Slashdot Mirror
Classic Gaming Gets Recognition
citizen_bongo writes: "A great story by MSNBC about classic gaming and the people that keep playing them (I do too, I admit). It also talks about 'Video Game Player of the Century' Bobby Mitchell, who scored 3,333,360 points in Pac Man. I can still play Super Mario Brothers, but I have trouble playing Starcraft for 10 minutes without getting bored. The classic games always have had something that modern games seem to lack, and that's simplicity and fun." I still love the classics, I even own a few. The games are still great, and it's a fun hobby, too.
I'm in the process of fixing up my game site to be more attractive and accessible, (it pretty much sucks now,) but I'm not sure what the goal of a free gaming site should be. You have to have so much traffic (for me, 20,000 views/month is huge) to even get paying ads, but I don't know if that many people will even find the site, much less ever spend any real time playing the games! I don't really know how to make this thing pay for itself, much less earn a profit of any kind.
Now, of course, the games have to be fun/interesting to play, but how often do people really tend to visit these sites?
PointlessGames.com -- Go waste some time.
MassMOG.com -- Visit the site; Use the word.
Of course nostalgia is part of it, but I think a lot of it is more about simplicity, as opposed to the relative complexity of "modern" games. Many modern game designers seem to focus on designing games that are, well, masterpieces of design. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it does represent a shift from games of 10-20 years ago when you couldn't design complex games (by today's standards) because of hardware limitations.
I think many of the people who enjoy "classic" games enjoy them because of that simplicity. As much as I liked Final Fantasy 8, it's not something I'm going to go back to for an hour or so when I feel like just sitting back, relaxing and playing a little bit of something; FF8 is a complex game and takes a good deal of involvement. With games like Pac-Man or Tetris, on the other hand, I can start the game up, play for a little while, and then switch it off and go do something else, without having to try and remember what I was doing last time I played or spend 5-10 minutes trying to think how to overcome the next obstacle. For me, that's a big plus; there are times when I just want to have a little fun, and those "classic" games are perfect for such a situation.
Best "flight simulator": original wireframe Star Wars
Best sports game and best GPA killer: Super Tecmo Bowl for NES
Best game ever: Asteroids
Honorable Mentions: Archon for C=64, Space Harrier, Missile Command, Outrun, Galaga, Centipede.
I probably forgot a game or two....
....
....
--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
Yeah, I installed it yesterday - I stopped at 1 o'clock in the morning after reaching the Siberian stage, 'cause those goddamn tanks keep killing me...
And I just found a site that has a bunch of old C64 games for download:
http://arnold.c64.org
I just played M.U.L.E. again for the first time in 10 years. I really missed that game. For those of you who don't remember, upto 4 players could play at the same time and it involved colonizing a new planet, bartering, setting up your property, and good health capitalist competition.
I am trying to find a good copy of Elite, a wire frame space trading game where you bought and sold cargo and carried it to other solar systems in order to make more money. You fought pirates and had to dock in rotating spacestations.
I also played a lot of infocom games and a bunch of other games.
I am using the vice emulator which is very good, and I am going to try the css emulator as well.
I also don't have to worry about being illegle, because I still have most of the original game disks for the games that I am playing. Fair use is a great thing.
Anyone know where I can find any of the old C64 manuals in html or pdf formats?
-- Never make a general statement.
I agree - very few games from the 90's will still be played in 2010.
Probably the original Quake will be one of them. It spawned a whole community, hundreds of web sites, and the concept and practice of professional video game players actually making money to frag.
Now that it's been GPL'ed, it can never die, despite the inevitable changes that will come to hardware and operating systems.
I just had a chilly moment of foreboding... In 10 years, some kid is going to see me playing Quake and say: "Hey! that's one of those old games, like... uh... Brother Mario, right? That was for a... um... Nuntindo Main Frame?"
(sigh.) I should be too young to anticipate feeling that old.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Commander Keen may have been good, but Raptor was of course the 'best' classic game of all time because of its intense gameplay and most of all, the soundtrack!
Who the hell marked the previous post as a troll?? He's totally on target. Most games today are seriously lacking in gameplay. They're built almost completely around flashy graphics. The game itself is an afterthought. Even worse than the PC game space is arcade games. Has anyone walked through an arcade lately? They're filled with dreck. There are really only three arcade games left; it's either fighting, driving, or shooting. That's it. How many iterations of Mortal Kombat do we need? In terms of gameplay, the vast majority of games today cannot touch classics like Pac-man, StarCastle, Rip-Off, Galaga, Defender, Missile Command, Robotron, Etc. (Notice how all seven games I just listed cannot be classified under one genre other than "arcade game?" Today you can classify virtually every arcade game as either a shooter, a driver, or a fighter)
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
We're living in a great time for games. Diablo II (You can call me DAME Annika, thank you very much), Counter-Strike (which I suck at, but it still kicks ass), Deus Ex, The Sims (which allows me to torture all my ex-girlfriends in their lesbian love-shack), Daikatana (just kidding), and Shogun:Total War all rock, and those are all going strong right now.
I understand the appeal of classic games (Jumpman, M.U.L.E, Ultima IV, Telengard, now I'm getting all nostalgic) but don't ignore the fine gaming goodness going on right now.
Bravo. Best I've seen in a long time.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
Civilization has to be the greatest example of a great game turned bad by a gaming company, trying to mold a once simplistic, entertaining game into a unnecessarily complex and difficult one. After the creators of Civilization got hired by Microprose, it took them about 3 years to release Civilization 2. When Civilization 2 finally hit stores, it didn't come with any internet/multiplayer support and featured no built in scenarios or tools that were a staple in the original Civilization. Civilization 2 also had little to no difference then the game play from Civilization, and else then tactful icon changes and simple added game options, it was practically the same as Civilization.
My other major gripe was that Civilization 2 was shortly followed by 3 add-ons (all costing 30 to 50 dollars). Just to play with my friends I had to buy the sequel (Call to Power), and just to play any worthwhile scenarios, I had to buy the Gold Edition. i mean what is this? In addition to this, the game literally came with a book trying to explain everything it had modified from the original Civilization (the original game took me 30 mins to pick up, this game about 30 days). I mean, shit like this just proves why things are moving from the PC market to the console market, because the PC games rape themselves by trying to get profits by making cheap add-ons just to make the game playable!
It appears today that games aren't about entertainment or fun, but about reading a novel to get into the game just to get some miniscule joy from understanding it--only to be ruined 10 seconds later when some kid has a hack that lets him obliterate you. (sighs like charlie brown)
Writen with ampthy and contempt,
Bongo
Amoureux des jeux, Hater de merdre de Bull
I'm enjoying old Genesis and Neo Geo games though :) Gunstar Heroes, Castlevania 2, Super Metroid, Samurai Showdown 2... excellent games. Also since I don't have a PlayStation anymore I use Virtual Game Station... very nice and puts Bleem! to shame (went way too fast for any game on my PC, and the speed was jerky, would keep shifting from fast to slow...). I love Castlevania: SotN. Excellent modern sequel to a classic.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Lots of animations, sounds, etc at: The Dragon's Lair Project --mark
I like game like Crazy Taxi, which mix the old (racking up points and pulling off cool maneuvers) with the new (great graphics). I played this game for hours.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I love my Mame. I can get my fill of Crazy Climber and Scrambler. All those games that I could never defeat are now my bitches forever!
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Check this out http://pocket.ign.com/previews/14300.html Dragons Lair, complete with animations, on the gameboy color.
FFV was definitely the best of the series. Bteer graphics and a tighter storyline than IV, and more involvement than anything that came after it. I still think the profession-switching system was the best thing that ever happened to the series - why did they only use it for FFV?!?
You seem to misunderstand. Those are my comments, not emmets. I think that simplicity is a necessity, becuase I don't want to swim through a 30 minute bull shit storyline just to play a game I paid 60 dollars for. I'm more for instant gratification then for wading through a book just to understand the game, let alone play it. But it's just my 2 cents.
BTW, all Emmet adds is "I still love the classics, I even own a few. The games are still great, and it's a fun hobby, too. ", everything else is my personal comments.
Thanks,
Bongo
Amoureux des jeux, Detester de merdre de Bull
Bullshit! There are quite a few of us that have collections of them. Have a look at VAPS to see how many people collect. --mark
I think a lot of it can be attributed to a 2D viewpoint, which of course most "classic" games have. This is similar to, but more specific than, the "limitations of technology make you more creative" argument.
A 2D viewpoint means that the designer of the game can force you to play from the optimal perspective for that type of gameplay. For example, Atari 2600 Combat works really well top-down, as does 1942, Xevious and Frogger.
Imagine playing Combat from a side view perspective, or Donkey Kong from a 2D top down perspective...
While I believe we are getting better and better at it, it's still fairly early days for the 3D perspective. We often give the player too much freedom, or make that freedom to difficult to understand and control. This usually makes the game harder, less direct, and -- I think -- less satisfying.
Currently, the most successful 3D games limit either limit the degrees of camera freedom available to the player, or use a first-person perspective (which has the advantage of being very similar to RL).
A lot of this comes down to interface. I don't think any game but Quake does a _really_ seamless job of immersing you in a 3D game world -- the kind of immersion that, say, Defender gives you effortlessly. This is, of course, highly subjective.
An _excellent_ case study is Konami's brilliant "Metal Gear Solid" on the PSX. If you analyse the gameplay, a lot of it is Pacman. Although the world is polygons, not sprites, the camera is often locked to an (almost) topdown perspective, and the map layouts are very grid/maze like.
Of course, MGS features many sections with different perspectives(including first person), but I believe my point is valid.
One last point: "classic" gaming is alive and well on the Dreamcast. Chu Chu Rocket is new-school 2D puzzling of superior quality. Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust-a-Move) 4 is a fantastic "classic" puzzle game. And Namco have just released Mr. Driller, a total old-school arcade throwback.
Enjoy!
grib.
maybe
And there is only 3 posts!
In English, that game was called Wolfpack.
I mean, forget the simplicity of PacMan and Tempest....
How about today's games, like Final Fantasy VII/VIII? I mean, who else agrees that junctioning magic and guardian forces to your vitatlity stats to increase your hitpower is a piece of cake?
That game pissed me off. I never even made it past the first choice. I wasted about four games worth of money, without ever figuring out so much as which directions were valid at what point....
Intolerant people should be shot.
The thing is, these days, I only want to play a game for 10 minutes. I periodically buy games, load them onto my computer, and abandon them when I can't make much progress the first few times I play them. I got half-life a year-and-a-half ago as a present. Sweet looking game, especially after I got the hardware to play it. But I still haven't gotten into it, since i have to master all of these damn controls. I seem to have lost the quick reference card for the thing, so I'd actually have to memorize the command to crouch and run forward (probably quacking like a duck, to boot).
I'm simply not interested in investing time in a game. I don't want a new career. I don't eant to develop new skills. I'm just here to blow shit up. Which is exactly what I get to do in classic arcade games. Gimme Rampage or Galaxian. Move left. Move right. Shoot. That I can handle.
Now, if I can just find some games that combin classic gameplay with cool new graphic eyecandy... I bought my neice that new version of Asteroids for the Playstation. Now, that is something that I could manage to get into.
As someone who owns 30+ classic coin-op arcade games, I can say with conviction that these games (in their original, full-size form) do have an enduring quality that can be endlessly fascinating.. However, it must be said that the whole concept of "emulated" classic arcade games is bullshit. Without the original controls, monitors, sound amps/speakers and cabinet art, you're not playing the game- you're playing a pale shadow of it. While I realize that owning the real thing just isn't practical for most people (it's not practical for me, but I do it anyway), and that MAME provides a chance to get reacquainted with these old games, there's a world of difference between MAME and the actual classic gaming experience. Just try playing Robotron or Sinistar on MAME for a truly sad example of this. http://www.sinistar.com for more classic game info...
Man, I could wax nostalgic for hours about these games. I still love the music...there's something to be said for a 60-second loop that didn't get old after months of pounding repetition.
:)
:)
(I replayed several 8-bit games recently and mpegged the music, sans sound effects...if u r lucky, u can download them some nite on napster or gnutella
The flood of ideas that we witnessed during the birth of video games was incredible. I think that there are many good ideas still to be implemented, but the market has grown younger and more reflex-oriented, and the really good programmers are working on other things. In the years between Dune II and Age of Empires, what did we get? Unit-building pipelines. Whoopee. Compare that to the conceptual difference between Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. I mean, christ.
