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The Maturation of Video Games
1up.com is running a piece examining how video games have matured since the early days. The article explores what the social context of gaming has been, from Hunt the Wumpus to 'Hot Coffee'. From the article: "The maturation of games might be viewed more accurately as a climb into a unified grace. By the time console gamers were wowed by Sonic The Hedgehog's 64-colour world, computer gamers were already familiar with zooming across galaxies, building cities and landing virtual planes. The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom."
For a long time, PCs were far more powerful than consoles
They still are, just not with such huge differences. This might change however when the 360/PS3 comes out, but PC's will catch up. Besides PC's have keyboards and mice.
Maybe it's just me but...
The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom."
Think that could be why they couldn't do it? Just an off guess...
My UID is prime... is yours?
'The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom.' http://www.gamespot.com/snes/action/doom/index.htm l?q=doom
As everyone knows, science fiction from long ago fuelled many scientists desire to enter the field. Science continues to break new frontiers. I was in fourth grade when NES came out but 7 years old when I got my TRS-80 and wrote my own games. The kids who played games back then undoubtably made their way into the business and continue to push the envelope today.
erin go bragh!
http://store.videogametrader.com/010086845068.html
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
...if the topic is really the maturation of video games! I think the Fat Man said it best:
"When it comes to comparing video games to all the other fine arts, we're about as far along as Beowulf. We can do killing, slaying, maiming, and slaughtering. That's about it."
(I am paraphrasing, my memory is not that good)
I'm not saying there has been ZERO progress, or that there aren't some really great games out there(Sands of Time, RE4, Smash Bros), but it is always good to be careful about celebrating things that haven't really happened yet!
Zonk, you sure you don't work for 1up.com or have some backend deal to send traffic their way?
... but some people haven't.
I really doubt the advantage of the 486's and 386's over the gaming consoles. When i was 18 i worked at a computerstore where we sold both consoles likes the SNES, Megadrive and PC's like 386 SX/DX's and early 486's (the SX-20 and DX-something). Of course i neglected customers to play games on both platformtypes. We used to drool over the multilayered parallax scrolling of SNES and Megadrive games whereas the PC's of those days were hardly capable of doing a smooth scroller with only one layer. ;-)
Okay, there were exceptions like the brilliant Xenon-2 port for the PC by the Bitmap Brother, Broderbund's amazingly fluent Prince of Persia character animations and some 'cracktro's' done by the Humble Guys et cetera. But on the most part the consoles kicked the PC's butt when taking into account games like UN Squadron and so on.
Maybe that's the reason why we all sought refuge in our Atari ST's and Amiga's
I can understand and appreciate what the author is trying to do here, but to be completely honest, I don't see that much development and maturity, or at least nothing noteworthy. Sure, the consoles of today are more mathematically powerful than they were, but it's not that big of a deal... Tekken loads up 3d models and texture maps which then get pushed down a pipe and into a drawable, playable characters. The NES wasn't exactly a tin can and string by comparison: Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu did animation of fighting moves for up to four completely different characters at once by switching several different pages of ROM directly off the cart, into and out of the video address space.
The sad part about the article is that it doesn't quite realize how bad and stale the game industry is these days. Dominated by publishers that are so addicted to the big money that comes from a market of $50-a-pop games that they believe games are all about finding the right market and developing a genre game geared to it, preferably with a promotional movie tie-in.
If that's industry maturity, you can have it back.
Well, what do you want for a lousy $200?
Well, gee, yet another thread along the lines of "but gaming platform X is better than platform Y, because its hardware is better".
Hello? Aren't we missing something? Like, you know, the _games_? Because it seems to me like that's the only reason to own a gaming rig in the first place: to play the games.
Until you can tell me that you're playing directly with the shader pipelines, instead of with a game that uses those... sorry, I'll concentrate on what games I can play on it, instead of the bogus "mine has more MHz than yours" willy-waving.
Want to know why I bought a console, "my PC has more MHz" willy-waving be damned? Well, for the games. Games such as:
- Gran Turismo, which was a better racing game than any racing game that ran on a PC
- Fighting games, which pretty much _disappeared_ on the PC after Mortal Kombat
- Jade Empire and Fable alone were worth the price of an XBox, and more
- Japanese RPGs, including not just Square ones, but also some very original ones like Valkyrie Profile and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Those two alone would make the price of a Playstation worth every cent I've paid for it
- Lightgun games. Yeah, the PC has keyboard and mouse. Wake me up when I can plug a lighgun in and play a House Of The Dead or Time Crisis game the way it was meant to be played.
