Gaming Now and 20 Years Ago

Anonymous Coward writes "A cool comparison of video games from the same genre, the only difference is about 20 years of technical development. The Bard's tale vs World of Warcraft is really funny."

Comments

rogue

[Jetson]

It's amazing how time flies. In 1986 I thought rogue was a huge improvement over hack....

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

In some ways, the older games are more entertaining because they leave more to the imagination. Our imaginations can be more entertaining than any kind of advanced graphics, despite how advanced they are; and even on a subconscious level. That's why games like Mario and similar side-scrollers will never get old, even when compared with modern games with graphical marvels.

Re:rogue

[hoover]

I wish I had some mod points right now. Your argument is exactly the reason why I still prefer nethack over today's role playing games: even the most stunning graphics will get repetitive after a while, while there's always something new to be discovered in NetHack. Nothing beats having two Baby Dragons flying from your pack and reading this message: "it says something like "daddy" ;)

cheers, uwe

Re:rogue

[Sique]

In the end Diablo and Diablo II are just fancy GUIs for Nethack.

Re:rogue

[jeremyp]

Rogue came first.

Re:rogue

[DrSkwid]

Imagination rules, that's why no-one uses porn

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternate spin: older games seem more entertaining because we remember them as more fun than they actually were. If you think those games left a lot of room for imagination, then not having played them for 20 years you could do some serious dreaming.

Re:rogue

[hey!]

Imagination rules, that's why no-one uses porn

You know that theory that says people have a "set point" for fat? I think there's a set point for titillation.

A Victorian pervert probably got all kinds of sticky enjoyment out of pictures of ladies in their underwear, even if the ladies were rather, uh, plain and middle aged, and the undewear looks like a cotton interpretation of a teutonic knight's jousting armor. You on the other hand can glance at a picture of an anatomically improbable young woman engaged in some equally bizarre sex act, then pass without missing a beat in your search for a blonde Japanese teenaged acrobat with large natural breasts and a knife fetish.

If you had anything close to the erotic imagination of your 19th century precedecessor, you'd have died from an aneurism the day you got broadband.

Re:rogue

[x2A]

Somewhat with you on that one. If you took a modern game (and of cause, the hardware required to play it) back in time to when you were so entertained with these old games, and gave it to yourself to play, I think it'd be a different story.

'Of cause it seemed more exciting 20yrs ago, I was just a kid! Everything was more exciting!'

Re:rogue

[jrest]

You should not compare the experience that YOU had twenty years ago to the experience YOU have now playing computer games. That is not fair. You changed too much during those twenty years.

• You probably had a richer imagination back then
• Playing a computer game -any game- was relatively newer to you back then, than it is now.

You should probably try to find a way to compare the experience that a kid today, new to computers, would have with a particular game-genre, with the experience you had, twenty years ago, with a game of that genre.

Re:rogue

[aplusjimages]

Oregon Trail rocked even though it had very simple graphics. It's like comparing movies of the past with movies of today. Sure the movies today have great special effects, but most of them lack a great story, which is what movies are all about.

Re:rogue

[Momoru]

Exactly... they are just comparing graphics. The real advantage to todays games is the depth of the environment, a game like Grand Theft Auto would have blown my mind more then a "pretty game". Games these days sure look pretty, but the old games had much longer playability. Heck, I STILL play Dr. Mario. Of course sometimes that had to do with the fact that you had to play through an entire game in an afternoon since "save points" didn't exist in many of them.

There are of course some very good games these days too, but all too many compensate for crappy game play with good graphics. Mike Tyson's punchout is just as fun as Fight Night Round 3.

Re:rogue

[sl4shd0rk]

Another good example of that is The Oregon Trail. Text only.. althought I think there was a map of some sort showing your group's progress... I always got my ass kicked, but the game forced me to imagine the covered wagons kicking up a plume of dust as they plodded across some sandy plains states somewhere (with someone dieing from an infection). Most games are so visual now that you r imagination can't compete.

Re:rogue

[koi88]

You on the other hand can glance at a picture of an anatomically improbable young woman engaged in some equally bizarre sex act, then pass without missing a beat in your search for a blonde Japanese teenaged acrobat with large natural breasts and a knife fetish.

Me? Dammit, I should really turn on this firewall thing ...

Re:rogue

[Giometrix]

In some ways, the older games are more entertaining because they leave more to the imagination. Our imaginations can be more entertaining than any kind of advanced graphics, despite how advanced they are; and even on a subconscious level. That's why games like Mario and similar side-scrollers will never get old, even when compared with modern games with graphical marvels. Agreed, agreed, agreed, and did I say agreed?
Final Fantasy 1 captured my heart and mind because my (then 9 or 10 year old ) imagination was able to fill in the blank. All subsequent FF titles have captured my imagination less and less.
I'm not necessarily saying that the new, nicer graphics are bad, in fact, looking at those old sports games make me cringe (except for the tennis one, which to me looks more fun than the xbox 360 version). It would be nice though if games were made in that old fashioned style (with some graphic improvements of course) where fun is put over graphics. If the console makers released a developer kit with their consoles (or sold it for relatively cheap) and allowed you to publish games via an online store, I imagine this void would be quickly filled.
Now I just got my 360, and I haven't had time to investigate, but I do notice there is an online store. Has MS taken steps to allow "regular" folks to make their own games?

Re:rogue

[twistedsymphony]

Your argument doesn't make any sense; games of today have much better special effects AND a much better story.

There are a lot of "classic" games that I enjoy though I very rarely find myself enjoying much before the 16bit era when I look at classics.

I think we're forgetting that the generations of 'ol had a much higher % of crap to good titles, and we seem to only remember the good ones. Sure todays market has crap titles and rip-offs etc. but back in the day there was even MORE of that then there is today. Yeah Mario was great but there were literally 10s if not 100s of crappy rip-offs that followed it, titles so bad we don't even think about them, they'll never appear on a greatest hits, and they'll never get a modern day sequel.

Re:rogue

[gfxguy]

I use gametap, and can say this is definately true in about 90% of the cases. Pac Mac is still fun an entertaining, as is Tetris and a few other ones, but by and large, those older games are not nearly as entertaining.

There is proof in there that good graphics doesn't make a good game - Pac Man and Tetris are pretty minimalist compared to todays graphics, but still entertaining. There's definately proof that a good game concept and gameplay are more important... just like todays movies that are all flash and no substance, the same applies to video games.

Re:rogue

[Xymor]

No, they don't even sell SDKs for "home developers". I guess you can only program somethiing for the 360 if you're on MS list...

Re:rogue

[twistedsymphony]

Classics had 2 things going for them. they either:
A. Left a lot to your imagination in terms of graphics or story, or
B. Gave you fantastic twitch gameplay

But the classics that still stand today are the ones with the twitch game play: Pac Man, Galaxan, Mario Bros, Tetris, etc.

I think we'll see a revival of "new classics" soon through venues like the Xbox Live arcade. I mean look at Geometry Wars or Wik. Those games totally embody what made the twitch type classic games great but they're done with and actually utilize modern technology.

As for MS allowing people to make their own content, it's coming soon.

Re:rogue

[Quantum Fizz]

I don't quite agree. I've found (in many different things) that working with limited choices often increases your creative processes. The older hardware (eg Atari 2600 and NES) were certainly very limited compared to today's standards, and many of the designers of those classic games really did come up with some very clever ideas.

As for me, I got bored of FPS games pretty quickly, and to me they all seem pretty much the same now. Whether I kill guys on a space station, monsters in some kind of labyrinth, etc. Of course I could just be a grumpy old man now, looking through the spectacles of youth. But the NES, IMHO, really had a much different 'feel' and 'soul' than today's games.

Re:rogue

[wideBlueSkies]

No, you do need imagination when you "use" porn....

You have to imagine that she's naked for, and wanting you.

Re:rogue

[wheany]

Let me tell you something: I just bought Command & Conquer: The first decade and boy does the original C&C suck compared to, say, C&C Generals.

It's slow, the units are stupider (apparenly it's possible), and if I get one more mission where I'm given only a handful of soldiers to kill everyting, I'm going postal.

Not even my imagination (fueled by the game's bad graphics) can make the game better than a modern RTS.

Re:rogue

[networkBoy]

River raid
KC Munchkin (Packman predicessor on consoles)

Those are still my top two games of all time. I still enjoy playing them.
-nB

Re:rogue

[Total_Wimp]

In some ways, the older games are more entertaining because they leave more to the imagination.

This is all good and fine for RPG/adventure games, but I can't imagine anyone using their imagination whill playing driving and sports games. A 3D environment and good physics help these genres quite a bit.

That's why games like Mario and similar side-scrollers will never get old, even when compared with modern games with graphical marvels.

Did anyone ever imagine a real plumber, real turtles and a real princess? Really? Um... Ok. Maybe it's just a lack of imagination on my part, but I never took more out of these games than what I actually saw on the screen.

TW

Re:rogue

[CastrTroy]

Then why is the most popular game on XBox 360 Geometry wars?

Re:rogue

[Hatta]

Alternate spin: older games seem more entertaining because we remember them as more fun than they actually were. If you think those games left a lot of room for imagination, then not having played them for 20 years you could do some serious dreaming.

But what if you played the old games last week and still find them more fun? There are so many wonderful old games out there I haven't played, I very seldom need to get a new one.

Re:rogue

[AviLazar]

picture of an anatomically improbable young woman

I have to disagree on this one point. Too many models with those kinds of proportions...and too many girls that I see with those kinds of proportions tomake the above statement true. Is it the majority of women, no (what a shame), but there are plenty of women who fit this body mold. Nothing is wrong with it. It has always been the case - a minority of the population have a certain look that everyone drools over, and others in the population want to degrade that because they do not have it.

Re:rogue

[AviLazar]

I agree 100%....I fondly, very fondly, remember the original Transformers series. I loved it and for years I thought it was better then all the modern cartoons...then I found some episodes and I was like "ugh, there goes my childhood memories". We do think those older games were the best because we were younger and more easily impressed...now a days we are so critical. We look at the game and think "Oh man, the anti-aliasing on this game sucks, why did they do this...oh god they made a typo, oh that doesn't make sense...and dammit why is it I need 1 gig of RAM to play WoW correctly."

Re:rogue

[arvid]

Of course but the kids now don't have any imagination anymore, so there is no way that they like our 20-year-old games...

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

I played Angband (a rogue-like game) just today. It was still fun.
My wife and I play the Super Mario Brothers games on my SNES quite frequently; they are also still lots of fun.

I enjoy many newer games, but I enjoy many of the 20-year-old ports I play on my Gameboy Advance just as much.

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

"a minority of the population have a certain look that everyone drools over"

Yup. EVERYONE has exactly the same tastes sometimes. Really weird, isn't it. There's always that one flavor of soda everyone likes the most, that one book everyone thought was the best, and that definitely carries over into body types.

Anyway, it's very easy to look "anatomically improbable"- get any sort of implant, and there you go.

Re:rogue

[Alcilbiades]

There is a difference between puzzle games and games that benefit from graphics. An RPG can be great even with minimal graphics but if both games have the same quality or play and one has good graphics I know which one I would play.

Re:rogue

[Alcilbiades]

I think most people fall into the thought process of "The good old days". Well in the Old days games were so minimal and repetative that they were maddening. Yes there are some good old games but give them better graphics improve some of their weak aspects and add some depth to them and they would be viable today. I bet you have a lower expectation from an old game than a modern one.

Re:rogue

[Mr Z]

I know I certainly never imagined I'd see a porn star dressed up as Mario. (Link is SFW)

Re:rogue

[gfxguy]

Sure, I agree... that's why I said it's true that in about 90% of the cases (after pulling number out of my butt), those games we used to consider fun really aren't compared to todays games. I mean, even compare first generation Wolfenstien to Wolf 3D and then to todays incarnations of Doom and Unreal... similar gameplay, same concepts, million times better graphics.

Re:rogue

[Aranth Brainfire]

The MMO I've spent the most time on isn't Guild Wars with 600 hours logged, no, it's... the Discworld MUD (http://discworld.atuin.net./ Full text, been playing it since 1998 with a few short breaks. Even only my most recent character alone has a logged-in time of almost two months.

So, yeah, old-style, imagination rules. Of course, new games with shiny graphics are cool too...

Re:rogue

[billcopc]

One big thing we didn't have "back in the day" was ever-increasingly violent games. Now don't get me wrong, there's a curious satisfaction in pumping a flying zombie doctor with a dozen rockets and blowing his guts all over the room, but I feel it has cheapened our entertainment. I remember when the first Carmageddon was released, part racing game, part pedestrian squishing game. If you look at the game from an objective standpoint, both parts sucked, but the game was a hit because it's inevitable for human animals to fantasize at one time or another, what it would be like to run people over with a car, or ram other drivers off the road. Okay, maybe I have a homicidal mind but I think about it every day when driving around my big crazy city full of imbeciles. Perhaps the only reason I haven't hit anyone yet, is that I don't want to scratch my car ;)

I also got kicks out of the Medal of Honor series, and Soldier of Fortune.. standard-fare military FPS, but the fact that it was a realistic fantasy; being set in WW2, or a rogue mercenary like a trigger-happy James Bond. It's easier to sink into character playing those games, than it is to believe the environment of Quake or Doom where you're quashing zombies and six-legged hell demons.

This leaves at least two types of games: puzzles and arcade-style games. Puzzles like Tetris, Hexic, Bejeweled etc, all are purely abstract mental jogs that don't give a rats ass about realism, they're just scientifically sterile applications of game design theory. There is no world to escape to, nobody to shoot, it's just you and the flashy geometric interface. The simpler the better, so that anyone can pick it up and play; the mantra is "Easy to play, hard to master". Those games have remained mostly unchanged since the dawn of computing, except for sharper graphics and sound effects. They're still every bit as fun as their 20-year old ancestors.

Arcade games are a special bunch, they're the conceptual sibling of puzzles, except you use your brain less and your hands more. They're equally designed for mass appeal with a low or progressive difficulty scale. Think Dig-Dug, Galaga, Pac-Man.. they often have a minor puzzle element that separates experts from casual players. Sometimes it's just a satisfying button mash like Contra or MegaMan, because the ape in all of us likes to push buttons that make things go.

It doesn't always have to do with imagination. Often it's just about giving the player what they want at the primal level, with minimal fuss. Give me shiny things that make fun sounds, give me generous positive feedback when I achieve a small goal, give me a funny colorful game world that brings me back to my saturday morning childhood before I ever knew about politics, money or STD's. We knew what "fun" was back then.

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had anything close to the erotic imagination of your 19th century precedecessor, you'd have died from an aneurism the day you got broadband

I'll put that one down under "list of funny things to do when I invent a time machine"

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternate spin: older games seem more entertaining because we remember them as more fun than they actually were

Yes and no. There are a lot of games I play in emulation (especially for my beloved Vic-20) and I think: man, this sucks total ass. But there are also quite a few older games that have a "hook" that I find lacking in newer games.. kinda like a catchy tune. And as always, the rule of "easy to learn, hard to master" applied to most successful older games. When you want to waste a few minutes as opposed to a whole evening this is the way to go.

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

A Victorian pervert probably got all kinds of sticky enjoyment out of pictures of ladies in their underwear...

Shhh! That was supposed to be a SECRET!

Re:rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the gameplay isn't remotely similar. There's a lot more interaction with side areas, weapons that do things other than cause different amounts of damage (see: Doom 3 plasmagun being able to down projectiles, etc.), enemies that are essentially identical in capability to the player (Unreal Tournament series)...

You're oversimplifying the gameplay to make your point. At their most basic level, Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3D were both about pushing keys to make things happen.

Re:rogue

[Manmademan]

One big thing we didn't have "back in the day" was ever-increasingly violent games.

"halloween" and " The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" on the atari 2600 disagrees with you. The first game depicted michael meyers killing children, the second had YOU playing as leatherface, attempting to kill as many people as possible. You could also make the argument that "Custer's revenge" was the 80's equivalent to "hot coffee." Violence and sexual themes in games are nothing new.

Re:rogue

[fooDfighter]

The last good C&C game was Red Alert. Can I have whatever you're smoking?

Re:rogue

[poot_rootbeer]

games of today have much better special effects AND a much better story.

That's not universally true, unless maybe you consider more complex stories equivalent to "better".

Myself, I'd rather have the fairly straightforward storyline of the original NES Metal Gear, over the convoluted, puzzling mess of Metal Gear Solid 2. Your mileage may vary.

As for the issues of me-too copycat titles, yes, they've always existed and always will. What concerns me more about the current state of game publishing is the sequel hysteria -- once they find a property that sells, there seems to be an obligation to release a marginally improved sequel to the title each and every year.

Say what you will about Nintendo's reliance on their top franchises, but they've almost always excercised good restraint in how frequently their release new titles in any given series. In almost five years of GameCube sales, for example, there has only been one "Super Mario" game (two, if you count Luigi's Mansion). How many "Madden NFL 200n" games have come out during that same timeframe?

Re:rogue

[poot_rootbeer]

One big thing we didn't have "back in the day" was ever-increasingly violent games.

I guess you never played Death Race 2000, Slaughterhouse, or Mortal Kombat???

Re:rogue

[gfxguy]

No, I'm not - I'm making the same point you are; a lot of todays games ARE a lot more fun. Similar gameplay = first person shooter, but newer technology, more memory, faster processors = more involved, detailed, and immersive... which for many games is a great improvement.

Re:rogue

[LittLe3Lue]

I disagree.

While I agree that nethack was an awsome game, I do not think that anyone has played any mario brothers game every day, for hours on end, and missed out on plans they made in order to play mario. For years at a time.

Welcome to world of warcraft, everquest, and so many other entertaining games of today.

While the GUI may not be the main reason for this, content and world wide interaction is.

Mario is a GREAT game which little else can compare for a few hours of immediate pleasure. that is something that MMO's cant really give you.

But in the end, I beleive todays games have really evolved.

Diablo was awsome at the time. Diablo 2 was awsome at the time. But play a MMO for a year and then try to go back. Its impossible.

Re:rogue

[twistedsymphony]

While I agree that for the most part sequel hysteria is a bit blown out of proportion, there are still new and fresh franchises that pop up and only get one offs. Some are worse offenders then others.

The only ones I would actually excuse from that are sports games like madden. The sport rarely changes in real live save for the rosters and stats, which is really the reason they DO release a new one every year. Sports games that don't require roster updates annually (like NFL Blitz) release new titles far less frequently... The REAL atrocity there is that EA charges a full $60USD every year. I like 2K's price scheme of $30. That's fair for a roster update, minor graphics tweaks, and some new novelty features and modes.

The only games I would complain about having an over abundance of sequels are stuff like the Tony Hawk series, DDR, or Need For Speed. more then 1 or 2 releases per 5 year "generation" for games that don't need annual roster updates and it breaks the point of being a tasteful sequel into cashing in on a franchise by repackaging the same game.

Sequels aren't all bad though. Some games don't need or shouldn't have sequels but others could have an indefinite amount and be fine. There are lots of games that never got sequels that I wish would: Killer Instinct, Rez, Space Channel 5, Deathrow, etc. I can honestly say that whenever I finish a really good game the first thing I think is "Man I can't WAIT for the sequel". If the game's got a story then it depends on what the developers have to say with that story. If the game is NOT based on a story then the franchise become the gameplay mechanic and the name is nothing more then a label on the style of the game (racing games like GT, PGR, and Burnout, or other genres like GTA or Final Fantasy where the story is different but the machanic stays the same).

If anything it's the re-hash of OLD games that are worse then new games. Like the remake of Spy Hunter, or Final Fight. These games could have done ok, if not BETTER if they used fresh and new themes instead of cashing in on classic trademarks to sell them.

Re:rogue

[AuMatar]

I've done it. THe only thing I miss from MMOs is being able to play with more than 3-4 friends at a time and PvP. With the number of design flaws (grinding, farming, forced raiding) in MMOs, I have more fun at Diablo (well, Diablo 2 is my preference, I like the classes better).

Re:rogue

[Sique]

First: I was not talking about Mario Bros. (I am not very into jump&run anyway).

Second: Diablo and Diablo II are from a map point of view, from a level point of view, from a scoring point of view and from the equipment point of view very similar to nethack, and it would be actually quite simple to generate a Diablo level from a nethack level (Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack :) )

Third: I was playing and programming MMORPGs when no one called them that way (they were called MUD, MUSH, MOO, MUSE or whatever at that point in time, and that was already the third generation of MMORPGs), and I have left that world without looking back too often. Actually I played only one completely, and I found it more fun to program them and expand them than to actually play them. I know we had a lot of players who thought different, who were asking us for new features, for new quests, for new landscapes or new guilds all the time to increase size and depth of the game. So I understand your point of view, but I won't generalize it.

Re:rogue

[Meagermanx]

Because it's five dollars, compared to sixty for a new game, and pretty much the only people who can afford XBOX 360s are older hardcore gamers who remember space shooters from their childhood?

Re:rogue

[ultranova]

Imagination rules, that's why no-one uses porn

I dunno, Custer's Revenge did it for me.

Hmm. I just posted a link to an illegal pirated game to a public messageboard, and propably offended an ethnic minority while doing so. So will the BSA use indian scouts to find me ?-)

Re:rogue

[CastrTroy]

But surely if you can afford $400 gaming system, plus another 1 or 2 $50 controllers, plus $x00 for a TV that actually makes a difference with xbox 360, then you could certainly afford 1 or 2 $60 games. Your argument makes no sense, Only people with lots of money can buy the xbox 360, but people with lots of money can't afford games.

Re:rogue

[louisadkins]

What do you mean the matches are wet?! I have to start over, again!! ARGH!!!

Re:rogue

[billcopc]

There are exceptions to every statement, including this one. Suffice to say that graphic violence in video games wasn't nearly as prevalent in the 80's, whereas modern games revel in it.

