Re: Why are imported games harder?

Depends on the decade, obviously. Later games in the NES library - they were made more difficult because Nintendo demanded it. The more difficult games were selling higher numbers of copies, so that convinced Nintendo to crank up the difficulty on all the games. They thought that higher difficulties meant higher sales. And the success of games like Legend Of Zelda 2, Battletoads, and the Contra series could certainly be used to back up those claims. Of course, high sales relate to more than one thing; difficulty alone doesn't make the determination. But not every businessman knows that.

As, yes - the "dark era" of gaming. This relates to the gloom-and-doom trend of North America. It happened in 1992, following the Los Angeles riots. After that, most of those bright, colorful games suddenly stopped selling. Same went for most music, movies, and TV shows of the same type. I don't think highly of this trend, personally, and I was glad to see it end in 1995.

Note that when I say Nintendo, it only relates to Nintendo of North America. Japan And European Nintendo follow different standards. Another note - unlicensed games don't always follow the difficulty trend Nintendo embraced. So when you grab an unlicensed game from 1993 - and it's both colorful and unusually easy - you've unveiled an upside to unlicensed games ... a reasonable difficulty, and a real fish-out-of-water experience in a trendy, copy-cat market.

- Tricob.

"Glass Tiger for life! "

Why are some games imported from the east to the west made harder?

I notice how game are just stupid hard or unfairly unbalanced or had a gameplay tweak that ruins the game.

And does that explain the reason why there are so many Dark-like games? All due to bad importing, but people couldn't back down?