There was a time in the arcades where I would put tens of dollars worth in quarters to try to get through a game or beat a boss. I recently had the chance to visit an arcade that had games like Mortal Kombat, Galaxian, Pac-Man, and many other old games. And what seemed like an amazing task back in the day is a piece of cake now. Why is that? Is it because we are older? More so, I think it is because we are so accustom to playing games that need multiple critical thinking and dexterity skills, verses back in the day where we had one joy stick, and maybe one button. I can now get levels higher in MK, where I used to have problems with the second level. With Galaxian, I can last through level 40, and with Pac-Man, I go for decades of Acts with it. It is the same game, something that was state of the art then, but our brains are used to the now. Heck, I even revisited Crossbow, and was able to get past more than just two screens. I actually went through to defeat the boss. Something I never thought I would be able to do back in the 1980s when I first played that in the arcade with my dad.
The same is with PC. Returning to games that broke the model, such as Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and Unreal, each of them were advanced at the time, yet now are cakewalks. The game has never changed. Yet our skills have. Aiming a sniper rifle at someone in a Wasteland now, where you have pinpoint timing to achieve a result, verses aiming a sniper rifle at someone in a 1990s PC game, and realizing now how easy it is to get the shot in that game, should give people reason to play some of the original classics. For someone like me, who likes to complete a game to make that effort, it is worth it.
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