![]() I can remember getting to the penultimate boss Biokinton - a conspicuously simplistic cloud with eyes - in Super Mario Land before being felled by its bizarre bird projectiles. While many who are nostalgic about videogames tend to wrack their brains to remember the first ones they encountered, it’s generally harder to recall the first game one has beaten, despite being theoretically fresher in the mind. My own personal Sisyphean task from childhood was Disney’s Hercules: Action Game, which was more lenient with its difficulty modes yet still incredulously themed the first quarter of the game as training levels. It’s ironic that movie tie-in games like The Lion King were particularly notorious, as their properties came from a medium which had the luxury of assuming the audience wouldn’t walk out of the theater. Some of these instances were the result of a lack of thorough playtesting, while others were entirely purposefully punishing. the Space Mutants started out as obtuse adventure/puzzle games before ultimately resigning to more reliable action/platforming. It wasn’t uncommon for these retro games to have a sort of reverse difficulty ramp that deterred player progress, with the canonical examples being the Dam from Ninja Turtles, the Turbo Tunnel from Battletoads and later on the rings from Superman 64. While one could now own and eventually master these games, for many the most expedient way to play a shallow amount of a broad selection was the repeat rental market. The arcade expectation of inevitable loss that encouraged quarter-pumping carried over to the limited lives and continues of home console titles in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Here the win state is a fail state of another sort. Even the designers and programmers of a game with a definitive climax like Donkey Kong didn’t foresee players reaching a skill ceiling so high that they would arrive at a “kill screen”, wherein the game’s internal variables cross an untenable threshold and “overflow”, causing the game to cease to function. For the first few decades of videogame history many games - especially those in arcades - simply couldn’t be beaten, as they were predicated on high scores and fail states nobody beats the bricks in Tetris. A not insignificant portion don’t even start the games they buy, but that’s another topic altogether. ![]() It’s a statistical fact that most people don’t beat the games they play. “It’s hard to believe that it’s over, isn’t it?” -Old Woman, Celeste
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |