So I was watching a few youtubes and remembered how the vast majority (of like the ten) nes games me and my sister had were hard as all hell. I loved to play Little Nemo and Street Fighter 2010 but I am pretty sure I never made it past the third level of either. Let alone infamously hard games like The Lion King.
Which got me thinking. Basically every game for the past 20 years has been designed around instant gratification and being accessible. We outright had to make a new concept "hard but fair" to account for games like Dark Souls that are designed to be difficult but beatable as opposed to putting you in a death spiral if you hesitate too long on a hard jump (hello Ninja Gaiden).
So do the younger folk even have a concept of a "favorite game" where you likely never experienced more than fifteen minutes worth of content?
Age of Empires 2. Love the game, but I'm terrible at it… I can barely beat the medium AI. I was defeated in pretty much every online match.
I always felt like the way you need to be playing AoE to be competitively good defeated the purpose of the game for me. It ends up become a rush of min maxing, as opposed to what I loved about the game which was building and designing empires and armies.
At some point you will drop down to your level online, but itll take a few losses to push through. It is such a lovely game though, but just a bit too stressful for me.