Sure, there's often only 30 seconds to a minute of playtime between each checkpoint, but just throwing money at the game won't ensure success.
Credit feeding is credit feeding, no matter how far back you are sent.
Sure, the game won't carry you to the end passively, but even Ninja Gaiden allows you to start exactly from the spot where you'd respawn from simply losing a life, it even allows you to return to the final boss with a subweapon, which you'd normally never have in that fight when playing the game normally.
Sure it's possible to never beat the game if you're just completely stuck at a specific boss fight, but I don't see how there can possibly be any doubt that allowing yourself to completely ignore the concept of a limited number of lives (which almost every NES action game has) will diminish the perceived difficulty of the game
immensely, and make it more difficult to compare it with other games, simply due to the different ways they might handle the concept of continuing, after technically having lost the game.
Basically, continuing will always reduce the difficulty of any game to the single most difficult checkpoint of the entire game, making the rest of it essentially redundant. Surely you can't disagree with that?
Gilbert wrote:
About R-Type, since it's more about pattern memorisation than reflexes,
Hiromasa Iwasaki (who himself was a programmer and director in Hudson soft) mentioned that it's very doable to beat it by practicing and following a "walkthrough". The game logic in the PCE port of the game was designed to be as close to the arcade version as possible, and there was an artist in the development team who was very good in shooting games, so for the attract mode game demos, they settled on recording this player's performance, instead of putting the original arcade ones in, even though this would make the game "less arcade perfect"(Iwasaki mentioned the recover pattern in the Stage 7 demo was exceptionally good). Following these recordings, even the worst player(another artist) in the whole company managed to beat the 1st loop of the game. I think this is an example of a game that is universally agreed to be hard, but could be helped a bit if you have some guides to follow.
R-Type tends to get a lot of both hate and love for this reason. It's commonly accepted to be a bit of a puzzle shooter, and recognized as very memorization heavy. A lot of shooter fans will hate this, but personally I really love the concept that a game can be devilishly hard initially, but at the same time, by letting the game be beatable mostly by "knowing what to do", it allows almost anyone, no matter how much they would normally suck at shooting games, to be able to beat the game. It's a staple of a lot of Irem games (Metal Storm for NES is a good example), and I'd say even Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden have strong aspects of this as well.
It takes away some potential depth of the gameplay, but on the other hand it will make the game feel extremely rewarding for most people who decide to give it a genuine attempt.
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Sure it's possible to never beat the game if you're just completely stuck at a specific boss fight, but I don't see how there can possibly be any doubt that allowing yourself to completely ignore the concept of a limited number of lives (which almost every NES action game has) will diminish the perceived difficulty of the game immensely, and make it more difficult to compare it with other games, simply due to the different ways they might handle the concept of continuing, after technically having lost the game.
You are completely ignoring the fact that play time as well as the patience of the player are typically limited. Even if the game allows for infinite retries, the player might not want to use infinite retries, which is why the game is perceived to be "harder" when the number of lives and/or continues is limited.
For instance, let's consider Double Dragon III. This game only have a single life (per playable character - you get 4 of them in the game but start with only one), and no continues. I'd say this game is extremely hard, as if you fail anywhere you have to restart
all over again. By your logic, DD3 is not any harder or easier than any other game, because having only a single chance does not make the game harder. And that is technically true - but you can't ignore the fact that when sitting at Double Dragon 3 for an afternoon, the chance you'll beat the game is a lot lower than an hypotetical game of the same difficulty but with lives and/or continues.
And that would be my definition of difficulty. You pick the game and play it 2 hours during an afternoon, without cheats nor save states, and note how far you progressed. The closest to the begining that was, the harder is the game. Because games were designed to be played casually that way, they were not initially designed to be abused, speedran, or had any additional challenge such as 1CC or beating boss with the weakest weapon or whathever.
Applied to the games we've mentionned so far and to my own way of playing :
- Castlevania : I'm extremely likely to reach the grim reaper, and it's almost unthinkable I'd beat him, so I made progress about 5/6 of the game. But I can't beat it. So on one side it's not that hard since I can beat most of the game, but it's impossible for me to finish it so we could also agrue it's very hard
- Ninja Gaiden : I'll be likely to make progress through the first part of the game without difficulty, only to be stuck later, so it's similar to Castlevania in this respect.
- Battletoads : I'm likely to have reached level 9 or 10, however on a bad day I'll fail before and run out of continues, so it's hard, but I can still see major part of the game
- Double Dragon 3 : I'm extremely unlikely to beat the first level, so game is very hard
- Mega Man games : Very likely I'll at least reach the Wily stages, and possibly beat them or not depending on how good the day is, so they're fairly easy.
- Kirby's Adventure : I don't think it's possible beating this large game in 2 hours, but I'd have made constant progress without difficulty, so we could say it's easy.
Bregalad wrote:
You are completely ignoring the fact that play time as well as the patience of the player are typically limited.
I'm ignoring that fact because it has nothing to do with how difficult a game is. That is the topic of the thread.
You can compile a list of how difficult games are based on playing each of them "2 hours during an afternoon", and I would even claim such a list is really useful for someone looking for some games they can get through fast for a quick non-demanding game fix. I've picked games based on this many times before, when trying to weed out my backlog.
It wouldn't give a very good indication of the entire scope of that game, and pretty much any decently challenging arcade like action title would end up on the same abstract scale of "very hard", but it's entirely a valid way of looking at the game, as long as you take your prefix into account.
