Everything Old Is New Again: Changing Expectations

I'm not a huge video gamer. Haven't been since I was much younger.

My brothers and I saved up, and - together - bought an NES. This was during the era when the system included the Zapper and the included cartridge was Super Mario Brothers / Duck Hunt. My younger brother, who has always been better at anything physical, was significantly better than I was at both games.

After a year or two, we bought Defender II. At some point, we wound up with Legend of Zelda. We had one of the Castlevania games, too.

But that was it for us. We borrowed games occasionally, and played games at friends' houses, but the NES didn't take over our lives like our parents feared it would (probably because we never had Tetris or Dr. Mario).

We never got an SNES or a Genesis. In fact, the next video game system to appear in the house was my original Playstation - more than a decade after the NES showed up.

But when I was in HS, I spent many a weekend going to friends' houses and playing Street Fighter II for hours and hours and hours. "Winner Stays" was the rule of thumb. And I was very rarely the winner.

For Christmas this year, my mother bought me a device called a "Retron 5." I'd seen it on the shelf at a record store, and then added it to my wish list (which I use as a way to keep track of things I'd like to check out later), where she saw it. It's a retro system emulator, with slots for NES, SNES, Genesis, Famicom, and Game Boy Advance cartridges. Have a game? Stick it in, and you can play it!

I thought it was pretty neat, so I spent a few bucks and got some games. And I was amazed at how well some of them had held up over the years. Dr. Mario is still super-addictive (and fun). Tetris is amazing. Super Battletank II is ... not but it was cheap. Golden Axe is alright. Altered Beast is what it's always been.

I see a lot of discussion these days about the price of games and how short they are, and I realize that these retro games are almost all shorter than most modern games.

Super Mario Brothers is all of 32 levels. People are beating it (without warps) in under 20 minutes. But I don't remember people complaining about how short it was, because it was from a completely different era of gaming.

I remember when I played Star Wars: Republic Commando on my XBox, I was disappointed at how short its single-player storyline was. It's about a nine hour game. And so (on average) is Legend of Zelda. But I don't remember any complaining about that one being super-short.

Of course, my XBox had an internal hard drive that remembered where I was, so I could turn it off and walk away. Some Nintendo games had internal memory storage, and could remember where you were, but most of them didn't. Some games gave you codes once you hit a certain level. That code would jump you to that level so you didn't have to start over every time you turned the device on.

But longer games are more viable, now, than they used to be.  Early NES games were basically arcade games - play for a few, run out of lives, and then either continue or start over. I don't know that "arcade games" are still a thing, to be honest.

Meanwhile, on the board game end of things ...

A particularly deep or complex game used to take literal days. Empires in Arms was (and continues to be) a particular favorite of mine. It takes weeks to play. Civilization with its sequels and expansions could take days. Whereas Eclipse takes only a few hours (and scratches a similar itch for me).

I don't really have a point, here.  It's just fascinating to that video games are taking longer and longer while board games are getting more and more efficient.  The two branches of the "game" hobby seem to be traveling in opposite directions.