Are Modern Games Too Easy?

bippy writes "Game critic Brian Crecente's weblog Red-Assed Baboon asks if modern video games are too easy. He argues, after playing the new Pitfall game, that what made the games from the '70s and '80s such as the original Pitfall! so much fun to play was 'because the game is so hard - brutally, temper-tamper inducing hard' - Crecente goes on to conclude: 'I'm not saying we should go back to the days of Donkey Kong and [the original] Pitfall!, but maybe developers need to worry a little more about challenging a gamer, instead of plopping them into something that is little more than an interactive movie'."

Comments

Yes they are

[schnits0r]

Modern games, Like mario bros can be beaten in only a few minutes of playing, back in my day we had simpler games that would take HOURS and HOURS and yu still woulnd't beat it. I mean, ET: The Extraterestrial for Atari 2600 only had 6 different screens, but I don't tihnk anyone has ever beaten it.

Re:Yes they are

[josh glaser]

ET is widely considered the worst game of all time. I don't think anybody wants to beat it :-)

Re:Yes they are

[Zeromous]

Ironically I tried-

I spent a whole day on it, then let my dog chew it up. Later, I busted him trying to bury it in the back yard.

Re:Different kinds of hard.

[woohoodonuts]

brutally, temper-tamper inducing hard

this may be offtopic... but that Goddamn third level on Burger Time still pisses me off to this day when I think about it... How in the hell are you supposed to get the top bun all the way down? It's freakin impossible!

I have wasted many... MANY hours of my life and still have yet to see level four...

and we walked up hill...

[flabbergast]

both ways to get to work! In snow! With no shoes on! With a bag full of rocks on our backs! And we crawled over jagged broken bottles with our zippers open! And we liked it! =)

I'm just a little too young to remember Pitfall! and such, but I think simplying saying "yesterday's games were harder than today's game" is an insult to good designers. One of the author's complaints, that we can save every few seconds, is true in many games, but some games, Splinter Cell comes to mind, have preset save points. And it should, because the game is friggin' long. I doubt most people could finish Splinter Cell in one sitting, no matter how hard they tried.

Other's here on Slashdot have commented on joysticks and their bazillion buttons. They have those buttons because the real world has more control in it than one button can offer. For instance, Pole Position for Atari 2600 could get away with just the joystick because push forward you go accelerate, back to brake, left and right. And that was a fairly simplistic simulation. Project Gotham Racing 2 has accelerate, brake, hand-brake, upshift, downshift, horn, and view change, along with an analog stick for turning. Splinter Cell also uses both sticks well, one to control world coordinate motion, another so you can rotate Sam around, as well as crouch, open/use, turn thermal cam on, etc etc. They're not there to be useless.

Text Adventures

[Anonymous Coward]

Now those games from Infocom... They were HARD! Heck, you had to use almost every key on the keyboard just to win those games! And the Grue. Oh, the Grue! One wrong step in the dark, and you'd have to reload every time.

Oracle

[InsaneCreator]

He should try "playing" Oracle. It's full of cryptic messages which rarely mean what they say, and every time you think you finally know what's going on, it throws another challenge at you - just like that.

For an added bonus, the documentation is also one big puzzle full of twisty passages, all alike.

The fun just never stops...

(Somebody, please kill me. I hear they use Postgres in heaven...)

Nice Generalization

[ArmenTanzarian]

ArmenTanzarian says that all generalizations made are too broad and that everything that's green tastes like sour apple.