Re:rogue

[Alcilbiades]

Oh I would agree then. Some past games I could not imagine enjoying if they changed i.e. Mario. If they made it into not a side scroller I think it would make the game less fun. I suppose part of the fun of older games was simply that they were meant to entertain while not requiring to much tedium. I would compare new games sort of to new books......today's books tend to have massive amounts of filler crap to try to distinguish themselves from older books simply because most of the ideas have been used before. Games are like that also. The ideas being used have been mostly used before so the add in stupid junk to try to make their game "unique" but quite often it just adds in boring stuff when just modernising and old game would have been the better choice. Who wouldn't buy a modern version of contra?

Re:rogue

[dslbrian]

(Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack :) )

Like this?, although not exactly "Diablo" like.

Re:rogue

[Sj0]

I've played literally thousands of games for most of the older consoles.

I hate to break this news to you, but the vast, vast, vast majority of games for Atari, NES, and SNES were just clones. For every "Metal Warriors" or "Super Mario Brothers", there are 10, or even 100 "Generic sidescroller space shooter or platform game X!!!". Making matters worse, a LOT of those clones were simply horrible and unplayable.

As much as I hate to admit it, the massive bar for entry today has resulted in titles of ridiculously good design, ridiculously massive scope, and ridiculously complete immersion.

Re:rogue

[grumbel]

### (Just add graphics for the chars. I am wondering if someone ever thought of generating a Diablo like GUI for the original nethack :) )

I neither know Diablo nor nethack very good, but from my understanding a simply GUI change won't turn nethack into a Diablo-like game, since nethack is esentially roundbased while Diablo is not. There are GUIs around with Diablo-like graphics, Falcon's Eye being probally the most prominent, but the roundbased nature gives it a very weird feel.

Re:rogue

[Helios1182]

Yet Mario64 was 3D and not a side scroller. It was also a great game. Simple to pick up and lots of fun.

Re:rogue

[triffid_98]

I have to disagree on this one point. Too many models with those kinds of proportions...and too many girls that I see with those kinds of proportions tomake the above statement true. Is it the majority of women, no (what a shame), but there are plenty of women who fit this body mold. Nothing is wrong with it. It has always been the case - a minority of the population have a certain look that everyone drools over, and others in the population want to degrade that because they do not have it.

Strange, I'm more used to seeing girls with these kinds of proportions...
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/35258

Re:rogue

[wheany]

Have you played C&C recently?

It is reeeeally slow. In Red Alert, the ore trucks at least dump their gargo at once instead of it being "milked out" bit by bit, like in C&C. In RA, a whole infantry squad queues into an APC automatically, instead of you having to click on the APC once for every person you want in. This after the last person is already inside. In C&C, the harvester moves slowly, and even more slowly after it has been damaged. Building troops is slow partly because they cost so much compared to the capacity of the harvester, and partly becuase building is just slow.

That said, I think C&C Generals better in every way to C&C and RA.

Re:rogue

[Sique]

Yes! That's what I am talking about. :)

Re:rogue

[wheany]

Same thing happened with night Rider. It was the awesomest tv-series ever. Until I saw it again.

Re:rogue

[AviLazar]

You know, I should know better then to click on links where I know what the image will be like and the image will not be a good one ;)

Re:rogue

[drsquare]

Am I the only person who thinks that Tetris and Pacman are utterly boring? Once you've played them for three seconds you've exhausted the entire depth of the games, there's nothing else other than to keep doing it over and over again.

Re:rogue

[DeadScreenSky]

It's not. It's not even close.

Re:rogue

[fm6]

This from a soccer fan!

Re:rogue

[drsquare]

No, you're thinking of basketball/ice hockey/tennis.

Re:rogue

[fm6]

So kicking a ball back and forth is exciting, but once you bring your hands into the equation it's boring?

Re:rogue

[drsquare]

Football isn't kicking a ball back and forth. The 'hand using' equivalent of football would be hockey, not tennis. You don't seem to know much about sport.

Re:rogue

[fm6]

True, I don't. In fact it bores me to tears. I was only trying to point out that different things engage different people. To you, Pac Man is just about gobbling dots. To me, all those sports are just about moving a round object back and forth for no good reason. Neither of us is "right". There are just complexities to Pac Man that don't interest you and subtleties to soccer/football that are a complete mystery to me.

Re:rogue

[Meagermanx]

Hypothetical situation: you just bought two or three thousand dollars worth of home entertainment. XBOX 360, HD-TV, the works. Now you buy a couple of games for $60 each. Now a friend comes along and says "hey, check out this awesome little shooter you can download for five bucks!" You play the demo, it's fun, and you figure hey, if I'm going to be spending this much on a gaming system, I might as well spend a bit extra and buy the little five dollar game, right?

Why is it selling better than other XBOX 360 games? Because it's five bucks. If it was $60 would it sell well? No. That's because even if you spend thousands on an XBOX 360, five bucks for a new game is still to sweet too pass up.

The Bard's Tale...

[Noryungi]

Oh boy. Twenty years ago, I was 19. And that's probably around that time that I bought my Amiga (a short while after I bought an Atari ST). And, yes, I played the Bard's Tale on it. *sigh*

I am just an old fart. There, I said it. Thanks for listening.

Re: The Bard's Tale...

[Black Parrot]

> Oh boy. Twenty years ago, I was 19. And that's probably around that time that I bought my Amiga (a short while after I bought an Atari ST). And, yes, I played the Bard's Tale on it. *sigh*

I was an Apple ][ Wizardry addict, back when they rendered perspective line drawings to show you what you saw of the dungeon.

I'm still afraid of running into a maelific somewhere...

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[keefey]

Tell me about it, even just the mention of The Bards Tale makes me go dewey-eyed as I fondly recall reams of squared paper so as to map every location. What a wonderful wonderful game that was. I still play many older games, even now; especially Monkey Island, Waxworks and the like.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[Bagheera]

And here I was so proud of myself for finally completing Adventure on the PDP11.

Kids . . .

Seriously though. When guys our age started playing computer games, they were all text based. The earliest graphics games were such a leap visually it was like night and day. The graphics now are like watching a movie.

Gotta wonder what it'll be like in another 20 years.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[magores]

I loved Bards Tale.

I seem to remember seeing it on an "abandware" site a little while ago, but now that I'm looking for it, I can't find it.

For what it's worth... My level 13 Human Priest in ADOM just died about 10 minutes ago. Decided to grab a beer and check slashdot. After seeing this thread... Back to ADOM.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[geminidomino]

!!! Home of the Underdogs is gone!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! /vader

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[MyNameIsEarl]

Monkey Island, ah the fond memories of the mid nineties Lucasarts turning out great game after great game. Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango. Now all they make are bad Star Wars games, nothing original, even X-Wing and TIE Fighter were pretty awesome games back then, but now, argh.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[Anonymous Coward]

(a short while after I bought an Atari ST)

Atari ST sucks!

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[Hatta]

From Wikipedia:

Sarinee Achavanuntakul, in a rare public appearance in IRC, related that this problem is due to credit card details, and the domain would be working soon. In the meantime, the site is accessible at http://209.120.136.195/

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[DerWulf]

I hear you! A little while back I looked up the graphics of X-Wing on wikipedia and boy does it ever suck. Basically the graphics are made out of blocks the size of my fingernails. Yet still, I ruined two joysticks on this game ;)

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[bckrispi]

Now all they make are bad Star Wars games, nothing original, even X-Wing and TIE Fighter were pretty awesome games back then, but now, argh.

You've obviously never played Battlefront, Knights of the Old Republic, or the Jedi Knight series.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[geminidomino]

http://www.xtcabandonware.com/

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[MyNameIsEarl]

I have played Dark Forces, thats a Jedi Knight game?(Maybe a precursor to the Jedi Knight series.) And I played a Jedi Knight game online where people fight each other, didn't do it for me though.

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga version of Bard's Tale was the best, by far.

I still have my original disks, and somewhere there's a folder of graph paper maps :)

Dungeon Master was awesome too!

Re:The Bard's Tale...

[Norfair]

Or Republic Commando.

Deeper level comparision

[Mattygfunk1]

While the screenshots are nice, if you compared other metrics like customer satisfaction and average hours of game play per gamer, how would they stack up?

My bet would be they are a lot closer than this graphics comparision which was purely a technology problem.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Pieroxy]

Not mentionning all the 20years old games are displayed with screenshots vs the newer games where prerendered 'commercial' pictures are displayed...

How can this be called a 'comparison' ? They are comparing apples with oranges on a superficial level only... Good job at screwing up!
--
XviD review

Re:Deeper level comparision

[albino eatpod]

Which ones are pre-rendered? A comment by the editor states that all shots in actual engine shots. I can testify for some of the 360 shots myself.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[solarbob]

I still think the old games had more playability (and though there are still gems like GTA) but newer games to me just seem to be more eye candy than anything else

Re:Deeper level comparision

[nnn0]

ehehhe. if you used customer satisfaction; none of the new games would even be in the shops today ;)

Re:Deeper level comparision

[msobkow]

Good point -- I remember burning a lot of hours (and quarters! Remember arcades?) on some pretty basic games, including Pong.

But one thing I notice is that while the graphics and sound have leapt forward, the improvements in game play itself hasn't kept up. It's as if the core is still based on the same old ideas, prettied up and repackaged.

Comparing a massively multiplayer game like WOW to a single-player adventure game is a fair comparison because it shows a genre that has made changes and adapted well to newer technology.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Pieroxy]

At least PGR3. There's the Microsoft logo on the picture! I doubt MS inserts their logo in every rendered frame, although one might be carful with the MS beast.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Rebyk]

It is like comparing a book and a movie telling the same story. Some people always prefer books because they force you to use your imagination. The same applies to old games. However, sometimes the makers of a movie or a game have a better imagination than you do or they can visualize something better. I admit that some, perhaps even most, new movies and games are just eye candy or special effects but sometimes they really make you feel something that was not possible 20 years ago, and that is just the visual part. Don't forget the sounds.

And then there's the nostalgy. If you played some game as a kid, you can't play a new game 20 years later and have the same feelings because _you_ are not a kid anymore. That has nothing to do with the quality or playability of the game. It is very hard to be objective in this matter.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[albino eatpod]

You're suffering from a lack of knowledge of the game. PGR3 has a rather neat in-game photo system that allows you take a photo from any angle, whilst also changing things like aperture, shutter speed, etc. The shot is taken using the game engine. The Microsoft logo is on there probably because it was taken from the Microsoft site, or was one of the shots in the press packs.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[KDR_11k]

Either way those screenshots aren't gameplay shots (because you can't play a game with such a perspective). I'd have preferred had they chosen comparable situations in the games and depicted those instead so there's actually something to compare.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[X-chan]

I can't figure myself playing the new games with the same camera view as they use for the screenshot. But eh, their point was to show off sheer graphical capabilities, not to show how the game actually looks when you play it.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Viol8]

Game play in some senses has gone backwards. I can't think of
any straight shoot-em-ups today that require anything close
to the quick reactions and finger dexterity of a game such as
Defender.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[KDR_11k]

But one thing I notice is that while the graphics and sound have leapt forward, the improvements in game play itself hasn't kept up.

What?!? There have been massive improvements in gameplay since back then. Take e.g. racing games, instead of dodging obstacles and ocassionally being pushed to the side (during a turn) you actually do something which resembles driving a car in modern games. Or Karate Champ vs. DOA4 there. While DOA is hardly the pinnacle of fighting it still beats out the old Karate games. Can't say anything about sports games since I didn't play them, neither back then nor now but it seems they are more like sports than pushing a ball around with a solid block.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[albino eatpod]

Yes, it's called "marketing", you might have heard of it. Welcome to the 21st century.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[sebol]

Some people said games good for child mind developement.
Imagination is good for kids, but if kid doesnt need to
imagine while playing games, its not good anymore,

I still remember when3D is still new, a lot of 3d cartoon created to make it real.

but now, look kat bob the builder and Mr Bean, they have technoly to make real image of tractor of Mr bean, but they purposely make it unreal to make the cartoon interesting.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[BillGod]

This is SOOOOO true. There are a million games out there now with kick ass graphix but the game play sucks. Graphix can only get you so far. Hell I still play my atari 2600 games. on my xbox with stella of course but I still play em.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[maddskillz]

Actually, the driving games have matured a lot too. The AI has improved a lot, you aren't restricted to driving in a lane, the cars actually understeer and oversteer depending ond drivetrain and power, and analog controls make a huge difference (previously only available at an arcade)

Re:Deeper level comparision

[ceoyoyo]

Definitely. Looking at those screen shots made me want to go look for an Apple II emulator so I could play Lode Runner and a DOS emulator to play Star Glider, the original Wing Commander Privateer and King's Quest: So You Want to be a Hero.

Wait, WCP has an open source remake... catch you guys later....

Re:Deeper level comparision

[steveo777]

Agreed

Shooters are shooters and really can't be compared with a such a different genre. The FPS is a 3-D environment vs a 2D. I suppose in the context of the article, you could handedly argue that it's part of the evolution.(ad a demention and you have so much more to deal with)

But here's my arguement. In a real shooter, one hit, you're dead. Rarely do you get so much as a shield.

And I agree, mostly because these games involve bullet absorbing meatbags that can instantly fix themselves up with a couple of adhesive bandages and a chemicle cold-compress. Reflexes are rendered less-necessary. Try Einhander for the PS1. One of the best shooters ever. Try Twinkle Star Sprites for Neo-Geo (I think that's what I played it on) if you think your anylytical mind can see order in a madness of bullets flying. Hell, even Geometry Wars takes real reflexes.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[CSMastermind]

Actually you know what that tells me? We had all the same games 20 years ago.......when will we get a new genre?

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Illserve]

Mod parent down

Modern rendering in the 360 can produce shots like that on the fly. The era of pre-rendered movies has been over for a few years.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that double dribble pick the 80's equivilant of a movie scene? I think I remember it going into that mode when you "dunked" as opposed to 95% of the game having even worse graphics. If anything they're making the 20 year old games look better than they should. (from my faded memory most of the examples they're using were the really cool looking games from that era too)

Re:Deeper level comparision

[IpalindromeI]

Some people always prefer books because they force you to use your imagination.

I think this a red herring. Good books don't leave much to your imagination. They explain everything so that the author can ensure you get the image they want to convey, just like the director of a movie is doing. Long paragraphs about scene details are not uncommon in books.

In my opinion, the real reason many people like books more is because of depth. Movie's often can't go into all the nuances of something because of the time limit. Books can take longer to flesh everything out, such as character history and interaction. One example I like, since the movie is relatively popular, is The Princess Bride. The movie is good, but the depth you get from the book regarding the characters adds a lot to the story. Many people think the extra time to read the book is worth the additional depth. That's why they like books more.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Cornflake917]

I can't speak for all the games, but I know for a fact that the WoW comparison is a screenshot from the game. If you go the worldofwarcraft.com, you can see that it's a runner-up in a screenshot contest.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[pilkul]

I think this a red herring. Good books don't leave much to your imagination.

Exactly. That's an annoyingly common cliche that anyone who actually thought about what they read wouldn't fall into.

The reason why reading novels should be encouraged is because it improves literacy. Everyone has an imagination and it doesn't need to be learned.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Blakey Rat]

None of those screenshots are pre-rendered. What are you talking about?

Re:Deeper level comparision

[empvirus]

Not just that, but they're comparing apples to oranges too. Nintendo VS Xbox 360 on all of them but WoW. Very partial IMHO.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[ars]

"Many people think the extra time to read the book is worth the additional depth."

What extra time? A book with the same amount of plot even plus additional depth, as a comparable movie, can be read in less them half the time.

Of course most books make up for that by adding more story/plot.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Pieroxy]

You mean they are screenshots? All of them? With the MS logo on it?

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Pieroxy]

Mod parent down
There seems to be some sense in the moderators these days, seeing as I'm still modded up.

Modern rendering in the 360 can produce shots like that on the fly
Nobody questions that. This is your own conclusion, not mine.

The era of pre-rendered movies has been over for a few years
So I guess you're implying that all the 'shots' from the 360 are real screenshots. Then I'll ask you why there is a Microsoft Logo on one of them? Do you have to play with the logo on it?

Re:Deeper level comparision

[LMariachi]

Try some of these Japanese "bullet hell" shooters. They take every bit as much dexterity as Defender, if not so many fingers. They do allow the player unlimited continues, but no one's forcing you not to start over every time your lives are up. If you look around you can find videos of people finishing them on one life.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone reads at the same speed, smarty.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[R3d M3rcury]

"I'm sure it would have made a HUGE difference and totally changed the meaning of the article. Except the opposite."

Actually, I agree with the parent.

You're right. The idea of showing the "advancement" in games is still there, no matter what. But, let's be honest, most of us already knew this. What would have made the article more fun would have been to have shown us the equivalent situations, wherever possible.

I'm mostly a casual gamer (I'm a Mac user, I don't have much choice). So since I'm ignorant of most of the games shown, it would have been interesting on a different level.

Heck, take "Double Dribble vs. NBA Live '06." In the "Double Dribble" frame, I see somebody making a basket. I don't see anybody around him. What's the context? Same with the "NBA Live '06" frame--just a picture of some guy from the Miami Heat. Is he blocking me? Am I blocking him? Is this a "replay" shot? Is the first one a "replay" shot? I have no idea.

Like I said, here's where having the same context would have made the article more enjoyable.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I'll ask you why there is a Microsoft Logo on one of them? Do you have to play with the logo on it?

Of course not. However, these are screenshots, and screenshots often get logos stuck on them.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[msobkow]

I dunno -- I look forward to trying some of the newer games some time, but I had blast playing through my older collection last year.

Besides, some of the twitch shooters are getting a bit too twitch for me to keep up with. But that's never stopped me from a suicide bomber run. :)

Re:Deeper level comparision

[bigman2003]

To the people who responded to your message and said, "Well this isn't part of the game..."

YES- it IS part of the game. And it isn't too bad. I spent a fair amount of time taking pictures of my cars in different places. They've got a lot of nice controls, and you can do all types of cool stuff. (Blur filters, lighting, angle, the whole 9 yards)

What's that you say? Taking pictures is stupid?

Did you ever play Pokemon Snap?

Re:Deeper level comparision

[Rebyk]

I see your point, but by "using your imagination" I meant creating mental images of things and events described in the book, not just filling in the parts that are not described. In a way, you are following an author's instructions to create an image in your mind (at least by combining memories of things you have seen before) but you still have to do it yourself, no matter how detailed the instructions are. In a movie, images and events are there on the screen created for you, not inside your mind.

I believe there are big differences in how detailed and realistic images people can create in their minds. Because the computer game graphics are better than 20 years ago, there are now much more people who can feel like they really were in the game world than there used to be. For those who already could imagine the surroundings in detail themselves the advancement in graphics has been just eye candy.

Re:Deeper level comparision

[drsquare]

Older games had hardly any playability, you just went round collecting dots, jumping over snakes or aligning falling blocks, there was no depth whatsoever. After a few minutes you'd pretty much exhausted the game.

More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ago

[Runesabre]

Companies are relying more and more on awesome graphics to make up for a lack of innovative and fun gameplay. Most games 20yrs ago were more fun than new games today.

Screenshots

[JonathanR]

What, you can now believe what you see on the box-art?

Ten yard fight?

[ndogg]

I still have a special place in my heart for that game. It was fun getting to your endzone, then running back to the other endzone, and throwing the football all the way across to the other endzone and getting a touchdown. As long as the pass wasn't intercepted, everything was dandy.

Pre-rendered shot?

[mgblst]

To be fair, a number of those shots for Xbox games are pre-rendered. NHL 06 and Project Gotham Racing. To be completely honest, they should have stuck to ingame shots.

It still makes you laugh though. If only there was as easy a way to measure game playability as these is to measure graphic differences.

Re:Pre-rendered shot?

[Runesabre]

If only there was as easy a way to measure game playability as these is to measure graphic differences.

This, I believe, hits at the root as to why we get so many multi-million dollar me-too efforts from big companies. The decision makers don't play games yet they are they ones that make the decisions on what gets created and published and what doesn't. These people don't understand gameplay because they haven't lived gaming; they have no connection with it. But they can see better graphics in the 5 minutes they spend in a board meeting skimming over game proposals.

Re:Pre-rendered shot?

[albino eatpod]

The PGR3 shot certainly isn't pre-rendered. Yes, it has a Microsoft label on it at the bottom, but those shots can easily be taken in-game using the photo system (where you can set things like aperture, shutter speed, focus, etc.)

Re:Pre-rendered shot?

[Anonymous Coward]

> NHL 06 and Project Gotham Racing. To be completely honest, they should have stuck to ingame shots.

They are in game shots. If your hardware were up to scratch you'd see the same as those shots. Get a better rig.

Re:Pre-rendered shot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit difficult to play the games from those angles, though.

Re:Pre-rendered shot?

[arose]

But a cut-scene shot of Double Dribble is fine?

Ice Hockey vs NHL2kX

[jurgenaut]

I remember laughing my ass off to those slow fat guys and the speedy small guys. That game was so much fun at the time. The only people laughing in connection to NHL2kX are EA sports, all the way to the bank.

The Ultimate History of Video Games

[Roy van Rijn]

Last Christmas I got this The Ultimate History of Video Games book. And I can really recommend it. It describes how everything got started, from pinball machines to arcade machines to the first home entertainment systems. Also very nice to read how all of the Atari developers where smoking drugs all day long, and how their annoyed managers hated that :)

Re:The Ultimate History of Video Games

[Anonymous Coward]

An excellent read. That book is very well-written and doesn't leave much out. I actually used it for a school paper once.

The histroy of computer gaming

[sucker_muts]

For those interested in some more background (and with way too much free time), check this out:

Wikpedia article about computer games.
Comprehensive article with lots of detail.