What I don't get is why my approach is invalid? It should be obvious to anyone that Rainbow Islands is created with the intention of beating the entire thing on one coin. But because you
can choose to just continue after you lose, it's no harder than Ghouls 'n Ghosts, which also allows this. I honestly feel this perspectice devaluates my feat, as if spending more than a year trying to master the game was essentially pointless.
In fact, Ghouls n Ghosts provides another interesting counter-argument. This game requires you to beat the game twice for the true ending. But there is almost no difference between the two loops, and anyone who's able to beat the first loop, should be able to beat the second one individually. So what is the purpose of the second loop, if continuing doesn't make a difference?
Personally I think the second loop is absolutely ingenious in the context of the game, since every single segment is based on a ton of RNG that means you'll get patterns that vary heavily in difficulty. But throughout a full 2-loop playthrough, the game will even out almost any good luck you might have in one segment, ensuring that only someone who truly mastered the game gets to beat it. But if you can potentially try every segment as much as you like until you get some fortunate patterns, this compromises an essential part of the game's incredible design.
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Applied to the games we've mentionned so far and to my own way of playing :
- Castlevania : I'm extremely likely to reach the grim reaper, and it's almost unthinkable I'd beat him, so I made progress about 5/6 of the game. But I can't beat it. So on one side it's not that hard since I can beat most of the game, but it's impossible for me to finish it so we could also agrue it's very hard
- Ninja Gaiden : I'll be likely to make progress through the first part of the game without difficulty, only to be stuck later, so it's similar to Castlevania in this respect.
(...etc...)
This only confirms exactly what I was saying though? You can judge a game's difficulty based on how far you can get with unlimited continues, but essentially what you get is an estimation of the single hardest part of the game, and not the game as a whole.
My neice's strategy in Kirby games when she was younger was always: Fly over the whole stage.
Yes of course unlimited continues has a large impact on a game's difficulty, no one disagrees with that. But that's not what we are discussing, also games with limited or no continues tends to be made much easier. For example Super Mario Bros has no continues while Super Mario Bros 2j has unlimited continues. SMB2j is still considered much much harder than SMB for many other reasons.
Why is your point invalid? Because you say that games like Ninja Gaiden doesn't make any different on a death and a Game Over even though it does in most cases (not on the final boss).
Rainbow Island is created to eat coins out of you and the PC Engine version is made more like a console game with a milder difficulty level by giving you unlimited continues although with new consequences not present in the arcade version. If you ignore the fact that a game has unlimited continues in your difficulty ratings because in your opinion the game isn't designed to use them, you are missing the point.
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You can judge a game's difficulty based on how far you can get with unlimited continues, but essentially what you get is an estimation of the single hardest part of the game, and not the game as a whole.
If that's how a game is designed that is how people is going to play it and that's how its difficulty is going to be judged. You may also consider getting a good score though. If you make up arbitrary rules and try to judge the game after that, you are only judging a new game that you made up yourself.
BTW a difficulty rating grade like: easy, medium, hard or 1 to 100 may work on many action games for NES but may be harder to apply for certain other genres and especially modern games that always comes with lots of modes and often works more like RPGs with progress saving. More complicated games may need a comment the explains in what way the game is challenging. There you could explain the differences between the above mentioned difficulty settings in Battle Kid 1 & 2 for example. But this also means more data that needs to be compiled.
I still fail to see how respecting the game's limited supply of lives is an "arbitrary rule". It's a completely intended part of the game's design, and anything else is an attempt to apply a much more "modern" approach to classic games, where any challenge in a game is designed to be a short range checkpoint-to-checkpoint experience, and extra lives is a novelty with no real value (see: Super Mario Galaxy).
It's the approach where you play a game until you have gone from the start to the end, and then you can move on to the next game - as opposed to having fun replaying the game over and over until you get good enough to master it.
That isn't how games were played back in the NES days, and it's not what they are designed for. There is a reason the screen says "GAME OVER" in capital letters before it allows you to choose "continue". They are designed for true replayability, and to continue challenging the player on every new playthrough. If you don't care to delve deeper into the game, you can choose to spam continues and just spend a few hours with the game, and that's fine if it's fun for you. Hell, a lot of games don't really deserve more than that anyway. But don't come telling me afterwards that the game was "easy" because you beat it in a few hours.
Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.
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and extra lives is a novelty with no real value (see: Super Mario Galaxy).
Perhaps the same could be said about Super mario bros. 3. Well, if you run out of them, you need to redo the world you're on, which is a drastic change of play. But at the same time, the game is extremely generous with 1ups, and the levels are rather short (a bit like close-range checkpoint to checkpoint). So most of the time, you won't experience what a "game over" feels like.
SMB2 is a lot harsher until you're good enough to beat it in one go. Perhaps also a bit harsher than SMB1? I don't remember, it may have been a full decade since i last played SMB1.
That was actually
one of my earliest points in the thread.
I feel that SMB3 "level design-wise" is a lot harder than the first SMB, but it gives you a lot of remedies to mitigate that, even to the point of powerups that let you bypass entire stages that you find too difficult. This is a part of the game's design, and as such it's clearly an easier (albeit much longer) game than SMB1.
