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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."
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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.
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 :)
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
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.
Dependency hell? =>
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.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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.
Rogue came first.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Article does not beg the question.
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
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.
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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
!!! Home of the Underdogs is gone!
/vader
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!