Re:The histroy of computer gaming

[bkmiictian]

thanz 4 da nice links! bein a 19 yr old today, i hv no idea abt these old games. this helped a lot.

Re:The histroy of computer gaming

[keefey]

That gamespot article is marvellous. Thanks!

Re:The histroy of computer gaming

[scaryjohn]

But we know the Britannica article on this is better because... well, they say so.

Flight Simulators

[Anonymous Coward]

Flight simulators have also come quite a long way since I first started playing them. The only thing that hasn't advanced for some reason is the way human necks are modeled. Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.

Re: Flight Simulators

[Black Parrot]

> The only thing that hasn't advanced for some reason is the way human necks are modeled. Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.

Yours isn't?

What planet are you posting from?

Re:Flight Simulators

[Anonymous Coward]

Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.

In other news, Anonymous Coward's head was removed and placed on top of a pole as a warning to generations to come that sometimes there is simplier solution than coding. Film at 11.

Re:Flight Simulators

[grumbel]

### Flight simulators have also come quite a long way since I first started playing them. The only thing that hasn't advanced for some reason is the way human necks are modeled. Flight sim cockpit views still shift around as if the player's head is a perfect sphere mounted on top of a pole.

Inaccurate modeling of the human body and physical interaction is a problem not only flight simulators suffer from. In many first person shooters the "hero" is still nothing more then a pair of flying arms, no legs, no body, nada. And even NextGen titels like Oblivion completly fail at providing proper hit feedback (hiting a rat with a sword looks as good as RPGs in 1990 already did, ie. not good at all) and realistic animation (NPC don't touch doors, they open automatically). While plain graphics have advanced, the underlying games and physics haven't much at all, which is why games today often look no different then games 10 or 20 years ago when one manages to see past the shiny shaders and reflections.

The Bard's Tale

[grumpygrodyguy]

The Bard's Tale is available for DOS, Apple II, Atari ST, Amiga, and Apple IIgs.

That photo is from the worst graphical version available(Apple II), and doesn't do it justice. The Bard's Tale was a wonderful game, and in many ways still is. Trying to play that game without the internet and without a clue book is extremely challenging. Games like The Bard's Tale, Wasteland, etc. deserve respect...they are the shakespearean classics of computer games.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Zedrick]

...don't forget the C64. I still have the original tapes (+disk versions from Gamebase64, that I recently transfered to my C64/1570. I really look forward to playing through BT1, BT2, BT3 and Dragon Wars again!).

Re:The Bard's Tale

[grumpygrodyguy]

Yep, and I forgot quite a few more according to wiki:

"It was originally released for the Apple II, and was also ported to the Commodore 64, Apple IIgs, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, Apple Macintosh, and NES platforms."

Re:The Bard's Tale

[twazzock]

I played the IBM/PC (that sounds so strange now) version of The Bard's Tale and I loved it! It's still a cool game, although I have played the NES version from their screenshot and it sucks, BAD. Didn't like the new Bard's Tale game at all: it had absolutely NO connection to the original series other than the name and a bard. Wow. Didn't know there was a speccy version. Will have to look out for it...

Re:The Bard's Tale

[bkmiictian]

is this game still available?

Re:The Bard's Tale

[birder]

That's not a picture from the Apple II version. I'd hazzard to guess it's from a Nintendo machine.

The Apple II version was actually pretty decent. They used staggered pixel drawing bitmaps (alternate color+white) to make checkerboard-like patterns and give the graphics a nice change of pace from solid colours. Lots of graphic adventures at the time also did this.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[ajs318]

That is categorically not an Apple ][ screenshot.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[bobcardone]

Well put. I remember sitting around with a room full of friends communally playing Bard's Tale on my Amiga. It just seems that the entertainment value of these "classics" exceeds most all of the new game releases. Just because we have hardware now we would have KILLED for 20 years ago doesn't mean that the newer games are automagically better.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Tim C]

I remember playing both The Bard's Tale and The Bard's Tale 2 on my Speccy +3, and loving every minute of it, so I was pretty excited to learn that they were remaking it for the PC.

Then I played the demo.

Oh well, that's another company on my List.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Greyfox]

You could probably find emulator images for all of the above discussed games if you felt like Googling around a bit. I should disclaim at this point that downloading and playing them is technically illegal...

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Anonymous Coward]

EA released the Bard's Tale games as part of the Ultimate RPG Collection, so maybe check a bargain bin. Lots of good stuff in that collection - all the Ultimas and Wasteland pop to mind.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Minwee]

Since the caption on that picture says "The Bard's tale, Nintendo, 1985", I'm guessing it's not the Apple version.

Maybe it's from the Amiga.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Sizzlean]

I want the Bard's Tale trilogy for the DS or GBA. It would be perfect on the DS - top screen for walking around and the combat text and bottom screen with party roster and menus navigated using the stylus. It would probably fit easily on a cartridge (at least one at a time - I don't know exactly how they'd do party transfer from I to II to III), could incorporate the C64 music (the best IMO) and easily absorb hundreds of hours of otherwise productive time. That way you could carry the whole thing to the fridge as MAML lays waste to the 200 bugmen you see before you. Death and drek indeed.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[Stoffel67]

I have so many good memories of that game. I played it through in CGA originally because that's all we had on our PC. We upgraded to an EGA card and I just had to play it all the way through again in its 16-color glory.

The message scroll speed was not very adjustable in my version. There was one spell--only one if I remember--that would hit all groups, not just the front group. Psionic blast or something? Anyway, I hit the tile of 4 groups of 99 azure monks with that baby and it took a full 15 minutes to get through the damage messages.

It's also the first time I cheated. I beleive either the parties or party members were stored individually in the save directory, so I gave all of my gold to one person, copied him, gave it back to the other, copied back, etc...

Ahh, memories.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[zlexiss]

MIBL - Mind Blade?

Re:The Bard's Tale

[berenixium]

Right on, man!
And I only cheated by replicating items in the character editor!
My point is: I had to *think* in a creative way to actually cheat. And even then it was only so I could get *another* Fire Horn when my bard(s) got a bit eager in battle.

Now a string of cheats come with any official players guide for modern games, as well as from countless games websites. Gah! New game cheats are just way too easy.

Re:The Bard's Tale

[bkmiictian]

thank you... shall look around for them, but wont play them ;)

Bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't be allowed to forward pass once the ball has crossed the line of scrimmage. Not that I'd expect any of the Euro Slashdopes to know what the hell we're talking about.

Re:Bug?

[Sique]

You know, there actually is a NFL Europe :) Most of the people I know who go to the games are telling me it's just about the party anyway (so why don't they omit the field and the players and just have fun?).

Re:Bug?

[ClamIAm]

Sounds like you have poor reading comprehension. While the original post was unclear, I believe the poster was referring to the following: driving down the field so you've almost gotten a touchdown, then on the next play backpeadaling with your quarterback all the way back to near the other goal line and throwing a 100-yard bomb. But don't let that get in the way of your racism.

Re:Bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

My disdain for you has little to do with your race. Rest assured, I am not a racist. European is not a race.

As for the original post, I find nowhere where it is either implied or insinuated that "getting to your endzone" meant "drive to the endzone". Anyone familiar with the parlance would recognize "drive" as a series of plays, whereas "get to" does not have a similar connotation. Additionally, running back to your own endzone (the original poster also had "your endzone" mislabeled) implies doing it in a single play. What is the point of driving down to the endzone, then running back 100 yards and throwing a touchdown? That is only half the fun. The real fun is running up to the endzone, attracting all the defenders, then running back to your own endzone, avoiding the safety, then running it back up the field for 6.

Anyway, in short: Bite me, Frenchie.

Re:Bug?

[wish bot]

Sounds like you think the real fun is whipping out your dick, attracting all the gay-boys, then running back to your mama.

Re:Bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your 'bite me' commment might have been a little bit more cutting if you hadn't have spent an entire paragraph desperately trying to explain yourself :)

Re:Bug?

[iainl]

What do you mean we won't understand? Us Europeans all know about Rugby, which is basically the Realitime equivalent of your turn-based football game, without the padding, and it's the same there.

Re:Bug?

[ClamIAm]

It speaks volumes about you that you assume I'm French. Yet you're the one SURRENDERING (to anonymity) because you don't want to be held accountable for your words.

"Short article" is right

[Beolach]

From TFA: "write this short article"... that little snippet is about 20% of the entire article text (yeah, bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point). At least he did call it short.

I was kinda hoping for an interesting in-depth article, rather than just a few side-by-side screenies. Graphics is probably the biggest, and definitely the most visible (pun intended) differance, but it's by no means the only change that's happened in games. The side-by-sides are kinda fun & interesting, but glancing at them really doesn't give any insight into much of anything. Sure, the graphics are better now. Does that make the games more fun? Well, yeah, all other things being equal, better graphics == better overall game, but is everything else really equal? I'd find an article making deep & broad comparisons between games today & 20 years ago very interesting to read. Little disappointed this wasn't that.

Re:"Short article" is right

[ClamIAm]

I don't think that games have changed all that much. Sure, we have programmable-shader 3D HD++ graphics, but the core gameplay of many genres has pretty much stagnated.

In genres like racing or sports (say football), there isn't much difference between Pole Position and Gran Turismo 4, or between Tecmo Bowl and the latest Madden. The "precision" may have gotten better, allowing more options or more accurate simulations of things like play calling or physics, but they're mostly the same games (save the fact that they're now 10 times as complex).

The higher parts of the gaming food chain (established genres and conventions) have been killing off lower species (innovation, weird stuff) for years, and it's weakening the gene pool. To take on the established species, you must either do it by force or by creating a species that disrupts the natural order.

These two strategies are being employed as we speak. Sony and Microsoft think that by building bigger tanks, the sheer power will be able to crush competing tech and create a higher barrier to entry. Nintendo, on the other hand, is quietly crafting experimental anti-tank gear. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Re:"Short article" is right

[Beolach]

I disagree. There's been a number of other advances besides graphics in games, even in genres like racing or sports. I remember an old American football game where the only interaction the player had was selecting what play would be used each down. The player selected the play & then watched is it either succeeded or failed based on what play the opponent had selected, with some random variations thrown in. That's very different than the level of control a player of a current American football game has. Physics and AI are also on completely different levels now than they were 20 years ago.

Now, those are all aspects of the underlying game engine, which is somewhat seperate from the overall game design. Advances in the various aspects of game engines creates more possibilities for the game design, but fulfilling the increased potential does require innovation on the part of the game designer; and it's by no means guaranteed that the designer will do so. But regardless of whether they fully realize their potential, does not change the fact that the game engine, and hence the game as a whole, is different than games 20 years ago. Innovation or the lack thereof in game design is in many ways a seperate issue than changes in the game engine. As graphics is only one part of the game engine, I'd like to have seen a more in-depth article that included more comparisons of other aspects of game engines between 20 years ago and today, in addition to the side-by-side screenies in the article.

Re:"Short article" is right

[Sark666]

And sometimes gameplay takes a step backwards (or several steps).

Case in point is ea sports nhl94. I've tried almost every version of hockey since and none compare. Nhl93 had some 'cheese' spots that were guaranteed goals, they fixed that in 94 and it was perfection. 95 and on were all down hill. I remember trying nhl2002 on a ps2 and me and my brother were getting ridiculous goals after about 20 minutes of play. It was just silly. And one of the main reasons for this is the attention to (lack of) the goalie. In the 2002 version the goalie was defaulted to select. Select? wtf. Oh and 94 is best on the snes, not the genesis as everyone used to say back then (genesis is better for sports). Reason being again is because of the goalie. The default geneisis controller lacked enough buttons to have one dedicated to goalie, so you had to press and hold a button a second or two, to get the goalie, well by then the puck was in.

Look at most reviews for most of the hockey games these days. They'll rant and rave about the graphics, the crowd, and all that and give it a 90+% rating, but towards the end of the review concede that advanced players will be able to exploit areas to score after awhile. So in other words, looks pretty, but the heart of the gameplay is flawed.

One thing that has remained true over the 20 years:

Gameplay is king.

Re:"Short article" is right

[plumby]

there isn't much difference between Pole Position and Gran Turismo 4,

At the level of 'they both involve racing a car around a track trying to go faster than other cars', yes they are pretty similar, but at that level they're both pretty similar to actually being in a real car race, so I'm not quite sure what sort of innovation you'd expect. If you want driving games that do something different, there's things like GTA and Driver.

In almost all other aspects of the game (control, feedback from the car, other driver inteligence, car customisation, graphics, sound etc), GT4 is a totally different level to things like Pole Position.

Re:"Short article" is right

[umbrellasd]

I still find the idea of playing Bard's Tale or Karate Champ more appealing then their modern counterparts...so ironic.

Re:"Short article" is right

[Sj0]

You're ignoring an important point: That's a gameplay element chosen intentionally.

The fact of the matter is, most people who play these games aren't very good, so to ensure that people will keep playing for more than a game or two, it's neccessary to make scoring easier. It's not realistic, mind you, but for most people, it's more fun to skate around with Wayne Gretzky scoring goals than to skate around with Wayne Gretsky being shown all the reasons why Wayne is the great one and the player is just some fat white collar bum playing video games on his 12 inch TV.

Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[Shivetya]

I have seen many space based adventure games come and go but none blew me away as much as Starflight did. I even have an old Tandy TX and SX just so I can still play the game!

For a game that only required two 360k floppies it was amazing in depth. The story was great and the detail was good as well. There was even lots of humor involved, some required you to be a real fan of the genre.

Wiki reference : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

Graphics can enhance a game but they never make a game.

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[Mugros]

Starflight was one of the best. Makes you feel how lonely it can get driving around on empty planets looking for ruins. And then if the energy runs out :) Great, great, great.
But hwat about Elite. This can't be a comparison of histroical games without Elite. The very first game i bought. And actually it does still look good compared to modern space games. It has 3D.

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[Winlin]

Starflight was the first game I played obsessively. I remember many late night sessions, going to do just one more planet before bed. And the copy protection wheel was practically a game in itself:)

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[flappinbooger]

That sorta reminds me of "escape velocity", the old Mac game. Very simple yet extremely addictive, deep, humorous, open ended.

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, starflight, i was hooked on this game. i want more games like this. HUGE ass game environment. great story and great aliens.

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[Acer500]

Starflight was amazingly advanced for its time.

I really liked how it could engage you in so many fronts (unlike many other games of the era) you could advance your crew (RPG-like), your spaceship, the plot, manage money, find artifacts (although you could spend hours in barren systems).

The starmap and especially the manual included with the game gave it a lot of inmersion, the back story was good too.
In fact, those are two features I find lacking in modern games (truth be told, I haven't bought many recently, so I could be wrong).

Re:Haven't seen a match for Starflight yet

[DoctorStarks]

Loved that game, even though I only got to play it for a week at my brother's place while visiting. I didn't own a computer at the time that would play it.

You know, you can just download it and play it on your PC. Start here and poke around the links. I don't know if anyone still enforces the copyright on it, but the sites that offer it for download appear to go untouched.

Or you can get a legitimate one off E-Bay, guilt-free, with box and manuals and everything (even the codewheel!).

It runs in CGA graphics, so you might install DOS in a Virtual PC just to run it. The nice thing is you can just suspend the virtual machine and pop right back in where you left off.

It doesn't quite hold one's attention like it did back in the day, but it reminds you of those aspects that made it such a great experience for the imagination.

No, they are not ...

[WARM3CH]

Those pictures from XBOX360 games are not pre-rendered. At least this is what the editor of that page says:

All screenshots are from the actual engines = none of them shall be pre-rendered. The scaling effect have a beautifying effect though.

Re:No, they are not ...

[Not Invented Here]

Even if they are done by the game engine, they aren't camera angles you actually use when playing the game. Take a look at the PGR shot, and ask yourself, "Could I really drive looking at my car from down there?"

I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer to play racing games with the camera looking forwards, and maybe with the speedo visible somewhere on the screen. Those wishing to take screen shots of racing games should read this useful guide.

Re:No, they are not ...

[Vo0k]

Still, these are cutscene shots, not actual gameplay. They could just as well put box art comparison (these old games had some pretty amazing box art at times).

Or would you like to play Gotham Racing with camera view stuck in direction of your front bumper? Or to see the face of the basketball player instead of the basket?
The problem with many new games is that they often concentrate on different 'cinematic' angles to show off the game art and disrupting the player's concentration. One moment you look how your car beautifully jumps from a ramp and the moment you see it composed into a lamppost. Or you frantically try to turn around to get the camera to show the opponent because the engine decided to focus on your face and the opponent is 'somewhere' in front of you but you have no idea where. That's actually where the old games had it right.

Re:No, they are not ...

[fatphil]

With the microsoft Xbox logo in the corner, the driving game _does_ look like box art!

FP.

Re:No, they are not ...

[pimpimpim]

And why do Ì see a microsoft logo in the bottom right of the PGR shot? Is that in the game as well? Sure makes it look like a shot from the PR department, rather than a real screenshot. And even then, what do I car, I just want a simple cool car game, where I can ride my car and crash it a little bit. If they had the right priority: first make sure you can drive the car easily, and then add nicely rendered crashing effects, I'd get it...

Re:No, they are not ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we can credit early game designers was solving the camera angle problem! Technical limitations meant they never really hit it. It's a third-person 3D thing, and they didn't have much 3D back then.
Still, it doesn't explain why every third person 3D action/adventure/platform game since the playstation has had camera problems. Why hasn't this been solved? And it's so easy - just enable first person mode or user-controlable camera and it can never really fuck up that badly.
Yeah, I think that game designers (or marketers) are just too in love with making you stare at their character's ass the entire time to fix it.

Re:No, they are not ...

[Echnin]

3D action/adventure/platform game since the playstation

To be pedantic, the PlayStation didn't have any 3D action/adventure/platform games before Mario 64 came out for the Nintendo 64. Speaking of the camera for that game, I didn't really think it was all that bad.

Re:No, they are not ...

[AviLazar]

Or would you like to play Gotham Racing with camera view stuck in direction of your front bumper?
GranTurismo 3 for te PS2 (as well as gran turismo 2 and probably 1) has an option, after the race, to see your car and the other cars driving around the track. It is not pre-rendered, it looks exactly the same as the rest of the race...the only difference, since the computer is controlling the cars movements you can change the camera angle to include the front. I do not have this Gotham Racing, but I am sure they have the same tech.

Re:No, they are not ...

[SanityInAnarchy]

every third person 3D action/adventure/platform game since the playstation has had camera problems..... just enable first person mode or user-controlable camera

To be fair, every third person 3D action/adventure/platform game I've played recently has had a user-controllable camera.

What games were you playing?

Re:No, they are not ...

[Sj0]

Actually, the simple solution is far simpler: Don't render polygons that are between the main character and the players line of sight. It's simple to implement, elegant, and allows the third person view to work without ever having to pull around because Raziel or Lara backed up against a wall.

Speaking of which, Defiance tried innovating with the camera. If the next game has the same "innovation", I'm going to have to destroy everyone the main designer has ever loved.

Re:No, they are not ...

[DeafByBeheading]

Or would you like to play Gotham Racing with camera view stuck in direction of your front bumper?

GTA:VC has a viewing option where the camera becomes positioned somewhere in the direction where you're headed. It follows your car as you pass by it and keeps focusing on you as you drive away. After a moment, it switches to a new location, again where you're headed. It's not too hard to drive using this mode once you know the city, and it looks very "cinematic". Pretty damn cool...

Re:No, they are not ...

[DeadScreenSky]

To be pedantic, the PlayStation didn't have any 3D action/adventure/platform games before Mario 64 came out for the Nintendo 64. Speaking of the camera for that game, I didn't really think it was all that bad.

Sure it did: Jumping Flash. In a lot of ways it even did it better, too. A shame the genre basically only became clones of Mario64 after its release. The Jumping Flash series offered an interesting alternative approach.

Except that Bards Tale wasn't online...

[Channard]

Bards Tale, which was also recently remade as a non-party RPG wasn't online. A fairer comparison would have been Playing Army (running around the streets with sticks for guns) versus World of Warcraft. The prime difference being that when your mum called you in for tea you had to go. Whereas World of Warcraft players are sustained by an IV feeding beef stew directly into their bodies and hence never have to leave their desks. Ever.

Re:Except that Bards Tale wasn't online...

[irchans]

Channard wrote: >are sustained by an IV feeding beef stew directly into their bodies and hence never have to leave their desks. Ever.... You think this is funny now, but 20 years from now, the IV hookup might be the standard way to enjoy your gaming un-interupted.

Re:Except that Bards Tale wasn't online...

[iainl]

Alternatively, change in the other direction. A comparison between The Bard's Tale and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion would be far more relevant.

Similarly, you could look at some of the following:

Lotus Turbo Esprit vs. Driver: Parallel Lines
Saboteur vs. Ninja Gaiden Black
Revs vs. Gran Turismo 4
3D Monster Maze vs. Doom 3

But then I'm revealing my UK heritage, and most of those Spectrum and BBC games don't mean much to Americans.

Re:Except that Bards Tale wasn't online...

[From A Far Away Land]

My favourite online game from the mid 1980s is Sopwith 3. The old graphics honestly don't bother me.

http://sopwith3.sourceforge.net/

Try it with a friend over the internet today. Keys are: ,./
s h
zx
b spacebar

No text only screenshots old and new!

[Zebadias]

This is hardly worth looking at! How about actually compairing gamplay, audio, game length ect. rather than just two side by side screenshots.

Re:More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ag

[starwed]

I have a pretty large compilation of old NES ROMS on my computer. And I can tell you that almost all of them suck. Many of them really, really suck.

There are also plenty of good games mixed among them, but Sturgeon's law holds true for video games. Both "back in the day" and now.

