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Are Older Games More Satisfying?
Kwirl asks: "While the computer and console gaming industry is growing at a remarkable pace, the focus is usually on better graphics as opposed to stronger gameplay and plot development/story arc. I personally have several titles (Sims2, Half-Life2, Doom 3, MSFS2004, Unreal 2004) sitting on my shelf that were amazing games, but just couldn't hold my interest for long enough to really be considered a worthwhile investment. In the last couple of years I had thought that the answer to my gaming needs would come in the form of MMORPG's. I have purchased and played many of them, but all seem to come to a stagnant point where I recognize that only addiction would drive me deeper into the game, and not better gameplay (Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Everquest II). In truth, I have found myself spending more time playing old MUD's (TorilMud, Medievia) again, or even amusing web-based games ( KingdomofLoathing, PimpWar, NeoPets). I am curious to know how many other people here find themselves walking intentionally backwards along the technological timeline of games for your personal expenditure of free time? What games/sites do you feel give you the best return of satisfaction versus time spent playing the game over the long haul?"
Yes
Longer story, my favorite all time game is the old classic Chess. Whether it's getting cremated by my computer or playing and even occasionally beating humans online or offline. The depth and amount it makes me think is just great.
Favorite dedicated computer game you ask? Try Civilization 2. Civ 3 for some reason seemed more fluff and the same amount of meat as Civ 2 (hence making it slower and doing nothing really for gameplay). Though I need to try FreeCiv one day.
In general I just like games that make me think more than anything else. FPS games amongst others are interesting for about 10 minutes then I just walk away.
...in bed
The latest games are good, and have a wow factor the first time I play each of them, but they don't have any staying power. I always seem to go back to my megadrive/SNES games, and ScummVM.
Part of it is probably reminiscing, but mostly I think older games couldn't rely on great graphics, so they had to make up for it in other areas.
In the 90s, it ruined my college GPA as it must have done other people. Everyone once in a while I download it again and play for a few weeks. Then I'll erase it after never getting past the mines and not think about it for a few years.
At least now it only ruins my normal sleep cycle. I work in land development so being awake isn't a major requirement.
There is one advantage for slow development cycles like with Nethack. You can pick it up years later and it'll be pretty much the same.
I just look for decent flash stuff on newgrounds and other flash portals.
I'm a 2D platformer at heart. The extra dimension allowed developers to get lazy, while the games that came from the 2D era had to be creative to set themselves apart from the hundreds of other 2D platformers.
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Yes.
:).
The game needs to have a clever or fun design, who cares how it looks. Try elastomania across or whatever it's name is, it's simple yet kick-ass. Same goes for lemmings and so on
"Puzzle"/skill games like those are games I like, even thought I never think about it, and also Strategy and the regular Quake FPS for relaxing.
Quake was love.
I just gave a talk at a conference which talked briefly about this. One of the my points was that the large companies have no incentive to advertise about older games. Activision makes more money for every copy of DOOM 3 that is sold than they do when someone fires up the original DOOM. (There are also issues with losing the history of the industry, but that's a whole other rant.)
In the end, the newer games get more attention than the older games. Companies spend a lot of money convincing people to keep track of the new games and that technology drives "fun". This is how the companies make more money.
This is actually a very backwards way of thinking of some games. For example, online RPGs (aka MMORPGs) actually get better with age. A game like my own Meridian 59 has had several expansions and tweaks done to the game over the years. These games tend to be very bug-free and well-balanced. The game grows and expands over the years, and the game you can play now is often quite different than the game it originally was.
Finally, sometimes games change. I'm a huge fan of computer RPGs, but the games released these days are hardly RPGs. Instead of being able to create a character (or party), I'm forced to deal with a pre-made character and run him (or rarely, her) through a pre-set adventure. Sometimes I just have to fire up a Wizardry game or the original Final Fantasy as an antidote to the mostly passive games that are released these days. I guess they sell really well, but it's not the type of game I want to play.
I'll post the slides to my conference talk on my professional blog (http://blog.psychochild.org/) when I get the chance.
Some thoughts,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
I'm deeply thankful from the bottom of my heart for emulators of old systems. It's true. I find myself playing the good old games a lot (mostly NES and SNES) more than the newer, shinier games. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor that brings me back time and time again. But it's probably because I share the exact same sentiments as the article. Games are not designed to be fun anymore. They are designed to make companies hoards of money. Those two business models are disgustingly different, and hence so are the games they produce.
