(I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I could still tell in which arcade I played each game).
> There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later insist that wasn’t the primary motivation and that they were meeting a demand from strong players for challenge.
Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between getting money out of people and people keep playing because they have fun.
I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it.
Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as played as others, as much as I can remember.
> Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK’s Ikari and its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release more sequels than him.
In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available []. I dare say that 90% of the games were either
vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian) * horizontal shoot 'em ups (think Gradius) * beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon) * platform (think Mario) * to a lesser extent, racing games (think Outrun)
I think mostly due to HW limitations.
So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way. Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards.
[*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron, Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.
As a kid with no money, I learned to get good at these and avoid the obvious cash crabs
I remember beating Zaxxon when I was only 6 years old in '82, in large part because I probably spent at least 100 hours watching older kids do it.
As someone who grew up playing the excruciatingly difficult NES version of Ghouls ’n Ghosts, can't say I'm sorry to see that mechanic go the way of the Atari Jaguar.
As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.
But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."
I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.
But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."
Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse.
Weeell...here's the thing. Erm. You didn't push through to the end. You just got the "bad" ending.
The game does very much have a proper ending, and reaching it is surprisingly straightforward.
You just have to beat it twice.
You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin
[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50% of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed my instructions.
That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in videogames, the discovery was amazing
I think anyone who says they've beat it is a dirty filthy liar. It cannot be bested.
And I'm with you, the one chance to point your jump in the right direction was INFURIATING.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Road_to_Dublin
A classic I only know because it was in the RDJ Sherlock Holmes movie.
The High Kings do a good version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdbeM2JWYE
