Classics and remade retro games are for our generation. I blitzed through the MegaMan collection for Gamecube, but my godbrother (10 years old at the time) thought it was the lamest thing ever.
He thought Contra was repetitive as hell and stupidly hard and boring. HE WAS RIGHT. I don't like it because the AI was retarded, I didn't like the stupid slowdown, and I certainly didn't enjoy the plot. I enjoyed Contra because it made me think of the times I was a kid playing that with my brother, dying all 30 times, and stealing his lives.
Nostalgia doesn't make something good.
Exactly! Pretty much what I've been trying to say in the first page.
But I do have to admit, there does seem to be a bigger atmosphere of experimentation with those old games, and we could learn a thing or two from them. Especially, when it comes to an emotional response from the player, I'd like to see games try and accomplish something more than horror/fear. How about some humor? Those old games had that going for them.
But yeah, for the most part those games sucked. We just loved them because it's all we had, and at the time it really was the best shit ever.
Why not tell your kid about old games? We tell them about old books, old movies, old music and it's all still good. People still watch Alien (or even Charlie Chaplin movies!), listen to Hendrix (or even Mozart), read Tolkien (or even Homer)... what's wrong with old games?
We don't blame Mozart for not using e-guitars, or blame Chaplin to only have made black and white movies. We appreciate those works for the art behind the technology, and this is something you can still do with some of the old classics.
^ This... When you watch egoraptor talk about the design elements in classics like castlevania and megaman you can begin to understand their brilliance on another level.
Then again, theres a difference between teaching someone who has an interest in games vs someone who doesnt.
Later, just after the GPU-specific bundled versions of MW2 were coming out, MW2: Mercs was released in a special "3dfx Accelerated" version that brought basic texture maps and other features to the engine. There was also a "Pentium edition" of both MW2 and MW2: Mercs, which I'm not as familiar with, that preceded the 3dfx Mercs - I believe it was a conversion of the engine from integer to floating-point math.
I liked this one. Had the dramaticest fog, and had the best visual clarity too since it piped through your host card rather than through some blurred DAC, and it was processed entirely in 24-bit.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPTvva591OQ"]Mechwarrior 2 PowerVR Version!! - YouTube[/ame]
But yeah, kids these days.... and I find more gaming-hipsters than actual grizzled gamers from the era these days. Sometimes I get fed incorrect info from them, and they even often have a false sense of copyright in them (the stupid "if its old, its abandonware, company doesnt care its free to steal" attitude) oh you know what i'm talking about
but in this case in the OP you're just talking to a brony. Scope harder and find an actual young dedicated gamer.
I've gotten into many a flamewar when I said "My favorite game from Activision is MW2"... generation gap confusion fun was had there!
Why not tell your kid about old games? We tell them about old books, old movies, old music and it's all still good. People still watch Alien (or even Charlie Chaplin movies!), listen to Hendrix (or even Mozart), read Tolkien (or even Homer)... what's wrong with old games?
We don't blame Mozart for not using e-guitars, or blame Chaplin to only have made black and white movies. We appreciate those works for the art behind the technology, and this is something you can still do with some of the old classics.
Except for maybe Charlie Chaplin, none of those examples are actually "old"
They're relatively old compared to how long you've been alive but think about how long people have been writing books, making movies, making music.... we're talking about a span of 130+ years for movies, writing goes back thousands of years, music probably about the same or longer. Mozart and Shakespear weren't writing stories and music when they were "new". Think of how long the video game industry has existed, maybe 40 years, and from a practical user adoption standpoint not even that long, maybe 25 at best. By comparison Mozart was making music when music had already been refined for generations, meanwhile game developers in the late 80s/early 90s may as well have been making some of the first games EVER.
People have a tendency to look at old games they love and think "man the only reason no one will play this is cause the graphics suck" when most of these games have way worse problems than that. I love Deus Ex to death, I still think it's the greatest game ever made, but jesus the interface and controls are TERRIBLE, half the items and augs are trash you don't want, heavy weapons? Junk. Why would you even put swimming/environmental skills into the game? It's like bait to increase the difficulty by letting them spend points in trash skills.
Art and design are a lot like a science, people look back at whats been done (in particular what THEY themselves have done) and build on what they know about how people reacted to them. Early game designers didn't have that luxury, they were pioneers and as a result their games were usually less refined, harder for the average person to pick up, and more difficult to understand and play.
Early games were great. I had a lot more fun playing EverQuest than I did playing World of Warcraft, but I'm not going to pretend like EQ was a better game. WoW built on what EQ did and they did it better, even if it did turn out less enjoyable *to me*...
Wow, am I the only one who hopes their kids don't know what DOS is?
God, my dad used to try and get me to not bother using a calculator, and use an abacus, and after 30 years I still don't see the point of learning how to use an abacus when we have calculators.
Fair enough, the important part here is knowing how to actually calculate things, meaning, using your head, which is something that youngsters often skip out on.
But there are other scenarios, why should I learn how a camera works when I can just push the button, why learn where electricity comes from when it's right there from the socket!
Or why learn what an OS is or what it does, why learn the history of anything, at all, even if it is the history of something that can undeniably be the most used invention in any humans life, that of the modern computer.
And sorry, but 99.99999% of games back then sucked. They sucked hardcore donkey balls. You all have beer vision goggles, if you think those Sierra adventure games hold up today. Most of the old school NES games were stupid, and had immature game design. SURE they were wonderful at that time, but for the most part, they were designed around 25cent arcades, and were made to suck your quarters. NOT be any kind of enlightening experience.
Now I'm often first to talk about nostalgia, and that old games weren't better BY DEFAULT than new games...
...but this is ballsacks, there were a shitload of shitty games out then, just as there were now, but there are still quite a load of unrivaled, I think few can argue against the simplicity of something like mario being in any way bad as they still use the same simple design these days in just about any platformer.
