Slashdot Mirror
Don't Go Down Memory Lane?
fieldsofclover writes "Gamers With Jobs is running a piece today about the darker side of gaming nostalgia. From the article: 'Here's an example. Konami's Castlevania had interesting monsters, catchy music, and a great gimmick: a guy with a whip. But if you went back and played it today, chances are you wouldn't bother playing past the second level. Why are the newest games in the series so drastically different from the original? The answer is because gamers demand more from their hobby now, and there's just not a lot of meat on those old bones. But when the fully 3D, story-driven sequel fails, they point at the original on its lofty pedestal and demand an experience that lives up to their memories. It's a double standard that's next to impossible to satisfy.' Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?"
You can lead a gift horse to water, but you can't shoot it in the foot.
That's a tad melodramatic don't you think?
....where everything is a hi-res shade of brown, and the boss is always a giant bug.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Super Mario Bros is still lots of fun, I don't care what you say.
It's time we put away the Conkers and Contras and Castlevanias of our past and focus on the games we have yet to dream of
This message should be for video game developers, not video game consumers. Developers definitely need to get their heads out of their @sses and start dreaming up new, creative ideas instead of just taking the easy way out with throwbacks. Consumers on the other hand have little impact on what games are being developed, and therefore consumers can do whatever they want. If they want throwbacks or if they want brand new fresh ideas, no biggy. But the writer of this article needs to direct his ranting towards the appropriate people.
Most games today suck. I would much rather play Final Fantasy 1 over 7-10. I still enjoy Castlevania 3. It isn't just a lofty memory, I still play those game because I still have the cartridges and re-releases (although the NES FF1 was much better than the GBA DoS).
If you want us to quit judging, make new characters. That's all you really need to do.
I have nothing to say.
It's because I have played the old games so much there is no surprise anymore. I can point out every event, every location and every item in Final Fantasy. I played it so much then, there is noting new in it to discover.
My gaming experience maybe jaded by my memories (I can't enjoy half-life 1 quite the same way anymore) and tunnel vision might obstruct my modern game view (New Super Mario Bros. was good, but It could have been so much more,)but they haven't discouraged my number one reason for buying the Wii...Fun new games with their classic predicessors all in one system.
Demented But Determined.
For some of us, gaming past isn't "looking back on things and remembering them."
While it's true some people do just look back on it and remember things as better than they were, and that's their issue, it's not the case for everyone.
Some of us still play those games you know.
Those "old bones" have a tendency to still have similarly excellent gameplay as the newer generation (and are usually far more challenging to boot!). When will we realize that gameplay isn't all bells and whistles?
Why put out new stuff when you make extremely minor changes and call it a new game? EA proved that business model to be a successful one, and everyone else has followed.
From a business standpoint, it makes sense -- why take a risk when you don't have to?
From a consumer standpoint, it sucks. Eventually enough consumers will quit buying SUPER-COOL-GAME-2,3,4....x and force a shift in the market. Until that happens, enjoy Madden 2007, 2008, 2009, etc and FinalFantasy-WHATEVER because its not going to change.
Maybe I am the exception. One of my favorite apps is MAME. Do I enjoy new games? You bet, and I don't think playing my old favorites on emulators has diminished that in the least. What the article is really trying to say is sequels suck, and that's been said for years in video games. The only games that should have more than 2 sequels are sports titles for roster updates, rule changes improvements. After two sequels to Grand Theft Auto, or Final Fantasy, or Legend of Zelda the developers should try something new and original.
Truth is, newer installments of classic games can be as good as ever, but they will never live up to the memories that gamers have developped for their classic, personal favorites.
Many of the great Super NES and Genesis games still have excellent replay value. Some of the fad titles and the crap shooter/fighter clones don't withstand the test of time when replayed. However, the true classics like Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island, Final Fantasy 4-6, Phantasy Star 2 & 4, the Sonic games, etc. are still as fun to play as they were back in the day.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I'm actually going back now and replaying quite a few of my older games, just because they're more entertaining than a lot of the current games. Castlevania? Played through it completely again a few months ago. Right now, I'm working on the first Might and Magic, and about to start on some of the Ultima games.
Ditto. I don't regularly play these games, the challenge factor isn't there as much, but every so often I'll fire up the ol' emulator and break out the classics... Mega Man series (esp. 2), SMB3, dragon warrior 1-4, contra, zelda...
