Hardcore = NES?

I've written before about my love affair with the NES emulator for PSP. I've been cranking it up whenever I have about 10 minutes to kill and it's filling the time fabulously. However, the one thing I'm finding is that those old games we knew and loved are hard. Like, really hard. It's amazing how just 10 minutes on an old 8-bit game can reveal how much your gaming skillz have deteriorated over the years. I tried my hand at Bionic Commando, Contra, Joust, Ikari Warriors, Metal Gear, Shinobi and others and the results were much the same: I suck at these games now.

Perhaps my sense of timing is shot, or my hand/eye coordination, or maybe I'm just plain rusty. Or it could be that I'm too spoiled by the shiny features of modern games and they've made me lazy. I've gotten too used to unlimited lives and continues, save points and game saves, bountiful power-ups and over-powered heroes. I played through 90% of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core without even dying. I couldn't think of picking up God of War without the liberal save points scattered throughout the game. Now I find it impossible to imagine playing an entire level of a game only to die and have to start over from the beginning. But that was the kind of gameplay we all cut our teeth on years ago, and we actually had fun!

Now don't get me wrong, most modern games are more enjoyable than the majority of those classics. I don't have the time to invest in a game that will take me countless hours to master it anymore. Maybe ten years ago, but not now. So being able to play through 20 minutes of a game and actually make some progress is rewarding, especially when time to game is so limited. But, if I have one complaint against modern games, it's that they seem to be specifically designed to save you the hassle of learning how to truly play them. Sometimes I'd like to play a game without a tutorial or on-screen prompt telling me what button to push. It's rare to actually discover what a game is about before it starts holding your hand through the intro. Part of the fun of gaming is discovery and overcoming challenges. Completely take these away and you lose a bit of the magic, which is something those older games still have to this day.

So as I fire up Castlevania and prepare to tackle Stage 3 without dying, for the fourth time, I console myself with the fact that the truly hardcore gamers weren't raised playing a Playstation 3, or Xbox 360, or a Wii (hah joking!). The Nintendo Entertainment System is where real hardcore gamers were born and bred.