Instead of listing all the really sweet games for all the different platforms, I tried to compile a list of novel game concepts along with games that really showed them off:
automapping and multiple game paths in d&d for intellivision
plot and character building in wasteland
monster and level design in blaster master
bionic arm (no jumping!) in bionic commando
fancy weapon system in space megaforce
interaction with the environment in ultima 6
secrets and tricks in super mario brothers
atmosphere in metroid
music in megaman 2
length and challenge in gauntlet
sensory overload in contra 3
attention to detail in Castlevania:sotn
simulation and responsiveness (control) in gran turismo
sheer audio-visual experience in darius coin-op (3 screens wide, hi-res, stereo sound)
depth of gameplay in civilization (until you realize the computer is cheating
on-line multiplayer character building in tradewars2002 (bbs)
navigating a 3d environment with ease in mario64 (magic carpet deserves a nod, too)
multipliers and multiball in any pinball game (the first powerups...)
You think paying $500 for a castle in Ultima Online is a big deal? I would have died to keep my character alive in The Pit for more than a week at a time.
So who has the time or the energy these days to give us intelligent soldiers in the next incarnation of *-craft, or RPG character-building that involves more than just killing monsters? I wish it was me, but alas, the video game industry has been MTV-ized.
..So its almost midnight, I've got to work in the morning, and now you've got me BREAKING THE LAW, downloading ROMs and launching into a game of Gauntlet, that I damn well know is not going to end within the next few hours:
"Valkyrie is about to die!"
Well, of course I'd be Valkyrie.. Who else?
I DEMAND that slashdot remove those links to those MAME sites before MORE innocent country & western-pop-stars are lured into a life of SIN. Its too late for me.
-
Starsucks
The person whose name I use here used to be one of the best known games programmers of all time. He achieved almost a cult status at the peak of his short career. Then he vanished into obscurity and soon after his best title was released he disappeared from the public view altogether. Since then some people made it part of their lives to search and find Matt. Nobody really knows for certain what he's doing now. It's a sort of obsession that's almost comparable to UFO sightings. Yes I'm a Mattspotter too!
If you just got back from the other side of the moon and still have no idea who I'm talking about I recommend that you read my User info.
I for one am glad more console developers are making games for PC. Capcom, Konami, Squaresoft... we need more!
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Well I'm glad someone else notices the fact that games are cloning like mad these days. Some genres are being shut out on some platforms for no reason...
Emulation has saved us... too bad we can only play ancient games though.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Why - what is it about these ones that does it for the ladies?? I mean there's no blood, no beasties with fangs, no scary death scenes...oh...now I get it.
Frog51
How is this illegal???
Did you go to the show? I did. There were two exhibitors there selling restored full-size video games. Bruce and Cathy Carso were there selling Atari hardware and software as they have for the last twenty years. The Intellivision developers were there selling a legal, licensed emulator with their games. So was Cosmi. Hasbro was giving away CDs with its PC versions of Atari games. Telegames was there with its games. There was a new developer with his classic Ultima-esque game and several tables with new 2600, Colecovision, and Lynx titles. Plus tables of used games everywhere.
Only one person was selling an emulator-style arcade cabinet that could run many games. But guess what? They were all legal, licensed versions.
There was nothing illegal at the show, with the exception of some mid-80s Atari pirate cartridges from overseas companies that are now prized as rare pirated cartridges by collectors who already own at least one of the legal versions.
Perhaps next time you should investigate a little before you start running off at the mouth; get some journalistic integrity. The website for the show is cgexpo.com.
That's what people are paying for these days: a game you can live in.
Sure the old games were great when you wanted to have a little quick fun, but you couldn't just pick one and play it for hours every day for months without getting bored.
People want games with huge worlds to explore: Final Fantasy N (where N is a sufficiently large integer), Zelda 64, even (dare I say it) Pokemon.
Strategy games that take days to play through a single game, and endless games to master: Civilization: CTP, Alpha Centauri, MoO.
Games with network play and replacable components: Quake, umm... those other games that play like Quake.
Games that are whole worlds unto themselves, complete with real human population: Ultima Online, Everquest.
Nothing less justifies the $60 price tag, and more importantly, nothing less justifies the effort of searching out and choosing which one is worth spending the money on. Sure, you might want a fun, simple arcade game, but when was the last time you shelled out for one?
You don't just play games anymore, you move in and adapt to prosper in your new environment. You want a nice home, don't you? That's where the money is, so that's where the development is.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
The Dreamcast is supposed to have an Ethernet connection to replace the modem bfore the end of the year.
... clever. Hang an extra 56k modem off a Linux box, set up PPP. Oddly enough, that's just what the DC uses ...
That said, you can still be
-- Riding the Winds of Fires Lit in Ancient Days
Lightforce or the original Elite for the C64?
Damn they used to rock!
I look at the graphics, sound and playability capabilites in something THAT old and that limitted hardware-wise and wonder why we have only gone as far as we have today...
'sapientia potestas est'
FF VIII isn't very original. It's just a really pretty version of the same console rpg's that have been around for 15 years or so. I still played the last couple Final Fantasies (and enjoyed VII alot more than VIII, 7 had more depth, especially in the magic system), but the last time I was really enjoying console rpg's was the fall of '95 when Legend of Mana and Chrono(trigger?? can't remember the title off hand) were pushing the SNES to the max. The genre's too old, and the horribly artificial battle system is just not fun anymore...
Intolerant people should be shot.
Well, I quite like nethack (http://www.nethack.org) but I much prefer Angband (http://www.phial.com/angband) and even better than that, Zangband (http://www.zangband.org).
Games that, for once, don't depend on the fillrate of my Riva TNT.
--
Peter
I can't take it any more, man. I can't fucking take it. GO AWAY. Jeezus H. Christ, give it a fucking rest already. Once is bad enough. How many times are you going to post this shit in one fucking article? 50? 60? Listen up, you shit-munching little piece of trash, one of these days you are going to get a big fat boot right up your worthless little ass. Are you listening to me, you sad, sorry little fuck? One of these days someone is just going to snap, walk into a 7-11, stab fifteen people to death with a spork, and say "I'm sorry, I saw 75 [color] syringe MDMA posts in one article and I couldn't take it anymore!" on the stand. For fuck's sake, man, do something productive. Go for a walk. Read a book. Jerk off. I don't care. Just go away. Nobody likes you, nobody thinks you're funny, and you couldn't troll your way out of a wet paper bag. Thank you for playing.
gopherguts, too lazy to log in and posting at 0 anyway
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
JOHN HOWARD
The chicken never even crossed the road. And it was not forcibly removed from its mother!
EVELYN SCOTT
To demonstrate a commitment to reconciliation with indigeneous chickens.
PETER COSTELLO
According to documentation submitted to the Live Foods Processing Authority, the chicken in question was uncooked at the time of its journey and therefore will not incur a GST charge. However, if that Chicken actually crossed the road for profit, regardless of its raw/cooked status, the road crossing would be considered by the ATO to be a service for which GST will be imposed.
PAULINE HANSON
Please explain ?
DR. SEUSS
Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes. The chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed, I've not been told!
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
I envision a world where all chickens, be they black or white or brown or red or speckled, will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.
GRANDPA
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
SADDAM HUSSEIN
This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and violence by counter-revolutionary terrorists and we were forced to defend ourselves from the menace of the chicken by dropping 500 tons of nerve gas on it.
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK
To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.
FOX MULDER
You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it's true?
BILL GATES
We have just released eChicken 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs (only in the proprietary brown_ms.egg format), file your documents, and balance your cheque-book and Internet Explorer is an inextricable part of eChicken.
THE CIA
Who told you about the chicken? Did you see the chicken? There was no chicken. Please step into the car, sir.
EINSTEIN
Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken?
THE BIBLE
And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.
---
blah
Reminds me about an interview with Jeff Minter I read once. As I recall he was esposing gameplay over shovelling on lots of slickness.
http://www.arrgh.co.uk/people/llama.html
I still think Paradroid is one of the coolest game sever written (sorry, never grokked Llamatron even though I though Jeff was cool)
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You could play Super SF2 Turbo on your PC? Who published that? Any idea where I could get a copy? I loved that in the arcade and would like to have it it on my PC... along with Killer Instinct (which might not be emulated properly for a while...) any pointers appreciated (to either game, but I'm assuming that KI doesn't exist for PC, excluding emulating the SNES to play it, which doesn't count because that version sucks).
My favourate game used to be Stargate, the 'sequel' to Defender. I remember one of those How to Beat the Games books called it "tougher than flying a 747". It was tough. My best scores maxed out a little over 1E6, but a friend of mine could literally play as long as he could stay awake. Held the world record, twice. Does anyone know if this game still exists for one of those emulation programs?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
The games where the system didn't just come out, had some pretty good endings. Of course zelda's ending sucked, and so did mario brothers.. but as the system stuck around, the endings did get better. Unfortunately, newer systems are coming out all the time. Gotta use the system's new capabilities than using your imagination...
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
If you want to see how some of the scores on old arcade games are achieved, wander over to Marp. The Mame action replay page.
There is even a 3.2 million Pacman score on there. It just requires Mame to play the playback files.
--
--
Super Metroid? I distinctly remember playing that one on SNES... (recently too. that was a damn fine game, that I went back and beat again about a year ago. It's also yet another game that won't see a sequel because Nintendo's too busy with cute mascot games for four year olds to make games for those of us who built their dominance of yesteryear...)
Intolerant people should be shot.
Dude, you are SOOOO right. You wouldn't believe this, but I had trouble finding and buying this game for so long. And for some ODD reason, my great grandmother (who's about 90 years old when this occured) bought it for me. She had NO knowledge of games or what I wanted, and I don't even know if she knew I owned a nintendo. I don't even think she knew it was christmas, but low and behold I got Bubble Bobble, and I played that game 24/7 for the longest time (I still it play it today). Keep kicking ass with Bubble Bobble d00d!
Much Love,
Bongo
Official Bubble Bobbler Of The 21st Century
My Momma (59 years old PhD in Lit.) has been gently criticising my and my brothers taste for arcade and computer for gaming for over 15 years. "Waste of time, waste of money, read a good book".
She is not generally technophobe, has used PC's at work for a decade, just doesn't dig computer games.
She saw me playing the original Pacman on MAME (only just discovered it), and excaimed "I want that! Why didn't you put that on my PC?" I was stunned. When questioned about the turnaround in opinion, she said "Pacman was fine! It's all these fire buttons I could never get used to!"
Better late than never, at least she will never want for entertainement in her retirement.(3 Million points...)
P.S. Despite having been through all Windoze versions, MacOs and other GUIs, I hate using mice, because "Centipede" taught me as early as 1984 that a 3" trackball is the only true pointing device.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
For some reason PC games have to be grossly over engineered for people to accept them. On the smaller platforms people want games to be fun, and small. Bloat is doubly bad, so people accept "cheap" looking games if they play well.
Games such as SFCave, DopeWars, and piemansimon.
Thad
Thad
Relevance?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
but I've got to wonder how much of our captivation with (and resulting rose-colored lenses for) the classic games stemmed simply from the novelty of video gaming?
Not really, no. At least not for me anyway. A large part of classic gaming today (IMHO) is based on nostalgia. I myself just finished playing through Kings Quest 2, a game I remember fondly from the days of the Tandy 1000 when I was six. I pretty much grew up with video games. In fact, I could describe to you the various periods of my life based solely on the games I was playing at the time. There never really was any novelty for me. Add to the nostalgia the fact that they're easily accessible, and free (as in beer), and you've got yourself a winning combination. And a lot of games that kick some serious ass.
"Dude, pounds are so metric, fuck that." - Noah
Go here... http://www.ziplabel.com/dpadpro/index.html ...make your own.
I was in attendance at the Classic Gaming Expo 2000 mentioned in the news article. One of the ONLY reasons I went was to play Dragon's Lair again (and Space Ace!). And I had a blast. To feel the joystick in my hands again, to press the buttons, to hear the little *beep* that the game emits when you make a correct move--it was all worth the price of the plane ticket!
Dragon's Lair's gameplay was all about memorization, it's true. But don't ignore the incredible animation created by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (who went on to create such movies as An American Tale, Anastasia, and most recently Titan AE). Many animation experts agree that the animation in Dragon's Lair and Space Ace is of incredibly high quality. Also, Dirk the Daring has personality.. great personality.
For many laserdisc collectors (such as myself), Dragon's Lair is all about reliving childhood memories. A ton of information can be had on the Dragon's Lair Project website (http://www.d-l-p.com) and I have written a Dragon's Lair emulator called DAPHNE which can be downloaded at the DAPHNE home page: http://daphne.rulecity.com .
As you mentioned in another post, Dragon's Lair is available on DVD now, but as you surmised, its gameplay is fairly useless. Whereas the original Dragon's Lair relied on timing (which presented somewhat of a challenge!) the DVD version relies exclusively in memorization, and no randomization. Hence it is rather dull. However, my emulator is true to the arcade version and I recommend it to everyone *shameless plug* Hehe. You do need the original laserdisc to play it though. But I've got it working with DVD at the moment (unreleased) and I just started messing around with mpeg1 yesterday. Progress is being made.
