Bad Game Design - (Some) NES Games 

Did people think I was actually serious about Fortnite? C'mon...

The glitching pixels was due to the NES having a max amount of sprites that could be animated at any one time. Making them flicker meant that you could have more animated characters on screen and render them in alternating frames.

The flicker in these old games was not a glitch from lack of polish. It was the result of hardware limitations.

Rayman Origins is one of those extremely hard games where it starts off east with plenty of checkpoints but slowly spaces those checkpoints out and makes it harder, it's one of my favorite games of all time

Did I just watch an ad for Shovel Knight?

Before NES, we had the Atari 2600. A dot shooting another dot with a smaller dot. The NES blew my mind when I first saw it.

Imagine having a series on game design and calling Sprite flickering a “Glitch.”

Dying at 0 lives in spyro sends you back to your last save not the beginning

Bubble bobble. Hard to beat in one sitting but every stage had a code so you could always pick up where you left off. Multiple endings. One of the greatest games of all time.

Snowman Gamig:There's no way Mario Games like these would happen today Mario Maker: Hold my beer

I regard Castlevania as one of the NES games that have aged the best. It's really hard but short and overcome-able. You have three lives, but all that happens when you lose them is that you have to restart the level. As long as you have lives you restart at the checkpoints. The reason that everyone hates the medusa heads isn't that they're badly designed, it's that they're the first enemies that teach you that you need patience and plan your actions in this game. And that's frustrating when the game so far had been pretty much hit and run.

This dude seriously used save states to beat Super Mario Bros. 3

Wait, so you're telling me a 30 year old game is going to look like a 30 year old game?

1:22 *"So let me state my FECES upfront."* When the guy admits he's talking shit.

"Glitching pixels and lag" was the result of the limits of the NES hardware, not a polish issue. Don't forget most of the NES's actual chips were 1970s tech or based on 1970s tech, and the NES itself wasn't even designed to run Super Mario Bros or Mega Man, it was designed to run nearly-arcade-perfect Donkey Kong. If you didn't want glitching sprites or slowdown in your NES game, there were four options: 1) Use background tiles whenever possible. Pretty much all of the best NES developers, including Nintendo, abused background tiles in ways Nintendo hadn't originally intended. 2) Use different hardware. e.g. wait a few years and make a game for Turbo Grafx 16 or Amiga instead. Sure hope you don't need to pay bills until then! 3) Jump through hoops to make sure the few sprites you do use don't overlap horizontally. e.g. make sure some sprites don't move vertically at all. 4) Give up and live with it. A lot of developers went for option 4.

Mega Man is definitely, in most cases, a master class in the sort of modern-day challenging design you spoke of. Barring the first game, which of course commits the inexcusable sin of making an item that can be confused for being optional, required to even beat the game, in a particularly nastily designed section that in some versions of the game, render progression impossible if it runs out, Mega Man tends very frequently to introduce a stage gimmick or mechanic in a safe environment where you can't be killed by it. Magnet Man's stage in Mega Man 3 mixes the ever-present disappearing blocks of previous games with a new wall-magnet mechanic dragging you off of them if you get too close, but the first two of these are in a safe environment where you aren't penalized for falling, but the third introduces a bottomless pit to the equation, suddenly raising the stakes and testing how well you react to this new magnet mechanic. Or, a more resourceful player, depending on when they arrive at Magnet Man's stage, may already have the Rush Jet, which they can use to bypass this challenge entirely, rendering it moot. Mega Man is full of potential options for a player to explore and that's what can make them so infinitely replayable. One of my favorite things to do is practicing a stage with savestates, stating at each new screen and making multiple runs with different weapons and items at my disposal, trying to develop the perfect "How do I best deal with this?" strategy.

One thing you neglected to mention about NES games that I feel makes a difference- you can often earn extra lives through finding secrets or score. This turns lives into a resource management system rather than a set number of tries, and NES games were often balanced around that. Is it worth it to farm a live or two to prevent a game over? Do you need to find all the secrets to get further, or is it better to not waste lives trying to find them? Lives and checkpoints on the NES encouraged mastery of a section that I just don't feel modern games do, and it feels disingenuous to describe them as a limited continue system when often, finding ways to generate more lives was an entertaining risk vs reward decision.

