I dunno this is a tough one. I think games of the past are harder. Like Ghosts and Ghouls and Contra. Those are hard.

But a lot of new games give you tons of saves and tons of continues. They make it easy to beat it.

Your thoughts?

In the old days, it was the challenge, and possibly story that made a game valuable. Nowadays it's the polygon and shader count. The faster they walk you through a game, the faster you go buy another.

Well, most games back then didn't have extensive difficulty modifications. Ghosts and Goblins was constantly a hard game, while Mario was constantly easy.

These days, there's several difficulty settings ranging from Super Easy to Insanely Hard for just about every game, that way the video game companies don't lose money for people not buying the game because it's "way too hard"

One thing I noticed, watching an "old" gamer and a "young" gamer play Pac-Man, the Young Gamer was schocked (and, it seems, a tad offended) that Pacman couldn't really do anything but move. No jump, no dodge, etc. Meanwhile the Old Gamer is complaining aobut new games that give you 8 different things to keep track of, controllers with 10 or more buttons, and two control sticks.

I guess it all just depends on what you're used to. Personally, since I've been more or less raised on controllers that become gradually more and more complicated, I've found myself having an easier time with newer games, where if I screw up a dodge I have 3 or 4 other actions I can try to get myself out of harm's way.

As games get more complex, you have a wider variety of actions you can perform to stay alive. Megaman only had one way to avoid a bullet headed straight for him and he could only retaliate with a burst of three shots. There were no slides, charging shots, or complex side stepping, melee attacks, swords, etc. The game would require players to make the best of the meager skills they were offered.

Also, AI hasn't kept up with advancing technology. Early 2D games didn't need complex AI. Simple level design and tossing enemy after enemy at the player was enough to add challenge to the game. That doesn't work as well in 3D. Enemies have to be smarter than than old "go straight for them" enemies from the 8-bit generation.

Old games are way harder.
A lot of the old side scrollers enemies will just keep spawning, forcing you to continue forward and constantly be losing health.
This was mostly a result of the arcade model; Get the kids to keep having to put in quarters!

i would say that new games are way harder as they require a tad bit more thought and MUCH better reflexis than old games but i myself still pull up my snes emulator and play mario or super metroid from time to time. maby im just saying that cause every time you play a game it gets 2 times easyer but i still think that new games are way harder but i have to admit that spambot does have a point. and i am totaly and compleatly on board with what inkmonkey said. i to have been raised from the nintindo and i think its because of that that i can so easly get the hang of new games without reading the manual or going thrugh any type of totorial on how to do stuff.

New games: you usually get tutorials.

Old games: you get the 'Go' icon.

Old games (Particularily arcades) are insane. I will never be able to master Raiden.

Who knows some games are just harder than others it doesnt really matter about age. most games i can finish in the space of 24 hours with out sleep, food or going to the toilet. ffs take around 50 hours.

To me, old games are harder. This is because I hate hate hate hate HATE sidescrollers. I always freak out whenever I'm in the air, and I'm never sure if I'll land right. Seriously, I've lost lives to goombas. GOOMBAS.

I prefer newer games because newer games give you swords or guns, so you don't need to jump. Also, Guitar Hero is a newer game, so bonus points.

Absolutely, older games were harder. Today, most games will hold your hand and walk you through the first level or two because they assume that people are too lazy to read through the manuals. Of course, there's also the fact that today, most "controls" at least vaguely follow the laws of physics. In the old days, that wasn't always the case, making things (to me, anyway) ten thousand times more difficult to control.

Even RPGs were harder due to (usually) the length of the main story. Today the length of everything is based on optional sidequests, which annoys the hell out of me.

A few weeks ago I sat down and tried to play through the orignal NES Legend of Zelda again and died almost instantly. lol! I felt pretty silly getting creamed over and over in a game that I completed when I was about six years old..

As far as jrpgs are concerned, I'd definately say that old games were harder.

As much as I hate to admit it, FF 7 >_< was my first rpg and after playing through the barrage of FFs that came in the following years, I turned my attention to some of the older stuff like the Lunar series and some of the old Romancing Saga games.

To put long story short, Lunar was difficult and Saga raped me hard =p

Old games are without a question much harder than their modern day counterparts. Or maybe I just have better motor skills than I did as a child. Only time will tell!

Old games! New games give you so many continues that you pretty much never die, but old games don't. I can't beat Metal Slug without a bag of quarters. =(

Yeah... old games were harder and would piss yah off much faster.

Damn you Toy Story for SNES, you were the end of me.

Old games are freakin hard. Some of them excessively so (Zelda 2, anyone?). New games are usually pretty easy, though. The new Zelda game was great, but I only died once.

They even edit some of them for American audiences! Fire Emblem: Path Of Radiance's insane super-hard Mania Mode was removed.

A lot of games now hold your hand too much and try to teach you as you go. It just makes it annoying to replay. (Navi in Zelda: OoT is a good example of this.) I LOVE Resident Evil 4 for the fact that it doesn't try to teach you how to play that much. "Here's a gun, shoot those guys before they kill you. What, you don't know how? Read the manual, stupid!"

I'd like to see more changeable difficulty settings in future games. More than just "easy" and "normal."

I find most 3d games are pretty easy! And even the "hard" ones always have somekind of loophole that helps! I bought a game for my x-box called alien homniod...(or something like that) its a 2d side scroller game much like metal slug and i still havent clocked it were as Fable took me like two days to clock! 2d scrollers RULE!

Maxw3ll
Old games! New games give you so many continues that you pretty much never die, but old games don't. I can't beat Metal Slug without a bag of quarters. =(

Well games like Metal Slug, while I love them, were designed to get kids to keep putting in quarters. The ultimate example of this is Gauntlet. I mean, you are always slowly dieing, even if you're doing well. What's up with that?

I gotta say that I agree that older games are harder than the newer ones. With old games, beating them was like a extra bonus. However, with newer games it's like apart of the game. There are very few new games that I haven't beaten, but the list of old games that I have yet to defeat is kinda high (I'm ashamed to say).