Did anyone beat Simon's Quest on their own, with no outside information, back then?
You're trying too hard to pigeonhole it by zoomie methods of thinking. The phrase:>with no outside informationis too loaded by your "modern standards" of resentment and outrage.
>>10874950children played games for 6 gazillion hours back then or something so probably
>>10874950Back then you were expected to buy a strategy guide. Pay to win.
>>10874950Why do you want to know if people played games in a vacuum like modern normies?Strategy guides existed back then and people shared tips with their friends. https://www.castlevaniacrypt.com/cv2-np/
>>10874954>expected to buy a strategy guideThis isn’t true, quit being a cynical cunt. They were a resource available to people who wanted them and magazines included lots of them in issues.
>>10874954yeah I mean like the Mexican Runner acted all puritanical about not using any info except the game manual but that wasn't what people actually did back in the NES era. you bought a strategy guide that showed you where all the hidden stuff in LOZ was. it was no different than looking at GameFAQs except it set you back $10.
>>10874962Nintendo Power was a huge resource for this stuff.
>>10874950Your entire attitude about gaming is wrong. It's just wrong. That isn't how games were approached back then. It was perfectly natural to play a game over and over without "clearing it", just having fun, exploring, maybe trying to get a little further. Then you'd go to school and talk about it with your friends. You'd share tips, tricks, lie, make shit up, brag, etc. And sometimes information from magazines, etc would filter through. A lot of the early computer magazines had reader-written tip segments where kids Just Like You could mail in stuff they figured out. And these tips would circulate by readers and word of mouth and eventually get back to you and little by little they'd flesh in the full picture of the game, and all the "secrets" like kneeling at the cliff would organically become common knowledge. And then we'd go outside and ride bikes.Your implicit underage way of thinking that games need to be immediately "clearable" or else somehow they're exploiting you, because you look at every game as an entry on a checklist to clear for your discord badge, and that "strategy guides" were some cynical way to bilk poor little victimized kids out of extra money to "clear" their game is such an insanely broken way of looking at the world of gaming it's difficult to even imagine how you ended up this way.
>>10874954>Back then you were expected to buy a strategy guide. Pay to win.>Strategy Guide > 1988 You had like three options in 1988. Get a subscription to Nintendo Power and use the walkthrough. Call the Nintendo Power Hotline. Or ask your friends in the school yard during recess or lunchtime.
>>10874954You post this cope in every thread, zoomer. Wouldn’t be surprised if you were the actual OP
>>10874950Not sure but nintendo had great soundtracks and this game is one of those
>>10874953Ha true. People would play these 3 nights in a row staying up past 2am so at least 5 hours a night and the next morning too. Usually beat any game in 2 or 3 rentals (about 38 hrs or so a game or less if they were an easy one)
>>10874954There were 800 numbers you called and asked them what to do or where you couldn't pass and why. Then the person on the other end would have you write down the strategy on paper
>>10874973Younger players are constantly trying to apply this heavily individualized and consumerist idea of gaming to older games where because of the times, the experience was more communal in-person. Of course the communal experience of learning games and strategies is still a thing now, via stuff like YouTube and discord, but some people have decided to look at that as cheating for some reason. And yes, games were always a consumer product but the entire lifecycle of gaming wasn’t so heavily marketized the way it is now.
no. I was such a little faggot pussy I returned the game because it was too scary.
>>10875048>>10874953lyl actually nobody played games that much. couldn't because there was only so much staring at a CRT TV you could stand before getting a stomping headache. that's a bad thing about flat panels btw; you can stare at them all day long with no issues so you never get off the computer or video game while back then CRT flicker basically forced you to limit your play time and take a breadk.
>>10875061You can just stand back a few feet though?
>>10875060based fucking same
>>10875070>Standing back a few feet.Anon this thread is for real gamers only.
>>10875075But standing really close to your tv is bad because you won't be able to focus on the entire screen at once.
The context this game was released in in Japan at the time is that the players loved this kind of stuff. It was the Druaga influence and somehow this design peaked in 1987, a fuckton of Famicom games have similar puzzles. Just from Konami alone, in the year 1987 alone, on Famicom alone, they released 5 action games with similar adventure elements. Dragon Scroll had a progression point that involved standing in a spot for a few seconds, similar to some of the things in Simon's Quest.>>10874954Ah yes, the publishers grand schemes to fuck with players in order to make money off strategy guides for Famicom games....... which cost on average between 300 and 600yen. Wow. So much money they were planning to make from the 100yen they had left from those sales.
>>10874958Modern normies definitely watch videos and read articles and wikis on their games.
>>10875018Based Simon slaying vampires in Roman garb, the excitement making his nipples harden so much they dent the breastplate.