I'm sure there are others like me out there who have let their passion take them far enough to the point where they make their own game in the "old-school" style. Of course I doubt anyone is out there making loads of money off of making new games that look like they could have been released in the 90s, but I bet there are quite a few like me who spend their spare time working on their game as a hobby.
On a side-note, I bet you kids these days wouldn't give such "ancient" looking games a second glance, since they've been suckered into the game media hype machine of "better-looking game = better game". *grumble grumble* Rotten kids!!!! Why I remember back in my day, we only had one button on our joypads, and that was damn well enough for us!
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
Many games today have too much flash or pow, though the art or message or depth of the games have improved in some places.
For example: The Marathon trilogy, made by a few guys whose company went on to make another pretty popular game. This game was the "thinking man's" Doom, complete with aliens, serious weapons (many of which have returned in one form or another in Halo), and a deep storyline that enriched play. Marathon was also one of the first (if not THE first) multiplayer FPS game, introducing the concept of the mouse-as-head game control to make for rapid movement.
The coolness of this game is that it's now freeware (not open-source, however). The game originally appeared as an original Mac OS game. That game is available and (currently) playable only a Mac that can run Mac OS 9 or Classic (in Mac OS X). However, Bungie also released the second game, Marathon 2, as a Windows game. So Mac and Windows users can download a special Mac OS X-native or Windows-native application (thanks to enterprising programmers who loved the game and wanted to play on) to play the original code, complete with a few modern graphic pick-me-ups.
Bungie still puts in a few Marathon in-jokes in their games. The first one you'll see is the insignia on Captain Keyes' uniform in Halo, and later, look closely at the Monitor's eyeball. Familar?
I'm still fond of old-school Zelda games on NES, SNES, and Game Boy, too.
Frog blast the vent core!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
- The set of all new games; let's say "from 2002 onwards" for concreteness.
- The set of all games from before 2002.
Now, consider your standard of "goodness". The questioner uses something he calls "satisfying"; there are many possibilities here. This is a meta-argument, so I really do want you to substitute your personal standards.Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?
Is this really surprising?
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
That said, there are some ways modern games are legitimately better. Linear RPGs are one strong example, I think (though non-linear RPGs are, for a variety of reasons, effectively dead). I'm not saying all standards will have this result... just the vast majority of them.
I'd say you need a bit of games that are classic in nature, but are at least reletivly new. For instance, games like Viewtiful Joe, or any of Nippon Ichi's creations bring out a nostalgic rush, and play like their older cousins, but are much, much deeper and/or stylish.
Personally, I get a lot of replay value out of the Metal Gear Solid series. To this date, it retains a very traditional camera placement, with very contraversial or thought provocing themes and fantastic graphics. The games, while holding on to the classic roots of the original MG or MG2: Solid Snake, also blur the lines between game and movie, but in a good way.
If MGS isn't your kind of game, go for the Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest) series. 1 - 4 are for NES, 5 - 6 weren't released here (SNES), but have fan translations, 7 was released on PS1 a few years ago and is one of the few games I've played to actually go over the 100 hour mark, and Dragon Quest 8 should be here by the end of the year for PS2. There's some excellent documentation and forums over at http://www.dragons-den/.
If you want an old game that has real depth, play Starflight. I recently started playing it for the first time, and it's like a good book but without being linear. I've been picking up clues to the story, while exploring planets and trying to stay alive.
The DOS version of Starflight is an 80808 era CGA game that has a lot of things that were way ahead of it's time. Inside of 700K there are hundreds of unique planets, several races and an involved storyline. The planetary details are generated by fractals but remember what you do on them. Almost everything is done in real time; if you stay silent on the comm channel too long, the aliens on the other side can get annoyed or take over the conversation. A lot of descriptions are done by text, so it requires a little imagination, but the atmosphere of trying to survive, alone in a cold unforgiving universe is very strong.
If you want to give Starflight a chance, I suggest using dosbox with the speed set to 1000 cycles. Anything higher will make battles and communication impossible. Be careful, though: saving or even playing the game modifies the main game files (stara.com, starb.com, starflt.com), so make archives of them if you want to save. You can't quit without saving.
Despite a slower pace than many modern games, this game is quite addictive once you get started. I'm going back to it right now... now if I can just find some promethium so I can repair the sheilds...
