Ninjutsu Training Techniques

Why were regular NES games so hard to beat?

You know the old school nintendo system? Most of their games were hard as hell to beat. Some examples include Battletoads, Zelda II, the Mega Man games, Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Turtles.

Public Comments

1. Because the programming code was a lot more primitive, so it made it harder. Those games forced you to use your imagination more than games nowadays. Ah... the good old days. :-)
2. well most of it had to do w/ limited mobility of your character (side scrollers). and u couldn't save ur progress as u got deeper into the game, especially if they were long games like ninja gaiden and shinobi.
3. primitive design is my guess. damn thats philosophical:)
4. Not exactly sure of the exact reasons, but maybe because they're to enhance the replayability? Like you die at a certain stage because it's so frickin' difficult, and you keep at it over and over again until you get past it. And I also heard that although the older games are pretty hard, they're actually pretty short games. Not counting the RPGs etc. like the Zelda and Mana games of course. So making it harder to beat = replayability = not noticing the short game length.
5. Well, first off, some of them really sucked. Poor controls and such caused them to be hard. But those games were meant more to challenge the player than impress and wow them. I have fun playing gears of war, or halo, just for the kicks. When I was playing super mario brothers, know matter how much it frustrated me, I knew I HAD to beat it, it was like work. Since there wasn't the booming graphics and deep storyline, the games had challenging levels and seemingly invincible bosses, well bowser was pretty easy, but you get the point. Ah, good times..
6. A lot of NES games were based on arcade games, and even the ones that weren't usually were created from the same mindset. Arcade games were designed to be hard in order to eat quarters. Also, games were much shorter back then. Making it insanely hard means that a game that can be beaten in an hour will take a newbie at the game 30 hours to finally beat once, creating artificial length.
7. I've pondered this question quite a bit since games are pretty important to me and I've seen the changes in games over the past 15+ years. A couple of the main answers were already mentioned here: One is replayability. If your game is small and you want it to seem bigger, you gotta force people to play it more in other ways. Making players improve by trying and dying over and over almost seems to create new levels(almost). The other that someone mentioned which I liked is the old arcade mindset. Arcade games are incredibly difficult just to keep you forking over quarters. This carried over to a lot of console games. Anyway, and now allow me to be somewhat original. My theory of this is based on how games have evolved over time. Games started out as a very niche thing that extremely hardcore nerds created themselves back in the late 70's on their very primitive computers. How the games were programmed was essentially just a mathematical equation. They got the basic gameplay figured out, then the speed of the game would exponentially get faster and faster, with no real end. This was merely due to the fact that they couldn't program very many levels or even an end to the game generally, so to compensate they just made it harder and harder and never had an end. A great example of this is Space Invaders. If you think about it, all that happens is the game keeps getting faster and faster. Anyway, so over time games did start slowly progressing. However, games still had this tendancy to be very difficult because that is the way they had always been. It wasn't considered cruel to make a game that a normal person couldn't beat; it was common practice. The standards for difficulty were still very much in the old school nerdy programmer stage. But as games got more and more popular, game developers wanted to make them appeal to a wider audience so they made them more beatable. On another note, I think the reason the SNES is so well regarded by my generation(even moreso than the NES), is because game developers finally started realizing that games should be approachable by more common people and should be beatable. Because of this they still had the old school feel of being a huge challenge, but they were beatable. This gave you the sense of really accomplishing something when you beat a game(the Final Fanasy series, for instance). Beating a game that is meant to be beat in a certain amount of time like Halo just isn't the same. In conclusion, games have evolved just like tools, communication, transportation, medicine, and everything else . You can just as easily compare games from the 90's to the 80's as you can music from the 60's to the 50's or anything else. It is all just slow evolution that slowly picks up new, popular trends and nuances of the times.