Whose Faulty Vision

Old video game design

I just got a disc for my PSP with about 20 old Sega Genesis games on it–things like Altered Beast, the Phantasy Star series, and Sonic the Hedgehog. I actually bought it for the Phantasy Star games, but I decided to take a crack at Sonic first. It’s a fun game, but it reminds me–I had largely forgotten–of how unforgiving video games used to be.

In Sonic, and I expect this’ll turn out to be the case for most of the games on the disc, when you lose your last life, that’s it–you have to start over all the way at the beginning of the game. There’s no password, no save points, not even a “Continue” option to go back to the beginning of the current “world”. And a lot of old games used to work that way.

I’m astonished that I ever had the patience to play games like that–nowadays, I hate games that make me replay the same sequence over and over again–but more than that, think about how limiting a formula like that must have been for the game designer. You can’t make your game too long: if it would take more than one gaming session for even an experienced player to win the game, then essentially nobody ever will. You also can’t make any individual challenge in the game too difficult: if a player has to go through two hours of game to get to a particular challenge, he’s not likely to keep practicing that challenge if it takes too many tries to get through it. (I’m playing Resistance on the PS3 right now, and it would be unplayable if you had a limited number of lives and had to go back to the beginning of the game after they were used up.) These are both real limitations that I’m sure held game designers back until checkpoints and quicksaves came into widespread usage.

Thank goodness, the folks who released the disc added a quicksave option to every game, so I don’t have to put up with replaying the same early levels over and over again. Of course, adding a quicksave to games that weren’t designed to have one throws the limitations into sharp focus–I’m blowing through the Sonic levels, because I don’t have to play through the early ones over and over again just because I die on a later one.