Topic: Why were kids in the 80s so good at playing games while kids today are so poor?

So_much_truth. I still can't beat that last level of Ninja Gaiden!
_{frickin' eagles /me shakesfist in rage}

Also, hai @the_shpydar and @ogo79

@bezerker99
woooooooooooooooooooooo brother...woooooooooooooooooooooo

[insert rant on why my generation is the truly best generation here]

Nintendo should host a Battle of the Generations similar to the competition on The Wizard or NES World Championships and settle this debate once and for all.

I like how older players are bashing modern kids without remembering that things like instant walkthroughs or handholding exist because of them, not because of 7 years old children.

I don't think there's a "best" generation, and I consider it ridiculous that adults feel the need to rant about younger kids not being as good at Castlevania as they were after playing it 389 times and reading Nintendo Power in the '80s. What it really comes down to is taste, I think. I was born in 1995, so I kinda missed the "EVERYTHING IS SO DIFFICULT WE'RE NOW SUPERIOR TO EVERYONE FOR PLAYING MEGAMAN 5 IN ITS PRIME" group, thankfully. But that also means I've been able to see what people are actually like when it comes to gaming nowadays. Essentially, it comes down to choice and individual taste. I love all sorts of games, but platformers are my personal favorite genre. Everything from Castlevania (FINALLY beat that last year) to Tropical Freeze. My younger brother likes RPG and strategy games, so he plays Dragon Quest and has stolen my copy of Fire Emblem to play on the harder difficulty levels. The other loves exploring and plays things like Pokemon for the adventure aspect.

By making the criteria for this "How good are kids now at games from the 1980s compared to kids from the 1980s?" it pretty much guarantees that the kids who grew up with those games will win. Since there's really no criteria for this that works, I'd have to consider it a draw. (Unless we can bring people's 10 year old selves back from the past for a contest involving games from the '80s to the present with modern kids)

Looks like Nintendo is doing something on Miiverse. I just saw this.

EDIT: I now have read what the first challenge is and this must be a joke. Moving along.....

Except the kids from the 80s aren't kids anymore, and they'll have 20 years of experience on the younger ones. We would need time travel to make it fair.

Took forever I don't think is a problem. (If I am loving playing something I want it to last as long as possible).

There is games I finished when I was younger that I don't think I could now. (And things I did I would never have the patience for). I never used a cheat until after the 8 bit generation. (Level Select on Sonic for the Megadrive was the first so I didn't have to start at the beginning each time).

I never started good at any of them but I got good by lots of practice.

Because kids of the 2000s don't know what patience is.

80's Kids: If it wasn't in the 80's, it just sucked balls.

We werent better. Just more patient.

What a bunch of old grumps! I am probably older than all of you put together and have loved video games since freaking Pong.

During his visit the past 2 months my 9 yr old grandson has been successfully playing Zelda: 4 Swords (by himself) and LOZ: OoA. He's died a lot but just kept trying. He is playing Rune Factory 3, which is a fairly new game but pretty complicated for a 9 yr old. He is a whiz at Rayman Legends. When hints come up in a game he doesn't bother reading them but just hits a button to keep playing.

Some of you need to get back to yelling at kids to get off your lawn. Danny and I will continue having fun.

Second quest of Zelda, that's hard. When I first finished it, It was complete accident I even found level 4.
And level 6 is another I'm not even sure how anyone would find on their own as that was one game mechanic you weren't even told about. That is the one point I have to admit needing GameFAQs.
I'm surprised to learn the slowdown in level 7 (which you would think helps, but doesn't) somehow got ADDED in the port from the Famicom Disk System to the NES.

simple in the past kids had a feeling of acomplishment by beating hard games, they had something to brag about because it was cool.
nowadays kids don't want that hassle and say any kind of challenge is cheap, when they play alone the game is unfair and sucks, when they play online the guy who beat them "must be a hacker" so developers dumb down their games so the now lazy kids can pretend they're good while still blaming hackers when they play online.
it's simple, for kids of the 80s kids from the 90s on are lazy, for the kids of the 90s kids of 2000s are lazy and so on, because technology advances to make things easier and parents don't want their children facing the same difficulties they did(even if many of those difficulties aren't actually difficult or bad at all) it's also a fact that the older you are the less you accept the fact the younger ones have it so easy compared to your times.

I just feel like kids today don't have to be good at them cause there is no consequence for dieing. Most games today if you die then you start over right there rather than at start of level and seems like limited lives and continues its a thing of the past.

I wholeheartedly agree. Also kids back then didn't have internet (the way it is now) to waste time on. It was either go read a book, or play your unfairly difficult batch of games.

I don't think there necessarily needs to be a consequence for dieing, nor does that really work in this day and age anyway. Dieing IS the consequence, games back in the day made you start from square one because many didn't save progress. They had little choice, the only solution would be passwords. Continuing from where you left off doesn't make a challenging game easier, if you hit a wall your still stuck there until you figure out how to clear it. Games like Monster Hunter and the Souls series are perfect examples of this today, and many classic games like Zelda or Dragon Quest were still plenty challenging without such consequences.

People have their rose-tinted goggles on when it comes to how poorly designed NES games were when it came to difficulty. NES games were hard back then, but that's because many games were cheap in terms of difficulty and many playable characters were very limited in their ability to deal with threats coming at them. Does anyone think a game like Zelda II was even designed well when it comes to difficulty? Or how about the obsession game developers had with respawning enemies the second you scrolled the screen an inch? Or the fact that a character with limited mobility was often forced to contend with pixel-perfect jumps, flying enemies, and if the game developers were feeling evil, weather effects.

8-bit games are a poor example of how difficulty should be in a video game. During the NES era, many of your major third-party developers were switching over from being Arcade developers to home console developers, and this era reflects that. Pointless and often cheap difficulty that would fly in an arcade, but becomes a serious issue when it comes to a home game.

Yes, you can improve with practice. But I consider the 16-bit era a far better example when it comes to difficulty in games.

By the time the Genesis and SNES came around, developers had finally come to grips as to how to create challenging games, without being cheap about it. You had games like the 16-bit Castlevania and Contra games give more options to the playable characters, while still making the games difficult. 16-bit games can be hard, but they avoid that cheap feeling that so many NES games brought to the table.