Etc.
In a nutshell, it's all about the games. If a platform has games I want to play, I'll go buy that platform and play those games. It's that simple.
I don't care which has the higher MHz or bogus benchmark scores. I don't play 3DMark, I play _games_.
I have a top end Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, a 7800 GTX, and a WD Raptor in my current PC, but trust me, looking at 3DMark still gets old after one 10 minute run. I'll play a game instead to keep myself entertained.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And this is different from how it's always been... how, precisely? The gaming industry has ALWAYS been a handful of gems plus shedloads of dross. Atari E.T. anyone? Why, I do believe that was even a movie license!
The thing is, there's a lot more games around today, and the good ones really are better. Sorry, but your Morrowinds really are better RPGs in every respect than Ultima 1 was, for example. And if you think that the only difference between Half-Life 2 and 3D Monster Maze is the presence of texture maps in the former, I suggest you take another look.
And yet those lousy $200 often kept me entertained better and longer than the many thousand I've dumped into keeping my PC bleeding edge. My current graphics card alone, it's a 7800 GTX, would pay for two consoles.
Yet on consoles I've not only found at least as many games worth playing, but also:
1. Games are actually tested and work. I don't have to wait for a month to download a patch, I don't get game bugs blamed on my hardware or drivers, etc. (True story: Victoria 2, German version, threw a script _syntax_ error right at the start of the main campaign. As released, it couldn't work on _any_ hardware.)
2. There are no hardware drivers to update, ever. I don't have to care if ATI's detonators 5.8 work better or worse with my game than the 5.7, or which version of NVidia's detonators screwed up which settings, or if I need a patch for the Creative drivers, etc. Again, games just work as is.
3. The game is optimized for that hardware. Read some console game reviews sites. Some need to mention if a game ever drops to 30 fps instead of a clean 60 fps. No upgrade race ever needed, no watching the game crawl on hardware that matches the _recommended_ configuration, and no getting insulted by clueless fanboys if you dare complain about it.
So, hey, if someone's giving me all that "for a lousy $200", kudos to them. Just the peace of mind that I can take any game home, pop it in, and watch it run flawlessly right _now_ (as opposed to maybe next month, if they don't screw up again in the patch)... personally I'd say that's worth every single cent in those $200 and more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom.
Except that's not true. Doom was ported to at least one 16-bit console, the SNES. It had its quirks, but it was undeniably Doom, and it was certainly a 16-bit console.
People throw around the word "mature" in console gaming more than they do "hardcore gamer" now. I dont think people understand what either mean.
Just because GTA has explicit sex scenes, graphic violence, and copious swearing doesnt make it at all "mature". Hell, most of the crap out there is just plain juvenile. For some reason, people equate GTA and other games of the same nature to equal mature, while games such as Mario are kiddy.
I think the real "mature gamer" is the one that doesnt give a shit about the "image" of the game theyre playing, so long as they have fun, be they a 13-year old or a 50-year old.
Besides, someone else already pointed out it was ported to the 1.xMhz SNES cpu (with help of the mode-7 hardware).
Forget Mode-7, the SNES version of Doom had a SuperFX chip in it. For those who don't already know, the SuperFX is a dedicated 3D chip that was used in games like Starfox to generate 3D graphics. So even though you can get a SNES version of Doom, it's not really a stock SNES in the strictest sense.
Oh, and the SNES's CPU (a 68C618) actually runs at 3.58 MHz. When the original article refers to a 16-bit system running at 7 MHz, they're most likely referring to the Genesis rather than the SNES (The 68000 in the Genesis actually runs at 7.67 MHz, but I've split enough hairs in this post already).
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
"Game journalists" tend not to know game history. If a game wasn't popular and wasn't released 5 years ago, then it didn't exist. Admittedly, this isn't entirely their fault: game history tends to be a self-taught, self-researched field and many (game and non-game) journalists seem to have the critical thinking and research skills of a rock.
