10 Things That Secretly Sucked About Old School Gaming
4. Games Were Designed To Frustrate You
In the arcade days, the popular design philosophy was to kill the player as often as possible so that they kept pumping in quarters. If you wanted to beat them, you either got good or got rich. It was super effective.
The problems came when that ideology carried over to home gaming. For some time, the popular method of designing titles was to hide how short they were by making them as frustrating as humanly possible. While some games like Mega Man used this design to their advantage, a host of others weren't so smart with their tactics. This resulted in many titles taking advantage of cheap enemies, broken controls and near impossible puzzles to prolong the experience.
If you were a fan of generic platformers that disguised the fact they only had four levels by making the first one impossible, it was a great time to be alive...