>Games were made hard at the arcade to make sure you spend more quarters>Retro Games were made hard at home to make sure you spend money on gaming guides and magazines>Yet following an internet guide, walkthrough, or watching a youtube video on a part you're stuck at is viewed as bad or you are accused of "not beating the game"I don't get it, you're fine with being suckered into having to buy guides from Nintendo Power to figure out a cryptic part of a game but looking up guides with the internet free-of-charge is a bad thing? Maybe the magic of it was the ritual of getting that magazine and figuring out a tricky stage or cryptic part of a world but it shouldn't of ever had to come down to that.
>>12528301I think it was only Nintendo that put obscureshit in their games to force you to call their hotline, which started before they even had a magazine and long before guides were common. But that's completely different from gameplay difficulty, which was mostly down to rentals and paranoid game devs. Reading "You have to shoot the monsters to kill them" in a guide doesn't help you to overcome that kind of difficulty.
>>12528301It was nearly impossible to find game magazines or guides until the early 90s. Before then, we relied solely on crowdsourced knowledge amongst the neighborhood and schoolyard kids. That part of older games is lost but cannot and should not be simulated with walkthroughs. The closest thing would be posting on boards like this, gamefaqs or even reddit and asking other players how to get past the parts you're stuck on.tl;dr: walkthroughs are still cheating
>>12528331The new arbitrary thing is making sure your game is longer than 3 hours.
>>12528301>>Yet following an internet guide, walkthrough, or watching a youtube video on a part you're stuck at is viewed as bad or you are accused of "not beating the game"I think those people are a mix of shitposters/memers, and the rare sincere, but also actually mentally unhealthy person.As long as you aren't using a guide or walkthrough as a checklist for going through an entire game, nobody gives a fuck.>>12528331>"You have to shoot the monsters to kill them" in a guide doesn't help you to overcome that kind of difficulty.Naturally, but that specifically depends on the type of game. For something like Shadowgate, there's no realtime combat or movement, so you really could just follow a set of steps for any given segment.>>12528342>walkthroughs are still cheatingEntirely contextual.
>>12528301>you're fine with being suckered into having to buy guides from Nintendo Power to figure out a cryptic part of a gameSir, I started gaming in the NES era. I never once used or had a guide. Not once.There are cases where it was a setup, but IMO it was rare as heck that a game was specifically designed to sell guides.The first thing I ever looked up online was OOTs Biggoron trade quest because that was stupid.Most games did not require guides, no games did actually. I owned SNES Lion King, and I beat it fair at age 5-6.You zooms have been convinced by YouTubers that guides are like some requirement and it's weird.Games were often harder to pad playtime or just because gamers like challenge. Sometimes things were hidden deep in games to reward exploration. It's really that simple, not a conspiracy.
>>12528301>"not beating the game"Just stop giving a fuck what retards on /vr/ say. Granted this also means you can't get gamer cred for beating a game, if you dared to use save states in a game with no continues and 3 lives, but you shouldn't be giving a shit about that in the first place if you're actually playing games to play them.
"didn't beat the game" is a zoomer dogwhistle. You should not care about what they have to say.
>>12528331>I think it was only Nintendo that put obscureshit in their gamesI don't know man, PlayStation had a fair amount of obscureshit. I was born in 99 so I didn't experienced this when it came out, but the puzzles in the entire original SH series were hard and many times random as fuck just for the sake of it; I do believe they were trying to sell guides
>>12528301I did not think retro games were intentionally made hard for home release. They were simply made hard at the arcade to keep the quarters flowing. But they did not really change much of the gameplay for home release, just exchange the add coins for a limited number of continues. But the games stayed hard.
>>12528301I recall magazines were more for learning about cheat codes. I learned things like the Sonic 2 level select and debug menu codes from them. Outside of that, Nintendo Power was decent for maps at least, until the final levels. They never showed any final levels.
>>12529087That puzzle was a bitch but I and a lot of other people completed it without guides. I'd put late '80s/early '90s in a different category from late '90s anyway. Late '90s games didn't have a lot of truly obscure parts, but they made up for it by adding lots of hidden and optional things that you did need to buy the guides for. 9/10 times that was the selling point. You'd look at the back of a guide for a game you already had and if it showed something that you didn't even know was in the game, you had a reason to buy it. But that's a lot more fair than what they did with Zelda II or Castlevania II for example.
>>12528826I think Japanese were more likely to use guides.
>>12528826Unless you were a shut-in with no friends, which was actually pretty rare for kids back then, you probably got a lot of tips from the other kids. First-time players don't get that now with older games.
>>12531491People with subscriptions to magazines which had guides would also borrow them to friends.
>>12528301It's true OP, literally nobody ever beat a video game ever without a guide and a save state. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. Games were just made impossible back then.
The 90ies was the first time many games were more easily solvable.In the 80ies, despite some major(or rarely niche) titles, many of the products were esoteric or not really well thought out. Latter was not really optimal but some of the mystery about games relied upon them being a bit unapproachable.Some of the oldies I saw being solved myself was Bruce Lee and Maniac Mansion.
>>12528301>I don't get it, you're fine with being suckered into having to buy guides from Nintendo Power to figure out a cryptic part of a game but looking up guides with the internet free-of-charge is a bad thing?No. Why would you assume I'm fine with doing something I never did?>Retro Games were made hard at homeWere they? Really? Which ones? Super Mario Bros. 3, the game you go out of your way to highlight? Are you seriously saying a main-line Mario game is too hard to complete without a guide? The only really hard part about finishing that game without cheating is that it's very long and doesn't save your progress, and you didn't need to learn how to counter that from any purchased guide because every kid heard about it from The Wizard or from another kid.Or, what else do we have there: Silent Service, well that's a simulation game and no ordinary kid would have expected to "finish" it (whatever that would even mean) with or without a guide. 720 I don't know much about but I don't think it's the kind of game a guide would help a lot with?? A Boy and His Blob, okay that's a guide-friendly game, but probably not a lot of people really cared about getting anywhere in it or about playing it at all. Pinbot is pinball. Astyanax is a simple linear action game that a guide won't really help with, you're just good at that kind of game or you're not.Are you serious OP? Maybe you're just trolling
>>12528684Ah yeah Shadowgate's a good example of a cryptic, guide-friendly game. Or King's Quest V, I played both of those on NES as a kid. I liked Shadowgate a lot more, so I tried harder at it and wouldn't you know it, I actually finished it with zero help from anybody, except maybe my sister who had gone in just as blindly as I did. And as for King's Quest V - I never looked at any guide there either; I simply didn't finish the game. It was only a rental so what did it matter? OP asks whether "the magic of it" was the ritual of actually obtaining and using the printed guide, but it can be much simpler than that: For me, the magic was simply that I was playing some new game, and I loved games. I didn't need to finish them all.