Sorry, they're still fun for me. Maybe Conker just sucks as a game? Haven't played it myself, but I don't see many people pining over the days of Conker... On the other hand, Zelda, FF series... those always have replay value.
sure the old games have been done to death by now, but for the most part the good games from back in the day were pioneering things. Though, it should be said that for the most parts the major driving force behind the remake is the nostalgia factor. I mean, look at NARC. The remake was absolutely horrible because they spent more time saying "Remember how you liked play NARC back in the day? Guess what, It's back! and SHINEY TOO!!!" when they should have been making a game where blast druggies with missiles.
It's not that we crap on game remakes because they don't take us back to 1989, we crap on them because they are absolute garbage that try to change too many things from the gameplay that made it classic in the first place. I mean, my brother just picked up a copy of "Space Raiders" for the gamecube for $10, it hardly changes the gameplay of the original space invaders, and then updates the graphics, but the core game mech stays exactly the same.
If you try to change too much, you alienate the memories we had of the original. If you change too little, you get the same game over again, which may or may not be what the consumers want. I don't know about anyone else, but my fond memories of Ninja Gaiden were rekindled when the new one came out. It gave shiney graphics, slick controls, was still hard as granite, but it didn't alienate the gamers. I think you can mainly credit this to the fact that tecmo actually tried to make a new game out, not just advertise the hell out of a poorly designed potential cashcow.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
On top of it all, New Super Mario Bros. just got released and is doing quite well. This is a perfect example of classic gameplay in a successful contemporary game. Maybe developers just shouldn't waste so much time on production values, but should just concentrate on gameplay and level variety.
Twinstiq, game news
The first RPG I ever played was simply called "Dungeon", this was the Commodore game that got my entire family hooked on video games for the rest of our lives.
We would sit around the supper table, each trading stories about our experience in this expansive and immersive alternate reality. I would inform everyone about the secret passage I found, where I found a secret spell called Temporal Fugue; my brother would update us as to how much money he had stolen from the bank that day; my father would describe his run-in with "The Devourer".
This game held a special place in all of our hearts and often we would fondly discuss how great the game was... until last year... when I found an emulator and ROM and decided to relive all my old memories. The lush and vibrant full-color dungeon memories that I had in my mind was immediately shattered by a crude 4 color, blocky rendition of what vaguely looked like walls and doors. My memories of thrilling game-play in a true-to-life virtual world were replaced by agonizing and seemingly endless boring hall-walking.
I showed my father. All he did was scream "NO! THERE IS NO WAY THAT THAT'S HOW BAD IT LOOKED! CHRIS YOU MUST HAVE MADE A MISTAKE. THIS CAN'T BE DUNGEON!!"
While my father is STILL in denial, I have accepted the truth. My fond memories of that game are gone forever.
" But when the fully 3D, story-driven sequel fails, they point at the original on its lofty pedestal and demand an experience that lives up to their memories. "
First, I can't imagine that the amount of people buying game X who have some kind of deep emotional ties to the original Sega Saturn version really count for anything in the grand scheme of things.
Second, if a game fails, you can't blame it on those people. If your game fails, chances are far greater that it sucked rather than that there exist large numbers of people who had unrealistic expectations of it.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Ah ok, so that's why "Konami Retread #35" is on the top of the charts? Thanks, I was wondering at all about that.
Seriously, if there were really millions of people buying re-releases, wouldn't that be, like, obvious? I'm the first one to reminisce about the good old days, but if you can't find a good game in todays vast market, I just don't think you're looking very hard. You mention Nintendo - well there you go. Those are the games you like...
With limited things that could occur technically, games of yesteryear seem to be a lot simpler. That simplicity means that things had darn well better be fun, or your player won't plunk down money to stare at a "blob" and hit a single button over and over. Nowadays, there's a lot more development which goes into a game, which means that gameplay isn't as big a focus, generally.
Also, old games were generally reliant on the ability to just pick up and go and be beaten in one sitting, as opposed to having games which take nigh on 40 hours now. Focusing on a tight experience leads to a lot less mediocrity than "hmm, what can we do for the next 3 hours of the game before they get to hour 30 when the real story starts."
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
"This message should be for video game developers, not video game consumers. Developers definitely need to get their heads out of their @sses and start dreaming up new, creative ideas instead of just taking the easy way out with throwbacks."
Yeah! Like ubisoft did with Beyond good and evil. What were they a throwback to again, Mr insightful?
We remember the old games as great because they were fun when we played them. Many new games are not enjoyable. They are justly dismissed and it doesn't matter that we compare them to the good times we had with the best of the best from the past: If a game can't deliver an entertaining experience then that game is a failure. If a game wasn't entertaining back then it was a failure too. Sure, the technical standards have skyrocketed, and there are some games which fail because they don't meet the expectations graphics-wise, but in the end more games fail due to just being plain boring or aggravating. Good graphics and sound will never work as a substitute for fun.