>>10875061>there was only so much staring at a CRT TV you could stand before getting a stomping headache.uh dude no, my sister and I would burn through 50-hour JRPGs during their rental periods, I recently sat for four hours playing every stage in SMB3 (original hardware including CRT) in a single run... no headache ever (you weirdo)
>>10874950prolly somebody did, but hell no it wasn't me - I did most of it with neighborhood friends present and probably some secondhand tips from Nintendo Power
>>10875061why so weak? he is a zoomer
>>10874973Ok, grandpa
>>10875050>There were 800 numbers you called and asked them what to do or where you couldn't pass and why.You mean 900 numbers...https://youtu.be/MgqUpKw9HWsThe 1-800 numbers were the toll free ones. The 1-900 numbers were the ones that charged x-amount per minute. Even the Nintendo game manuals would have 900 numbers listed in them for the Nintendo Power Hotlines.
>>10874950Yes. It was insanely obtuse at points but enough other 80s games were too. It just takes persistence and too much spare time. >>10875061At least try to be credible when age larping anon.
>>10874950I had a kid in my class tell me about where to kneel with the crystal, but other than that I played through it without a guide or anything. It look me a very long time and a lot of trial and error, I really enjoyed it though and still do.
>>10874950Yes. I owned it and beat it. First game I ever bought myself. $20 at Thrifty. Even my brother beat it and he wasn't really into games like this.
>>10874954Wrong.
>>10874953This is correct. We had a lot of time and fewer games, especially before game rentals took off.
>>10875018For the cost of postage, you could write to Nintendo Power and they would respond directly by mail. They told me which rare items dropped from which eneamies in Final Fantasy 2 and Secret of Mana. Wish I still had the letter. Pretty cool of them.
>>10875061Complete nonsense.
>>10874950I did about a week before the Nintendo Power issue came to my door. Took forever to figure out how to get to Brahm's mansion because the clue for it was mistranslated. I found it by luck more than anything.
>>10876329>For the cost of postage, you could write to Nintendo Power and they would respond directly by mail. They told me which rare items dropped from which eneamies in Final Fantasy 2 and Secret of Mana. Wish I still had the letter. Pretty cool of them.Would Howard Phillips write each letter himself? That is neat, anyway.
>>10875018There were strategy guides like this. Which would cover like 20 games.
>>10874950yes, multiple times
>>10877114Oh Link. Jesus christ. What happened man
>>10874950>no outside informationof course, there was some word of mouth at best, back then it was all about making games last for as long as possible>>10876324>We had a lot of time and fewer gamesTrue, games were scarce new ones even more, rentals changed the landscape some but not much, it was the sea of crapware that came with the digital age that ruined the essence of vidya
>>10877172you try getting out of the lost woods without a strategy guide
>>10877114What the fuck is there to advise about Double Dragon? Double Dragon 2 maybe, because it can be hard to discover the special moves on your own.
>>10874973based. Your post oozed a nostalgia to me that I've been riffing on all day. Its true that there is a secret sauce that comes with sharing tips. The only time I ever beat CVII is because a friend of a friend was over and helped me as his friend had helped him.>>10875018another great post. Where there was a will there was a way. >>10875269Interesting. I flipflop on whether I like this approach to game design or not. On one hand, I always thought a proper game is one that teaches its mechanics to the player thru gameplay and can be enjoyed in a seamless go. Megamans and Kirbys and whatnot. I believe that to be true but I'm learning to appreciate esoteric bullshit a lot. Beating Castlevania 2 is kind of kino because someone took the time to make you an initiate. They passed on the wisdom.
this game was released many years before I was even born kek
Nintendo Power and word of mouth. A lot of kids got Nintendo Power or you would just look it up while at the store with your parents or whatever.
>>10874950Video game magazines and friends. Honestly though, not many people finished it. Most games were like that. That one has two endings, also a rarity at the time.
>>10882124It's funny that I beat Simon's Quest multiple times, CV1 endlessly and CV3 a number of times and still have yet to finish any Mario other than DokiDoki or Zelda other than LA.
>>10882163Is it even that weird? I've beaten a bunch of hard NES games but never finished the original Mario either. I just don't like playing it. Mario 2 USA's a lot more enjoyable for me.
>>10882213It seems weird around here, it seems to be regarded as the greatest gaming ever was, but in general maybe not. I never got why people love playing Mario so much, even as a kid I got bored with it.
you guys realize the avgn thing was a joke, right? a skit. it wasn't meant to be taken literally. play your own video games.
>>10882228I guess it's just simple enough that it's "flawless". I think it's pretty boring too, though.
