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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
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
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.
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. :
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)
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.." ;) )
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
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.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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My name is Sue,
How do you do?
Now you gonna die!
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
I.E. for the oldies, we remember things like 'American Pie' (the original, not the Madonna cover). We forget about things like 'tourist leggo short shirt' [just pulled that on off the back of an old album].
When you compare the classics against the currents, it's like comparing 'american pie' to the current Brittany Spears hit. We haven't had a chance to filter for the best of the decade yet. Probability favor the classics in that context.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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...)
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The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.