Just look at Metroid, Mario, Metal Gear, Castlevania (SotN and gameboy), Zelda, Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy... Fans and newcomers alike hated the more recent installments, right? Right?
No, it's not hard to involve the themes, maybe part of the storyline, and the major gameplay elements from the original game into an entirely new engine. But it does make a convenient scapegoat if you're a developer whose games are failing or a pundit firing off the first story idea that came to his mind.
In my first runthrough of Doom 3 I was rather disappointed. Not only were my memories of the previous games absolutely stellar, but thanks to id's open sourced engines there were graphically superior iterations that played every bit as smoothly as the DOS originals. Beating that is a tall order, even for id.
Inexplicably I got a hankering for Doom 3 again several months later. I installed a mod that gave me all the door codes (you need a pen and paper otherwise) and suddenly I had a really great time! Door codes aside, I think I had pooped on my own party by equating Doom 3 with its predecessors.
There are a hand ful of old games that I will pull out and play through all the way.
1 - Monkey Island. Straight up one of the best humorous adventures out there, even in 16 colors!
2 - Quest for Glory 1. After the VGA remake, the 256 color imagry interesting story line, and great game play make it worth running through over and over.
3 - Quest for Glory 2. The old CGA version still keeps me entertained. The type-action interface requires actual thought. Instead of clicking on someone for a dialog option, you actually have to type "ask about sword", or "climb rope". No glowing outlines on interactive objects.
What I'm waiting for is a first/third person pov world, with much less combat and much more throught than most of the current FPSs these days and a healthy dose of social humour. Tomb Raider meets Myst with Leisure Suit Larry cameos.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I think the thing that was most enjoyable about the 'old' games, was that they always pushed the edge. One of my favorites was Ultima 7. The game play was very simple and consistent, but provided a ton of freedom. Once I beat the game, I spent a long time playing with the editor(cheat) mode, building castles out of gold bricks, making Lord british join my party and such. Wolfenstien, DOOM and Quake were much the same game, but all of them made huge leaps in gameplay. Then you had merging between MUDs, FPSs and Strategy(Ultima Online, Starcraft, etc...). The mixing of genres in a simple consistent way pushed the edge again. After that I started to grow up and found myself more interested in being social, so I'm not really up to date on how more modern games push the edge. However, I wonder what ideas slashdotters have for pushing the edge of gameplay.
There are a lot of games that I look back on playing fondly as a child. My friends and I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning playing some of them - to us at that time, there were great. Inevitably we would beat them, and then we would move on to other games that we loved for a time. I've discovered after breaking them out later, that many of these games were great because I was 12 - or because I was hopped up on mike and ikes and generic cola with my friends. Those are pretty easy to spot now - and honestly, all the castlevanias fell into that category.
There are however games that are timeless and still surpise, challenge, or entertain to this day. I think you'll find that those games are the ones we still come back to years after their release. Those are the games that game designers should be looking at.
Also, I'd argue the ability to save/load anywhere on an emulator enhances people's perception of older games. There are plenty of RPGs in the past that are mega maze crawls with no save points in between. If you actually have to play such a game it'd be quite a painful experience because you literally cannot leave in under X hours. Emulators essentially enhance the gaming experience by allowing you to break down an otherwise painful long stretch of boredom (and if you enjoy these things, you could just not use these features, so it's the best of both worlds). The Turbo feature found on most emulators also greatly enhances the value of a RPG by shortening the otherwise boring random battles (and if you find them fun, you can always do it at the regular speed).
I look at older games as enjoyable not because of how everything back in the good old days was better, but rather now I have the tools to make older games more enjoyable. If I can make my PS2 run 5 times faster at the switch of a button, an otherwise boring game could be tolerable, but this technology only exists with older games via emulator. Given the choice of 2 equally boring game, I might as well pick the one that I can speed up 5 times and not waste as much time.
I _know_! I mean, just yesterday when I was playing Ms. Pac-Man in a bar, I was pining away for the clean simple fun gameplay of the latest Primal Fury Wrath Fighter Clone Thing. Oh, wait, no I wasn't, because Ms. Pac-Man still kicks butt.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
"Should we make more games like the original Castlevania, or more like the recent 3D ones?" is an absurd and inappropriate comparison. It's a false choice. "Should we make more games like the recent 3D Castlevanias, or more like the recent 2D Castlevanias?" is a perfectly valid one. It's completely possible to combine oldschool elements of games with new technology, while not bowing to 8-bit throwbacks like awkward controls and artificial difficulty (eg having to memorize where every Medusa head is going to be before you can successfully make a jump). Recent 2D Castlevanias, as well as New Super Mario Bros., do a great job of mixing classic and modern gaming sensibilities.