I hope most people designing games don't have that attitude. I'd much rather buy a game that I know I can enjoy multiple times than one I'll never want to replay. I can play Super Mario 3 over and over again, even though I know where all the stuff is. There are a lot of SNES games that I've played multiple times through - I just have to give myself a few months to forget some of the details.
If I'm only going to play a game once, I'd rather just rent it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
as Scott mc Loud would say 100x better, using symbols in drawing, or graphics allows the brain to treat the data it's presented in a totally different way than if the subject was looking a a detailled drawing. You instantly know when you look at a symbolic graphic that there's more to it that what you see.
Old games used symbols to display things on screen almost of the time, because the machines couldn't do more. But you didn't treat the things displayed on screen as if they were realistic drawings anyway, you knew they were just symbols which meant tree, kobold, or whatever and all the real action had to happen in your imagination.
So everyone in fact had a different, and extremly rich perception of the game.
Constrast that with 3D. The things you're looking at are generally not symbols, they're literally what you, or your character, see. That means your imagination can't interface with what is displayed. Those realistic, tangible objects aren't compatible with it.
That means that if the illusion isn't 100% perfect, the charm will be broken.
Now, you're just consuming a world someone as prepared for you, the same as everyone else. Before, your brain had to build it itself, but it was incomparable.
Ultima V
//e with a green screen. Then one year later I discovered girls and gaming died that day.
Amazing game. One of my all time favorites. Nothing beat playing on my old Apple
"Hunt the Wumpus" never gets old for me.
Best game ever: Star Control 2. It's a hilarious RPG with, in my opinion, fairly high replay value. The best part? It's now abandonware!
This discussion reminds me of Sim City 2 VS Sim City 4. Sure, SC4 had more features, but it lacked the same soul. Pretty graphics can't make up for a sense of humour and fun gameplay. Another example: the decline of the Leisure Suit Larry franchise.
One of my other favourite games is Chopper Commando by Mark Currie. CGA Graphics, but the messages when you died were awesome.
"I'm sorry, but your husband died on his last mission."
"That's okay. He wasn't that good of a husband anyway. What are you doing tonight?"
"He didn't make it on the last mission, sir"
"Alright, you win. Here's your five bucks."
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
For any gamers looking for a fresh (freeware) 2D platformer with an old-school feel, look no further than Cave Story. It's an amazingly designed game by Studio Pixel, which is actually just one guy with a lot of talent. The game plays a lot like Metroid or Mega Man, but it has a unique weapon system. The graphics are very reminiscent of an SNES or DOS-based game, but the pixel art is spectacular and the story is very engrossing. I highly recommend it to anyone, as it's easily the best freeware game I've ever played.
- Neverwinter Nights - I have a PW Server that I have been playing on for years now. Still a ton of fun. I play this several times a week usually.
- Jagged Alliance 2 (and its mods) - Every couple months or so I get heavy into a game of this for a week or so. This game is brilliant! Been playing it regularly for years now.
- DOSBox - While not a game per se, I use this to run X-COM, Master of Orion, Privateer, and Ultima Underworld. If you have DOSBox and a good PC then abandonware sites are like gold mines. I regularly rotate through the above games as the whim strikes me.
- 4X Games - These tend to have lots of replayability. Master of Orion (DOSBox), Space Empires IV, and Galactic Civilizations are some of my personal favorites.
- Bioware and Black Isle games - Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout. These series are great to replay every so often. Fallout 1 is always cool to play through because its a quick game compared to the rest.
- Shooters - I think the most fun ones are Quake, Quake2, Serious Sam, Fortress mods, and Duke Nukem 3D. Others are cool but I keep coming back to these for some mindless blasting. I gotta say I'm burned out on shooters right now though.
There's no doubt that the replayability of most new games has suffered. It seems like the old ones always had randomizers and scenario generators while new ones just trust that they will live on in multiplayer and user-made mods.My hope for the future: Duke Nukem Forever, Jagged Alliance 3, Fallout 3, Quake IV, and Elite 4. They all come from a long lineage of "fun" games and hopefully they will uphold the tradition.
Clickety Click
Are generalizations always wrong?
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You hit the Hydrite with your Herculean!
The Hydrite is flurried by the infernal blast!
