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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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My bet would be they are a lot closer than this graphics comparision which was purely a technology problem.
What, you can now believe what you see on the box-art?
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
> 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?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
In the end Diablo and Diablo II are just fancy GUIs for Nethack.
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.
You can see how much we've moved on, just compare the original Duke Nukem with Duke Nukem Forever!
Oh wait...
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.
Imagination rules, that's why no-one uses porn
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
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.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Article does not beg the question.
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.
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
Start a happiness pandemic
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So we'll be seeing today's Windows games vs today's Linux games?
I kid, I kid
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...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
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Sounds like you think the real fun is whipping out your dick, attracting all the gay-boys, then running back to your mama.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
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
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.
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."
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I'll put that one down under "list of funny things to do when I invent a time machine"
>> I'm foreign.. hence... ...there is nothing bloody wrong with... ...the archaic definition!
You're British?
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi