On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:02:02 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> 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).

I think you're overlooking why arcade games were the way they were.
They were not just designed to milk you for quarters... the goal was
to optimize them such that you got such an extreme level of
entertainment for your 25 cent investment, that you were compelled to
repeat the experience over and over. If it just took your quarter and disappointed you, it wasn't going earn a return on investment for the
arcade owner (and remember the cost of the dedicated hardware of these
machines was not a small thing back then).

The net effect of that was that when a new game came out, cabinets
that seemed more addictive in play testing naturally became more
popular with arcade owners and vendors that provide the hardware.

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?"

Game completionism and quarter-munching arcade games are two
completely separate topics that have little to do with each other.

Developers of games prefer to get paid for their talent over starving
to death. So if there's money to be made in arcade hardware (clearly
not much anymore) they'll focus there, but if the money is in console
or PC games in which the SP campaign lends itself to having a
conclusive ending, they will do that. But don't conflate the two
types of games, they're not the same.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

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.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)