There were some games we played because we had nothing better.
Then there were games we played because they were fucking awesome.
I play Asteroids, Puzzle Bobble, and Galaga regularly. I will fire up an NES for Punch-Out, Duck Hunt, or Mario. I doubt anyone in their right mind would slight Street Fighter II or Metal Slug.
Games like Castlevania, Resident Evil, and even Zelda were more promise than game in their first iteration. They were landmark games for their time, but if you were honest with yourself when you first played them, you knew that those games needed more power. The developers were making do with what they had, but they were coding for future systems. Those type of games don't age well.
The answer is because gamers demand more from their hobby now, and there's just not a lot of meat on those old bones.
Where "meat" means elaborate but generic 3D models, horrible screechy voice acting, and gigantic fully-interactive worlds which are in fact only "interactive" in the sense that every single NPC in the game is capable of giving you a different generic fetch quest.
You might not ever get past the second level of Halo 2 either, but that's okay, because these days everything has an online deathmatch mode where you play the same 4 or 5 levels over and over and over again, and that's an acceptable stand-in for gameplay. Decades-old Castlevania, on the other hand, if a blogger gets bored after replaying the first level, well, that's bad.
I'd take people more seriously extolling the potential of all this fancy gee-whiz-bang technology if anything was actually being done with it. You say the retro craze is stupid because new games have more "meat"? No, no, you've confused, the retro craze started because people started to feel like modern games don't have any meat.
You want to focus on "the games we've yet to dream of"? The thing is, the people right now who are doing the most to actually do that are the ones who are least following this guy's advice-- Nintendo, who are saying "shove it" to the entire big flashy world of 3D "meat" this guy wants, and making simple but compelling games which embrace the idioms of older games while coincidentally taking advantage of the technology and production values of today's games. The idea the blogger guy here is setting up, that you either have to go retro or go forward, is a false choice; Nintendo's been doing great lately going forward by going retro. In doing this they can avoid the creativity pratfalls of modern dreck without suffering the low-tech conveniences of old classics, and make games which are deep and rich and fun. For example, sure, nobody likes the big ugh 3D castlevanias, but everyone who's played it that I've talked to loved the new 2D castlevania for the DS.
Maybe Conker just sucks as a game? Haven't played it myself, but I don't see many people pining over the days of Conker...
Conker's Bad Fur Day was a late release in the Nintendo 64's lifespan. Many of the gamers of that time were either losing interest in games entirely, or moving on to newer consoles like the Dreamcast.
I have to assume there was at least SOME nostalgia for it, though, or Rare wouldn't have bothered giving it a makeover and releasing it as an online-enabled Xbox title.
When people talk how much better older games are to new ones, they tend to only pick out the best games from a previous generation, and the average to worser games of the current generation. Obviously, there are a lot of games out there today that can't live up to great classics(personally I don't think any new mario game can live up to Super Mario World), but when you look the average platformer game back in ,say, the NES days (average meaning anything thats not the Mario Bros. series) they're not as good as the average platformer would be today. I wish I could remember what some of these older games were called, but I distictly remember them being incredibly slow, unintuitive, and lacked a sense of momentum. Something that the average platformer today would have. And taking a look at the racing genre, I think its safe to say that GT4 is better than Rad Racer.
It's not the games that have changed while they've sat in our parents' basements (next to our beds). Moreso, we have changed and the way in which we approach the games. It struck a chord in me when he mentioned going to great and illegal lengths to play Super Metroid. I was similarly inspired and was willing to drive 2 miles and pay $12 for the chance to play it again on my SNES. I wasn't disappointed in the game at all as I approached the game like almost any other; I play the hero and save the galaxy. If I had picked up inflated expectations of what the game was like when I was a kid, I probably would have been sorely disappointed. It's kind of like going back to the old tire swing 20 years later, remembering how high you used to swing only to find an old worn-out tire hanging knee high from a branch you could now reach up and touch with your hand.
