Grinding can be fun. Grinding with a combat system as archaic as FF1 is unfun. There’s not enough there to enter a flow state. Art is subjective, but that grind is as close to objectively boring as possible.

This discussion always makes me think of Super Meat Boy, which is a perfect case study for how punishing difficulty can be incorporated without poisoning the experience for the player. SMB is hard as fuck and demands impossible precision from the player, but there’s no punishment for failure. You die, you try again immediately. It makes the two second door animation in Mega Man feel like an eternity.

And when it came out, it felt strangely innovative. Like, it’s obvious in hindsight, but just reducing the punishment to 0 turns it from an exercise in frustration into a game that trains the player to perfection without holding their hand.

I did get it! Also most of the other UFO 50 merch on that site, like the t-shirt and the pins. Great t-shirt. Better fit than the Tunic one I got from there.

I was slightly disappointed that the guide didn’t reveal another layer of the meta-narrative like I’d hoped, but it’s still a neat object and very well made.

I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.

But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.

So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.

I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.

Yeah I don’t have any idea what you’re referring to. There are still a huge amount of new and innovative games every year. It’s possible you’re just not playing them.

The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.

Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.

That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.

In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.

That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.

But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.

Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.

Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.

Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks your ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.

Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.

Barbuta scratched an itch I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. Piecing it together in the dark was one of my best gaming moments last year. I love how almost everyone who beat it came to the same solution and got out a pen and paper to draw their own maps.

Game design is better today than it’s ever been. For most of us I think it’s just nostalgia for our childhoods and for living in simpler times that makes us think otherwise.

I mean have you ever gone back and played a classic game that you didn’t grow up with? It’s rough. I’ve plumbed the depths of the NES virtual console and found that all the best games just happen to be the ones I’ve already played. That’s probably not a coincidence.

Even when the game is genuinely great, there’s still a mountain of bullshit and bad game design to get through, which is just unnecessary today.

With that said, everyone in this comment section needs to check out UFO 50. It’s a collection of 50 “retro” games by a group of indie games designers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.

It’s a loving recreation of playing games how they used to be played, except it’s cleverly laced with subtle, modern design features that make the retro goodness so much better. It’s like combing through old ROMs trying to find a diamond in the rough, except there’s more diamond than rough.

Speaking of Easter eggs, UFO 50 also has a hidden meta-narrative buried deep in the collection, detailing the dark history of the fictional company that made them.

Stop editing other people’s comics.

And don’t forget to try the Big Arch, the new burger from McDonald’s.

I’m reminded of a story from Oliver Sacks, where one of his patients had some kind of vestibular issue that made him unable to tell that he was always tilted about 20°. He couldn’t correct it alone, because that felt level to him.

The patient had been a carpenter, so his solution was to mount a spirit level to his glasses. He watched it out of the corner of his eye and constantly corrected his posture. Eventually it became second nature to him.

Sounds like he could use a Snickers.

There’s nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social

Gross. He should have had a Simply Lemonade instead! It’s Never Concentrated, Always Delicious.

I’m going to frame all my responses to his comics as advertisements.

Really makes me want to buy a PS5, you know?

Playstation 5: Play Has No Limits

Does anyone else wonder what those kids are making? I’ll tell you what they’re not making: Levi’s jeans, because Levi’s has a strict policy against child labor.

Levi’s: Quality Never Goes Out of Style.

Is the front cover of a book an ad? Are the credits at the end of a movie an ad?

If a signature is an ad, what is it advertising for exactly? Can you define the word “ad” for us? Imagine hating ads so much and literally not knowing what they are.

Thumbnail looks like a sandwich.

Not my logic. You’re the one who wanted to simplify it to body counts. Is adding good deeds also too much nuance for you? All morality is judged on bad deeds alone? Wow that’s even more simplistic.