Old School Gaming

[Jason]

We bought my youngest son a 2DS for graduating from pre-school last week, so I decided to try out the Nintendo eShop to purchase digital copies of the original Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. (two of my favorite old-school games).

First, the entire account process to buy and use Nintendo digital games is so much more complicated than Xbox Live or PSN. You need to create a Nintendo account online and then have it linked to a Nintendo ID, which can only be created on the gaming system.

Second, there's also no option to buy digital codes directly from Nintendo. They're available to purchase from online stores (Walmart, Target and Best Buy), but you don't receive the code immediately as it has to be emailed to you. Surprisingly, Amazon only offers physical cards that must be shipped to you. I decided to skip the digital codes and just pay with my credit card.

Third, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. were ports of the NES games as opposed to original arcade games. That's not a huge deal, but it's a little disappointing to me as I was a big fan of those games back in the day.

The funny part is that I challenged my three kids to beat the four levels in either of the two games. They could try as many times as they wanted to and anyone who did it would get $10 from me. I even let them watch me beat the four levels on each game so they could see how to do it. I blew through DK Jr. since I was a bad-ass at that game in the arcades.

As expected, my youngest son struggled with the games and decided to be a judge with me. My oldest son, "Mr. Call of Duty", thought he'd breeze through the challenge, yet after 30 minutes of playing he was only able to get through the first level of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. I even showed him how to beat the elevator level in Donkey Kong and he still struggled with it. He would get even more annoyed when it'd beat the level in less than a minute. This was payback for all the times he made fun of me for having him "help" with some parts of Arkham Knight and a few other games throughout the past year.

My daughter didn't try them tonight, but I'm curious to see how she does tomorrow since she does play a lot of mobile games on her phone which are very familiar to old-school games as far as gameplay goes. Even so, I'm betting against her winning my challenge.

I did make it a point to let me my kids know that kids today just can't handle old-school games.

To be continued...

[BDSooner72]

That is the problem, kids today have so many things vying for their entertainment dollar and attention span. Those damn birds in Ninja Gaiden would trigger them into a depression and cause them to have a meltdown on twitter. 

http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/AB6fNnYyngYLPy_5S0ugegTs2hIITnie

Available for the 2DS, it would make a great punishment for when they act up. 

[Jason]

I remember beating the the first Ninja Gaiden at my friend Billy's house.

I don't miss how hard those old games were. I like the more casual (easy) gameplay experiences nowadays, but I've earned it by being tortured by the difficult games from my childhood.

[Mike_S]

First post in a long time, hope you guys are good...

On a similar topic: I attended the California Extreme game show yesterday with my 10-year old son and two of his similar-age cousins.  (http://caextreme.org/).  We played tons of pinball and arcade games for 4 hours and all had a blast. 

But it was amazing how hard a lot of the early games were, especially for the kids -- all of whom are reasonable gamers on PS, XB, iPhone/iPad, etc.  Some were so hard they had to play 2 kids at the same time and share the controls!!

[Jason]

Older games were definitely designed to be more challenging. I think that all changed once gaming became more mainstream and the term "casual gamer" became part of our vocabulary. Part of what made older games so hard was the lack of continues and save points. Most of the time, if you died on a level, you had to start from the beginning.

BTW, no one collected my $10 bounty.