Anyway, to summarize what I've been trying to say here... to many of us, Dragon's Lair and other laserdisc games ARE what classic gaming is all about (the early 80's). The other vector/raster games are cool too (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc) but it was Dragon's Lair which blew EVERYONE away. Can you imagine playing on a game with the graphic of Donkey Kong and then seeing a game that had CD quality sound and NTSC quality "graphics"? (basically a movie). Everyone was blown away. Dragon's Lair rules!! Hehe. And as far as replay value.. well... I still play it from time to time just to relive the old memories. And also what you didn't mention is that Dragon's Lair has a "very hard difficulty" setting in which incredibly precise timing is involved. So the game isn't just about memorization but it's about timing. The timing can be QUITE challenging.
Laserdisc games rule =]
PS - I would be interested in buying that Dragon's Lair that is sitting in your friend's garage.
The game you are talking about was called Street Rod. My brother used to play that all the time. :)
And that is why I liked the game Subspace so much. It was the first really massively multiplayer game, made by Burst (gone Bust, now known as Harmless Games) and financed by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (also gone Bust). But Subspace still lives. It's four years old, totally abandoned by the creators, but the players still keep very good servers and leagues going. Subspace too is easy to learn, and hard to master. The general controls are a bit awkward, but learn very quickly, and the physics of the game are very simple, but to become a master takes ages, because you're always playing against other humans, never (NEVER) against bots of any kind.
Four years ago it was the greatest thing out there. A truly online game, with centralised servers. A 2D top-down view space shooter, kinda like Asteroids, but with over 100 people in one zone, and lots of mods available. I played that game for 3 years (2.5 years of beta and then half a year after it went retail). That's longer than I've played any other game except Civilization...
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
I've just recently discovered Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator) and have been busy rediscovering the games of my youth.
I never remembered just how low-tech these games looked and sounded. I remember that Asteroids for the 2600 was a disappointment at the time, and I still feel that way compared to MAME's Asteroids (and Asteroids Delux).
Still, to finally play Adventure again is a great joy. If I could only remember how to find the secret key...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Tetris Tetris Tetris Pacman Asteroids Centipede
And for you people that grew up on the kaypro, cloned Ladder! (Shameless self plug)
I'm sure you can any of the most popular games just with a quick search on google. :
Nintendo ---North vs South(cannot find this) Side scroller - R-type(super) super mario bros -- remember the bouncing turtle extra lives trick; Odyssey and INtellivision Baseball, SNafu or Surround on Atari, Congo Bongo, RPM Pinball {Puts on flame-retardant suit}..Motocross Madness 2..this game definately is bitchin.
Actually KI is being emulated. Have a look at this site. You may also want to look at this site for some material that may help you get the emulator running when it's released.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Anyone remember Xenon 2? Or for that matter Xenon 1? Certainly the graphics leave a lot to be desired after seeing the likes of Quake 3 (actually, come to think of it, even doom had superior graphics!) But the GAMEPLAY? Wow, there's something there that's been missing from games for quite a while now. Even PacMan has more gameplay than some of the shite around these days!
:)
The point is, who is really being harmed by these old "abandonware" games being downloaded across the net from huge sites like Abandon Games. These games are no longer on sale, so the game companies are no longer actively making money from them. I don't agree with current games being pirated, for the same reason I think MP3's will probably be a hinderance to music development in the long run - as when artists (or game developers) receive a fraction of the money they should have, common sense would say they're less likely to carry on producing material.
However - back to the original topic - seeing how i paid money for my original copy of Xenon (i know registering shareware is an alien concept to most!) so i don't see what damage it can do the makers if i knock off a couple of copies now?
Oh and by the way, if you want a truly great game, with awesome gameplay, try one of the Space Quest series! Kids these days, they don't know what they're missing!
I'm sure this will probably spark off a violent reaction from the anti-piracy purists, but what the hell
jh
"Education is the perpetual realisation of our ignorance"
Not wanting to labour on the obvious but where any of these game mentioned:
1. Space Invaders 2. 1942 3. Asteroids,4. Donkey Kong 5. Defender
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
... and Rainbow Islands too!
:-)
This is scarily true - my GF was over the moon when I gave her a copy of Mame and a pack of roms for those games (yeah, yeah - I know!! Shouldn't be doing that!). Anyhoo, she's now WAAAAY better than me at those platformers - though I kick ass at Mr Do and Qix
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
We *still* have this around the house. Every now and then I'll crack it open and play the old classics - Spy Hunter, Kane (I love that game) California Games, Paperboy.. and what was that build-a-car-up-and-beat-the-King one called? That last game was a classic in strategy. Carefully select a car (Pontiac Silver Streak) assemble all the best parts, tune the engine for either drag or road racing. To beat the King on the drag, you had to bump him all over the strip. To beat him on the road, you had to stay in 3rd, let him get ahead of you, then with about 1k left, hit the gas, shift into 4th then roar by him with about 50m left. Fucking awesome. Which game today resembles that one? I love Doom, Quake is good but the older games bring a tear to my eye.
I never rated the original myself. For some reason, it just didn't have the appeal of other games at the time. Now Llamatron, on the other hand, had me hooked for ages. Strange...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Tetris kicks ass! Just happened to play it again with a roommate.. until 7am. We concluded that a computer platform is not worthy unless it has a Tetris clone. (high-load servers are excused, although tetris for terminals won't bring your system down)
Unfortunately if you dialup a 56K Analog Modem from another Analog Modem(like your dreamcast has in it), your best throughput will be around 33.6 since the compression needed for k56/v90 is only attainable through a digital RAS box... However all is not lost. Since you will be connecting at v.34, your transmit and receive rates will be closer to a 1:1 ratio which will mean less apparent "lag"...due to interpretation of the games' sense of lag. So you might even be better off than someone who is connecting at a 53K download, but is only uploading at 24000.
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
My iMode features a mobile version of Gunpey, the New Age Tetris successor. I have a permanent callous on my thumb from trying to move this stupid little joystick around faster than humanly possible. But it's only a matter of time before these phones become even more Gameboy-like, probably with the ability to download and play every classic game of the 20th century to boot.
But that's entirely the point. There aren't any new, original games, these days. It's either another first person shoot-em-up, a driving game or yet another sports sim. Where are the original ideas these days? Games like Jetpac, Wizball, Paradroid and the like? These weren't rehashes of old ideas. They were new and interesting, and that's why we played them. Of course, the fact that they had gameplay helped, something that most modern games have forgotten about in the rush to get more polygons on screen and better 3D sound.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Video games are like any other form of art in the sense that we can have flashy products that only last a short time, while older and more hard to appreciate ones last long. Make the effort of really listening to Bach's music, and in a few years you will realise how much crap is your favorite band. Make the effort of tasting blue cheese, and you will realize how cheez wizz is disgusting !
"Hey, Linux hardly has any new, cool games!"
"I know, what can we do?"
"Let's advocate classic games!"
Old games rock. Besides my Xmame addiction I own an original 1983 Star Trek:Stratigic Operations Simulator sit down arcade game in very good condition.
Even though I have the ROMs in MAME (which I can say I legally own without a wink wink nudge nudge) there is nothing that compares to sitting in the game with it's large color vector display, kick ass sound, and hearing Mr. Spock say "Welcome aboard, Captain". Best eighty bucks I ever spent.
Did somebody say Zaxxon? Mmm...
Whaddayatalk...
No Laughing Allowed!
When you look at a Q3A the complexity is certainly great- it's single combat (or multiple) against other individuals, but that doesn't mean it's a high point in gameplay depth. It's a very well realised but essentially direct sort of game. Compare it to, say, WarBirds (MMOL WWII combatsim) and you see a lot more constraints. In Warbirds you're in a propeller-driven warplane. It's powerful (and very realistically modelled) but it's no F15- you cannot point up and hit 'go', you'll stall and crash- or end up muddling around at low speed, unable to maneuver effectively. When you evaluate an enemy, you gauge their 'e' state (energy) to see whether they are slow or fast, high or low compared to you. You register what plane they're in- if they're in a hot ME109 and you're not, you don't try climbing away from them. If they're in a P51 Mustang you don't dive away from them, etc. These constraints have a profound effect on what you can do and expect to survive- now, imagine 20 different planes all in the sky around you, some nearer, some attacking, some far or fleeing or doing other things. It is called SA, or Situational Awareness. Your ability to survive and fight depends on maintaining a mental model of all these interactions, plus being able to handle a big hunk of steel with a roaring engine whirling a big prop (or two, or four).
Compared to this, Quake is far more physical- in Q3A the differences among players are minimised, it becomes a straight challenge of reflexes. This is one extreme of gameplay- in some ways Warbirds in full realism is another. In Q3A having uber-reflexes may be the ideal quality, in Warbirds a person with uber-reflexes but no SA will typically lose to a person with OK reflexes and greatly superior situational awareness- because that person can get reflex-man into impossible situations. For instance, if the reflex player is in a FW190 pursuing a ME109, he is already hosed by lack of climb ability, and can be doubly hosed by use of a climbing spiral on the ME109's part. The ME can do this- the FW190, on the other hand, not only cannot match the ME but also has very nasty departure characteristics, tending to go into violent spins and sometimes flip into inverted spins spontaneously. All the ME has to do is entice the heavily armed FW to try and pull angles for a desperate shot- and then swoop down on the helpless butcherbird as it tries to recover from the resulting spin.
There is no reason games can't be both simple and possessed of this depth of consequences- but you can't have that level of inner complexity without some very good design. It's a lot easier to set up balanced players to ensure no bitching, and work to make everything equalised. To introduce 'situational' elements such as the realistically modeled warplanes of WarBirds will tend to cause competitive gamers to pile onto what they feel is the strongest 'game piece'- in WWII flightsims, this has changed madly with different sims and versions, with everything from the FW190 to the Spit to the P-38 Lightning being, temporarily, the 'uberplane', sometimes for very dicey reasons (at one point in Air Warrior, you could spin a FW on purpose and recover pointing whatever direction you wanted, in normal flight attitude. This got fixed and the players who racked up high scores doing it got well and truly hosed when the 'bug' got fixed...)
I think perhaps Pac-Man is (in the set-top-score mode) not properly complex in this way. Unless you have to make judgement calls based on how the ghosts are likely to move, it's just a Zenlike repetition of memorised patterns- not SA. Centipede is actually more like SA. Tempest tries to be, but not effectively- (the spikes are mere obstacles to clear). Missile Command is more like situational awareness because of the distributed nature of the bases and the need to focus on protecting certain areas if you start getting flattened :) In general, a game can only have situational awareness if it has a situation. Some games like the descendents of Warcraft are very good at establishing situations beyond the player's ability to fully perceive, and then developing them and forcing re-evaluation (where did that guy come from? For that to happen there would have to be a base over _there_, etc)
Think about designing games not only in terms of defining the neat stuff on screen, but defining what is unseen. For SA, the 'game space' needs to be more complex than the player can entirely grasp- but little bits of it need to be immediately abstracted, formed into concepts or generalisations, ideally so that information leads to better performance. ("That TIE fighter's a long way from home.. how'd it get out here in the first place? Those are only short range! Look, it's heading for that moon.." ;) )
Amen brother! :)
Seeing that ECA appear on the screen always gave me a good feeling
ShoutingMan.com
Making me feel old. I remeber the tandy tape loading system from the first run of games as well. Took a damn hour to get into a game that took 20 minutes to beat. Gotta love the old days.
"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly." -Batman Costume warning label
See I agree that the newer FF games have great graphics but they will never come close to the old Apple IIe RPG games. Bards Tale 1-3, all of the original AD&D games. Plus there was that first game for the Apple I think it was called apples and oranges where you had to hit the right button at the right time to get points...now that was challenging. I wonder if my apple is still in the basement.
"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly." -Batman Costume warning label
Try taking an origanal game design to a publisher and see what happenes. They may well tell you they like it. What they won't do is fund it.
Try taking an origanal game (compleated) to a publisher and you *might* get a publishing deal, what you won't get is decent royalties, (because if they "take the risk" they want decent profits), and you won't get a decent investment in PR, it'll go out on the cheap, and if your lucky a brave reviewer will go against the norm and give it a good review, and you'll get a vocal fan base, and it'll turn in to a slow-burn profit maker. Assuming you got a royalty deal.
Games publishers want games with proven formats, its to expensive to gamble on an unusual idea, and thats why all you see, and all you'll ever see is clones, until the public stop eating the shit their beeing fed.
Discalaimer: I'm a published computer games developer.
