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Videogame Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To be
Thanks to GameSpy for its 'Pixel' column discussing the dangers in letting videogame nostalgia run unchecked, as the author explains: "Number one: Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's particularly good. And number two, loosely based on Sturgeon's Law: 90% of all video games ever made are either mediocre or crap." He gives an example: "Case in point: A little PlayStation game called Gunners Heaven. It was a very early Japanese release by Sony... [and] the American import magazines covered it a bit and described it as a Gunstar Heroes clone", but the game, once acquired, "was thoroughly mediocre", showing "the dangers of unchecked nostalgic anticipation."
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
I'm a big retro-gamer, but I agree. I love the NES and most of the other systems from that time period, but I admit that many of the games that were made then are for historitcal interest only. (Deadly Towers, anyone?)
However, I still think retro-gaming is important for the industry. Older games, like old movies, should be respected, studied and preserved for future generations.
One guy gets hyped up about some old Japaneese game he'd never even played before, solely based on the fact that people - including paid reviewers which are probably the worst source of info on the planet - compared it to a similar game he enjoyed. A couple years later, he buys it, finds out its crap... and suddenly nostalgia is a danger to everyone.
Excuse me while I go hit my head against a wall for an hour.
I wanted to say the same thing. Since when does an example of an old game no one ever heard mean nostalgia for old games == bad ? At the very least I was expecting nostalgia in the form of games people actually heard of and played to be discussed.
Holy case of RTFA batman. The reveiwer is compaining about some japanese game that he had never played. This is a case of over-hype, not nostalgia. For Nostalgia distortion to take place, you must have had at least played the damn game once. And for the record a game that was made for the the playstation cannot inspire nostalgia yet. Now Contra, there was a game, they just dont make em like they used to.
This article is about the level of uselessness I've come to expect from a Gamespy article.
Claiming that nostalgia is somehow to blame for lame knockoffs is as retarded as claiming Richard Simmons is responsible for bombing Iraq (well, maybe he is, that PRICK).
The "90% of everything is crap" rule certainly applies to old games, but we didn't waste our childhoods on the crap games, so we don't get nostalgic about them.
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I've been on a bit of a tear myself, playing old games and finding them deficient. First it was Double Dragon on the NES, which I had at one time thought was pretty ok, but now realize is awful. Then there was Prince of Persia (again, NES), which is a neat idea, but way too long. Then Deceptor on the Commodore 64, which I had always wanted to finish. I played through it, beat it, and found that the ending was absolutely terrible. Then Into the Eagle's Nest, another Commodore game, that is really not worth the effort. (As a generous human, however, I'm making a series of maps for it just so other people don't have to suffer.) And then DragonStrike (back on the NES) which turns out to be a terrible version of a classic Commodore 64 game I'd always wanted.
Fortunately, these are all cheap games, so I'm not really out a ton of money, but it is truly disappointing to see how cruddy the past was and I didn't have the sense to realize it.
The above summarizes a couple weeks of posts, but if you care to read the longer versions: Double Dragon, Prince of Persia, Deceptor, Into the Eagle's Nest, DragonStrike.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
The best part of the entire article is that the sentence "I officially veered off the path of rational thought and entered the dreaded forest of unthinking nostalgia," appears next to an ad for Star Wars Galaxies.
"How could it not be worth getting?"
The ______ Agenda
Designers call it 'going back to the hitory closet' when they use past styles as a basis for new designs. Good ideas are good ideas no matter what skin you put on them. FPS games work because the genre works, although there are some memorable wish I could forgets, most follow the same concept, kill an opponant from the killers point of view, and that concept works.
Does anyone remember a video game called, I hate to give my age away by bringing this one up, Jane of the jungle? Not the best game but it had some cool quirks, such as if you didn't do anything for a period of time, jane would start to tap her toe waiting for you, if you still did nothing for about a min, she would look at her watch.
