Kids React to retro gaming

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Lol. I found this video was pretty entertaining especially considering how as a kid I thought these types of games were fairly trivial. I mean, of course you have to shoot it.. lol. But I guess that comes with growing up with Nintendo.


I also read this article on a father who put his kid through the steps of video gaming starting off with basic games and moving into more newer games now and the results are spectacular.
https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3

Gaming is too easy now?
 
Whoever filmed it has the patience of a saint
I would be screaming at them "did it not occur to you to press all the buttons to see what they do, there's only 2 of them fer christ's sake"

Idea for the next game. Microprose Falcon 3 from 1991
These are the manuals
fD7akML.jpg
 
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Lol. I found this video was pretty entertaining especially considering how as a kid I thought these types of games were fairly trivial. I mean, of course you have to shoot it.. lol. But I guess that comes with growing up with Nintendo.

That was fascinating to watch. I mean yeah Mega Man was tough, but jeeze it wasn't as tough as they make it out to be in that video. I can't imagine any of them would ever be able to beat the cyclops boss in that game. As an aside, I finished that game the same day it came out :)
 
That was fascinating to watch. I mean yeah Mega Man was tough, but jeeze it wasn't as tough as they make it out to be in that video. I can't imagine any of them would ever be able to beat the cyclops boss in that game. As an aside, I finished that game the same day it came out :)

If they think this was tough they should try playing Commando on C64/Atari/Amiga :D
 
I was born knowing I had to press up.
Lots of other games would have you automatically grab the ladder. Understandable that the first time was a mistake. At least the mistake wasn't repeated.

Old games were tough, and sometimes unfairly so I'd say. Basically they had to be to create replayability. In the 8bit era, a game would last 30 minutes end to end. The only reason you got hours and hours of gameplay from it was learning the minutia of the timing and pixel positioning. There are many 8 bit games on Spectrum that I never completed. However, on console (Master System) they were all completed, including R-Type twice through where the second time through was 'bullet storm' mode, and the machine couldn't handle drawing all the sprites so it flickered like Betsy! I'd say the console games were fairer. The computer games were thrown together by guys with no knowledge of decent...'game design' because it didn't even exist as a discipline back then! And as devs, without testers, they'd suffer the balancing problem of tuning the game for their many, many playthroughs not appreciating how a noob would take to the game.

I notice in that video that what the players haven't mastered is the timing, the pauses and synchronisation. That's something I think is missing in modern games that are all action based. FIFA, COD, and everything on mobile is constant motion and simple decision making. It's obviously a genre-specific quality to games. And the genres that have strong timing and spacing control requirements are few and far between.

As a final point, this is presumably a random selection of kids, who may not be particularly gamers. So comparisons with the 'yoof of today' would be erroneous. Take the same game and hand it to a random proportion of people in 1987 and plenty would make the same mistakes and fail to understand the game. Also, give the game to many adults now who were around in 1987 and they'd have the same issues if they didn't learn gaming back then. I think some are taking their learnt skills for granted, forgetting that they too started as noobs. Mega Man and games of its ilk are similar to playing tennis against a strong opponent. If you've never played tennis, you can't be expected to do well. So why expect people to play computer games well the first time around? They haven't learnt the skill-set nor the mindset.
 
I've played Virtual Tennis and was immediately good at it :p

Biggest difference to me in gaming today and in 80's-90's is lack of tutorials and a lot of thinking for yourself needed in older games. I'm not speaking about arcade shooters, but more serious games like flight sims, RPG, strategy, adventure games and many more. It probably steamed mainly from limitations of older computers where it was more important to put extra content to the game than build in tutorial. You relied on printed press to help you beat the game or used manual to find out how to play.

Being challenged by game is what keeps my interest in it, but it needs to be done right. I think this is one of the reasons I so much enjoyed quick spell of Unmechanical as it just let's you figure out what to do and not guide you to next step like a little child.
Another example of great game without tutorial is The Vanishing of Ethan Carter which I started to play just for pretty graphics but soon I found myself enjoying challenge this game gives you. I can draw many similarities to old MYST games and many point and click adventure titles from 90'.
 
Whoever filmed it has the patience of a saint
I would be screaming at them "did it not occur to you to press all the buttons to see what they do, there's only 2 of them fer christ's sake"

Idea for the next game. Microprose Falcon 3 from 1991
These are the manuals
fD7akML.jpg

Oh man this brought back memories. We had F117A Stealth Fighter, Falcon, Chuck Yeager's falcon. Something about copy
Protection and having to open your tome of a manual to page X line 13 word 6. Haha. No manual game over.

Having said that I could never get into the flight sims, I just didn't know what I was supposed to do.
 
Lots of other games would have you automatically grab the ladder. Understandable that the first time was a mistake. At least the mistake wasn't repeated.

