DEBUNKED: Nintendo's Iwata on games getting easier

hothardware.com/News/Nintendo-CEO-90-of-...al-Super-Mario-Bros/

There are a lot of larger cultural issues and business issues that feed into this- Iwata is correct, games have gotten MUCH easier and MUCH less dependent on players developing skills. These days, most video games are little more than Z-grade SyFy movies with interactive portions acting as a sort of gating mechanic...play through them to see the next part of the story. It's not really about gameplay, which is why gameplay innovation at the AAA level is almost completely dead in the water at this point. But oh, look at Captain Price's arm hairs rendered on the Xbox One...

If you'll recall, back in the arcade days, it was ALL skill. They put out books about how to get good at the video games. Playing games like Pac-Man and Galaga and even on through to Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat were things that you could develop skills for and play at very high levels of performance and competition.

Some of that remains in online games like Call of Duty, which is actually REALLY FUCKING HARD. But as for single player games...yeah, there's pretty much nothing as difficult as even the original Super Mario Brothers.

Part of it is that people don't want to lose while they're supposed to be having fun, it's this whole bullshit "everybody's a winner" culture. Trial and error is regarded as a design flaw. So you put everything on rails, strip away player choice and the demand for skill, and you get...Tomb Raider '13. Zero risk, despite it being an adventure game about high risk situations.

Another thing going is that games aren't designed to be played indefinitely anymore...gotta sell more 10 hour single player games, so you make them easier.

And yet another is that things like AI are almost completely neglected these days...it used to be that you put it on a higher difficulty and the AI improved. Now, it just takes five more headshots to kill a bad guy or there's just more of them. Unfortunately, with multiplayer games becoming such a thing, good AI programming isn't as important as it once was.

But there are still things out there like the Souls games, Roguelikes, the more recent downloadable Mega Man titles, Super Meat Boy, Super Hexagon, and so forth that do recall "classic" difficulty"...it's just that level of difficulty used to be _normal_ because people enjoyed the fun of being challenged.

Nobody would EVER make Super Ghouls and Ghosts today.

Seems true.

My son is asking for a new Angry Bird download of more stages every week all the while he's having fits with Super Mario World on the Retro Duo he got for Christmas.

Game design is different now. Seems like the idea is to string along the customer and sell them more stages rather than one solid game to master.

I could be totally wrong though. I only know the current video game scene through the few phone games I've downloaded for the boy.

The increased emphasis on "story" in video games really shifts the purpose of why we play games. The running and jumping of platformers isn't really the point anymore. Now it's getting to the end of a story, kind of like plowing through a TV show. The whole "save the princess" plot of the Mario games has never really mattered, and it feels really thin to modern gamers. The problem is, the story was never the point at all. The entire summation of why Mario is fun is wrapped up in the actual playing. Nintendo has always been good on at least keeping the gameplay as the focus, even if it goes to the same franchises a bit often to pull it off.

The wild thing is how much that very first stage was designed to actually train the player how to play the game. It gives you a mushroom early, it presents you with an easy enemy right away, and it even shows a little something at one edge of the screen to show you what direction to go. I read an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto where he said all of these factors were intentional, a sort of stealth tutorial. But when the story becomes the focus, anything that keeps you from seeing what's next becomes an annoyance.

Much of the skills-oriented aspects to arcade video games began to fade around 1982. I distinctly recall a guy named Nick Ostrosky explaining the game he was playing where he was bombing what appeared to me to be arbitrary chunks of forest for no reason. His explanation was that there are "secret" locations to destroy in the game, they never move, and in order to proceed you needed to play often enough to memorize all the locations because without knowing them you couldn't score enough points to advance. You had to pay again.

And I think that last sentence is the heart of it, because providing a path for someone to play for 40 minutes via skills for a quarter was a non-starter, especially since they took the machine offline for other paying customers. There needed to be a way to churn more money out of the customer's pocket, and the one-coin barrier was proving difficult to overcome. That's when I saw gaming change, from Asteroids and Defender and Robotron where skill development was the only path to success to a more Pac Man oriented approach, where memorization is king.

These days gamers often are getting the entire game spoon-fed via YouTube, or at least any parts that are providing any difficulty to them. The players now are every bit as smart as we were then, but there's so many more options to choose from and so many outlets for clues and solutions that smart players select the easiest path. You can call it lazy, but the business world calls the same concept "productivity".

S.

I really only like games that are challenging or have just very unique theme/content. A story driven game has to have one hell of a story for me to be interested. I think I can count my recent game purchases fairly easy (few and far between over the past 5 years):

Pinball FX2 (actually challenging to get all the rewards and complete all the modes)
Spelunky (very challenging)
Bayonetta (challenging and great content)
Brutal Legend (loved the content)
Red Dead Redemption (loved the setting/content - gameplay just so so)

Angband - still my favorite game; hard as hell.


