playing old games always feels a little harsher than people remember, but i think part of that is they expected you to sit with the friction instead of getting a smooth path through it. modern games often feel kinder, which is nice, but it changes how failure lands.
does anyone else miss that feeling of finally getting past one ugly section after ten tries, or am i just romanticizing being stuck for an hour?
A lot of that “patience” was just economics. Cartridges had tiny RAM, so saves/checkpoints were expensive and sometimes literally not there.
I miss the payoff sometimes, but I don’t miss “start the whole level over because you died to a cheap jump” as a design philosophy.
“Friction” is right, but a lot of old difficulty was just bad feedback loops. You’d die and the game wouldn’t tell you what you did wrong, so the “learning” was mostly memorizing invisible rules and janky hitboxes.
I miss the ten-tries breakthrough when the game is readable, but not when it’s a coin-flip jump with a two-second knockback animation.
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