Thad
Thad
The younger brother of a friend of mine from Philly...I met him in a laundromat/video arcade (they'll get *all* your quarters), back in the late seventies, was known, by name, to Atari...he'd told them about bugs in the original Star Wars arcade game on the 20th level, etc. When I met him, I watched him die...at 47M points, on the 40th or 50th level!
mark "I did beat SWIII a number of times"
Yes but if those are old clones of Wolfenstien 3D then that makes the original Wolfenstien the great great grandfather of FPS's. Damn and I was really good at that game. Wonder what happened since now I suck at thos games. Oh well. I just thought I'd bring out the even older games that the ones claiming to be classics.
"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly." -Batman Costume warning label
Star Craft is a wonderful strategy game. If you were bored within minutes of playing, you probably don't enjoy resource management as recreation.
:-)
Loving Scar Craft doesn't rule out classic games.
I have the Atari 2600 emulator, xstella, installed on my Red Hat box and that too provides Good Times (tm). At work, we have a tertis like co-op called Klax (1989). Lot's of fun there!
The graphics are great in Star Craft, but the game design was well thought out. Good job Blizzard!
Unfortunately, I agree that many new games have
CRAPPY design. I don't care for the Doom-esque games particularly since they don't seem to have much point other than:
1) blow up stuff real good
2) have me motion sickness
Still, I play Space Invaders or Galga whenever I can.
Simplicity is what makes classic games great. Even with color Gameboys, etc. the best game for any portable is Tetris. Games with a simple yet addictive concept are the most enjoyable. Those of you with TI calcs might remember FallDown -- I could play this forever.
Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
Aladdin's Castle! We had a couple of those in shopping malls here (Madison, WI.) I remember you could rent them out for birthday parties after the mall closed on weekends. What a blast! A couple dozen desperately over-sugared kids, wide-eyed and punch-drunk with unlimited tokens for an hour. Mmm... tokens.
One of them closed a few years back, but the other is still there, same place in the same mall. It's a lot different now, though: Bigger, with more games of chance -- skeeball, etc. -- which makes it feel more like a Chuck-E-Cheese than an arcade. The video games they have are all the "Kung Fu Kill Death Maim Axe Blood Fight DIE DIE DIE!!" variety anyway. Not a single "classic" to be found. All the other arcades in town have closed. Sad.
-A.
---
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
I'm finding it very hard to continue writing this without going into pointless nostalga so I'll end with my point. If you haven't played these games, PLAY them. Find a buddy with an old deck. Download an emulator. Maybe you'll get bored with them, but then again maybe not. They are different games than today. You have to think a little differently. Perhaps that is just what you need to bring a little spice back into your gaming. Classics have stood the test of time. If you give them a try and let them have a chance you won't be dissapointed.
Actually, I don't think you'll see any more Metroid games, as Gunpei Yokoi, whose team created Metroid & Super Metroid passed away in 1997.
--
Gauntlet was also great, but for a different reason: if you knew about the three-minute trick(stay put for three minutes on any level past the introductory levels, and all the walls turned into exits), you could play for hours--and I did. Hell, the electricity that it took to run the machine for that long probably cost more than a quarter.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
...I was wondering if anyone would get that.
The ones we remember after ten or so years are bound to be good.. or is it the crappiest pieces ever that get the most attention? :-/
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
--
Well, when I was 8, it was cool. Hey, an interactive cartoon, where if I don't make quick correct decisions, Dirk gets bopped on the head!
Actually, I'm 90% sure that Dragon's Lair was a Bakshi (Secret of Nymh, Iron Giant) production.
I nominate M.U.L.E as the best multiplayer game ever made! Well, maybe second best. Archon might be the best :)
I wasted so much time playing those games as a kid with my best friend. I can still hear the M.U.L.E. theme song in my head if I concentrate.
Welcome to the Planet Irata. We hope you enjoy your stay.
ShoutingMan.com
Which is why you don't see too many text adventure games anymore. They probably had the maximum ratio of thought and effort to features available. A game without eye popping graphics and 3D-realism just wouldn't fly today.
..is they had to do more with less - the limitations of the technology in some ways enhanced the good games. You couldn't rely as much on eye-candy to sell the game.
I for one am very grateful for the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and themame.dk rom archive -I can finally play these old games again.
air and light and time and space
My mistake!
If you really want to just blow shit up these days, have a look at Soldier of Fortune by Raven Software. I have been blowing shit up for the past three nights... I think I perhaps have a problem. Don't buy this one for your neice tho.
The classics are also getting recognition in the form of a stamp. (Defender, on the Atari 2600 to be specific. Perfect choice IMHO -- that could be a photo of me 20 years ago...)
What I really enjoy about the 20 or so year old games is the fact they were simple but provided enough challenge to make you want to keep playing. My friend has an old NES and we play Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Jr. for hours trying to top each others' score. Games started getting longer and more complex to play. Sometimes this can be good in the case of Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior but in adventure or action games you need simple stuff. I'd like to get ahold of an old Atari console, those were some very fun but simple games. I'd play Pitfall for hours when I was younger. Many games around now are just too much at once, if you're blood starts pumping for a minute and then subsides, you're going to get bored right after the action stops. This is the reason arcade games are pretty straitforward and simple. You are playing for short periods but you're replaying a large number of times. Duck Hunt has to be one of the best old games ever.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Perhaps that last part is the most important thing for me. When I play pacman I couldn't care less what happens to pacman. He's just a big yellow dot that eats little dots. Some people try to go for high scores, but that just doesn't interest me. It's a number that's all.
Now, I'm not trying to force anyone to share my viewpoint. If you like going for high scores then good for you. More power to you. I just want to make it clear that not everyone shares that opinion. Yeah, there are a lot of unoriginal games today, but if you think there was ever a time when that wasn't true then your memory is playing tricks on you. You've simply forgotten the clones an knock-offs because they're so...forgettable. There are original games being made, unfortunately most of them don't do so well. System Shock 2 was an incredible game, but hardly anyone bought it. You can find in in the bargain bin these days for like $15, and at that price you don't have any excuse not to get it. There's also Deus Ex, which I haven't played yet (I don't think it will even run on my computer :-( ), but I have heard some very good things about it. If you've got a good computer, check it out!
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
Yep, Me too.
I won a copy at the local CompUSAs grand opening (actually renaming from SoftWarehouse).
I broke it out and played it about a month ago. I got silly and beat all the computers tanks with what I termed stupid tank. It didn't move, Its AI was rotate the scanner and look for an enemy tank. Once it found one track it until it entered range or disapeared. When in range shoot until not in range. Just by buying better armor and weapons I beat it. Silly.
This is why, if you're a fan of the old games, you always have your handy 386 in your room. I still like to play 3-D Pong at a speed where the game lasts longer than 4 seconds. For some of the real classics, it's well worth the disadvantages that come with a depressingly slow computer.
I can't really call myself much of a gamer any more, I tend to get bored after the first few minutes of pretty much any new computer game, except maybe some of the simulations. In the past though, I played computer games a lot. The novelty aspect of it at the time was a major factor in this, but there's more to it than it just being new at the time.
All the games were different from each other. Sure, things started to form into genres pretty quickly (2D platformers anyone?), but for a few years, you really tell the guys thinking up new stuff from those slavishly copying the previous big hit. Today, it's almost impossible to find a game that has any innovation whatsoever. Differences in graphical speed and quality, but very little in the way of new gameplay.
Oh, except for Ape Escape on the Playsation a year or so ago. That one was just so totally drug induced I couldn't help but like it.
-- "This is the Space Age, and we are Here To Go" - W.S.Burroughs
Leaving aside the debate about the ethics of playing old games on emulators, there are plenty of absolutely legal sources of classic games. You can still find many of them in arcades, testament to their enduring popularity (and the limited budgets of modern arcades). In addition, many of the great classics from companies like Williams, Namco, and Atari are available in licensed compilation disks for modern home consoles, including the Playstation and Saturn. Typically, these run the original arcade code under emulation.
The comments in ITALICS are those of the person who submitted the topic. The little bit at the end about owning some classic games is emmet's - everything else has nothing to do with him.
C'mon, how much brainpower does it take to figure that out?!?
More than I had last night at that hour, apparently. My apologies to Emmett.:)
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Wah!
Pac-Man is a finite game, though. There's a theoretical limit on how many points you are able to score in it, and 3,333,360 is up there near it.
--
Anyone else remember this old Atari 2600 game? The first time I beat it it took four hours. And like all true games the only way to win is to max out the points. 1 million in Megamania. Remember no such thing as a pause botton, can't even stop to take a leak.
Ahh, A nice legally binding electronic signature...
Straight to the point. For a good example of this type of mentality, check out Noble Armada from Holistic. Sort of a cross between Homeworld and Privateer, with a feudal space background. The publisher(Ripcord) decided they didn't want it anymore, so the developers threw up a demo. The demo got a huge number of downloads, so all of a sudden Ripcord says Holistic is to slow, so they're giving the game to another developer in Malaysia or something.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
What about nethack? Is that a classic game or a modern game? It's still being distributed and maintained. (try buying a new copy of Cadash)
What's the status on that? Classic, modern, the ascii equivalent of heroin? Any ideas?
I know nethack isn't an arcade game so it's a bit offtopic, but that's for the best really. I'd have blown $4000 USD in quarters if it was.
--Shoeboy
It happened a couple of years ago for the PlayStation, and has been going strong ever since. There are about a dozen or so 'collection' games of old arcade classics, and there are a bunch of 'new' versions of old games-- just off the top of my head, I own the new version of: Xevious, Pong (really!), Q*Bert, Frogger, Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest, Robotron, and Space Invaders. Several of these include the original version as one of the play options. Heck, I originally bought a Playstation so I could play the original Bosconian off Namco 1-- ok, I'll admit it was for Bust-A-Move as well, but I would have bought it just for Bosconian. :-)
---
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
That's right! I found out a few months ago that Studio 3 (former System 3) is working on THE LAST NINJA 4! It will be released for PS2 and PC(windoze duh)...
For some reason they removed all info from their homepage but make a Google-search for "last ninja 4" and you'll find plenty of info...
It's really looking GREAT and I can't wait for this one! The Last Ninja series was some of the best games ever! I remember back in 1986 when I spent months in a row and almost no sleep playing The Last Ninja...
Beautiful screenshots!!
Studio 3 homepage
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084. (heh).
But my vote for the worst game of all time, that combines the most money spent with the worst game experience has to be Dragon's Lair. All that expensive animation, a video disk player (that wasn't cheap back then), etc. Too bad the gameplay stunk. It was total no-skill memorization.
To those who never played it, Dragon's Lair was developed by a former disney animator (I believe). You played as a midieval character who trys to rescue a maiden. It would play a certain video animation, and at a critical point you had to make a choice using the joystick. For example, you might hit a fork where you had to go over a drawbridge, or jump in the water or something. The problem was that there was little or no hint what the right answer was. You had to guess, and then remember it for next time (a bad guess used up a life, and you got three lives). After choosing, it would play a video of the outcome of your choice, either moving on or dying in some amusing way. It was novel, but got boring pretty fast.
A great lesson in how not to design a video game. Ironically, it was so new and "innovative" at the time that I had some friends who invested money in buying one. They lost big $$$ on it. I think it's still in someone's garage.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
All those old trackball based games taught me that if your parents are too cheep to buy you are a real trackball you can substitute by moving the joystick back and forth really quickly. Course then they have to buy a joystick, but a $5 joystick is more accaptable then a $40 trackball.
PS, I've only tried this trick on a Atari 400, the best machine ever made. Users of lesser machines (This means you C= guy) may not have luck.
PPS, sorry about the last line, I got carried away in nastalga.
Tetris is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. Slashdot once ran a story on one developer's legal problems, which have since been overcome, freeing me to create the ultimate clone and release it for Linux, DOS, and Win32 under GNU GPL: freepuzzlearena. I figured out how to add depth to Tetris without adding too much more complexity: gravity combos.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't forget System Shock 2 and Thief, epecially Thief! What a breath of fresh air that was. If you haven't played this game, you owe it to yourself to play it. Not only was Thief a great game, but people all over the place have developed additional single-player add-on missions, some of which are as good as the originals. Some are even a bit better.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
pfft. your memory's playing tricks on you :
pac man had
make trax
eat em
nibbler
chomper
that damn scrubbing bubble game
all of its freaking sequels, including the one with the pinball machine
galaga had its share of clones and sequels too.
defender had stargate and vanguard
I think star castle was pretty unique, and I don't remember Rip-off.
dig-dug and mr do
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if you wipe off the patina of memory, you'll see that the innovators stand out from the clones. 10 years from now, people will be saying the same thing about the fighters and racing games in the arcades now... besides, the only "original" games seem to be based on wierd controls, like Safari Hunt (?) from sega (outback driving sim, you lasso animals), the fire fighting game (hose as control) , and all of the skating/ skiing/ canoeing/ soccer / horse racing games that have specialized input. Are you going to remember Whitewater Adventure ten years from now?