It would be nice to see some more interesting things like this happening in games, not that I think they would be better for it, but it would show a level of having fun with the game while creating it.
Sorry about that side track... where was I? Oh yeh, Nostalgic works well for things that were clasic due to some form of non-marketed love by people. The new beetle and the new mini are proof of that, Harleys have stayed basically the same for ever, but what do you think the chances of a nostalgic 80's K-car doing well.
Back to games.
Xaxonn for the coleco was pretty cool as was donkey kong, but you don't see many ripoffs of xaxonn do you? Why is that? Because the genre of 3D that the game was advanced for in it's day has gone well beyond what xaxonn did. Now a 3D FP donkey kong would rock as a nostalgic new game. Super Mario or Mario Cart not withstanding
flinging poop since 1969
What I want to see are more modern versions of old games. I don't know to what extent this has been done, but I personally loved Duke 3d, and I would love to play through it on a newer engine.
I'm thinking Tenebrae, only more so. Gameplay pretty close to the same, although levels might be a bit more complex (since it'd actually be fully 3d) -- but mind-blowing graphics.
Basically, what I'm hoping Doom 3 will be. In fact, Valve has promised to port Half-Life to the Source engine -- hope that gives us a souped-up replay of HL.
In other words, it's the opposite of what people usually mean when they say "videogame nostalgia" -- the original, pixellated version, or a new, pixellated sequil, which is only marketable (maybe) because it runs on a mobile device (Metroid Prime on GBA, say).
Has this been done too much? Would there be a market for it? Would people take offense at a modern FF7 with english voice-acting?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
90% of everything is crap
Like slashdot stories (and editors) and gamespy articles. Funny how that works.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I liked the Defender remake for GameCube, but I'm also a hardcore Defender fan. The Defender remake holds so true to its original that unless you like shooting aliens and rescuing colonists all the time, you're going to get tired of it quick. In one way that preserves the game, but in another it limits it.
Frogger's remake tried to do things a little differently, but there's only so much you can do with a jumping frog.
In halo, if you don't do anything for a while, the master chief plays with his guns, fiddles with settings, etc.
I remember the Sonic series (even the earliest one) on the Sega Genesis had a feature like this. Sonic would appear to get impatient if you let him stand still for too long. Start tapping his toe and so forth. I don't think any of the early Mario games had anything amusing like that built in (correct me if I am wrong, never had an NES). Because the point in Sonic games was to make the game run fast enough to induce seizures.
As far as nostalgic remakes, I thought Pong 2000 was a novel idea. The soccer field was awesome, you could do flip kicks with your paddle.
I miss the ol' Commodore 64. A lot of the games sucked, but for some reason I continued to play them almost ten years later. I still think breakout/arkanoid, moon buggy, pac-man, donkey kong and jungle hunt are cool games. Ok, well maybe not jungle hunt, that was kind of stupid.
Remember there weren't game cheats on those old titles, most of the games relied on basic hand eye coordination and quick reflexes. In my not so humble opinion this is why Pong takes more talent than say Mortal Kombat or . You can't say that I am overkilling with that special move in pong. With pong I don't have to suffer through a poorly made movie loosely based on the game.
Furthermore, it helps to have three thumbs when playing Mortal Kombat, nothing to do with the number of times I punch or kick the other guy...Oh yes the topic was nostalgia sorry. Old games are cool!
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
90% of all games are mediocre or crap.
I'll agree with this statement. Although I will add that the signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves has gone down in recent years.
The retro gaming phenomenon is more than just simple nostalgia though. The truth of the matter is, today, a random sample of 20 NES/MS/SNES/MegaDrive games, would probobly fare better than a random sample of 20 PS2/GC/XBox titles. It turns out that just 'having' better graphics, more buttons and more music does not a better game make. A lot of recent titles would not hold a candle to the best of 8/16 bit gaming. But that's to be expected. Dispite whatever era a game is made in, the fact that it's good won't change.