I noticed this problem when I was the lead tester for Atari Anniversary Advance for the GameBoy Advance. This title had the original ROMs of Asteriod, Battlezone, Centipede, Missile Command, and Tempest being emulated on the GBA. When I first got the title, I thought these were awesome games because I played them when they first came out. (I also played Pong when it first came out as well.) But, with the critical eye of a professional tester, I found out that there were sure buggy as heck. Mostly due to the limitation of the hardware during the early 1980's. The gameplay is still awesome and I still suck 20 years later. :P
What's the point of hypothesizing about "if", when emulators are cheap and plentiful? If you think that Castlevania 1 was better than it's latest sequel, go play it. Nobody's going to pick on you for not keeping up with the times.
Sometimes I find out that I just had low expectations when I was young. (e.g. Dragon Warrior 1, Final Fantasy 1, Paperboy)
Sometimes I find out that games which were good have nevertheless been surpassed by better alternatives or sequels. (e.g. Zelda 1, Mario Kart 1, Duke Nukem 3D).
And sometimes, the old games are fondly remembered because they were really, really good. Star Control 2, Deus Ex 1, and the Baldur's Gate series are each 5 or 10 years old, but (despite playing Starcon 3, Deus Ex 2, Neverwinter Nights, and lots of similar games from the same genres) I still haven't found any similar-but-better games to replace any of them. Judging by sales, there are a lot of people that feel the same way about Starcraft and Half Life 1. We don't all have some retro-gaming fetish, we just know what we like and know how rare it can be.
Metroid on the NES was good, within the limits of the hardware.
Metroid on the SNES was good, within the limits of the hardware.
Metroid on the Gamecube was good, within the limits of the hardware.
Metroid on the Wii looks like it's gonna be good, within the limits of the hardware.
So, sequels don't necessarily suck (even Metroid Prime 2 looked much better than the first).
Amazing hardware doesn't necessarily equal "better game" either.
Get creative: make games, not hardware demos. After all, you're supposed to be game companies, not demo groups like Triton, Future Crew, etc.
I just finished Monkey Island 2 last night, and Monkey Island 1 last week, and will start MI3 tonight, and I have to say, they are every bit as good as they were brand new.
Of course, I would not want interactive 3D dysentary.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
This isn't really anything different than what goes on elsewhere in other industries.
Was the reissue of Star Wars better because of the updated effects? Should we "let go" of the original?
How about Casablanca, should someone make "Casablanca II: Rick and Ilsa Go Wild In Ibiza", does that mean we should "progress" and not watch the original?
All those pre-digital-age bands; should we not buy the records because the masters were recorded in analog, mono, etc.?
Preferences are what they are; so when you ask "Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?", it really makes no sense and amounts to whining.
Most developers would love to do something creative with the paltry time and money their publishers give them.
But the publishers see only one thing: the bottom line. They are firmly convinced that making a guaranteed mediocre profit is better than taking a risk and possibly hitting the big time with a new, creative, fun idea.
"I played it so much then, there is noting new in it to discover."
Sounds like an old guy describing mastrubation.
This can be true. I'm a big music game fan and I've recently gotten my hands on a copy of PaRappa the Rapper (one of my favorites). Now lately I've been playing tons of Guitar Hero (awesome game). So then I go back to PaRappa for a little bit. Now the graphics look really blocky (it was PS1 after all), but that's not a problem. However, compared to Frequency/Amplitude/Guitar Hero/Donkey Konga it is REALLY HARD to get the timings right. I don't know what the issue is, but it seems to be much less forgiving (either that, or the indicator at the top of the screen is inaccurate). It's still fun, but that was a surprise to me when I started playing again. If the game came out today, I think it would have a hard time because of that.
Then there is also just the fun factor. I got a copy of Donkey Konga 2 a few months ago. After playing Guitar Hero it just wasn't very fun. The music in it was terrible (worse the the first by far) and it just wasn't as fun. You didn't get the connection to the music like you do with GH. Then just for comparison I put in my copy of Donkey Konga, and it was the same. I really liked that game, but now it just wasn't as fun.
Guitar Hero has REALLY raised the bar, it seems. Some games hold up very well (Frequency and Amplitude are still fun to play), others don't.
This happens in all genres. If a game is good enough (Super Mario World, Mario 64) then it will stand above it's peers for years to come. But if a game was just good when it came out, it may not stand the test of time. That's what we're seeing in some of these things.
I played through Kid Icarus about two months ago for the first time ever. I've got to say, that game was HARD. If I didn't know better I'd think it was an arcade (that you'd have to pump full of quarters). You can really see how games have changed. Most games that hard would never survive today. There is nothing wrong with a strong challenge, but that game just beats you over the head with it. I know tons of people think that is one of the best games ever, but I just can't see it from my (obviously quite different) perspective.
