“Ever since games have gone 3D, they have become too easy,” is a common sentiment that I hear quite frequently. While you may not find games that will challenge you in the vein of old 2D side-scrollers like Contra (1987) or Battletoads (1991) today, I ask you, “is this really such a bad thing?” 

Back in the hay day of videogame design (think the early 90s and before), developmental teams and budgets were quite small in comparison to today. This essentially took away resources from making games large, sweeping epics. In short, we were really often left with extremely short and linear games.

Now you might be thinking, “hold on a second, videogames weren’t necessarily shorter back in the day…” but then you’ve got to really analyze how developers lengthened the longevity of the games to make the hefty price of a cartridge worth it.

As a result of games being much shorter in their linear scope, developers had to often make them, at times, excruciatingly hard for you to reach the end. 

Generally considered one of the hardest games of all times, Capcom’s Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985) was ridiculously brutal, mostly in part to its unforgiving health system. In this monster-killing 2D side-scroller, players were only allotted two hits before their knightly hero took a permanent dirt nap. In addition, continues were very limited and there were no save points. 

Now if you contrast that to “easier,” more modern games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), it’s really obvious that Infinity Ward’s popular first-person shooter is much more generous with its health system. Not only do players automatically regenerate health over time, but checkpoints are plentiful; now if you gave Ghosts ‘n Goblins a much more generous health system (infinite lives/frequent checkpoints), it would be one of the shortest and most unfulfilling games of all time. 

So are games easier today? In many ways, the answer is yes. However, the gaming landscape has evolved (In my opinion, for the better). With games being more accessible, the market has been able to grow and with that, the resources, budget, and man power creating these games have increased. This in turn has allowed games to become much bigger in scope. In essence, the days of superficial longevity of making games harder just to be longer so that gamers feel they got their parent’s moneys worth is over. 

Still, often times I’ll hear from hardcore gamers that “such and such” game is too easy and that the save points are too frequent. Yet, I never see these gamers walking past save points. If you really wanted to, you could manually recreate the arduous difficulties of past games. For instance, BioShock (2007), a game known for being easy, isn’t quite so easy if you choose to turn off your system and restart the game every time you die (thus ignoring the game’s checkpoint system, thereby mimicking the save system of yore) Try playing 2K Games’ underwater first-person shooter like that for the whole duration of the game and I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to accurately recreate the challenge (and frustration) of your younger years. And while you’re at it, try rubbing grease all over your face so that you can also recreate the real-life pimples as well. 

While the hardcore crowd will argue that games have gotten too easy, the emergence of multiple difficulty levels and un-lockable harder difficulty levels has become much more prominent in modern games. Options such as these allow gamers of all types to enjoy the medium, which only expands the videogame industry as a whole.

Another facet where new levels of challenges are being created for the modern generation involves online play. While most gamers will be able to beat the single player components to their games, there’s always somebody bigger and better to face online. 

With the online scene being as competitive as it can be and with single-player games offering new, different, dynamic challenges, we here at GameXplain hope you stick around our site to help you get the cutting info on how to pwn noobs like you did in 1992 (or, whenever year it was you got into videogames.)