Were some games meant to be cheated on?

[worcestersource]

Define “few.” I never expected it to have a proper “ending” back in the day, but getting through the first three or four levels wasn’t too difficult. You needed a fair bit of luck, though. A life or jetpack bonus was always welcome, of course.

I just played it for the fun of it. Great graphics and sound.

There are levels in Krakout where there’s the ball chewing sphere that can end a game pretty quickly. Getting past those is just luck, whether being able to skip the level or somehow miss the sphere within the level.

[Morkin]

I think considering it has a whopping 512(?) screens, Starquake still definitely 'feels' do-able... I think I've managed about 6 core pieces, without using a map, and I'm probably a fairly average gamer. The more you play it the more recognisable the routes and areas become (though not as learnable as Atic Atac's map).

I do wonder whether many programmers assumed people would use magazine tips (rather than POKEs)...?

I play modern games and try not to read anything about the game online until I've finished it, unless I get totally stuck.

As a result I managed to get to the end of Bloodborne without learning the (gun) parry, visceral attack or transform weapon attack mechanics (to anyone who hasn't played the game, these are fairly key combat gameplay mechanics that can give you an advantage). I was a bit miffed when I discovered them afterwards, as the game is hard enough as it is...! I miss inlay card instructions sometimes...

[AndyC]

There are levels in Krakout where there’s the ball chewing sphere that can end a game pretty quickly. Getting past those is just luck, whether being able to skip the level or somehow miss the sphere within the level.

I absolutely hated those things, they completely ruined what would otherwise have been a fantastic game.

As for games that literally couldn't be finished because developers ran out of time etc, wasn't one of the Wonder Boy games like that? Maybe it was the CPC version though. And, of course, RoboCop on C64 where they just made the time limit on one level too short because they hadn't finished the rest of the game.

[Timmy]

I would like to talk about specific games in this thread, but it's a bit late and I wanted to make one thing really clear:

I love that I can't finish some games without hacking into them. I've learned a lot of z80 coding that way.

Without some of those impossible games where there were no pokes available, I wouldn't be good at z80 as I am now.

So I hope they were meant to be cheated on.

That said, I try to make my games very easy so that I can easily solve it, because in the end I still need to test them many, many times.

[toot_toot]

I think you have to put yourself in the position of playing games in the 1980s, that is “Value For Money” was often used as a marking point when reviewing games (Crash even literally had a “Value for Money” percentage rating).

But what is “Value for Money”? Back then, it came down to just how long the game would last for and with the limitations of memory, one of the easiest ways was just to make it harder. And when it came to budget titles, when maybe they didn’t spend quite so long on the development cycle, it really was about making a lot harder.

An example is Booty, a well loved budget classic. It’s got great graphics (for the time) and it’s got good gameplay. Crash gave it a Crash Smash of 93%, with Value for Money being 99%. Like you can’t get any higher than that.

BUT here’s the thing, I never managed to complete Booty. Ever. It was just so difficult that I don’t think I managed to get even close to completing it. I guess that’s good Value for Money? Like you’ve managed to get hundreds of hours out of a piddly £2.50 (or £1.99 when it was re-released on the slightly cheaper label). It must have been huge to never complete it?



Yeah, it’s a “whopping” 20 screens big. Yet it’s been rated as great value for money, but that’s really down to it just being incredibly difficult, not that it has a huge amount of screens like say Jet Set Willy.

But back to the original OP, would Booty be better with a Poke? Maybe if you could turn down the difficulty a little, or maybe make the enemy patterns a bit more manageable. But an immortality poke would just mean that you’d beat the game in 5 minutes. And you’d be really disappointed at just how few screens it really has.

[toot_toot]

And what’s interesting about Booty is that the review says “this should be a £5.95 game”, yet the pseudo sequel Moonlight Madness was indeed full price (albeit a slightly more £7.95) and it was slated for being too expensive. Sure, Moonlight Madness was released in 1986, 2 years after Booty, so I can get their point.

