Game difficulty between then and now?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by spiff

The best equivalent today would be Artorias in Dark souls

Ha ha, everyone has their favorite hardest boss For me it was Manus. I still dread having to fight him to this day.

[Anubis]

One of my favorite MMO RPGs had very interesting bosses throughout game and even getting all end game gear bunch of earlier one were still challenge to fight solo. (some even in group )

Just way to many party wipe... and usually because some idiot did not follow mechanics in boss fight (usually multi-step mechanics, like - only magic skills used on boss etc.)

[Photon]

Originally Posted by sneckburger

Rubbish joysticks made old games much harder.
I'm going to look into buying an adaptor for the Bug joystick

Syntax error 666: cannot compute. I shouldn't say that, I should say 'to each his own', but you also said rubbish joysticks so I had to react Just a normal arcade stick on a board with arcade buttons next to it is what we never got and is what I think is a non rubbish joystick.

Originally Posted by gimbal

Just Cause is a nice sandbox game that allows you to go full postal. I'd rather play that than any of the recent Battlefield games.

Just as a heads up, that's not what going postal means. At least not in Postal. Etc.

As a side note, there are a lot of nasty games out there (e.g. Rockstar Games) that require you to finish off enemies. Games getting you used to this, like it's nothing, is harming you psychologically and should always be 18+, because when you're adult you are free to do anything, including harming yourself psychologically... :/

Anyway, that ilk of games just want to offend and shock you for attention. There are identical games that don't force you to do this.

Originally Posted by spiff

I'd say most e-sport titles wipes the floor with older games on those aspects
Team play, strategies, reflexes, spatial ability etc

(Arcade etc... snip just to make it shorter sry)

I just don't have the patience.. and the more games I play, the worse it gets :/

E-sports games are the shoot'em-up games of the post-Quake era - very basic, concrete and physical in premise, but (I have to concede this) in return have extremely high focus on refining what is there - getting every bug removed, balancing everything - if you are competitive, that's definitely your first requirement. Any game that gives you an advantage from anything other than winning matches, stay away from it. Pay2win is extremely unpopular.

Competitive is the opposite of casual.

Patience is a mindset that you can actually acquire - but it puts very high demand on the game idea having depth and spending time being appealing - without necessarily being casual.

There are some games out there that are not casual and still require patience - I guess Elite would have been one of the first.

~ epilogue ~

The best chances for a hit that you enjoy plowing hours into (something that is actually considered value for money today) I think are found in the Survival/Crafting/Building, Simulation, and Strategy genres - but: they have to have depth that doesn't come from just a lot of content. It has to be in the gameplay. If that makes sense.

Obviously you need the time to plow into them, so some games ever so alluring could be avoided because you know you'll never have the 100 hours to get ahead in them.

But the good thing is, normally you can find out if any game is for you by searching for "gamename gameplay" on Youtube once the game is out, and you'll have the answer in seconds. By stark contrast, 99% of trailers say nothing about a game's gameplay these days, just a bunch of unrepresentative custom scenes and not somebody actually playing the damn thing. :P

*cough* steps down from soapbox

[lesta_smsc]

Treasure Island Dizzy ... what a game. The intro music has been firmly embedded in my brain! Unfortunately, you're right it was hard to play this without any additional lives... I still have not completed this game because of that, but may be I should be able to with 'save states' now!

Games without saving were always a challenge because you had to complete the game 'in one sitting'. I never really understood this because if you did, the game becomes redundant very quickly lol.

I remember recording over my original Monkey Island because I needed the disks and did not know how to play it... how I regret this now! (Although this did have a save option!)

[vbgd]

I remember Blood Money and Lethal Xcess to be unplayable difficult. You will never reach the end without cheats.