i keep seeing people call old games “badly designed” when really they just didn’t hand you progress every five minutes. A lot of them felt more like getting dropped into a playground with no instructions — annoying sometimes, sure, but also weirdly memorable.
maybe i’m just old, but i miss when a game could be a little stubborn without everyone immediately asking for a difficulty slider. do you think modern players have less patience, or did retro games just hide the fun behind too much friction?
A lot of that “stubborn” vibe was on purpose, but yeah, sometimes it really was just bad design. Arcades and rentals basically rewarded games for wasting your time (or your quarters), and a bunch of console stuff was working around tiny memory plus zero good ways to teach you besides “die, repeat, maybe notice the pattern.”
I miss the playground feeling too, but I don’t miss the part where the “learning” is eating an invisible rule for an hour. I don’t think modern players are uniquely impatient — there’s just way more competition now, so friction that doesn’t feel fair gets dropped fast.