Despite that, it has a lot of individual stages that are much more difficult than anything SMB1 has to offer. I've considered making a hack for SMB3 that makes it into a leaner, more challenging action game, because it's well designed enough that a 100% no-miss clear is completely possible, but that is very easy to overlook due to how much it allows you to screw up without really punishing it.
In fact, this was the very first thing I posted.
That I think there are so many different approaches and different ways to play a game, that it's impossible to compare different people's takes on different games.
Hah, yeah sorry, my memory proved too short there.
Your idea of a hack sounds promising. A more action and skill focused ruleset applied to the already well designed but tough levels of smb3. I'd be happy to try and fail at it.
I was kind of going in the same direction with the idea of removing some of the cheesier/exploitable aspects from Castlevania III. But it's more about nerfing certain subweapons so they can't kill bosses in seconds without requirement of skill (holy water, fire spell, etc), which should also have the side effect varying the players' choice of weapons a bit more by having their versatility evened out.
Sumez wrote:
That isn't how games were played back in the NES days
That's certainly how we played games back in the NES days. I used warps and tricks as much as I could after learning about them. There was two levels in world 8 of SMB3 that I couldn't beat as a kid. It's the two first levels of the dark part of the world. I think the second one has a black & white sun. I always used a cloud item to skip the first one and a P-wing to fly over the second one. It wasn't until I got a bit older that I started to beat and explore every level in games and also try to 1cc games.
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and it's not what they are designed for.
Well if the game allows a certain something it's certainly designed that way, no matter what the initial intention was. The fact that a game may have both lives and continues with not much different between them, or like Galaxy or Eggerland no real different at all, is only because they remain from a concept invented in an arcade environment where it maked sense.
Quote:
Perhaps the same could be said about Super mario bros. 3. Well, if you run out of them, you need to redo the world you're on, which is a drastic change of play. But at the same time, the game is extremely generous with 1ups, and the levels are rather short (a bit like close-range checkpoint to checkpoint). So most of the time, you won't experience what a "game over" feels like.
Yes and Super Mario World is even worse in this regard. SMB3 doesn't really just make you redo a world though, it remembers what levels Mario and Luigi has cleared respectively, and if Luigi Game Overs only levels that Luigi has cleared are restored.
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In fact, this was the very first thing I posted.
That I think there are so many different approaches and different ways to play a game, that it's impossible to compare different people's takes on different games.
Yes you have a good point here. Playing style certainly affects the way you judge the difficulty.
Quote:
Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.
Oh yeah I forgot there's a trick to continue. I guess it's one of those common cheats that's considered part of the game's rules and not a cheat. I've never used it though (I didn't know about it as a kid), and SMB2j is obviously still much harder with or without it.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
SMB2 is a lot harsher until you're good enough to beat it in one go. Perhaps also a bit harsher than SMB1?
"A bit harsher" is an understatement.
SMB2 is so harsh that we got
SMB2 instead.
For clarity, i didn't mean SMB2j but the thematical adaption we got instead.
Sumez wrote:
Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.
YMMV, but I consider anything not mentioned in the game's original documentation cheating. ("A+Start to continue" is not mentioned in the manual.)
(That's not to say that I never cheat. Some games just aren't worth the pain.)
Then
Super Mario Bros. is impossible because entering pipes is required to complete WORLD 8-4, and
its manual doesn't mention that pipes (which it calls "flower-pots") can be entered. It describes the function of Down on the Control Pad as "Crouch. (Super Mario only.)"
Sumez wrote:
If you don't care to delve deeper into the game, you can choose to spam continues and just spend a few hours with the game, and that's fine if it's fun for you. Hell, a lot of games don't really deserve more than that anyway. But don't come telling me afterwards that the game was "easy" because you beat it in a few hours.
I really have no idea where you're getting that anyone can beat these games in just "a few hours". Ghosts 'N Goblins, Castlevania, and even Mega Man took
several "few hour" attempts for me to beat them. I remember the first time I beat R-Type III, (probably the first really hard game I ever beat) I left my Super Nintendo on overnight so I wouldn't lose my progress; that run easily took over 8 hours. You said that games with unlimited continues are more limited by the player's patience than their skill, but can't you make the argument that skill is directly related to patience? I don't know how you could argue that anyone in the world (without a relevant mental disorder) couldn't beat even Battletoads if they practiced literally nonstop, unless you can reveal that certain people are too limited by their genes or something.
And finally, yes, games with unlimited continues are often much more difficult than ones without them if you disregard this. Battletoads is probably the only game with limited continues that ever gets as difficult as Ghosts 'N Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, R-Type, Super Monkey Ball, or other famously difficult games with unlimited continues if you disregard continues.
Yes patience is certainly a necessary skill to get good at games. Those games took me countless hours to beat for the first time, and while my skill level in action games probably isn't anything special in hardcore gaming circles, I'm certainly better than average. A few hours for "anyone" to beat Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania sounds very optimistic to me.
thefox wrote:
Sumez wrote:
Also, Super Mario Bros has unlimited continues.
YMMV, but I consider anything not mentioned in the game's original documentation cheating. ("A+Start to continue" is not mentioned in the manual.)
(That's not to say that I never cheat. Some games just aren't worth the pain.)
