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New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics
RealDSmooth writes "Codemonkey over at 2old2play.com just posted an article on the evolution of gaming, and how new technology like the XBox 360 and the PS3 stack up against the classics that got us where we are today. It's a nice look at what has changed over the years, and what has (thankfully) stayed the same." From the article: "It is expected with any new game that hits the market that a patch may exist for that game before you ever put it into your PC or console. Why? Has the market degraded to such buggy software that we have to download a few megabytes of game fixes before it's even usable? How many patches did we have to get with Super Mario Brothers or Zelda? How many crashes did these games have besides your typical game lock up due to dust on your cartridge? Were games more solid 'back in the day'?"
It's reasonable to say that new games take more resources to develop than older games. Unless we want to see higher and higher prices, cost savings must be made. Given that downloading a multi-megabyte patch is much more reasonable now than it was, it seems like an efficient trade-off. Not that I agree the trade-off should be made, but it's an obvious choice if you are going to cut corners.
Could this be a result of Nintendo's loss of monopoly on the gaming market? Back when Big N was the only dominant force in the video game market, they could probably take their time in developing solid and uncrashable games. As the summary points out, how many times did Zelda or Super Mario crash or Punch Out crash? These days though, there's always the push to release games faster and faster at an unprecidented level of graphical and technical sophistication to beat out not only competing systems, but other 3rd party providers. Just recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!" but I'm guessing that it'll have impecable programming and few if any technical errors. It seems like the creedo these days is that it's better to release more games at 90% rather than fewer games at 100%.
but larger, yes.
Games were small and simple then-- they are large and complex now, bugs will be easier to find in a large program.
DYWYPI?
"new technology"
360?
Was that supposed to be a joke by the submitter?
The ability to target a single platform reduces bugs. Also, the more complex the platform is, the harder it is to be certain that your program takes into account all the idiosyncracies it may encounter. Furthermore, input devices have gotten more complicated.
Guess the guy's never played Devil may cry has he? He acts like all games now must be huge, dialog filled and super complex, yet if he picked up Devil may cry for five minutes he'd see that games today can get by without being "super realistic" and just be a damn good game.
He some how acts like because a game has a full team of developers it's fine to release a buggy game. It's more important to make stuff "look real" than make a damn good playing exprience. Yet I can think of countless games which are still damn fine from several eras, where as "flashy" games based on the latest fad (WWII-FPS and graphical whores) which just don't stand up any more (check out PSX games all based on graphics, you'll laugh till you're sick).
The guy needs to look beyond his nose (or his agenda as it maybe), to see that games can ship with little or no bugs if people want to do it.
I like muppets.
A more complex game is going to have more chances to go wrong.
Modern games have more 3D models, scripted sequences, dynamic rendered doodahs etc etc. Many older games would easily fit on 2MB of space, moderns games you're lucky if it's under 4GB. With so much extra information, so many extra possibilities, bugtesting is far harder - the code itself can't be checked for bugs, but instead playtesting is mainly relied on to find them. Thus, many bugs will be missed, and those that are missed will require more "space" to fix, as the language describing whatever's wrong will be longer, and thus more will be needed to replace it.
A bit of an oversimplified way of explaining it, possibly, but getting across what matters.
This may be a difference in perception, as I may have payed more attention to such an opinion because I share it, and that I would tend to disregard an opposing view. It also may have been a matter of the choice of communities that I monitored.
Of course, I did see plenty of "Nintendo is teh suck" type opinions, but those seemed to be from people with a prior bias against Nintendo, and didn't really care about a Zelda release other than as an opportunity to engage in a flame war.
-- $SIGNATURE
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy." They're certainly not any more buggy than the original Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda, and they're far more complex.
I've only seen one Nintendo game crash (Metroid Prime), and it's only happened once to me in hours and hours of play.
I haven't played a PC game in the last few years that wasn't patched within a week of release, but most console games are definitely very playable out of the box.
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Next question?
I think one of the reasons that older games are more 'refined' could be due to the fact that the industry was much smaller then and millions of dollars were not riding on whether or not your compile completed that night.
Back in the days of the Atari 2600, games were often made by one guy in a basement writing assembly code for small, fledgling companies that did not stuff 10 million dollars into the development of Combat.
I cite the example of The Sims Online. Never played it myself, but I heard horror stories. A lot of the things that were advertised on the box were disabled so they could be finished later in a patch. This apparently would have been a decent game is EA had left well enough alone, but the pressure from the suits, who DID put millions of dollars into the game, forced it to come out early and unfinished.
i am so bold, i suggest that the quality of gameplay and number of bugs are both inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on hype and advertising.
or, maybe they should advertise AFTER the game is COMPLETE, and not just for any given value of complete.
---- I was woken up this morning by a face full of fur. Damn cat thought my head made a good pillow.