2:02 I'd like to point out that there *is* a somewhat justifiable reason for many NES games functioning like arcade games despite the lack of coin feeding, and that's game length. Limited technology only allowed for so much space, which is why games can be completed in less than an hour with enough skill. On top of that, games were often just as expensive as they are today, if not even more, before all the inflation that's occurred since then, so developers really needed to pad out the play time with punishing elements. This doesn't change that these are bad design philosophies, but developers had to work with what they were given at the time. Anyway, a modern game that I'd argue has captured the old-school difficulty without adopting outdated design is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. The platforming challenges are hard, but never unfair, as the game drip-feeds players the mechanics across a stage before throwing them all together for a final test of skill. Lives are incorporated, but the game provides so many of them that it takes a sufficient lack of skill to actually run out of them -- that and it's basically necessary for the co-op, as lives are shared. It also has the bonus levels that offer no checkpoints, as well as Hard Mode, which allows no partner, no checkpoints, no help items, and only one hit, allowing players craving that punishing difficulty to indulge in it. It's a master of its craft.

Those aren't "glitching pixels" in the way of Bethesda glitches. It's a fundamental NES limitation.

heres a rough chart of every comment 100% : the flicker in the old game wasnt a lack of polish, it was hardware limitations. 0% :

The games were hard not because they were trying to emulate arcade, but because they were short. Imagine spending $50 on castlevania and beating it in under an hour.

Mega Man, they did the isolation techniques for almost ever enemy, very few random enemies most trigger when your near them, game over only made you replay the stage but you keep all the beaten ones and power ups. Etc

I played and beat castlevania 1 for the first time recently and can say it is an incredibly tightly designed game, there is a moment just before the fight against death where you have to move forwards, fight the axe throwing knight dudes and avoid medusa heads at the same time and its actually thrilling Its life system is excellent, you get 3 tries to make it through the stage where you get to restart from a checkpoint otherwise you go back to the start of the stage but the stages are reasonably short The final boss though is the ultimate test because dracula can only actually move and shoot He is really predictable but also quite hard to fight, but you get the unbroken rythm and finally win and its amazing Also i would disagree with you about committed jump arcs because castlevania 1 is designed around them very well You have a very specific toolset designed exactly for the job I played through 1,2,3,4, and rondo of blood and id say 1 is probably in the running for best becase its so much tighter than 3 and 4. though rondo of blood is probably my favourite, the fact that it competes so well with its successors has to say something

“Bethesda ain’t got nothin on this!” - Fallout 76 would beg to differ.

What you call "Glitchy pixels" and "lack of polish" are actually limited sprites that the memory allowed. These were actually pretty clever tricks, if you had X limit, and wished to show X times 2, you had to "flicker" between them each frame. Wish games these days were that optimized.

Something to note is that Shovel Knight & Hollow Knights punishments add variety to play, Shovel Knight adding another risk/reward system with gold placements and Hollow Knight with a potentially annoying enemy in some situations. Makes dying not just repeating the same thing over but better this time.

Flickering graphics on NES were a programming hack to add more sprites on the screen than the hardware could handle. That's not an example of bad programming or a lack of polish, it's an example of pushing the hardware to the absolute limit successfully.

Issues: 1: Sprite flickering was actually a solution to a hardware issue. Each sprite was 8 pixels horizontally and 8 or 16 pixels vertically. If there were more then 8 sprites on the scanline, the 9th sprite and onward will not draw. So devs would alternate the sprite priority every frame, which caused the sprite flickering. 2. You warped to world 8 you cheater. No wonder it was hard, you skipped passed 6 1/2 worlds.

I think Balloon Fight has fair challenge. The enemies are as limited in movement as you are, and you can choose to kill them off when they're weak, or wait for them to get their balloons back so you can pop them for more points, the fish only appears when you get too close to the water, and the stars are one hit kills but they always move the same way and you can see when and where they're going to appear before they can kill you. But it's Balloon Fight. Your only reward is points.

I remember beating Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Castlevania I and III when I was 9. I was a goddess among my friends at school. Beating old school NES games was a thrill. They had to be hard because otherwise you'd be dropping $50 on a game that you could otherwise beat in under 2 hours. It was also a way to get people renting games repeatedly ("I didn't beat it last week, so I'll try it again!").

Dude, even the original Spyro had saves. Several PS1 games did, so I'm not sure what kind of games your wife is remembering.

That "flicker" is better explained in the development of Micro Mages: the NES can only have a certain number of sprites on screen. To render more, they cycled through each one.