Some nostalgia is good. Some games really deserve it (Super Mario World, Mario 64, Yoshi's Island). But many games are remembered fondly and while they were important, they don't stand up to recent games.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The same kind of experience went for me when I tried to introduce my family to the Final Fantasy series. First was FF9 since it was out at the time. They liked it mostly for the music, as well as the pile of little sidegames that FF has long included.
Then I showed them FF8 and I have to say, even if the characters weren't four heads high semi-chibi style (a major complaint of FF9), they weren't more compelling either.
I got an old copy of FF7, arguably the best-loved of the "modern" FF series, and the low resolution graphics was positively oppressive. It had more edge, the translation not shying away from mild but persistent profanity. I flipped through some mame roms for earlier FF games and each trip backwards showed less game, less character, less world, and yet, maintained a few elements that bind all FF concepts.
Then we played FFX and FFX2, and were quite pleased with the artwork, storylines and world scopes (though FF games are still way too linear in my opinion). The smoother, easy-on-the-eyes antialiased graphics and more fluid animation style didn't hurt either. The voiceovers are controversial but we didn't really mind them. It's still not what you'd call state of the art in ANY direction technically, but it's an impressive tour de force when taken all together. Some still fondly think back to FF7 or FF3 or whatever, but give me more YRP. And if my family is to judge, the newer games in the series are just more fun than the old ones.
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This is precisely the same problem with Star Wars: Episode One. It is impossible to live up to the memory of seeing Star Wars for the first time, especially when the first time you saw it you were seven.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
It just doesn't get any better than that.
:-)
Okay, maybe a well-timed L2000,M1,M1. Or actually being able to type BAGN^H^H^H^HBANG the first time.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Well, I did bother to play it for the first time ever a few month ago and had plenty of fun with it. After I was through with Castlevania1 I continued with Castlevania3 and yet again had plenty of fun with it. There was absolutly no nostalgia involved, since I never happen to play those games before, I only ever played Castlevania Adventures on Gameboy and hated that pretty much back then (just way to slow). Similar things have happened with Metroid and plenty of other games. Those old games are still good to this day. Only real exceptions are games that were all about GFX, which often simply can't stand the test of time, especially 3d gfx of yesterday can sometimes look incredible ugly today, but thats a different story.
The thing one has to remember is that you can't get the experience of the past days back exactly the way it was. You won't talk with your friends for weeks and month about an up coming NES game, you won't talk about puzzles and impossible to fight bosses, secrets and stuff, since cheats and walkthroughs are easily available today, every question you might have about a game is solved in a minute of googling, while in the old days some questions could stay mistery for years or decades. Instead if you today play a game released 10-20 years ago its just you and the game, no media buzz, no friends playing through the same game at the same time, etc. If you can accept that the experience of consuming a old game today will be different then it was back in the day due to all the surrounding factors, you however will still get a very good experience, not a 20h gameplay one, since most old games can be finished in an hour or two, but still a very satisfing one.
That said, I have nothing against todays games, there are quite a lot that I love (Katamary, SotC, PoP:Sands of Time, Tomb Raider Legend, Dreamfall, ...), however I am still quite a bit angry at the game industry, not because it delivers bad games (well, sometimes it does), but because it doesn't deliver the games I would have hoped for. Where is my current day X-Wing-like game or Strike Commander? Better graphics, more realism and simply overall improved? Not available, instead of that the "soft" flight-sim genre has died out almost completly, we are stuck with some arcadey shoot'em ups (all most all not even featuring a cockpit perspective) and Microsoft Flightsimulator, everything inbetween simply faded away. Same with games like MechWarrior. The adventure genre also disappear, it didn't really die out completly, but what game in the last year is up to the quality of what LucasArts released back in the day? And heck, where have my videos with real actors gone? I know, sometimes a CGI character can do a better job, but I still miss Wing Commander and friends. Last not least there are also many concept that never really have been realized, in old flightsims or racing games you very often had a lot of surrounding 'simulated', if you ejected over enemy territory you got caputured, if you crashed hard into a wall you got brought into a hospital by an ambulance and stuff, all this was just a static picture with little or no gameplay relvance, but it gave those games personality which is often completly lacking in todays games. In flight games you can't even eject, neither start or land manually today and in racing games you end up driving a nobody, have often no remotly real damage model (200mph against brick wall != scratch in the paint) and there simply isn't any surrounding simulated at all.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but I do miss Origin, Bullfrog, Micropose and the LucasArts of the old days, a lot. Their games where awesome and provided an experince which little of today comes close to, not so much because todays games are worse, but simply because they are quite different.
