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[Senae]

This game... This hellish, cheating, difficult pile of pain and agony.
This masterpiece.

I spent the first roughly 500 deaths swearing at it. I rarely, if ever, swear.

: show

By the time I got to the game over room, I laughed. It was the laugh of madmen, lunatics, the game broke me. I looked upon it's face and knew that up until today, I was not a man. I was not worthy of even thinking of the Guy
And then I wept.
after that, I found Mike Tyson. I saved after beating him, going back because I fully expected something to fall sideways and kill me as I was leaving the door. I got the orb and jumped off the wall. I burned and died, then said "Fuck it" and gave another path a try, on another save. Something happened to me then, plumbing the depths of Megaman, heading for Metroid. What the game had broken was repaired anew, stronger. I knew without a doubt that I could go back and defeat Mike Tyson. I almost had Mother Brain. Mother Brain

What was mike tyson to me.

Mother Brain didn't like my tone of voice, and so she disowned me. by shooting me. A lot.

Eventually, after giving the left path a try, I relented and returned, defeating Mike tyson and going on.

And here I am, having just defeated my third boss, I walk to the next room and am crushed by a wall of spikes, I return to the room again and again, I need to defeat this room, though it seems to require I move faster then the game will let me. I realize, in what could only be discribed as the same rapture any newfound desciple of christ feels, upon hearing the word of god, that this game is the best game. Ever.

No game has ever had the ability to make someone feel worthless before slowly building them up, into a god.
Much like a master blacksmith will continously pound a peice of steel into the form of a sword, then fold it back into itself, corrupting the shape so it can be made finer.

I congratulate you, Kayin, for being an artist.

[Bittersoul]

Well written, my friend.  A faerie nymph somewhere weeps at the prose you've laid forth for us all.

[Kitty]

I would call that beautiful if I really felt like it.

[Xylon Lionheart]

Wow.  How eloquent.

[McDohl]

Yeah. You get to a screen and it rapes your face for an hour and you get frustrated.  I leave it and come back to it an hour later and everything seems to fall in to place.  It's awesome actually.

[Kayin]

Someone posted this on another forum I'm on...

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

Of course, due to the lack of lives and constant continuing, IWBTG doesn't really match whats being described in the way the guy is trying to explain it, but the mental effect is the same. Sucking it up and becoming fucking ninjas.

[azuraith]

hey ^^ i'm new here but the game and that essay compelled me to join this forum. Living in asia, I actually understood what he meant there. and this game is so awesomely painful. it makes me want to finish kaizo mario world the way it should have been finished.

[Bittersoul]

It's a very impressive and accurate essay, though the results in America are not as favorable as I could wish.  Arcades now attract a different sort of clientele in the US than they used to, and still do to some degree in Asia.  The arcade is now more of a myth here.  An approximation of what used to be, and in turn they attract a customer base that will remain loyal to them no matter how challenging the games are.  The people who go to arcades in America are those who go there for no other reason than to say they go to arcades.  However, they're the bulk of those who are still loyal.

The Excellent® business model represented by arcade gaming failed to change when the home market expanded, and collapsed on itself.  People have desensitized themselves to the challenge and difficulty in the arcade, and have been pushed - rather harshly - into the relative ease and laziness of the home gaming market.  You can see the unfortunate degredation of the arcade here in the rural centers with every step you take.  It used to be that nearly every mall had at LEAST one small well-populated arcade, not to mention the standalones, where gamers got together to do exactly what that essay describes: challenging themselves and the developers.  Now there's no need.  The arcades are vanishing, and the landlords want nothing to do with them anymore.  With a plethora of choices on the shelves at EBGames, there's sure to be something that matches the intensity and raw investment that the arcades provide!  Right?? ...   RIGHT??!!

Well, obviously not.  You constantly hear people complaining about the lack of challenge and girth in today's modern home-based gaming experience.  But the problem is all about presentation.  How do you convince Joe-Bob Officeworker to go out to a populated urban center to shell out an *unknown* amount of quarters in an attempt to beat a game he's probably not nearly skilled enough to even play?  Therein lies the question.  How can an arcade find a niche in a horrifyingly grotesque and swollen home gaming market when they're still presenting themselves like they were 20 years ago?  Well, sadly, I don't think they can.

The American Arcade missed its chance to battle the degeneration caused by an increasingly well-presented promise of an experience that was comparable right in your own living room!  Not to mention that it has a fixed price!!  How can you beat that??!!   HUH??!!  The problem is that arcade gaming IS better.  It is BY FAR more challenging and more rewarding to have something of yourself invested into the experience.

