{"id":987,"date":"2013-06-10T14:18:42","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T19:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=987"},"modified":"2013-06-13T08:09:52","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T13:09:52","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-rayman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/987\/retro-scan-of-the-week-rayman","title":{"rendered":"[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> Rayman and Frustration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ubisoft<\/a>Rayman: Missing limbs since 1995<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I bought Rayman<\/em> for the Atari Jaguar shortly after it came out in 1995, hopeful it would bring some Mario-style platforming magic to Atari’s “64-bit” machine. While lushly illustrated with a deep color palette, I found the gameplay and the controls a little kludgy, and I had trouble advancing past one of the first few stages. I gave up and moved on to other games.<\/p>\n

Shorty thereafter, I lent Rayman<\/em> and my Jaguar to my brother and his roommate to play at college, and they beat it within a few days. Determination was just as important as skill when it came to completing video games in those days, and I had no motivation to torture myself with a frustrating game.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to a tangential point: When I was a kid, if I couldn’t beat a video game, I thought it meant that I was a bad video game player. I thought it was my fault. But years later I realized that the games that frustrated me most were just poorly designed.<\/p>\n

Not to say that all difficult games are bad games — in fact, I’d say there’s a big difference between “difficult” and “frustrating.” Merely difficult games are still fun even if you fail; they make you want to try again to complete a challenge. Frustrating ones feel unfair and make you want to smash your game console with a hammer.<\/p>\n

One of my friends did that to his NES once. He also threw it off his second story apartment balcony. Ah; those were the days.<\/p>\n

[ From Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1995, p.129]<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

Discussion Topic of the Week:<\/strong> Have you ever visited physical violence against a video game console or controller?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rayman: Missing limbs since 1995 I bought Rayman for the Atari Jaguar shortly after it came out in 1995, hopeful it would bring some Mario-style platforming magic to Atari’s “64-bit” machine. While lushly illustrated with a deep color palette, I found the gameplay and the controls a little kludgy, and I had trouble advancing past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,27,26],"tags":[170,551,554,552,550,359,358,547,60,549,198,548,546,553],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-game-info-and-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","tag-atari","tag-cd-rom","tag-damage","tag-frustration","tag-jaguar","tag-playstation","tag-psx","tag-rayman","tag-retro-scan","tag-saturn","tag-sega","tag-sony","tag-ubisoft","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}