Game designers/programmers are, admittedly, not much more informed. Again, the same problem exists -- game history is a self-taught, self-researched field and if you are using your professional time to learn about cutting-edge systems and video coding techniques, you don't have much time to spend on research.
Unfortunately, without a good grasp of what video games did in the past, a lot of good game ideas/techniques are lost. Games end up like the latest Hollywood block bluster -- bland, predictable, and stuck in one or two genre ruts.
Whoa. I read the article and saw Zonk and something about the history of videogames and assumed it was a dupe.
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Hmm, what does that remind me of? Oh yes, Sword of Vermillion or any of a dozen other RPGs from the age of sidescrollers:
Sword of Vermillion
Perhaps he's referring to the cheesy cut scenes?
Yes, everything moved so realistically in early 3-D fighting games like, say, big title Battle Arena Toshinden for the Playstation:Battle Arena Toshinden
Yes that was so much better and more mature than say, Eternal Champions or Street Fighter II.
I'm going to ignore his comments that cute, furry mascot characters are better when given a gritty edge and guns. (I exempt Conker, but because Conker was supposed to be a joke against the hypercute furry animal games. If they are all like that, then it isn't a joke anymore... or maybe it is, but a joke on the industry.)
Oh, but I remember why I didn't get the 3D version of Earthworm Jim the sadly departed Conker of the 16 Bit era. It was because they tried to change it into a "3D" game and the result sucked!
... By the time console gamers were wowed by Sonic The Hedgehog's 64-colour world, computer gamers were already familiar with zooming across galaxies, building cities and landing virtual planes. The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom.
The other side of the coin is that computers weren't able to replicate a great platformer like Sonic for a long time after Doom.
Actually, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, is one of the best games I have ever played.... and it was released in 1985.
Part of my fondness for the game came from learning that to add a member to your party from the towns, you actually had to embody the virtues that the people of that town respect.... To get Iolo the Bard to join your crew, you must be compassionate. Generally, this means don't attack harmless creatures just to gain experience, run from bad guys that aren't really evil, and give the beggars some pocket change when they ask for it.
The SNES is a 65C816, not a 68C618 (which does not exist!).
The SNES follows a design principle similar to the Amiga's. I find it interesting that the SNES had better sound technology onboard than any computer would for a very long time. The GUS was great, but it wasn't standard; most people had a terrible SB16, whose FM synth was as bad as the Genesis' Z80 sound!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
But what does it mean??
Wake me up when I can plug a lighgun in and play a House Of The Dead or Time Crisis game the way it was meant to be played.
Try playing one of those on an LCD TV or even a CRT that upsamples everything to progressive (480i to 480p), and see what breaks.
A problem with consoles is that because of the licensing system, you tend to get more "sure bets" from established developers and fewer quirky experimental titles (Katamari Damacy notwithstanding).
You can now play Hunt The Wumpus, the famous UNIX game on Google Talk! Just follow my instructions here.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
I agree, why pay 2000 pounds for a PC with only Nibbles and DOOM.
When an Amiga with its dedicated blitter chipset costs only 400 pounds, with a huge library of games, plus we had Doom clones too!
Sorry people who think Hot Coffee is "new" It's not.
:)
Anyone who played old games and had access to decent source can name a little game called Softcore... It's a Porn Text Adventure. Those who REALLY know, know that it later became a little game called Leisure Suit Larry. Those who know what LSL was about, will enjoy that fact.
There was much more sexually orriented then anything in the mainstream in the last 5 years, the latest LSL game actually is so freaking lame compared to the originals.
There was many more pure sex games back there, the fact that people JUST realized that there sex in games, and game makers have those thoughts don't make it so that these games haven't been here ever since. The fact they just weren't as mainstream is. I mean hell they didn't even PUT this code in the actual game, it was unused, and people are blowing it out of proportion.
For every hundred or so games of any type, there's probably at least one or two sexual orriented games, there's a market for anything. In fact in japan there's a whole lineage of dating sims, the purpose is of course to get your "love" interest into bed with very sexy results. However that's more lust then love but who knows.
The fact is simply that people who have no idea where the past of games are, need to realize that GTA:SA isn't the first in ANY area. It's a very fine game, and a great fun, and I still play it on the PS2, but it didn't invent sex in games, we've had that since the begining of the easy to use programming languages and well done text parsers.