That's my definition of cheating too. Although sometimes you can bend the rules. SMB isn't that difficult of a game though so I don't think it really needs continues. I for one was perfectly happy without them as a kid when games in general was very hard for me. Doesn't matter that I couldn't get far, I just play the same level over and over and thought it was the greatest fun there is. I heard there are no life stock or Game Overs in Mario Odyssey, kids nowdays have it too easy...
tepples wrote:
Then
Super Mario Bros. is impossible because entering pipes is required to complete WORLD 8-4, and
its manual doesn't mention that pipes (which it calls "flower-pots") can be entered. It describes the function of Down on the Control Pad as "Crouch. (Super Mario only.)"
lol
Pokun wrote:
A few hours for "anyone" to beat Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania sounds very optimistic to me.
^^^
The GameFAQs site actually has some decent feedback from players.
This list, limited to games that have 200+ votes, pretty much has all the games mentioned in this thread right at the top (except TMNT, I'd rather not think about that game too much, heheh).
https://www.gamefaqs.com/games/rankings?platform=41&genre=0&list_type=diff&view_type=0&dlc=1&min_votes=3When you lower the minimum votes, the list perhaps gets a little noisier, but the more obscure titles will show up.
minimum 50 votesminimum 5 votesThose rankings seem fairly agreeable. Doesn't really cover the fairness factor, though. I have heard several experienced players say that Adventure Island might be one of the hardest NES games. I haven't played through it or even attempted to, but it sounds like one of those cases where it has to be a no-death run. If you lose power-ups, you're doomed.
The other day I was thinking about a night when friend and I tried to beat The Three Stooges (not hard overall, it's just random). We couldn't do it, and at some point we just laid the controller down. Then the game continued on by itself, with no further input, avoiding enough of the mouse traps, and picked up enough of the money to actually win.
Ikari Warriors was the first 3rd-party NES game I had as a kid, it's pretty brutal without the cheat code. Even then it's still hard, because the cheat code will happily respawn you inside the walls (it's almost guaranteed to happen in 2-player mode).
Memblers wrote:
https://www.gamefaqs.com/games/rankings?platform=41&genre=0&list_type=diff&view_type=0&dlc=1&min_votes=3
Lmao at 1943 not even being on the list.
The list looks like more of a popularity contest than anything; why is Castlevania rated higher than Punch-out?
Memblers wrote:
]Ikari Warriors was the first 3rd-party NES game I had as a kid, it's pretty brutal without the cheat code.
I don't own it for NES, but I actually got to play it at an arcade, (Thunder Valley, in Virginia) which was awesome. I went all the way through the first level without dying once, until I reached a helicopter boss and saw that the game basically wanted for me to just hand over my money at that point because there was no way to attack it without being hit as well. This same arcade actually has an After Burner II arcade cabinet, which is really badass. I'd be interested to know just how much the PCB for the game cost in 1987...
Espozo wrote:
Lmao at 1943 not even being on the list.
The list looks like more of a popularity contest than anything; why is Castlevania rated higher than Punch-out?
Difficulty rating lists will always be like that, when they are a community effort. Look at how high Mega Man is compared to a ton of other games that are actually difficult.
Also, I don't think any single person would ever put the US Ninja Gaiden III below any of the other NG games. No one in their right mind would do that.
Popular games would naturally get more data and therefore more accurate ratings. Trying to order them by difficulty would very hard until enough games has enough data. Less known games will never have enough data though I guess.
Espozo wrote:
Memblers wrote:
Ikari Warriors was the first 3rd-party NES game I had as a kid, it's pretty brutal without the cheat code.
I don't own it for NES, but I actually got to play it at an arcade, (Thunder Valley, in Virginia) which was awesome. I went all the way through the first level without dying once, until I reached a helicopter boss and saw that the game basically wanted for me to just hand over my money at that point because there was no way to attack it without being hit as well. This same arcade actually has an After Burner II arcade cabinet, which is really badass. I'd be interested to know just how much the PCB for the game cost in 1987...
It's a Senjou no Ookami/Commando clone but it used an extra stick to aim with. This doesn't work very well on the NES though so it's a very hard game. I used to borrow this game as a kid, the ABBA code stops working at the end of the third level when missiles comes raining down. I never got past that point.
I got around playing Ninja Gaiden for probably the first time in three years. Even for an NES game, it is really dependent on memorization, because sometimes you need to take it slow and other times you need to just hold right and time your jumps and slashes, which requires memorization largely due to the terrible enemy pop in this game has. Choosing the wrong option will have you get hit by something, and because your invincibility window is so narrow, everything will then combo you until you are knocked off the edge. The final bosses are really the only part of this game that get infuriating, largely due to the penalty for dying on them. Because the second part of 6-2 is so much easier than the first, I would intentionally get a game over if I arrived at the door before the boss with inadequate health or items. People complain about the second stage of the boss, but it's not so bad when you have 99 item power and the flame wheel item and never have to jump.
I actually had the most trouble with the third stage of the boss, because I had no idea what to do; I initially didn't know that you could take out the tail, so I was throwing items at it but I kept dying because the majority of where the boss throws the projectiles is a good ways in front of it, not immediately in front of it.
Man, the ending sequence with the castle falling at the end really goes to show how much this game sought to copy Castlevania. It's a shame the in game artwork is so much uglier than the cutscenes; I couldn't find anything in the credits suggesting that these were handled by different people though. Also, I know it's anime, but still, Ryu Hayabusa is definitely Caucasian.
It was long time I played this last, how did you get the flame wheel on the final boss? I think someone said the sword spin is useful on it if you can keep it wall the way.
When you chop off the head of the boss it comes crashing down on you. I have no idea if you can get past that without taking damage.
