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.

Comments

2D = compelling gameplay

[gribbly]

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.

Re:I agree...but...

[Chris Johnson]

The thing is, Centipede's _actions_ are as simple as you can get (almost- see 'pong' or 'target fun') but the 'game space' is much more complicated than that. You have the little mushrooms which seriously affect the motion of the centipede, you have spiders, all sorts of things can affect the shape of play. It's like shooting all the invaders in the middle of Space Invaders and then there are only two left on opposite ends of the screen and they rocket downwards at a sickening pace- the _pattern_ of the gameplay can be more involved than your actions.

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.." ;) )

The *worst* game of all time

[Reality Master 101]

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.

--

What is enthralling?

[laborit]

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

Bored of Starcraft... and Quake 3... & everything

[Halcyon-X]

The reason you got bored when you played Starcraft is because you got bored of it back when it was called Dune II... Same with Quake3/UT/Halflife = Quake...

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.

Re:The thing about classic games..

[Stephen Samuel]

The thing about classic games is that they're good. My equivalent to Warsaw's closing comment is: They're not good because they're old, they're old because they're good.

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.