Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics

Posted by Zonk on from the we-had-paddles-and-we-liked-it dept.

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'?"

11 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. To play devil's advocate... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:To play devil's advocate... by Alpha27 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Mod parent up. To further show by example, let's look at games developed for the Atari 2600, that took 1-2 developers and less than 3 months, in some cases just a few weeks. Nowadays, it takes 3 to 24 months, sometimes even longer, with the number of people involved starting at 5 to 50 people. There are more pieces in the games, more lines of code, more things you can do. Overall, it's all more. One shouldn't be surprised that we have to deal with patches. But I will say one thing, they should have either spent more time or patched ET for the Atari.

  2. Loss of monopoly to blame? by MagicDude · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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%.

    1. Re:Loss of monopoly to blame? by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe it was Miyamoto that said a slipped release date is temporary, but a bad release is permanent.

      Nintendo seems to understand this.

      As a side note, the article seems to be comparing modern PC games to old console games. My memory of old PC games was that statistical likelyhood of any game you bought actually working was slim, and it would take almost days to find this out. Wrong sound card manufacturer? Game dies. Wrong video card manufacturer? Game dies. 486 Sx instead of Dx? Game dies.

      Compared to PC games of yester year, modern PC games are a bastion of compatibility.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    2. Re:Loss of monopoly to blame? by cloudofstrife · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It isn't the loss of the monopoly that's to blame, it's that the developers don't spend time making there games. Look at Blizzard: every game that they make has been delayed past the initial release date, and yet every one of them has been an incredibly good game that innovates. Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft have all been critically praised.

  3. Causes for stability... by hackwrench · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Causes for stability... by Nasarius · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

      Back in the days of DOS, this was extremely important. Now it's almost irrelevant. Everyone writes their games using DirectX and/or OpenGL, and it's overwhelmingly the responsibility of the libraries and drivers to ensure compatibility, not the game.

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
    2. Re:Causes for stability... by Perseid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, it's the reverse now. Back in the days of DOS you had to code everything manually, which was a terrible hassle, but it also meant that the developers were much more in control of what was going on. If you tested that your game worked with an SB16, it was pretty safe to assume it's going to work on your neighbor's SB16 too.

      Now you have to worry about new patches from Microsoft, new drivers from NVidia, Creative and that obscure Taiwanese company you've never heard of that made the onboard sound for that red motherboard.

      Yes, DirectX/OpenGL shield you from a lot of things, but that's both good and bad. You as a game developer are often at the mercy of the API, OS and driver.

  4. It seems simple to me... by ChowRiit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Is it really that bad? by Phantasmo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --

    The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
  6. Re:360? by Nataku564 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In theory, the new XBOX is designed to take games in a slightly different direction - via programmatically generated art. If you read some of their design articles and such, you see that the reason they went with a triple core processor (besides the shinyness) is so that a parallel thread can run alongside the main game, and programmatically generate scenery and such. So, instead of having roughly a 2:1 ratio of artists to programmers, this would (in theory) allow the programmers to take some base art model and mutate it based on a given algorithm, and thereby cut down the number of artists required to make a game.

    Not that I really think its going to take off...