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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

We're obviously remembering different NES games.

The NES games I remember could generally be beaten in no more than an hour, if you knew how to actually do it without dying 1000 times.

A good warpless speedrun time on Super Mario Brothers is about 19 minutes.

If warps are allowed, it's under 5.

Legend of Zelda? 27 minutes

Ninja Gaiden? 12 minutes

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It's a bit absurd going off of speed runs is a way to accurately identify a game's normal play length.

I think all the games I had were 60+ hours, but I just liked JRPGs more than most genres.

FFVIII was picked not only because it was one of my favorites (FF1 too, SMB3, ...), because the remake today has turned it into 3 games, and even then those 3 games seem long by today's standards.

To be noted the famous term "Nintendo hard", which indeed... doesn't indicate that Nintendo games would be typically finished quickly (at least, without considerable skill) :-)

Interestingly, based on the Wikipedia page¹, the historical difficulty of the Nintendo games is quite nuanced.

¹=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

What games do you play these days?

I have the opposite experience - I feel buried in 60+ hour games I want to play and feel like games could be shorter.

There's a bit of difference between an NES and as PSX, which came out a full 2 generations and 12 years later.

The NES didn't have any way of saving, for instance.

The two have about much in common as a PSX and an Xbox1.

Zelda II the Adventure of Link had a save feature. I thought Kirby's dreamland did as well. There were a number of games that had save files although of course many did not include the needed hardware on their carts.

FWIW, the SNES also had no storage, and saves were in the carts. Not until the N64 did Nintendo ship a device with fungible, non-cart storage.

Most NES games had a way of saving, except the earliest NES games.

Most of them had codes you'd type in that was a save point. Many had actual save states on the cartridge.

The earlier games got around not having a code by having a secret early on the game that was revealed later on in the game so you could skip all of the parts you previously played.

I wouldn't consider codes a save. They often loss state.

Basically just an encoding of "start at level X with Y lives". Maybe not even lives.

There were only 54 NES releases with actual, battery based saves, out of 716 officially released and licensed titles (and heaven knows how many bootlegs).

So, "most" is an overbid.

Well, most of the ones I wanted to play at least. ^_^

Yep, they were pretty short, and a lot of them had no save feature so had to be finished in one sitting (unless your parents let you leave it running and just unhook the coax cable so they could watch TV). I remember going to a local game store that would let you try out used games in the store to verify that they worked, and I actually beat a game at the store.

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