Maybe Ryuu is supposed to be half-Japanese, his father is Joe Hayabusa in Japanese which sounds like he a Caucasian that was adopted into the family or took his wife's last name (hayabusa means peregrine falcon BTW, but the name is written in katakana in the game so I'm not sure how it's written in kanji).
Espozo wrote:
I would intentionally get a game over if I arrived at the door before the boss with inadequate health or items.
(...)
People complain about the second stage of the boss, but it's not so bad when you have 99 item power and the flame wheel item and never have to jump.
When you reach the boss (or whenever you beat one phase of the boss and proceed to the next) you will always have all your life regained, and all your items taken away. This happens every time a cut-scene happens, and was probably not originally intentional, but something the developers decided to leave in.
This means you have to beat all forms with only your sword, and adds a great challenge IMO since you can't cheese them like you can with every other boss in the game.
It does however allow you to return to the boss fully equipped with a subweapon and ammo if you do mess up, which is a nice helping hand to beginners who are just trying to credit feed through the game, without giving people going for a real hardcore clear the ability to cheese it. It's how I beat the game the first time around, but I wouldn't accept it for a "serious" run of the game
Quote:
Man, the ending sequence with the castle falling at the end really goes to show how much this game sought to copy Castlevania. It's a shame the in game artwork is so much uglier than the cutscenes;
Ninja Gaiden is pretty much a high octane Castlevania, and I love it for it.
The first game tends to get a lot of praise for its graphics for some reason, but I agree that it's ugly. Especially the jungle is a garbled mess. The third game in the series is really good looking, though. One of my favourite examples of characteristic NES graphics.
Pokun wrote:
When you chop off the head of the boss it comes crashing down on you. I have no idea if you can get past that without taking damage.
You can't. Objectively bad game design, but at least it's a small offense in an otherwise neat boss fight.
Sumez wrote:
You can compile a list of how difficult games are based on playing each of them "2 hours during an afternoon", and I would even claim such a list is really useful for someone looking for some games they can get through fast for a quick non-demanding game fix. I've picked games based on this many times before, when trying to weed out my backlog.
It wouldn't give a very good indication of the entire scope of that game, and pretty much any decently challenging arcade like action title would end up on the same abstract scale of "very hard", but it's entirely a valid way of looking at the game, as long as you take your prefix into account.
What I don't get is why my approach is invalid?
The reason you approach is, not really invalid but instead weird or biased, is that you are ranking how hard it is to 1cc game. But most gamers won't care. Their goal is to beat the game, not to 1cc the game. If you can beat the game, but it will requires many continues, people are still happy to have beaten the game, and only if they want to seek further challenge they will do so. For many of the mentionned games, the problem isn't that people aren't able to fulfull an additional challenge, many people can't beat many games at all, no matter how much time they put onto them.
Maybe YOU are so good of a gamer that "beating a game" is a totally trivial and uninteresting task to YOU. But for weaker gamers like me, it is quite otherwise. Our limited abilities, patience, and available palying time are determining when it comes to how "hard" we percieve a game to be.
This is how the games were played back then. Nobody would sit before the tv 24/7 until you beat a game - instead you just tried to do what you could for 2 or maybe at most 3 hours and then after that time has ellapsed your patience is over in the rare case where you don't have a more important thing to do.
I don't think it's totally invalid for judging the difficulty, it's a way of playing the game after all. But thinking it's the only way or most common way to judge is naive. If you judge the Megaman games like that, Megaman 2 would probably be the hardest game instead of the next easiest.
All this talk of Ninja Gaiden made me dig it up and play it again after all these years. I seemed to remember most things although I made some bad mistakes early. I used 2 continues and was on my final life when beat it, beating all the final bosses in one go (thanks to all your tips). I should be able to 1cc it with some practice. But now I wanna play Ninja Gaiden 2.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Quote:
subweapon multipliers in Castlevania is very easy for people to miss out on
When i got CV3, the first thing i did was read through the manual, as part of the whole christmas magic. I think i tended to do that with whatever game i got my hands on. So there's no chance i'd miss the significance of the double/tripple tablets. But for someone playing these games alone for the first time today, that experience might be different like you described.
I do not understand people who do not read manuals.[/url]
Sumez wrote:
If you are allowed to continue indefinitely - how do you even measure the game's difficulty? If it's technically impossible to lose the game, what merits succes? And what about games that limit your number of continues? Is that something that makes a game "harder"?
Infinite continues means the highest/longest continuous performance is limited to "between any two checkpoints". You only need to play "at least yea good" for any segment once.
Without continues, you need to play "at least yea good" for the entire run; which means you need to become
consistent at playing well, or raise exponentially with length your number of tries to just happen upon the right move.
It's like the difference between having to run 100m while correctly reciting single stanzas 50 (non-consecutive) times vs running a 5k while reciting the entire poem correctly. Or, for the unskilled, flipping a coin and eventually accruing 50 heads, vs flipping it and getting 50 heads in a row. (Finite continues would be how many tails you might get, or being allowed some options to restart 100m+stanza in the 5k on screwing up/being too slow.)
Myask wrote:
I do not understand people who do not read manuals.
After a court ruled that it was copyright infringement for a video game rental shop to make a photocopy of a manual for a rented copy of a video game, video game rental shops stopped including manuals with rented copies.
Or do you also not understand people who rent games?
Myask wrote:
I do not understand people who do not read manuals.