So that's progress

[LainTouko]

I haven't played any of the games in that comparison, but purely looking at the screenshots the 20 year old games generally look better. With many of those modern shots I can't see how you could possibly feel in control, you just can't see enough.

Re:More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ag

[PrawnJuice]

I'll second that. Most new games are sugar-coated crap. Reminds me of a new operating system due to be released next year...

Obligatory...

[ricepudd]

You can see how much we've moved on, just compare the original Duke Nukem with Duke Nukem Forever!

Oh wait...

"Article" begs the question...

[hyfe]

... which versions were more fun?

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[RedWizzard]

Article does not beg the question.

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[hyfe]

I'm foreign.. hence, I learn phrases from their actual usage and not their archaic meanings.

Now, 'begging the question' as good as always means the article is practically begging the question to be asked; ie the question is written in bold-faced gigantic invisible letters inbetween the lines and you'd be a bloody retard if you didn't spot it.

'Begging the question' might have been used for a fairly limited context in old times. But I don't care much about that, since old times aren't now. More importantly the phrase actually does make sense in the modern usage. The wikipedia article states that it's used as a synomym for 'raises the question', which I really don't agree with. There is a slight difference in who the one raising the question is. With 'raises the question' the subtext is "I'm so smart that I'm asking this really insightfull question', while with 'begs the question' the subtext is 'this is so stupid, anybody reading this will point this out!'.

In my opinion, holding on to precision and subtetlies in language is a very worthwhile cause. Crusading against stuff that actually makes sense just because your grandfather used the phrase slightly differently is just inane. Language is just communication. If a phrase actually is easy enough for a foreigner to actually understand the first time he's reading it, there is nothing bloody wrong with phrase. If anything, there might be something wrong the archaic definition!

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[Placido]

>> I'm foreign.. hence... ...there is nothing bloody wrong with... ...the archaic definition!

You're British?

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[Kitsune818]

..not to mention that English is about as fluid a language as you can find. It was never strictly formalized and has generally been shaped by the influence of numerous other languages. It consists of a preponderance of idioms that come from very different background that sometimes didn't translate correctly into English, but were adopted anyway. Just try, for instance, to determine the absolutely correct origin for "let the cat out of the bag."

The same problem arises with terms like irony. Yes, they meant something different 100 years ago. They no longer mean that because they are no longer used that way. Get over it, move on. Doubly true for spelling (although, I would argue the Americans are in fact wrong in many instances since a lot of their spelling variations come from Webster).. however, you never see any of these sorts who want to seem intelligent and adhear to proper archaic word usage denegrate someone for using the word "check" or "favorite".

If I took the time to write everything in proper old or middle english, no one would be able to read it.. why are there no complaints that things have changed from that period?

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[hyfe]

You're British?

Norwegian :)

Re:"Article" begs the question...

[Godwin O'Hitler]

So what phrase would you suggest we use to make sure people understand what we're talking about when we mean "begging the question" in the logical sense?

Come on now, you've stolen the original meaning so give us something in return.

As for your argument about creating a different nuance from "raising the question" - give it a rest. You're inventing nuances to justify your argument. Do you really think people stop to ask themselves if "raises the question" is strong enough to convey their true feelings before setting pen to paper?

Re:sid meier's railroad tycoon

[ceeam]

And that would be a nice title for a game!

still nice to see EA

[solarbob]

...has got the monoply on the major sporting titles. 10 years and still going strong...

all modern games listed are xbox or pc

[Anonymous Coward]

am i the only one who noticed that? or maybe ps2 or gamecube are in "then" category in this review?

Age of Sequels.

[Vo0k]

And where are NEW games?

Double Dribble vs. NBA Live'06

Karate Champ vs. DOA 4

Tennis vs. Top Spin 2

Bard's Tale vs. WOW (there were quite a few warcrafts/starcrafts/etc before)

Rad Racer vs. PGR 3

Ice Hockey vs NHL 2006

10 yard fight vs Madden NFL 06

Punch Out vs Fight Night round 3

Re:Age of Sequels.

[cyborg_zx]

You're asking a postmodernist question. Pretty much every type of game that could be made has been made so there's nothing much more to do other.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Red Flayer]

And the older games were not copies of other games? "And where are NEW games?
Double Dribble vs. NBA Live'06
Basketball
Karate Champ vs. DOA 4
Martial Arts competitions
Tennis vs. Top Spin 2
Uhhh... tennis, like on a clay court
Bard's Tale vs. WOW (there were quite a few warcrafts/starcrafts/etc before)
Dungeons and Dragons
Rad Racer vs. PGR 3
NASCAR, F1, etc.
Ice Hockey vs NHL 2006
Real Ice Hockey
10 yard fight vs Madden NFL 06
NFL/USFL football
Punch Out vs Fight Night round 3
Boxing

I think in your eagerness to point out how unoriginal games are today, you missed the observation that all of the older games listed are just videogame versions of other games. There is no originality there.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[westlake]

And where are NEW games?

You were expecting novelty in a sports simulation? This is social gaming. The general idea is to capture the game-day experience, almost always as it seen on TV.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[SydShamino]

When comparing old games to new, similar games, one might expect the new games to be, well, similar to older ones.

They didn't compare any recent "rolling around gravity balls to collect objects and build stars" games to the equivalent from 1985 because there wasn't one back then to compare.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[SuiteSisterMary]

Well, you conveniently ignore the fact that most Super Nintendo games were remakes or rehashes of NES games with the word 'Super' prepended to the title, and that most N64 games were, again, remakes or rehashes with the number '64' appended to the title.

What are the major hits of the Gamecube? Lets see. Metroid, goes all the way back to the NES. Zelda? Goes back to the NES. Rogue Squadron? Wow, only goes back to the N64. Super Smash Brothers Melee? A sequal to a game about old Nintendo characters. And so on.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Firehed]

There's something to be said for being the first to put an existing sport in digital form though. At least back then they were the original version of the sports, not just a minor graphics update and another $60. Just think that once we get our micro-SCUBA things (a la Star Wars 1) set, we'll have based our RL-Blitzball off of the FFX original. How ironic.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Epyn]

Late but I must say:
NES games were largely ports from the arcades, hence the ungodly bias towards killing you cheaply (e.g. Ninja Gaiden).

SNES had one up on that in the fact that almost all games were made specifically for the console, had more content, less cheap death, and I found them to be the most entertaining of all consoles. My top favorites still contain many SNES games.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[SuiteSisterMary]

I agree; the SNES/Genesis era was a damn good one. I'm just pointing out that this generation doen't have a lock on doing remakes/upgrades/whatevers of old games; they've been doing that since, well, the second generation of games.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Quikah]

What? Those weren't the original versions of the sports either. Did you forget the awesome Basketball, Boxing, Hockey, etc. from the Atari 2600? The NES versions of the 80s are just "minor" graphic updates and another $XX.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Red Flayer]

You're right -- but then again, there were handheld versions of football and baseball before there were PC or console versions.

I like the fact that there are annual releases of good sports games -- I buy Madden every three years or so, and it always seems like a major upgrade to me. Plus, since I don't need to have all the current players, I buy the previous year's release used for $10-$20.

If the game is good, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel every year when you update the players and toss in some better graphics. And for a casual gamer like me, there's no reason to buy every new version.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[karnal]

If you think Ninja Gaiden(NES) was a port of Ninja Gaiden(Arcade), I think you better go back and look at both versions...

While the name stayed the same, I can hardly call the NES version a port of the Arcade version... just a nitpick tho...

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Vo0k]

but still the old ones were new approaches to old themes, each of these games was revolutionary in its own way, a NEW game of given genre. These are SEQUELS - sometimes 5th or 6th iteration of the same old idea only with very minor changes. WoW is about the only original thing on the list - riding old franchise but under new gameplay concept. The others are purposedly rehashes of old versions, remakes, upgrades, not new games.
Just look, Half-Life, Serious Sam, were just another FPS, Morrowind was a 2nd sequel to a cRPG series, FF7 was seventh reiteration of the series, but they all were revolutionary! And what do we have here? Pathetic remakes! It's still possible to make a great RPG, a new interesting FPS, a new game of given genre that is interesting, challenging, revolutionary. But the industry purposedly avoids them, choosing tiny incremental changes instead and investing in graphics, sound, and NOT playablity or ideas.

Re:Age of Sequels.

[Red Flayer]

" But the industry purposedly avoids them, choosing tiny incremental changes instead and investing in graphics, sound, and NOT playablity or ideas."

Well, what do you expect with dev costs so high? That level of risk is unacceptable when you have a proven revenue stream from releasing moderately upgraded versions of a game.

Also, why does something have to be 'new' or 'different' to be good? If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you can improve it, do it.

Eventually franchises get stale, and then the franchise either gets revamped (like FF) or it dies off and another one takes its place. When ROI of a rehashed release is less than the ROI on a revamp or a new title, then we'll see companies making more creative games.

Don't forget, for every Morrowind or Half-Life out there, there are a dozen games that tried and failed. To a business with an established product line and reputation to protect, the risk just isn't worth it.

Re:More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ag

[acid_zebra]

I agree, but Nintendo didn't really hit their stride until the SNES. That's where the games are that I still load once in a while.

For all you retro farts

[Xiph]

Memory.
For you old farts(i'm 26) who seem to think old games were better than new games remember the following: point Your memeory doesn't serve you well (neither does my spelling)
you don't remember the bad things, and you will make the good things seem even better than they were. When you remember that really good game that you spend hours playing when you were younger,
you forget about both the bad sides of the game and the other bad games. All the good games, i've gone back and revisited, have been good for the first 10 minutes, but few of them i've kept playing for more.
They're fun, but the fun part lies mainly in my memory and in the storytelling, and with the really good lines, i remember the story. A few of them i manage to keep playing (like the original master of orion), a few have better gameplay than current day; I still think Dune 2 is superior in game play to many modern rts' unfortunately the interface is horrid and the bugs are weird.

The first mistake lies in comparing the great old games to the games that disappointed us, if you wanna compare bards tale, do it to something like the elder scrolls series instead of a game we'll all happily forget next year. The second mistake is forgetting all about the disappointing games in the past or all the horrid pacman clones that were sold to diehard fans, all the pong alike games or the front/side -scroller inferno with thousands of ever more similar games. Anyway if you want a good game, without paying for hyped graphics, indie games have a lot to offer.

The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present,
is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Runesabre]

Certainly it is hard to objectively evaluate the past and separate nostalgia from reality.

With that said, game graphics have advanced immensely in the past 20 years while game play has not. The problem lies in how these games are developed. Nearly 75% of a game budget goes towards graphics and technology and processes to support the graphics. The leftover goes towards rushing in content at the last minute and quickly hacking together gameplay to utilize all the coolio graphics.

Yes, there were many, many disappointing and crappy games "back in the day"; but, there were also many games that were completely mind blowing in how cool and inventive they were. Today, we have lots and lots of disappointing games sprinkled with a few games that are entertaining but nothing more than graphically updated re-hashes of past successes. Rarely do we actually see anything that totally surprises the masses with totally new, inventive and fun gameplay. We've seen a few such as Dance, Dance Revolution or The Sims or Guitar Hero.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Kangburra]

The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present,
is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.

This may be true to a point, but there are some games (Mario, Mario Kart) that I would still play if I could. Yes I was a Nintendo fan.

While there may be bad parts I have forgotten I would still prefer Mario Kart over something Need For Speed Underground.

NFSU is a good game, but the time it takes to finish it is so short.

If you played Mario Brothers and enjoyed it, boot a Linux distro and have a go with SuperTux, it's very close and it's fun.

That's what the old games had...fun! :-)

Re:For all you retro farts

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the lecture. No, really.

Re:For all you retro farts

[ClamIAm]

And yet, people still read Shakespeare.

Re:For all you retro farts

[should_be_linear]

Main difference: Today's gaming _industry_ is based on marketing and technical qualities (graphics, music). In old days, it was gameplay. If Elite is released today, noone would notice, because it had crapy graphics and no music (On my ZX). Yet quite few peole spent _years_ playing it. My take is that industry killed gameplay. 2 programmers + 3 Artists good, 20 programmers + 30 artists + whole lot of other people involved, bad.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Goffee71]

Well I remember Spectrum Match Point taking up as much of my time as Virtua Tennis World Tour does now on my PSP, the game plays from the same angle, the only differences are range of shot selection and the replays, which are mostly skipped. Simple games are still simple games no matter how much dressing you put on them. One thing is certain, simple games back then loaded in one go and played smoothly whereas modern games have pauses as often irrelevant content loads from disc or slowdowns where they try to force too much through a processor.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Kjella]

I still think Dune 2 is superior in game play to many modern rts' unfortunately the interface is horrid and the bugs are weird.

The basics haven't changed much, but I realized Dune 2 had been passed up already when Dune 2000 came. It was the same with better graphics, but particularly things like queuing had improved in other games.

I never had so much fun as I did when I played Dune 2, I completed the campaign with all three (even the bloody useless Ordos, don't know anyone else that did). But well, trying to relive memories by playing the same game just doesn't work.

Personally, I don't have much against new games. Yes, there are comparatively fewer games now. But the time you can spend lost in each one of them is also vastly higher. Next up on my "must buy" list is Oblivion. The last time, I had to rush Morrowind in the end (walkthrough) because exams were coming up, but I had already played it for months.

Before that it was Civilization 4. Space Rangers 2 was surprisingly funny. UT2k4 is nice to play from time to time. Before that, Guild Wars. Before that... well, the point is I feel there's more than enough good games to get lost in (even not counting EverCrack-style games where you can grind for ages).

Re:For all you retro farts

[EvilNecro]

blah blah blah.... M.U.L.E., Archon, Seven Cities of Gold

Re:For all you retro farts

[KDR_11k]

Really? I grew up on a C64 and waiting a minute for a level to load would actually happen.

Re:For all you retro farts

[phpWebber]

I'm 35 and I agree with you. So many people are going to come in claiming how great the gameplay was long ago. It wasn't. That was just all you had. I loved Basketball for Atari but I'm sorry NBA Street is better than NBA Jam is better than Arch Rivals is better than Double Dribble is better than Intellivision Basketball.

Are you telling me you'd rather play Night Driver over Burnout?
Adventure over Baldur's Gate or Elder Scrolls?
Combat over Battlefield 2?
Star Trek (the ascii grid version) over Wing Commander?
Mule over Civilization? (ok maybe Mule is bad example. That game rocked)
There was a reason you only needed one button on your joystick. The games just weren't that deep.

Older gamers, learn to accept you just aren't as good at video games as you were 20 years ago. Drop the "no gameplay" excuse.

Re:For all you retro farts

[chrysrobyn]

For you old farts(i'm 26) who seem to think old games were better than new games remember the following: point Your memeory doesn't serve you well (neither does my spelling) you don't remember the bad things, and you will make the good things seem even better than they were. When you remember that really good game that you spend hours playing when you were younger, you forget about both the bad sides of the game and the other bad games.

I've got you by 3-4 years. I'll take your challenge. I didn't have much money growing up (never poor, I mean, we had an IBM PC in 1981, but it didn't get a single upgrade until 1990). I had to choose my games carefully. I argue that, even if you choose carefully, you can't find "sweet spot" games like those from 20 years ago when plot and game play had to make up for graphical and technical deficiencies. The article steps back ~20 years, so let's do the same.

Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel. Today, we might compare it to Burnout and the ilk, but honestly, the controls are mostly the same. Sure, we've got snazzy instant replays and stuff, but we had a really great game 20 years ago. Graphics were... suitable. Test Drive II even had expansion packs for cars and maps.

Starflight. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm still sore over seeing Starflight III get turned into Star Control II. The story could have used another sequel. This game had excellent plot, game play and depth. There were real characters to interact with. Dialogue was somewhat repetitive at times, but there were real twists and turns in how the whole thing played out. You can't show me an equivalent game today. Remember that moment when you figured out who the Uhleghk were?! The Umanu?! (The next person who argues with me about SCII not being SFIII may just force me to break out the star maps of SFII and start pointing out plot "coincidences".)

Starcraft. Even stepping back 10 years ago (we can go a bit further if you want to call Starcraft "Warcraft II.IV" if you like). Intense replayability. This game has no equal. Some of the graphics are dated -- but honestly the 2D graphics would suit just fine today if they were updated to higher resolution monitors.

The reason that the past always appear more glorious than the present, is that we're repeating the past and this time we have the experience to see the flaws and are too stubborn to revise the past.

No, games today don't have the same appeal. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by restricting myself from the OCD-fest that MMPORG games (I'm OCD enough that I think one game session would eat my brain for a long time). Honestly, compare whatever games you like. But consider what could have happened with game plot designers from 20 years ago leading a team of modern artists and engine developers. Today it seems like the engine guys lead the artists and the plot guy is a preteen pulled from Myspace.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Megane]

Two words: Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is crap.

Now maybe the crap quotient is a bit higher in games these days, but the principle is still the same - 10% or less of everything is not crap. There were great games back then, and there are great games now (Katamari Damacy, for instance). But now the crap games are soooooo shiny ("You can't polish a turd, Beavis.") and all the popular games these days seem to end in digits. Back in the Atari 2600 days, I loved the Space Invaders game on it, and that was a system seller for me. Combat was good, too. But most of the other games were pretty boring.

The point is that there are games from back then that are better than what we have today. There are true classics that people still want from all over the past 25 years. The only really new thing these days is the internet allowing people to play against each other without having to leave their couch. And even online gaming isn't all that new, I was playing a text MMORPG 15 years ago on the GEnie service.

I also find it amusing that this is comparing current games with 20 year old games. You could get a similar article by comparing the games from 20 vs 25 years ago! Games have gotten more shiny because the hardware now has the capability (storage space, graphics memory, CPU/GPU speed) to show more shine. But that doesn't contribute one bit to gameplay.

And it's not just games... movies and mainstream American music these days suck more than ever, too. It's all because once you get that much money in it, things start to get managed by the "mooks", who have their own screwy ideas of what the public wants, and start to throw in cliched crap in a cargo-cult attempt to succeed. What they don't understand is that you can't make a classic by throwing everything including the kitchen sink into it. Hell, even 2600 Pac-Man and E.T. sucked so much because management said "we need this game now!" The truly original ideas rarely get funded unless they somehow escape into the public awareness first... and then they become the next cliche to throw into everything.

And keep off my BGCOLOR="#00FF00"!

Re:For all you retro farts

[Hoi Polloi]

Same goes for music. People start to think that the (insert decade here)'s were the best for music but forget that what is played now is usually the best from that period. Do a little research and you find out that 90% of what came out was crap and has been forgotten.

If you want to find out how bad things got back in the old days of video games just look at the rom listings for MAME. Clones and copies galore.

Re:For all you retro farts

[valkraider]

Except... I STILL play the old games, many on my ORIGINAL game systems. (I am 33) I have many many many, and with things like MAME and other emulators - I have most every game I ever touched as a kid. Let me touch on just two examples. 1. Zelda I still have my original gold cartridge for my original NES. I also have the ROM of an emulator, and I have the original Zelda on GameCube disk that came as a bonus for buying the Zelda edition gamecube. I still play this game. In fact I played it just last week, got through five of the dungeons in the first "quest". I can show you on a map where every item is, and I still find enjoyment in playing the game. 2. Paperboy. I didn't enjoy the game then, and I don't enjoy it now - on one of my "retro" game disks for gamecube. Still sucks. So yeah, not every game from back then was great - but in order for a game to sell well back then it had to be GREAT! And I had all sorts of games man, Apple II, Commodore Vic20 and C64, Tandy CoCo II, Nintendo, Atari, Intellevision, ColecoVision, I even had a SEARS clone of one of them, I forget which. I still have most of them. Sega master system. Sega dreamcast, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, SNES, various game-boys, PCs (man I spent months playing DOOM and before that Kings Quest and before that Wizardry). All have had stinker games, and all have had good games. But seriously - now the games TEND to focus on graphics more than gameplay. Hey, I appreciate the anatomically correct DOA games as much as anyone. ;) But my favorite game system currently is my Nintendo DS because it is so damn fun to play, and easy to play over the net or with friends right there. No config or hacking - just fire it up and play Mario Kart with 8 friends, or 4 on the Net, or all by myself. Feed my nintendogs, Get my butt kicked at Meteos or Tetris... Heck, even the easy multi-player game of monopoly/boggle/battleship/yahtzee is a blast, and it has no graphics whatsoever. Just fun multi-player capability in a small portable package... Why is Mario Tennis and Mario Golf so fun - compared to the more hyper realistic sim golf and tennis games? Gameplay. Ease of use. Fun!

Re:For all you retro farts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the 80's video games were a pain because they each costed a quarter, and at the time I wasn't exactly made of money.

OTOH you could kill a whole night w the Atari 2600, whereas nowadays it's uncommon I get 15 min to blow on the Gameboy Advance SP

Re:For all you retro farts

[mliu]

It's interesting that you include Starcraft in that mix, relatively young at less than 10 years old. Interesting in that I remember hearing this same type of criticism that has become so trendy now, among aging gamers back then. Sure, they'd say, there's the occasional game that's fun like Starcraft now, but there's no match for the MULE, the Elite, the Starflights, etc.

The simple fact of the matter is, 90% of creative works are mediocre. We remember the good ones. You include Starcraft now as being from the age when gameplay still counted. Well how about Dance Dance Revolution, Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto, the entire genre of MMOGs? Innovation is far from dead, but that's hardly fashionable to acknowledge.

Compounding this remembering the good ones effect is the fact that we also remember things through rose colored glasses. The fact is, we can go back and play a game like Bard's Tale, and it kinda sucks. If a game with identical gameplay were released today, even with beautiful graphics, no one would play. We only think it was better because we were more open-minded back then.

Do you remember how you felt as a kid, when all the old people were saying how things aren't as good now as they were when they were growing up? You are the old person now.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Illserve]

You're mostly right, but there are exceptions. I dare you to put MOO2 down after 10 minutes.

