Video Games That Hated You

Hey, listen. I love old video games. I love any games, honestly. Most of my time is spent playing video games and it has been since I was a kid, which means I have been playing entirely too many video games for over 20 years.

In that time I’ve seen a lot of changes. Technology has advanced. Instead of some kind of vaguely Italian plumber looking blob in the days of the NES and SNES, now you can see literally every single strand of hair in Mario’s moustache. It’s kind of upsetting.

But the biggest change is accessibility. See games used to be really, really hard. And it sucked. Cue the nostalgia-driven folks yelling: “Hey! This was a good thing! They really knew how to make games back then!”. No, you’re all wrong. So very, very wrong.

Those games were hard because games were new. Did you know what you were doing? Of course you didn’t, no one did. There was no internet to look up cheat codes. And they’d far too often throw something in that would mess up your whole playthrough, forcing you to restart the whole dammed game if you forked up. Those games? They hated you.

Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places)

I played the second Leisure Suit Larry, a very adult game full of very adult things where a weird disgusting little dude tries his darndest to get laid, as a literal child.  But that’s not the worst part of this story. 

Early on in the game, you can score yourself some spinach dip from a restaurant on a cruise ship. You straight up steal it. Free dip. Happy days.

So, come to a while later and you now have to escape said cruise ship on a lifeboat, because a KGB agent is trying to kill you. Without your input, Larry will decide he is hungry and, hey! Spinach dip!

He eats it, again without your input, you cannot stop this, and he dies. Straight up dies, that’s the end of the game. That dip was rotting, and lethal. See what you needed to do was throw the dip overboard while you were on the ship. Without knowing anything about what could happen if you didn’t. That leads to a future Larry fishing to feed himself, instead of eating rancid, somehow deadly, spinach.

Bullshit, right? This isn’t a unique case. At all.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The predecessor to the ever popular The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, 2002’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a dark, dingy game that makes no secret of the fact that it hates you and does not care whether you succeed or fail.

In Skyrim, if you happen to knock a non-playable character down in an accidental sword fight it just kinda flops over, then gets back up, slightly miffed. Not in Morrowind. Once they’re dead, that’s it.

The game will then give you a little spiel to make sure you’re aware of this, letting you know that the character is indeed 100% dead and as a result, you’ve doomed the entire world. But hey, you can keep on playing if you want. Enjoy this completely and utterly doomed world you’ve created, knowing you can never progress.

 

Dark Seed

The fairly obscure 1992 adventure horror game Dark Seed features art by H. R. Giger, of Alien fame. So you know it looks good, at least.

You start the game inside your home, and then you leave it — going about your business,  trying to get that weird alien embryo thing out of your head. It sounds like it might be, but that fact isn’t actually important right now. Because once you’ve completed the “outside” tasks for the day, and mosey on up to your door, it’s permanently blocked.

If you ever want to get back inside, you’ll need to leave your house, set up a completely different way to re-enter it, then go back inside. All before you have any idea you’ll need to do this. Adding to the proof that this game absolutely hates you is that Dark Seed plays out in real time. Events in the game happen at certain moments, so you’re constantly on a time limit to get this right.

This is what games used to be like. They hated you. They hated the fact you were playing them, and were personally going to go out of their way to make you suffer for it. Easy mode and autosaves are simply a blessing. Most games now aren’t made to kick your ass hours later, punishing you for not clicking on some random bullshit two minutes into the game.

So thank you, game developers. Thank you for realising that was, indeed, bad. And thank you even more for giving us so many options to make things easier.

 

Grace Hester is a connoisseur of video games, cats and having fun on the internet. Grace tweets at @steamjamboree