I still spend a lot more time playing 1990s or early 2000s video games than more recent slop. A big reason is that modern games are not really games but instead movies pretending to be games or thinly veiled propaganda pieces that want to teach you that there are infinitely many sexes or that beautiful women do not exist. Even the better games have the problem that they take too long to replay. While there are people who claim to have played through games like The Witcher III or Dragon’s Quest XI multiple times, which are both games were even a relatively rushed playthrough takes between 60 and 80 hours, the typical consumer probably is not inclined to do so. I could not even bring myself to go through the post-game content of DQ XI, I am referring to “Act 3”, which starts after the game credits roll. The game is really good, but the third act is just too much. The Witcher III sadly overstays its welcome so it was a slog to finish it.

The first consoles and handhelds I owned were a Game Boy, a Super Nintendo, and a Sega Dreamcast, and afterwards I paid relatively little attention to gaming, except for some highlights like Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube. In hindsight it is a pity that I did not have enough time for playing Dreamcast games because its library is absolutely fantastic, and I have only really started to dig into it in the last few years. For about twenty years I am telling myself that one day I am going to put a serious effort into Ikaruga but it still has not happened yet. These classic games, with the exception of early RPGs, were primarily built around solid mechanics. This means that playing the game and mastering its controls, was what made them fun, not getting funneled through a bunch of lame puzzles and brain-dead fighting scenes in order to watch the next cut-scene.

When I got into gaming again, which was at the tail end of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, I quickly noticed that this industry had fundamentally changed. No longer were games made to be played, replayed, and mastered. Instead, it was all about content. I recall playing Bulletstorm and liking it quite a bit. On my second play-through, though, I realized that there were parts that were so poorly designed that you could not avoid taking hits. Thanks to regenerating health, this was not much of an issue, but this is simply horrible design as it means that true mastery was not possible. Of course, I am familiar with the “resource check” principle of arcade bosses, i.e. final bosses that are so difficult that you have basically no chance of beating them if you do not have a few extra lives or bombs left. Yet, the truly dedicated even manage to overcome these odds and “no-miss/no-bomb” such boss characters.

There were three games I played a lot as a child, but not even excessively by today’s standards. My playtime was limited to about an hour a day and I did not even play every day. Anyway, I sunk a lot of time into Super Mario World (SMW), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (ALttP), and Street Fighter II (SF II). SMW takes just a few hours. If you are really good, you can finish it in one sitting. ALttP takes about a dozen hours, and one play-through of SF II can be done in about ten to twelve minutes. Yet, just beating the game is not really the point. It is just the warm-up. Back then, there were not that many games around, so you tried to squeeze more hours out of them. This meant that in Super Mario World you tried to not die, or finish the game without activating the so-called switch palaces that made the game easier by making helpful blocks appear in some stages. I did not play Super Mario World enough to be able to not lose any lives, but I was able to finish it with losing few lives. ALttP I managed to finish without losing a single life, on my second or third run but at that point I was done with that game, as I also had a maxed-out character in terms of health and equipment.

More interesting was SF II, which I probably played more than all other SNES games I ever played combined. Because of sour grapes I even told myself that SF II: Turbo, which came out one year later, was not as good as the original. Granted, I like the graphics of the original better, but SF II: Turbo is a much more comprehensive game. Anyway, let me break down how you can approach SF II if you are a bit autistic: first, the game gives you a choice of eight characters. If you are a total beginner, you may switch characters after losing a match against the CPU, but you will probably quickly graduate to picking one character and sticking with it. The first goal is to beat the game with that character. Then you can try to beat the game with that character but without losing a single match, i.e. a one-credit clear (1CC). If you are more autistic, you may try to not lose a single round or even not to get hit, or try to conserve as much of your life bar as possible. I also set myself self-imposed challenges for fun, such as defeating the CPU by using only throws, or by only using hard punches, or only with standing high kicks. Beating the CPU without using special moves is also a fun challenge.

Mastering one character well enough to beat the game with only a few repeated matches will probably take a novice a few dozen hours. Then there are higher difficulty modes available, and at the highest level, the game becomes really quite challenging. You will sink a lot of hours into studying the CPU to figure out how to beat it without losing a match, let alone round, at the highest level. I recall that I managed to do that with my “main” Ryu, but perhaps also with other characters. Once you have mastered one character, pick another one and do it again! Granted, Ryu and Ken are virtually identical, but the others require you to relearn the game. All in all, you could sink well over hundred hours into this game, and keep returning to it. I have played SF II on the SNES for years.

I almost wish I would not have been such a snob about SF II: Turbo, which is the game I currently, 30 years later, play the most, as I could have gotten even more entertainment out of it. Let me visualize it with some screenshots:

On the far right you see a screenshot of me having beaten the game on standard difficulty settings as Ryu without losing a match. This takes you ten minutes or so, but perhaps it takes you 100 hours to get there. In SF II: Turbo, you have 12 characters, two modes (Turbo and Normal), five standard speed settings for the turbo mode, six unlockable additional speed settings, and nine difficulty settings. If you get really deep into this game, it could entertain you for many hundreds of hours. The differences between the various speed and difficulty settings are not trivial, so you probably need to take one step at a time, for both speed and difficulty.

Modern games do not really give you that. Obviously, there are new versions of Street Fighter and other fighting games but the gameplay has changed so fundamentally that they are much different games. I do not think there is much of a single-player culture surrounding them anymore.  A lot of fighting games have some kind of “revenge mechanic”, meaning that you can build up a special gauge and if you take enough damage, you can unleash a really powerful attack on your opponent and if you succeed, you win. I can’t say I am the biggest fan of this gameplay mechanic, even though I like one game a lot that is built around it, i.e. Street Fighter Zero 2. Fighting game design has also gotten more conservative. You may get 60 characters, but the differences between them may not nearly be as pronounced a they were in the limited cast of SF II.

I know that a lot of people enjoy replaying Dark Souls and other “souls-likes”. These games tap into the old concept of mastery, i.e. the first playthrough is basically a tutorial, and afterwards you work on getting better and better. This only works if the underlying mechanics are good enough. I am not entirely convinced that Dark Souls deserves the high praise it gets, but it is clearly a much better designed game than your typical Western slop that consists of going through hundreds of markers on a giant map.