Or take the precursors to strategygames or sandbox rpg's, where you'd have gigantic worlds like the ones in the ultima series, where ultima 7 from 92' still has one of the most detailed sandbox rpg worlds even prior to the existance of the elderscrolls series, it's hard to argue that it is only due to nostalgia.
I'm certainly not going to force my children to watch old black and white silent nickelodeon films before they get to watch Toy Story.
From 95'... why force them to watch toy story when they can watch any modern 3d rendered movie from some random animated studio, I mean, they might argue that it has bad effects compared to new movies, and someone might argue that is old and therefor not good.
And we can just forget the fact of what it did for 3d-rendered movies (or the fact that a kid will still enjoy it to this day)
I'm not going to require they play Dice based D&D before I let them play Dragon Age, and I sure as hell won't force them to use an old rotary dial phone before they're allowed to use a mobile.
I dunno. I hope the future generation are better than we are. I think it's really lame to think they should be subjected to the exact same media and upbringing as we were.
It's not about forcing them, but what if they have no idea pen and paper rpg's exist, wouldn't you tell them about it? wouldn't you want to spike their interest, learn something that is actually valuable?
There's no point in anyone being elitist, but there's no point in withholding history either.
Exactly! Pretty much what I've been trying to say in the first page.
But I do have to admit, there does seem to be a bigger atmosphere of experimentation with those old games, and we could learn a thing or two from them. Especially, when it comes to an emotional response from the player, I'd like to see games try and accomplish something more than horror/fear. How about some humor? Those old games had that going for them.
But yeah, for the most part those games sucked. We just loved them because it's all we had, and at the time it really was the best shit ever.
We have much more costy, polished and high value production these days, the shit vs gold ratio is about the same though, and some of the shit we value high.
Just as much as there exists games that were better than a lot of the ones before, there are a ton of games that were better than new variants.
As my last words: You can still show xcom to a truly open newcommer to old games, and he'll enjoy it in this day, even with the knowledge of modern games, this if something shows that there's some value to old games as much as there is values in old books or movies.
good points. I like your comment. You're right, games are much younger. I think I'm even more suprised when there's no respect for the work of those pioneers whose time was just a few decades ago. And indeed there are enough games and game concepts which stood the test of time and are being resurrected as franchises, remakes or for casual/mobile platforms.
Personally, I have a problem dismissing an entire generation by just looking at graphics, technology or popularity. Remember interactive fiction? There were some great pieces there (e.g. Guild of Thieves, or Steve Meretzky's games) which were create back when people thought that games will rival books rather than rivalling hollywood movies. The concept of reading tons of text and considering it a "game" will sound strange to young people, just as it sounds strange that anyone could enjoy a game with just 16 color graphics. Yet some (but clearly not all) of those games can still captivate you if you give them the chance.
I don't think a 10 year old will appreciate this though. If you grew up with a certain standard its hard to go back. Watching black and white series sucked when I was a kid. But eventually you grow up and you value different things and you can even understand why someone like Steven Spielberg would take a step back and make a move in black and white.
I remember not seeing what's the art about Chaplin's movies or what's so special about Mozart's music. But once I got older I appreciated the skillfulness of their art and enjoyed it. I think this is possible with games too, even if you weren't around when they got made and were popular.
Are old games perfect? Heck no. People were pioneers and everything had to be discovered. GUI design, AI,controls... but have we really advanced so far? Current games are still plagued by the same issues, or by new ones. Dismissing old games because they were not perfect is like saying today everything is fine. I play games and I think we still have a long way to go. But whos know what will happen when Dovahkiin grows up and he looks back at the game where his namesake comes from...
Games aren't really younger, they're an older concept than music and literature, transported into a digital medium. Computer games are predated by board games, pen and paper RPGs, and 'active games', i.e sports.
Other than that, I won't really argue. The medium for videogames is still relatively new, even when compared to say radio or television.
Had this conversation yesterday with a 15-year-old Halo / COD:MW / MOH:BO "pro" gamer I'm acquainted with. He's legitimately pretty good at those games, and too smart for his own good, but very much the stereotypical console kiddie FPS fanboi... so I've been trying to broaden his horizons a little and teach him a little of our history.
I submit it to you all for reminiscence, chortling, and shaking of heads.
Hunter: Know any good retro games?
Me: MechWarrior 2.
Hunter: What console did it run on.
Me: Please tell me you're joking.
Hunter: Nah, I don't know retro stuff.
Me: DOS. IT RAN ON DOS.
Hunter: What's DOS?
Me: Give me strength... Before there was Windows 95, there was Windows 3.1. And before there was Windows 3.1, there was... DOS. It was a command line OS with no graphical interface. Back then programmers wrote their own game engines to run from scratch, with direct access to the hardware, instead of using stuff like DirectX nowadays. Back then, programmers were fucking hardcore.
Hunter: So windows?
Me: No... DOS. You've seriously never seen a DOS prompt?
Hunter: Nope Ha
Me: Stop making me feel fucking old. Look, just play the damn game. This is where 3D games came from. Before this there were text adventures and 2D sprite graphics. Mech2 all but singlehandedly launched modern 3D games. This is our history and our heritage as gamers.
Hunter: What type of game is it?
Me: Mostly sim.
Hunter: I don't play lots of those.
Me: You better damn well play it, or you don't have any right to call yourself a real gamer.
Hunter: Okay, I'll download it after this episode of My Little Ponies is done
Me: I hate you so much right now
Kids these days, yaknow?
There is STILL a Dos prompt for Dos games, and its Dos Box. This isnt surprising that a 15 year old pro COD / Halo / MOH etc, player doesnt know about Dos, and watches My Little Pony. Its just a 15 year old trying to act smart. Although it is kind of disturbing. =\
If you guys want kids to really know where the video game actually started, you can give them this game.
eld; I guess I am a very firm believer that we are progressing forward so rapidly, that the entire medium of 'Video Games' completely shifted from what it was, to what it is now.
Back then, games were designed to suck quarters out of your pocket in these things called 'Arcades'.