The old games were sort of like checkers, easy to learn and hard to master. The new games seem to be more like Chess, hard to learn and hard to master. The learning curve to most of the new games is much larger than the classics that got us hooked at the video arcades.
I still feel a tinge of nostalgia every time I see the original version of pac-man or galaxian.
I also miss the simplicity of the old style atari joystick, wish I could find a joystick like that for my pc.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Perhaps this is sad, perhaps this is a sign of my mind getting riddled with the "blip-vert" super-short form of entertainment, even so, I where as emmett gets bored when he plays Starcraft for 10 min., I get bored now when I play Pacman for 10 min.
Emmett remarks: "the classic games always have had something that modern games seem to lack, and that's simplicity and fun". While I definitely agree that more 'modern' games are usually more complex, to me personally, that's a GOOD thing! I want a complex, rich, detailed world to play in -- Centipede just doens't cut it in this respect. In fact, I would encourage game designers/publishers to put even MORE though and depth into their games...for example, in using movie genres, there have been some damn 'horror'-ific games, there have been some hilarious games, but we still haven't figured out how to do a good 'drama' yet.
So I personally don't think necessarily that "simplicity and fun" are definitely linked. Are games more complex?...definitely. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Definitely not. Will there always be place for another Tetris variation? Sure.
Donkey Kong is still my all-time favorite game. In fact it was because I was looking for a Commodore 64 emulator to play Donkey Kong that I stumbled across MAME. I no longer had to play some weak port. I could play the actual arcade ROM!!!
I play muds religously now, and i think that one of the reasons that people aren't into new games like they used to is because the simplicity of all text allowed for a complex and intreging gameplay, and when you couple that with a large multiplayer element, you just can't match up to any 3d game out now...not even diablo2, even tho that game does rock..
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
freepuzzlearena for GNU/Linux, DOS, and Windows is the premier open-source Tetris clone for PC.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I prefer Final Fantasy IV. Every character was distinct; they had a class that matched up pretty well with their personality. Final Fantasy VI was better than V, but it was the first game in the series to give all characters magic capability, which I think really screws things up. In VII and VIII, the only things that differentiates one character from another are the limit breaks. Any character can use any skill, depending on what Materia or Guardian Force they've junctioned.
To Sum up:
Good - I, II (sort-of), IV, VI
Bad (or different?) - II, V, VII, VIII
It seem to me that arcade & clasic remakes are usualy pretty good, and often much better then the origainal, because the game play is already established. an ecelent example of this is frogger for the pc and psx. new levels, 3d graphics, and new elements are added to an already grate game. this aplies to most arcade remakes, and i have not yet found a bad one.
I'd have to consider Tetris a classic. Even with the cheesy OPL2 music it still keeps the old fscks and the teen geeks coming back every lunchhour for a little brain tease. And of course it's one of the few good games you can squeeze into 256 bytes of x86 assembler =)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I didn't say that the classics weren't cloned. My point was that you could walk into an arcade 15-20 years ago and see a lot of diversity. There weren't any "genres" per se. The gameplay in the seven games I listed was fundamentally different from each other. Missile Command was unlike any other game, before or since. It was a great game, and very popular. Same thing with Crazy Climber. Today it is totally different. Your only choices are fighting, shooting, or driving. Mortal Kombat is SoulCaliber is Tekken is Karate Champ (which is the game all of the fighters derive from, and IMHO, was better than any of the current crop of fighters). They are all the same game, but with different graphics.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
...are these still around?
:)
Nothing like the old early bird specials where the first few people in the doors got zillions of tokens for every dollar. Really helped a poor kid like me play alot more games.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Console games seem so dull, like going back to Bard's Tale or Might and Magic, where you fight stacks of monsters. The graphics might get better, but the magic and combat system are just as shallow as they were back then.
And console RPGs tend to be so low on the interection scale... Zelda 64 had like 200 or so text responses from enemies and every time you came back to an area it was exactly like it was before. Yawn.
Mario 64 (and most other crappy 2d->3d copies) have probably the worst controls ever invented.
Ugh, console games are pretty crappy when compared to what you can get on a PC.
Sure, a ton of PC games suck, but there are ones that are masterpieces. Sure they may inspire tons of crappy clones, but who cares if the original game is good.
What sucks is when people copy the crap, just because it's got cute marketable characters, etc.
But there was another, similar game in the arcades at the same time that I enjoyed much more.
Cliff Hanger
Anyone remember that one? All the animation was Japanese, from the Lupin III series (footage was from Castle Cagliostro and Lupin and the Clones, IIRC) and while it had a similar interface, it seemed much more natural. At critical points you were prompted either for an action (hands or feet) or a direction (4-directional joystick). Loads of fun, although I never got past the bit in the hotel room with the armoured ninjas.
classic games were fun, new games are also fun, I just wish that they wern't almost all exactly like doom, thief is a good twist on the 3d shooter, they need to make more adventeure games like that, I'm sick of being a super human death machine who can carry 8 thousdand pounds worth of guns and ammunition. Speaking of really old games, any one know where I can get a copy of the game Zork, like the original one, I used to have it on my Apple 2, I loved that game.
What the hell is a sig?
An earlier poster pointed out the obvious: that the classic arcade games are easy to learn and hard to master. I'd like to add that they have a certain meditative quality when you do learn to master them. It's hard to describe, sort of a Zen-like link between the screen and your hands. Back when Tempest was still around, I used to end up on about the fourth or fifth series of levels and realize I hadn't even been paying conscious attention to the game. Hard to do that with Quake ..
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
My all time favorite NES games has to be River City Ransom... I loved that game... I loved buying food and building my character and beating the boses. I don't think there is a single game around today that can bring me as much satisfaction as River City did in just a little time. I wouldn't trade the annoying 3 line 30 letter passwords for anything! :) And hearing the double dragon music twoard the end of the game kind of makes me smile each time...
I always wanted to get my hand on a copy of the Tegnen version of Tetris.. Ya' know the one Tegnen released without a license from Nintedno(and tegnen was superior too, great 2 player, while Nintendo was onl 1) and they had a major lawsuit on... I've seen that game listed in price sites for around $100, and that was a couple years ago.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just a piece of my childhood that I really want to collect, or it's just a fact I tihnk maybe Nintedno games may be worth some money some day as antiques...
Anyways, to stop my rambling on non-sense, I think I'll always remember being pissed off about not being able to find the hammer in Adventure of Link right away and being agravated when I couldn't figure out how to throw birdo's eggs back at him in SMB2... Anyways, these are memories and thoughts I think I'll always be able to reflect and think of when I'm alone on a cold night in future years... I'm proud to have been a child in the "video game" revolution :-)
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
If we just think back to what these people had to work with (compared to today) it's amazing the great games that were produced.
With the visual limits of hardware pretty much easy to max out, they had the time to concentrate on game play and functionality. That's where these games excelled! Who cared that they didn't have 3d texture mapping and realistic, spurting blood. The game play rocked!
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Calling Starcraft a Dune II clone is telling me you've played either the demo, or N64 version. Which is a shame, because starcraft has been one of the best games of this decade. It's too bad if you looked at it and dismissed it as a Dune II clone. rattid
Is that they're all the same... Quake, Unreal Tournament, Soldier of fortune... Civilization, Age of Empires, Diablo... Need For Speed...
It seems as tho game designers are trying to woo their customers with fancier graphics. And it works, the graphics sure are perty. I picked up a copy of Deux Ex. wow. Nice game, but it really requires a lot of preparation and focus. I want to have fun, I don't want to work on a game.
I remember 1987, playing Super Mario Brothers and Tecmo Bowl until my eyes bled and my thumbs couldn't move. I mean, gaming today, you don't get any of the nifty hand injuries or mental dilusions (after playing 20 hours straight of Super Mario Brothers in 7th grade, I literally thought my dog was that crazy mushroom character). All you seem to get from today's modern games is a headache and a boner from looking at Laura Croft too much.
Oh well. I still collect Nintendo games and they have some great deals on EBay (I often find systems and games bundled together with price tags less then 50 dollars). There seems to be a lot of love left for Nintendo and classic gaming, at least with my friends. We often just play Double Dragon and Baseball Simulator 2000 all day if there's nothing better to do. Does anyone know if any of bundles of these classic games are availabe from purchase from actual stores? I know you can get the ROMs (I don't think ROMs compare to actual console playing) and bid on them on EBay, but I'd like to be able to purchase them from actual stores. Thanks for the help.
Love,
Bongo
Amoureux classique de jeu
Yeah, I had a problem with the MOM disks too. I ended up calling Microprose on it, and they shipped me a new "disk 4" for free. I can still remember playing version 1.0 of the game, and saving every damn turn, cause you never knew when it was going to crash. And waiting 45 minutes between turns while the computer cranked away on my 486/25 Compaq Presario. And wondering what the hell this "Guises" spell was supposed to do...:)
A few years ago, MicroProse re-release MOM, MOO, XCom 1 and 2 on CD's, all packaged together. They called it the "Blast-from-the-Past" pack, or some such drivel. Despite the shitty title, those 4 games are all classics (think of XCom2 as a mod for XCom1: it helps), and definitely worth picking up on CD. Don't know if the set would still be floating in a bargin bin somewhere or not.
Yeah, but unfortunetly it wasn't that fun, not the same kind of game etc.. :(
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Yeah. The arcade version rocked the house. I miss the giant beer in Level 41. (Nintendo took it out. *sob*) Bahumat, hardcore Bubble Bobble lover
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we just banned children outright.
For more information, click here.
Talk about your clever use of limited technology - in the game "Kingdom" (a Hammurabi clone), as the game loaded from cassette tape, it would hit a section with a slick introduction to the game, with music and instructions. I was pretty impressed at the time!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
You want playability? Replayability? Play Counter-Strike. 465,271active players can't be wrong.
this is it? looks like vector Combat to me
THAT's what crazy climber reminded me of to start with!
lunar lander. it's a shame they came out in the same year
<bluff> clearly a burgertime clone.</bluff>
I used to love PacMan when I was kid; now, at 23, I love Final Fantasy VIII. And Star Trek New Worlds, among others. I never used to really be into games much; I concentrated on programming real applications, not games. Then my exboyfriend got me hooked on Final Fantasy VIII (damn him! *grin*) ... Most games these days are much more involved, and a lot more accepting of bad things that will befall your character. In PacMan, when you died, you died. You started from level 1, game 1. In Final Fantasy VIII, when you die, you simply load a saved game and start from there. I used to play on the TI-99A and TRS-80 Color Computer III. The games back then were solid and fun. Talking about addicting; the challenge was to go from level 1 in a game to the last level without dying. Of course, now we have a "Save Game" feature in our modern games. Both my ex and I have racked up over 60 hours playing Final Fantasy VII (ahhhh. The invention of the game timer!) each, and while I've stopped playing (got to the beginning of Disc 4 and stopped), he started over again from Disc 1. I thought he was nuts, but this is the age of addicting games. Where PacMan was addicting, Final Fantasy VIII is fatally addicting. On some days, he and I would be playing Final Fantasy VIII and not realize that we'd been playing all day without eating. And now with Star Trek New Worlds, I'm equally as addicted. (Granting, it's the demo version, but still... *grin*) I personally think that games are going to keep getting better, but we have to at least pay homage to the first pilgrims like PacMan who forged the way into our hearts in order to make 3D gaming a reality.
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
Furthermore, StarCraft is more than just the traditional game. Ever played the bunker command map, for instance?
In fact, many of the use map settings maps are very similar in concept to "classic" game play ideas. Heck, you could implement PacMan under StarCraft if you wanted to without too much effort - but you couldn't implement StarCraft under PacMan without doing some serious coding ;-)
I don't know much about pre-NES games, but I do love my NES.
I think there are a lot of people who grew up playing now "classic" games that just wince when they see the latest 3d game where the designer's biggest puzzle was to figure out where to hide the rocket launchers. I mean, I dig Quake a lot, but I have also played newer games like Half-Life and Quake 2 which I think are just toal crap.
There is something about the technical ability of programmers which draws me to a game. When I first saw Quake with it's all software 3d engine doing 20 or 30 fps on my older pentium long ago, it was the neatest thing I have ever seen. For some reason I don't get as much joy knowing that a graphics card is doing all the 3d number crunching. The same thing when I play Solstice on my NES and puzzle myself over the complex dynamic sprite masking that works so quickly and so flawlessly on that 1.6 (?) Mhz processor. This interests me so much more than XYZ million triangles per second on a hardware accelerator.
