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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

"Games back then were much harder and more unforgiving"? Man, most modern blockbuster games require marksmanship skills way beyond what '80s games ever demanded. Open world, nonlinear plots... You just can't compare recent stuff with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups or roguelikes.

Some games might have felt unforgiving because technological limitations (no saves) or commercial considerations (coin-op first, home later) forced players to repeat procedures over and over again. This is not something to celebrate. I hope my kids will never have to spend the same amount of time and money I wasted on the first 8 levels of WonderBoy II.

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> Man, most modern blockbuster games require marksmanship skills way beyond what '80s games ever demanded.

Like, which ones? Triple-A FPS games that actually have players that require marksmanship? I don't know of any.

Battlefield?

Any modern FPS played competitively definitely takes a lot of skill for sure

The card game "War" takes skill if you play it competitively. That doesn't mean it's a hard game.

If you play a game competitively, you play against other people. That will always take skill. The conversation going on above is about playing against the game itself, not other people.

An FPS is certainly more technically demanding than War.

Counter-Strike does, and I say this as a Mario fanboy.

You think the hyperprecision was made on purpose to force players to replay (at cost) ?

Any coin-op was obviously trying to walk a tight rope between maintaining user engagement and making it hard enough that you would have to spend significant sums for training purposes. Otherwise you might as well give players 999 lives.

Proof: there is no technological limitation for modern coin-ops regarding saving state, but games actually implementing some sort of saving mechanism are still few and far between (and even then, saving features are almost invariably another way to force players to buy add-on gizmos...).

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