Retro Games Are More Than Just Child’s Play

I had heard good things about Yoshi’s Island for years. And the fact that the game’s Gameboy Advance incarnation was sold out everywhere I looked just served to confirm that positive word-of-mouth. Of course, my inability to find the game heightened my desire to play it. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which originally came out for the Super Nintendo in 1995, was now officially at the top of my list of old games I had to catch up on.

Fast-forward to last July. After finally managing to procure a copy of Yoshi’s Island, I boarded a sleeper train to Chicago with my family, certain that this oft-praised game would make the 20-hour trip fly by. I had always loved one of the game’s sequels, Yoshi’s Story for Nintendo 64, so I figured I’d love the original just as much, if not more—the gaming community is pretty much in agreement that Island is way better than Story.

At first, after beginning the game, I was having a great time. The graphics were appropriately adorable, the sound effects were almost identical to those of Yoshi’s Story, and the game seemed to be shaping up to be a deeper, more expansive version of its successor.

And then, not 15 minutes after I’d started, I hit a roadblock. Despite its deceptively childish look, I couldn’t get past the fifth level.

When I was younger, one of the reasons I had loved Yoshi’s Story so much was that I could finish the game quickly, often multiple times in one day—I only ever rented the game, so I could never spend that much time on it. But now, as I sat crammed into a tiny train cabin with my brother and sister, struggling through Yoshi’s Island, I realized that I had forgotten one crucial piece of information during my endless reminiscences about Yoshi’s Story: I’m terrible at video games.

Yes, despite my love for playing games—not to mention reading and writing about them—I can barely hold my own in a Mario Kart race. I should have known that there was something weird going on when even I could beat Yoshi’s Story in under an hour without batting an eyelash. Obviously, Yoshi’s Story was way too easy.

The discrepancy in difficulty between Yoshi’s Island and Yoshi’s Story is exemplary of such an overarching trend in video game evolution that I can’t believe I didn’t expect it. It seems like every day I hear a different person lamenting about either how hard an old video game was (the original Final Fantasy, for example) or how easy a new one is (Blue Dragon).

Yoshi’s Story, which came out in 1998, isn’t that new anymore. But even 10 years ago, video games—with a few notable exceptions—were beginning to diverge from their challenging ancestors. It seems that as games became more and more able to express themselves through their constantly improving visuals, music, and storytelling capabilities, they began to rely less on their difficulty to lure players in.

It’s possible that game developers just got lazy in the wake of so much new technology—after all, why put all that effort into crafting devilishly challenging levels when an easy level is going to look just as ridiculously pretty?

But putting the blame squarely on the developers is taking the easy way out, so to speak. As I already mentioned, one of the reasons I was so fond of Yoshi’s Story back in the ’90s was because I didn’t have any trouble finishing it. As someone who doesn’t have a natural aptitude for most video games, it can be incredibly frustrating to be unable to beat a level on the third, fourth, and fifth tries. And, as someone who lacks the dedication necessary to power through to the 19th, 20th, and 21st tries—at which point I might actually be able to get the hang of it—I often end up giving up on a game if its initial difficulty scares me off.

What it comes down to is that everyone is at fault. Without a doubt, the game developers are slacking off on difficulty in favor of flashier technology. But the gamers are getting lazier too—it’s a combination of not giving the really tricky games enough of a chance and (of course) buying shallow yet pretty games by the boatload.

One can’t forget, though, that a few recent game sequels that have notably upped their difficulty—Guitar Hero III, Beautiful Katamari, and Contra 4 come to mind. Instances like these indicate that a portion of the video games industry has realized that they need to strike a balance, and dignify their consumers with at least as many difficult games as there are easy ones. And hopefully, gamers will rise to the challenge.

Yet as I sat on the train to Chicago last summer, sheer game difficulty had reduced me to staring out the tiny window instead of playing Yoshi’s Island. I couldn’t help but think that if I only had an easy game with me, I would have more than my siblings’ bickering to entertain me. Perhaps there’s a time and a place for difficult video games—unfortunately for me, neither of those is a 20-hour train ride.

Elizabeth Simins is a Columbia College
sophomore.
Playing Catch-Up runs alternate Thursdays.