One Change That Would Make A Retro Game Perfect

[WerewolfJones]

Recently I’ve started on a little project. I have Nintendo Switch Online and a ton of retro game collections, so I’m going through my backlogs of games on them. Some of them are games I’ve played before, others I haven’t. But I want to give them all a shake because I’m finding more and more how deeply I prefer retro to modern gaming.

Right now I’ve dived back in to the Cadtlevania Anniversary Collection, and I’m playing through the first Castlevamk for the first time in forever. Castlevania has aged like fine wine: great music and graphic for its atmosphere, tough ass difficulty including some truly brutal enemy placement. It’s a near perfect platformer for me. But there’s one thing that really gets me.

I really hate the whip upgrade. It seems superfluous to me, and having to hope you get whip upgrades after you die is obnoxious. I get the basic idea of it, but unlike, say, it really feeling like an integral mechanic like Arthur and his diminishing armor in Ghosts an’ Goblins, it kind of just feels like a cheap way to weaken your primary tool and pad game time by how much of a penalty death is. If your whip was just static, the game would still be difficulty, but at least more fair.

anyone else got any examples of this, where there’s just one little thing that turns a 10/10 to an 8 or 9?

 

[Pinballbuzzbro]

Making it so that when you die in Rendering Ranger R2, your weapon upgrade level doesn't reset back to zero. Either that or increasing the power of your base gun by 5x.

Legit took that game from being an 8/10 to a 5/10 for me, hate to sound cliche but genuinely wtf were they thinking with how slow and pitiful your stock peashooter is. Even something as simple as a DOOR takes almost 10 whole seconds to simply SHOOT DOWN with the thing, so you can imagine how nightmarish fighting basic enemies and obstacles is.

 

[Cardboardtubeknight]

It would seem that in the effort to make games back then more "whole" they made them difficult for the purpose of allowing you to gain pattern recognition, timing, and spatial awareness, and it was a commemorable practice but did some of them really have to make it  one hit? Sure, is that an example of an 8/10 to 5/10? Probably not in the general sense, that would be skill issue territory on my part, but the examples I'm thinking of are Contra or Sunset Riders. The latter I was actually playing earlier. Games like that are bullet hells. They're designed in a meticulous way where dodging is essential, but in my opinion the one hit kill makes what again I find to be a commemorable practice into needless padding.