Retro gaming is really picking up recently. Perhaps it's due to the availability of emulators, or a ready supply of old SNES cartridges. However I think it sends out a signal that people aren't very impressed with the current lineup of games out there. If customers are willing to seek out 10/15/20 year old titles in preference to your spanking new one, I think that should get some people thinking. Were these game actually better? What made them so? Are people dissatisfied with games whose primary selling point is a Hollywood atmosphere of better graphics and music?
Games in the 80s and early 90s could offer only poor 2D and pretty awful 3D graphics. Their music was shackled to the limitations of MIDI tunes, and even the controllers offered little enough buttons for control. Without having the cushion of cinematography to fall back on, there really was only one place developers could engage the player. In the gameplay. Add most of them made a fair stab at it. Contrast this with *shudder* Gran Turismo or FIFA, whose sole selling point is graphics and snazz.
There will always be great games that shine out through the layers, but I feel the percentage of such games has decreased, simply due to the fact that there are more games being made. The quota of quaility games does not increase linearly with the amount of developers, alas. I just wonder how this will affect the outlook game players have on the industry and games in general.
I suppose it's like the evolution of cinema really. Initially you needed a danm good story and actors for a play/movie to be successful. Although these still help, and the best movies by definition have these, they are not a requirement for movies to make it big time. So I guess it's the same for games in a way.
May the Maths Be with you!
I agree with the essential thrust of the argument, although not with the author's means of making his case (there are better arguments to bring up than some obscure Japanese remake).
A lot of gamers just don't really how good we have things today. As far as gaming goes, the "absolute stinker" is all but obsolete. Sure, you get some complete duds from Valusoft and the like (cf. the somethingawful reviews), but when you buy a game today, you are pretty much assured of decent production values, a reasonable length game, decent graphics and a certain degree of gameplay depth. When we talk about "bad" games these days, we generally have titles like "Enter the Matrix" in mind. Mediocre though these are, they are still, to the dispassionate observer, actually better than any "classic" games of their equivalent genre.
So why does nostalgia still sell games and influence opinions? First of all, I think there's the gradual diminution of the "wow" factor. A lot of people who rave about classic games do so on the basis of happy memories of playing that game during childhood. Back then, games were pretty much a new thing and the "wow" factor could be achieved by a game having more than 8 sprites on screen at the same time, or actually managing to scroll smoothly. The "wow" factor basically seemed to die in the mid-late 90s. Doom was mind-blowing... it drove forward graphics and gameplay far beyond anything we'd seen previously (including in Wolf3d). Quake felt like a bit of a step back in terms of gameplay to most of the non-hardcore crowd, but the engine was fairly jaw-dropping. Quake 2 and the first generation of 3d accelerators were impressive, but already, the impact just wasn't the same. The next "milestone" was Quake 3... well... it did have curves. I think a lot of people go back to try classic games in the mistaken belief that they'll be able to recapture the sense of exhileration they used to get when a game really impressed them. Problem is, it just isn't there any more. Our standards have gone to high.
The second and more depressing reason behind ostentatious nostalgia for classic games is one-upmanship. You see this a lot on slashdot. There's a school of though which goes that if you played a game long before it was "big", you are inherantly superior and have some kind of divine right to look down on those who have only played the sequels. Refuse to play anything more recent than Doom? That clearly makes you superior to people who play the Quake series, but inferior to those who refuse to play anything with colour graphics. I often wonder how many gamers got into the Final Fantasy series with VII or X, and then went back and forced themselves to play through IV or VI, so they could join in when their friends started moaning about how it all went downhill from VII onwards, even though they don't actually agree (not that they would admit this).
Classic games *are* important and need to be preserved. Like the old silent movies, they represent the birth of a new medium. However, it's not as if I'd even consider watching a silent movie every day.
Firstly, let's not forget that EVERY game gets mixed reviews - Stuart Campbell thinks its still great, for one.
