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

[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

[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

[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

[wideBlueSkies]

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

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

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

[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

[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.

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...

[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...

[geminidomino]

!!! Home of the Underdogs is gone!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! /vader

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

[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

[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

[CSMastermind]

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

Screenshots

[JonathanR]

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

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.)

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 :)

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.

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: 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?

"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.

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.

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: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.

Obligatory...

[ricepudd]

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

Oh wait...

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.

"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...

[Placido]

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

You're British?

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.

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.

[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: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

[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

[EvilNecro]

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

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.

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!)

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

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

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???

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.

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.

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. :(

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!

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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: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.

Because No One Masterbated to Commander Keen!

[Siffy]

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

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.

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: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