I don't think I ever read a game manual in my life, except maybe for a few pages here and there. Part of the reason was that manuals weren't always translated (at first, video games were mostly imported), and I was absolutely clueless about english back when I was a kid. Later, when translated manuals became more common and I started to learn english, I was already used to not reading manuals.
Thankfully Bergsala always translated the manuals to Swedish. The manuals was part of the fun in the NES and SNES eras, that's why I prefer to collect games CIB or at least with manual. They are filled with great artwork and teaches tricks not always clear in the game. I think it was during the GBA era when manuals stopped being translated to Swedish (although I knew English by then so that alone wasn't a problem) and PAL manuals was thinner and black & white. Later I learned that NTSC manuals was still in colour and not so much thinned down! Nowdays Nintendo manuals are in colour even in PAL regions again but on the other hand they are not as fun as they used to be (applies to all regions). They just contains important (and less important) information on how you play the game with screen shots, no funny artwork or anything. And as games also comes with tutorials and stuff the manuals usually don't contain any unique information either. Thankfully 3DS manuals comes in digital form on the cartridge though, so we don't have to worry so much about loose cartridges in the future.
BTW I played through Ninja Ryuukenden 2 and 3. 2 was maybe a bit easier than 1. It doesn't have the intense difficulty spike in the last level as 1 had, it's more evened out in the game. Enemies also doesn't spawn on the same spot as easy as in 1. Finally it doesn't require as much memorization. I used tons of continues, but that is only because I haven't played it as much as the first one.
3 is much easier than 1 and 2, and the spawn points are even less aggressive (you have to go quite far to make an enemy respawn), and there's almost no memorization at all. The bosses are also much easier. I used tons on continues on this one too but I have played this game much less than the first two as this is my least favourite out of them. It's the most polished one though, with best graphics, effects and controls.
Looking at the cut scenes I don't really agree that Ryu looks Caucasian though. He looks like a typical Japanese guy do in Japanese manga, I don't think he is half after all (Joe is probably just Jou which I guess could be a Japanese name). Irene and Robert are most likely American or from another English speaking country though, judging by the pronunciation of their names.
Pokun wrote:
Looking at the cut scenes I don't really agree that Ryu looks Caucasian though.
Definitely not with the mask on, but I was a bit thrown off with his appearance in the ending cutscene. To me, this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=1m20s and this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=18m10s don't even look like the same person. I can't look at the pictures side by side, but his eyes look less narrow and his face less sharp, although this could just be due to how the second image is smaller so it's harder to make out fine details. However, his hair in the ending cutscene (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=17m36s) is much brighter than is should be to be "fully" Japanese and is definitely different than it appears earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyFQ9aRp_U#t=0m42s It's not a palette issue, it's just that the highlight is far bigger.
However, now that I think about it, Ryu from Street Fighter has had some hair colors atypical for a Japanese person (or any person, for that matter) so you could argue that it's just an art thing.
About manuals, I got a lot of my current SNES and N64 games passed down from my cousin without the manual. However, I got these at an age where I wouldn't even be able to read them, so it didn't matter.
In my opinion, if anyone even needs to read the manual, there's a flaw in the game design. I will admit though, I am sad over the loss of physical manuals for all the artwork and whatnot they had in them. I especially love the DKC manual where Cranky rants about the game.
He definitely has Caucasian features as well as Japanese ones, but that's just how the Japanese artists draw in general I mean. It's even more clear in Ninja Gaiden 2, 3 and the OVA (recommended watch) where he is drawn even more like a very typical Japanese main character in manga. Realistically, I think he could be half or fully Caucasian though, but I don't think that's what's intended. I can't say anything about him in mask or the less detailed image of him in the intro.
Quote:
About manuals, I got a lot of my current SNES and N64 games passed down from my cousin without the manual. However, I got these at an age where I wouldn't even be able to read them, so it didn't matter.
In my opinion, if anyone even needs to read the manual, there's a flaw in the game design. I will admit though, I am sad over the loss of physical manuals for all the artwork and whatnot they had in them. I especially love the DKC manual where Cranky rants about the game.
I'm also missing a lot of manuals for my older games. I was careful with my things, but I also loved to read them which often made them break or become lost.
In the NES era, it was much harder to have in-game explanations for things so the manuals was often necessary (although they mostly explain things you could figure out on your own). Nowdays it's easy to have online messages and stuff in the game that shows up and explains every little menu or situation, or a display that shows what the buttons do etc.
Yeah Cranky is a classic example of how great game manuals used to be.
Pokun wrote:
BTW I played through Ninja Ryuukenden 2 and 3. 2 was maybe a bit easier than 1. It doesn't have the intense difficulty spike in the last level as 1 had, it's more evened out in the game. Enemies also doesn't spawn on the same spot as easy as in 1. Finally it doesn't require as much memorization. I used tons of continues, but that is only because I haven't played it as much as the first one.
3 is much easier than 1 and 2, and the spawn points are even less aggressive (you have to go quite far to make an enemy respawn), and there's almost no memorization at all. The bosses are also much easier. I used tons on continues on this one too but I have played this game much less than the first two as this is my least favourite out of them. It's the most polished one though, with best graphics, effects and controls.
.
From what I read, they made the US version a lot harder than the Japanese version. Which, if you thought it was easier, if believe. The USA NES version is a lot harder than 1 or 2.