Some of the games of nes were designed to emulate arcades but the difficulty thing in lots of games wasn't artificial difficulty but artificial lengthening

i like at 7:57 he says it's funny that games were released with this little polish. as opposed to games now which are released half done and the other half is released as an expensive DLC or very large updates(betrhseda). Or "Big Rigs:Over The Hill Racing"

Part of the appeal of lives systems for me is that they mean you have to get consistent with playing the whole game well, or at least a decent part of the game before you can actually beat it. To me this is more fun than just spamming infinite checkpoints/savestates at a brick wall until you happen to clear it once and then move on to the next brick wall, never having to think about earlier parts of the game ever again. Sure, modern games that use lives systems should make an effort to make collecting lives actually meaningful, and provide the player with some ways to make each playthrough of previous sections different from the last, but to dismiss lives systems as inherently outdated is just kinda dumb imo.

"Hey, I have beaten Super Mario Bros 3 with the warp whistle" good job, much research, such knowledge

fortnite restarts a game if you lose in battle royale fortnite is bad game design confirmed

"It's all about not having any setbacks and just forward progress. Except I also don't want too many checkpoints, because then it doesn't feel like I accomplished anything. But I also prefer save states. Also none of that matters and it's actually all about enemy placement and I have no idea what I'm talking about."

Nintendo’s quality control, despite some of its annoyances, at least made it so NES games were possible to beat, even those that were “NES hard”. I remember some pre-NES games being impossible to beat.

I think "bad" game design isn't really fair here. "Dated" is the word you're looking for. A lot of these games are not good by todays standards, but the difference between an outright bad game and a dated game is that if you get you mind out of the headspace of comparing it to games made after 30 years of trial and error have occurd these games can still be a lot of fun. Hell, the Megaman games are still considered classics, and for good reason.

The first Legend of Zelda on the 8 bit NES was fair. You had a map to navigate, clues to find secrets, we're introduced to new abilities progressively, and all enemies with predictable patterns. It was a well rounded game that just took time, skill, resource management and a little knowledge.

7:54 man that's super unfair to developers of back then. Those "glitchy" sprites aren't really glitchy -- the programmers had to actually make them cycle in terms of visibility in order to be able to show that many things on screen at once. (Well, clearly not "at once", but you get it.) It's one thing to say that the games look ugly today, but to say they were unpolished, even though you concede they were under technical limitations, is selling the work of these people way short.

7:56 the NES has a sprite limit, these “glitching pixels” were necessary to have a full field of players.

*Several people are typing...*

“You misunderstood me I didn’t say ALL NES games!” *Put footage of Castlevania, DuckTales, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, Contra etc. As well as in the thumbnail*

Hotline Miami is the first example that pops to mind. It was brutal. Had the perfect amount of punishment that built up tension, stakes and provided accomplishment.

Gotta love having to play the same game twice to get the true ending in Ghosts n Goblins. What a creative way to extend the length and difficulty of a game.

Ok but if you’re going to put ducktales, castlevania, and mega man next to the words “bad game design” you’re just asking for hate Not hating just saying lots of people will get mad

Sonic The Hedgehog did difficulty well. It had lives, but a forgiving mechanic for damage in the form of rings. Also, people had fewer games back then so Sonic was designed to be rewarding to replay. People often complain about sonic having enemies and springs that trip you up if you go too fast. This was to reward memorization. The creators imagined people replaying the games and remembering were all the traps were and getting faster and faster. It was designed to be easier and easier each time you played through. This made having to reply levels less of a grind and more of a learning experience.

I sigh every time I hear the old "lives are artificial difficulty" because that doesn;t make sense. Of course there is something to be said about replaying the same levels multiple times otherwise we wouldn't have the games to that do so with infinite lives. I'm not talking about NES games specifically, but I'm thinking back as a kid playing something like Tearaway Thomas or Gynoug, there is a real thrill being able to play earlier stages better than you were able to before. Getting to the end of level 7 with 4 lives where last time you only had 3? there's a real sense of weight to that. Even in more recent times playing Ducktales Remastered, I adore Extreme mode. I've never actually been able to beat it but each attempt has been exhilarating since every hit matters. The issue is about what is being measured, in the lower difficulties the game sort of reverts everyone to an equal playing field regardless of skill. If you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth or you trounced them, all that matters is "you did it" so the box has been checked off the list. Now my counter example of the exact opposite is Super Meat Boy. Everyone loves Super Meat Boy and I do enjoy the game, but I get bored of it really really quickly. When scale of rewards is diminished, the game becomes a case of "keep playing until you're perfect". Plus if you want to call replaying bits "artificial" then that applies here too surely. If a level consists of "5 jumps" and I keep dying on the 4th and 5th, then why make me do the first 3 jumps every time i die? what exactly is the scale of this issue? if it's a question of playing through 5 seconds of progress 2000 times or playing through 2500 seconds of progress 4 times, I choose the latter (generally speaking of course)

The blinking sprites were due to technical limitations. The console could only display a set number of sprites on the screen at the same time, but if you skip some frames on their rendering, you could display other sprites while they're off and so on.