I just lost a week to it recently after I was stupid enough to reinstall it.

I'm sure Civ would be the same.

Modern turn-based games have gotten too complicated and have lost the fun aspect. In this case, the old ones really are better.

Re:For all you retro farts

[ichigo 2.0]

I agree. I had over 1000 games for my Commodore 64, but I only remember there being a couple of dozen good games.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Creepy]

and I was just thinking about how shallow some recent games are

after 6 hours of playing Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4) I
a) think my character feels like a cardboard cutout
b) think the NPCs in the game world would be as much fun as drinking pee
c) still wonder where all the children are (ok, I know - laws against killing kids screw that up for some countries)

but read this reference from one of the TES Oblivion developers - this guy subjectively refers to characters people care about, yet I feel the game failed to deliver that, at least at this point. Another great effect is games that set a mood - the fairly recent games F.E.A.R. and the haunted house in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, for example, are good horror effects.

I didn't really realize how much characters mattered until I thought about the games I liked most, including those I played as a kid. Not that this is required - I loved Wizardry for all the stuff you could find. I loved Ultima for the quests (they seem a bit shallow now, but at the time they were cutting edge). I loved Civilization and Medieval: Total War for the strategies - for that matter, I loved Escape Velocity (and its distant predecessor Elite) for that reason, too. I loved Doom for the variety in the creatures you'd encounter. Still, the games I want to revisit years later almost always have strong characters.

Some of my favorite (and some are weird choices):

Below the Root: Apple 2 - a mostly non-combat game that was almost unplayed because it was edu-ware based on a book nobody read. Probably the most interesting part of this game to me was how the weaker characters could tell the disposition of NPCs (via empathy). NPCs exhibited everything from racism and hatred to caring and love for your character. Also, it's the first game I remember with pre-generated characters (side scroller) where two of the three characters you could play were female.

Wing Commander: did you care about the characters as much as have fun playing the game? If you tell me you didn't want to send a missile down Maniac's tailpipe more than once, I'd say you were lying. Compare that to Freelancer - did I care about anybody in this game? No. Heck I didn't even care about Edison Trent (the main character). Do I have any interest in replaying it? No - I'd much rather play the extremely dated Elite.

Gothic (I): this game isn't that old, but was referenced in the link above - Diego and the Old Camp. Diego saves you early in the game and helps you throughout the game. The combat interface was clunky, but the best parts of the game were the characters and storyline.

Full Throttle and The Longest Journey (and I never played Sam and Max or Curse of Monkey isle, but have heard they're also great) - two of my favorite adventure games because I like this sort of game for plot and story, not for puzzles. Quite honestly, I can't say I like Myst-like games all that much - 12 hours (at most) of puzzles. Syberia took me a bit longer, but I felt nothing for the main character - nice attempt through the phone calls, but the game felt stark and lonely. If you want to play a godawful adventure, try Midnight Nowhere (from some Russian developer) - it's not the game that bugs me, it's the main character - I feel more for the ball in pong than I do for him. Honorable mention goes to Maniac Mansion, which I thought was a boring game (humor just didn't hit home for me), but had interesting characters.

some of the later Infocom text games - Hitchhiker's Guide (chars from the book) and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Trent or Tiffany) pop into my head.

Fallout series - as funny as it may sound, I actually liked this game most for the pop culture references and jokes. The unique characters were ok, but I would have preferred characters that interact a bit more, though the episode with Vic and Val was pretty good. Of all the D&D games (going back to the ones on Intellivision), I liked Planes

Re:For all you retro farts

[Anonymous Coward]

wesnoth.org - Wow, simple, cool, and fun. But it's a turn based game from antoher era.

Re:For all you retro farts

[Anonymous Coward]

A Linux distro blatently ripping off 20 year old technology ? Say it ain't so!

Re:For all you retro farts

[karnal]

Same goes for music. People start to think that the (insert decade here)'s were the best for music

What's funny about that comment is the fact that no one I know would ever say that about music from the 80's.

But they (myself included) sure do know alot about it.... and even listen to it on a regular basis.....

Re:For all you retro farts

[Anonymous Coward]

No way, dude. I still have a Nintendo emulator specifically to play all those games I enjoyed as a kid. And I still enjoy them. It's not some foggy recollection of an idyllic bygone era that makes me see such games in a good light, it's because I bust out my wireless USB controller and fire up Super Mario 3 or Guardian Legend and get my fix of old school 8-bit gaming.

On a related note, it's great that I upgraded my main gaming machine. With my Athlon 64 3700+, a gig of RAM and an X850XT, Zelda has never looked sweeter!

Re:For all you retro farts

[rtb61]

There was one thing older games did definitely have that newer games do not and that was depth. A world war two strategy game for example covered the whole of the war not as now where only one region or battle is covered. It was the big drive to go episodic in the distribution of games i.e. sell you basically the same game over and over again with just a minor extension to the story line and maybe the graphics extended.

A good example was the close combat series that drove atomic broke, people got sick of the lack of depth and stopped buying, it was driven by the publisher, microsoft who was a big proponent of selling you the same game an episode at a time, copying the same premise for their operating system and office suite into the game world.

the best are retro

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of which, one of the best games I've played is a retro freeware game similar to early NES games like metroid. Cave Story is the top downloaded game on gamehippo, highly rated, and has awesome replay value. Check it out (originally in japanese).

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/

http://www.gamehippo.com/

--riotgrrl

Re:sid meier's railroad tycoon

[kubrick]

The sequel to Evil Genius, maybe?

Not the same bugets anymore...

[happyrabit]

It are not the same 'budget' games anymore, there was a time where small teams could get their stuff out and conquer the world, like prince of persia or others like the bullfrog team, and others..., i forgot....
But I just wanted to share this site for the nostalgics http://c64s.com/ classic Commodore 64 games online..., even if I was rather a huuuge Atari ST fan, i had a lot of fun with the c64.

Re:Not the same bugets anymore...

[happyrabit]

Before anyone else does, Ok I misspelled the subject line, of course you should read 'budget'... mea culpa!

Re:Not the same bugets anymore...

[rdwulfe]

True. However, there are still a few good game companies out there, doing unique things with gameplay. Introversion, for example. http://www.introversion.co.uk/ Darwinia, Uplink, and now a Global war game, remeniscent of the old movie. Awesome.

And the old games are STILL more fun...

[vistic]

Seeing that shot of Ice Hockey made me want to take out my NES now and play it. I actually haven't really played many post-N64 video games, so I don't even know how the controls would work in the newer games. If the game played exactly the same as Ice Hockey, wasn't unnecessarily more complicated for "realism's" sake... but just LOOKED better and that's it... I'd be willing to play it.

The problem is I don't think it's just the look of the games that's changed fundamentally over the years, it's the actual dynamics of the gameplay. Ice Hockey aimed at being fun and amusing... I have a feeling this new NHL game aims at being intense and real.

I think the old games were just more fun. Nintendo has been keeping the spirit of being "fun" alive through to the Nintendo64, but after that I felt Nintendo tried to become aimed at an even younger audience. And the Playstation and it's style and mindset just was never me. I hated the look of all those games.

I'm 24 years old, and me and some other computer science students recently got together and took out the old NES and SNES... and I think we had a LOT more fun playing those games than we would on any new system.

(My favorite system I own is still the Genesis/32X/Sega CD... 3 power plugs, yeah!)

Re:And the old games are STILL more fun...

[mliu]

If the game played exactly the same as Ice Hockey, wasn't unnecessarily more complicated for "realism's" sake... but just LOOKED better and that's it... I'd be willing to play it.

Now the interesting thing is, I don't think many people who deny that if somebody did this, the game would sell horribly and no one would buy it except for a few nostalgics like you.

Take a moment to think about that, and consider why you suppose that is? Is it that people no longer value funness?

Re:And the old games are STILL more fun...

[markimusk]

Good God man! Get a CDX!

Re:And the old games are STILL more fun...

[vistic]

It's not that they no longer value funness, it's that they no longer value funnosity.

Re:And the old games are STILL more fun...

[vistic]

Can you even plug a 32X into the top of a CDX?

I remember I rented a CDX from blockbuster or something once before I actually got a Sega CD. Those things are pretty cool.

Re:And the old games are STILL more fun...

[markimusk]

most certainly! I don't know why this video game myth will not die, but the 32X works fine with the CDX. I have both, no probs.

One old game that still kicks ass...

[shotgunefx]

Star Control in Melee mode, human to human.

With two good players, fights can go on for hours, especially when they are evenly matched (Syreen vs Spathi comes to mind.)

Re:One old game that still kicks ass...

[enjar]

I recall one summer almost watching a friendship dissolve over Star Control person to person ..... great game.

My memory...

[MaestroSartori]

...must be playing tricks on me. I don't remember Bard's Tale being a massively multiplayer online game. Oh, and I don't remember having to queue for 45 minutes before getting to play it either, even when loading it from tape! Not all of the "improvements" in games have made things any better! :(

Re:More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ag

[Runesabre]

Not disagreeing that there were as many crappy games "back in the day" as there are today.

The difference is there were comparatively more genuinely fun games "back in the day" that really stood out as awesome accomplishments of entertainment than there are today. Most of today's game hits are graphical updates to past successes.

Sturgeon's Law certainly holds true that both then and now produce a lot of crappy games. The law says nothing about how great the good ones are.

Old Nintendo vs new Microsoft...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one noticing that the article mainly (only?) compares crappy old Nintendo graphics with shiny new XBox graphics.

They could just as well have compared some of the 1986 4-coloured PC games with new Gamecube games. Heck - even comparing old PC games with other games from the same era, would make the PC look silly! :-D

Re:Old Nintendo vs new Microsoft...?

[LordofEntropy]

It seems to me that the whole point of the comparison is to demonstrate the difference in technology; Xbox and Nintendo comparisons are perfectly valid. People seem to be reading some sort of value judgement into it. I think it is kind of like "gee whiz look how far technology" has come.

Nintendo - aargh

[Jarlsberg]

One thing that always irks me about these lookbacks is that it's mostly seen through the eyes of a console gamer. Gaming consoles in the 80s and 90s were underpowered toys compared to the computers of that age (starting with the micros, ie. Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, and then going on to the 16 bit micros, ie. Amiga, Atari, followed by the PC, ie. Doom). Nintendo and Sega had their platform games and their kiddie icons, but that was about it.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[TrappedByMyself]

I still remember the horror when I first played Gauntlet on my friend's Nintendo. It had bombs in place of the magic potions. Bombs!?!
I felt as if a whole generation of children were being mislead by a false prophet.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[cyborg_zx]

Damn straight, and I'm glad you meantioned the Spectrum otherwise I'd have to complain it's all seen through the eyes of AMERICAN console gamers ;)

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Viol8]

Not completely true. Most consoles have some dedicated hardware to do some pretty nifty effects that would be
almost impossible on a home computer of the day. Eg the
SNES had sprite scaling and rotation and perspective that
could all be done in real time. Try doing that on a Spectrum.
The only home computer AFAIK than could do the same was the
Amiga.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Haeleth]

Most consoles have some dedicated hardware to do some pretty nifty effects that would be
almost impossible on a home computer of the day. Eg the SNES had sprite scaling and rotation and perspective that could all be done in real time. Try doing that on a Spectrum.

Uh... your chronology is rather inaccurate. The SNES reached the West in 1991, nearly a full decade after the ZX Spectrum.

By the time the SNES appeared, sprite scaling and rotation and perspective were trivial and commonplace on home computers. For example, the 3D space combat in Wing Commander (1990) is based entirely around smooth scaling and rotation of sprites in real time. And within a year of the SNES launch, PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld (1992) that totally blew away anything that was ever achieved on unextended 16-bit console hardware.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Viol8]

> For example, the 3D space combat in Wing Commander (1990) is based entirely around smooth scaling and rotation of sprites in real time

On which platform? AFAIK only the Amiga had any fancy hardware based
tricks.

>PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D

Well so what? A PC isn't home computer in the traditional sense. I
could easily mention an SGI graphics demo I went to in 1992 that
demonstrated some hi end graphics that weren't bettered by a PC until
a few years ago.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Anonymous Coward]

And within a year of the SNES launch, PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld (1992) that totally blew away anything that was ever achieved on unextended 16-bit console hardware.

blah blah blah. http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/wo lf3d/

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Guysmiley777]

"A PC isn't a home computer in the traditional sense."

What??? Yes, yes a PC IS a home computer. Wing Commander came out in 1990. You think Origin released a game that was only playable in a lab?

In 1991 I had a 486/33 and I played Wing Commander. Even when the SNES was brand new PCs (as in home computers) put it to shame.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Viol8]

If a PC was a home computer then so was an SGI Onyx since both
could be bought by someone with enough money. WHich makes the
whole argument moot.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[DeadScreenSky]

The Wolfenstein 3D SNES version came with an extra processor in the cartridge. It wasn't unextended.

Re:Nintendo - aargh

[Anonymous Coward]

By the time the SNES appeared, sprite scaling and rotation and perspective were trivial and commonplace on home computers. For example, the 3D space combat in Wing Commander (1990) is based entirely around smooth scaling and rotation of sprites in real time. And within a year of the SNES launch, PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld (1992) that totally blew away anything that was ever achieved on unextended 16-bit console hardware.

You must not have played the same Wing Commander as the rest of us. Ours did "smooth" rotation and scaling by displaying grainy pre-rendered sprites taken of a 3D object in, oh, 15-30 degree increments.

This was true at least through Privateer. WC III had FMV -- I forget if it truly displayed 3D objects.

The Horror, The Horror!

[gbulmash]

Back in the 70s, my dad bought this off-brand game console from Fedco (a pre-cursor of Costco). Oh, it was terrible. I think it played pong and brickout, but the only one I remember for sure (and the only one he played) was blackjack.

My friends had Atari, and I had junk. It was so embarrassing when my friends would be over and my dad would ask us if we wanted to play video games. He was so proud of this cheap, no-brand, POS.

I don't care how prehistoric some of the old games seem in comparison to the flashy new stuff. Back in the '70s, I would have killed for those prehistoric games.

- Greg

Re:The Horror, The Horror!

[fishbowl]

When Pong was current, it was way out of the price range of anything I could afford. Some relative gave me a *mechanical* pong game (A Sears-branded Marx TV Tennis). I didn't appreciate it much, but now I kind of think that was pretty cool... Ironic that a battery-operated mechanical "Pong" game could have been 1/5 the cost of an Atari console. This was '76. A Super Pong was well over $100, more expensive in '76 dollars than today's consoles.

I remember being taken in by the TV ads for the Odyssey long before Pong, but I never actually saw one.

Re:The Horror, The Horror!

[bigdogs]

I had the same experience. I had this POS Radio Shack thing that played Pong, while several of my friends had Atari 2600's. I kept trying to get my parents to spring for one, but they wouldn't budge...

Article only compares graphics

[jazman]

It ignores gameplay. Apart from the ability to shoot the monster, is Quake 2 (haven't tried 3 or 4) really any more playable than 3D Monster Maze? T.Rex got me regularly, and I still remember jumping out of my skin as I accidentally strolled past him and having to push the 7 key REALLY HARD on the grounds that the key was pressure sensitive and would let you run faster if you only pressed hard enough, which for some reason I could never do. (OK, I was only 14 at the time so perhaps that had something to do with it.)

Re:Article only compares graphics

[mcphail]

I was 6 when 3d Monster Maze came out. It was the first "1st person 3d" game I'd ever played. For the first 10 minutes I sat staring at the screen, randomly pressing buttons and trying to work out what the hell I was looking at. When Rex came running down the corridor towards me, however, it became clear...

I can confirm that pressing '7' harder made it more likely you would escape from the dinosaur's jaws: by making the RAM pack wobble and crashing the machine!

I played the game on a ZX81 emulator a few years ago. I got away from Rex every time. Maybe in another 20 years I'll be able to complete Quake 2?

Lode Runner and BBS Games

[Whiteox]

Lode Runner has got to be one of the all time great games on this planet, solar system, galaxy and universe! (Apple ][)
The amount of creative time I've wasted playing that game and the amount of joysticks I wore out is immense. Tehre goes about 2 years of my life. I must be some kind of loser......

What I really miss are the BBS games. Anyone remember them???

Re:Lode Runner and BBS Games

[Fedarkyn]

I sitll remember trade wars...
I would like to play it again, web based or via telnet

Re:Lode Runner and BBS Games

[rdwulfe]

It's out there! Several people run very nice open servers where you can play. If you want, message me and I'll send you a few, or go Googling it. Gods, that was one of the best bbs doors ever. I wish they'd bring back some of the others as well. Heck, wish I could just find an old repository of all the good old web games. Wulfe

Re:Lode Runner and BBS Games

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Oh, yes. Where is the originality in today's games? (granted, there are a few)

I still enjoy the occasional game of Lode Runner, Tower Toppler, Boulderdash, Impossible Mission, Space Taxi, Ms. Pan Man, Galaga, Sonic, Mario Kart, etc.

Not to mention a bit of a Nethack habit. ;)

Dell sells gaming machine

[hpcanswers]

Along with new stuff for gaming, it appears Dell will sell a massively overclocked (4.26GHz) Pentium D version of the XPS 600.

si, pero

[Toreo asesino]

One thing which has interested me is that between the very first games and now, the human interaction part of games has barely changed at all!

I mean, with the exception of rumbling joypads which do little else for gameplay but pleasure the misses on bored nights in, bugger all is different!

I played a virtual reality shooter once, years ago. It involved shooting orange polygons at red polygons in a bizarre 3d, pre-doom 1 style game. It rocked! Just looking around with my head and not a mouse at the glorious untextured enivronment was flippin' ace!

Why o why can we not have something like that for Doom 3/Quake 4/[insert fav game here]?

Re:si, pero

[KDR_11k]

Come back in a year or two when the Revolution is released. Then you can compare modern controllers and controllers 20 years ago again and get different results.

20 years on and still nothing as good as Defender!

[Anonymous Coward]

25 years after Defender was released in 1981 and still there is nothing as
good as Defender or Robotron (or Sheep in Space and Ancipital, both by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft fame). Dingo was simple but cool too (from Ashbury Computers and
Graphics - the people that then went on to found Ultimate Play the Game). What about Anteater? Great game. Simple, enjoyable, playable.

Modern games lack gameplay, I was saying that in 1990 and its still true now.

Cassette loader

[glas_gow]

With ZX spectrum and Commodore 64 games taking anything up to ten minutes to load from a cassette [if they loaded at all], you were kind of blackmailed into thinking they were better than they really were.

Re:Cassette loader

[Vo0k]

You bastard, don't talk about C64 and ZX Spectrum with their frequency-modulated casette recorders! I had Atari 65XE! 600 baud, sometimes and more minutes of waiting, even worse reliablity... we were so envious about your load times! Ah, the "Turbo" extensions, cartridge, tape recorder mod, up to 30 games on a casette instead of 4-6, and finally 5-8 minutes instead of 20-30!

With standard casette recorder you would think twice before starting to load a game, and spend next 3 hours or so on it.

Re:Cassette loader

[glas_gow]

You had it easy . . . Monty Python we lived in a carboard box in the middle of the road and had to entertain ourselves with broken glass.

Re:Cassette loader

[Quikah]

Haha, I had a Commodore 1541 floppy drive and was able to load games in under 5 minutes!

Re:Cassette loader

[Anonymous Coward]

With Warp 25 you could load it in 6 seconds :-)

Were games better with worse graphics?

[Opportunist]

Sure, as my old German teacher once said "Memory is a very kind and gentle judge". Sure, we remember the gems, the Railroad Tycoon, the Civilisation, the M.U.L.E, the Starflight and of course the ELITE, and forget about the bombs that we wasted money (or at least Disks) on, the crappy rip-offs made after some movie hits. Sure, they existed as well. The games that weren't even good for an hour of entertainment.

But the other ones existed too. Games that kept you up at night, games that made you lose sleep over, games that swallowed away half a year of your life by simply being SO good that you cannot get away from them.

And, to be honest, I miss those kind of games. I haven't met a game in the last 10 years that had the capability of sucking me in as badly as Starflight or Elite did. Sure, graphics are stunning today, but it's still the same games that I played already. Did we reach the level where there's no longer anything new to come? Where we've seen it all?

Appearantly, there's only a market for shooters and realtime strategy games and nothing else. And appearantly there's a market for a billion of either. Personally, I can't even see them anymore. What happened to space sims? Economy sims? Adventures? Flight sims?

No longer viable? Take too long to make for little return?

I don't know how to say it, but today's games lack the power to keep me going for months. Few games interest me for longer than a few days, even though I got far less time to play today than I did 20 years ago. Am I getting old? Or are games getting worse, gameplay-wise? Considering that I don't care about graphics at all, could it be the effect of feeling that I already played it (in another incarnation, so to speak) and dumping it because of that?

I don't know. All I know is that I miss the originality in games. Todays games are bland, in my opinion. They lack depth, they lack challenges, all that's left is better graphics, better sound and needing more horsepower in your computer. And, honestly, I'd love to play my old games again. But my 486 recently died, so they don't run anymore. :(

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[glas_gow]

Now you mention ELITE, I think Frontier, Elite II, was far superior.

http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[advocate_one]

And, honestly, I'd love to play my old games again. But my 486 recently died, so they don't run anymore. :(

Dosbox to play them on and "home of the underdogs" to get the files so that you haven't got to scratch around hunting for an old 5 1/4 drive... (sorry haven't got time for links, can't do that much browsing at work)

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[clarkc3]

I'd love to play my old games again. But my 486 recently died, so they don't run anymore. :(

Check out dosbox - great little 286/386/486 emulator that enables you to run most of your old dos games on modern pc's

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[roman_mir]

And, to be honest, I miss those kind of games. I haven't met a game in the last 10 years that had the capability of sucking me in as badly as Starflight or Elite did. Sure, graphics are stunning today, but it's still the same games that I played already. Did we reach the level where there's no longer anything new to come? Where we've seen it all? - I agree with you completely.
Commander Keen
Blockout
StarGoose
Dangerous Dave
Jill of the Jungle
Prehistoric
Star Defender
Alcatraz
Arkanoid
Cd-Man
Deathtrack
Digger
Titus the Fox

From the newer ones:
MDK
Descent FreeSpace
Neverhood

and many more game actually were interesting to play, I stayed up pretty damn late playing them. That certainly hasn't happened in the past 7 years.