The real issue in America is that it took everyone 20 years to realize that the promise of a comparable experience for a fixed price was a well-dressed lie.

[Saiai]

n.n;
He does raise some good points, but I think he sort of ends up praising his own philosophy a bit too much. x_x Plus he doesn't even take into consideration cases of fake difficulty/cheating by the computer. There's a difference between continuing because you suck and continuing because the game makes you lose.
(Fortunately, Kayin knows the difference. :3 At least from what I've seen so far. n.n;)
I play on Medium Difficulty, which gives me more time to train on specific obstacles at the very least. Plus I like the ribbon. >.> I like thinking of it as taking it one room at a time.

Also, while I was trying to post this I got this message-
"The following error or errors occurred while posting this message:
Warning - while you were typing a new reply has been posted. You may wish to review your post."
Awesome that SMF does this >_>
Anyway, to reply to the guy who just posted above me- The problem with that is that a home game easily COULD have extreme difficulty settings, and indeed they used to. It's a better business model in general for home systems to have varying difficulty levels because then they'll attract wider audiences. The only thing I could say that contributes to this lack of toughness is A. Lazyness, occasionally >_> and B. There's a big difference between spending ten minutes to die at the same spot and spending 2 hours to result in the same thing. Console games have the option of lots of length, and horrendous difficulty can burn people out if they keep hitting walls every 10 minutes in a game that's 10 hours long.
Survival horror games that force you into resource management in particular would be a good example. It's one of the few game types I know of that can force you to start over all over again simply because you have a lack of ammo and simply can't finish off the next or last boss. n.n; Of course, I'm not as tough as most people here, but such an experience wouldn't make me jump up and say "AWESOME I GET TO PLAY ALL OVER AGAIN".
...Then again, I usually do restart games like this a couple times to get the feel of things. >_>

[Bittersoul]

Oh, absolutely.  There COULD be harder difficulty settings, and sometimes there are...  But what's the point?  It's a fixed price, there's nothing to encourage home-based developers to go above and beyond.  With arcade games, once you've sunk that 10 dollars into it, it's got you.  Can you let it beat you now that you've already sunk ten bucks into it??!!  Pffft!  Yet if you buy a game for you home console, play if for 10 hours, get stuck, give up, or beat it completely, the devs still get their cash, and the gamer gets the 'comfort' of knowing that if they ever want to play that game ever again, they can do so at no (more) cost to themselves!

Unfortunately, the entire appeal for home-based games is getting the progression of an arcade game in the comfort of one's the home.  You're right, however - if a console game is too hard, it can result in the console game not being played again.  Which can result in reduced sales for the developers.  It goes the same way in reverse if it's too easy.  There's nothing tangible as far as profit in the console market.  There's units sold.  That's it.  In an arcade a large part of the profit margin is based on difficulty.  But when you put them side by side, laziness and a dream of challenge seems more appealing than the initiative required for an honest challenge combined with the question mark of not knowing how much you'll be spending (despite the fact that it's probably going to be WELL less than for a console game).

But I think this is all a result of how swollen the home market has become.  It never used  to be this way, it's been a slow progression.  Now there are so many choices that no matter WHAT the devs do, games will sell.  People will bitch, sure, but what other choice do they have?

[Xylon Lionheart]

Did you take that first paragraph almost directly from the essay?

[Saiai]

One question about the one-credit rule, though. n.n;
How does that apply to games that have lower continue costs than start costs?

[Xylon Lionheart]

It would still apply, since you'd be at a harder part of the game, and thus would start using more and more credits as the game gets harder.  You'd still be wasting money.

[Bittersoul]

Did you take that first paragraph almost directly from the essay?

Hah, I wish it were that easy.  I only skimmed the first half because anyone who addresses the reader like a naive moron within the first couple lines of an essay is a bit too self-indulgent to get my full attention.  I did, however, read the last half in its entirety, so most of my writing is brain spillage if you will.  You know, like my brain were a glass full of...    let's say beer, just for the sake of argument...   and someone was flailing round wildly with my brain.  And some of it spilled out and made a little stain on the carpet.

That's what my rant was.  Brain-beer carpet-stain.

[Saiai]

Something someone said in an LP of a hard-type puzzle-centric SMW hack is making me think, though.
Certain games get less like something you play and become more like memorization, repitition, and practice... While that kind of thing is challenging, and certainly part of IWBTG... It's not really playing a game, it's more like work. =/ While I can enjoy myself with certain parts of IWBTG, there were others (like the air-manuvering you had to do to get to Mother Brain) that were just pure frustration for me. x.x I didn't succeed by practice, it was almost all luck. =/