The Atari, the Nintendo, and to some extent, the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era were essentially PORTS for those arcades. But something happened around the PS1 era.
People stopped going to arcades all together.
We realised we no longer had to go OUT and sink quarters into machines, when we had perfect emulations of those games at home. Oftentimes we had BETTER games. And as a result, games stopped being designed to suck our quarters. They stopped being about '3 lives' with life bars, and time limits. Heck, our games flat out stopped having a 'Continue' countdown.
Around that era, we started playing games that started to have very engaging stories, we started playing games with immersive experiences, games that required thought, time, and emotional investment. Graphics were a big part of that, but at the same time the voice acting got better. The in-game animations got better, the dialogue became somewhat more believable, and we now have Acadamy Award calibre talent on our games. Heck, our games stopped being about trying to KILL us all the time to take our quarters, and started being about actually FINISHING them.
Now we have games that have massively multi-player virtual online worlds, with persistently existing characters, chalk full of player controlled economies, player controlled governing systems, and virtual items that have REAL world value. This is WAY beyond any kind of scope any video game player in 1985 ever thought was possible.
What I'm getting at, is I doubt our experiences with Pong, or Frogger will improve where the industry is heading. You have exchange your weekly allowance into a roll of quarters, then sink it all into 'Double Dragon' or 'Bubble Bobble' to know how special those games truly were. Picking up and playing an emulation of it is not the same experience, nor does it make it any good.
eld; I guess I am a very firm believer that we are progressing forward so rapidly, that the entire medium of 'Video Games' completely shifted from what it was, to what it is now.
Back then, games were designed to suck quarters out of your pocket in these things called 'Arcades'.
The Atari, the Nintendo, and to some extent, the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era were essentially PORTS for those arcades. But something happened around the PS1 era.
People stopped going to arcades all together.
We realised we no longer had to go OUT and sink quarters into machines, when we had perfect emulations of those games at home. Oftentimes we had BETTER games. And as a result, games stopped being designed to suck our quarters. They stopped being about '3 lives' with life bars, and time limits. Heck, our games flat out stopped having a 'Continue' countdown.
You are severely limiting your scope of view towards consoles and arcade machines, you are talking as if this was the only market that existed, if you look at the pc you'll see it quite ahead of its time, games with deep stories, very long length and no intention to eat coins.
The first person shooters and its birth during the very early nineties, and you're talking as if it's completely different now, 20 years later, did our shooters get deeper, are old shooters about nostalgia?
They're both good, old and new!
In fact if you want to look at a solid design on multiplayer firstperson shooters, you can go all the way back to quake, from 95' that's 15 years ago, and it still holds up today.
Around that era, we started playing games that started to have very engaging stories, we started playing games with immersive experiences, games that required thought, time, and emotional investment. Graphics were a big part of that, but at the same time the voice acting got better. The in-game animations got better, the dialogue became somewhat more believable, and we now have Acadamy Award calibre talent on our games. Heck, our games stopped being about trying to KILL us all the time to take our quarters, and started being about actually FINISHING them.
This happened a long time ago, even while the arcade machines were still strong, you just have to look at the pc games industry and its games during 85-95, we rarely come across games with deep stories and meaningful dialogue, yet we've had 12 years to perfect our game-storytelling since planescape torment.
Our technology has increased exponentially, but our knowledge of storytelling is as good now as it was back when gaming first hit big.
Now we have games that have massively multi-player virtual online worlds, with persistently existing characters, chalk full of player controlled economies, player controlled governing systems, and virtual items that have REAL world value. This is WAY beyond any kind of scope any video game player in 1985 ever thought was possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1 While the term mmorpg wasn't coined yet, it wasn't a super alien thing, we already had giant mmo's running almost a decade before world of warcraft came out, we even had these mmo's like ultima online that had way more interactivity with the world, items could be dropped anywhere, houses were built, shops opened.
Multi user dungeons are still not beaten in terms of interactivity, persistancy and the dynamic elements of the world when you compare it to the modern mmo.
What I'm getting at, is I doubt our experiences with Pong, or Frogger will improve where the industry is heading. You have exchange your weekly allowance into a roll of quarters, then sink it all into 'Double Dragon' or 'Bubble Bobble' to know how special those games truly were. Picking up and playing an emulation of it is not the same experience, nor does it make it any good.
The world has changed. So have our video games.
Pong and frogger is a tiny microscopic view of the old games, it's way too narrow-sighted.
The app-market are dominated by games that pull from the old era of games, where simplicity was key.
The Elderscrolls series was born from being a take on the ultima underworld series, you can still see the impact of all those titles on the modern entries, like skyrim, and you can see how ultima7 from 92' still acts one of those rpg's that birthed the sandbox rpg genre, and how important it was for elderscrolls when morrowind hit.
One example of how old games have directly influenced modern games today would be to look at Minecraft, which undeniably comes from Notch's own experience with tons of old games from the golden pc era of the 90's, and Minecraft might possibly be one of the biggest impacting modern game.
Procedural content still go largely unused in games, but you can see it's important in minecraft.
And while we at this day have a few planets we can go to in the mass-effect series, we could back in 1993, in elite 2, go to worlds from space down to the surface of the planets seamlessly, not just in a solar system, but in a full galaxy, all this fitting on a single floppy disk.
No game-designer will deny the importance of the old games, and what you can pull from them, and how they're still relevant today.
No game-designer will deny the importance of the old games, and what you can pull from them, and how they're still relevant today.
This right here. I am not arguing vintage supremacy. I believe in vintage importance. We need to remember and preserve our history to better and more fully understand how to continue building better and greater things into the future.