My last point is that most new games let you save your progress at any time or place. This takes away so much of a game and wipes out all that the programmers have done to build up a climax in the game. I like games like Blaster Master on the NES which required at least an hour in front of the TV if you wanted to finish it. You can't just play for 5 minutes, save, and come back to it later to finally finish the game in a week and get a fraction of the experience.
I'm probably missing out on a lot of really good newer games and also a lot of pre-80's games but I don't really care.
I didn't think your examples were addressing my point. I don't disagree that there were clones made of some of the classics. That's irrelevant (in fact, I wish clones would have been made of more of the clasics; I would LOVE to see a clone of Crazy Climber done with modern graphics). Plus, most of the games you cited are already considered old and are hard to find in an arcade. The point is that back then, in any arcade there would have been many different kinds of games to choose from. Today you only really have three choices. I disagree that there are new games being put out that vary from the shoot/fight/drive mold.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
In the old days it was just not possible to create something that even remotely looked or felt like reality. Gaming developers were forced to be creative. Also I think that the gaming industry has become way too fascinated with 3d. Monitor and mouse really are somewhat more appropriate for 2d manipulation (I'm still waiting for cheap VR-glasses).
BTW: I've just implemented a nice clone of the classic 'Artillery Duel'. But I'm not sure whether the server can take much load.
The game was nibbler - it was one of those snake-eat-the-dots-and-watch-out-for-its-tail-as-i t-grows games...Just like the one on the Nokia phones.
The community should not tolerate further hijacking of Linux by ESR any more.
There is no fucking "community". So who cares anyway?
Actually, not it's not, technically. You should be able to keep going, but there's a well known bug that crashes the game at a certain level. 3,333,360 is the most points one could rack up before the crash. You have to get all four ghosts all four times and get the fruit every time to acheive that score.
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Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Starcraft as a solo game is crap. I mean, it's not even worth mentioning. HOWEVER, as a networked game, it's probably one of the best available today. It's *perfectly* balanced, it's fast paced yet requires strategy, and after having played for a few years you still wonder how some people are so much better than you (no, it's not trainer they don't help *that* much).
There are a lot of comments about arcade-style games which you can now get on MAME, and NES games, but are there any fans out there besides me of Sierra's games from the late 80's to mid 90's? They came out of the Infocom text-adventures, but the best ones (read: Quest for Glory series, which never got as much hype due to not being written by Roberta Williams) were based on gradual character development. The backgrounds tended to be taken from hand-painted pictures. And the games were funny, too. (Innumerable Monty Python references.) The Police Quest series did similar things with a more serious subject matter. Am I alone?
grep -ri 'should work'
But can I get an original, mint-in-the-box copy of Custer's Revenge?
I just downloaded it yesterday, and the ROM was well worth the 0.8 seconds it took to download over my 33.6kbps modem. Absolutely hilarious.
For more information, click here.
Well nothing's stopping me from playing them, but the problem is, not enough people are making new ones on PC for me to enjoy. I've pretty much played out the good oldies... Plus it's nice to see different genres of games take advantage of the PC's abilities.
Just because new genres exist doesn't mean old ones have to die... and just because 3D still exists doesn't mean 2D has to die... etc.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Having MAME is all well and good, but if you've got the space, get a cabinet! I own a Hyper Sports and a Neo*Geo, both with 21" cabs, and there's no substitue for the real thing. You'd be amazed how cheaply they can be picked up. Beware though, old monitors are not to be toyed with, unless you know excatly what you're doing, get a pro in.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
I tried to play with my ancient miraculously salvaged copy of Death Track, and as soon as I launched the race, I was dead because all the other cars have run already had time to run around the entire track a few times and frag me like there's no tomorow. Old games often don't anticipate newer hardware...
You should really try MoSlo or something similar, it should be easy to find as it's all over the 'Net
Here's a Google search for MoSlo downloads
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Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
actually, I think that the hyper melee was one of the only high points of star control 3, when not in the isometric view anyways. There was a falling out between Toys for Bob (the creators of star control 1&2) and Acclaim after star control 2, and thus the third was done mostly by Acclaim (through Legend, if I remember correctly). The story wasn't by the original authors, but I think it maintained the intrigue and humour of the originals. Truly, though, it was a bad game.
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/x/
As for the AC who asked "Who the hell has a real frogger" (Not an exact quote but close enough). Well, the answer is: A lot of people! I myself own 20 games. Collecting Arcade games has taken off in the last couple years (for better or worse).
If you want to know what its like to have 20 games in your house, imagine owning 20 refridgerators.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Too true. Everyone in the computer gaming industry should pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS. Heck, I recommend it to anyone, period. Among other things, he teaches the reader to really SEE the literal and symbolic meaning of drawn images (in particular comics). To summarize the book(from memory):
1. Time = Space
2. Reader imagination/participation is absolutely vital to communicating the work
3. You can communicate many things better with symbols and words, than with words alone.
4. The complexity of a picture has almost nothing to do with its communication value.
Lots more in there. Go read it, and his new book REINVENTING COMICS.
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
One of the greatest games made in along time is Battle Girl. Simple vector graphics, great sound and a pace that has brought me close to siezures, now thats a game! It does feel like the old games though; its simple and repetitive.
Now if they would only make a windows or linux version so I didnt have to go find a mac to play it on...
-nostradorkmus
Sorry if I messed that phrase up.
I've actually gone back and played a lot of old games I used to like and found a lot of them to be quite monotonous and boring. Even my beloved Castlevania III, which for years I had touted as being the absolute pinnacle of game design and closest thing to God imaginable, turned out to be a so-so experience after playing it ten years later.
It's just that you're all remembering fondly what was most interesting and exciting to you at that particular time period. When I discovered a vintage 25 Ms. Pacman arcade at an equally vintage Pizza Hut near my house, it zapped me right back to 1983. *sigh* Those were good years.
But as a game, Ms. Pacman isn't exactly that dynamic or anything, or really exciting. When it was released it was new, and different, and it was a simpler time in your life. But that's it, it's the past and it's gone. The only thing real is the present.
Actually there are alot of good games out there right now, that after playing them would make it hard to go back.
This is not to say that all old games are crap. I'm just saying that the reason a lot of people like them is for nostalgia, not because they're actually good games. And what I'm reading on this subject is "games were better back then". Well, not really, you just forgot about the ones that sucked.
Incidently, ever see what happens when you score too high in Ms. Pacman and it crashes? It's pretty cool.
did you ever play seven cities of gold?
As the discussion has gone on, people have described both Defender and Quake as being enthralling, enveloping games that bring you effortlessly into their world. How can it be that a primitive 2-D game and a modern graphical tour de force share this quality?
I'd like to bring up Scott McCloud's "simplification" paradigm from the seminal Understanding Comics. Simple, uncluttered cartoon images like Charlie Brown and Mickey Mouse have an immediate appeal that realistic drawings and live actors lack. A line drawing is just as compelling a face as a photo of a face. McCloud suggests that detailed images are what we see, but line drawings are what we feel -- my face looks like a photo of a face, but your face feels like two eyes and a mouth. Simple characters give us a place to insert ourselves into a comic's (or a game's) world.
The advent of RT3D that mimics our own perspective may eventually trump this abstraction. But it helps explain why classic arcade games could offer something we are only now recovering.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Had to hack it a few times, the big ball targeting system wore out. And it blew a processor. Luckily I had spares! (6809 IIRC).
But the wife got that in the divorce. She can't even play it! What a bitch!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I just went out and bought a bunch of the funky controllers that are available for the PSX. I have 2 big heavy Namco controllers with real joysticks (essential for Robotron), a mouse, a trackball, and an analog-joystick controller. This works pretty well for most games, even in some ways you wouldn't expect (the trackball actually makes a really good substitute for Tempest's paddle), but not really for all of them-- nothing will ever replace Stargate's wacked 6-button-plus-joystick setup, for example. If anyone's interested in hearing more, send me email (no, it's not clickable, look it up thru my user info) and I'll let you know what works and doesn't work for me.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
*sigh* the counterexamples that I was referring to are the non fighter/shooter/drive (fsg) games.
e.g.
firefighter ( has a large hose and flow control)
whitewater adventure (kayaking)
-the rest of the examples are ones I don't know the names of, but see in the arcades. (plural!)
various sports games
Virtua On ( you can say it's all 3 aspects of FSD, but I'd disagree)
skiing, snowboarding, flight sims, horse racing...
Your arcade isn't close to a high school, is it?
try going to a dave & busters or ren & jerrys, or one of the big sega arcades if you can...
Master of Magic was fun for a while, it was like Civ with the interesting twist of adding an "underworld". My biggest problem is that disk 5 of my MoM installation got corrupted and my 386 crashed once, leaving me gameless. Never have found another working copy.
Master of Orion I blew a lot of time on too. Building your own ships was fun.
These are all Microprose hits, another Microprose deal I haven't seen mentioned is X-com: Ufo Defense.
Man I wasted so much time on that game... Defending the earth from aliens. Heh. My favorite thing in the world was to take over the mind of an alien, make him arm a grenade and have him walk to where his buddies were. (it was kinda a bug).
Like Hi guys, BOOM! hehehehe... sometimes I'm sick that way.
like on the pocketwatch game, when a hotel took fire, customer jumping in the void and firemen are trying to get them safe...
If someone interested, it's in C/C++ using SDL, and it *is* really really alpha code ;)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/firemen
Be seeing you...
Chicks dig Bubble Bobble!!
I was a depived child. I had a TI-994/A so I didn't get to play all the hip modern games(ultima,etc) at the time.
My favorite game for the TI tho was always Tunnels of Doom. Took forever to load on cassette, but it was an aweseome RPG.
Sorry, add sports games to the three genres already listed. Firefighter is just another shooter (point the water hose instead of a gun. wow.), and I would categorize the skateboarding, skiing, kayaking, etc. as driving games. I would also classify the flight sims (haven't seen any new ones lately) as driving games, since they don't really simulate flying at all. Horse racing (you're talking about the first person thing where you sit on a model horse, right?) is just another driving game.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
A lot of us wax more than a little nostalgic for the games of yore, remembering just how much time and effort we sunk into playing them and how we couldn't get enough. Likewise, we do quit a bit of criticizing of newer games, calling them "boring" (Emmett's editorial blip about "Starcraft" being a perfect example) for their inability to capture us with the same simplicity.
I'll be among the first to admit that simplicity has a seductive and effective elegance to it, but I've got to wonder how much of our captivation with (and resulting rose-colored lenses for) the classic games stemmed simply from the novelty of video gaming? As time has gone by, and games have grown (or not), and gaming has gotten more demanding and jaded, are we just harder to impress because it just ain't new and different anymore?
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Violence is only a problem with immature children who don't get a good enough education from their parents. Forget education in schools, because that's a bunch of crap. Children need guidance from parents (a realistic education, so to speak), otherwise they'll be dilluted to violence and be more prone to commit violent acts themselves.
As for Star Control 2, that's as classic as classic gets. I played through it for like the fourth time a couple months ago. Truly revolutionary in terms of music and story, and just plain originality. The sequel, which still had a neat story, was overall unexceptional and solved too many of the mysteries from the previous. Chances are we'll never see another Star Control. In a way that's a good thing; it's better to quit while your ahead than drag something through the dirt.
NOBODY is still writing interactive fiction
Vermifax
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A billion points may be nice, but there's no standard as to what a "point" is. In Outrun and other early Sega racing games, you got 10 (100?) points for every pixel the car moved, plus bonuses for checkpoints and speed, etc. In pinball games, you can easily rack up a few million points by hitting a few targets, and then you get the encouraging "EXTRA BALL AT 5,000,000,000" message when you're on a roll.
But still, 2 1/2 days straight is pretty damn good nonetheless.
For more information, click here.
What was his high score at Pac Man?
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Most online retailers now. They have released them as DVDs for computers and for stand alone DVD players.
Vermifax
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I still have several Wico models still working, I had used the same stick on my C64, A500 and then a 4000. Wico's were used in arcade boxes, IIRC.
Got my last wico for my 12th or so bday, I'm 28 now.
-- I speak only for myself.
Shoulda had them on that message
Vermifax
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Certainly brightened up my day, I can tell you.
For those who started on the original Space Invaders, may I recommend the ROM for 'Super Space Invaders '91'. It's like that spotty 12yo has been fed bad acid.
I'm amazed how much playability they could fit in 10-20 kilobytes.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Yes, almost every single game published by Looking Glass Studios has been incredible. I doubt you'd be able to find many people who'd played their games and not liked them. Unfortunately, they went under because Eidos spent too much money on Ion Storm and Daikatana to help them out during a brief spot of trouble.
Another (fairly) recent game that is quite new and interesting is Independence War by Particle Systems.
-RickHunter
Anybody feeling nostalgic about classic games should try Deluxe Ski Jump.
no idea.