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[Therilon]

Personally, I think that it's you that's changed, rather than the quality of the games. Is it so difficult to accept that in 20+ years people's tastes change? I don't think that it is. I missed out on the classics of the NES and the C64 that people seem to be raving about. About the earliest game that I've played would be Civilization 2. And to be honest, I don't really care. The games today are absolutely amazing from both a technical and artistic standpoint. Just because 8-bit sprites are no longer used does not mean that the gameplay can't be there as well. In 2026, the gamers of today will be complaining about the lack of originality of the games, and saying exactly what the gamers of the 1980s are saying now.

"Graphics don't matter, it's gameplay that counts."

"There's no classics now like Half Life 2 or Katamari Damacy"

What people seem to forget that the games that people fondly remember now did have incredible graphics for their time. They were amazing not only because of gameplay, but because of the graphics they had. It's only right that things should change as time goes by. Things change. Don't blame the new generation for it.

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[eison]

Play Eve Online. Seriously.

Re:Were games better with worse graphics?

[eison]

Heh, read the other comment and reply. Oops. So much for the fast use of reply button. :)

Gaming Now and 20 Years Ago

[Trogre]

So we'll be seeing today's Windows games vs today's Linux games?

I kid, I kid

T.B.H.

[berenixium]

I think that games today are a stinking pile of highway banditry, and are leaning towards fleecing hard earned dollars constantly from consumers. The owners of WoW can hang up their oven-gloves and spend the rest of their lives doing the gardening since they've turned a significant amount of the worlds population into financial slaves. (I wonder where they got that methodology (M$) from?)
At least with The Bards Tale on my trusty ol' Atari ST, I could spend hours beneath Skara Brae without having to worry about my bank account being emptyied by Interplay.
My message to the current generation of hardcore-games players is: Free yourselves, and run! Stick to the single players while you still can avoid being sucked into a dominance that you might find one day hard to abandon.
More on topic, computer graphics back then were, well, what graphics were supposed to look like. Today they might as well be digitised photo's. The art of the bitmapped pixel was never really understood by the management of the games companies, and were chucked from the mainstream way too soon in my opinion (bring back Outrun-like graphics, Sony!).

They were simple yet not stupid (i.e. Bards Tale). That's why those games worked. Games today are complicated to look at, but stupid, requiring little brainpower (although RTS is an exception to that opinion), and like I said earlier, present day computer leisure-time is being designed to drain your coffers and turn people into currency slaves. (but what's new?)
Bah, it almost sounds like a conspiracy!

Re:T.B.H.

[KDR_11k]

At least with The Bards Tale on my trusty ol' Atari ST, I could spend hours beneath Skara Brae without having to worry about my bank account being emptyied by Interplay.

Yeah, now move forward a bit and arrive at Neverwinter Nights where you paid by the hour.

Re:T.B.H.

[discord5]

At least with The Bards Tale on my trusty ol' Atari ST, I could spend hours beneath Skara Brae without having to worry about my bank account being emptyied by Interplay.

Yeah, but they got in your wallet none the less. MMORPGs need the monthly subscription to keep paying their staff, servers, and of course make a profit. Single player games don't have those extra costs. If you want to play a persistent game online, and not end up playing on a server that is being maintained by volunteers, scripted by volunteers, and mostly populated by those same volunteers you have to be ready to fork over the cash.

I've played NWN on a persistent world server. If you've ever toyed around with the NWN construction kit, you know what a pain in the ass building a relatively small module was. There were people out there building entire persistent worlds on that engine, which is very impressive... Unfortunatly, it showed that it was a free server... While the content in the world was definatly worth while, the quality of the server was not. Serious load issues (in part to blame on NWN itself), the world itself was extremely bugged (which i don't blame the developers for, since it was a pretty huge undertaking on their part), and (most importantly) very few players.

My message to the current generation of hardcore-games players is: Free yourselves, and run! Stick to the single players while you still can avoid being sucked into a dominance that you might find one day hard to abandon.

The current generation of hardcore players isn't reading this, they're too busy grinding to repair their epix. You're preaching to the choir :) I play WoW in my sparetime, and in my guild there's a couple of these really hardcore kids. If you ask them about wether they mind shelling out x $ per month for a game, they'll happily announce that their parents are paying anyway (either directly, or indirectly). If you ask them if they ever play single player games, you'd be surprised at how many of them play WoW together with another game that takes less time.

Games today are complicated to look at, but stupid, requiring little brainpower (although RTS is an exception to that opinion), and like I said earlier, present day computer leisure-time is being designed to drain your coffers and turn people into currency slaves. (but what's new?)

Yeah, some games are really easy. Take Fable for instance. In less than 13 hours of gameplay you can finish that game, as long as you realise you can easily create an uber character with a few select choices in your abilities. But there are also a few games that really shine. The problem is that as a gamer you've evolved. The gametypes hardly ever change, and a lot of the game rules get recycled so often that you end up waltzing through most games at a very high pace.

But that isn't just a phenomenon in modern games. The old-school games have been recycled like mad. It's hard to be original when thousands of others have been making original things before you were.

Re:T.B.H.

[berenixium]

heh, I think I'll just stick with KOTOR I & II, thanks. :P

Re:T.B.H.

[lgw]

He's talking about the old Neverwinter Nights, no relation to the current title (thought there a mod for the new one to re-create the old one). Not sure whether to call it a MUD or MMORPG, but most people payed by the minute to play it. My old guild (New OutRiders) ruled that game.

Re:T.B.H.

[berenixium]

Hey, anybody remember Icewind Dale? I teamed up with a streamload of strangers to form an adventuring party on Gamespy, spending countless hours battling undead and Chaotic-Evil party members, and it was free. The characters didn't look like a work of art (although after I increased them a few level's, they became works of art in themselves - believe it dudes).
Did I say that the service was free? (apart from bandwidth costs, obviously.)
It might have been a linear experience, dedicated around a single, unchanging storyline, but it was FUN! The bitmapped graphics weren't WoW, but they were FUN! And I only had to spend my cash just the once to continually play it.

What happened to games like this one? Oh yeah, the creators were screwed over by their executives. And at around about the same time in which proprietary MMORPG's were starting to become financially lucrative... talk about a coincidence or what?

Re:T.B.H.

[Sj0]

You know, this copy of Guild Wars on my drive just doesn't seem to be costing me any additional funds...

You get what you ask for

[el_womble]

I started gaming with the Spectrum 48k. Apart from the 15 minute load times the thing that stuck out the most in my memory was the desire for the flash screen the apeared halfway through game load was the actual ingame graphics.

When I finally got my grubby little paws on a NES my wish was granted, and then I started to wish that the games I were playing were more 'realistic'. At the time I played beginner Games Worksop games like Hero Quest and Dungeon Bowl. What I wanted was a game were I could actually be in the 'dungeon' and walk around it like my characters in the game could. I upgraded my PC to a 486 SX20, installed Wolfenstein 3D and then I wanted it to have better graphics.

There were side wishes: I want to be able to shoot someone with a genuine fake gun: duck shoot. I want to be able play golf with a genuine fake club, I want to play racing games with a genuine fake steering wheel.

My current wishes include: play jedi knight with a real lightsaber (revoluntion?) and I want a truely immersive environment - just like the matrix. Do I expect the games to be any better? No not really.

Its not the games that are to blame for the increasingly bland gaming landscape its the market. We understand that emmersive 3D environments are expensive, so we're prepared to handover $60 per game, but we are also defensive about handing over that ammount of cash if we don't know we're going to like it.

I think one of the cool things...

[random_amber]

...about REALLY old computer games was that they used to be entirely the product of *one person's vision*, like the old Infocom games and the first few Ultimas. I mean one or two guys used to code/write entire games! Now I don't think anyone of those games listed has less than what? 50 people in the credits?

Not that I'm pining away for times of old particularly...I love new games as well...too much. I'm a recovered EQ addict who avoids anything WoW like the plague for fear it will suck away my life as well.

Random_Amber

Re:I think one of the cool things...

[Megane]

...about REALLY old computer games was that they used to be entirely the product of *one person's vision*, like the old Infocom games and the first few Ultimas. I mean one or two guys used to code/write entire games! Now I don't think anyone of those games listed has less than what? 50 people in the credits?

Right, and only in independent games will you still see that. And there are still some of us out there crazy enough to write new games for old systems.

Back in the day, most 2600 games were written by a single person over a period of about six months or so. It didn't hurt that the graphics were so primitive that you didn't need a good artist. But the days of one or two people creating a game pretty much ended by 1984 for consoles.

Lockout chips saw to it that nobody could create pirate copies of games (not easily, anyhow), and neither could they write their own without a company above them to pay console licensing fees. The first was obvious, but the second was a bit less obvious unless you understand the reasons behind The Crash in 1984. Third-party 2600 games had reached the point where the vulture capitalists were pushing out crapware in the mistaken belief that all games were equal, and once you got them out there, you would rake in $30 a pop. The worst of them all was Mythicon who released three games at $10 list price each, and two of the games were identical except that the graphics were different!

Home computers still had some room for independent publishing and still do, but it got to the point where less people cared about programming (because computers were going mainstream, but programming wasn't), and because there was less chance of keeping up with corporate games. These days you can do some really interesting games (or even silly throwaway games) with Flash, so there's been a bit of a resurgence.

But you still gotta have people who both know how to program and can make the art. There's not a lot of intersection between really good programmers and really good artists. I think getting them together without bringing in a lot of management is the real problem.

Re:I think one of the cool things...

[slagheap]

I mean one or two guys used to code/write entire games! Now I don't think anyone of those games listed has less than what? 50 people in the credits?

Check out http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/. It's game developers working by themselves and taking a nugget of a game idea and working on it for no more than a week.

I've been wasting a lot of hours on Tower of Goo Unlimited during the last few days. Many of these games have surprisingly good/sophisticated production design. The gameplay is simple, but very fun.

Re:I think one of the cool things...

[CFBMoo1]

Smart move, right now in order to make PvP rank in WoW for the GOOD stuff you litterly have to participate 6-8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for several weeks. Everyone I saw make the top Rank 14 spot was wished well and told to get some sleep. PvE isn't any better, it's comprised with big raids and dungeons that require huge time sinks in order to progress. The simple fun that was there early on evaporates after reaching the end of progression. The game is one huge time sink and not so much fun as it once was when it was billed to be different from other mmorpgs.

Shmeh

[melonqueen]

I'm 18 (born 1987) and have been gaming since I was a little tyke. I don't remember any of those games mentioned in that article... But the only game I do play from the current ones is WOW, and usually then its just the Frozen Throne expansion at LANs. But we were actually discussing this at school today (I'm a first year programming student) and we all agree that some of the best games we played were from when we were younger. Games that got mentioned were like Frogger, Tetris, the original Alex Kidd, Sonic 2, Pac-Man, Space Invaders... We all had fond memories of earlier consoles like Atari, Sega Master Sytem and MegaDrive, original GameBoy, and Super Nintendo. A lot of games these days, while flashy, don't seem to have the same substance. Fair enough, they still keep us occupied for hours... But if you gave me the choice right now of pulling out my old Atari or giving me an Xbox 360, I'd take the Atari.

The comparisons are unfair. People will look at the graphics and go "Woah! Glad I live in this age!" But all it's show is how technology has advanced to give us flashier graphics and therefore creates a gimmicky feel. Not to say I hate todays games =0) But this is such an apples and oranges comparison... And not really all that informative anyway!

Re:Shmeh

[xtracto]

Wait a mintue, I do not believe that you really played any Atari games at all, I am smelling a bit of bullshit here. You see, you said you born in 1987, Atari 2600 was released in 1977, Nintendo NES was released in 1985, two years before you born, at that time the only atari available was the 7800 which was a piece of crap, and the only real consoles were Sega Master System (haha, not really) or Nintendo Enterntainment System.

Re:Shmeh

[MysteriousPreacher]

Suppose he saved himself the misery of playing ET. To this day, I'm glad we had a local rental store so all it cost was a pound or so to find out how terrible that game was. Most of the games he quote (except for the very well known titles like Space Invaders) are from the Sega and NES period so you're probably right. If he really had a 2600 he'd have mentioned Pitfall, Missile Command or Defender as some of the classics.

Damn I miss those joysticks - best ever designed IMHO.

Re:Shmeh

[xtracto]

Truth, I never really played ET (as far as I remember, I was quite young when my father bought atari), from the ones you said, I remember MIssile Command and Defender, they rocked, but I also remember Seaquest (the submarine, did you palyed it?) and Warlords (played with the paddle controllers). I also remember one terribly shitty game of porky's which was totally frustrating (so yes, there were bad games at those times) and one of my favorites was .

Thinking a bit about it, I guess Tetris could have been created for atari dont you think? for the 2600 I mean, which was the one I had =o).

Oh, those where the days, although I shall tell that as I was born in 1981, the Atari was not *really* of my generation, I played it a lot because my father bought it (he always have liked computers although he is a Biologist, that may explain seaquest hehe) for me, it is the NES and SNES the ones that got my best memories.

One thing I remember is a joystick for the NES which was similar to an Airplane controller, I looked a bit on google but could not find anything about it. The controller was really cool because it was just the stick with the A and B buttons on the top and front (as far as I remember), the way you controlled the movement (D-pad) was by tilting the controller to the front, back or to the sides.

I have not seen anything similar in a long time, if any slashdotter has more references to that controller (or remember something else) I would be really glad to read it. Anyway I think the NES accessories were really cool, were I lived (somewhere in Mexico) there was a game rental company which had several of those accessories for rent, it was really cool because you could use them just to try them. I remember that the person that was in charge also told you which games were cool to play with each controller.

Re:Shmeh

[MysteriousPreacher]

Sir, you have good taste in games. I was practically raised by Defender and Missile Command. Born in 1974 so i was lucky to be right in the middle of the 2600 boom. Blimey, warlords looks familiar but i can't remember whether I played it or not. I remember the artwork on the cartridge though. Not heard of Seaquest or Porky's.

NES controller was pretty cool. i didn't play that many NES games (pretty much just the mario series) but it was perfect for them.

Yeah, would have been pretty easy to make tetris for the 2600. Moving large blocks of colour around, that's what the 2600 did best.

Re:Shmeh

[melonqueen]

lol... Just cos I was born 10 years after it's release doesnt mean I didn't play it! We had the 2600, which had been bought before I was born. It was our only console until our father bought us a sega mega drive in the 90's. So just cos I'm young doesn't mean I didn't play it ;0)

Remember - one person could code a commercial game

[Viol8]

In the 80s and early 90s it was possible for one person to
code a game that could sell commercially (as opposed to just
as freeware) in big numbers. Which meant that amongst the
reams of dross you got the occasional gem of inspired lateral
thinking gameplay that could never have come from a 20 man
committee which seems to be behind all the games today.

People expect amazing graphics these days and this means
its simply not possible for one person (or even 2 or 3) to
write a killer commercial game since no matter how good
the gameplay , buyers won't touch it if it doesn't match up
to the lates Duke Nukem, Gotham Racer etc.

Which IMO is a real shame.

Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[donscarletti]

Companies are relying more and more on awesome graphics to make up for a lack of innovative and fun gameplay. Most games 20yrs ago were more fun than new games today.

That is such an old bunch of trotted out cliched tripe. Twenty years ago games were not as fun as they are today. Twenty years ago you didn't have MMORPG junkies that derive their entire existance from games. Twenty years ago you couldn't make your own fun in computer games like you can in HL2 by painting zombies and walls with the grav gun, or in BF1942 where you can forgo the game for acrobatics like detpack jeep boosting and wing to wing transfers. Twenty years ago you couldn't be in a situation where you have a whole city or world to explore with no rules like you do in many of todays games like the GTA franchise. Generally speaking games 20 years ago were twiddle tests where only ones reflexes are ever challenged. Games today embody strategy, tactics and sometimes even empathy, things that could never by fortold 20 years ago.

I buy a game today and generally I am far more satisfied than I ever was in the past, I like nice graphics and I like added realism but I also like gameplay and I don't see any reason I'm getting less of that now than I ever was. We all see the past as a rosy time but really, games wern't that great back then either. The franchise has always been a part of games, we all remember the crap that was River Raid 2; plajorism has always been there, how many space shooters did you play in the old days; bad movie tieins have always existed, remeber ET?

Don't kid yourself, the game industry would have to be REALLY bad if things were going downhill.

By the way, does it occur to anyone else that when people ask for "innovation" they tend to really be asking for abstract games? Does anyone else just plain enjoy games better if they can immerse themselves in a model of the real world and get down to some good old fasioned violence? The best times I ever had was commanding my huge army in Rome: Total War and thinking about how cool I am, that wouldn't be possible with brightly coloured squiggles and dots.

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you didn't grow up 20 years ago.

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.onlineobchody.com/amastore/

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphically and technologily speaking of course todays games are going to be better than the games of old. However I would like you to think about this, has any recent made any contrabution to gaming that wasn't just the result of faster computing, better networks, and better graphics? The MMORPGs are nothing more than graphicly enhanced 3rd Person slasher/shooter games that are hosting thousands of plays at a time instead of 3 or 4. Again this is due to technology not enhancements to game design. Also will you be playing HL2 20 years from now? How about BF1942? The point I'm try to make is that you can rant and rave about what ever you want, but in a few years you will no longer be playing the games you claim or so great yet countless other will still be playing clasics like galaga which my friend just paid $0.50 to play the other day at a sports bar.

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

at least 20 years ago there where some original ideas, there days its just engine copies with tweaks and some new gfx, hardly any inovation

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[grumbel]

### Twenty years ago you couldn't make your own fun in computer games like you can in HL2 by painting zombies and walls with the grav gun, or in BF1942 where you can forgo the game for acrobatics like detpack jeep boosting and wing to wing transfers.

Twenty years ago, well alomst, I created my first own levels via Boulder Dash Construction kit. And when it comes to stunts and stuff, Stunt Island had that 14 years ago. Making your own fun with computer games is nothing new, even so the advent of physics engines of course helps a bit.

### Games today embody strategy, tactics and sometimes even empathy, things that could never by fortold 20 years ago.

Difficulty in games of today is often so damn low that you can finish plenty of games without even dieing *once*. Just compare something like Metroid Prime Hunters (DS) vs. Metroid (NES), the last one (19 years old) requires far more skill and tactics, without acting a bit clever you won't survive for a minute. In Multiplayer it is true that you need some more skill, but Singleplayer games have only gotten easier and seldomly require any real kind of tactics or strategie. And in case of puzzle solving it looks even worse, while adventures always provided fun and interesting
puzzles, even 20 years ago, games today are often bugged by unimaginative stupid key/door puzzles.

That doesn't mean that all games today are bad, neither does it mean all games 20 years ago where great. But the last game that really had that jaw-drop feel for me was Mario64 and that was already 10 years ago, after that nothing really groundbreaking happened. What makes the situation quite a bit frustrating is that games today often contain the same basic flaws that already bothered me years ago (no body in first person shooters, lack of a interesting story, doors still open without anybody touchnig the doorhandle, etc.). Improvments in the last 10 years have for most part simply been of cosmetic nature, more polygons, more shaders, but the basic gameplay is still the same, even so there would be plenty of room for impromvent. And in terms of genre there has been a lot varity lost, where are the flight simulators today? Where are the WingCommanders of today? And why does every RTS look like a ripoff of Warcraft, why doesn't somebody try something else (think Syndicate)?

Games havn't gotten a lot worse in the last years, but neither have they gotten a lot better, which in turn is one of the reason why I often prefer old games over new ones. However its true that 20 years ago games where still in their beginning and sometimes lacking, so I prefer the 10-15 years ago timescale for most part.

Re:Games sucked just as much 20 years ago.

[donscarletti]

I did a lot of growing 20 years ago, 2 year olds grow fairly fast.

Not it

[farker haiku]

I promise I'm not the farker who submitted this.

Games vs Reality

[grumbel]

A third column showing how said game would actually look in reality would have been nice. Especially with videos it often becomes pretty obvious that todays games aren't a lot closer to reality then those games 20 years ago, sure they look pretier today, but animation, physics and 'flexibility' of the environment don't even get close to how complex reality is. Animation is also often very primitive since motion captured sequences don't blend together all that well, making everything look robotic. Physics are still missing from many games, especially when it comes to objects that aren't the main focus of the game (ie. a car might have a (often lame) damage model, but the environment is far to often indestructable). And the player is also limited to a few predefined actions in very many games, so that the key differences between games today and games of the past is made by the more buttons we have on the controller, not by the rest of the game.

offtopic: ukr

[wild_berry]

ukr is wonderful.

Talk about you

[aepervius]

I am STILL replaying ultima IV-V.
I still replayed recently Bard tale 3.
I am still replaying from time to time Planescape Torment.
And that is a short list of oldies that I play more than any recent game EXCEPT NWN....

Re:Talk about you

[Hoi Polloi]

I know the feeling. I just finished playing Baldur's Gate 1 for the 2nd time and have started Baldur's Gate 2. Great games! I'm looking forward to playing my copy of NWN that taunts me on my shelf.