Lots of old games - even HL1, Deus Ex, X-wing, Mech2, Total Annihilation, and others we think of as "magnificent classics" - had some flaws. HL1 had some gaping signposting, player-goal-awareness and endgame gameplay design flaws that drove Valve to do things better in HL2. Deus Ex had a bunch of bugs, some bizarre AI glitches, weapons and skills that didn't get used much (although I wouldn't argue they were useless), and horrible animation. X-wing had crappy controls and repetitive enemy AI, Mech2 had gameplay mechanic pitfalls and some damage bugs, TA had all kinds of screwed up weapons and unit balance until the mods got hold of it... Even the timeless classics have parts that are going to make us chuckle and roll our eyes in comparison to a recent next-gen offering.
But the important part is how much they got right in one package, and how they did it, and what we can learn from those successes to build our work today on the shoulders of those successes, instead of reinventing the wheel every time, or worse, repeating old mistakes.
And at least for me, gamer culture, especially PC games, has been around for 25 years or more now. That's a lot of time and a lot of great things we've experienced, people that have come and gone, and things we've made and done. Understanding that history and that heritage, to me, is an important part of understanding and appreciating games, understanding how they got to be where they are today, the culture surrounding them, and the people within it - us.
For somebody who lived it and knew it first hand, that understanding grew organically. But for somebody who's grown up entirely on modern consoles and didn't experience the huge revolutions from early to late DOS, then late DOS to Win95/98, then the DirectX leap, the rise of the Playstation and Xbox and the console wave, plus gamer culture as it followed along and evolved offline and online... there's some amazing history and legacies they can learn about and it seems very wrong, to me, to not preserve it and share it with them for them to enjoy as well.
I played with a ball-and-a-cup so now I will give my child a ball-and-a-cup to enjoy as I did when I was his age. But these days the kids want to play with Toy Ray-guns, and I have people telling me not to bother because Toy Ray-guns are the future.
This is all that is occurring: A parent is sharing something of value from their past with their offspring. Or in the case of OP somebody is willingly trying to share anecdotal knowledge of its value. I was born in the 80s so clearly the media gap is not as high but my dad is an avid Dune fan and showed me the 80s movie adaptation. I enjoyed it immensely and continue to bond with my father over this IP. Does the fact that it was made before I was born or the fact that it is flawed in comparison to other movies of my youth make it unnecessary? Of course not, it is something we enjoy and see the value in.
We can do this with games also. For all those who have shirked their nostalgia goggles and denounce past games as primitive and flawed, can you explain yourself as to why you enjoyed them? Don't say you had no choice, their poor quality elements remain constant. You could say you were younger and knew less but this is where the discussion finds its place.
Kids today are still those young people. The games of yesteryear have the same qualities they did in their prime. We can downplay them by comparing their sophistication against today's games. Graphics and computing allowing us to improve the quality of what we are trying to emulate. But even though gaming now has epic stories, and advanced AI, we are still making games. Us as kids then and kids now are playing games... for fun... Pong and Frogger are still fun for important gameplay reasons. We should understand the value of basic gameplay elements conceived in the past in order to make use of them now in a more advanced and evolved manner.
I played a couple of old games not too long ago which I didn't play as kid - mostly because those games were already old then, or there were games around I considered cooler - or games I missed to buy (like Full Throttle or Grim Fandango)
On of those games was Ultima V. I never played it before, this was my first time and man the graphics sucked and the controls were awkward. It took me days to overcome this but at some point it made "click". The game had drawn me in. I didn't care any more about the graphics or controls - I wanted to progress, level up, find out where the story leads me.
Even though there's better successors (Skyrim game devs hold Ultima really dear as one of the earlierst open world games) the original still has the power to draw someone in who's not coming back due to Nostalgia.
It's like digging out your parents old record box on the attic and finding out that not everything sounds as bad as you thought it would, just because its old.
Also consider that "retro" games reach new audiences via mobile gaming. People who never played games before enjoy them. Those games work for those people and they're not wearing Nostalgia goggles. All they want is some quick and uncomplicated game which they can learn quickly.
I know people who almost never play games and those old games where you press just 2 or 2 buttons are great, because for them beasts like Skyrim appear like Maya to someone who never used it before. Big and intimidating.
I grew up on games like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Metroid Prime, Super Mario 64, etc. I grew up on cartoons like Sponge Bob, Invader Zim, and reruns of the Rugrats (since the show first aired when I was 1 years old). I feel like I've missed out on so much, and I always feel left out of the conversation whenever the big early titles like Chrono-Trigger come up. I vow to find a way to play that game some day.
My parents let me play what I want, so I was able to play games like Duke 3D and Doom on the N64 despite being a 6 year old. When I became a teenager in early to mid 2000s I discovered how much bigger the world of games really was, and I bought copies of old games like Doom, Duke 3D, Half-Life, the old CnC's, etc. for the PC, and finally played through those.
I was a kid when the original games that turned into the milked franchises first sprung up. I was 10 when Halo came out, and I remember spending so much time at my friend's house who had an Xbox just to play it. I remember playing the original Call of Duty so long ago.
Old games like CS 1.6, chrono-trigger, etc were always being pushed by the older generations, and I didn't get it. Now I do. Today my family was over for Thanksgiving, and my 8 year old cousin found an N64 cartridge in the closet, and asked what it is. I was in disbelief. How could someone not know what an N64 cartridge is? I even hooked it up and showed it to them in action, and they were laughing at it.
And of course, there's all the pop-culture references that the younger generations don't get either. Despite being born 6 years after it came out, most if not all of my generation has seen Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future as well. But things like that are starting to fade, because most of today's younger generations have never heard of either of them.
I played a couple of old games not too long ago which I didn't play as kid - mostly because those games were already old then, or there were games around I considered cooler - or games I missed to buy (like Full Throttle or Grim Fandango)
On of those games was Ultima V. I never played it before, this was my first time and man the graphics sucked and the controls were awkward. It took me days to overcome this but at some point it made "click". The game had drawn me in. I didn't care any more about the graphics or controls - I wanted to progress, level up, find out where the story leads me.
Even though there's better successors (Skyrim game devs hold Ultima really dear as one of the earlierst open world games) the original still has the power to draw someone in who's not coming back due to Nostalgia.
