Forum Overview :: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers :: 90s and later Arcade games in general.

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]The term used in the scene is "Rank." Basically, a trend that popped up in 90s arcade games was tying the difficulty to the player's skill so new players wouldn't be scared off and skilled players would still get the boot to the sack level of challenge they craved. Different games would track this through different means, like how powered up your weapons are, how diligent you are in picking up bonus point items, how often you use the hyper mode super shot, etc. If you're really diligent in Elevator Action 2 with grabbing all the hidden score items and not dying, the number of enemies onscreen will noticeably increase. However, if you're paying attention, the points you get for enemy kills doubles or triples as well. This keeps the incentive there for superplayers who figure out the game's programming psychology not to keep their rank at the bottom. This also, by the way, is why icycalm was so fucking wrong when he told me that scoring is only something newbies care about, not the real Nietzschean Ubermensch hardcore arcade gamers. I would have pointed this out to him directly but at that point he had already banned me. If a game uses scaling difficulty as a selling point, chances are they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's not quite <A HREF="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2015-Metroid-Other-M" TARGET="new">Fully Voiced Movies</A>, but it's close. If you ever see a youtube video of someone playing a shump and intentionally avoiding powerups and point items, they're keeping rank low to make it easier to get a 1CC.[/quote]