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