Honestly though, developers sticking to color and musical limitations makes a game in an NES style so much more impressive. Plus, when games say they're, "8 bit," I expect them to ACTUALLY be close to 8 bit.

Dude, I suck at Castlevania, Contra, Punchout, and many more. But it’s the difficulty I think that make video games of the past more worthwhile to beat.

Like... I love the Good/Bad Game Design series but I do feel like you maybe put a HUGE emphasis on platformers and puzzle games. Which - I get it - you like those games - that's good.... But I wouldn't mind seeing your takes on a wider variety of games. What makes good/bad game design in say - RPGs? Or Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley-like Farm Sims? What do you think makes a good or bad game design in casual games? Or other types of sim games? Or battle royales (with or without cheese)? Or combat games? This series is amazing... But it has so much potential to cover a much wider breadth of game design and you can kind of only cover platformers so much before you're just rehashing content.

>bad game design >megaman What.

Snowman: a good example of a retro homage is Shovel Knight. *Proceeds to mention all the stuff Shovel Knight got from Mega Man, despite showing a lot of disdain for Mega Man up to this point*

Damn, the thumbnail was click bait and I feel for it. I thought a good argument was going to be made not, “This game is designed badly because it didn’t hold my hand.”

"there's a reason why the konami code came into existence" yeah it was meant to be a SECRET code that helped the game devs test out any bugs by getting into the game further much easier, and what benefits do these games have of wasting your time? it doesn't make any sense

The "come back to the beginning" thing was due to the games being waaaaay shorter than today. The first Super Mario Bros with save states/continues would suck for example!

Love the old school NES games. They were difficult...part of the appeal though. The simplicity in game design is what made these games so special.

I admit, sometimes Megaman is a bit cheap. But nothing will ever make me stop enjoying it.

Shovel Knight was THE game to teach me that dificulty can be fun and rewarding if fair

I get where you're coming from, and agree with a lot you say. But I also think a concept such as lives can provide an extra dimension to a game. In Megaman games for example, you're often put to a choice: will you take the riskier route for an extra life? And if you die the first time taking that route, will you try again to break even or cut your losses short? Matter of opinion I guess. I don't think there is a universal standard that games have to adopt.

I warped straight to world 8 Skill arc: imma bout to end this whole mans career

bro i cant believe you like fortnite, it doesn't even have checkpoints!

"It was harder to see what was coming because of the lack of widescreen" Uhh... And make the already small sprites on screen even smaller on an already blurry screen?

It's easy to write off the difficulty of these games if you didn't experience them when they were new and don't understand the context of how they were experienced. In the NES era video games were very expensive, around $100 when adjusted for inflation. Most people weren't buying every single new game that came out, especially not kids, who were the primary audience for those games. You might get one new game on your birthday and one at Christmas, and you would play them all year long. Imagine if you got a brand new game on your birthday and you beat it in a couple of days like most of the games today - that money just went down the toilet and you just have to hope you'll get a new one soon. It's easy to just load up a game on an emulator, play it for two seconds, then decide it's too hard and move on to the next one. Players at the time didn't have that luxury - you had the games that you had, and you got your time and money's worth out of them. Video game design used to be about maximizing value for the consumer, now it's about maximizing profit for the publisher. If you spend too much time on Game A, you're less likely to go out and spend money on Game B when it comes out next month, so you need to see everything in the game as quickly as possible so you can move on to the next shiny new thing that you'll inevitably forget about when the next shiny new thing comes out, ad infinitum...

When he mentioned Mario Bros 3 I cringed while remembering how Nintendo handles the true final levels in modern Mario Bros games.

I disagree with a lot of things in this video but yeah, the zombies in ghosts n goblins are bullshit actually, there's a lot of bullshit in that game

Wait, weren't these the reasons you were prasing getting over it?

In a funny way this video shows me how a head of the curve Nintendo was at "game design", they started to migrate the arcade style design pretty quickly on the bigger titles fairly early compared to the other developers on the system

I actually like lives for shorter games. They force the player to master the early parts of a game before beating it, and can add in interesting resource management.

Talking about experience NES games and beating SMB3 from Super Mario All Stars on SNES using saved states, enough said.

To be honest there are things in the back of my fridge that have aged more gracefully than 80% of the NES library.

It is like the reviewer here has no idea about hardware limitations and cost of production. The fact that some of these old games are playable at all is due to very good design and hard work. Try to program in bits and see how difficult it can be.

I think Binding of Isaac really captures that ‘old school difficulty’ feeling. Whenever you die, you have to restart your run, but you get to keep any unlocks and any long-term progress. It’s a difficult game, but all of the rules are laid out and enforced clearly. It is a very rare occurrence for me to feel like a death was unfair.

Snoman: "NES Hard is artificial difficallty" Everyone: "OmG sNOmaN dON'T LiKe neS gAMes!!!!!!"

I was actually kind of surprised not to see Celeste mentioned for the opt in b-sides and strawberries.

“Have you played NES games lately? They kinda suck!” Video closed.

"I beat super mario bros 3... i warped straight to world 8."

Imagine skipping 90% of a game and saying you beat it. I guess this is why people like pay to win games so much.

While some of the things you said were true, and I can tell your INTENTIONS are good, this logic just doesn't really apply to old NES games. The reason they set you back so far were twofold: for one, renting games was a BIG business back then, and they didn't want people to beat it in a weekend rental - they wanted people to buy the game and really sink their teeth into it. And for two, they wanted to extend the playtime of someone who DID buy it as much as possible - so when they beat the game, its not a feeling of "ah, well, dunno if that 2 hours was worth $50.." but rather "damn, this was quite an arduous adventure and I got a ton of playtime, I feel like I really overcame this monster" Considering just how limited storage space and general tech was at the time, making really long experiences out of pretty much any game you mentioned (e.g. Mario 3) pretty much required some amount of this "bad" game design (or stuff like dragon quest/final fantasy endless amounts of grinding, but that's a whole different kind of bad that wastes the player's time even more.) Sorry but, this was a weak video from you.

I think you should watch "how we fit a game into 40kb," where a game studio tried to fit a full game into the original memory limitations of the NES (prior to fancy bank switching cartridges). They don't fit much on those cartridges! Then, bear in mind that each one of these tiny, 40-512k cartridges cost around $50usd ($132usd in 2022). They were bloody expensive. For the average kid, they were only going to get 2, 3, maybe 4 new games per year. The memory limitations combined with the expense put a real conundrum on game developers' shoulders.. Let me ask you this, what do you think it felt like when you got a new game, and you knew it would very likely be the only new game you will get for the next 3-6 months, and you beat it in a single weekend, or even worse, on your very first play through, which dictated by memory limitations, was probably only an hour or two? Feels bad man.. Real bad! Those games got left in the back of the drawer. It was the really tough games that you had to keep practicing over and over, as you hoped one day to master them and actually see the ending that earned a place in gamers' hearts. Without lives systems and hard difficulty, you would see all that a NES cartridge could hold in literal minutes. So no, difficulty and limited lives were not just a "relic of arcade gaming" that persisted for no reason other than developers were not as clever as modern critics. There is a reason the difficult ones are the ones that are remembered and cherished, and the easy games are long forgotten, and no, it's not some universal masichism that every single kid int he 80's was born with.

Dear Snowman the blinking in pixels is something limited by the NES and similar machines. that has noting to do with bad game design but is a forced limitation from 8 bit era. it can be worked around, but it limits the options on NES games strongly. Watch this to learn more, and about 3 minutes 3 seconds in, they explain why NES games is blinking. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-QaIoW1aL9GE.html Also some newer games is not even using a true 8 bit or 16 bit formula, they only imitate the 8 or 16 bit, and then a few actually code in the limitations that a classic NES game had

Upon retrospect, a big flaw this video has is lumping all NES games with this kind of design: alongside ignoring the NES games that did things right, the problem with this is that this kind of game design would not go away for quite a few more generations. We got a ton of Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafix, Gameboy, Nintendo 64, Playstation, and even Gameboy Advance and Playstation 2 games that subscribed to this kind of brutal and unfair game design. It really wouldn't be until the generation of the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 when common usage of these games died out completely. To only call out the NES for this seems very unfair.

The cursed Snowman Gaming video.

This video is all over the place. He calls the flicker in old nes games "lack of polish" when it was lack of hardware. If gives credit to the souls format of picking up resources if you die, losing them if you die twice to shovel knight and not dark souls and he gives shovel knights credit for teaching without teaching when many nes games introduced that mechanism.