It's like digging out your parents old record box on the attic and finding out that not everything sounds as bad as you thought it would, just because its old.
I have this happen all the time which is why I get very annoyed when people dismiss it as nostalgia goggles. I picked up Zelda: A Link to the Past only a few months ago and was amazed at how well it played and at how well constructed it was. Similarily, I played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the first time not so long ago and also, I was amazed with how great the game was. The Thief series, Might and Magic 3-5, Icewind Dale II, ICO and even original Doom were all at least several years old when I played them for the first time.
There's a ton of other games that still hold up (and I dare to say, are sometimes better than newer titles) regardless of clunky controls, interface issues and wonky graphics. In fact, I often end up being impressed with how certain aspect were done to combat the techncial limitations of the time.
When it comes to things like story, characterisation and themes I believe that games of the PS1/PS2 era (including other platforms of course) are yet to be beaten. Back then, games used to communicate stories using its own language. But during this console generation, we've seen a massive shift towards "cinematic" gameplay.
While I do like the idea of bridging the gap between cutscenes and gameplay there's only a handful of games that have done it right in my eyes. I also feel that it's been taken way too far with more and more control being taken away from the player. The fact that most stories today are ultimately pointless, macho power-fantasies doesn't help much either. Not that I don't enjoy these, but enough is enough.
Anyways, I'm not trying to say that games in the past (and frankly, it's hardly the past since I'm comparing mainly last three console generations) were always good. There's plenty of shitty games I have played over the years. Most of the early 3D games have aged horribly and regardless of how much I try, I cannot get into them. There's also tons of shovelware and movie tie-ins, so things were not all that different. But if I have to compare highly acclaimed games, both old and new, in most cases I find myself enjoying the older titles more. Even if they are extremely flawed in a purely technical sense, I tend to find the overall experience much more memorable. Deus Ex:HR and Skyrim are possibly the only games released this year that made me feel this way.
Anyways, I'm not trying to say that games in the past (and frankly, it's hardly the past since I'm comparing mainly last three console generations) were always good. There's plenty of shitty games I have played over the years.
yup. I don't think old games are in general better than new ones (or vice versa). I just think that both views "everything was better back then" and "everything back then sucked" are equally flawed when you look at games, or art in general (now does anyone want to discuss if games can be art? )
yup. I don't think old games are in general better than new ones (or vice versa). I just think that both views "everything was better back then" and "everything back then sucked" are equally flawed when you look at games, or art in general (now does anyone want to discuss if games can be art? )
Totally agreed. Personally, the main problem I have with this console generation is that while games have gotten objectively better on a technical level, on a thematic level they're nowewhere as interesting as they used to be. It is of course a gross generalisation on my part, but what I'm trying to say is that to me most AAA titles resemble Hollywood blockbusters; perfectly crafted, but ultimately shallow joyrides. Personally, I'm much very forgiving when it comes to mechanical aspects, but I can't enjoy a game unless it evokes a full spectrum of feelings, including the forbidden frustration :poly142:
How many things in games have been brought on because of advancements in technology?
Its interesting to look at elds insight of MUD's / roguelikes and the dynamic and expansive content that they have. I really want people to draw a huge fucking line (for the most part) between;
graphics // gameplay
as most of the time this isnt really true.... anyway, back to my original question.
How many elements are unique to our era and because of progressions in technology?
- 3D obviously had a huge impact.
- Havok physics? (not as ragdolls, as puzzles in the game world... i.e. hl2)
- Could a mechanic like portal work at a 2d level on nes tech? (im sure there are "gravity" reversing games from back then)
- AI
- Dynamic lighting, although there arent too many cases where it is actually integral to the gameplay like thief/doom3. Theres some interesting indiegames that are playing with the light as an object that is climbable.
My point is, that I dont think improving visuals is always the main driving force that improves GAMES and the way we interact with them.
The only defining design traits of a videogame are that they are:
a- interactive
b- experiences
Technology certainly contributes in a multitude of ways, big and small, to one's ability to design interaction and convey experience. A game is certainly not automatically good because it has better tech.
The only defining design traits of a videogame are that they are:
a- interactive
b- experiences
Technology certainly contributes in a multitude of ways, big and small, to one's ability to design interaction and convey experience. A game is certainly not automatically good because it has better tech.
I would go even further as to say that it's just:
a- interactive
Any other leisure pursuit can be considered an experience. In terms of media, they are all passive, except for games.
Replies
Exactly! Pretty much what I've been trying to say in the first page.
But I do have to admit, there does seem to be a bigger atmosphere of experimentation with those old games, and we could learn a thing or two from them. Especially, when it comes to an emotional response from the player, I'd like to see games try and accomplish something more than horror/fear. How about some humor? Those old games had that going for them.
But yeah, for the most part those games sucked. We just loved them because it's all we had, and at the time it really was the best shit ever.
^ This... When you watch egoraptor talk about the design elements in classics like castlevania and megaman you can begin to understand their brilliance on another level.
Then again, theres a difference between teaching someone who has an interest in games vs someone who doesnt.
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I liked this one. Had the dramaticest fog, and had the best visual clarity too since it piped through your host card rather than through some blurred DAC, and it was processed entirely in 24-bit.
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But yeah, kids these days.... and I find more gaming-hipsters than actual grizzled gamers from the era these days. Sometimes I get fed incorrect info from them, and they even often have a false sense of copyright in them (the stupid "if its old, its abandonware, company doesnt care its free to steal" attitude) oh you know what i'm talking about
but in this case in the OP you're just talking to a brony. Scope harder and find an actual young dedicated gamer.
I've gotten into many a flamewar when I said "My favorite game from Activision is MW2"... generation gap confusion fun was had there!
