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From: JAB <noway@nochance.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Old entertainments (Re: Free Castle Break on Steam!)
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:48:29 +0100
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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.