cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
The biggest pain point of the oldest games is that they came out of the arcade era, so they were specifically designed to lack save features, and be so punishing that you would spend more of your quarters playing them.
I did a playthrough of both Castlevania 1 and Megaman 1. After a while I gave in and started using savestates, and suddenly both games became amazing. Jumping over Dracula's fireballs is a lot more dramatic when you have to do it with pixel precision.
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.
If I remember correctly, I think one of the Rayman games were one of the first to try a gameplay loop like that. They definitely tend to feel better, but I think it depends on the game too.
Like some of the Souls games can have fairly punishing boss battles, where losing comes with the penalty of a painfully of a relatively long and dangerous trek just to get your ass handed to you again. If they did that for every boss I would hate the games, but that they throw usually just one of those in there makes them just frustrating enough to be extra spicy.