I still play Civ2 (I'll probably upgrade though), classic games on MAME and on Apple II emulators. I've even broken out my old copy of the original "Command and Conquer"

Ultima 7 "Exult" is an incredible port of the game. Not to mention the ported versions of Privateer and Elite you can get. I'm thankful for all of the fanatics with great programming skills out there doing these ports of classic games.

Re:Talk about you

[ichigo 2.0]

EXCEPT NWN....

NWN isn't exactly recent either, ~4 years.

Re:Talk about you

[Quikah]

Don't worry too muich about NWN, it pales in comparison to BG 2 (as does BG 1 IMHO), it is fun, but really lacking storywise compared to BG 2. BTW, if you don't have it yet get the expansion for BG2. And make sure you keep Minsc in your party, he is awesome. :)

The satisfaction is in the imagination

[jbarr]

Today's games, while they look amazingly realistic, remove one element that has made older games and toys so enjoyable: Imagination. Of course, games like Bard's Tale, Defender, Battle Zone, and Pong had low quality graphics, but the fun (at least for me and my friends) was that the vivid memories and excitement about playing these games was that you had to imagine a lot to "fill in the holes" that the "lesser" technology left out.

It reminds me of the scenario where kids were given a large, boxed-up toy to play with. When the parents returned a while later, they found that the toy was thrown in the corner, and kids were having fun playing with their new box "fort".

Imagination is what really makes playing fun. Technology that removes the need for imagination really takes the fun out of it...

involvement

[tinkerton]

This does make me think of Marshall Mcluhan's work actually. The older lowres screens/images achieve better involvement because they reduce the information stream they deliver(cold media). Hires information is less involving(hot media).

Still working it out for myself tho...

OT: Space/Economy Sims.

[splutty]

What happened to space sims? Economy sims? Adventures? Flight sims?

On the off-chance of sounding like I want to plug something.. But in the MMOG world, there's one space/economy sim that I keep coming back to, and that's Eve Online (www.eve-online.com)

It's graphically quite good, but the graphics aren't all that important. It's the actual gameplay on that which is. If you loved Elite, take a look at the 14-day trial. (Trying to figure out how to outfit your ship with the powergrid and cpu requirements you have brings back old old memories :)

Splut.

Re:OT: Space/Economy Sims.

[Opportunist]

been playing for about 3 years. And counting. But it still ain't the same.

Re:Remember - one person could code a commercial g

[Hieronymus Howard]

buyers won't touch it if it doesn't match upto the lates Duke Nukem,

And just how long is it since the latest Duke Nukem was released? 10 years?

But what about the ultimate retro game....

[Kaptain_Korolev]

Tweaking your autoexec.bat and config.sys so that you had enough of the first base 640k of RAM to actually get any games to run on your power beast 486. That's were the fun really was!

Himem.sys and emm386.exe, I had nearly forgotten all about you guys, ahhhh those were the days.

For those who want more of this jovial tweakfest go here

Re:But what about the ultimate retro game....

[Arwing]

Oh god, you have to bring that up.. .. I had three boot disks 1) Everyday operation 2) Normal gaming 3) Maxed out memory config

Re:But what about the ultimate retro game....

[nuzak]

Most of us just warezed a copy of memmaker and never touched those files again.

Now dealing with BLASTER environment variables ... gah.

Re:But what about the ultimate retro game....

[berenixium]

Hahahaha... fuck, that brings back a lot of happy memories. Thanks. :)

Re:But what about the ultimate retro game....

[Sj0]

Erm...........

Memmaker came free with DOS..........

Bard's Tale on Nintendo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bard's tale vs World of Warcraft is really funny.

Sorry, but it was still fun. And better hardware was available at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bards_Tale_GS.g if

All about the feelings...

[wandazulu]

I think, in a large part, that it's how the game makes you feel at that unterminable level that makes it worthy of the "remember when". My game was Adventure on the 2600, as I'll bet was also for a lot of people here on /. No part of the game stands up to scrutiny today; the graphics are beyond laughable, the levels were, small, fixed, and unexciting, and the gameplay repetitious.

And I loved it and have nothing but the fondest of memories of it even now.

Yes the graphics have gotten better, but the games aren't as engaging for some reason (at least for me). More realism = less need for imagination = less emotional involvement in the game. I wonder if this is really the gaming plateau we've all been fearing: the games are bigger, better, faster, and totally divorced from my psyche. Franchises should be a help here, but I can't think of any franchise, save Shenmue (and we know how that worked out) that gives you multi-game characters (Link doesn't count because as the stories go, it's not the same one). I would have thought FF was it (and for a lot of people it is), but I found the world *too* big, and too populated with characters you never see again to make that emotional leap.

Here's hoping that the $2000 sdk price of the revolution will inspire a renaissance in games, bringing new games with some heart and soul back into our lives.

Re:All about the feelings...

[Sj0]

Could it be that your rational mind has constructed an irrational reason trying to explain the behaviour of your irrational mind?

You conceed on all counts that the game fell flat on it's face. Even the vaunted "Gameplay" that everyone in this thread seems to put on a pedestal is obviously lacking. There is no good reason to believe that those games were better. Yet, you end up giving it points for "imagination".

This reeks of whimsical nostolgia.

When I was a kid, Monopoly seemed like the most incredibly interesting and fun game ever. It was great -- terribly complex for a 10 or 12 year old, almost impossible to get through and entire game because it was so drawn out and complex, and the strategy seemed to surpass anything I'd seen before! However, playing it today, it seems like a terribly fatalistic game, with a simplistic joke of an economic model, where the players all fly towards the inevitable end-game.

It wasn't the game that had changed. It was myself. I'm willing to bet that if you had some of the cooler games today back when you were a kid, they'd put adventure to shame: Simple web slinging was the coolest thing in the early spider-man games. Imagine if you gave the youthful version of yourself Half-life 2 and the gravity gun? Hours of giddy fun and childish experiments.

Remembering the good old days

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been gaming for the vast majority of my life. I remember fondly games such as spacewars, starcon, zork, River City Ransom, Super Mario Brothers, Final Fantasy, Dragon Worrior, Street Fighter II, Altered Beast, and the list could just go on and on. What I think has gone wrong for most games is that the focus of the games has shifted from making it fun to making it a "hit".

I know many will be wondering what is the difference. The difference is that a game that is fun continues to be fun after you have beaten it 100 times were as games that are a "hit" get lots of sales, but after you've played it a few times you are ready to drop it and move on to the next "hit". Nintendo IMHO is one of the few companies that still trys to make it fun.

Re:Remember - one person could code a commercial g

[Viol8]

Who cares. I don't spend my time checking out what are
this weeks latest games , I have a life. Sue me.

Name Call

[Lexical_Scope]

I've played most of the games listed above (Bards Tale seems to be the big one that I missed). I play MMORPGs now and spend quite a lot of my free time online, but I am pretty sure I will NEVER pass the amount of time that I spent playing (on the C64);

1) Realms of Arkania (D&D-stylee adventure game...isometric turn-based group combat!!!)
2) Turrican (move aside Mario...best platformer EVER!)
3) Lords of Chaos (turn-based strategy game)
4) Exodus (Mastertronic? kind of like Defender but not and with flashing llamas!!)
5) Sensible Soccer (how can no-one have mentioned this?!?!)

So much fun and good memories...gonna load up Dosbox tonight and see if I can find some of these games to play. Oh and Lords of Midnight if I can find it!

Actually...

[suso]

The were well aware of game marketing in the 1980s as well. If you ever looked on the back of a game box from the early 80s compared to one from the late 80s you might notice that later ones have the caption "Actual c64 screenshots" next to screenshots. This is because marketing was getting creative using the screenshots of a platform with better graphics (like the Amiga) on a weaker one like the c64 or *cough* EGA PC.

Just look at the front of early game boxes for Atari 2600 games. Fantasy art was used to make the game seem fun where screenshots of pixelated blocks did not at face value.

Re:Actually...

[Egregius]

Not to mention they used the NES version of Bard's Tale. The Amiga version and the PC version had better looking graphics.

Ok, so maybe the PC version had EGA colours, who needs colours anyway?

Re:Actually...

[Gulthek]

The point was: Are these screenshots actual shots from the game, or are they prerendered?

The response was: These screenshots are actual shots rendered by the ingame engine on the fly.

Your marketing recap has no bearing. Although I do wish that games nowadays included swag like 80s games. I still have that ankh, coin, moonstone, autoduel toolkit, and loads o' booty from infocom.

Re:Actually...

[twistedsymphony]

They do still include stuff like that, though you often have to either pre-order or buy the Limited Edition for it.. it's still there

Most recently I've got:
-A 1 of 20something Collectors "Koin" from Mortal Kombat Deception, Also came with a bonus disc with a making of and an arcade perfect version of the original Mortal Kombat (Xbox)
-A 1 of 9 Collectors card from Perfect Dark Zero, Also came with a bonus disc with a making of, dashboard themes and "gamer pictures" that I can use on my console (Xbox 360)
-A Kasumi figurine and trading cards from Dead or Alive Ultimate (Xbox)
-A 2006 Dead or Alive Calendar (Xbox 360)
-A Full Auto themed Faceplate for my console (Xbox 360)
-A Collectors coin, map and book with Oblivion, also came with a bonus disc, again with more extra stuff. (Xbox 360)

Obviously I have a preference towards MS's consoles but I know of other recently (with in the last year) released games on other platforms that come with other things like medallions, t-shirts, etc.
Maybe you're just buying the wrong games, or at least the wrong versions.

A lot of times the LE version will come with a nicer case and a bonus disc with some behind the scenes, developer interview, pre-release type stuff, or other things like dashboard themes and pictures, classic versions of the game, or extra weapons, cars, maps etc. you can use. To me those those things are FAR more valuable then some trinket coin, card, or figurine, or some ugly t-shirt that built for either the fattest of Americans or the skinniest of the Japanese.

Re:Remember - one person could code a commercial g

[Anonymous Coward]

People expect amazing graphics these days and this means
its simply not possible for one person (or even 2 or 3) to
write a killer commercial game since no matter how good
the gameplay , buyers won't touch it if it doesn't match up
to the lates Duke Nukem, Gotham Racer etc.

Out of interest, how many people did it take to write Lumines?

Cut scenes and replays?

[Cinnaman]

I think the article is skewed, the modern shots all looks they've been taken from cut scenes or replays instead of "in game" shots, for a fair comparison.

Could they have at least mentioned Cabal?

[hal2814]

The very first screenshot they showed is from one of my favorite games: Cabal. I read the entire article hoping they'd compare it to the modern FPS. Cabal is part of the great pentavaret of crosshair-based arcade games (Cabal, Blood Bros., GI Joe, Rambo III, Nam 1975). I'd think the casual gamer would much prefer the crosshair games over an FPS with a pretty complicated control system. As far as longevity goes, I'd think the FPS would provide more hours of gameplay. Of course, the article didn't bother to compare the gameplay of the games anyways. They were too busy oogling the 360's cutscene graphics to notice. Speaking of which, wouldn't it have been more fair to show Cabal in all it's arcade glory instead of showing the NES version?

Escape Velocity

[Monx]

EV still exists and is still a lot of fun. The latest version runs on Windows as well as OS 9 and OS X.

Nice Screenshots

[Digital Vomit]

I don't think comparing images from games from 20 years ago with images from pre-rendered videos of today really counts as a proper comparison.

Re:sid meier's railroad tycoon

[miller701]

You didn't like the Poptop RRT2&3?

I hold many fond memories of SMRRT & the first Civ, but now, looking back some of the limitations of the originals, I'd rather play the new ones.

They sure were impressive for the time though!

Did you see this http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/18/ 2021233 ? It looks like he is taking a look at RRT again!

Games that are fun once, twice, many times

[JoeWalsh]

You're right, Sturegeon's law holds true for video games. But I've been discovering that there's more to it than that.

Over the winter, I went back through all my collected console games (Atari 2600/5200/7800, ColecoVision, Intellivision, NES, TG-16, SNES, Genesis, Jaguar, N64, Atari 800, Apple ][, Amiga) plus a lot of arcade games. And, unlike some, I've also kept up with modern stuff through the Playstation 2.

What I've found is that, for me, the games that hold up the best are the ones that are simple to use but complex behind the scenes. That is, games like the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge, where you simply move around a multi-screen world, avoid being eaten by the three dragons, and move various game pieces into the correct locations in order to win. That game would be pretty boring, except that there are many different game pieces (each with a different use in the game world), and the number of ways they can be laid out around the game world is pretty huge. That keeps the game fresh, while the simple rules and game controls keeps it from becoming a job to learn to use it each time I come back to it.

I find that so many games are either too complex for non-obessive play, or are of the "play it through once and toss it" variety, or both. And that's just the *good* games. There are of course the other 80% of games that are absolute crap and not worth even a minute of my time, or that are simply an inferior implementation of a good idea some other game designer had.

So, I find myself playing the classic, relatively simple games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Star Raiders, and King of Fighters routinely, because I can have a quick bit of fun with them and then go on with my life, while I play the more in-depth games like Adventure, Military Madness (oh, for a randomized version of that!), and Wizard's Crown less frequently but for sustained periods each time, when I really want to get into a game and have the time to do so.

But there's still one huge problem with *all* games - they're horribly repetitive. That's what killed my interest in The Sims, as well as all the online games. But it's also what keeps me from playing everything from Pac-Man to Civilization more than once in a while. After a while, all games start to feel like work. You take the same actions over and over and over and over. In some games, you get power ups of one sort or another, but they're always rendered useless because your opponents get equally more powerful, leaving you effectively running to remain in place. Doesn't that sound more like work than fun?

Even so, I'd settle for another game as non-static as Adventure if I could find it. So if anyone can point out large-world, randomized games that have come out in the last five years, I'd appreciate it. I simply haven't found a single one, but it'd be nice to have one with modern graphics and game play.

-Joe

Thank you for pointing that out

[jorgeuva]

I just installed dosbox on my PC and started playing all those games I used to log countless hours with back in the day. Surprisingly to me, I can't really take playing them for more than a few minutes nowadays before I get a sad sense that I'm not going to get that childhood feeling back. I think something to bear in mind is that many of us were between 5 and 15 back in the mid 80s and we were easy to entertain. (I mean, we watched Voltron cartoons, and about 40% of that half hour was pre-canned transformation animations.) Adults have higher standards, as they should, and probably a smaller percentage of games today meet those higher standards. This isn't a function of the quality of the software out there, but of the demands of its maturing customer base.

Re:Thank you for pointing that out

[grumbel]

### Surprisingly to me, I can't really take playing them for more than a few minutes nowadays before I get a sad sense that I'm not going to get that childhood feeling back.

You have to play those old games for more than a few minutes to really get into them. Many old games suffer from bad user interfaces, lack of tutorials and other problems, so its easy to dismiss them, since they just arn't that smoothly played as many todays games. However once one is past that initial throuble they can be as fun or more fun then any game today. It might still not bring back the full childhood feelings, but they can still provide a great experience.

Last not least I think one of the things that ruined the childhood-feeling isn't just the getting older or the quality of the games, but also the advent of the internet. With the internet walkthroughs, cheats and other helps are readily available, for todays games often at release day or just shortly after. Back in my childhood however it could take month or years till you get a walkthrough or cheat for a game, so it was just you, some friends and the game. Since games also often lacked any kind of auto-mapping, quicksaves or other helps that is pretty much standard these days, those old games really turned out to be an interesting challange, beating a game really meant something and felt like an acomplishment. While today beating a game is for most part not a problem at all, getting bored of a game is the biggest danger of not completing it, not difficulty. And a final reason might simply be that older games are far more intense in terms of gameplay, there is no running around in circles to solve some stupid svitch-puzzle in SuperMario, the goal is always completly clear, but getting there can be extremly hard, today getting there is however often trivial, finding it is the hard (and often anoying) part.

Re:Thank you for pointing that out

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I just loved having a game that was easy to get stuck halfway on, getting half value. I also *like* finishing games within a decent period of time; I don't have the free time I did as a kid. Play through and do side quests, extra bonuses if you have the time, I wouldn't mind seeing the end of the story that I have been playing though.

My god, the Kings Quest games, where you'd have to hover your mouse all over the screen to discover some hidden thing... and put together weird items in odd combinations (literally spend time combining items in your inventory together in hping it would provide something to unblock you). You know I much prefer WOW and thottbot.

I agree that the sense of discovery is lessened when you look up the answer instead of finding it, but you kid yourself if you think kids didn't ask their friends how to get past the hard parts and they all figured it out on their own.

Re:Thank you for pointing that out

[grumbel]

### but you kid yourself if you think kids didn't ask their friends how to get past the hard parts and they all figured it out on their own.

Twenty years ago there simply wasn't anybody to ask, no internet and even game magazines were rare, so hard facts on a game where pretty much non-existant, sure there where rumors and stuff, but nothing that gets close to today where two seconds in google open up all those secrets you ever wanted to know about a game. I am not saying that I want to go back to that time, but those times certainly gave games a mystery feel, since you never knew something for certain until you have seen and experienced it yourself.

That article SUCKED!

[cerebud]

Wow, one screenshot from each game with no commentary about the comparison between the two. It looks more like an ad to download the old 80s games. Crap.

I don't think so.

[edremy]

As an older gamer, I have somewhat the same experience as you in that many games don't seem as interesting, but I think it might be age more than innovation/quality. I think back to the "old" days of game playing and realize there were only really a very few games that really drew me in like that, but since I'm remembering 20+ years of playing it all sort of compresses. I adored the oringial Civilization and played it far too much. But thinking back to that time (grad school) there are only two other games I remember- NetTrek and Marathon. So, in a five year period there I have 3 "great" games. That's not a lot.

There are good/innovative games out there today. I just got a copy of Oblivion, which frankly actually *is* exciting to me. Yes, it's been done before, but (at least so far) not this well. Prior to that I've been playing Puzzle Pirates, one of the oddest hybrids imaginable. Laugh all you want, but here's an MMOR(RRRR)PG that has a totally functional economy and a world far deeper than the cheesy graphics would indicate. I'm really looking forward to Spore- yeah, it's SimWorld on steroids, but it's only possible with the serious power of modern machines. I find myself moving away from the simpler FPSs and even strategy games (Alpha Centauri is still king as far as I'm concerned) to things with a story- you can always tell a good story and entertain me. The mountains of books in my house is testament to that- the technology hasn't changed in 400 years but I still buy tons of them.

The other problem is that with age it's harder to spend that immersion time that draws you in. I've got a job, a house, a wife and two young kids. Between all of that, my gaming time is vastly more limited than it used to me. I can't play things that need that 8-hour stretch to get into, and I can't play things that won't let me drop them instantly when the baby wakes up and needs to be fed.

Well...

[ROFLMAObot]

Anything compared to Nintendo is obviously superior.

Don't forget Ultima!!!

[Khyber]

You had to learn an entire written language! Anyone else ever play an RPG where that was a requirement in order to beat the game w/o looking up cheats for the mantras and words of power?

Re:Don't forget Ultima!!!

[Sj0]

Actually, most game developers aren't that cruel anymore.

Forcing a player to learn a fictional language is part of the family of the lowest forms of length increasing gimmick.

Reminds me of playing Star Trek: 25th anniversary(I think it was...), and having some ridiculous puzzle. Even after I looked up the answer to the puzzle, it was like "Of course! The talderians have three fingers, so they'd be using base three! and stigmata is their favourite national holiday, so the first number must be 2! And cacodemons don't even exist as a literary reference in this universe, so the second number is 6!" -- a complete non-sequitor to the rest of the game at that point.

Double Dribble!

[SABME]

Seeing a screeshot of Double Dribble, an NES game from the mid-80s, brought back memories of college, when we used to have our own "Double Dribble March Madness" tournament.

My friends and I also enjoyed the Engrish pronounciation of "Double Dribble," as a synthesized voice announced the name of the game while the initial splash screen was displayed.

Ah, those were the days ...

You could beat 'em!

[smithcl8]

I liked the old games because without using cheat codes or digging for info (maps, how-tos, etc.) you could still beat the games in a reasonable amount of time. I see too many people going to Blockbuster, renting a game, using all of the cheats, beating the game, and taking it back the next day. However, if you actually attempt to beat it on your own, without the cheats, they are way too difficult. The developers need to reach a nice middle ground, where it's challenging enough to remain fun, but not impossible either. Games like Mario Bros (at least the 1, 2, and 3,) Dragon Warrior, and Ninja Gaiden could be beat without consulting a gigantic book of tricks. Some of us aren't interested in playing online, getting pummelled by people who play all the time, or making a video game feel like real work. I just want them to be fun. Sonic, Mario, and Metroid games are the best for me. And that's not just because I'm "old."

today's games have a fatal flaw.

[Spy der Mann]

To insert a new scene you require voice acting and a lot of rendering. Yesterday's games just required animating some sprites and adding more text.

This is why, IMHO, pixelated games have a yet unexplored potential with today's machines. Imagine hundreds of megabytes of scenes, unexplored territories, dialogues with new characters...

I'd say there is a Moore's Law of videogaming: The data requirements of videogames gameplay is proportional to the data storage improvements. In other words, gameplay must be sacrificed for multimedia.

To break this limit, we must advance software capabilities in speech synthesis, realistic facial expressions and of course, sync (you don't want videogames to look like dubbed chinese martial arts movies, would you?)

This is ESSENTIAL. We can't let our imagination be limited by our consoles' memory capacity.

In college I worked with a speech synthesis program using General Regression Neural Nets. (Record words and assign them text - then split the syllables, and let the AI do the magic). Because to play a syllable the AI included the context before chosing, there were no clicks and it was able to synthesize new words without any problems. And this was 12 years ago!

If we can add expressions and moods to the voices, like mad, confused, curious, etc, I'm pretty sure we could make a giant leap. Now combine this with MP3 compression and we'd get a helluva voice synthesis engine. Maybe all the data needed for voice acting could be stored in a few megabytes.

