Why were Games in the NES,SNES, and even Nintendo 64 days simmingly more difficult to beat then modern games of today? Games such as BattleToads, Myst, Contra, Ghosts N Goblins, and Ninja Gaiden are classic difficult video games of the past. These games were harder to complete
The main reason is that storage space on cartridges was very limited. You couldn't fit the amount on a NES cartridge as you could on a CD or a Nintendo Switch cartridge. So developers had to make do with what they had. This meant that they had 2 options, either make the game harder to beat or cut down on the graphical quality of the game as well as the soundtrack. As you can imagine the graphical quality was already limited due to the nature of the hardware being used. The onboard RAM limited how much could be put on their before the game started going down in frame rate. So the game was extended by increasing the difficulty of the game itself.
Another reason older games were harder was because the price of a game in that day cost $80-120 in today's dollars. That is a lot of money to spend on a video game. No one was willing to pay that much money for a 5 or 10 hour experience so developers had to extend the length of the game by making it more difficult.
That difficulty was often pixel perfect precision as in the case of a lot of the platformers of the day. Another aspect that could be made more difficult is making things difficult to figure out. As in making the puzzles and such more complex. That could extend the game quite a bit.
Having no mini-map increased the difficulty as well. Look at modern games today. The majority give the player a sense of direction and even show where you are with a blinking dot on a map. This is a far cry from what was possible and what was done in the 16 and 32 bit era.
Games such as Myst extended game length by making the player write down a lot of the information that was necessary to finish or make progress in the game. Quite a few older metroidvanias did this and it definitely helped extend the game by making the player make the map in his head or on paper. People would make homemade maps which give a bit a nostalgia hit just looking at them.
The main reason is that storage space on cartridges was very limited. You couldn't fit the amount on a NES cartridge as you could on a CD or a Nintendo Switch cartridge. So developers had to make do with what they had. This meant that they had 2 options, either make the game harder to beat or cut down on the graphical quality of the game as well as the soundtrack. As you can imagine the graphical quality was already limited due to the nature of the hardware being used. The onboard RAM limited how much could be put on their before the game started going down in frame rate. So the game was extended by increasing the difficulty of the game itself.
Another reason older games were harder was because the price of a game in that day cost $80-120 in today's dollars. That is a lot of money to spend on a video game. No one was willing to pay that much money for a 5 or 10 hour experience so developers had to extend the length of the game by making it more difficult.
That difficulty was often pixel perfect precision as in the case of a lot of the platformers of the day. Another aspect that could be made more difficult is making things difficult to figure out. As in making the puzzles and such more complex. That could extend the game quite a bit.
Having no mini-map increased the difficulty as well. Look at modern games today. The majority give the player a sense of direction and even show where you are with a blinking dot on a map. This is a far cry from what was possible and what was done in the 16 and 32 bit era.
Games such as Myst extended game length by making the player write down a lot of the information that was necessary to finish or make progress in the game. Quite a few older metroidvanias did this and it definitely helped extend the game by making the player make the map in his head or on paper. People would make homemade maps which give a bit a nostalgia hit just looking at them.
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