Re: Old entertainments (Re: Free Castle Break on Steam!)

On 16/10/2024 16:02, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

I love my obscenely-large collection of old-timey video-games... but
damn if most of them just aren't worth playing even for a few moments.

And even though they are playable, I suck at them! 🙁

Of course, with old-timey games, you're EXPECTED to suck at them.
Originating from arcades, most video games were -for the longest time-
extremely antagonistic towards the player. You weren't expected to
win; rather, you were expected to lose in order to milk you for more
quarters (or simply disguise how little game there actually was). It
took a long time before developers started thinking, "Say, what if the
idea was to let players actually see the WHOLE game instead of getting
repeatedl stuck on level three?"
 I know there are some die-hard purists who see this shift as a bad
thing -- 'git gud, scrub!'-- but overall I prefer the 'modern'*
method. Aside from making for a better overall experience, it forced
developers to expand their game design. When you expect that most
players won't see more than three or four levels, you can get away
with only one mechanic, but once the expectation was that you'd get
through the whole game, developers had to start mixing things up and
adding variety to keep gamers from getting bored. 😉

I was an early adopter of the Specky 48k and the gamers moved fairly rapidly from being dominated by arcade style games, with a basic text adventures and strategy games thrown in, to having games that were 'designed' for a home computer setting and not an arcade one.
It's not that I didn't enjoy arcade games but it did get frustrating when it was a case of you could do all the levels up to X blindfolded and then you had your three lives to see if you could get through this time.