As far as Ryu being caucasian, I always thought his look was based off
Leonard Whiting.
Quote:
From what I read, they made the US version a lot harder than the Japanese version. Which, if you thought it was easier, if believe. The USA NES version is a lot harder than 1 or 2.
Yes the NES US version (but not the SNES US version in Trilogy). I guess they thought the game was way too easy.
It looks like they removed the passwords (not like you need them), increased damage from enemies, limited continues and added more enemies. I played this game a long time ago on emulators, I remember it was very hard.
I just came to think of one thing that i think i'd file in the "don't do this" cabinet regarding difficulty:
In SMB2 (u/e), a continue is worth as many extra lives as you can get, which in turn is closely related to
1)finding as many coins as possible
2)using those coins in the one-armed bandit.
The potental sum of that outweighs finding 1ups in the wild. Because this is the most common form of getting extra lives, it effectively means that the difficulty of the game is a factor of how good you are at winning on the one armed bandit after each stage. The skill of a fun but redundant mini game shouldn't really be able to be so influential.
This is also very unlike secret 1up mushrooms. These make getting through the game easier as a reward for thoroughly exploring and getting to know the levels.
It's not the only game to have a mini-game reward you with extra lives, but it's a game where the outcome of the minigame is so significant in terms of 1ups. Even SMB3 which has a number of such minigames has tons of varying mechanisms which all spam 1ups, so roulettes/bandits matter somewhat less and if one of them isn't your strong suit, maybe some other is.
On the other hand, collecting secret coins and using them is part of the fun, so i'm not really sure... i just think it's a bit too influential, in hindsight.
Bonus levels/minigames is a part of games that I've always loved though. It's a nice and fresh feeling to take a break from the normal mechanics, with a game where losing usually only means that you miss out on the bonus. And getting good at it and winning as much as possible may be a fun challenge in itself (who doesn't try to get all the coins in the coin heavens?).
But yeah Mario games are quite generous with dishing out 1UPs left and right from SMUSA and onwards . SMB1 and SMB2j have better balanced bonus levels that only gives coins or some power up (the coins are especially appreciated in SMB2j). But I have to say I love the bandit in SMUSA and the variety of the bonus minigames in SMB3, even if they shower you in 1UPs and items.
Oh, i'm not against mini-games and bonus games, they can be great! Definitely agree that they can help complement a game a lot.
That one struck me as being a bit off-balance speaking strictly in terms of different difficulties. But i guess you can argue it may potentially help players with less platforming experience get through the game easier if they happen to be good at timing slots instead. It's a random scenario, but it's there.
Yes I used to be good at getting the cherries in the slots (not anymore though), and I was definitely a much worse platform game player back then than I am now, so I probably needed the 1UPs a lot more. It's a much more skill-dependant machine than real one-armed bandits are, it's not for gambling after all. I used to get as much coins as possible so I could play it more. Nowdays I think it's a bit tedious and might even skip out on coins so I don't have to play so much slots.
The SMB3 minigames also had their tricks. For example I noticed that the lower left card in the memory game was always a star. This was long before I knew that they use fixed patterns.
Really good point about the minigames/slot machines. As much as SMB2 is a great game, that's definitely a flawed mechanic, and skews the perspective of the game's challenge towards how well you'll get perfect 1up-rewards in that minigame (which is really easy too, as far as I remember). Of course, this does assume the approach I suggested where any time you use a continue, it counts towards the game's difficulty. Otherwise 1ups are meaningless.
Pokun wrote:
3 is much easier than 1 and 2, and the spawn points are even less aggressive (you have to go quite far to make an enemy respawn), and there's almost no memorization at all. The bosses are also much easier. I used tons on continues on this one too but I have played this game much less than the first two as this is my least favourite out of them. It's the most polished one though, with best graphics, effects and controls.
3 is indeed a much more "polished" game than the first two. It loses a lot of the unique charm that defines them, and 1 is still my favourite partly due to how lean and unique it is in what it does, but 3 is a much more stereotypical, classic NES sidescrolling action platformer. As such, though it's an absolutely perfect example of those games, a subgenre that kind of died with the NES, too. I regret that it is as easy as it is, as despite being fun, it outlives its potential after a few hours, compared to the first two games which remain being fun years after beating them the first time.
Fortunately they remedied that in the US release, with a much higher damage scale and more thought out and challenging bonus item placements. The result is a game that's infamous for perhaps going too much in the opposite direction though. It's certainly been too daunting for me to pick up so far, but one day I know I will defeat it. It's a game that deserves it.
Myask wrote:
Infinite continues means the highest/longest continuous performance is limited to "between any two checkpoints". You only need to play "at least yea good" for any segment once.
Without continues, you need to play "at least yea good" for the entire run; which means you need to become consistent at playing well, or raise exponentially with length your number of tries to just happen upon the right move.
Exactly...
Yes and the story in 3 is also less exciting, although I honestly think it was the best approach or they would have to repeat the same basic story as the first two games a third time. It also has many improvements in controls and such, so it's a shame it lost so much charm. You don't have to remember what ninjutsu you get from what container anymore because the containers are see-through.
I really recommend the OVA though, it takes place after all three games (some time after Ninja Gaiden 2). It's story is good and could very well have been used in a fourth game, and you even get to know what happened with Robert which wasn't clear in the second game. It really feels like a cannon part of the series (which it probably also is) and not some cheap anime filler episode.