Secondly, its not nostalgia if you didn't play it first time round.
Thirdly, do people really expect every old game to be good? I merely hope that the ones that were great still are, and that seems a lot to ask sometimes.
But this game was a PS1 title, under 10 years old. Is that even old enough to be 'retro'? Is it considered irredeemably nostalgic to buy a DVD of SE7EN or Heat now?
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Crazy Climber.
...
... it just gets me. Sure, its nostalgia, but you can't buy nostalgia, at any price, so complaining about nostalgia is stupid. Get it where you can, when you can, and live for it!
Maybe its just the memory of that distant summer holiday in Spain, the one with the 3 British tourist girls, a swimming pool full of loose coins from the pockets of drunk tourists, a pool nobody but me could dive to the bottom and retrieve, literally, handfuls and handfuls of change from, and the Crazy Climber cabinet, tucked away in the corner away from the noise and madness of those coin-drop machines (and Pacman)
Whatever it is, Crazy Climber still, to this day, sucks me in. I can't play it for shorter than 10 minutes
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yeah I remember this on Commander Keen too, he would turn and shrug his shoulders at you, check his watch, and even sit down and start reading a book!
More recently, I think it's Rayman 3 (on the PS2 at least) where he starts to use his body as a hacky-sack if you dally too long.
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So, while the quality of the average game produced back-in-the-day may been the same or lower, the quality of game actually played by gamers was higher. Or so I suspect.
Variance is good for consumers, but bad for marketing executives who love consistency. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and people paying the piper can't stop calling for the Lullaby of Mediocrity.
Most of today's games use that , and it's not only conformed to sidescrollers/platforms only.
It's seen alot in First person shooters too, and i admit it's very funny to see 'myself' spin around my shotty once and awhile ;)
Well, the article doesn't present a compelling case or even a decent point, so as to not let this thread go to waste, I suggest you head over to see the hey hey 16k song/animation by the b3ta crew. It's the best tribute to old gaming nostalgia I've ever seen.
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
This person is, get this, getting nostalgic about nostalgia! That's just absurd!
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
Except Gamespy is pushing the 90% envelope pretty hard :P
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At least 90% of everything is crap.
Nintey percent of music, books, video games, movies, televison, and at least 90% of web pages are totaly crap.
Frankly I like the reto game movment but I find the emulator old game combo to be much more fun than the new twist on old games.
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Nostalgic is probably the wrong word, but you can pry FF7 from my cold dead hands. I'm also happy so see the FF1-6 being re-released on the PS1 since I never had a console till the PS1 and missed so many games because of that. Re-releases on new hardware is a great thing.
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No, but I vaguely remember a Jill of the Jungle... maybe that's it. Or maybe I'm remembering it wrong.
Deadly Towers was a great little game. You want to talk about bad games, tho, I got two words for you: "Wisdom Tree"
The great part about Jill of the Jungle was the gameplay action. Remember Epic Pinball anyone? While neither of those games was all that spiffy, for whatever reason the feel of the controls was quite nice. This too is often lost on more modern games.
Then again I played an N64 for the first time in at least 6 years the other day. The whole 3d control system on those things sucks!
Keen would also moon you if you stood in a specific spot in a specific level.
Remember there weren't game cheats on those old titles, most of the games relied on basic hand eye coordination and quick reflexes. In my not so humble opinion this is why Pong takes more talent than say Mortal Kombat or . You can't say that I am overkilling with that special move in pong. With pong I don't have to suffer through a poorly made movie loosely based on the game.
Really depends on what level you playing at. I bet you a top Street fighter player/ mortal combat player (I don't think they exsist anymore) will annihalte you at pong because they also happen to have incredible hand eye coordination on top of their ability to memorize complex button combos.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Would you pick up something written from the dawn of time? I think at some stage that games will reach the same stage as books (I have a dream...). But even so, there are a lot of bad books written 30 years ago.
Something to think about....