Oh, yeah. We wouldn't want to lose Manos: Hands of Fate, or Plan 9 From Outer Space, would we? XD

All I can say I was super happy when I could finally see this movie, I learned about it only some years ago:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200642/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Also, there are specific old karate/ninja movies I'd like to see again, but unfortunately for e.g. one I don't even recall the title, nor any of the actor's names, so I can't locate it by those.

A year ago or so I accidentally bumped into some old ninja movie I had seen as a child due to one recent article in a Finnish magazine. The reason it was mentioned was because, something I didn't know, it was apparently filmed in North Korea. A North Korean ninja movie from the early 80s or late 70s, how cool is that?!? EDIT: I think it was this one:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254387/

I always knew the movie was Korean, but I always assumed it to be South Korean. No wonder Japanese invaders (ninjas, of course) were portrayed as super-evil bastards. The movie is (or at least was) in Youtube, I am sure I have the link somewhere...

The dilemma of archiving stuff for historic purposes is tricky I admit, as nowadays the humankind just produces so much stuff. Should all Facebook and Twitter entries be archived for future generations, even for the case those companies cease to exist? Maybe not, but then who knows what important and/or hilarious historical events, comments etc. have taken place in those services, maybe things whose value people will understand only decades from now?

I dunno, the MST3k episodes on those were pretty great.

I presumed him to mean those do have historical value, and fortunately they were archived? After all, they later made a Hollywood movie about making of the Plan 9 movie, that's how historically important it is...

Also something that I only now learned, there is even a 2015 remake of that movie???

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014319/?ref_=tt_trv_cnn

One thing that always seems to be hated but I kinda like in more modern FPS games is the regenerating shield. I think Halo introduced it?

The reason is that it gives kind of an semi-automatic way to adapt oneself to the difficulty level of the game. Taking too much damage from enemies? Slow it down, take it easy, don't rush (while the shield regenerates). I was reminded by this while playing Descent 3, which doesn't have regenerating shields but you have to pick up shield powerups to replenish it, and if it goes to 0, you die. The problem is that in the hardest difficulty levels the shield powerups are very weak (giving even less extra shield than what a single shot from an enemy takes away), and it is partly about luck how many such powerups you will find, and you never know if a killed enemy drops zero or several powerups.

It isn't that new idea anyway, after all haven't we had regenerating shields in games like X-Wing and Wing Commander already before? Why are regenerating shields tolerated in one genre but not another?

Another thing I've noticed in many older games recently is that their difficulty levels seem to be way off. Of course it could be said this is partly "dumbing down", making games easier, but come on! Try playing Descent Freespace, or Descent 3, in the hardest difficulty level, and tell me there is not something wrong about their difficulty? I think in Descent 3 the developers suddenly realized how impossibly hard they had made the hardest levels, hence they simply made it so that you have infinite amount of lives, ie. you can die as many times as you want without seeing Game Over. And a lot die you will. It is hilarious to see the end mission statistics how I've died, not hundreds, but thousands of times already...

This is not generic to all old games though, it is not like all of them are very very hard. For instance Doom, I think it is quite an easy game on any difficulty level. I just feel that maybe nowadays at least AAA games are play-tested more thoroughly, and they try to avoid making the games insanely and frustratingly difficult. Yeah yeah, Dark Souls this and Dark Souls that... I bet your ass you will have even more problems in Descent Freespace playing it in the hardest difficulty level.

Well, one thing people don't take into account when they remember the "good old times" when games were actually "challenging" is that most, if not all, of those games had to be made artificially difficult to make them last. Otherwise, the amount of content you could produce with the small teams and budgets of that time, and cram into a couple of floppy disks and some hundred KBs of RAM (or 1 or 2 MB), would last you less than one hour. Which is what happened exactly when you got to master a game. (And that's in the PC era. A bit further back in time 8-bit games would keep you busy for weeks until you finished them for the first time, and after you memorised the whole thing (usually the only way to finish those bastards), replays would take you 15-20 minutes.)

Regarding modern games, difficulty, frustration, infinite lives and so on, I found this read by the Super Meat Boy guys quite interesting: http://web.archive.org/web/20120118154900/http://supermeatboy.com/13/Why_am_I_so____hard_/

(Talk about archiving stuff. That post isn't in their blog anymore.)

That might have been the case with some games from the early 80s or so, but less so with e.g. later 90s or early 2000s, like the aforementioned Freespace and Descent 3. I just think less thought was generally put into the correct difficulty levels back then, playtesting etc.

Also if you think about modern indie games, quite many of them are in fact quite short games, like lasting a few hours. If anything, I feel games have become shorter generally speaking.

I guess nowadays many developers evade that difficulty problem by simply making their games multiplayer games. Then you can't complain much about difficulty, you just suck compared to other players. :)


Thanks, I need to read that. The subject interests me because (depending a bit on the genre) I want my games to be challenging enough but not overly frustrating, and I prefer if the developers find some genuinely good ways for people to adjust to the difficulty without having to manually change some difficulty setting. Or then give them enough options for different aspects of the difficulty (like, I'd really like to be able to switch off the 90 minute mission timer in Rise of Nations, I think the timer is just stupid and destroys all the fun).

I don't agree that we are in a Golden Age of gaming. I think that we saw that some time in the mid to late nineties.

But for back pain, Timppu is certainly correct -- try inversion therapy.

