What happened to "Nintendo Hard?"
The technology, while pretty impressive at the time, is nothing compared to the beastly machines of today. The original NES used an 8-bit microprocessor and contained a mere 2 KB of work RAM and 2 KB of video RAM. Needless to say, you couldn’t put any overly lengthy games on the system as it just couldn’t handle that much data. Also many carts didn’t contain battery backups, which meant you couldn’t save your progress. Some developers got around this by offering codes to help you skip to certain levels, but for the most part these technological restraints resulted in games that were designed to be completed in a couple of hours or less.
If you knew what you were doing, the original Metroid was a game that could be completed in about an hour, but I’m betting that few of you were able to complete it in that time frame, and if you were, it was only because you had hours and hours of practice – mastering moves and memorizing the convoluted map. Metroid II added a save feature that allowed the user to continue without having to input a special code, and Super Metroid added more features still such as the ability to shoot as you walk backwards. The later Prime games were much longer, but didn’t task the player with the difficult job of mastering the game by including a difficulty selector, a map and a hint system that would keep the player from getting frustrated; all features that were missing from the original.
The original Mega Man game only included six robots, but was a tough game by anyone’s standards. Mega Man 2, the best selling game in the franchise and a fan favorite, expanded on the original by adding two more robot masters and some additional features that eased the difficulty in the form of the energy tank, an item that allowed the player to refill Mega Man’s energy at any given time, and the password system which would generate a code so that the user could continue from any given point in the game after the system was turned off. These features may seem small, but were necessary for a longer game to work without frustrating the player.
As password systems and battery backups became more common, having the ability to save your game became a standard feature for even the most rudimentary of games. This allowed for longer games that didn’t have to be artificially padded – thus the difficulty level was lowered.
Difficulty selection in consoles was first introduced on the Atari 2600 and was actually a system feature rather than a software feature. A switch on the console could flip between two difficulty levels – O for original and B for beginner. Since difficulty selection was an optional feature at the time, many games that were released on the system didn’t make use of them and later consoles – such as the NES – would leave it up to developers to include this as a software feature instead.
While the concept of letting the user select the difficulty of their experience wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, developers had to deal with technology limitations in terms of programming hours and cartridge space. Adding a difficulty setting would take up precious space that could be used for another level or additional sound effects or music.
As games evolved and space became less of an issue, difficulty settings found their way into games on a more regular basis. Sure, the original, brutally hard Ninja Gaiden didn’t allow for you to play it on “easy” but the 2004 Xbox version did.
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