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this does assume the approach I suggested where any time you use a continue, it counts towards the game's difficulty. Otherwise 1ups are meaningless.
Super Mario USA has limited continues if I remember correctly.
Pokun wrote:
you even get to know what happened with Robert which wasn't clear in the second game.
I thought Robert died. Didn't the game make it clear he sacrificed himself?
Bregalad wrote:
Am I the only one who find SMB difficult ? I mean there's only a single hit point, and the movement control is so erratic, I hate it. I prefer heroes running at constant speed, I hate how Mario accelerate and decelerates so slowly. I probably didn't get much further than world 2-4 or something. However in SMB3 it's much more easier for some reason, this is the only Mario game where I really went far (although I don't think I've beaten it).
Oh, I'm right there with you. (Although I've beaten SMB3 several times.) The mechanics in SMB are a bit frustrating sometimes (but also in a way more realistic; a real person isn't going to suddenly face the other direction in midair), while 3 is smooth if not ideal in motion control.
One of the difficulties that make me shy away from completing SMB1, however, are the pattern/path areas (e.g., 7-4), where I basically have to commit minutes of trial and error for one stage.
Sumez wrote:
2. Battletoads - one of the games you'll see mentioned most often when people talk about difficult NES games. And yeah, this game is really difficult.
Now this is a seriously difficult game. I mean, I
managed to complete it through state saving, but it took days to complete. No matter how hard I tried, I found the Clinger Winger (Buzzball) level
impossible; I could only get to a later stage by skipping it.
DRW wrote:
Even "Vice - Project Doom"? I was under the assumption that this will not be one of those Nintendo-hard games, but more in the average difficulty category.
Vice - Project Doom was ridiculous. Not only do you seem to get infinite weapons (wait a few seconds, you mysteriously have two more grenades on you), but Game Over only sets you back a little ways. (Maybe this is only the case in the English language version?)
tepples wrote:
You know, like the infinite spin and other "world" rules that The Tetris Company has been enforcing on most products since 2001.
Ugh. Lol. I didn't and wouldn't know since I play only the original Gameboy version (even if it is in grayscale) or Tetris Max.
S..story in Ninja Gaiden? There's a story?
ap9 wrote:
Now this is a seriously difficult game. I mean, I managed to complete it through state saving, but it took days to complete. No matter how hard I tried, I found the Clinger Winger (Buzzball) level impossible; I could only get to a later stage by skipping it.
I think you're misremembering because I don't think the clinger winger is skipable. Did you mean the volkmire inferno ?
Yeah, there's no warp past the clinger winger level. You could game genie past it though?
I also thought the clinger winger was impossible, at first. It's really just down to learning where to time the change and getting used to that. You can sorta make it easier by hitting pause at every corner, change your direction then unpause, but that's a bit annoying to do for the whole level. I also found it helped to lift the thumb right off the d-pad for the changes rather than sliding between directions.
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S..story in Ninja Gaiden? There's a story?
Yes of course! One of the best parts of the series is the movie-like cut-scenes between acts with cool characters like Ryu and Robert or scumbags like Foster and Jakiou. Don't tell me you skip these!
Jedi QuestMaster wrote:
Pokun wrote:
you even get to know what happened with Robert which wasn't clear in the second game.
I thought Robert died. Didn't the game make it clear he sacrificed himself?
Yes he used his last strength to buy time for Ryu and was in a really bad pinch. But you never saw him dying nor did you hear about him surviving so anything could have happened. I'm not going to spoil it.
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he mechanics in SMB are a bit frustrating sometimes (but also in a way more realistic; a real person isn't going to suddenly face the other direction in midair), while 3 is smooth if not ideal in motion control.
One of the difficulties that make me shy away from completing SMB1, however, are the pattern/path areas (e.g., 7-4), where I basically have to commit minutes of trial and error for one stage.
The challenge in Mario games is to get a feeling for the physics so that you are able to make the correct decision in jumps and know when to break. It's totally different from games like Megaman that has almost unlimited acceleration (I think Megaman reaches full speed within 8 frames) or games with fixed jumps like Castlevania. This difficulty peaked in SMB2j although SMW also has a few very hard levels in the special world. The path patterns can easily be memorized, there is only about two levels that has paths in SMB (most of us probably have them memorized since we were kids), in SMB2j however there are more of them (not only castle levels) and they are more difficult, for not mentioning having to learn to avoid negative warp zones.
For 3D Mario games I guess the difficulty peaks in Super Mario Sunshine that has some challenging levels where you can't use FLUDD. You really need to master the 3D Mario physics here, I loved it. The Galaxy games never gets any difficult and the 3D Land/World games doesn't seem hard at all (I have 3D Land and it's very easy). Not only are you bathing in 1UPs, but you are given cheat items if you die too many times on a level. They are ridiculous and I'd never use them. I think Nintendo must have become afraid of getting calls from
monster parents or something.
Pokun wrote:
One of the best parts of the series is the movie-like cut-scenes between acts with cool characters like Ryu and Robert or scumbags like Foster and Jakiou. Don't tell me you skip these!
I watch them the first time, and then skip them. They are very well made, and the story is surprisingly well put together, even if it's kinda throwaway. It even manages to completely avoid engrish in the translations.
But after watching them once, I skip them. They are very long and ruin the incredible flow of the game. I only watch the endings, and the obligatory intermissions of Ryu gazing at a fortress.