Melee Update posted

I have finally gotten around to finishing the title screens for the 1.1 version of Modern Melee Combat. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this updated version of the game supports keyboard shortcuts, has much faster game play due to the re-worked animation subsystem, and it has a proper title screen. Now that the title screen is finished, I am able to post the new code to the repository. Of course, this is only the original arenas. A new set of arenas (and a separate title screen so you can tell which version you are playing) will be released this Friday. The difficulty has been ramped up quite a bit. I am sure that there will still be a number of people who complain that it is still too easy, but I am not a glutton for punishment.

Speaking of game difficulty, I keep hearing people insist that older video games are so much harder than the modern games. While I do remember that some games were hard, I didn't think that there was that huge of a difference and most of the difficulty claims were probably due to the fact that after playing games for years the player has simply gotten better at playing games. A few weeks ago I decided to try some of the more difficult retro games that were available on my Wii virtual console. My conclusion is that the older games are harder, but not because they are more difficult. They are harder because they do not have proper save systems so you end up playing the same sequence over and over again. This is probably a requirement of the game as without this false difficulty, players would quickly discover that the game they paid a lot of money for was over in only a couple of hours.