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The Ten Greatest Years in Gaming
Ground Glass writes "Next Generation has posted an abbreviated version of gaming's history by only chronicling the high points - the ten best years in the history of the medium. While it doesn't cover 1998 (and therefore forgets the birthdays of Half-Life, Starcraft, and Zelda: Ocarina of Time), most of the memorable moments are there. What was your best year for gaming?"
I disagree, and I've got systems as far back as the Atari 2600.
Mario 64 was my high point in the series. The sheer size of the world, the open-ended nature... It was really the first time I felt I was in a game instead of playing a game.
The only thing I think that would've improved it was to use the same format but on the mario RPG system, where you walk from town to town, get equipment, and level up.
Exactly! The golden years of gaming where 1991 - 2001. Those were the years that were really innovative. It ended with Black and White . That was the last game to be anything near innovative IMHO. The game industry becoming "big buisness" made it lose it's soul.
The entire article is a load of utter garbage.
It follows mostly console development and visual development and is severely biased towards shoot-em-up retards and their taste. The other branches of game genealogy are not followed at all.
It does not mention Rogue-to-Nethack and dungeon exploration games of old, Larry, Civilisation series, Sims to name a few.
The apogee of quests games does not even get an honourable one-liner. Neither does the original Castle Wolfenstein.
Yuck...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
(By the way: You can listen to cover versions of the above at Press Play On Tape's website.)
The Secret of Monkey Island!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1984 was also the year that Elite was released on the BBC. Why has nobody else mentioned this? I spent more hours playing that than any other game since, including Doom.
"Pokey, are you drunk on love?" "Yes. Also whiskey. But mostly love... and whiskey."
Wow, forcing me to post from work.
Although I am an Apple fan, I am by no means a fan boy. "Cementing the place of pc games forever", is a bit strong.
Many of us were playing games on our apple 2s way before the mac was released.
Mask of the Sun
Lode Runner
Miner 49er
Wavy Navy
Everything by Infocom
Kareteka
Summer games, Winter Games
I would say the early apple 2s and the Commodore 64 were the ones that cemented the pc game world. The Commodore was cheap and great. Also do not leave out the Trs-80 and the CoCos. Not everyone had the cash for a Mac, and when it came out most Apple guys did not like it at the time.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Agreed these are good years, especially for adventure gaming. :-)
:-) )
Also...
- Day of the Tentacle, 1993
- Sam & Max, 1993
- Legend of Kyrandia, 1992-1994
- Simon the Sorcerer, 1993
- Myst, 1993
But not just that genre, how about:
- DOOM
- X-Wing
- Pirates!
- Syndicate ( I hope you didn't miss this one!
- X-COM
- Frontier: Elite 2 (some purists didn't like it, but I did)
A funny aspect of this is that these games look pretty old and bland in effects and such things, but then you consider Jurassic Park with its realistic dinosaurs and breakthrough in CGI was also done in 1993 and the mind boggles a bit.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Lets see... starting in 1989 with Prince of Persia and Mech Warrior. Add the "Quest" years of Serria with Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Quest for Glory. Put in some Aces of the Pacific. Then bow down to Wolfenstein 3D. And then... good god, if this wasn't enough, along came Sid with Civilization (91). Finally, in 1992, the RTS comes into its own with Dune 2. It was a good thing I had a summer job.
Palum and Porum gave their lives, their lives dammit! Only to be forgotten and ursuped by lesser pretenders in a crappy story on a crappy system with a crappy reliance on FMV sequences (yeah, I'm looking at you FFVII).
I see FFVII as the end of the Final Fantasy series.
See, this is the problem game companies have. Goldeneye was a freaking fun game. But, MR PC FPS here thinks that no matter what the game play was like, if it didn't show 100+ frames per second, have 4x anti-aliasing, etc., it sucked.
Thus, creativity in gaming is now measured exclusively by how many frames you can push, how many polygons you can render and how it looks. Yes, for those that complain about the game market, just remember, we've made it that way.
It's one thing to like FF VII, or to even think it's the best in the entire series. That's an opinion and everyone's entitled to have them.
But revolutionary? I take issue with the concept, and since your conclusion is based on that one game, your entire statement.
Let me try to wrap my head around the point, starting with how it could be revolutionary within the realm of Final Fantasy games. I'll start with the most common "points" brought up, with games noted by "US/JAP" release titles:
-(Obviously)It wasn't the first FF game
-(The Aeris point) It wasn't the first FF game where characters, party members, and large numbers of innocents died (see FFII/IV's Tellah, FFIII/VI's Castle Doma, Breaking of the World, General Leo, and many others related to the recurring party members, and FFV's Galuf)
-(Materia) It wasn't the first FF game where you could teach your characters things (Espers in FFIII/VII, and the Job/Skill System in the Famicom's FFII, as well as FFV)
-(Story) It can be argued, as a matter of opinion, that FFII/IV and FFIII/VI had incredibly good stories, especially by those who played them before Playstation/FFVII came out.
-(Soundtrack) Granted that FFVII's music didn't have to be midi's, but by the same measure, FFIII/VI's soundtrack was available at the US's release date and was fully orchestrated (and sounded damn good)
-(Chocobos) Nope, been around since at least FFII/IV, and IIRC, FFII on the Famicom/GBA.
-(Party Switching) The ability to select who comes and who goes at will has been around since FFIII/VI. In fact, some of the best and more "revolutionary" sequences forced you to split up your party into multiple groups, causing some potentially difficult battles if you didn't know how to play each character's strengths and/or poorly developed their skills and misgrouped them.
