Nintendo Power Required

I don't see much of a problem, because you can always just look up a guide.

Milon's Secret Castle was the worst offender (yes, the AVGN tipped me).

I blame the translators, there was an in-game tip that was kinda generic, and considering the rest of the tips it wasn't easy to be taken seriously.

Casting the "SPELL" magic spell in a corner of a city was kinda obscure, I guess.

It was typical to just get stuck at a game for years. No internet meant no hope so if nobody knew and you didn't had a magazine about it then you had no choice but to force brute it, which was certainly no fun.

For what? Nintendo hard? Git gud faggot, or maybe you'd rather play Nintendos modern casual shit you stupid nigger

There's a difference between hard and obtuse.

...

Why were some games back then very cryptic, where they flat out wouldn't tell you shit? From the Genesis/SNES era onward that seemed less of an issue.

Makes me wonder was there a Japanese version of Nintendo Power?

I'd actually like try an experiment with a kid that's reasonably intelegent and an average gamer and knows nothing about Simon's Quest. I'm willing to bet that if they reached the point where you use the red crystal they would figure out how to use it with out having to resort to guides. The tricky part is trying to find a modern child that hasn't been ruined by mobileshit and the hand holding of modern games.

Some of it was just poor translation combined with a strict character limit of early cartridges. But another reason was that many translated games for the NES were intentionally made more difficult than their Famicom versions because game rentals are illegal in Japan but not in the US. So in retaliation they made the US games harder to prevent kids from beating them during the rental period.

He is an opinionated idiot who doesn't do his research before trash talking a game.

Well, like, you expect the earlier product not to be terribly flawed? I mean I've watched enough AVGN to know how prominent unreasonable game design was that generation but a lot of that can be chalked up to designers not having enough common sense to work on something that was new after developers had been treated like shit leading into an industry crash. It isn't exactly surprising that these people couldn't differentiate fun and what today we'd see as clear bullshit. -or rather that's still a lesson that refuses to be learned from the short-sighted people left around who tolerate the shitty working conditions of big companies. The SNES/Genesis still had plenty of that shit but it's many people's favorite generation so it gets more forgiveness.

Punch an old lady five times to get a candle. She gives no indication that's any different from punching any other old lady (yeah, you get the chance to do that a lot) but bam, punch #5 spawns a candle.

That's the most obvious one but I remember having to follow the Nintendo Power guide pretty closely to finish this game.

Is there any reasoning for that isn't blatant greed? Seems like there an awful lot of measures put in place within the games themselves to ensure people don't either finish their games fast or pick them up after a while or share them. -though I guess that's to be expected regardless.

Fucking kill yourself.

AVGN is fine, fuck off and go suck nughostbusters cock, faggot.

Nintendo has come out and admitted that they made games were you NEED to have Nintendo Power to beat them. they wanted nintendo kiddies to feel like they had a one up on kids who didn't have the Power. Anyone who says other wise is a fucking moron.
Being lucky and accidentally finding something doesn't make you good at a game.

In DKC3, if you unlock the Lost World without talking to Bluster, then talk to him, he'll say "Oh, so you cheeky so-and-so's must have used Nintendo Power to unlock that place! I know I did!"

Even with the guide, it's still a pain in the ass. I tried playing it but I just couldn't stand having to go and read the guide every fucking 2 seconds.

"More like Milon's Shitty Asshole!"

Yeah, still playing through Battle Of Olympus and there have been 5 items and 3 locations that have had no hints and are hidden in fucking random spots were the game never hints at. Glad to read this game was a commercial failure.

He looks a lot younger in that picture, he's aged quite a bit now.

AVGN is a cuck.

Nope.
The worst thing about these old nes games is that some of these are really good mechanically/gameplay wise. It just shows how new and inexperience action rpgs were back then.

Did they MAKE the game that way or did they LOCALIZE the game that way? That's the real question.

You know what, I should really go father down the rabbit hole on that one. I do not have an answer. Man, playing this game is really fucking depressing. Reminds me that clones of games have been around forever, Forcing players to by guides to beat games. Making shitty games with a famous title attached to it. Terrible translations/ ports.

EVEN NINTENDO POWER WON'T SAVE YOU THIS TIME!

Nintendo 64 as a console and early Gamecube games were awful about this shit. They knew kids would buy strategy guides because fuck you, you're not gonna find that shit without it.

The worst part is some kids got this idea that this sort of gameplay is actually fun and created shit like Shantae and Bunny Must Die without even having a marketing reason to do it. It's just "fuck you, you're not getting shit unless you rub your face on every wall in the game and magically understand any out of place, twisted logic we threw in".