Inversion tables are very affordable and provided you don't have any blood pressure issues or any other health concerns which might conflict it is certainly worth a shot. I would strongly advise having someone to assist you until you are familiar with the table as getting back into an upright position will likely be the greatest hurdle until you have the table set properly and learn to control your balance on it. Just make sure you have it assembled properly (safety straps etc) and read instructions thoroughly.

Ok, in that case you might be interested in reading this. It's longer but more recent, and talks about some dos and don'ts in game design regarding difficulty: Difficulty Levels And Why You Should Never Use Them

Certainly difficulty levels are a big don't, as you can infer from the title. "First of all, we’re asking players to make a crucial decision that will impact their entire experience… before they even got to know how the game actually plays!"... Oh my, how I hate that moment...

I would argue every last one of those points, if I didn't find them fairly accurate. But not the pain pills. I would never argue pain pills.

The AAA games are already fewer with every year. Big releases are few at a rather decent distance between each other, rarely seeing release days overlapping for the big publishers. A slowdown in quantity and an increase in quality is never a bad thing. Consumer mentality kind of is.

A Golden Age for gaming?! Wouldn't call it like that, but that's a really good period for every game developer out there. The market is better catered in our days, that's true. Every genre knows a revival.

As for the dumbing down...some stuff was okay, other stuff, not so much. I am okay with automaping or quest arrows. Not so okay with fast travel, as it destroys the exploration.

That's a good article and raises similar concerns I have. Like I said i like challenge, but even if the game offers the possibility to lower the difficulty while playing (without having to restart the whole game), to me it is not really better than cheating. If there is a hard encounter or mission for which I had to specifically lower the difficulty level, only to raise it later... isn't it practically the same I would have used some cheat code to enable e.g. unlimited ammo and/or health or somesuch?

That's the feeling I got in e.g. Tie Fighter expansion missions, that one darn mission at the very end which I retried like hundreds of times... after which I just said phuck it and changed the difficulty to Easy for that one mission, just to skip it fast and be done with it. It didn't feel any better than that I would have just entered a god mode for that mission.

Making the gameplay so that people with different skills and expectations can adapt themselves to it must certainly be tricky, I admit. I guess that's why the developers prefer simple difficulty levels where in the harder difficulty the enemies make 2x more damage to you and have 2x more hitpoints, or something like that.

I personally just feel that as long as the hardest, or the only, difficulty level can be finished by the playtesters over and over again... then that is the correct difficulty level (for the hardest difficulty), and I have no one to blame except myself for failing. There certainly are some Freespace missions or Descent 3 encounters where I'd like to really see how the playtesters succeed them without dying, and can do it over and over again. Like e.g. those PTMC mercenaries you face at the end of the fourth mission ("PTMC Corporate Headquarters") of Descent 3... I'd love to see how the Descent 3 playtesters cleared them in the highest difficulty setting, without dying over and over again. If they repeatedly die on it even though they are the experts in the game, then the game is simply too hard.

One more important thing: I am against auto-adjusting difficulty though, like the enemies becoming dumber or weaker because the game sees you are not doing too well, or the AI cars in Sega Rally (2) slowing down or speeding up based on how well you are driving. That is the wrong solution to the problem IMHO as well. That is not different than the game forcing the game to easy mode (or hard mode) automatically.

Any gamer should be able to tackle the challenge either by doing something extra (like conserving ammo and advancing more slowly in a FPS game, or gathering more experience in a RPG in order to face a difficult boss), or simply by learning by repetition.

Golden Age?

I'm trying to think of a period, from the moment that I first discovered computer gaming, that WASN'T golden. I mean, hell, that's part of the premise of the foundation of gOg: that games have continually kicked ass from the get-go and people want to play those same titles yet today.

If one were to compare the ratio of good stuff to crap, I don't think the market today would be considered particularly golden in comparison to other periods.

I much prefer the days of going to the store, browsing the boxes on the shelves, picking a title, and dedicating a fair amount of time to soaking up the game you just bought. Buying a game used to be a luxury and something to look forward to, and now it's starting to feel like buying yet another commodity like toilet paper or laundry detergent. "That game looks moderately fun, and since it's only $3.50 just a few months after release then it won't be a big deal if I never get around to playing it." Meh. But that's crusty old me talking.

Agreed, absolutely a golden age:

- The medium is experimenting with exploration games / walking sims (a bit akin to the CD-rom craze of the nineties)
- The indie scene is alive and kicking!
- VR became reality. So sick!
- With Spelunky (2012) the modern roguelike genre was born! It's all about what you expect. A HOG is supposed to be casual, but a lot other genres are not. The PC is not just a computer, but also a medium with it's own tropes and traditions.

If a game is designed for multiple platforms - pc, mobile, console - it won't be able to commit itself to either of them. If I want to play a game on my PC, it is because I want to play a PC game, not an xbox/android port. I'm not sure who you are adressing. Who is it that tries to archive each and every game? GoG? Archive.org? Nevertheless, I have re-played roughly a hundred DOS games from eightysomething, and while some were more interesting than others, each felt like a valuable historical artifact. I don't see it as a bubble, more as a business model. Even if people are only interested in one of the games, getting ten games on the cheap appeals to most folks. And since there is no production costs, it makes sense to sell a 'bundle' instead of a single game.

I agree with you about the late 1990s/early 2000s being a golden age of gaming...maybe I'm biased because that was the time I was most into gaming, but a lot of great titles were made back then.
Can't really come to an opinion about present-day games since I buy few really new games. One exception is adventure gaming, especially Wadjeteye's games...which in some ways are superior to classics from the 1990s in my opinion. So you may well be right.