What a horrible article. A roommate comes back with a Conker title which he probably only really enjoyed because of the crude humor (which he has since grown out of) and suddenly all nostalgia gaming is doomed.
Go back to the true classics and then tell me that I shouldn't be nostalgic. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Mario Brothers, Pengo, Bump-n-Jump... All fantastic games which are still fun to play today.
It's the gameplay, stupid.
Gah, I already moderated a bunch of posts but I just have to respond to this. A lot of people missed Conker's Bad Fur Day as it was one of the last few titles to be released for the N64... But! it was also one of the best, definitely in the top 5 for me.
;)
Rare perfected and expanded upon their platformer formula which had already provided some great games for the system (Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie), throwing in a good helping of brilliant (and very adult at times) humor. Also, probably the best ending to a video game ever. I won't spoil anything, but if anyone reading this was a fan of the N64 and did not play this game (through to the end), you really owe it to yourself to check it out.
P.S. TFA is load of shit-- just my opinion
When's the last time we had a decent turn-based strategy game?
Nintendo's Advance Wars and Fire Emblem series-- available for the GBA, Nintendo DS, Gamecube, and soon the Wii-- are fantastic turn-based strategy games.
"The answer is because gamers demand more from their hobby now, and there's just not a lot of meat on those old bones."
Bullshit. I play more old games than new, and not for their "nostalgia" value. They are great games. People who "demand more" are graphics whores who like to look at pretty graphics, and are not real gamers.
"But when the fully 3D, story-driven sequel fails"
Which is 99% of the time because not only are the new so-called "gamers" graphics whores, so are the developers. They spend 90% of development time making a game look 5% better than the last shiny, graphically overdone game, then throw in gameplay, control, story, and fun (or lack of same) as an afterthought.
By the way, 74% of the statistics in this post were made up. 87% of you probably already knew that.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
Back when the graphics were cheesy 3D lines (Wizardry) and 2D pictures (Bard's Tale), the top down looks (Ultima), or the top down look of Might & Magic, the the companies couldn't rely on "wickedly cool graphics" or "scantily clad heroine" to make a game work. They had to rely on the story in the game to keep you coming back.
The original Wizardry made it feel like you were playing a bit of DnD on your computer, right down to the dungeon crawl. The story wasn't that great, but the gameplay was different from a lot of other games.
Ultima gave us a fantastic story, coupled with 2D first person (and later, 4 person group) graphics to give you a sense of size to the world. You felt like you were going somewhere as the story plot carried you along.
The Bard's Tale was just flat out brilliant. The graphics were cheesy, but the story was strong, and you felt yourself moving around the city advancing the story.
And Might & Magic truly had a lengthy story line, filled with interesting puzzles that kept you going for months.
All of these games went beyond graphics to make you feel immersed. They had original thoughts and ideas, and were successful because of it. Then, the sequels started, and many of them stunk. But the name recogniztion alone made sales happen, and the bottom line is always the almight dollar.
Nowadays, with as much time as people have to put into the graphics, for a one time shot type game with limited extra revenue potential, they skimp on the story, and try to wow you with graphics. Even some MMOs are falling into this model, and don't last long.
I completely disagree with almost all the comments in this article and made in response. I've dug out old systems, and downloaded emulators and while on a few occassions the games were much easier due to their play-style (The Orig. Super Mario Bros, I could never beat it as a kid, now I pull it out for my kid and its super easy for me) but by and large they are very similar to how I remember them, and they are still fun to boot! - I find the early 3D games a little tough on the eyes, but I imagine they were just as nausia inducing back then, we just tolerated it more.
To this day I have never played a game as fun and well designed as the original Legend of Zelda, and I have played it many times on emulators, on original hardware, and on the gamecube release. It is still great. Sure it has no story, and no dialogue, but I find I play games for the play not for the story line anyway. I can always watch a movie for the story. Which brings up the problem with this piece, how can you hope to ever have games be considered art if you constantly rant about how dispossable they are? I'd like to see a film reviewer rant about given up on watching old movies because modern film techniques and special effects are so much better.
You'd be surprised what you _can_ find if you do your research instead of complaining about youth these days. And that's coming from a mid-30's guy, so don't rush back on the "you young whippersnappers" bandwagon yet.
E.g., "real time strategy" doesn't only include C&C clones. It also includes Paradox's games which span continents or even the globe, and are thus truly at strategic level. You don't have to select companies or order aim artillery strikes in real time, because such things are abstracted by brigades and doctrines. Plus you can do such things as setting divisions or indeed army corps to auto-reinforce any of its neighbours that are under attack, so you don't have to respond in real time to everything.
