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Ice2SeeYou
Title: Sexual Tyrannosaurus
Joined: Sep 28 2008
Location: South of Heaven
Posts: 1761
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I was on another forum discussing how much harder videogames were back in the NES/SNES/Genesis era. In referencing difficult games, many of the usual suspects came up: Battletoads, Ghosts N Goblins, Top Gun, Shadowgate, TMNT, Zelda II, etc.
Back then the difficulty was much higher, and was also a function of how many lives and how many continues you got. I never finished Zelda II because no only did I run out of lives trying to get the damn hammer, but you didn't get any continues. Top Gun gave you no continues, either. If you failed to refuel the jet (and you would), you just had to run out the clock until your remainig fuel ran out and you died. Then you were always back to the beginning, having to play through the entire game again (once your rage subsided).
Nowadays, we have savepoints and checkpoints. Usually they're spaced pretty regularly, so you rarely have to keep playing through a certain area again and again, only to be killed by the boss.
Are there any games out there nowadays that give you a limited number of continues? Or is the continue an extinct relic of gaming?
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 Sydlexia.com - Where miserable bastards meet to call each other retards. |
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Sexton Hardcastle
Title: The Supreme Element
Joined: Apr 01 2006
Location: Maine
Posts: 514
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Contra: Shattered Soldier is the only game I'm able to think of that could be considered a recent game...and that was released way back on the PS2.
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Deadmau_5pra
Title: Amatuer film/podcaster
Joined: Feb 10 2009
Location: Chicago Area
Posts: 1126
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Aren't they somewhat the same thing as savepoints and checkpoints?
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UsaSatsui
Title: The White Rabbit
Joined: May 25 2008
Location: Hiding
Posts: 7565
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Quote: |
I never finished Zelda II because no only did I run out of lives trying to get the damn hammer, but you didn't get any continues. |
Um...Zelda II has unlimited continues. You just have to start at the North Palace each time.
And no, limited continues really are sort of a thing of the past. They were only really sort of an artifact of converting arcade games over to the NES, where you needed to preserve an "arcade feel" in a setting where you had all the quarters in the world and could just brute-force through a game without such a limit.
I'm not sure limited continues are a good thing, but didn't Wii Punch-Out do something similar with the Last Stand mode?
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Knyte
2010 SLF Tag Champ*
Title: Curator Of The VGM
Joined: Nov 01 2006
Location: Here I am.
Posts: 6749
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I aways hated games that only gave you limited continues. Like most of the arcade ports. My rationale was that if I bought the arcade game, then wouldn't I have unlimited continues? I mean I could just open the coin box and press the quarter switch as many times as I want to. So, if I buy an arcade port on console, it should have unlimited continues as well.
I also think that was what the codes on my Game Genie were for, for about 90% of the games I had. I would put in the unlimited lives or continue codes, because I thought it was BS.
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Syd Lexia
Site Admin
Title: Pop Culture Junkie
Joined: Jul 30 2005
Location: Wakefield, MA
Posts: 24886
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XBLA/VC/PSN have arcade ports with continues. Ikaruga for example was released on XBLA, and that has continues. Most fighting games still use continues in their Arcade Mode.
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Pandajuice
Title: The Power of Grayskull
Joined: Oct 30 2008
Location: US and UK
Posts: 2649
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Well the limited (or none at all) continues in the NES/SNES era were pretty much a way to extend the life of the game, as I understood it. Back then a new NES game was $50, but a lot of them probably only had an hour or two of playtime. So that was extended by the use of crushing difficulty and limited continues.
Think about it now. If you play Kung Fu, or Ninja Gaiden, or a game like that nowadays using an emulator with save states, you'll breeze right through it in an hour at most. The same would have been true had those games had unlimited continues. Getting pissed about a really short game that cost $50 isn't a new phenomenon, so uncreative developers tried to avoid that in the best ways they knew how.
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jackfrost
Title: Cold Hearted Bastard
Joined: Feb 21 2009
Posts: 861
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That is very true. When you memorize the levels and learn the boss patterns most games are much easier. I can beat almost any level based game in one sitting if I save after I finish each stage. When games had limited continues you had to perfect each level one at a time. Since you brought it up the Ninja Gaiden series is a great example. The first two games had unlimited continues and were much easier in my opinion. The first Ninja Gaiden, however, started you back at the beginning of the last stage each time you died at the final boss. I had no problem with the rest of the levels, but that last one took me a lot longer to complete. The second Ninja Gaiden was a lot easier because you weren't sent back to the start of the level when the last boss killed you. I beat that gamethe same day I started playing it. The third Ninja Gaiden actually did have limited continues though, and in my opinion that was the hardest one on the NES. The levels weren't any harder than the previous games, but the lack of continues really cranked up the difficulty. I played that several weeks before I finally beat it.
