Might be a really stupid question, but it appears I just kinda suck at retro games. I love them a ton, but I'll be fucked if I could ever beat one. Do some people just have a gift to be awesome at games, or is it all just practice?
pic very related.
I sucked at NES Contra and had never beaten it. I started playing it and got to where I could clear it (no code). I hadn't played it for a while, tried to play it again, and sucked. If I picked it up today and put in a bit of time to get back comfortable with it, I am sure I could beat it easily.
Similar story with arcade Makaimura and FC Batman: couldn't beat them, kept playing and playing and playing, then I could beat them. While of course natural reaction time plays a part, if you really want to beat a game, play it enough and you eventually will clear it. I don't mean play it for a couple days, stop, then try again a month later. Just dedicate all of or most of your gaming time to it for a significant period of time and I am sure you can do it.
Practice, patience, perseverance, getting the fuck gud.
>>3325859
practice
people don't become good at something just sitting on their asses (unless they're trying to get good at video games)
>>3325871
Noted. Thanks!
Also does anyone feel like watching others play might make you play better?
Dunno what to say OP, I've been good at games all my life. I'd say some people do have a natural affinity for video games. Of course, I played them a lot too so I got plenty of practice, but I don't remember a period where I sucked (or perceived that I sucked, anyway) and intentionally practiced to get better. Like most things in life, I'd wager that it's part natural talent, part effort. If you aren't good, practice, but know that many will be just as good or better than you with less practice required.
>>3325898
Definitely. If you see someone else do something that works, do it yourself.
>>3325898
im not gonna lie i watched a speedrun of CV and would have never beat death without knowing about the holy water strategy
>>3325902
Hows that autism?
>>3325898
You should go in blind, watching others cheapens the satisfaction you get for beating these games by using a guide/watching a walk through
>>3325859
Retro games, especially NES can be a brutal reminder of how hard old school can be. I was in grade school trying to beat Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania and Mega Mans
ive been playing 1980 Rogue for 8 years
Not once have i beaten it, let alone something like Nethack
>>3325859
Keep this in mind- these games were designed for a playerbase that would get maybe 2-3 games a year and to fit into a tiny cartridge. Also keep in mind that gamesharks were super super popular. You don't "suck" if you can't pick a game up and finish it within 20 minutes, these games are legitimately difficult and often require memorisation.
>>3325859
If you look at every single non RPG game from the 8-bit, 16-bit and even 32-bit generations, you'll find that they're all short, sometimes no longer than 20 minutes. But many of them were made to be particularly difficult, going so far as limiting the number of hits you can take before you die and/or the number of lives you have. Many games went with the setup of, for example, 3 lives and no continues. Castlevania and, for example, Ghosts n' Goblins, gave you very few lives, you died rather quickly if you weren't playing well and both feature a timer which, upon running out, takes one life away anyway, but give you infinite continues. Later you realize many games preferred to limit or outright remove continues and sometimes even lives, or giving you 3 lives for the whole game.
The difficulty level is to make the games seem much, much longer than they really are. Remember, games back then cost as much as they do today, circa 40-50 of your currency.
That price nowadays is outrageous if your game is less than 5 hours long and many people will complain if a game is even less than 10 hours long at full retail price. So back then the extreme difficulty levels were to compensate for how actually short the games are and you got your money's worth out of replay value. If you wanted to beat your game, you have to be good at it and there are no checkpoints or save features to save your time. Plus, many of the games were designed for arcade machines, meaning you had to insert another coin to keep playing each time you lost all your lives/continues, so that's how they made a profit too.
If you paid 50 for a game and beat it in 20 minutes you'd be pissed. Playing these relics nowadays isn't to prove your worth as a gamer, it's to show just how dedicated you are at beating a game without modern gaming's checkpoint & save systems.
In short, you're not the only one who sucks at old games, we all do. They were designed to destroy you until you played them well.
>>3326027
This. Why bother completing a game if you know just watched someone else do it.
The best motivation should be getting through it by the sweat of your brow. And if you feel more annoyed than accomplished after taking down a difficult game, maybe something a little more modern and casual is more your speed.
And I don't mean that as an insult, some people just don't feel satisfaction from extremely difficult games where the result is most likely nothing but credits and a 30 second cutscene.
50gb blu ray of content x Zero challenge = 40 hours gameplay
600mb CD of content x Moderate challenge = 40 hours gameplay
128k rom of Castlevania x Brutal challenge = 40 hours of gameplay
>>3325859
Everyone born after 1990 sucks at retro games. It's just a medical fact.
>>3325902
I agree, some things such as reaction time, attention, forward thinking, logic, etc. can be enhanced by training, but may never come far from its natural scope.
Some games are harder than others. Also some ports are easier than others.
These days you have the luxury of choosing which game and even specifically which port to play. Back in the 80's, you played what you had, and that was that. At some point you just had to keep going no matter how hard a game was, because you just wanted to see what the next stage was like. Now a lot of that incentive is gone, because of full reviews, screenshots, videos, etc.
Granted, if you had a magazine subscription or something, you might have also seen some screenshots, but in my experience those were more like teasers and nothing like the comprehensive dissection of games that are popular these days. Quite frankly, I wonder what the point of playing a game is after seeing everything laid out so that no surprises remain.
>>3327140
It's not that cut and dry. Some games I just sucked at in the 80's. I never got past 2nd stage of Nemesis, for example. And I never even got past the start of Renegade. But a lot of other games I finished or got pretty far into.