Need to try:

FTL

Space Ghost wrote: Pinball FX2 (actually challenging to get all the rewards and complete all the modes)

Oh, just shut up.

Level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is the greatest video game tutorial ever made. It doesn't TELL you how to do anything, it encourages you to explore. That first ? box, what do you do with it? Oh, a Mushroom, this makes me bigger. Can I touch this Goomba? Nope, now I'm small again. Bricks can be broken, but only when I'm big. Green pipes sometimes have secret areas. That's pretty much all you need to know, and at no point are you lead around by another character explaining to you what the X button does, stopping until you effectively look around with LS.

That's not a real interview. It's from www.p4rgaming.com whose recent headlines include "Team Fortress 2 Update Includes New Feature: Dual Hat Wielding" and "Children Who Pick a Side in Console Wars Are 90 Percent More Likely to Join a Gang".

Michael Barnes wrote:

Space Ghost wrote: Pinball FX2 (actually challenging to get all the rewards and complete all the modes)

Oh, just shut up.

You know it is true. I am still along way from getting all the achievements - some of that is ridiculous.

Now, it is time for you to plug the listed game into your Barnes-a-compute-a-tron and give me some good recommendations.

NeonPeon wrote: That's not a real interview. It's from www.p4rgaming.com whose recent headlines include "Team Fortress 2 Update Includes New Feature: Dual Hat Wielding" and "Children Who Pick a Side in Console Wars Are 90 Percent More Likely to Join a Gang".

Ah, shit. Sorry, everyone for starting this thread.

The issue to me is that games are focusing more on being pleasing instead of being interesting. They don't respect themselves. When you first meet Red Arremer in Ghost'n Goblins and try to get a cheap shot on him, he suddenly flies vertically and you die. "Who do you think you are? I'm worth more than that!", the game says.

Of course, that's "unfair". It's "unfun" because I'm losing. I'm supposed to feel like a pro and get the chicks and be a complete winner. The average modern game is so afraid to hurt its player's ego that they end up being completely undesirable. Where's the fun in winning? There's nothing interesting in it. It's not fun to get a crit in Team Fortress and killing someone without aiming, pointing and dogding their shots.

In that sense what modern design philosophy is doing is exchanging the inititally cold but real fun with fake smiles and shallow warmth. It's not about really about difficulty per se.


Because the problem is not with Contra and The Tower of Druaga, the problem is that now you can't make Myst without players complaining.


@Sagrilagus

I'm sure that game is Xevious. You don't need to find any secrets to complete it.

Bogus or not, what was said is pretty much true.

Now, it is time for you to plug the listed game into your Barnes-a-compute-a-tron and give me some good recommendations.

Right on.

Have you played any Treasure games? Specifically, you really should take a look at Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun, both on XBLA. They're masterclass top-down scrolling shooters, and both are hard as balls. Definitely rewarding, however, and I think you would really like them. Probably Ikaruga more than Radiant Silvergun in your case. Bangai-O: Missile Fury would be another one for you, sort of a bizzare puzzle shooter...thing. Really unusual mechanics, hundreds of levels, hundreds of missiles on the screen at once that you are expected to dodge.

Since you liked Bayonetta, there's no reason not to go for Vanquish especially since it can be had for under $10 now. It's kind of like what would happen if the people that made Gears of War were less concerned with macho bullshit and more concerned with snorting mountains of cocaine and watching early '80s Japanimation. Probably the best third person shooter I've ever played, and it has plenty of Platinum/Sega ludicrousness going on. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is actually pretty skill-based and very Platinum/Sega even though it's from the MGS franchise...there are definitely some Bayonetta-class moments of sheer insanity. I can't beat the last boss on the hardest setting. Definitely a challenge.

I think you'd dig Super Meat Boy if you want a really tough platformer. The level designs are impeccable, and I like that it doesn't waste your time- you die, and immediately start again...then you get to see ghost replays of all your fuckups while you try again.

Kind of surprised you didn't pick up Dark Souls yet...I think you would get a couple of years of play out of that. I think it's like $10 or so now too.

Wasn't Ikaruga the one where the hail of bullets coming at you were white or black and you could flip your ship around to be immune to one but not the other? If so, I had that on the gamecube...it was nuts! I couldn't beat it, no way.

I had a lot of fun getting into the zone with my headphones and trying though. Great game!

Yeah that's it...there's only five levels. I've seen three.

There have been quite a few games that have taken on the polarity-switching mechanic- Outland, from a couple of years ago, was one of the best.

Super Ghouls and Ghosts...I always wanted to see it kick my ass back to the beginning of the game. Unfortunatley, I wasn't good enough to get to the end the first time.

UN Squadron, Axelay, and SF II. Those were my games. No telling how many hours I sunk into them. Well worth the money I spent. I'd play them over and over and over...