Happy Monday, folks! This is Wolfman Jew, your host for the Weekly Video Games Thread.
Well, I did it. Yesterday, I (iron) knuckled* down and beat The Legend of Zelda. Ganon is defeated, at least until the next time.** Being as big of a Zelda fan as I am, it felt important to do it. Fortunately, Zelda 1 is also a rather incredible thing, albeit a challenging and formative one. The world is huge yet full of mystery. The bosses are gruesome. To say it shows its age would be an understatement, but there is a beauty in it. A power.
On that age, though. This was my third completed NES game. A few years ago I beat Kid Icarus and Kirby’s Adventure, both great games (at least, when you include save states in the former’s case). That’s not a lot for the hundreds and hundreds of games made in the 1980s. And while my Nintendo fandom doesn’t require me to play every game of theirs or the most formative entries of their franchise, and while journalists are allowed to have blindspots, I think I should try more retro games. They’re valuable experiences.
Still, I can’t deny that retro games can be hard to play, and especially hard to complete. They’re often janky and clunky and almost never have any sort of accessibility features or easier difficulty modes. The interactivity is an issue that makes older games harder to engage with for many players than other art forms. I’ll openly admit that I regularly used guides, maps, and save states to make it through Zelda 1. And it’s made me want to play a few more. So in the interest of yet another largely self-serving prompt: completing retro games, and the broader difficulty of getting into them. What experiences do you have beating games that are pushing middle age (both as retro games and when they initially came out)? What games have you found to be easier and harder for modern audiences? Do you use the amenities of modern emulators like save states or rewind? And are there games from the Seventies, Eighties, and early Nineties that you find modern enough in their design as to be perfectly playable on their own?
* Yes, I know Iron Knuckles aren’t in this game.
** No, I don’t care that this game is last is its part of the timeline.