For those of you who actually waded in this far reading all the other posts...well, bravo. You got a lot more patience than I do but hopefully what I post should make it worth your while. For those looking to enjoy classic arcade games and even the games of consoles forgotten in this age of 3d grafix and dvd up the wazoo (not saying I mind it...I'll be the first to admit I purchased a Playstation for the sole reason of playing Final Fantasy 7 and a Sega Saturn to play Dragon Force), all you need is your PC. Don't give me hell for providing a site plug here, it's not my own, but for those looking for current info on the current emulation scene, check out Http://www.emux.com . If you're in this thread it's because you are a pretty die hard gaming fan, and this site is a tribute to all of us. Enjoy. --Spec0
Among all the oddities strewn about the old destroyed lab, none stood out more than a faded plastic sheet to be used on
Actually, I thought Mario 64 had the best control scheme I could imagine for an N64 controller. And its still one of the best games to come out for the system. (which is mostly because its too expensive to make games for than because its some manner of gaming pinnacle). You're right about the copying of the cute character games, which is, imo, hurting Nintendo by marketing exclusively to 10 year olds...
Intolerant people should be shot.
Waiting for my Saturn to arrive so I can play NiGHTS..
Actually, there are programs available that will allow you to play these older games on a new processor at a reasonable speed. One, MoSlo, I got packaged with the Ultima Collection CD (now that was a classic series, until they started focusing more on graphics than story. Ultima VI is still one of the best games of all times, and the only one I know of with an interesting plot twist :-) It sets you up in a shell running slow, and it's always interesting checking out the mulitpier... Running Ultima4 on a PII333 slowed it to about 7% of it's normal speed...heh....
-Space for rent
It will be interesting to see how much longer it takes for the games industry to catch on that there's a serious market for classic games.
While there's been a few jumbo-sized compiliations published, they are currently (IMO) missing the boat. Classic games could end up as a solid niche in much the same way classic movies are. Sure, not everyone wants to watch silents or black-and-whites, but a lot of people are happy to pay for TNT so they can watch Lillian Gish and Casablanca.
Of course, having this happen in the game industry could be a mixed blessing. Making it heasier to get at the great hits of the past would be a fine thing; however, it will most likely end up being accompanied by a crack down on ROM trading, which doesn't especially bother me, and a horde of clueless lawyers trying to kill tools like MAME, which does - because the free emulators are streets ahead of those that have been bundled with any of the compilations released to date.
--
My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
Oh, people are designing origanal games. Some people are even developing origanal games. The problem is that no one will publish them.
I don't think that's true at all. Spend time poking around the web, looking for stuff done from a different point of view than "I wanna be like company X." There is almost nothing. I want to say "there is nothing," but after a long while you might actually find one.
Amateur game development once seemed like it could be an art form similar to fiction writing or music, but instead it has become something more like hobbyist carpentry than sculpture. There's discussion of the merits of different band saws and belt sanders, studying of books about how to build birdhouses and coffee tables, and the practitioners seemingly enjoy building birdhouses and coffee tables, with the emphasis on the crafting rather than creation. It never occurs to anyone that there's more to games than Tetris and Asteroids and Quake, just as it never occurs to birdhouse builders that they should be sculpting works of art instead.
Amateur game development is creatively dead, but it lives on as a craft for tech-oriented hobbyists.
The best game of all time... one that just about anyone can play for hours upon hours...
Tetris.
Not any of those new stupid versions of it. The plain old Nintendo Tetris. That game NEVER gets boring... and it's so damned relaxing...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
In downtown Portland, OR, there's a cd store called "Retrocade". They have about 40 old game boxes set up inside.
Robotron, Joust, Tempest, Joust, Pac-man, APB, Defender, Q-bert, a couple pinballs, etc.
I've spent close to $10 in quarters this past week walking home from work, and I'm currently the daily high scorer on Robotron. I missed arcades when I was growing up by just a couple years; now I can live that part of history over. Cool.
i had this one game of civ where i was on an island and kept to myself, totally terraforming my tiny island until it was all mined/irrigated/railroaded/etc, with about 3 or 4 cities on it. i had bronze legions. the computer races had nukes. ;) so i loaded up the 'unlimited money' cheat, built tons of diplomats, and tried to land them on the shore. i landed, they killed me, i landed again, bought off some units, they killed everything again, i landed again... finally i established a beach-head and landed enough diplomats to subvert cities and steal technology, and got nukes myself... then i nuked all the enemy units wandering around along with most of their cities... caused global warming, pollution over most of the map... 3-4 nukes every round launching... one of the best games of civ i ever played. :)
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
and suffered from a lack of marketing check out http://www.theunderdogs.org
Vermifax
Vermifax
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Apparently, they have Released Dragon's Lair as a DVD game. It would probably be worth picking it up just for the animations.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The basic controls of M64, in an open field, were okay, and it had some funky stuff like the triple-jump and wall-bounce. The problem was the camera and how it would swing around you. The same problem that Tomb Raider had... stand next to a wall and the camera swings away to a completely useless position.
The problem with Maria is that the controls are relative to what's shown on the screen, not relative to Mario... So when the camera swings away, your controls change.
Ugh.
Unfortunately, there aren't any arcades for miles around here because of a stupid ordiance that outlaws adult entertainment, and it classifies arcades as being such. But, when I do make it to one, I'll spend most of my time at pinball, and maybe a little bit of time at the racing games. (I'm a sucker for those..)
OT: Has anyone seen the Star Wars Epsiode I pinball machine? It plays movies for you on this screen as to distract you from the ball :(
-bugg
This game was so far ahead of its time that it was ported to GameBoy a full 12 years after its original release.
Plot: Your aircraft carrier is passing through Japanese-held territory and you, the brave Hellcat pilot, must make sure your carrier makes it out in piece. You had to bomb barracks, rocket pillboxes, and strafe soldiers as they run around on their islands. Of course, there were also dogfights with Zeros, and winning took skill. And then there were the ships! You had to sink destoyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers, all of which were gigantic compared to your puny fighter plane.
The attention to detail was incredible: bullets kicked up dust, bombs bounced off of camoflage nets, and your carrier (which you had to land on) rolled with the waves.
For those who have played: who can possibly forget your heart pounding as you dove full-throttle straight toward a battleship in a do-it-right-the-first-time-or-die rocket attack? If you slowed down, the guns shredded you; if you got the angle wrong, you missed your target which meant that the guns would get you as you pulled out of the dive.
And who can forget the satisfaction of jumping a Zero as he scrambled to protect his base? If you did it just right, the hapless Zero would cut swathe of destruction through his island as he crashed.
Sounds good, huh? Want it? You can download the Apple ][ ROM!
sig semper tyrannis!
In 1988 I was obsessed with what I termed, "the perfect port". My game of choice was Gravitar. I had a Gravitar PCB + rom dumps. I began typing in a 6502 sim. Soon I had the sim working on a Sun3 and also my Atari ST Mega4. I was running the Gravitar code and I could see writes to the VGO port but I did not know how the AVG ASIC worked. So I wrote a 6502 assembler and made a boot rom for the Gravitar PCB this boot rom would receive nibbles from one of the other rom sockets (attached to a ribbon to the parallel port on the ST) (Doug Neubauer of StarRaiders fame helped me with the hw here :) ). I could then feed in AVG data (peek/poke fashion) into the vector ram. Then I could send VGO and see the result. Finally I ran a sim on the Sun3 of Gravitar saved all the data going to the vector ram and then moved the data to the ST and nibbled it over, hit VGO and boom, out popped the High Score list!!! I was in. About a year went by until I met Eric Smith via a usenet posting. Via a critical "hint" we were able to totally figure out the AVG. Eric then steamed on with other games and that is how the VECSIM part of MAME began :) Later Al Kossow and Eric cracked the mathbox for Tempest and Battlezone. I am sure I can speak for them in saying that we are amazed at MAME and just how fast and well new games are adopted into the system. It makes our early efforts look like watching grass grow. Also I would like to make a comment or two about how lucky we are today to have these fast computers. In 1988 the Sun3 could not run the simulator in real time. Today it is easy for a P6 to do the sim (possibly multi cpu) and the audio + graphics. It strikes me that if you add about 10years to any arcade machine, that is the time that an emulator of that machine will be real-time. Nowadays it doesn't seem too feasable to do emulators of the current crop of games since many of them have 400pin asics in them. Good luck busting these games (and who really cares about them anyway :) ).
Hedley Rainnie
M.U.L.E.
Those who know it will know what I mean.
I mean, no game since the original mule has managed to master it's simplistic sophistication.
You wanted to win? You wanted to beat those evil mechanoid computer players? You had to compete, and cooperate all at the same time....
It's a simple sweet taste, at the same time while detesting your competition, (How DARE you take that river plot! I hit the button first!!) you had to make sure you didn't completely kill them, unbalancing the whole community and ending in a low score.
You think dimplomacy in AlphaCentauri is good? Ha, nothing beats cold hard capitalism. Buy high, sell low. But as with most great games, the concept was really easy and simple to learn, but difficult to master.
Just pray you have the good fortune of your mule winning a beuty contest...
The new games are fun, but I can still sit down and play galaga under xmame for hours. In fact, last night I beat my highest score in galaga. Anyone selling a full standup version of galaga? -- Twivel twivelslothmud.org
Who needs ROMs? Seriously.. there's nothing like the feel of a controller in your hand, and 27" of screen. I can't imagine playing NHL 96 on an emulator would be even NEAR the same experience.
:\
It's all about getting the buds together, and settling in with some booze for a nice night of Combat on the Atari 2600. A joystick breaks here and there, which you don't have the problem with with ROMS, but they're only a dollar. And I don't have friends vomiting on my keyboard, which I consider a plus.
I've recently (past 6-8 months?) bought an Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Nintendo, and a Gauntlet II arcade machine that's in my living room. I love games, and playing them on the console that they came out on provides the best playing experience, IMHO. Even if the Blue controller doesn't move diagonal very well anymore.
BilldaCat
BilldaCat
I remember the evening news trotting that one out for a segment on how appalling the video game industry was and how it was corrupting our youth etc etc. Decades before Quake and Columbine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This might sound a bit off topic at first but hasn't anyone realized that ever since the advent of 3D, PC developers have gotten really redundant (i.e. unoriginal)?
I remember when I could play Commander Keen, Raptor, One Must Fall, Tyrian, Terminal Velocity, Descent, Doom, Hocus Pokus, Duke Nukem, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Wipeout, Earthworm Jim, damn good versions of Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, all on my PC.
These days all it seems I can play is Quake or Dune II clones or some shoddy sim game. The only original games as of late are Final Fantasy 8, Deus EX, and Half Life... and two of those are still stemmed from Quake.
No wonder emulators are so popular. PC developers better get on the ball otherwise consoles are just going to overshadow the PC. Think of it, why shell out any amount of money to buy a PC when you can get a console for much less that all the PC games worth playing will be ported onto, *plus* you get a lot more variety with the (or so it seems) console-only game genres.
I for one, in terms of gaming, only use my PC for emulators and once every 6 months maybe a decent PC game.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Anyone remember that not-so-old Mac game called Diamond with that disco song that kept looping and looping ? :)
;-)
P.S. Any idea what is the name of that song?
I heard it recently but if i dont have a name, i dont cant't look for it
---
Still have my original box, manual, and 5 1/4" disks. :)
I remember a really old copy of Electronic Games magazine (I think it was EG, probably sometime in the mid 80's) that had an article about the first person to score a billion points in a coin-op. I can't remember the name of the game, but I think the guy played for 2 1/2 days straight. Anyone else remember this?
As a matter of fact, many of us do have working arcade games. In this case, Defender, which takes up a prominant place in our living room. :-)=
At my last job, there was an original Joust machine in the kitchen for blowing off steam.
Next wrong stereotype?
[TMB]
Old does not necessarily mean quality, quite a few (half? more than that even?) oldies were horrid pieces of waste. I believe that the only thing that they had going for them is nostalgia. Witness E.T. for the Atari 2600. But then again, 90% of everything is crap, so I guess that's just common sense.
I played FF5 on a SNES emulator. Three times, with two different translations. Each time through was punctuated with "oh wow, kickass", "this game is so great", and other corny expressions.
The hardcore Final Fantasy fans will verify the trend in that series, but it seems to be an industry-wide epidemic. New games seem to focus too much on showing off technology, not enough on making the damned good games of yesteryear.
But then, I said the same thing ten years ago, and I just spent a week playing Star Control 2.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Was there ever any doubt.... I find it easier on my arm too.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
But... they'll all be gone from the arcade in a couple of months, replaced by bigger, louder, fx-ier games that are supposedly better. Very few current games will ever be driven to the ranks of "classic" simply because they won't be playable (meaning that the average person won't have access to them) for a very long time at all. Today Beatmania might be cool, next week it'll probably be passe, and after that it'll be Beat-what-was-it-again?
