RF Generation Message Board

The author of this article suggests that it might just be kids trolling but I don't think it is. 

*puts on gramdpa glasses and pulls up pants way too high

When we were growing up, we didn't have the internet to rely on when we got stuck in a video game so that we could avoid using our brains or problem solving skills.  We had to FIGURE IT OUT and that was part of what made the game great.

http://kotaku.com/the-kids-of-today-seem-to-be-struggling-with-super-metr-507848662

Time to call the Nintendo Power hotline....oh....wait.

A similar phenomenon with Ultima IV: http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/09/unplayable.html

The cause? The kids don't read the manual. They're used to games holding their hands and having arrows point exactly where they need to go.

OK, this is begging for a community play-through (after Disney month) now.
 

That would be a cool one to playthrough, but I'm not sure we'd get much participation.

I like "y can't metroid crawl?" Its time to educate the young whipper snappers.

I'm willing to bet that they are just struggling with the game because its not that much fun :D

Good point. ;)

Someone posted this in the comment section of that link and I think it sums it up nicely:

"I'm a 80's / 90's kid, and yet I never played this game, so it's pretty likely I will have a pretty hard time with it, as well.

I don't believe for a second that kids nowadays are worse gamers than we were back in the day. I see videos of 9 year old kids playing Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flame" on Guitar Hero on expert difficulty, and that alone tells me that present-day kids are quite capable.

If we had something like Miiverse back in the day, we would also have been spamming it with pleas for help for Super Metroid, or Contra, or all the Mega Man games.

But we didn't, instead relying on trying and trying again until we got shit done; it's not that we were better gamers, it's just that that was the way games were, and we accepted it, and we played it because we had no other choice. It was the culture back then, where we were super patient and didn't rest until we could beat that damn underwater level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Put a modern-day kid in a similar scenario - say, put him in a deserted island with only a CRT TV, a NES and Battletoads, and I warantee you that the kid will play it endlessly until he's capable of beating the game on a single life.

If we were the "super hardcore gamers" as so many people seem to think, tell me: why was the Konami Code so popular? How many people actually beat Contra without using it (and Contra wasn't even THAT hard, mind you)? How many people actually finished Battletoads, Marble Madness, Punch Out!!, Ninja Gaiden I & II, etc?"

Ah, the old playground discussions. You'd get stuck in a game and hope that somebody else had it so you could discuss it.

It wasn't always the case back then though. I remember trying to get some help in Tomba! when I was a wee tot and everybody looked at me and somebody said, "What's Tomba?"

ya i don't think the ability for kids to mentally figure out these puzzles is any lower now than 20 years ago, it's just that they have the option now to give up and find a walkthrough. i'm sure if we had that option back then it would have been used just as much.

Crabby, you only picked quote because it mentioned TMNT.... :P

Fixed.



I think we should do a Persona 4 playthrough.   ;D

Its the same reason I picked this quote too ;)


I'd be so in for that!!!

A lot of the newer games are easier. Back then we had Arcade ports which were meant to be hard to suck quarters. We also had games costing 2x what we do now so kids got about 2-3  games a year at most if lucky. Games were mostly shorter in the 80's early 90's so they made them much harder to get more replay value. Not a knock on the newer generation of gamers but your skills can only be tested as much as they practiced.

If the kids were tested more they would be more used to tougher games and figure it out pretty easy.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest.

'Nuff said.

It's not just gamers these days.  It's society as a whole that wants a quick solution, and rightfully so.  Lives have gotten so much more complicated than generations past, and this has been reported on many times.  I guess you can't blame the kids for adopting this mentality.  But then companies have catered to the quick fix.  News organizations with 30 second reports, 15 minute insurance quotes, and game creators with their checkpoints and go-this-way arrows.  Skylanders allows you to buy a key to unlock a puzzle without solving it.  This is what new gamers are used to.

Although I'm part of the NES/SNES generation and want to feel that "kids today have it so good", I tend to feel a little pity that they don't get to experience the struggles, the constant re-attempts to pass a level, and then the satisfaction of finally being able to beat a game.  Remember when your NES stayed turned-on for days at a time, because there was no save?  Memories.  These days most games only get a single play through, and then they are forgotten on the shelf or traded-in for another.

I tend to agree with Crabby.  We aren't better gamers, the old bastards that we are, but enjoyed what we had the best that we could.  And current gen gamers are not used to the differences, just like I have to remember the auto-save feature exists now. 

i still don't trust auto-save, most of the time i re-load my file after quitting to make sure i didn't lose anything.

I agree with Techie's comment. Today's world is so fast paced and unnecessarily complicated. Moreover, the younger generation just isn't reading as much; so forcing them to read a manual to understand gameplay and mechanics just isn't going to happen. An extention of fewer readers is a weaker imagination that would allow out of the box thinking and experimentation.

The older games worked on a paradigm of trial and error, challenge and reward. Modern games aren't too different. It's just that the players give up after not accomplishing something on the first attempt. No instantaneous rewards turn people off.

Definitely with you on the imagination portion of it. I grew up on text-based adventures and MUDs, and the quests required a lot of imagination and thought because most of them were written at the beginning of the game's lifespan. Many younger players had no clue where to go, and often times would give up on the quests and gripe because they were too hard when all you had to do was type "search" - not even searching particular keywords!

Anyone ever draw their own maps as a kid when playing certain games? I also remember when playing Zelda OoT having a notebook and writing down every song as I learned them. Think I still have it.

Heck on Master System Miracle Warriors I think came with a figure and a big fold out map. Was an RPG and the world was so large it needed a physical map and figure so you place your figure where you are in the game. Skyrim of it's day.

I still draw the occasional map as an adult, lol. Last one I remember doing was for Section Z last year.

I did for the original Zelda.