-(Active Battle System) Not even close...see FFII/IV and beyond.
The only "revolutionary" action for FFVII in the Final Fantasy series I can think of is that it was the first one to come out on a platform that could support FMV-style animation sequences and also use polygons instead of sprites, thereby appealing to a wider audience.
Now, taken in a greater scope of all RPGs, I really can't think of *anything* that FFVII did that no RPG previous to it (on any computer system or console) hadn't done first, or better.
Now, for my "old man" disclaimer...I'm 25, and grew up on the early FF games. I played through FFVII, and enjoyed it. FFVIII didn't do it for me, but FFIX I enjoyed, and I found Final Fantasy Tactics (like Tactics Ogre) to be refreshing and extremely enjoyable. I stopped playin' them after that, but not for dislike of the series -- my interests simply changed, though I do plan to try to come back to the series in the future, when there's time in my life.
I've just heard the (relatively baseless) "OMG FFVII is teh best ev3r!!!" argument too often, and felt the need to offer rebuttle.
Thanks!
Actually, you couldn't have played a thing without 1971 ... well unless your parents are freaks of nature and your mother popped you out in 27 days
That would be a record (not to mention make the entirety of the female population jealous of your mother)
The release of Final Fantasy VII did mark something, but it wasn't a great milestone. It marked the end of games being created for gameplay and the start of games being made for graphics.
Prior to FF7, the emphasis was on changes to the story and improvements to the battle system. Starting with FF7, that all changed. Originally Squaresoft was considering/working on a Final Fantasy game for the N64 - it's unclear how far it got, but Squaresoft was, traditionally, a Nintendo developer. That changed with FF7, because while the N64 was graphically superior to the PlayStation, it didn't have the FMV support that the PS had.
If that last sentence doesn't sound completely ass-backwards to you, you need your head checked. Squaresoft declined to use the technically superior console in favor of the one that let them play movies. Great games are not played based on movies. They're based on gameplay.
Instead of improving gameplay, they improved the graphics aspect, creating large graphical cutscenes. They destroyed the character advancement system, making all characters essentially identical, based on skills you could move between characters.
1996-1997 has to go down as the worst year in gaming, because it marked the devolution of games from being about the gameplay to being about the graphics and sound. Prior to FF7, the Final Fantasy games were about challenging gameplay and interesting stories. Starting with FF7, they became videos with brief periods of gameplay added in. And seeing Squaresoft's success in impressing people with pretty pictures, the entire industry became infatuated with graphics.
The golden years for PC gaming were from 1984 (first King's Quest) to 1992, when Castle Wolfenstein was released.
I liked it. I had played wolfstien, the dooms, quake, dark forces, strife, heritic, duke nukem, whatever else the pc had at the time. It was a good game. It did what halo is doing for this generation. It brings the fps game to a bigger audience then the pc. I didnt play 007 until my first year in college, wow, that was 8 years ago, where does the time go? Anyway at the time not many people had pcs and even fewer people had games to play on them (I probably went to the wrong college). But they did have n64s and playstations. I initially hated 007 for the same reason pc people hate halo, controls and graphics just weren't up to par with the pc stuff. But 007 had one thing that my pc games didn't, 3 other people in the room yelling and screaming and having fun. So I ground my teeth and learned how to play it, and ended up having a fun time all year with it. I later got into the single player aspect of it and found it to be a lot of fun. It had its moments, and i really enjoyed how they changed the level objectives as you scaled up the difficutly. In multiplayer it also featured a mode I had not seen before, though I will admit that at the time the only mod of a game I had played was quake ctf. Anyway it had the 1 shot 1 kill mode. I racked up many hours with my friend playing pistols only with 1 shot 1 kill. It was a ton of fun. Maybe rainbow six was out at that time? I remember buying that and it didn't work due to my video card being unsupported (glad those days are gone). Anyway 007 was the precursor to halo. Halo is the holy mecca for younger gamers now just getting into it, the same way 007 was before it. We people fortunate enough to have PCs had a lot before it, but 007 was still a very signifigant game.
It also existed for IBM PC/XT and it was tremendous fun. You had to think, plan ahead and operate with a very limited amount of resources counting up to a single bullet in many places. It also increased in complexity as it went along instead of being evenly daft and putting a fat retarded accelerated supercretin in the last room. Most of that got lost in the 1990es rerelease which has degenerated into a doom-like shoot-em up vs retarded monsters (with german uniforms) and mandatory last-level "big ones".
As far as shoot-em ups are concerned the article also misses one of the 1990-es pinnacles of shoot-em ups - Star Wars: Dark Forces. It was the first successfull FPS shoot-em up with some resemblance of a plot, a story line and real artwork thrown in between the levels. Half life, Unreal, Duke Nuke 'M, Jedi Knights all followed on where this game trailblazed. Granted, it suffered from some of the major problems of all shoot-em-ups (compensating for poor AI by high speed and lots of HP in high level monsters). None the less it was fun to the extent Quake and many of the more visually rich games never were.
The article also completely misses the early space simulators - Wing Commander and X-Wing/B-Wing/Tie Fighter. The artice also misses another game which was nothing much as far as game play, but was definitely a turning point in 3D game design - Terminal Velocity.
As I said, it is written to appeal to the common values of the current mainstream gamer which has been brought up to enjoy shoot-em ups with Tits, shoot-em ups without Tits and shoot-em ups with Tits and Hot Coffee. Speaking of tits, the article also misses the first year of Lara which was the first successfull game with a female as the main personality.
I can continue ranting forever but the summary shall remain the same "the article is garbage".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Everyone has played King's Quest, no?