The original SMB had lots of bugs. You could walk through walls, glitch the warp pipe to take you to world " -1", pass through the left side of the screen to the right using a vine, get trapped and not be able to move on a vine, trick the game into thinking that you were shrunk by getting hit and touching the axe at the same time, using the previous glitch to become little fire Mario, beating the castle and dying at the same time, sliding around by firing and jumping at the same time, and locking up the game by getting more than 255 extra lives.
You're right, new games have some bugs but SMB had quite a few of its own.
... run NetHack. I mean, what other game do you need? All this new-fangled stuff, colors, sound. Good grief.
Old software wasn't any less buggy than their modern counterparts, but in the good old days we had to accept the bugs and learn to live with them, and even try to work them to our advantage. We had to get up early in the morning to start the tape player if we wanted to play the game during the afternoon, but they were often so difficult we rarely got beyond the first screen. The bugs were also spectuclar, often culminating in bosses not being possible to kill, to sprites getting stuck and tapes that demagnetized. Consoles. Eh, we never touched them. Good times.
Super Mario Bros was not a bug free game. I know of three bugs...
1. Lil Spits. While big and fighting Bowser, land on the hammer and be touched by Bowser at the same time. You will complete the level and go down to small size, but the game will be confused and still think you're big. On the next level, hit a mushroom block. It will put out a fire flower (since the game thinks you're big). Grab the fire flower. Now you're still little, but when you hit b, you throw a fireball.
2. The Fabled Minus World. At the pipe at the end of level 2 - 2, stand on the edge of the pipe facing left. Duck, jump up, and move back towards the wall. If you do it exactly right, you will go through the wall, and come out the other side in the warp zone. Immediately go through the first pipe (before the numbers appear). You will be warped to world - 1, which is a copy of world 2 - 3, except that it never ends. The end pipe for the level will take you back to the beginning of the level.
3. Get Stuck. At the end of level 2 - 3, there is a space above the exit pipe. Duck and swim into it. Then let go of the down button. You will get stuck in the wall. There's no way to get out.
All that being said, these bugs didn't interfere with normal gameplay, as usually the only way they showed up was if you were trying to show them to somebody. And even then, they weren't easy to trigger. The third one is the easiest. The other two are a little tricky to pull off.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Not that it excuses poor QA, but the gaming environment now is much different than the gaming envirionment "back then."
How many possible configurations can a PC gaming rig have? How much more complicated are the games themselves, and the process of making them?
And fault... Who's fault is it if a game crashes with certain video cards because of a buggy driver? Is the game maker really responsible for ensuring that every possible system that meets their minimum specs can run the game?
With consoles, the games are less buggy because they have 1 target to hit. There are bugs (seemingly more now than back then) but there are also more games.
There are more automobile related fatalities now than there were in 1930. Is this because automobiles have become less safe, or is it because we have more of them, being operated in all kinds of environments, being used by a broader scope of drivers?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
How about Duke Nukem 3D?
It's not from the 16-bit era, but my all-time favorite game is Deus Ex. Modern shooters can't even hold a candle to its story and gameplay.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
... the games are also orders of magnitude more complex? Complex software having bugs, who would have thought?
There were innumerable ways to get all kinds of wierdness to happen in the old NES and SNES games. I never owned a Genesis, but I can't imagine there aren't tons of them.
I knew several people who used to glitch hunt back in the day. It was a way to hack the games without really being able to hack them per se. Figuring out all the flaws. A quick search for such gave me http://kontek.net/davidwonn/nes.html which is a glitch listing site for NES games, and I'm sure there are far more like it.
The difference between the glitches of old and the bugs of today is that for the most part, the old time glitches didn't interrupt normal gameplay. If you never tried whatever the particular arcane button combination was at the exact time you needed to do it, you never saw it. Sometimes you wanted to, like the invincibility glitch in Mega Man 3, because it made the game easier or made everything all wierd colors or something. These days bugs tend to make games almost impossible to play, or damage your computer. See Deus Ex 2 for Xbox (would BSOD the console, always amusing) and Pool of Radiance 2 for PC (the infamous hard drive erasing bug).
Of course, there were plenty of shoddily designed games back in those days where the bugs were so awful that it made the games near unplayable, but they generally game from fly by night operators in the first place. Look around the old NES game reviews in GameFAQs and you'll see a ton of prime offenders.
One of my favourites is the bug in Bomberman. If you planted a bomb on your square, and held down the button without moving, it would turn your character into a continuously exploding square. Of course, the minute you let go of the button you would die ... but it was still fun to walk around as a blazing inferno.
Since small programs do very little, a bug will be more noticable because, chances are, the buggy code will be executed quite often (the program has little else to do). This makes finding, and fixing, bugs before publication a lot easier.
In large programs, there are a lot of chances for rare conditions . It is nearly impossible to recreate each of these conditions in a reasonable time and therefore it is only logical that not all bugs will be found before publication.
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All I know is that no-one has even come close to creating a better football (soccer) game than Sensible Soccer.
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