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Burt Reynolds
Title: Bentley Bear
Joined: Apr 07 2008
Location: California
Posts: 1399
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There is way more going on in video games these days. How old were you when you played those games on NES? I can go back to most games I played in my childhood and can own them pretty well even if I haven't played them in a long time. I think it's more that we have years experience playing games now, and don't realize how much better we have become. I say that save states are a product not only of the ability to do so now, but games kind of have evolved with our generation and I don't have the same patience to go through an entire level/game over and over again and the games now are marketed not only to children but to us. Not to mention most nintendo games aside from rpg's take 10minutes to an hour to beat as opposed to 10-60hours
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GPFontaine
Joined: Dec 06 2007
Location: Connecticut
Posts: 11244
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Saving when you want where you want does make games easier, but it allows a person to incorporate games into their own lifestyle rather than the game becoming the lifestyle.
Example 1: World of Warcraft - There is no saving, so therefore you can't stop, walk away and come back at a later time. It is always on, never ending...
Example 2: Far Cry - You beat a section of a level quickly, but in your haste you do so with limited health. The save point is auto generated and your health is marked. You may find yourself at a point where getting hit is inevitable, but if you could have saved at your own pace, you wouldn't have been left with only enough health to die constantly at the same point.
Example 3: Just about every Final Fantasy game before "quick saves". It really sucks when you are 30-50 minutes through a part of a dungeon and your real life catches up with you and you need to go. I don't mean leave the system running type of go. I mean that you shut it off and lose 30-50 minutes of your life type of go.
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FNJ
2010 SLF Tag Champ
Joined: Jun 07 2006
Posts: 12294
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Ice2SeeYou wrote: |
I was on another forum discussing how much harder videogames were back in the NES/SNES/Genesis era. In referencing difficult games, many of the usual suspects came up: Battletoads, Ghosts N Goblins, Top Gun, Shadowgate, TMNT, Zelda II, etc.
Back then the difficulty was much higher, and was also a function of how many lives and how many continues you got. I never finished Zelda II because no only did I run out of lives trying to get the damn hammer, but you didn't get any continues. Top Gun gave you no continues, either. If you failed to refuel the jet (and you would), you just had to run out the clock until your remainig fuel ran out and you died. Then you were always back to the beginning, having to play through the entire game again (once your rage subsided).
Nowadays, we have savepoints and checkpoints. Usually they're spaced pretty regularly, so you rarely have to keep playing through a certain area again and again, only to be killed by the boss.
Are there any games out there nowadays that give you a limited number of continues? Or is the continue an extinct relic of gaming? |
how entertaining was top gun for you? did you enjoy repeatedly dying over something incredibly stupid? is going into a fit of rage really what people want to do when playing a game?
howzabout battletoads? how many of us actually saw anything past the third level in that game? I'm pretty fond of the game, but if I was in the game store and saw it on the shelf, I wouldn't buy it.
on the other hand, however, we have strider 2, which is completely ruined with the insta continues.
I don't really know how I feel about this subject.
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slapolakinkaido
Title: Illegitimate Son of God
Joined: Jul 14 2009
Posts: 1565
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Some games were so fucking hard it didn't matter how many continues you got. Remember Ghost's n Goblins? That game had unlimited continues. Great, now I can spend all night dying instead of just dying for 30 minutes or so.
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Pandajuice
Title: The Power of Grayskull
Joined: Oct 30 2008
Location: US and UK
Posts: 2649
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GPFontaine wrote: |
Saving when you want where you want does make games easier, but it allows a person to incorporate games into their own lifestyle rather than the game becoming the lifestyle.
Example 3: Just about every Final Fantasy game before "quick saves". It really sucks when you are 30-50 minutes through a part of a dungeon and your real life catches up with you and you need to go. I don't mean leave the system running type of go. I mean that you shut it off and lose 30-50 minutes of your life type of go. |
That's a good point GP. It's not that saving anywhere makes game noticeably easier, it's just, to me, it's one of those more recent gaming innovations that every future game should have, if possible. I get pretty annoyed these days if a game doesn't at least allow for quick saves, because you're right, it's just not convenient anymore to play to the next save point. It can really ruin the fun when real life forces you to shut the game off when you haven't been allowed to save recently.
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Syd Lexia
Site Admin
Title: Pop Culture Junkie
Joined: Jul 30 2005
Location: Wakefield, MA
Posts: 24886
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And then you have every Super Mario game that isn't the original or Lost Levels, where it's so retardedly easy to earn 1UPs that continuing becomes a moot point.
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Doddsino
Joined: Oct 01 2009
Posts: 5316
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One of my favorite games was Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, it gave you unlimited lives since the potential for dying was quite high. Very fun game though..
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Ice2SeeYou
Title: Sexual Tyrannosaurus
Joined: Sep 28 2008
Location: South of Heaven
Posts: 1761
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UsaSatsui wrote: |
Quote: |
I never finished Zelda II because no only did I run out of lives trying to get the damn hammer, but you didn't get any continues. |
Um...Zelda II has unlimited continues. You just have to start at the North Palace each time.