But the other thing is that Moonlight Madness only technically has one more screen than Booty



But in the Crash review it says it has 43 screens. I know there was the annoying Eye maze section, which was just the one screen really, but I don’t know where they got the extra screens from in their review.

[SteveSmith]

But in the Crash review it says it has 43 screens. I know there was the annoying Eye maze section, which was just the one screen really, but I don’t know where they got the extra screens from in their review.

Presumably that was what they were told by the publisher. I find it hard to believe that a reviewer would sit down and specifically count the number of screens just to add as a line in a review.

[uglifruit]

I think the philosophy of "completing" games was rather less prevalent back then.

In the documentary "Once upon a time at Atari", Howard Scott Warshaw talks about the formative years of kids watching films, reading books etc. the general plot arc was that the protagonists were - ultimately - going to win and defeat the baddy. Which is a nice "message" to leave. He was worried that the generation who grew up playing arcade games were left with the narrative that "in the end you are defeated". What kind of lesson is that to leave with the youth who played them?

80s home video games often seem to follow this philosophy, and the impossibility of finishing them is consistent with this.



And that's why I'm on antidepressants today.

[71owl]

This is an interesting one - I recently finished reading "The Spectrum of Adventure" by Thomas A. Christie, and there are many, many instances of the parser being called out as the main problem, for exactly this reason. Memory restrictions are cited in some cases, but others are clearly author oversight, and there's at least one instance of a game requiring a very specific - and entirely unintuitive - command to accomplish a goal.

Ask any adventurer from BITD and they could give you many, many instances of an unhelpful parser or an author requiring something incredibly specific. The Interceptor adventure games were notroios for this.

My favourite has to be, in Denis Through The Drinking Glass, at one point you have to input "Debag Fowler" to make progress!

[Timmy]

To be honest too many reviewers and people just never had the time to read the instructions, and then complain that they can't finish the game and need a poke.

Or they never really want to read the in game help and look at the map, and see that it has like 30 screens so it must be easy to complete.

Or people who don't have patience and have to fit the game into a live stream or youtube video, and are incentivised to shock and complain instead actually being any good in game.

Oh, and you have those people who complain they don't get 50k+ rooms in a 48k Spectrum game, and then complain when they do get too many rooms for being too many and they need a poke, or that they were too similar.

I think they are valid complaints though. Especially if your income is depending on making as many complaints as possible.

[blucey]

Combat School.

The cheat is RIGHT THERE. While waggling left right (on keyboard), hold the UP button. Instant full speed. I always used it because the waggling sections are rubbish and I'd rather play the fun shooting range bits.

It's one thing typing in a cheat code but if the game is so poorly made that simply holding up is enough of a cheat then for me it's not even cheating.

[Vampyre]

As a result I managed to get to the end of Bloodborne without learning the (gun) parry, visceral attack or transform weapon attack mechanics (to anyone who hasn't played the game, these are fairly key combat gameplay mechanics that can give you an advantage). I was a bit miffed when I discovered them afterwards, as the game is hard enough as it is...! I miss inlay card instructions sometimes...

Holy cock! How the hell did you manage to complete it? The parry isn't essential (but does make things a bit easier when you get the timing down) but I'm amazed you didn't even accidentally come across the weapon transform. Fair play to have completed it without using any of those!

My Bloodborne story: Got it on release day and the very first enemy you face is a werewolf in the clinic. You have no weapons at this point other than your bare hands, so you can try karate-chopping it to death but it's more or less impossible - you are supposed to die and be sent to the main hub. In my eagerness to get back and try again I used the gravestone-warp to head straight back to the clinic, only to die again at the claws of the werewolf. Two f***ing hours I tried this, in disbelief that From Software, already notorious for their games' difficulty, could make it so utterly impossible.

In the end I went online and did some Google-fu. I could have cried when I read that when you're sent back to the hub there's a choice of three guns and weapons on the floor - right by the gravestone. FML...

[Joefish]

Not Bloodborne, but I played whole real days of Subnautica before I noticed some online screenshots of the game had a compass on the HUD and I didn't!