Of course, we could get lazy and say that a few gigabytes "ought to be enough for everybody"... but we know where that road goes - right Billy?

The old games are serious competing fun. Proof:

[Qbertino]

The old games are fun and competingly so. Try this for proof:
Go here: http://www.zapthegame.com/ and download the demo. It's 25 years old in style. It just uses modern hardware for frictionless vector rendering. And it's serious fun.

Because No One Masterbated to Commander Keen!

[Siffy]

http://jokaroo.com/funnyvideos/jerking_off_world_o f_warcraft.html

Retro gaming rocks!

[Zerbey]

It just serves to remind me that I will always prefer the older games, because of their simplicity. I've always enjoyed games I can just dive into and have fun, rather than learning a bunch of commands. Maybe I'm just getting old and if I asked 12-year old Chris what he thought he'd probably tell me to shut up (actually, no he'd never say that to an adult... that kid was so polite it makes me sick, probably because I wanted to be a monk at 12. True story).

There are still some gems out there with modern games, all of the Quake series (and Doom before) it where a blast, I still play the original shareware version of Doom when I'm bored. MVP Baseball 2004 was great (they ruined it with 2005... not tried 2006), but then again baseball is a religion to me. I still play Centipede on my Atari as well, though. And Space Invanders. And Moon Patrol. And Star Raiders 2 on my Speccy. I really need to grow up...

don't hate me because i'm beautiful

[kpharmer]

> Nothing is wrong with it. It has always been the case - a minority of the population have a certain look that everyone drools over, and others in the
> population want to degrade that because they do not have it.

What? bulimia, silicon injections and air-brushing?

Re:don't hate me because i'm beautiful

[Dante Alighieri]

Silicon injections strike me as a remarkably bad idea. Even using silicone seems unwise.

Re:don't hate me because i'm beautiful

[Meagermanx]

And the "No Shit, Sherlock" award goes to...

Re:don't hate me because i'm beautiful

[AviLazar]

What? bulimia, silicon injections and air-brushing?

Seeing that you are a a duly designated representative of the "others in the population", I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension.

In other words - there are people who look as good if not better then the models in the magazines who are not bulimic, silicon injected or air brushed....and many models in magazines are naturally gorgeous. To claim a group who happens to have good looks couldn't have gotten it without the help of cosmetic surgery or air brushing is generalizing and prejudiced...somewhere along the lines of saying anyone who is fat must eat four cheeseburgers, a whole cake, raw fat, and drink coke every day.

The real scary thing revealed here...

[fishizzle]

The real scary thing here is that all the best games from the mid-eighties were released for a Nintendo system, whereas all the best games released today are for a Microsoft system. :O ... Of course this has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft is the only company that has a next-gen console on the market right now, but still.

Too bad they can't easily compare the emotions felt by the end-user the first time they got their hands on such a system back in the 80's to now.

GAMES DON'T NEED STORIES (dammit)

[drx]

How often do i have to read that games need elaborate stories? Why are games always compared to movies? When will this ever stop?

A game is a game and a movie is a movie. That games started to look like movies only proofs how few imagination game designers have.

I mean, even "Tetris Worlds" has a story nowadays, because it is a must, because nobody can imagine that it would work without one.

YUCK!!!!!

Re:GAMES DON'T NEED STORIES (dammit)

[twistedsymphony]

Some games need stories, others do not... some music needs to speak to you, other music just needs a catchy beat. ITS CALLED VARIETY. My point was that on a whole those games with stories today typically have better stories then those games with stories way back when.

Some of my favorite games today are games like Burnout, and Call of Duty 2. Neither of those have stories and they're both fantastic games. Burnout flat out doesn't have any rime or reason for the things you do, you're in a car and you crash into stuff, thats it. COD2, while based on WWII doesn't really have a story, you're in some town and you need to kill all the enemy troops in the buildings in front of you, again THATS IT.

And while Tetris Worlds might have a story, most puzzle games today don't. Hexic, Bejeweled, Zuma, etc.. none of them have stories, or need them.

Other Games need a good story backbone. Games like Final Fantasy, or Condemned would be total garbage if it wasn't for their fantastic story. They don't offer any compelling gameplay but they encourage you to explore and experience their worlds, and they challenge your mind to figure out what's going to happen next and discover and peace together all the parts of the story.

Saying that all games should be one way and that's the only way is just ridiculous.

Re:GAMES DON'T NEED STORIES (dammit)

[aevan]

..because a lot of movies now days seem to lack any semblence of story?

The games get stories and the movies get the good graphics (i.e. special effects).

I agree that some games have no need for a story, but others (like RPGs) do; it all depends on the genera of the game.

As for games being compared to movies...Final Fantasy 7 I ratherly disliked-it was more like a sequence of cutscenes interrupted by leveling up. Give me the old Phantasy Star III where choices I made actually had different outcomes.

Re:GAMES DON'T NEED STORIES (dammit)

[Sj0]

Final Fantasy 7 is just one game though. I loved Daggerfall because it plopped you in a world with no real guidance, just "Ok, here's a world. Go do stuff". Morrowind picked up on this and delivered an entire island, while utilizing modern technology and game design to make the world INTERESTING, so the terrain they had created wouldn't be ignored as it was in Daggerfall. Oblivion later this month may kill me. :P

Re:GAMES DON'T NEED STORIES (dammit)

[Miamicanes]

... which is precisely why so many adults who USED to love videogames now own Gamecubes instead of XBoxen and PS2s. Sure, most Nintendo games have some kind of superficial story... but most of the time, it's obvious that the game came first, and the story came about 3 days before the packaging materials went to press. That's a GOOD thing. Nintendo, more than anyone else, understands that good graphics are necessary, but are not in and of themselves sufficient for a great game. There are a few notable exceptions (like Zelda), but for the most part, even progressive games like Super Monkey Ball II can be enjoyed a level or two at a time.

The biggest problem with most XBox/PS2/PC games is their determination to be lifestyles rather than games. Most Nintendo games (as in, games made BY Nintendo, not necessarily games FOR a Nintendo platform) bend over backwards to have at least one or two play modes to accommodate people who just want to insert a metaphorical quarter, enjoy a few minutes of gratification, then go do something else. In particular, they have some mode where you can quickly launch the game with some sensible set of defaults... unlike most of the XBox games I've seen, where starting a new game involves forcibly making more choices than setting up Active Directory under Windows 2000 Server (and is about as much fun).

Memories...

[Hoi Polloi]

I'm amazed at some of the games I considered cool just because they were something I'd never seen before. The ultimate example of this was the old Apple Flight Simulator that I loaded off of a cassette tape (listen for the tone!). You had to start it with a "CALL -XXXX" in the assembler mode. The best part was that the enemy planes were SINGLE PIXELS. Nothing more than dots! Plus the bomb "target" was another dot that you could bomb by landing and driving over.

"Games that kept you up at night, games that made you lose sleep over, games that swallowed away half a year of your life by simply being SO good that you cannot get away from them."

Egads, Wizardy almost cost someone an eye in my house. My brother and I would head to the basement right after school and fire up the Appple II to beat Werdna and find the blue ribbon for the elevator ("Blade Cuisinart" anyone?). We got into a big fight once over who got to play once. We only came up for bathroom breaks and food (pissing off my parents to no end). At least it kept us off the streets.

Later on it was the Ultima series for me. Since my brother wasn't as into these as I was we had far fewer fights.

"What happened to space sims? Economy sims? Adventures? Flight sims?"

They aren't console friendly. They really require a keyboard and they don't have the violence factor the game companies consider necessary to sell. I think we'll have to depend on dedicated independent developers or boutique software companies for these.

"Few games interest me for longer than a few days, even though I got far less time to play today than I did 20 years ago. Am I getting old?"

You answered your own question partly there. We don't have entire days and nights to fritter away in front of our computers. We also usually have more diverse interests (I'd rather spend my weekend day tripping and eating out or backpacking). On top of that just the fact that we have been playing games for 15+ years means that we've seen almost every basic idea and plot that people can come up with. It is like going to a movie and within 10 minutes you can't help thinking of 5 other movies you've seen that this one reminds you of. We're jaded I guess.

Controls, Controls, Complicated Controls

[PhYrE2k2]

But controlling these games in the day was so much easier. You know, A is fire, B is jump? Space to shoot the puck, CTRL to pass the puck, and arrow keys to move (even in NHL'94 on its 4 floppy disks).

These days, a PS2 controller with 4 buttons + 4 buttons on top (not to mention the games that use these as modifiers to make 16 buttons up front) + 2 push-button sticks + D-PAD + start/select buttons... not to mention those controllers that sense their own movement and angle.

Games are just so complicated these days. So many moves, so many options, so much extra aiming. What happened to the aim and shoot method? The auto-reload needs to be replaced with a three-button combination? Do we really need 360 degrees of freedom for our joystick or would a 4-way/8-way pad do just as well for a driving game?

Yes games are more complex than pac-man and frogger ever were, but I think it's become a bit extreme... *thinks of playing GTA for the first time and jumping out of a plane instead of firing a weapon*.

-M

Re:The Bard's Tale... lives?

[jank1887]

Someone else could verify but, on my last browse through the game bin at WalMart, I saw a "new version" game in the Bard's Tale line. nothing like the originals, I know nothing about the game, but there was a sticker on the box saying: Contains the 3 original Bard's Tale games!

Just peeked over at amazon, and found this link to the game, by Vivendi.

No mention about the other games on that listing though... the only thing I could find about them on google was this old 1Up blog review

Re:More accurately: Game Graphics Now and 20yrs ag

[Anonymous Coward]

Some time ago I found a torrent with 9 GB of SNES ROMs. The best games in there were Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia. I finished Chrono Trigger.

Somehow, I don't particularly feel bad about never having owned an actual SNES.

Holding it

[elGrippe]

One thing Atari did for me, if I have to go, I can hold it for as long as I need to.

No pause button.

game innovation

[Shooter6947]

What this means to me is that after 20 years, they're still writing the same games that they always did, but just with better graphics. Because those better graphics are so much more expensive to produce, nobody is willing to take a chance on a *truly* new and innovative game concept. _Spore_ being a possible exception.

And it's all sports...

[porcupine8]

I thought I was going to see several different genres, from the summary - instead, it's five sports games, a driving game (which could be called sports), a fighting game (or two fighting games if you move boxing to that genre, or you could move the karate game back into sports for a total of 7 sports games), one RPG and one military shooter.

No platformers, no puzzle games, no simulations (SimCity vs The Sims?). What other genres have been totally ignored here?

The title should be "Sports games look much better than they did 20 years ago!"

Re:And it's all sports...

[Sj0]

omg! a gurl on teh innernets!

Sometimes more is less, less is more.

[master_p]

We play games for entertainment, right? todays games are orders of magnitude better than the games of yesteryear, in all categories: graphics, sound, control, gameplay...but are new games more fun than the old ones?

I have recently been in a conversation regarding complexity of controls for the new football game from Konami for PS2 (soccer for US). Almost all the buttons of the controller are required to play the game: you have to simultaneously sprint, adjust pass, control direction, pass specific buttons for dribbling etc. We all agreed that it was too complex, and most of us used a subset of the controls.

Then the discussion brought up Sensible Soccer: a very simple soccer game, compared to today's standard: overhead display instead of 3d, minimal animation, one button only...and then we remembered why had more fun with it: it was simply easier on the eye, easier to setup, easier to play, easier to control, and therefore, MORE FUN!

My take on this

[Torradas]

I have dosbox and vmdsound installed, and although I have a souped-up system at home with AMD64 (etc, etc) I still play Eye of the Beholder, UFO, Space Quests, Dune II, etc. This because I feel that nowadays games replace game-immersion with graphics when the old-days they really had to work on story lines, etc. The advent of "Modern Graphics" killed (for example) the adventure genre (Made famous in Larrys, Space Quests, Indiana Jones - I could go on forever) and it just happened to be one of my favourite genres. Im left with no option but go back and replay all this classics. Too much Eye-Candy and little substance seems to see the order of the day now. This is maybe also because the process of "game-making" nowadays is a bit too complex and reserved for the big companies. Great classics like Tetris (and to some extent the Sierra Adventure games already mentioned) were made with little resources but great enthusiasm. In a ill-made comparison, I would say that "Old Games vs. Modern Games" is a bit like "OSS versus Commercial Software" - Little means and great enthusiasm on one side of the scales and big resources and money-oriented objectives on the other... I for one, am not a sucker for graphics. I like it when the crudeness of graphics leaves something to the imagination. There is even a fallacy in photo-realistic graphics which you may have experienced before in "state-of-the-art" games. First used in robotics but with many paralels in modern graphics, the Uncanny Valley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley) Effect may trick your brain into thinking that Eye of the Beholder (for example) is actually "more real" than say, World of Warcraft. A balance is yet to be found, when cutting-edge graphics are easy to use to people with ideas for games, we will have games that are good for the eyes and the soul. :) Cheers, Torradas Cheers, Torradas

WoW cant hold a candle to Bard's Tale

[Anonymous Coward]

A pity too, Bard's Tale was a true RPG.... WoW is just 24/7 grind no imagination!

do we actually HAVE moderators?

[argStyopa]

1. Submit pointless little non article comparing in-game screenshots from ancient games with promo shots of newest games, without any real comparison or even fucking text.
2. ??
3. Profit.*

* until your server starts smoking from the people coming from slashdot actually EXPECTING something to read.

Whoever approved this one for the frontpage should be immediately dumped from the editoral staff or at least put on probation.

Werdna could kick the Bard's @$$!

[iamlucky13]

I think we all remember going through that one door in the fourth dungeon for the first time and finding out just what a bunch of level 7 ninja's, samurai, and priests could accomplish.

An encounter...the monsters surprised you!
A Lvl 7 ninja attacks Gimli...Gimli is decapitated!
A Lvl 7 samurai attacks Aragorn and hits 3 times for 47 damage
A Lvl 7 priest cast a Lahalito
Gandalf takes 27 damage
Aragorn take 15 damage. Aragorn is killed!
Faramir takes 9 damage
Bilbo takes 36 damage
Legolas takes 31 damage. Legolas is killed!

Somebody should've spent more time killing creeping coins, wandering through the pits in the 3rd dungeon, or duking it out with Murphy's ghosts. Actually, I didn't discover the game until probably 2000 (weak proof perhaps that old games can appeal to the younger generation) and I played the PC version (the identify item 9 cheat was removed). I did eventually beat Werdna, but I couldn't get my characters to import into Wizardry 2 for some reason, and it just got to be a pain in the butt to level up the characters.

PS - Trebor Sucks!

OK, here they are for nethack

[hawk]

test

test2

Re:OK, here they are for nethack

[hawk]

oops!

Let's try again.

Here's a screen shot for nethack in 1984,



    +---------+
    |...O.....|
    |.....@d..+
    |.........|
    +-----+---+


Now, here's one from the current version:


    +---------+
    |...O.....|
    |.....@d..+
    |.........|
    +-----+---+


This clearly shows the superiority of technology used in text games. But then, nethack is the only game that *matters*.

hawk

Just as stupid

[LKM]

Twenty years ago games were not as fun as they are today.

This is just as stupid a generalization as "everything used to be better". Some games (or even whole genres) used to be better, others are better now. Ice Hockey on the NES is still a whole lot more fun than any recent hockey game. Similarly, Punch-Out quite frankly still beats the crap out of any modern boxing game. Super Mario World on the SNES was probably one of the best Jump-N-Run-games, and the Sonic games on the Megadrive haven't been surpassed until the DS version of Sonic.

On the other hand, games like Total Annihilation, Halo or Metroid Prime simply weren't possible until very recently or are a whole lot more fun on modern consoles.

So some games and genres have improved, others have become worse, and even others simply aren't being made anymore. But games in general haven't become better or worse.

Re:YEESSS Wasteland

[Anonymous Coward]

The first game I ever played you could get a VD from a prostitute. Won that baby without help.

MAME?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right! This MAME thing will never be popular. That's why nobody will ever bother to make emulators for older gaming machines and their ROMs. The thought is just ludicrous!

"The Naughty Victorian Hand Book"

[Anonymous Coward]

[hey! wrote:]A Victorian pervert probably got all kinds of sticky enjoyment out of pictures of ladies in their underwear, even if the ladies were rather, uh, plain and middle aged, and the undewear looks like a cotton interpretation of a teutonic knight's jousting armor.

I laughed at what you wrote, because it was "on target". A couple of years ago I was also amused to run across a book called The Naughty Victorian Hand Book : The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation (by Burton Silver and Jeremy Bennett). Pictures had holes cut into them to put your fingers through, so you could imagine that the flesh of the fingers were...something else. Ahh, the days before the computer and the Internet. Descriptions of the books at:

Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0894806246/002-88 80166-8008029?v=glance&n=283155

We-don't-apply-for-no-stinkin-software-patents-Bar nes and Noble:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0747504202&itm=1

It looks like the books are now out of print. You could buy them used, but I shudder to think...

I feel your pain

[Radical Moderate]

My best friend had an Atari 2600, and his parents drove a Porsche and a Jaguar. We had a Pinto and Pong.

Twenty years ago, we had it all

[MMaestro]

Twenty years ago you didn't have MMORPG junkies that derive their entire existance from games.

Twenty years ago we DID have MMORPGs, we just didn't have massive worlds capable of serving THOUSANDS of users 24/7.

Twenty years ago you couldn't make your own fun in computer games like you can in HL2 by painting zombies and walls with the grav gun, or in BF1942 where you can forgo the game for acrobatics like detpack jeep boosting and wing to wing transfers.

Uhh... Players have been screwing around inside of game environments since the first attempted murder of Lord British in Ultima. The only difference is the lifting of limitations. (Speed runs? Playing any of the Wizardry games with only 1 character? Beating Final Fantasy 1 with a party of 4 white mages? Beating Doom without using any guns?)

Twenty years ago you couldn't be in a situation where you have a whole city or world to explore with no rules like you do in many of todays games like the GTA franchise.

Again, simply the lifting of limitations. When Ultima first came out, it was HUGE. And there were 'no rules' so to speak. (We've all tried killing Lord British one time or another.)

Generally speaking games 20 years ago were twiddle tests where only ones reflexes are ever challenged. Games today embody strategy, tactics and sometimes even empathy, things that could never by fortold 20 years ago.

20 years ago, most RPGs were virtually considered to be either strategic or tactical turn based strategy games. Playing as a Healer/Healing geared manner basicly meant you had to throw every single strategy guide out the window and write one on the fly (Level caps and woefully balanced stats didn't help.) Most puzzle based games were considered to be TOO difficult since this was pre-GameFAQs. (Lemmings anyone?) A lot of action games actually required a lot of pre-planning since different choices meant having to completely re-think attack patterns. You can nitpick but its largely remained true well into 2006.

Re:Remember - one person could code a commercial g

[Sj0]

You know, I make games by myself. I've learned something: You don't have to compete with the million sellers. I don't sell my works, because They're sometimes fun but entirely trivial and sometimes they break more copyrights than they actually contain(A nice quirk of quantum physics), but even if I did -- what then? If I beefed up Star Phalanx, which I developed in about 24 hours, with four episodes, more ships and weapons, and a couple powerups, It would likely only take another 24 hours max.

What number of sales at 10 dollars per registration would justify making another game? When you think about it, you realize it wouldn't take many.

Twenty years and this is it??

[hughperkins]

That's all we have to see for twenty years progress?? :-( Man, I was kindof hoping to have inter-stellar space-travel and stuff by now...

Re:YEESSS Wasteland

[Wocko]

URAQT2

Re:Remember - one person could code a commercial g

[Viol8]

Looks good. Heres my version of Defender:

http://www.ogham.demon.co.uk/zips/def104.tgz

It still has a few quirks I don't like but generally I
reckon is a reasonably faithful version.

Yes you can!

[Anonymous Coward]

On PGR pause the game at any time and you can select camera mode, which lets you view and take pictures of anywhere on the track from just about any angle/focus/saturation/etc. You can also move these to your PC. I don't know why anyone would want to, but it is there.

Nope, not exactly

[BeanThere]

Memmaker was only introduced very late, from DOS 6 onwards ... most of us go back long before that ... IIRC, prior to DOS 6, what became memmaker used to have another name and was sold as part of a commercial product, Microsoft just purchased the app, and renamed and rebranded it (like they've done with ... oh, just about everything they ever sold). It's likely the GP is thinking of the original app, not memmaker per se. (My memory is a little fuzzy though on all this so I may be mistaken but this is how I remember it.)

Re:Nope, not exactly

[BeanThere]

Trying to track down a reference ... I think I might be thinking of QEMM, but MS didn't buy that ... I might be mixing this memory up with some other one of MS buying something (e.g. maybe doublespace/stacker). In any case, prior to memmaker one did need a [pirated] commercial app for this.

Re:Nope, not exactly

[Sj0]

Doublespace/Drvspace is a wonderful show of Microsoft at work. As I recall, they were sued successfully by Stacker for more or less ripping off their product.

I really hate this especially for car games

[aliquis]

This is exactly what is wrong with ALL the reviews and screenshots of car games. Search for any new one and the images are always replay / camera shots, not inside-looking-forward screenshots which actually tells how the game looks when you are playing it. The replay / between level shots always looks nice but who gives a shit? Back in the days when I got my A500+ I thought that the wood in the "Heimdahl" game intro looked real.

Oh, memories...

[Explo]

Anyway, I hit the tile of 4 groups of 99 azure monks with that baby and it took a full 15 minutes to get through the damage messages.

I'm pretty sure that this is from the Bards Tale I and happens in some tower whose name I can't remember right now. The 4x99 monks were an initially really painfully tough fight even with any mass destruction spells, until we got a fire horn for the bard of the group. That was sufficient addition to get the amount of monks down to something that we could survive.