(Now I really dated myself)
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BAH! The only support for Adlib as advertised is in that stupid bar. The rest of the game is completely PC speaker
They're relatively old compared to how long you've been alive but think about how long people have been writing books, making movies, making music.... we're talking about a span of 130+ years for movies, writing goes back thousands of years, music probably about the same or longer. Mozart and Shakespear weren't writing stories and music when they were "new". Think of how long the video game industry has existed, maybe 40 years, and from a practical user adoption standpoint not even that long, maybe 25 at best. By comparison Mozart was making music when music had already been refined for generations, meanwhile game developers in the late 80s/early 90s may as well have been making some of the first games EVER.
People have a tendency to look at old games they love and think "man the only reason no one will play this is cause the graphics suck" when most of these games have way worse problems than that. I love Deus Ex to death, I still think it's the greatest game ever made, but jesus the interface and controls are TERRIBLE, half the items and augs are trash you don't want, heavy weapons? Junk. Why would you even put swimming/environmental skills into the game? It's like bait to increase the difficulty by letting them spend points in trash skills.
Art and design are a lot like a science, people look back at whats been done (in particular what THEY themselves have done) and build on what they know about how people reacted to them. Early game designers didn't have that luxury, they were pioneers and as a result their games were usually less refined, harder for the average person to pick up, and more difficult to understand and play.
Early games were great. I had a lot more fun playing EverQuest than I did playing World of Warcraft, but I'm not going to pretend like EQ was a better game. WoW built on what EQ did and they did it better, even if it did turn out less enjoyable *to me*...
Fair enough, the important part here is knowing how to actually calculate things, meaning, using your head, which is something that youngsters often skip out on.
But there are other scenarios, why should I learn how a camera works when I can just push the button, why learn where electricity comes from when it's right there from the socket!
Or why learn what an OS is or what it does, why learn the history of anything, at all, even if it is the history of something that can undeniably be the most used invention in any humans life, that of the modern computer.
Now I'm often first to talk about nostalgia, and that old games weren't better BY DEFAULT than new games...
...but this is ballsacks, there were a shitload of shitty games out then, just as there were now, but there are still quite a load of unrivaled, I think few can argue against the simplicity of something like mario being in any way bad as they still use the same simple design these days in just about any platformer.
Or take the precursors to strategygames or sandbox rpg's, where you'd have gigantic worlds like the ones in the ultima series, where ultima 7 from 92' still has one of the most detailed sandbox rpg worlds even prior to the existance of the elderscrolls series, it's hard to argue that it is only due to nostalgia.
From 95'... why force them to watch toy story when they can watch any modern 3d rendered movie from some random animated studio, I mean, they might argue that it has bad effects compared to new movies, and someone might argue that is old and therefor not good.
And we can just forget the fact of what it did for 3d-rendered movies (or the fact that a kid will still enjoy it to this day)
It's not about forcing them, but what if they have no idea pen and paper rpg's exist, wouldn't you tell them about it? wouldn't you want to spike their interest, learn something that is actually valuable?
There's no point in anyone being elitist, but there's no point in withholding history either.
We have much more costy, polished and high value production these days, the shit vs gold ratio is about the same though, and some of the shit we value high.
Just as much as there exists games that were better than a lot of the ones before, there are a ton of games that were better than new variants.
As my last words: You can still show xcom to a truly open newcommer to old games, and he'll enjoy it in this day, even with the knowledge of modern games, this if something shows that there's some value to old games as much as there is values in old books or movies.
good points. I like your comment. You're right, games are much younger. I think I'm even more suprised when there's no respect for the work of those pioneers whose time was just a few decades ago. And indeed there are enough games and game concepts which stood the test of time and are being resurrected as franchises, remakes or for casual/mobile platforms.
Personally, I have a problem dismissing an entire generation by just looking at graphics, technology or popularity. Remember interactive fiction? There were some great pieces there (e.g. Guild of Thieves, or Steve Meretzky's games) which were create back when people thought that games will rival books rather than rivalling hollywood movies. The concept of reading tons of text and considering it a "game" will sound strange to young people, just as it sounds strange that anyone could enjoy a game with just 16 color graphics. Yet some (but clearly not all) of those games can still captivate you if you give them the chance.
I don't think a 10 year old will appreciate this though. If you grew up with a certain standard its hard to go back. Watching black and white series sucked when I was a kid. But eventually you grow up and you value different things and you can even understand why someone like Steven Spielberg would take a step back and make a move in black and white.
I remember not seeing what's the art about Chaplin's movies or what's so special about Mozart's music. But once I got older I appreciated the skillfulness of their art and enjoyed it. I think this is possible with games too, even if you weren't around when they got made and were popular.
Are old games perfect? Heck no. People were pioneers and everything had to be discovered. GUI design, AI,controls... but have we really advanced so far? Current games are still plagued by the same issues, or by new ones. Dismissing old games because they were not perfect is like saying today everything is fine. I play games and I think we still have a long way to go. But whos know what will happen when Dovahkiin grows up and he looks back at the game where his namesake comes from...
Other than that, I won't really argue. The medium for videogames is still relatively new, even when compared to say radio or television.
There is STILL a Dos prompt for Dos games, and its Dos Box. This isnt surprising that a 15 year old pro COD / Halo / MOH etc, player doesnt know about Dos, and watches My Little Pony. Its just a 15 year old trying to act smart. Although it is kind of disturbing. =\
If you guys want kids to really know where the video game actually started, you can give them this game.
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Back then, games were designed to suck quarters out of your pocket in these things called 'Arcades'.
The Atari, the Nintendo, and to some extent, the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era were essentially PORTS for those arcades. But something happened around the PS1 era.
People stopped going to arcades all together.
We realised we no longer had to go OUT and sink quarters into machines, when we had perfect emulations of those games at home. Oftentimes we had BETTER games. And as a result, games stopped being designed to suck our quarters. They stopped being about '3 lives' with life bars, and time limits. Heck, our games flat out stopped having a 'Continue' countdown.