Ever since Abe's Oddysee I've noticed games just giving you as many lives as you need so you don't have to repeat sections, but then these are games with hundreds upon hundreds of puzzle screens to get through. But they quickly turn stale if there's one particular bit where the difficulty suddenly spikes, or you just don't get any hints from the layout. Or you get a fair way in, then just get stuck going round and round the same loop (Rick Dangerous II, Metroid Advance). The 'lives' that still persist in games like Mario 64 onward are a bit of a farce, where you can just pick up as many extra lives as you like from assorted levels. It almost becomes a 'survival' game in that respect with you just farming extra lives at the start of every session.

[Morkin]

Holy cock! How the hell did you manage to complete it? The parry isn't essential (but does make things a bit easier when you get the timing down) but I'm amazed you didn't even accidentally come across the weapon transform. Fair play to have completed it without using any of those!

My Bloodborne story: Got it on release day and the very first enemy you face is a werewolf in the clinic. You have no weapons at this point other than your bare hands, so you can try karate-chopping it to death but it's more or less impossible - you are supposed to die and be sent to the main hub. In my eagerness to get back and try again I used the gravestone-warp to head straight back to the clinic, only to die again at the claws of the werewolf. Two f***ing hours I tried this, in disbelief that From Software, already notorious for their games' difficulty, could make it so utterly impossible.

In the end I went online and did some Google-fu. I could have cried when I read that when you're sent back to the hub there's a choice of three guns and weapons on the floor - right by the gravestone. FML...

Haha..! I twigged when I died in about 3 milliseconds and ended up in the Hunter's Dream that I probably wasn't supposed to win that one, so I had a look around and the weapons were sitting right next to me....

...Just for clarity, I realised that you could transform your weapon into its other form (you get told that), but I had no idea about the transform attack (during combat) until after I watched stuff after finishing the game. I also did as much exploring as I could, and still missed a bunch of bosses.

I found other souls games like Nioh have a bit more in the way of tutorials, so you don't really miss the main gameplay elements. Watching video tips of Nioh after I'd finished it, it turned out I'd figured out most strategies through natural gameplay, and hadn't missed much... It's just Bloodborne that relies on you not missing anything while you're playing. Don't get me wrong - I thought it was a great game, but I think I only would've figured out how a whole bunch of things worked if I'd gone online to read about it. A training dummy or something would've been nice...

...Ahem, anyway, we digress... Speccy games, that's what we're talking about, right?

[toot_toot]

Yes back to Speccy games that should be cheated on (sounds rude, but anyway)

Miami Vice

I had this on the Dixons +2 pack and it was so unbelievably frustrating. Touch anything and you instantly explode. The car handling was also quite poor, but at least if you didn’t explode all the time, you could possibly get somewhere.

Except it also had a really convoluted storyline where you had to go to certain locations at certain times, on certain days in order to build up the clues to find Mr Big. They published the first days locations and times in the instructions, but after that it was up to you.

However, it literally does need to be poked in order to play it, from the DB entry

When you catch a criminal in the game, he reveals time or place where you can catch another, more important criminal (which leads eventually to the boss). Unfortunately the bug makes the time to be displayed badly, instead of minutes you get some screen trash.
Fixed using POKE 40557,112 (changing "LD (HL),A" to "LD (HL),B").

With that and the car not exploding at the slightest touch of grass (plus some more hints on where and when you’re supposed to get the criminals), it could be a much better game. Maybe as good as the 8/10 that YS for some reason scored it.

[dvduk]

This is an interesting one - I recently finished reading "The Spectrum of Adventure" by Thomas A. Christie, and there are many, many instances of the parser being called out as the main problem, for exactly this reason. Memory restrictions are cited in some cases, but others are clearly author oversight, and there's at least one instance of a game requiring a very specific - and entirely unintuitive - command to accomplish a goal.

Agreed with that - a game I spent a lot of time writing and came darn close to release had some very specific challenges which were a combination of me trying to be clever (well.... I can blame being a youngster I guess!) and lack of experience.