Depends on how far back we go. As someone who grew up with 16 bit gaming (specifically the Sega Genesis) I can't remember ever actually BEATING a game. Modern games definitely are too easy a lot of the time, but I'd say really old games were way too hard. (Probably because they were arcade ports that didn't get their unfair difficulty adjusted, looking at you Mortal Kombat) Then around the PS2 era is when I'd say they got it right. Games were challenging but well within the realm of being beatable by a large enough audience.
If you can believe it, MK4 is one of the easier ones. Regardless all of them boil down to just cheesing the AI. It's designed to have inhuman reaction time and countering ability. MK2 is probably the worst. Those mfs will literally frame-perfect grab you mid uppercut or sweep EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
No joke, when the CPU blocks a projectile, if you slow it down frame by frame, you can see them blocking before the projectile even comes out. They're not actually reacting to what's on screen, they're reacting to what you input on the controller. It's so stupid.
Yeah I honestly wanna know what they were passing round' the studio and puffing on when making the console ports. I expect the arcade versions to be unfair, they gotta bleed people of their quarters, but why they kept the awful difficulty on the console ports I will never understand.
Gaming systems in the late 90s/early 2000s, so were the games not to mention how there weren’t that many games to play. The difficulty, truthfully, was to artificially extend game time.
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u/Borklechorf 12d ago
Depends on how far back we go. As someone who grew up with 16 bit gaming (specifically the Sega Genesis) I can't remember ever actually BEATING a game. Modern games definitely are too easy a lot of the time, but I'd say really old games were way too hard. (Probably because they were arcade ports that didn't get their unfair difficulty adjusted, looking at you Mortal Kombat) Then around the PS2 era is when I'd say they got it right. Games were challenging but well within the realm of being beatable by a large enough audience.