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Retro Gaming Gets Hot
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."
I'm glad that some companies have figured this out! I love the latest and greatest games as much as anyone, but my heart still belongs to good old 2-D action games. Ah the memories of dimly lit arcades where you could go and bask in the warm glow of electronic sex, erm I mean video monitors...
Emulators like MAME and ZSNES are a blast when you just need a quick game to let off some steam or kill some time. When on the go the old Gameboy Advance really has you covered with tons of classic games available as well.
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Instead, they've got blocky graphics, tinny sound and bizarre objectives. And despite their rudimentary look, these games have inspired an almost manic need to play them
Because when you know for a fact that you have 4 colors and less than 100 pixels on an axis, your mind will start thinking how playable you can make it. When you have 1600x1200 on a 100fps, 48bits w alpha and a graphic card which beats most PC's computational power, you mostly think how to fill all of that for a 'real-life' gaming experience. Well, if I wanted real gaming experience, I would go and play waterpolo or football, not pc 'real games'
Legal or not, emulators do the work of the majority of old arcade machines out there. Pair them with the right controller/pad/what have you, and you get all of the old arcade experience, or at least most of it. You don't get the old, dimly-lit smoke-filled rooms with drug deals going on in the back, but still, it's damn close.
I'll be more interested when one of these devices offers a faithful emulation of Baby PacMan. I loved that game, and I always wanted to get good at it, but the machine at the Showbiz Pizza(the only place that had one around here) was almost always broken.
It's no wonder that retro gaming is big business. Those who used to play the earliest arcade games are starting to come into positions of influence.
Take a trip back to the early to mid-90s, or whenever you were a kid, and try to recall all the public service announcements and news stories that all had the same message, "Video games are bad, get out more."
Now suddenly, video games aren't so bad anymore. Especially the older ones; those who are intrested are making the moolah.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
So how long until Nintendo or whoever starts going after the authors of emulators?
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Tulip in the netherlands has revived the Commodore brand. While they're distributing things like an ePet memory stick or an eVic-20 mp3 player, they also have a 'console' to play ancient C64 games.
Of course with the number of C64s still out there and available for $2 from goodwill stores, you may as well go buy the real thing and get to play Impossible Mission instead.
Something I've noticed is that retro gaming means different things according to where you're from. Generally this is met with ignorance from the Americas, as they've not been exposed to our scene as people on our side of the pond have.
American retro usually means old arcade games, such as Pacman. Old consoles like Atari and NES are also common, whilst young, overly blog-keen teen Internet wasters think that their SNES is the most retro thing since sliced bitmaps.
European retro tends to mean Sinclair Spectrums and similar computers, with strong emphasis on the programmers and sceners involved, particular in smaller countries where more people know each other.
Amiga and C64 seems to bring common ground to us all, as most countries featured these as popular machines.
Goes to show that all the money and time you spend on graphics and special effects is all for not if the gameplay suks. I mean these games are in 8 bits at best yet the game play is truly revolutionary and addicting still today. I hope this goes as a message to all the game companies that visuals are nice but gameplay is what will truly make the game great
And people wonder why companies hold onto old games, instead of releasing them into public domain.
What I really enjoy about the emulators is the mobility that they give you.
I have an Apple II emulator running on a notebook computer, so I have that with me - not just for gaming (downloads of Apple disk images are available), but for playing with the old system. You can do a "call -151" and drop right down to machine language. Boot an (emulated disk) with Integer basic, do a call -151 and then an F666G (I hope I got that address right), and you are in the mini-assembler... You can play with these systems in many ways - not just on the gaming side.
Also, you can look up Apple CE. This program lets you run an Apple emulator on your handheld pocket PC. All the disk images on your emulator can be brought right over. The Apple emulators tend to support a Monochrome mode, and there is a nostalgia to the warm green monitor feel that is produced. Besides, when you save off your spreadsheet at work for someone, and they have trouble reading it, you can always just tell them that it's in "Visicalc."
There are often some (technical) differences between emulated environments and the "real thing" - sound a delays of disk devices, the number of supported expansion devices may differ from the simulated and "real" systems, including how shared resources / critical sections may be handled (if anyone really wants a technical example of this, they can e-mail me).
Anyway, emulators are really expanding the use of "orphaned" platforms.
There are emulators for IBM 370, Apple, Commodore, and many others. At the University of Pennsylvania, they did an "Eniac on a chip" project. For many, the emulator itself is the game.
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Back when I followed emulation pretty heavily, you could just tell this undercurrent was coming back up. I picked up on this in 1996. It's 2004. Something about newer games really smacks of "losing soul", because they take forever and a day to play. Personally, i just got sick of following new games after a while, because they are too complex for playing for short periods of time. I admit it: I'm a grazer, and when I can choose from a thousand NES ROMs, I'll play nine or ten in a session.
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There are still plenty of people making awesome, simple games that you can sit down at for 20 min and just have fun. Check out this guy's stuff, you'll never think of 2-D shooters the same way again.
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In the bad old days (yeah I'm thirty in a handful of days, and i have been using and programming for 25 of them) games didn't have the hyper-real look to them. They didn't have specially mastered soundtracks, nor cinematic cut scenes.
But they did have gameplay. I remember sitting on the couch playing my old dick smith vz-200 with my brother, becuase the game encouraged co-operative play. And it was fun. I don't enjoy playing some tekken clone where the sole point of the game is to beat up the guy next to me.
Sure I can see my blood splattering everywhere as my avatar gets the crap beaten out of him, but it winds up leaving me with very little empathy for the guy i'm playing with.
The difference really comes down to the fact that the current titles are all derived from traditions coming out of the hyper-competitve japan school boy environment, whereas the old games came out of a very different co-operative environment of the old silicon valley.
"Hey! I get to PAY AGAIN for this game I bought 10 years ago! YEAH!!!!"
You had a Pacman machine?
"Derp de derp."
I've bought a few of these to do web reviews, as well as for the novelty value. I have the Atari 10-in-1, the Activision 10-in-1, and the Namco Arcade joystick.
They flat out suck.
I am horrbily disappointed that, in this day and age of microcontrollers and well-written emulators, a better product could not be produced.
TVGames is slaughtering at least my memory of these classic games. Amongst other things, I found that all three are lacking a noise generator (makes explosions sounds like "boops", especially in Missile Command,) the colors are off, and the Namco arcade joystick is locked into four positions but includes Bosconian -- an eight-position game. In their defense, the game play for most games are identical to the originals.
What it comes down to is that if you DON'T have the console or a good emulator and rights (term used loosly) to the ROM image, it's not a bad $19. Otherwise, stick with the emulators and, of course, the original console; the former posessing much more longevity.