In those days tutorials weren’t a thing. Games came with manuals that you were expected to actually read.
And they were cool! And it was better that way! And get off my lawn!
Yup…
RTFM
The literal first thing you do is get stuck in a room that you can’t get out of until you learn to use the morph ball. Tutorial as gameplay was innovative.
I’m getting flashbacks to NES Rambo seeing your comment. First ragequit, fuck that game lol
that car drive back home when you’re reading the game manual, oof the anticipation.
I took some of the character bio’s a bit far. For a while I used to believe that Yoshimitsu from Tekken was a real person.
I remember that Kazuya liked sneakers
well when you meet her in person, you can tell her that
Pardon?
you can tell her that, when you her in person meet well
In those days, developers largely didn’t know the concept of player training through gameplay and had to resort to text dump tutorials (or worse, tutorial videos (where applicable)).
? You start in a room you where right leads to ledge you can’t jump to, and left takes you over a pyramid with a power up and small hole.
It was gameplay teaching you.
Mind, this is the only such moment. The rest of this game is fucking bullshit that ate my childhood
Hollow Knight was kind of like this, with a better tutorial, and I loved the game for that. The exploration felt so much more mysterious.
The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you’ve played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you’re presented with a narrow passage you can’t crawl through. At this point, you’ll discover that you can also go left. There’s another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you’ll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can’t jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.
Not to mention that at that time, games shipped with an instruction booklet that told you the controls…
I liked the FFVII manual that gave you bios of all the characters, along with telling you that Cid is “old”.
He’s 32.
Yeah, the best games back then had tutorials built in. Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 is probably one of the best tutorials ever made.
The first areas of the Halo 1, 2, and 3 were all designed to have all the movement training in it and have sections for the new weapons.
The level 1-1 glazing is crazy. It’s iconic for being the most played level but it’s not an incredible engineering feat.
I just said it was a good tutorial…
Not your particular comment, the common view on level 1-1 is it’s the perfect tutorial. I’m not targetting you specifically
“Which way is Firelink Shrine?”
I never understood why they call this genre Metroidvania. Metroid definitely came first right? Why isn’t it just Metroid-like?
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1 revitalized the genre so much, I think it’s fair that it took on half the genre name. Modern metroidvanias are as much SOTN as Metroid.
Metroid wasn’t first. Games like Pitfall II and Montezuma’s Revenge predate it.
As for the “Metroidvania” name, originally it just applied to Castlevania games in the Metroid mould (particularly in the GBA/DS days when there were a tonne of them) but people just started applying it to the entire genre. It was always a terrible name.
Kinda reminded me of Warframe after you finish Vor’s quest and the game is like: here’s a billion systems I never properly explained, go have fun.
Totally based.
Warframe is… special.
Did you make it thirty hours in? Congratulations, now you can create your character.