Old games were tough, and sometimes unfairly so I'd say. Basically they had to be to create replayability. In the 8bit era, a game would last 30 minutes end to end. The only reason you got hours and hours of gameplay from it was learning the minutia of the timing and pixel positioning. There are many 8 bit games on Spectrum that I never completed. However, on console (Master System) they were all completed, including R-Type twice through where the second time through was 'bullet storm' mode, and the machine couldn't handle drawing all the sprites so it flickered like Betsy! I'd say the console games were fairer. The computer games were thrown together by guys with no knowledge of decent...'game design' because it didn't even exist as a discipline back then! And as devs, without testers, they'd suffer the balancing problem of tuning the game for their many, many playthroughs not appreciating how a noob would take to the game.

I notice in that video that what the players haven't mastered is the timing, the pauses and synchronisation. That's something I think is missing in modern games that are all action based. FIFA, COD, and everything on mobile is constant motion and simple decision making. It's obviously a genre-specific quality to games. And the genres that have strong timing and spacing control requirements are few and far between.

As a final point, this is presumably a random selection of kids, who may not be particularly gamers. So comparisons with the 'yoof of today' would be erroneous. Take the same game and hand it to a random proportion of people in 1987 and plenty would make the same mistakes and fail to understand the game. Also, give the game to many adults now who were around in 1987 and they'd have the same issues if they didn't learn gaming back then. I think some are taking their learnt skills for granted, forgetting that they too started as noobs. Mega Man and games of its ilk are similar to playing tennis against a strong opponent. If you've never played tennis, you can't be expected to do well. So why expect people to play computer games well the first time around? They haven't learnt the skill-set nor the mindset.

Agreed. This is fair to the kids, we all likely struggled to get as good as we are back then at things like spacing and timing, and we no longer remember the journey. Oddly I never got good at the spacing timing thing for street fighter but that is a different story.

Listening to the kids make decision making was insightful. You are right that modern gaming has really insulated players from making tougher decisions, but I believe this is because in video games today you can seldom go "back". It's assumed that the game always wants you to go forward. IIRC correctly I read that this was a big point of modern design (your thoughts Shifty?) that going backwards was a bad thing for your players so games only allowed you to go well: forwards.

It actually seems quite impactful on how people learn and play. Progression now is directly linked to how forward you go. And in this example where Mega Man series is notorious for having to come back/go back it likely posed a dramatic shift for these children who are more adept at playing
mobile games than classic console games.
 
If they think this was tough they should try playing Commando on C64/Atari/Amiga :D

Commando on the 64 was a mess but it had that Rob Hubbard soundtrack that made everything awesome.
 
Those kids are damn lucky they don't have to suffer thru tons of garbage while waiting games finally to get better. Early 80's gaming was crap. Useless Atari ports for my c64 (at least they were free as piracy laws didn't exist in Finland untill early 90's). Thankfully there were Ultimas, Gold box games, Wizardys, Sid Meier games and adventure games like Zak McKracken and Leisure Suit Larry but they were mostly later part of the 80's and of course still featured terrible graphics and UI. I do like the SID sound chip, but that's aquired taste.

Generally games required speedrun type of strategy and you experienced first lvl/world way more of ten last. Not that games were long anyway. I used to play Commando and Last Ninja just to hear the great tunes. I think speedrun times would have been rather nice after n:th run.
 
Those kids are damn lucky they don't have to suffer thru tons of garbage while waiting games finally to get better. Early 80's gaming was crap. Useless Atari ports for my c64 (at least they were free as piracy laws didn't exist in Finland untill early 90's).

My friends and I grew up with Atari 2600 cartridges costing £30 (which adjusting for inflation is £112 today). Of course we were careful but a friend called Sean bought ET :-/ Mind you I remember Raiders of the Lost Ark (which can actually be completed in about 7 minutes) keeping us occupied for about a week! Then there were endless games like Asteroids, Pacman, Star Raiders, Indy 500 (with special controllers) offering endless hours of entertaining when the rain came.

But plenty of 64 games were awesome. Elite, Gauntlet and the rip-off Druid series, Paradroid (in fact anything by Andrew Braybrook), Zak McKrakken and Maniac Mansion, LCP, Activision's Game Maker (which let you play and edit Pitfall), International Karate+, The Last Ninja series, International Soccer (I had that on cartridge!), International Basketball, Rocketball, Bubble Bobble, The New Zealand Story, Exile, Laser Squad, Impossible Mission, Boulderdash, Summer/Winter/World Games, Gunship, Wizball, H.E.R.O, Fight Night, Pitstop II, Spy vs. Spy, Mercenary, Racing Destruction Set. I can't remember a fraction of the stuff we played.

Sure there were some lemons but if your read Zzap!64 or other decent mag you could avoid them. So many games and never enough time to play them all.
 
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