At a book club meeting to talk about the game UFO 50.

One of the things we talked about was how arcade games feel “sharp” compared to more modern games, in particular because they lack save states and tend to be pretty difficult. The group pointed out that games from this era sometimes didn’t even have the ability to save the game yet, and when the ability to save your game was developed the design of games also changed. I think this is an interesting moment in game design history that I could look into more later.

We noted that Velgress, despite having no save states and being quite difficult, was quite fun compared to other games with similar qualities. I pointed out that this is because Velgress gives you more variety in challenges every time you start playing while other games with hard resets essentially amount to you more or less backtracking through parts of the game that you already understand well, but are just difficult.