Gaming has made a lot of advancements in the last 20 years. We've gone from the PS2 and the GameCube to the PS5 and the Switch. Load times have been hunted to the brink of extinction. Ray-tracing is kinda cool. We were already throwing the word "photorealistic" around back in 2003 for any games that weren't cartoony, but now those non-cartoony games are even more photorealistic.
Times change, games change with them. But arguably the biggest, most important evolution the past two decades have brought to the medium is the death of a common mechanic that was the bane of my game-playing existence as a kid. I'm talking, of course, about button mashing.
If you came of gaming age during the last console generation, you may notဣ realize how good you have it. You may have had to deal with🐻 the worsening climate disaster and the novel coronavirus, but you live in the age of a vital cure – that is, game developers have been cured of the idea that hitting a button a bunch of times in quick succession is a remotely fun thing to do.
It isn't and it never has been. But when I was growing up, button mashing was extremely common. Usually the way it worked was that you would have to hammer a button really quickly to fill a meter in a certain amount of time. If you didn't hit it fast enough, the meter would drain.
If you weren't good at ferociously tapping A, you were out of luck. Or, you might have to wait until a friend who was good at tapping could come over and carry you through that section. It was often embarrassingly quick. Your friend would pick up the controller, furiously tap the button for 15 seconds, and then hand the controller back to you. This happened to me as recently as 2015 when I was playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:South Park: The Stick of Truth and had to ask one of my roommates to do the part where you button mash to make your character take a dump. That friend used the technique where you take both index fingers and use them like one of those chiropractor guns on the button's soft tissue. Whenever I tried this it was slower than just using my thumb so I just used my thumb.
I was reminded of these bad old days recently because I've been playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush. Tango Gameworks' rhythm action game contains optional chests that you need to button mash to unlock. But the window is forgivingly wide, so I've never had trouble getting one of these on the first try. Even then, Hi-Fi Rush is the first time in a long time that I've encountered any kind of button mashing at all, which is a boon for all players. Now if a game, like Insomniac's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man, is going to ask you to repeatedly tap a button, there's almost always the option to turn that tap into a hold, instead.
I don't have a disability, so it's sometimes easy for me to overlook the extent to which gaming is a much more accessible place in 2023 than it was in 2003. We have the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Adaptive Controller, Sony exclusives like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 1 now offer a suite of options for players with a wide range of disabilities, Ubisoft games begin with screen-readers enabled, and on PC, Valve's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life: Alyx included an option to play with one hand. The industry has changed in important ways, but I'm also glad that it has changed in this one, small, petty way. Farewell button mashing, you won't be missed.