But what is the real reason behind this? There are simply way more games coming out today then there were in years past. With a glut in the market, arcades are apt to change their content on a virtually continuous basis. Because newer games won't be around long enough to enjoy meme-like status (or, at least wide-spread meme-like status) they will eventually just fade from our collective conscience.
The same argument may be made to concole/PC games, with very few changes.
I am not saying that no current games will ever become classic, but that the entire meaning of classic has a hint of long-lasting, and so speaking up and saying that [game that was released five weeks ago] will become classic has little/no substance. If it's still around in 6-12 months, maybe something could be said then.
now you're just being unreasonable.
:)
now that I've looked at it, there was a spiderman game that closely mimicked crazy climber.
you've dismissed my 'classic clone' argument by saying it's irrelevant(and still say that there was a lot of diveristy in yesteryear's arcade) , but aren't willing to do the same for more modern games. you've lumped in games with different play experiences into overly broad categories.
as an excercise, please provide a few examples of classic games that aren't
pong derived (ball and paddle)
platform derived (could also be considered a 'racing game'-get from point a to point b)
maze or pac-man derived
shooter derived (we could easily put missle command in here, prevent the bad guys from reaching your home base or lose a life)
or card/trivia based....
the only thing I can think of is Tapper, and that dismisses itself.
---
I would almost kill for a copy!
My favorite part of the multiplayer experience was the buy/sell screen!
I always will love Adventure for the 2600. Arcade games were great, especially I, Robot and Gauntlet and the Star Trek game. Anyone else remember pumping loads of quarters into that big sit-down game? I must have spent at *least* $50 in quarters at the local arcade on Star Trek. I'm trying to track down one of those large modules for my home, but no luck so far (I want to stay local, easier on the transportation.)
Gauntlet was also a great game. "Valkyrie, your life force is running out" used to be an integral part of some of my conversation. I worked my ass off to get money to burn on that game.
I still wish that local arcades would have more of the older stuff, if only to attract us 'older' people back into there for some sweet flashbacks.
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
It becomes painful to play them on my 19" monitor. Each pixel becomes incredibly huge, and I am looking at a once gorgeous world of Civilization, and realize i just really can't do it because it just looks WAY TOO UGLY. The same happened with other games. I tried to play with my ancient miraculously salvaged copy of Death Track, and as soon as I launched the race, I was dead because all the other cars have run already had time to run around the entire track a few times and frag me like there's no tomorow. Old games often don't anticipate newer hardware...
i think the biggest draw to old school video games is that they're really fun when you're drunk.
have you ever tried to play Gran Tourismo 2 after a 6 pack of Coors? It's not happenin' - although when you wake up in the mornin' is IS pretty fun to see the cars you bought the night before ("boy did i trick out that volkswagen")
Additionally, there was more of a feeling of fraternity (you too ladies) with games "back in the day" - even up to a few years ago. Now when i play computer games like half-life and its various mods...i can't go 30 seconds without someone complaining that someone else is cheating. Whatever happened to the days when, if someone beat you, you said "damn...that guy's good!"??
shit - i gotta go...the space invaders are coming...and they're black and white!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Rampage Just plain different.
Rip Cord Try to land a parachute on a platform
Reactor Just plain interesting.
And that's just the R's.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I've been in my parents' basement, playing Pac-Man over and over and over, determined to get the highest score ever. I dropped out of college and haven't seen the outside world in the past ten or fifteen years or so .. but I think I finally did it! A score of 3,332,950! NO ONE could beat that, not even that Bobby Mitchell guy I heard my parents yelling about once...
Amen to that brutha!
I've been playing Bubble Bobble and Super Bubble Bobble (which is identical to Bubble Bobble except it has Super on the title screen) for the past two weeks now. I was into it big time back in da day (circa 1989 when it was released) and just this week bet my high score of 1,869,840 on a single life.
The NES version was good, but it doesn't beat the arcade by any stretch... and Bubble Bobble 2 (NES) and Rainbow Islands (The Story of Bubble Bobble 2) sucked...
J
Emulators are not illegal. Sony went to court again Connectix and Bleem and didn't succeed in prevently the sale of the Play station emulators. Okay maybe the copying of roms is illegal but I think whoever owns the rights to many of these games should really think of selling large cdrom collections of them at a reasonable price and people will snatch it up.
Actually, it's not /.'d, but rather, it's Junkbuster/Cookie-Dropping/Netscape incompatible. On my machine, it just keeps reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading in the background with an endless series of redirects to an ever-lengthening URL.
Quite annoying.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I wouldn't consider Dragon's Lair the worst game of all time, at all. It had great animation and humor, and was fun to play, despite its primitive play mechanics.
However, I think a good case can probably be made that it was a disaster for the videogame industry. Everybody thought it was the wave of the future, rather than an example of a poor concept being surmounted by great execution. Sega rushed out a CD add-on for the Genesis (even though it lacked the graphics capability to do a very good job of it), based upon the expectation that full motion video was the Next Big Thing (and Nintendo nearly did the same, but had an attack of sanity). Hollywood stars were hired to act in video based games. It all flopped utterly, because there really was no way to take the Dragon's Lair concept any further, or even improve upon its execution.
All that money lost all because of a single, hit game...
Classic can be interpreted in several ways: - A 'classic' is a game which defines a genre, and inspires the creation of hundreds of clones. Q3Arena, Unreal, Doom etc are all clones of the classic - Wolfenstein 3d. Examples would be Tetris, Elite, Pole Position, Lemmings etc. - A 'classic' is a game which can be played again and again and again, always rivetting, inspiring and fun to play. Examples would be Civilization 2 (my all time favourite), Quake 1 (it's still great after all these years, better gameplay than all sequals) and Fifa99. These are games I'd take to a deserted island (together with Naval Signalling for Dummies). So, without further ado, here is my top 10 list of 'classic' games. 10. Age of Empires2 (PC) (hey, I love it!!!!! - best game I ever played) 9. Freecell (night shift classic) (PC) 8. Pinball Dreams (Amiga), the Ignition table. 7. Tetris (C64) 6. Lemmings (Amiga) 5. Quake - the original - nightmare is still challenging, and fun (PC). 4. SWOS (Amiga) 3. Elite (for C64) 2. Fifa 99 (PC) ...and finally... 1. Civilization 1/2 (Amiga/PC)(I played that 'til 6:00 in the morning the first time I tried it). Almost that long for Civ2. No other game has captivated me as much.
Revolution = Evolution
I've been playing computer games regularly for about the last sixteen years, and I can happily say that I can play StarCraft and Diablo II all day. I love playing Unreal Tournament, System Shock II and the Final Fantasy genre.
Pac-man, on the other hand, bores the pants off me. Getting three billion points in it seems to be more an exercise in how to maintain concentration in the face of near-terminal monotony.
Space Invaders likewise. MAME held my interest for all of three days, before the nostalgia value wore off, and I started to wonder just how easily amused I must have been when I was fifteen.
There are _some_ games I'd like to play through again (the original C-64 Wizball springs to mind, although that's probably a little "post-classic"), but a lot of classic gaming seems to just be nostalgia for things that were only good because they were the best that could be done at the time.
Charles Miller
(Woo, gonna lose karma over this one...)
--
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
That people bash something just because it is popular. O_o Besides, StarCraft was my first experience with wine, just to prove to myself that I could do it. I think that was more fulfilling than the game, though, in an odd sort of way. Oh, why do I care what you say. I think I just felt the need to defend StarCraft because I have played a couple thousand games of it over the past few years. Mmmm classic gaming. Got to play a cocktail Pong, should'a bought the think. What's $75, anyway. Drugs are bad, mm'kay?
Some of the games I own today have that classic game feel. Crazy Taxi, Gauntlet Legends, Pong, Zombie Revenge, Mr. Driller, heck, even SF3 all have some qualities about them that make me think back to the older games. They're simple, don't take a whole lot of time to get into, but take practice to master. The rest of my next-gen collection is rounded out with rpgs and tons of fighting games. For my money, fighting games are the best out there for 2 player fun. You can play one for months and feel like you're great, only to play against a truly great player and get destroyed. But it's all about skill and strategy, so you learn from your mistakes and become a better player. I just can't wait until Vampire Chronicles, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Network Edition, and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike come out for the Dreamcast. :)
This ain't flamebait; it isn't even a good troll.
Let's see -- unnecessary political yammering, guilt by association, uninformed claptrap...
Oy.
/Brian
(Hey, at least I signed my name, grits boy...)
Most people above are griping about how classic games deliver solid gameplay, while modern games are all flash. However, it's like comparing apples and oranges; games like Pac-Man and Asteroids are used for quick fixes, but to play games like Starcraft and Half Life, you actually have to invest some time into them. However, in the end, the experience will be much more satisfying than a 10 min. Pac-Man game.
Couldn't agree with you more. Unfortuantely the latter versions eg. especially ones featuring him on the N64 have just basically taken his character and chucked him into a 3D based game we have all seen before. I suppose they where relying on his popularity from the "old-day's" to sell a few more cartridges.....ho humph. Although I have to say Kong64 was not a terrible game it was basically a case of been there seen that time a million.
I suppose the old addage that there are really only 8 stories in the world that keep getting retold over and over again is probably true of video games as well. Wonder what the 8 are (something like that could really keep a no-lifer like me up at nights???)
Thanks for the reply.
Keep dodging them barrels...
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
They had those here in the states too. I wonder who copied who :) I remember playing it. I especially loved the sound of the torpedos.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
There are new games still coming out that I'm sure will eventually gain "classic" status. I'm sure most of you have seen some of the new music/rhythm games, like Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania. Those games are really fun and addictive (and if you're young, you can tell your parents that you're getting great exercise from video games).
shameless self promotion - http://kibbles.org
Bubble Bobble, despite many years of fanatical gaming, remains my favorite game of all time. It combined a simplicity and entertainment value since unmatched by any game.
:D
There's just something about bubble-blowing kyoote dinosaur/dragon thingies that draws the mind into it's 100 levels of mind-blowing fun.
http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/bubbob.htm has a good review on the game. Check it out.
And for crissakes, get a NES emulator and the rom, and play it for yourself!
Bahumat
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Your gorgeous Civ is now ugly? Well of course, with all the pollution and terraforming going on, you've ruined the countryside and created an industrial wasteland. He he, too bad that I developed the Hoover Dam first, and now I have the equivalent of a non-polluting Hydro Plant in every city. But my scientist keep warning me that because of **you** there is a chance of global warming occuring and the icecaps melting. Nah, it will never happen. Aha, my SS MODULE is complete. Lets call it ISS ZVEZDA.
Revolution = Evolution
I find that the only new games I can still play are multiplayer. I get bored to death on any single player new game, no matter how good the graphics are, I just feel like I am wasting my time. Add multiplayer into the mix and I feel like I am actually accomplishing something. I have an n64 with a bunch of games, but the only one I ever play is Goldeneye cuz it is great to have a friend or three over and just shoot each other. I was quickly bored with the single player version, though it has great depth and was probably the best SP FPS of that year.
The only games that I can play single player anymore and not get bored are the old Nintendo games, Contra especially, you can never get bored of that. Getting bored of them are like getting bored of watching Rocky or Ferris Bueler's Day Off, whenever they are on you just can't help but watch it.
I think Multiplayer is what is keeping gaming alive, not prettier graphics. As an aside, I think we need some more freeware multiplayer games (for all platforms). Games like Tetrinet. It proves you don't need great graphics in new games for them to be fun.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
At this point, the ONLY game I'm playing on my PC is Diablo II. Everything else, I have a Sega Dreamcast (Gauntlet Legends is a beautiful, fun updating of the classic) or PSX for. My PC is typically too busy running a browser to play games on anyway.
I've put another network tap in my den, however, so that when the DC gets its Ethernet connection, I can masquerade it out over the cablemodem. Heavily multi-user games are the major advantage of the PC over the console now, and soon, that will be gone as well.
-- Riding the Winds of Fires Lit in Ancient Days
I know most of you never heard or even seen this game, since I grew up in Soviet Union, we had this 'mechanical' arcade, where you had to shoot ships from you submarine periscope.
:)
I remember spending all my money on it, of course this was pre atari days. And when I say mechanical: it didn't have any tv screen, just model ships and lights
If I can just remember what it was called.
I remember going to a friend's house, setting his Atari 800 to load a game from the *tape drive*, and then going outside to play for 30-45 minutes while it loaded. Often we'd come back it, and find that it had failed. Repeat.
That's what's wrong with kids these days, they're not forced to play outside while their games load.
(In best Granpa Simpson voice: And that's the way we liked it!)
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