And no, limited continues really are sort of a thing of the past. They were only really sort of an artifact of converting arcade games over to the NES, where you needed to preserve an "arcade feel" in a setting where you had all the quarters in the world and could just brute-force through a game without such a limit.
I'm not sure limited continues are a good thing, but didn't Wii Punch-Out do something similar with the Last Stand mode? |
I wouldn't call starting over at the beginning location a "continue." Yea you got to keep your items and progress, so you were technically continuing the same game, but my idea of a "continue" would be starting you over reasonably close to where you died.
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 Sydlexia.com - Where miserable bastards meet to call each other retards. |
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Doddsino
Joined: Oct 01 2009
Posts: 5316
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Yeah, the Zelda 2 continue was bullshit. At least if you died in the dungeon during the first game, you started back at the beginning of the dungeon, not the case in this game, where you'd have to trek ALL the way back there, which was much more tedious than the first game.
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Ice2SeeYou
Title: Sexual Tyrannosaurus
Joined: Sep 28 2008
Location: South of Heaven
Posts: 1761
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Doddsino wrote: |
Yeah, the Zelda 2 continue was bullshit. At least if you died in the dungeon during the first game, you started back at the beginning of the dungeon, not the case in this game, where you'd have to trek ALL the way back there, which was much more tedious than the first game. |
Exactly.....you could get the same effect by pressing the Reset button.
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 Sydlexia.com - Where miserable bastards meet to call each other retards. |
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Rydog
Title: Dragon Slayer
Joined: Aug 11 2009
Location: Massachusetts
Posts: 1511
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Ice2SeeYou wrote: |
Doddsino wrote: |
Yeah, the Zelda 2 continue was bullshit. At least if you died in the dungeon during the first game, you started back at the beginning of the dungeon, not the case in this game, where you'd have to trek ALL the way back there, which was much more tedious than the first game. |
Exactly.....you could get the same effect by pressing the Reset button. |
To make it worse, I believe they took away any experience points that you earned as well. I stopped playing that game SO many times because I didn't feel like walking back to a dungeon.
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Ice2SeeYou
Title: Sexual Tyrannosaurus
Joined: Sep 28 2008
Location: South of Heaven
Posts: 1761
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Rydog wrote: |
Ice2SeeYou wrote: |
Doddsino wrote: |
Yeah, the Zelda 2 continue was bullshit. At least if you died in the dungeon during the first game, you started back at the beginning of the dungeon, not the case in this game, where you'd have to trek ALL the way back there, which was much more tedious than the first game. |
Exactly.....you could get the same effect by pressing the Reset button. |
To make it worse, I believe they took away any experience points that you earned as well. I stopped playing that game SO many times because I didn't feel like walking back to a dungeon. |
Yea.....I never made much progress because I couldn't get the hammer. Those fucking axe-wielding alligators would kill me every time, and then I'd be too pissed to bother going through all those caves again.
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 Sydlexia.com - Where miserable bastards meet to call each other retards. |
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UsaSatsui
Title: The White Rabbit
Joined: May 25 2008
Location: Hiding
Posts: 7565
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You lost any XP you picked up, but kept your levels.
And there was one true "continue point". Once you got to the Great Palace, you could continue from there (and thank fucking GOD).
You know, if anyone is interested in tackling Zelda II again, I know where you could find a good walkthrough.
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Doddsino
Joined: Oct 01 2009
Posts: 5316
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I don't know how many times I was on the verge of leveling up, die...then fucking have to start all over. The first dungeon alone pissed me off since those pig warriors spawned for-fucking-ever.
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Ice2SeeYou
Title: Sexual Tyrannosaurus
Joined: Sep 28 2008
Location: South of Heaven
Posts: 1761
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UsaSatsui wrote: |
You lost any XP you picked up, but kept your levels.
And there was one true "continue point". Once you got to the Great Palace, you could continue from there (and thank fucking GOD).
You know, if anyone is interested in tackling Zelda II again, I know where you could find a good walkthrough. |
Ah. I never got to the Great Palace (not by a long shot) so I never got to see that continue point.
I've tried playing through Zelda II on emulators, but I haven't been able to find a ROM that runs smoothly. The only emulator I've used is Nesticle, but Zelda II is always choppy on it.
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 Sydlexia.com - Where miserable bastards meet to call each other retards. |
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LeshLush
Joined: Oct 19 2009
Location: Nashville, TN
Posts: 1479
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I've never understood the nes/snes continues. Why not just give me 15 lives instead of 5 and not give out continues? It amounts to the same thing.
I think what's even worse is that today's kids have no notion of what it's like to keep up with a notebook of passwords. Man, the ritual of writing down the passwords for the next level of Castlevania, and then looking them up the next time you played was almost as fun as playing the game itself.
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Rydog
Title: Dragon Slayer
Joined: Aug 11 2009
Location: Massachusetts
Posts: 1511
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I had pre-made Megaman grids, it was fun now that I think about it.
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