EPTOn October 23 2018 09:56 Nevuk wrote:
Let's see... a lot of it is that saving games seemed like a new concept until most of the way through the NES era. So there are some NES games you can save like FF1, but others that use weird passwords as a save mechanism and still others that got their value through being insanely hard and requiring lots of replay. Mario 1/3 fall into that last one, as there's no save game option and you're expected to play through it a lot to actually see everything.
Prince of Persia was quite good aside from the hair tearing out difficulty. You have an hour to save the Princess iirc. After that hour is up, game over. And if you die, game over. And you'll die like all the time, so it probably would take a rather long time to beat. Savestates are basically necessary for playing that type of game imo, and using them makes it so you only spend 2-3 hours with them instead of 40-50
There's just a fundamental change in mindset that comes from being able to save. Robin Hood for NES was a movie tie in and actually really good - but it only takes about 2-3 hours to beat once you're good at it, which is super short for a full priced RPG game.
For the most part the overall quality of games have definitely improved as it's gotten easier to make them. The SNES period probably had as many good games made during it as during all of the games made before it combined.
Some Genres just don't hold up well also. Especially those that get remade every year/gen. Flight sims, sports games, driving sims, etc. I enjoy quite a few RPGs/SRPGs made before 95 though (FF1-6, any MegaTen game.
Let's see... a lot of it is that saving games seemed like a new concept until most of the way through the NES era. So there are some NES games you can save like FF1, but others that use weird passwords as a save mechanism and still others that got their value through being insanely hard and requiring lots of replay. Mario 1/3 fall into that last one, as there's no save game option and you're expected to play through it a lot to actually see everything.
Prince of Persia was quite good aside from the hair tearing out difficulty. You have an hour to save the Princess iirc. After that hour is up, game over. And if you die, game over. And you'll die like all the time, so it probably would take a rather long time to beat. Savestates are basically necessary for playing that type of game imo, and using them makes it so you only spend 2-3 hours with them instead of 40-50
There's just a fundamental change in mindset that comes from being able to save. Robin Hood for NES was a movie tie in and actually really good - but it only takes about 2-3 hours to beat once you're good at it, which is super short for a full priced RPG game.
For the most part the overall quality of games have definitely improved as it's gotten easier to make them. The SNES period probably had as many good games made during it as during all of the games made before it combined.
Some Genres just don't hold up well also. Especially those that get remade every year/gen. Flight sims, sports games, driving sims, etc. I enjoy quite a few RPGs/SRPGs made before 95 though (FF1-6, any MegaTen game.
Yeah RPGS are the only genre with multiple enjoyable games pre 1995 for me; Secret of Mana/Evermore, Terranigma, Chrono Trigger, Lufia, FF6(1-5 were too "old" for me already). The only other games i could even name are things like NBA Jam and ISS but they feed off the multiplayer and i wouldnt consider playing them solo.
Shoutouts to anyone german here who played Vampires Dawn or Eternal Legends, i was 10 or so and they were on the Screenfun CD's and one of the only games which were running on my first pc 8D.
