Submitted 2 days ago by Dis32@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/073c7666-1a26-4833-8c31-a1aa375ae442.gif
The real easy mode is looking up stuff on the 'net. It might be subtle at first, maybe you just looked up something when you were genuinely stuck, but before you know it you’re just looking up stuff because you’re impatient or don’t want to take notes yourself.
Though I guess there’s games that are mostly about getting the timing right. Like I don’t think the internet helps much with beating the early Super Mario sidescrollers.
Oh yeah.
Back in the (dial up) day, amongst the neighborhood kids?
If you looked up a GameFAQs guide to a game, if you had to do that, to beat it?
You were cheating.
Only possibly acceptable if it was a game with an onbnoxious amount of hidden collectable type items, and you were just now doing a full completionist run.
Nowadays, you’d have to basically make a whole lot of your game procedurally generated, to get back to that kind of a paradigm, (hence the existence of roguelites, i suppose) but yeah its absolutely totally normalized now that just looking up a guide or a playthrough is totally acceptable, whereas pre-mass-internet-adoption, doing that was largely seen as cheating.
Personally, I never cared about the cheating aspect, I was never particularly good at gaming and I’d definitely prefer cheating over not finishing a game or trying to bruteforce whatever I’m stuck on for 10 hours. The issue is that looking up stuff casually like many people (including me) do today has a high risk of reducing the fun for no real reason. And I feel like games today tend to be easier and less grindy than they used to be in the dial-up days, too, so there’s also less reason to look anything up in the first place.
All the platformers I used to think were easy are now super hard, and all the RPG and RTS games are now much easier.
I have a soft spot for platformers, I grew up on Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank…🥹
I grew up on Sonic the Hedgehog and Battletoads. The former is OK, the latter is absolutely impossible now even though I finished it on the Mega Drive when I was like… 12.
Can’t relate, haven’t/never played it 😞 in this case I was just replaying Lord of the Rings Return of the King on the PS2, that one level called “Palantir of Saruman”, used to find it so easy until I realised I was doing it on Easy mode, hence I made the meme 😅
I didn’t finish it as a kid, but I got through the first circuit of worlds in KH 1 fairly easy. I picked the game up again last summer so I could finish it and play through the whole series, and 19 year old me was borderline in tears on some of those boss fights. I was on normal mode. Thankfully I was playing Remix, so I didn’t have to hear every boss speech 40 times ("Ee oo, not Clayton!"), but it still felt bad man.
One day I’ll go through the games again and fight the secret bosses on hard, but thinking about the amount of grinding it’ll take makes me cry internally and curl into a ball.
That Clayton fight was also the reason I celebrated skippable cutscenes in FM. I picked it up again myself just for funsies, and I thought, “Hey. You’ve been doing some souls-likes and souls-lites. You can handle Kingdom Hearts of all things” before starting on Proud mode…
Sigh at least it’s not “Get up on the hydra’s back!” from 2. But unfortunately, I am a completions so still quite the grind. It will be worth it though. Right…?
I don’t know much about Kingdom Hearts (I hope that’s what you’re talking about). I don’t usually like RPG/Strategy stuff but it’s fascinating still.
Keep up the good grind, I’m sure it’ll be worth it 😅 plus you get all that good old nostalgia factor with it replaying it all over again.
Yup, KH = Kingdom Hearts. It’s more typical smack your enemies to death action, not turn-based. I think the only one that truly could be seen as a strategy game would be the card based side game, but that one is also still real time battle, not turn based.
Anyway, I’ve got a huge backlog of other games I gotta get through, so I probably won’t be replaying them anytime soon. But when I do, I will gladly relish in wiping the floor with Sephiroth and the lot 😌 just gotta git gud soon
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
When i started gaming 2 player vs was common, but i had 2 brothers. We used to play where the loser passes the controller and the winner stops on. Competition got fucking fierce. By the time xbox live came around we were so far ahead of the skill curve it was unreal.
If only streaming was a thing then, we’d have cleaned up.