Whippersnappers Bad-Mouth Old Games

1up.com has posted the second in an article series called "Child's Play", where they invite youngsters to experience the joys of classic gaming to hilarious effect. From the (sob) article: "Bobby: After you beat the Death Star level, there should be a snow level, then a small speeder bike level. They should make a Matrix game in the theme of Star Wars. So then you take out your sword and run up to a guy and go, "Chiiing!" And after you saw through his head, you fly inside your X-wing."

Comments

Re:Like the first one...

[magnwa]

I referee soccer. I deal with 11 year olds and younger and older all the time. Don't doubt them. They're a lot smarter than they ever let on. I've had discussions in game with a few of them and they brought up soccer stars of old, plays that are legendary but fifty years old, and history of games and rules that a lot of advanced referees in my area don't know.

11 year olds can be EXTREMELY intelligent, so long as they've not been told to shut up all their life.

This does not bode well for the current generation

[Jailbrekr]

Back in the bronze and silver age of arcade games, we did not have the technology to create "realistic" games, so we made fun games where ones imagination was required. This level of abstraction made games fun and entertaining without the (argueably) negative societal consequences.

Today, kids engage in auto thefts, mass murder, and first person real time role playing where they can be anyone they choose to be (be it good or evil). There is no longer any need to exercise ones imagination, as that has been replaced by stunning graphics which is slowly approaching a level of realism which will make any differentiation between the real world and the arcade world difficult.

That is why there will always be a special place in my heart for the classics. They encouraged my sense of imagination. Todays games lack that.

We still had vivid images

[popo]

Hell I can describe *exactly* what locations in Zork I, II, III, StarCross, PlanetFall and Enchanter looked like. I remember vividly what color the sky was, what the walls looked like, paintings on the wall, weird machinery, smells, music playing, etc.

I also played the hell out of Wolf3D the day the shareware was released. (We downloaded from BBS's in those days). But I can't say I have the same vivid memories from that game. I can't say I have any sort of emotional attachment to that world at all.

Which makes me wonder if nostalgia will even exist for current games. *Is* there a level of emotional attachment to worlds / characters / situations in today's games? There have been very few games since then that have blown me away on a story / personal imagination level. ("The Dig" from LucasArts was totally underrated on that level).

Looking back on it, *all* of my favorite games have one unifying factor. The graphics weren't really that important. I challenge anyone to name a greater single player RPG than Baldur's Gate II. (Ok mayble Planescape). Those graphics were pretty lame even whent the game was released.

The way I see it, we're doing a lot of things with graphics today _because we can_. We're going through a sort of adolescent flexing of muscles in the gaming industry. There's been so much change in the technical department, that graphics have caught everyone's attention. And we all know where they're going: They're going to look like films. Not just a little bit, they're going to look *exactly* like films. And then we know where they're going to go next: They're going to go Helmet VR. And then when we're all done thumping our chests and graphically beating the pants off last month's graphical wonderkind -- we can get back to writing compelling fiction.

Not to say that its not happening today. Half Life II is currently my happy place. But that's one title in a sea of 3D trash that no one will ever have any emotional attachment to at all.

My two cents.

Popo

Learning history from games

[Theseus192]

If your child's video games aren't teaching them valuable lessons about World History who is?

Actually, I learned a lot of interesting history from some old Microprose PC games. Sid Meier's Pirates! (original version), Colonization, and Darklands were all historically accurate and taught me lots of anecdotal stuff about world history that was never mentioned in school, like for instance the first permanent European colony in the New World was not on the mainland but in Cuba if I recall (Colonization), or that medieval alchemists were not just looking for ways to turn lead into gold, they were looking to cure disease and prolong life (Darklands).

Admittedly I am the kind of person who took an interest in this stuff and read further, but computer games did contain a lot of history that was just ignored or glossed over in school. I see no reason why even today's plot-light, graphics-heavy games can't incorporate accurate historical settings.

Just history repeating itself

[WebCowboy]

I stopped buying console games after the N64 introduced a new wave of medocrity in gaming. With a few exceptions from Nintento direct, almost all the third-party games were crap.

You sound almost like you time-warped in from about 20 years ago, or you took a quote from the era and replaced "Atari" and "2600" or "5200" and replaced them with "Nintendo" and "N64". Anyone else remember that era?

I remember getting my Atari at the height of the craze (1982 or so?) and there were some awesome games (Yar's Revenge, Missile Command, Circus Atari, almost everything from Activision--amazes me what those wizards could do with 4k of address space and only enough RAM to hold your scores, lives and *ONE SCANLINE* of screen data). I also remember the side-effect of the craze--by Christmas 1982 it was already happening. Everyone was caching in on the craze. I clearly remember ads in Archie comics touting crappy games featuring that walking Koolaid pitcher, Bubblicious gum and Quaker Oats (WTF!? yes I'm serious).

Each and every one of these junk games was some kind of poorly executed variation on the adventure /combat/pacman/shooter themes. A couple years of that made people take a serious look at the cheap home computers that were flooding out and the bottom fell out of the console market--All the main console makers (Atari, Coleco, Mattel) even lost focus and interest and turned towards making computers or console-to-computer expanders. The thought was that if that is all games had to offer that the programmability and more "serious" apps gave PCs more educational and productivity appeal.

Consoles didn't die though--a couple years later the NES took the world by storm. Technically it was only a modest step upward from what Atari and Coleco had offered to that point (still had a CPU based on 1970s tech) but it had excellent marketing and ORIGINAL GAMES--at least for awhile (side-scrolling platforms were nearly nonexistent on home systems to that point, much less ones as well executed as Super Mario).

Things are a BIT different now, since todays console owners tend to already have PCs (so computers aren't likely to steal marketshare from consoles). The crucial thing is that we're at a peak now creatively and the economic curve is following (game sales were brisk this record-setting year). There will be a saturation point where more people will be like you and say "I'm tired of the n-teenth sequel that is the same game except for more detailed graphics". That'll probably give the industry the kick-in-the-butt it needs.

At any rate did anyone else notice a new phenomenon this year? It seems to be the start of a retro-craze: Atari has re-released the 7800 with the best of the 2600 and 7800 games built right in, and there was a big pile of "system-in-a-controller" units out there (from legitimate retro systems to 100-in-1 bootleg NES to the Spongebob Joystick with original games). It's bigger than just Jeri's "64 in a stick" toy for nostalgic geeks too--those bootleg units at the mall kiosks got a lot of attention from teens who weren't even born when the NES came out. I see that as an early indicator that the "same old new thing" is losing its appeal.

Re:Perhaps they should have played Wolf3D!

[Dr. Spork]

I'm sorry, but I read the whole thing and I thought that overall, those 11-year-olds had more articulate observations to make than most of the stuff posted on Slashdot, including the parent post.