Around that era, we started playing games that started to have very engaging stories, we started playing games with immersive experiences, games that required thought, time, and emotional investment. Graphics were a big part of that, but at the same time the voice acting got better. The in-game animations got better, the dialogue became somewhat more believable, and we now have Acadamy Award calibre talent on our games. Heck, our games stopped being about trying to KILL us all the time to take our quarters, and started being about actually FINISHING them.
Now we have games that have massively multi-player virtual online worlds, with persistently existing characters, chalk full of player controlled economies, player controlled governing systems, and virtual items that have REAL world value. This is WAY beyond any kind of scope any video game player in 1985 ever thought was possible.
What I'm getting at, is I doubt our experiences with Pong, or Frogger will improve where the industry is heading. You have exchange your weekly allowance into a roll of quarters, then sink it all into 'Double Dragon' or 'Bubble Bobble' to know how special those games truly were. Picking up and playing an emulation of it is not the same experience, nor does it make it any good.
The world has changed. So have our video games.
You are severely limiting your scope of view towards consoles and arcade machines, you are talking as if this was the only market that existed, if you look at the pc you'll see it quite ahead of its time, games with deep stories, very long length and no intention to eat coins.
The first person shooters and its birth during the very early nineties, and you're talking as if it's completely different now, 20 years later, did our shooters get deeper, are old shooters about nostalgia?
They're both good, old and new!
In fact if you want to look at a solid design on multiplayer firstperson shooters, you can go all the way back to quake, from 95' that's 15 years ago, and it still holds up today.
This happened a long time ago, even while the arcade machines were still strong, you just have to look at the pc games industry and its games during 85-95, we rarely come across games with deep stories and meaningful dialogue, yet we've had 12 years to perfect our game-storytelling since planescape torment.
Our technology has increased exponentially, but our knowledge of storytelling is as good now as it was back when gaming first hit big.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1 While the term mmorpg wasn't coined yet, it wasn't a super alien thing, we already had giant mmo's running almost a decade before world of warcraft came out, we even had these mmo's like ultima online that had way more interactivity with the world, items could be dropped anywhere, houses were built, shops opened.
Multi user dungeons are still not beaten in terms of interactivity, persistancy and the dynamic elements of the world when you compare it to the modern mmo.
Pong and frogger is a tiny microscopic view of the old games, it's way too narrow-sighted.
The app-market are dominated by games that pull from the old era of games, where simplicity was key.
The Elderscrolls series was born from being a take on the ultima underworld series, you can still see the impact of all those titles on the modern entries, like skyrim, and you can see how ultima7 from 92' still acts one of those rpg's that birthed the sandbox rpg genre, and how important it was for elderscrolls when morrowind hit.
One example of how old games have directly influenced modern games today would be to look at Minecraft, which undeniably comes from Notch's own experience with tons of old games from the golden pc era of the 90's, and Minecraft might possibly be one of the biggest impacting modern game.
Procedural content still go largely unused in games, but you can see it's important in minecraft.
And while we at this day have a few planets we can go to in the mass-effect series, we could back in 1993, in elite 2, go to worlds from space down to the surface of the planets seamlessly, not just in a solar system, but in a full galaxy, all this fitting on a single floppy disk.
No game-designer will deny the importance of the old games, and what you can pull from them, and how they're still relevant today.
This right here. I am not arguing vintage supremacy. I believe in vintage importance. We need to remember and preserve our history to better and more fully understand how to continue building better and greater things into the future.
Lots of old games - even HL1, Deus Ex, X-wing, Mech2, Total Annihilation, and others we think of as "magnificent classics" - had some flaws. HL1 had some gaping signposting, player-goal-awareness and endgame gameplay design flaws that drove Valve to do things better in HL2. Deus Ex had a bunch of bugs, some bizarre AI glitches, weapons and skills that didn't get used much (although I wouldn't argue they were useless), and horrible animation. X-wing had crappy controls and repetitive enemy AI, Mech2 had gameplay mechanic pitfalls and some damage bugs, TA had all kinds of screwed up weapons and unit balance until the mods got hold of it... Even the timeless classics have parts that are going to make us chuckle and roll our eyes in comparison to a recent next-gen offering.
But the important part is how much they got right in one package, and how they did it, and what we can learn from those successes to build our work today on the shoulders of those successes, instead of reinventing the wheel every time, or worse, repeating old mistakes.
And at least for me, gamer culture, especially PC games, has been around for 25 years or more now. That's a lot of time and a lot of great things we've experienced, people that have come and gone, and things we've made and done. Understanding that history and that heritage, to me, is an important part of understanding and appreciating games, understanding how they got to be where they are today, the culture surrounding them, and the people within it - us.
For somebody who lived it and knew it first hand, that understanding grew organically. But for somebody who's grown up entirely on modern consoles and didn't experience the huge revolutions from early to late DOS, then late DOS to Win95/98, then the DirectX leap, the rise of the Playstation and Xbox and the console wave, plus gamer culture as it followed along and evolved offline and online... there's some amazing history and legacies they can learn about and it seems very wrong, to me, to not preserve it and share it with them for them to enjoy as well.
This is all that is occurring: A parent is sharing something of value from their past with their offspring. Or in the case of OP somebody is willingly trying to share anecdotal knowledge of its value. I was born in the 80s so clearly the media gap is not as high but my dad is an avid Dune fan and showed me the 80s movie adaptation. I enjoyed it immensely and continue to bond with my father over this IP. Does the fact that it was made before I was born or the fact that it is flawed in comparison to other movies of my youth make it unnecessary? Of course not, it is something we enjoy and see the value in.
We can do this with games also. For all those who have shirked their nostalgia goggles and denounce past games as primitive and flawed, can you explain yourself as to why you enjoyed them? Don't say you had no choice, their poor quality elements remain constant. You could say you were younger and knew less but this is where the discussion finds its place.