Man that game was fun. I contacted the author, one "Dustin Nulf" once and suggested that a Overkill themed Half-Life multiplayer mod would be really awesome. He wrote back and agreed but I gathered he was too busy with other things and he had put OOII behind him. Pity, it was really a nifty game. Once again, your imagination did most of the work.
Clickety Click
While I'll aggree that there is _some_ nostalgia involved, that is definitely not the whole story. Games _are_ becoming more and more "streamlined" and shallow.
1. Games are becoming more and more simplified, I assume for the benefit of the casual gamer. I'm all for cattering to casual gamers, since I like a good intuitive interface myself. But often it means degrading gameplay as well.
E.g., look at a single series of games, from the same company, not even going that far back to be a case of nostalgia. Look at the (d)evolution that happened between Patrician 2 and Port Royale 2. (And if you're nasty, trace it all the way back to Elite, since Patrician 2 to Port Royale 2 are basically Elite on water.)
The economy got over-simplified. Basically while Patrician 2 was _hard_ and actually a trade and economy simulation, in Port Royale 2 you pretty much are guaranteed to make money as long as you don't actively try not to. It also doesn't help that the whole strategy element of leading a _fleet_ in Patrician 2, eventually devolved into a sea arcade game with a single ship in Port Royale 2. (The rest of the ships in your fleet are basically extra lives in that arcade fight.)
2. As an additional reason for that, there's a bunch of stuff that's just hard to implement properly in 3D, or not obvious to the casual player in 3D, so it either disappeared or got the equivalent of a big neon sign saying "use it HERE ==>"
E.g., I can think of old 2D games where you could scale any wall, or (try to) blow up walls, or use a grappling hook on any ledge. Nowadays you have clearly marked "you can climb this one" walls, e.g., in Sudeki. Or if you get a grappling gun, there will be a big marking where you can use it, and typically not too often.
3. There's a lot of stuff that gets streamlined because everything today has to be real-time. Actual strategy tends to be replaced by whack-a-mole clicking without a plan. E.g., whereas a PC RPG used to involve basically squad tactics and use of a whole range of spells (status effects, buffs, etc), nowadays you get action-RPGs where you have to run, hit and block in real time, and if you get any spells they're direct damage.
Compare for example, the old D&D games from SSI, which were practically a turn based tactics game, to, say, Demon Stone. Right. Nothing says "D&D" like having to do attack combos, and all spells being nothing more than a weapon upgrade for the mage.
4. Variety _is_ shrinking. Games tend to be easily dividable in narrow "genres" lately, often meaning a clone of other games that sold well. While it doesn't necessarily say "new games are bad", playing an exact clone of a game I've already bought before, does somewhat reduce my satisfaction.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The son of Civ II: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri... I can't keep away. The graphics are great, the gameplay even better. , customizable units, unobtrusive mood music you don't mind leaving on... See, I feel like playing it right now!
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Master of Magic 2!
*pokes*. I'm not trying to start a flamewar here. These are just my observations and how they relate to the parent's question.
Most console(Xbox/PS/etc) carry mostly instant-fun (almost arcade-like) games. Most of those games have a short *wow!* effect. You usually play those games for a couple or days or even hours before doing anything else. Of course there are some exceptions, but, it's what most people generally expect from a console; that you can sit down and just have fun for an hour or so, sometimes with your friends.
PC-games are more of the long-lasting kind of fun. The fun is spread out over a couple of weeks, sometimes even months. Cities need to grow, characters need to be leveled, progress needs to be made.
At least, that's how it used to be (think of all those old PC games you played for ages!).
Something has changed.. Gameplay has become less important, and Graphics and all those other 'goodies' such as real-time physics simulation have become more and more important, why? Who knows! It probably sells better in the first few months.
Also, more and more and more games are being developed in a "multi-platform" way; ie, they make the same game for PC/Xbox/PS2. So what? That's only good! More joy for everyone! Well, is it? Take a look at the game Deus Ex , that's one excellent game. Now, its successor, Deus Ex: Invisible War was a multi-platform game and it all went wrong. Why? Because while Deus-Ex was a typical long-term-fun PC-Game, the sequel was a typical instant-fun short-term game; that's what its design elements reflected. Now, this is an extreme case, but I believe that more and more games are becoming the 'instant-fun short-term' kind of games for various reasons; multi-platform, better sales, more focus on graphics.