I think I'm too young to be in the map drawing generation but I have done it for older games like first person RPGs. Somewhere, in a box at home, I have maps drawn out for the first two Shin Megami Tensei games that I can remember, who knows what I've forgotten. If I didn't have the internet I would definitely need to draw Phantasy Star maps as well.

EDIT: I have a grid map for Shining in the Darkness somewhere.

The cool kids in the 80's had Nintendo Power. Rest of us had to figure it out lol

This had me ROFL

I can remember writing a letter to Sierra On-Line's hint department back in the day to help me out with King's Quest I and King's Quest IV, back before hint books started becoming a niche business for retailers. Of course, that's PC, not console, but same principle.

Is it bad that I STILL can't beat the Mega Man games? Like, ANY of them? Or Castlevania and Castlevania 3 US?

I hope not- I think I beat MM2 and MM6 without rampant cheating but that's it.

Maybe I'm just too forgiving of this, but I don't see the issue. I've played through Super Metroid a few times and I still have "I have no memory of this place" moments where I completely brick on what to do.

I don't have any issue with getting stuck either, I get stuck all the time.  It's just an interesting by product of the instantly accessible solution on the internet that younger gamers are less prone to use their own problem solving skills instead of looking online for the answer as soon as they hit a roadblock.

Yeah, you can argue this about anything really. I mean, I look up how to do all kinds of crap all the time. From tying a tie to cooking a steak. Does this mean I'm less intelligent than people who learned these things differently in a pre-internet era? I don't think so. If anything, our ability to find answers faster and easier should lead to the biggest jump in mankind's everyday functionality since the advent of the written word.

I'm not saying that the internet hasn't revolutionized the way we do almost everything.  It has, and mostly for the better. 

I just think that discovery is a huge part of interactive entertainment and that being told the answer takes away the joy of figuring it out for yourself.  This most recently happened to me while playing Limbo.  I ended up getting stuck on a puzzle, tried for a bit, couldn't figure it out, and I looked up the answer.  I was immediately mad at myself for not seeing the solution and for robbing myself of the joy of discovering the secret to the puzzle.

I would not look up the solutions to any other puzzle in the game and whenever I recommended it to friends, I told them to solve each puzzle on their own.

Again, not making a judgement on anyone who decides to look something up, just an observation.

i tend to look up the answers if it feels like i've tried literally everything the game offers as an item or ability, with no results. i definitely give it my best before going to the web though. i've seen some people go to a walkthrough right at the start of a game and say they just want to see the end and that's all that matters to them. those people make me mad, they should stick to movies.

I do think it was a special time playing pre-internet games. Shining Wisdom has a special place in my memory purely for the fact I was stuck in the game for half a year. I was completely stuck at the Sand Labyrinth. I even restarted the game multiple times in case I had missed something. I checked out this Labyrinth so thoroughly I even found a bug that let me walk on walls before finding the solution. Plus before the net & growing up there was less to do so games got more undivided attention I found.

Older gamers and younger gamers are completely different and it's mostly due to the internet.

I refuse to look at a guide unless it's completely hopeless (i.e. Castlevania 2). Older gamers were also trained to "figure it out yourself". That's the beauty of a video game for most of us.

Imagine a younger gamer playing The Legend of Zelda without any guidance aside from the map and manual that came with the game. That gamer is on gamefaqs or looking for a youtube walkthrough within 5 minutes or the game is turned off, never to be played again and is instead playing a game that holds your hand.

Edit - Let's put it this way. I can cruise through a game like Borderlands 2 in my sleep. A 9 year old has no chance at beating Rygar. Not because a younger gamer is less intelligent or skilled, but because they would never have the determination.

Wait, Zelda CAME WITH A MAP?
...yeah, I never had manuals with games as a kid since all of my NES titles were cartridge only (2nd hand flea market). Zelda was fun to stumble into things on though.

original final fantasy had a map too

Tons of games have maps.

Bringing up those maps is an interesting point. As far as I know, and I may be wrong, these maps were included in the US versions of games because it was assumed that western players wouldn't be able to figure out where to go or what to do. So it seems that at the time, Nintendo thought US/Canadian gamers weren't as competent as their Japanese counterparts.

Nor were we...

Yep, in fact one of the more common localization changes other than censorship was dumbing down the difficulty on games.

No speedruns to the extreme for them then, I take it?

Get off my Zebes, you should be saying.

y can't metroid crawl guy banned from miiverse lol

I'm still struggling w/ the original Metroid! Lol! It's funny though because I think gorwing up on the original NES really "trained" me to think and not have to rely on guides. There were some exceptions and I never owned a game genie until 2001. I only resort to either of those things unless I absolutely must. The games now, I blow through them A LOT quicker, it's like they hold your hand throughout the games you play on XB 360 or PS3. Not to mention there were no saves really(with the exception of Zelda), just passwords and/or continues and sometimes you didn't get either(depending on the game). It was just you against the game and you played on a Friday or Saturday night until the cows came home or beat it! Kids have it easy today w/ the NGC's! Damn kids and your rap music! :laugh:

Playing through Super Metroid is one of my fondest memories of gaming. I did subscribe to Nintendo Power and I did have the Player's guide, but I think I only had to consult it a couple of times to get unstuck. I wasn't a very good gamer, though. I now have a lot of admiration for people who COULD figure out those games. But man...so few modern games can create that level of immersion. Super Metroid is a shining gem of a game.

Now, the only games that interest me are old, hard games. It's just no fun if you're guided all the way through with no challenge at all, as in so many modern games.

The thing I loved so much about Super Metroid though..the graphics, the music, were such masterpieces. And the game felt so incredibly vast. It really felt like you were exploring an alien planet. I can't even comprehend the idea that younger kids wouldn't pick up this game and react like: why the FUCK am I playing anything new???