It's honestly amazing how well so many NES games hold up. Sure, limitations like data read/write speeds meant things like modern checkpointing were typically impossible, but it seems odd to compare new games to old ones while ignoring how new tech (emulation, save states, etc) renders so much of the complaints about those older games moot. A more fair comparison would be if you equalized the failure state for both the new and old titles (ex: die 3 times and you have to restart from scratch for both).

When an NES game makes you start over from the beginning of the stage: "BULLSHIT!" When a roguelite makes you start over from the beginning of the entire game: "OMG I'LL BUY TWENTY!" This is what's wrong with the gaming community.

The End is Nigh is so good. I also did not complete the 8 bit levels, they were a nice bonus but like actual NES games the frustration level was high. I think the roguelites have captured the challenge essence well, Enter the gungeon in particular is brutal, and unforgiving until you master the skills, but each run allows you to unlock more progressively working towards both story and making the challenge easier through new weapons and abilities.

For games like Balloon Fight and Ice Climber it's not about beating the game it's about seeing how far you can go and who gets the best score. I personally think these arcade style games are best played with a friend.

Why would you warp whistle and save state your first playthrough of SMB3? Just play the game and you get rewarded with tons of powerups and extra lives. You also skipped the progressive difficulty built into the game. Using it as an example of game design when you didn't bother to experience any of what the game teaches through playing it is a disservice. I beat it when I was four years old. You can do better. Unless the whole purpose of this video was to game the algorithm by getting us all to interact with it through comments and dislikes.

My problem with this video is that you seem to be implying that there is one right way to go about things, when in my opinion I like a lot of the things you say are wrong, like in having to restart the level from the beginning, you have to beat challenges that you've already beaten which can get annoying, but it also becomes a reminder of your progression, it makes you look back and see how much better you've become, which gives you the motivation to overcome the next challenge. But I dunno… just some of my thoughts.

This may be a bit of a controversial take, but I think Zelda 2 was pretty smart about its difficulty. Even close to the endgame it was only a few minutes to get back to where you were if you got a game over, and you didn't lose any "flag" progress, only "spatial" progress. Especially since just losing a life only sent you back to the beginning of the room you died in, it was possible to get extra lives (though they were limited), and you had your spells to carefully ration out to get to that next point of progression. In a way, the progression of Zelda 2 was very Souls-like. The "bonfires" are the upgrades you get that stick with you when you get a Game Over, so once you pick them up it's "safe to die", as it were. After that, it's just a matter of getting used to the combat and the game becomes very fun to tensely traipse through. Also, the hardest part of the game, the Great Palace, has its own Game Over checkpoint, so you don't need to go through Death Valley again.

The limited lives thing wasn’t about arcades getting transferred. It was actually game companies making the game harder so you would play it longer

Colour coded enemies aren't a new thing. I remember seeing them back in the mid/early 90's in Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. Pretty sure they were even introduced earlier than that in other games as well. Also, just because a game is hard, doesn't mean it's bad. Sometimes it's a case of learning the levels, the enemy placements, earning lives and not dying. You also have to keep in mind that games back then were kind of meant to be played differently. Yeah sure, there was a time limit of how long you could play before you parents wanted to watch the news on TV, but that just meant that you (and I hate to say it) get good or use that experience for next time you played. Now, some of those games were quite tough on purpose as they were sometimes arcade ports (formally designed to make money). Some were tough, designed for a player with a higher skill level. And yes, some were tough due to bad design. There were also a lot of technical limitations back then that prevented things like checkpoints or saves. Sometimes it was cheaper for a company to make a game without a battery save or smaller memory capacity. Everything adds up in the end and I believe that sometimes, it's us gamers that rise to the challenge of passing a difficult game regardless of whether or not the design is bad, simply because we can. Be it for bragging rights, or just because we don't want to be defeated.

7:53 That's a mouser. Although arguably, you'll only know what that was representing if you were from that era, which by hearing that they're "old and gross" doesn't seem you're from so I'll let that pass. Dang kids. lol

Boy I wish this was uploaded on April First.

I love how 99% of the comments point to the hardware not being good at the time to criticize the video while the youtuber himself did talk about hardware limitations causing most of the problems in old games. And for those saying the vid looks like a shovel knight ad, it’s really just that the game is a well-known and great tribute to NES games; it perfectly fits in here.

The Adventures of Bayou Billy was hard af but I think had a very good game design