It's a shame really, but there's still hope. I'm pretty sure that this is just the zeitgeist of gaming, and it probably acts a bit like a sinus-wave, y'know? In a couple of years there might be more long-term fun-games than the instant-fun ones, it'll reach the top and then it makes way for short-term instant-fun arcade-like games, once again.
One studio that holds my interests in particularly is Lionhead Studios . Black & White II seems like a typical PC-game, and hopefully its not as bug-riddled as its predecessor. Also, they also seem to try and change the definitions of gaming, or at least experiment in its boundaries, take a look at The Room (Scroll down to "Gameplay Moves Forward into the 21st Century" and click the Register button, register or fill in any dummy info and watch the video, skip through to the "The Room" part).
So there's hope, but right now, I'd say yes; old games are definatly more satisfying. But right now, you got to know where to look and what to look for. May I recommend Psychonauts? An excellent multi-platform adventure game for all ages?
Go. And computers are a very long way off from beating humans in this one.
Direct away from face when opening.
i understand what you mean when you say some new games rather hit the shelf after - or even before - completion instead of hanging around your hard drive.
:)
there are a few reasons behind that.
first reason - times change. back in the old days, the beatles were great. Don't take me wrong, they're great performers, but if they were released now, they'd be dilluted into all that's going on nowadays. there are just too many bands, too many genres, too many releases everyday just for you to be able to really focus on and enjoy a few specific bands. It's the same with games today! How many FPS are out there? How many RPGs? How many come out every week? How many are available for you to borrow from friends, rent, or simply download? One thing i've learned from dealing with kids. You give them 1 game a month and they'll enjoy them as you hand them away. But if you give them a pack of ten games, they'll stick to one or two and they won't even try out the others... Plus, they won't enjoy the games as much, because they'll be eager to play the others.
Plus... we are more trained in the subject of games. When Half Life came out, it wasn't an EASY game. You had to play it, to improve your hand-eye coordination. well, now you already have trained, so similar games seem rather easy compared to HL1 or the like. Hell, even HL2 turned out to be fairly simple to overcome and finish. People want MORE! They are more demanding, they want MORE!
There is, however, a thin line between realism/how difficult a game is and FUN. If the game's too real it might be too difficult or worse, NO FUN at all. Take an FPS for instance. You want it real, alright, but do you want it so real as if you fall from a ledge and brake your foot you'll have to be limping across the map? No instant-healing medical kits can save you! Would that be "fun"? Would it sell?
So, some people are turning to the old games, alright. Keeping it simple. Most of them are lead to those games by nostalgy. They HAD fun with that game, they might as well give it a try again. Hell, i'm doing it with Jedi Academy and i do it quite often enough with Jagged Alliance 2.
Where will this end? It's all in the software developers' hands. We can't take many games like HL2. Of course the die-hard fans love it, I DO... but it always seem like there's something missing in that game and otherrs of the like lately...
let's wait and play
This side up
Frankly, the biggest factor for me concerning how fun a game is are my friends. Am I playing with them? Are they sitting next to me, or are we playing online miles away? There is a reason LAN parties rock. Whatever networked game you play, as long as your friends play it, will be the best for a LAN party. Whether it is Halo 2, Starcraft, Counterstrike, or even a game that's kinda bad, it doesn't matter. What matters is having fun with your friends, making jokes, and generally just having fun. Granted, if you don't have a set of friends for this sort of thing you have to simply play something meant for only one player. And the fact is that there are more old games then there are new ones, and so there will always be more good old games then there are good new games, and if you look at old games, only the good ones remain to have a name. But still, I prefer LAN parties.
I still actively play a lot of the text based games myself. Be it MUD, MUSH, MUSE, or any other version of the MU* base, there is something for just about any subject you can think of. If it's a geeky genre, you can bet on finding at least 10 or more MU* catering to that.
These games have to attract people solely on gameplay, content, and quality of characters/players in their little world. You'll also find that most of these places ask for no money at all, and are often paid for entirely by the owner. A few have made the leap to pay for play, but those are rare compared to the free ones. Finding them is pretty easy, just look for any MU* listing out there.
http://maelstrom.areth.org/mud/ is a small list of active places that even includes 'talker' based chats rooms, while http://www.mudconnector.com/ is one of the larger ones and even lists pay for play. If you want to see an interesting MUD that is a mix of a few of the more geekier genres in one, I recommend http://www.areth.org/ as something you don't find everywhere else.