I recall seeing a picture on "Random pics that make you laugh" that roughly talks about something like this: the old video games are easy at first but the difficulty catches up to the level of frustration near the end. Newer ones have a fairly consistent difficulty level.
Anyways, I was bored like hell tonight, so I decided to try some.... RED ALERT 1! Since EA released the game as freeware, it was very easy to find and download it (I downloaded the Soviet disk). Installing it was very easy, and it ran smoothly on my netbook.
I thought it wouldn't hurt to play the missions. I have actually never played the missions before (even though I kind of touched skirmish mode before), so it's actually a fresh experience for me. However, I did play RA2/RA3 and their respective expansion campaigns before on the greatest difficulty, so I figured that for RA1 I should do the same.
First mission was a joke. Just ordered my paper airplanes to fly around a bit wins the mission. The next a couple were easy too. Then mission 5(?) came, which I have to make a landing on an island and destroy the enemy base there. The only problem? The Soviet navy does not have any sea-to-land weapons! After several saves-and-loads, I managed to assemble six transport ships stuffed with tanks and crushed the enemy's resistance. I couldn't pull off any more than that, because my side of the map ran out of resources. It wasn't until near the end that I realized I was supposed to expand to the enemy's island using the new MCV provided. FFFUUUUUUU. But hey, at least I beat it.
The next mission was worse. I had to deliver some trucks across a river. Instead of starting nice and peaceful in most missions, all sorts of Allied Tanks were firing at my MCV and I had *barely* enough forces to hold it off. After one reload and some gosu micro, I fought off the initial attack and managed to setup my base. Then I figured I should build some riflemen and scout. I did that; all that managed to achieve was attracting a huge wave of attack. Suffice to say I got pwnt. Reload again, played conservatively, and after many back-and-forth trades and some crazy micro and macro, I won. Took me an hour to do it.
Then it came... the HORROR. The next mission apparently is some kind of stealth mission which I am supposed to place some engineers in some places to avoid a nuclear meltdown. In this mission I got my quickest defeat in a mission in my entire RTS career: in less than 1 second.
If you don't know this mission, here's a youtube video of some guy beating this mission.
It starts at about 0:31. The player in the video immediately moved his stuff to the right because he knew what he was doing. I didn't, so I got instantly wiped out by the flame.
The rest of this mission was not that much easier. The map is full of traps; one wrong move = game over. This includes hidden enemy riflemen, hidden flamethrower, oil barrels, Tanya (I couldn't recognize her), etc. etc. I was so frustrated that I ragequitted. Now I found myself here, cumulating my frustration in the form of a blog.
As I was writing this, I remembered that there are 15 missions in total for each side in Red Alert 1. FFFUUUUUUU. I wonder how bad the last mission will be.
By the way, does anyone know the difference of the countries (England/France/Germany vs Russia/Ukraine) in skirmish?
On July 03 2011 21:15 clusen wrote: RA1 isn't even hard. Go and try Z for example :p
Old games did not hesitate to punish you for mistakes, which I like.
not really, alot of old sidescrollers didnt punish mistakes, they punished you for fun.
the traps and stuff could only be known about after already being killed by them, so many games that were "hard" were just a test of memory not a test of how good you were at that game type.
On July 03 2011 22:45 s.a.y wrote: I am currently playing Age of Empires.
There is a map in the third campaign that i restarted about 30 times and used save and load for about 50 times. That's a single mission.
I predict ending it late summer :D
Which mission is it? I want to replay that game if there is a that hard mission in it. I do recall it being hard, but nothing over 3-4 restarts that I can recall.
As for RA1, it doesn't get much worse, just different problems.
On July 03 2011 21:15 clusen wrote: RA1 isn't even hard. Go and try Z for example :p
Old games did not hesitate to punish you for mistakes, which I like.
not really, alot of old sidescrollers didnt punish mistakes, they punished you for fun.
the traps and stuff could only be known about after already being killed by them, so many games that were "hard" were just a test of memory not a test of how good you were at that game type.
Do you mean stuff like jump'n'runs? Never had any console except an Atari 2600(I still have it) until PS1 was released :p No Gameboy, nothing, so I played mostly strategy games, shooter or rpgs back then or games you could play with 2 or more people on consoles like Mario Kart.
Except one game which was unbeatable because it was so horrible( E.T. for Atari) none of the games I played were unfair.
Wing Commander 4 was one of my most frustrating gaming experiences ever...Riven was as well, but its hard in a different way since its an exploration/puzzle game.
I've only EVER played new games. Can someone give me an estimate of how much the difficulty would be? I have played BW a bit, and have touched AOE2, how difficult are those in perspective of the other oldies games?
The game isn't hard, it just doesn't let you screw up.
I had no problem beating Red Alert (my favorite C&C game to this date, the multiplayer is fucking Badass) but it definitely is a game that will take advantage of you if you make mistakes - something that most games don't do anymore. Older games are just less forgiving in general.
The AI will repeatedly attack you with rather large forces, so it's not really that easy to be like "I'ma store up 50 billion tanks then attack move to victory (even though there's no attack move in this game!)"
That island mission was by far the hardest one, though. I knew exactly what you were gonna talk about when you led into the conversation :p
Some of the oldest games compensated their shortness with difficulty, then became the era when they were quite good lenght and hard.
RA1 was at some points pretty frustrating, as I played it when it first came out. You could play somewhat turtlish but you had to micro and abuse the AI as much as possible, repairing damaged tanks was always cheaper than to build new ones I think.
AI didn't have infinite resources though, but it was hard to starve, because one harvester would instantly fill all the silos and refineries if it ever got back.
You had to snipe several of them if you wanted to win by starving them and even so they still had decent base defenses and units that they didn't use to attack but to defend.
EPT
