Ace Ebb — Nintendo Master? Where is He Today?
- Scribbled on May 22nd, 2007 by Devin Grimes
- Filed in Editorial Content, Features
Meet Ace Ebb — the first ever Nintendo Power Player featured in the Nintendo Power magazine (as heard on the latest Player One Podcast). Never heard of him? Well, let’s go ahead and read the synopsis sent by his 1980’s gaming clan, the NES masters:
Our club is called the NES Masters. We know right off who our Power Player is! His name is “Ace Ebb.” He writes to Nintendo all the time telling them his accomplishments on games. His hobbies are playing Nintendo games, period. He has no pets, instead he plays Nintendo all day! He beat Metroid in three days, Tyson in five, saved Zelda in five, and finished Super Mario Bros. in five.
The point? Ace Ebb, in his time, was a gaming god among little kids of yore. Something all too common in the 8-bit era, and an element virtually gone from today’s gaming society; all because of one key point — difficulty. Granted, Ebb’s achievements are no longer the de-facto standard achievements, however completing an NES game actually felt like an accomplishment. It left you with a feeling of sheer power and skill.
The question: Where has that element of achievement gone in today’s games?
Think I’m totally wrong? Well, you have probably have some valid points — I’ll get to that later, but let’s change the words printed in Nintendo Power around a little bit:
Our club is called the Game Masters. We know right off who our Power Player is! His name is “Joe Gamer.” He writes to Nintendo all the time telling them his accomplishments on games. His hobbies are playing Nintendo games, period. He has no life, instead he plays games all day! He beat Halo 2 in three days, God of War in five, saved The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in five, and finished Super Paper Mario in five.
Not quite as impressive, huh?
Beating a game is just no longer an accomplishment. Look at all the games listed above. None are particularly hard, all it takes is a matter of time. Twilight Princess is the closest thing to a gaming achievement — and that’s just because the damn game takes 30+ hours to even work your way through!
Still, it’d be ignorant not to acknowledge the few games out there that have challenged the art of button mashing. Ninja Gaiden for the original Xbox is one of them. It challenged gamers with its hypnotic combat system that made the elite console players really stand out amongst the inferior.
What inspired this post? Guitar Hero. On the higher difficulty levels, the game gets pretty rough, but it never gets impossible. We’re spoiled with many games just being handed to us, and instead of developing a certain sort of skill level, you do the same monotonous task over and over.
Initially, in GH you’re suffering the wrath of bending and moving your fingers in ways you never thought possible, and to even jump to expert at the start is almost a death sentence to immediate failure. Taking the time to learn the game though, by starting at the lowest difficulty level and working your way up, you’ll start to develop actual skills at the game.
Two great examples, but while searching for something that’s barely there in single player games, I realized where the real difficulty has moved to: multiplayer gaming. Ah, there’s where the gaming gods have moved to. Fatal1ty, T Squared, and all the others are the ones pioneering the art of videogames — these are the Ace Ebbs of the gaming community today. The toughest competition to our fingers and thumbs isn’t some AI controlled character — it’s other gamers.
Whether competing at Halo 2 MLG LAN tournaments, or just fragging your human adversaries in Counter-Strike: Source from the comfort of your home, to actually succeed in the online gaming arena requires practice, and skill far beyond that found in the standard single player experience.
The success and exhilaration found in these online matchups has only skyrocketed since the inception –Microsoft recently announced that over 6 million users have since signed on to their Xbox Live service, and with MLG even getting it’s own TV show, it looks like the online competition is only going to go up from here.
While the single player hardcore gaming scene may have diminished, the difficulty in games lives on in the form of Player vs. Player matchups. But is that enough to sustain our hunger? Do you guys feel like we should be challenged more in games? Think I’m totally wrong? Leave your response in the comments…
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
While it is unfair to rate the past as compared to the present I can say this. I’m almost embarrassed to remember the time I put in on such mundane button mashing pixel versus pixel games. The feelings of accomplishment were very narrow in scope. Rarely was there anyone to cheer or jeer or fancy long winded closing and credits. Just a simple “Total Score 9999″. I always felt cheated and wanted much more. Thankfully, the gaming industry through innovation, technology and imagination have given me something that I think I’ve earned for the effort put in. The challenge is there and it is still difficult. Sometimes impossible and thus the cheat codes can come in handy. When all else fails, blow the snot out of the bad guys with infinite ammo and invincibility. Yeah!
Some games these days have an very interesting story line and playing along for immersion may surpass the requirement to be physically demanding. Games these days are so much more than hardcore button mashups of the past. I don’t want to go back to those games.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:08 pm
You’re approaching this issue from the wrong direction. You’re asking “why are games so much less difficult now?” when you should be asking, “why were games so difficult back then?” The answer is simple - when you had hardware that could only handle the most basic of graphics you increased a game’s longevity through difficulty rather then content.
More games are easier today because the experience features more content and doesn’t need a steep difficult curve to give it longevity and, therefore, value.
If you’re looking for that old-school challenge, though, emulators are everywhere and plenty of smaller, independent developers are still pumping out quirky little games that follow along with the “beat the player over the head until he pulls his hair out” design philosophy.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:43 am
Nintendo stooped to making a fake personality to make kids think it was alright to sacrifice their social lives to their console. Think about it.
August 14th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
[...] it does make me a little embarrassed to remember when arcade games were cool. Well, it’s cooler than Ace Ebb, anyway. Much cooler. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can [...]