The girlfriend and I got to talking about Altered Beast last night while I was putting the finishing touches on Herr Waycoolen's new digs, and once we got all the "WISE FROM YOUR GWAVE" nonsense out of the way, dug a little deeper on the topic. Conclusions drawn were twofold: Modern gaming is woefully light on comically ripped heroes, and being an angry energy rape-bear is just about as much fun as transformation is bound to get. This stumble down memory lane prompted a booting up of Altered Beast, and I was stunned at just how hard I was getting stomped. The controls were stiff, my dude was slow, and he didn't so much punch and kick as he did pose forcefully.
Brief digression: During a long-ago podcast, Anthony Burch mentioned that, when we were ten, there were no such thing as shitty games. A quick look back at LJN's thrilling catalog of NES titles indicates otherwise, sure -- but the point is that at that age, you'll play just about anything and force yourself to love it, no matter how broken the controls or brutally unfair the game. I think the titles we mentioned to justify this newfound discovery of our wayward youths were Back to the Future (NES) and Cool World (SNES), two games that represent the most barbaric acts ever committed by licensed games. But you overlooked the crap, because you rented that game or got it for your birthday, and motherfucker, you were going to play the hell out of it.
Digging through classic titles of yore has been a drag as of late, because I'm finding more and more that my victories as a younger, swifter Linde are almost certainly unrepeatable; I beat Battletoads at 12, but at 23 just starting the game gives me a brain hemorrhage. But I'm getting a sense that some of my favorite titles of the era weren't just hard, they were extremely flawed -- the sort of hangups that would nowadays preclude my playing a game at all. So, one wonders: do we suck as we age because of a changing of standards, a higher bar? Or is it as simple as withering reflexes?
Fucking Altered Beast, treading on my self-esteem like that. Hey, Sega -- those wolves? They look like deformed pigs.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Retrowanking: I Didn't Always Suck
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2 comments:
Dude, I just went through the same thing with my Rondo of Blood debacle. And today I was real sick so I was downloading all these VC games and I was like "Hey! Altered Beast!" And then I was like... "Nah. You know that'd be too hard for you now."
Plus, I'm pretty sure I had a cheat when I was young, but I don't recall.
Sick? Sorry to hear that. And yeah, Rondo of Blood is similarly brutal -- god damn, you know what else? Super C. As if Contra 4 wasn't hard enough, the unlockables remind me that I was never very capable at run-'n-gunning.
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