Kids today are still those young people. The games of yesteryear have the same qualities they did in their prime. We can downplay them by comparing their sophistication against today's games. Graphics and computing allowing us to improve the quality of what we are trying to emulate. But even though gaming now has epic stories, and advanced AI, we are still making games. Us as kids then and kids now are playing games... for fun... Pong and Frogger are still fun for important gameplay reasons. We should understand the value of basic gameplay elements conceived in the past in order to make use of them now in a more advanced and evolved manner.
On of those games was Ultima V. I never played it before, this was my first time and man the graphics sucked and the controls were awkward. It took me days to overcome this but at some point it made "click". The game had drawn me in. I didn't care any more about the graphics or controls - I wanted to progress, level up, find out where the story leads me.
Even though there's better successors (Skyrim game devs hold Ultima really dear as one of the earlierst open world games) the original still has the power to draw someone in who's not coming back due to Nostalgia.
It's like digging out your parents old record box on the attic and finding out that not everything sounds as bad as you thought it would, just because its old.
Also consider that "retro" games reach new audiences via mobile gaming. People who never played games before enjoy them. Those games work for those people and they're not wearing Nostalgia goggles. All they want is some quick and uncomplicated game which they can learn quickly.
I know people who almost never play games and those old games where you press just 2 or 2 buttons are great, because for them beasts like Skyrim appear like Maya to someone who never used it before. Big and intimidating.
My parents let me play what I want, so I was able to play games like Duke 3D and Doom on the N64 despite being a 6 year old. When I became a teenager in early to mid 2000s I discovered how much bigger the world of games really was, and I bought copies of old games like Doom, Duke 3D, Half-Life, the old CnC's, etc. for the PC, and finally played through those.
I was a kid when the original games that turned into the milked franchises first sprung up. I was 10 when Halo came out, and I remember spending so much time at my friend's house who had an Xbox just to play it. I remember playing the original Call of Duty so long ago.
Old games like CS 1.6, chrono-trigger, etc were always being pushed by the older generations, and I didn't get it. Now I do. Today my family was over for Thanksgiving, and my 8 year old cousin found an N64 cartridge in the closet, and asked what it is. I was in disbelief. How could someone not know what an N64 cartridge is? I even hooked it up and showed it to them in action, and they were laughing at it.
And of course, there's all the pop-culture references that the younger generations don't get either. Despite being born 6 years after it came out, most if not all of my generation has seen Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future as well. But things like that are starting to fade, because most of today's younger generations have never heard of either of them.
So this is what it's like to get old.
I have this happen all the time which is why I get very annoyed when people dismiss it as nostalgia goggles. I picked up Zelda: A Link to the Past only a few months ago and was amazed at how well it played and at how well constructed it was. Similarily, I played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the first time not so long ago and also, I was amazed with how great the game was. The Thief series, Might and Magic 3-5, Icewind Dale II, ICO and even original Doom were all at least several years old when I played them for the first time.
There's a ton of other games that still hold up (and I dare to say, are sometimes better than newer titles) regardless of clunky controls, interface issues and wonky graphics. In fact, I often end up being impressed with how certain aspect were done to combat the techncial limitations of the time.
When it comes to things like story, characterisation and themes I believe that games of the PS1/PS2 era (including other platforms of course) are yet to be beaten. Back then, games used to communicate stories using its own language. But during this console generation, we've seen a massive shift towards "cinematic" gameplay.
While I do like the idea of bridging the gap between cutscenes and gameplay there's only a handful of games that have done it right in my eyes. I also feel that it's been taken way too far with more and more control being taken away from the player. The fact that most stories today are ultimately pointless, macho power-fantasies doesn't help much either. Not that I don't enjoy these, but enough is enough.
Anyways, I'm not trying to say that games in the past (and frankly, it's hardly the past since I'm comparing mainly last three console generations) were always good. There's plenty of shitty games I have played over the years. Most of the early 3D games have aged horribly and regardless of how much I try, I cannot get into them. There's also tons of shovelware and movie tie-ins, so things were not all that different. But if I have to compare highly acclaimed games, both old and new, in most cases I find myself enjoying the older titles more. Even if they are extremely flawed in a purely technical sense, I tend to find the overall experience much more memorable. Deus Ex:HR and Skyrim are possibly the only games released this year that made me feel this way.
yup. I don't think old games are in general better than new ones (or vice versa). I just think that both views "everything was better back then" and "everything back then sucked" are equally flawed when you look at games, or art in general (now does anyone want to discuss if games can be art?
Totally agreed. Personally, the main problem I have with this console generation is that while games have gotten objectively better on a technical level, on a thematic level they're nowewhere as interesting as they used to be. It is of course a gross generalisation on my part, but what I'm trying to say is that to me most AAA titles resemble Hollywood blockbusters; perfectly crafted, but ultimately shallow joyrides. Personally, I'm much very forgiving when it comes to mechanical aspects, but I can't enjoy a game unless it evokes a full spectrum of feelings, including the forbidden frustration :poly142:
Its interesting to look at elds insight of MUD's / roguelikes and the dynamic and expansive content that they have. I really want people to draw a huge fucking line (for the most part) between;
graphics // gameplay
as most of the time this isnt really true.... anyway, back to my original question.
How many elements are unique to our era and because of progressions in technology?
- 3D obviously had a huge impact.
- Havok physics? (not as ragdolls, as puzzles in the game world... i.e. hl2)
- Could a mechanic like portal work at a 2d level on nes tech? (im sure there are "gravity" reversing games from back then)
- AI
- Dynamic lighting, although there arent too many cases where it is actually integral to the gameplay like thief/doom3. Theres some interesting indiegames that are playing with the light as an object that is climbable.
My point is, that I dont think improving visuals is always the main driving force that improves GAMES and the way we interact with them.
a- interactive
b- experiences
Technology certainly contributes in a multitude of ways, big and small, to one's ability to design interaction and convey experience. A game is certainly not automatically good because it has better tech.
I would go even further as to say that it's just:
a- interactive
Any other leisure pursuit can be considered an experience. In terms of media, they are all passive, except for games.