The Essence of Old Games

I love old video games ("old" being NES-era forward). I love the hand-drawn graphics, the simple yet addictive gameplay, and the rocking electronic-beep soundtracks. It will come as no surprise then to you to find out that I also love the Wii's Virtual Console service which lets you download old games right onto your Wii for a pretty decent price. I spent this weekend playing Lords of Thunder, which originally launched on the TurboGrafx-16 (the little-known third contender in the 16-bit era), and I rediscovered the other essential part of the "old-games" formula: crushingly brutal difficulty.


A typical enemy in Lords of Thunder. Not pictured: Me, sobbing softly.

Actually, as a testament to how serious I am, when I googled "Lords of Thunder" to find that picture above, the first site that came up was called Hardcore Gaming 101. Indeed, Lords of Thunder is hardcore. The game only has seven levels, but I have put at least ten hours into it and have yet to finish it. How is that possible, the new generation of gamers ask? Well, it's because there's no way you are beating any of those levels on your first try. Not even on your second try. By the time you master that level, finally, better get used to doing it over and over again because guess what-- you only have three lives, and if you get a game over, that's it! Back to the start of the game. I'm currently in a trance of beating those six levels and then attempting the final one over and over again.

But you know what? It'd darn fun. After a while you do begin to master it, and you derive a true feeling of satisfaction from it. What's the saying-- anything worthwile isn't easy to do? Well, regardless of how worthwhile spending ten hours playing a game is (give me a break, I'm on slack week!) it's true in the context of game-playing. I'm not going to start harshing on modern-day games because I enjoy them too, but they are definitely different. Gone are the days of a handful of levels that you have to master by replaying. Instead, you are offered constant new terrain to traverse. While that is neat, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from overcoming adversity is never really present. Hmm, maybe I am knocking new games.

Well, services like the Wii's Virtual Console and the Xbox's Live Arcade are bringing a steady stream of old hard-to-find games, or new games made with the old "arcade" mentality back to the forefront, so all's good anyway. As for me, I guess I'm back to the grind-- Time to suit up in the water armour and give it a go once more.