Frustrating Traditions in Gaming that Need to Die
09-28-2011
- by Dante Alexander, Staff Mumbler
Infuriating patterns in gaming that should have been abandoned when the NES was succeeded.

To this day, I've never been able to understand what people get out of difficult video games. I have friends who refuse to play a game on any difficulty below expert and, while it's all well and fine if they want to be stuck on the same level for hours of their day, when I'm playing it with them I want nothing of it. Maybe some people just like the challenge of fighting odds that present themselves as overwhelming. I mean, sure, there has to be some kind of thrill when you've poured endless amounts of your time into an unbeatable game and finally see the final boss crumble before your eyes. I can imagine that being an insane feeling, to say the least. I can imagine it being on par with winning a medium-low sum from the lottery. But one of the reasons I find this so similar is luck. When you play enough of an impossible game, it isn't up to skill anymore. When you're playing that same level hundreds of times per day, desperate to get to the end, luck is the only thing that's going to get you there. And while some games give you easier settings or puzzles that don't require a quantum physicist to solve, there are still the titles so insanely ridden with difficulty that the only way I'm willing to beat them is with an off button.

Recently, I'd taken an interest in retro gaming. Being more a fan of the Nintendo 64 than that gimmicky bastardization, the Wii, I figured that the older systems were worth looking into as well. I remembered an old friend who used to have a Super Ninteno, a system my memory has been kind too, and started there. The experience was halfway decent- some games being indisputable classics while others were nothing more than steaming piles of garbage that made Atari's infamous E.T. look preferable. But when that was all done with, I moved onto the NEs. The system I'm going to have nightmares about.



I'm going to have to start checking for this under my bed every night.

Now, it's worth mentioning that the NES was pretty amazing for the time. Some classic game series had their roots there, and this system more or less pointed gaming in the direction that it has come to today. It's classic, and I normally wouldn't need to mention that, but as I was only just asked, "What's a Nintendo 64?" the other day, I'm just going to assume most gamers have never seen any system that doesn't play Call of Duty games. But with all respect due, I have never played an NES game that didn't completely infuriate me. These games are hell in a little plastic package, with no purpose other than to induce fury and misery of the poor fools who try to play them.

There are multiple reasons for this. The more obvious one had to do with money. Nintendo intentionally made some game play damn near impossible to figure out without the detailed instruction found in Nintendo Power magazine. Buying the game wasn't enough, they wanted more of your money. And this is all fair and fine because, come on, the internet exists today. What mysteries are there in the world of gaming that can't simply be solved in a flurry of keystrokes? Very few. Most of the unsolvable ones normally have to do with bad games anyway. But then, just when I thought I had it all figured out, the other reason occurred to me. It occurred to me when I was playing Mike Tyson's Punch Out, a game that has a disappointing lack of torn ears, and I was still going out of my mind with frustration.

After an aggravating loss and several seconds spent pondering the idea of smashing my controller into a wall, I thought- wait, how could this game be so frustrating so early in? It wasn't like they wanted someone to buy a strategy guide. It was just boxing. Why did the evil masterminds at Nintendo feel the need to turn a simple boxing game into a catalyst for rage and anxiety? Padding. It all came down to padding the levels, making a game so frustrating and repetitive (in the sense that it sent me back to another opponent before I was allowed a rematch) that you seemed to have more game play because of that. What a load of crap. Game designers in the generation of any console are guilty of this and I'm sick of seeing it. Whether it means wandering around a level with no indication of where to go, sending you in circles and making you debate how much beating the level is worth to you (I'd go with the second Left for Dead game as a good example of this), puzzles that are impossible to understand (pick the water temple of ANY Zelda game, old or new), enemy combos that keep you in the air/helpless until you've lost half your health from not being able to attack or block (mainly super smash brothers), or simply games so hard that you're forced to fight your way back from checkpoints back to the part that killed you in the first place. On top of that, you already have games where you're forced into the padded repetition of collecting some pointless object and games where you have to walk for hours just to find your next mission. It's amazing that anyone wants to play these messes. Does no one create fun and original content anymore? Does it all have to be an illusion? No wonder the gaming industry has lost so much money to Angry Birds.

Tags:   Vintage Nintendo 64 Game System  Atari Game Console  NES games