Plus, at least in single player you can always pause the game and take your time thinking up a strategy. So why the huge fuss about lightning reflexes and the like? (And trust me, you'll need to think pincer maneuvers, envelopment and cutting off supply to win a Paradox game. Try just grouping everyone and sending them that-a-way lightning fast, and you'll have the honour of seeing your Wehrmacht thoroughly thrashed by Poland. How's that for strategy?)
And you can even find the occasional turn based game published in the last few years. I know I even have one on the PS2, and there are several on the handhelds. And I can think of two for the PC too, just off the top of my head. So you can pick your poison.
And then there are games like Civ 3 and 4 which are technically empire building, but are turn based all right. Heck, even Rome Total War can be played as a Civ game if you leave the battles on auto. It worked for me, anyway.
And that's just in the commercial arena. If you move on to F/OSS games, you can find stuff like, for example, MegaMek. It's an excellent implementation of BattleTek. Turn- and hex-based, like in the good old days.
Puzzles? Get an adventure game, since they're making a spectacular comeback. It may not be an exact clone of whatever puzzles you have in mind, but there are plenty who'll exercise the little grey cells. E.g., the latest Sherlock Holmes game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You mean we, meaning gamers? I dunno. From the summary, it sounds like the problem is that the industry is shooting itself in the foot by insisting on strip-mining those old classics instead of coming up with new ideas, despite the fact that (as is mentioned) there's not much meat on those old bones. It's the same reason everyone's always ripping on Hollywood.
Breakfast served all day!
Everyone raves about all the old games. I whip out MAME or a NES emulator now and again, but the thrill just isn't there anymore. I remember being astonished, when playing Pac Mac for the first time in who knows how many years, that the maze was the same on every level. I'd completely forgotten.
Downloaded the Galaga demo on XBox live last week. Meh...
They're fun for a couple levels or rounds or waves or whatever, but then that's it.
I agree with one of the other posters, though. The games seem MUCH easier now. Maybe that's the problem.
When I sit down to the Nintendo 64 with my six-year-old son and play Pokemon Coliseum... It's not memory lane it's a Hell of a lot of fun. Older games are still fun if they were fun in the first place.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
I was just thinking about this recently, that the reason I can play newer games for hours on end but older games only a short time is because of just one thing. Older games had extra lives, new games have save points. The only reason I can imagine for having extra lives is as a carryover from arcades, where you needed to limit the amount of time someone was playing for each quarter. The difference is in how much each sets you back:
Lose a life: only a few minutes at most for most games
Continue: Back to beginning of level, so maybe five or ten minutes
Restart game: However long you were playing, so could be 20-30 mins or more
Restart from save point: Depends, but usually only a few minutes in a well-made game. However, memory card and disc access add time.
Because of this, modern games flow so much better. It still can be frustrating, especially if the load sequence is long, but most older games would be so much better with infinite lives. This is very true for the original Castlevania.
A few years ago while I was still in college, I wrote a paper for my computer ethics class on the subject of abandonware. In the course of my research I stumbled across some old games that I'd never played as a kid; the first game in the Monkey Island series, and the first three Quest for Glory titles. Those games were positively *ancient*. Someone already mentioned in the comments that these games are considered classics (bringing back memories and whatnot), but I thought the games were compelling, even without having played them as a kid. I remember taking a three week break from Unreal Tournament to play through QFGII for the first time. I thought it was great, despite the EGA graphics and text parser. That is evidence enough for me that vintage games can have more than just nostalgia value.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
"I have also wondered why the mega boss always leaves tons of ammo for weapons possible enemies might have sitting outside thier door"
You are so right. Whether the boss is a giant bug or one of those dragon-thingies they toss in every once in a while for variety, they are kind of dumb, and should be depicted with pointy hair.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"It's time we put away the Conkers and Contras and Castlevanias of our past and focus on the games we have yet to dream of."
Translated: "Please stop holding our modern games to any respectable past standard. Look, we require a video card upgrade every other year; what more could you possibly want?"
How's this: you keep making DooM XXXVII: In Da Hood 2, and I'll keep myself entertained with something with replay value. Pricks.
Ah yes, it's a lot like 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'. In many ways it's superior but will never be as recognized as the original.
Ahhh, I have some quite fond memories of playing LOTRD on the local BBS's. At the time, live FPS's weren't really available (well, doom entered at some point in time, but 'online' play was limited to 2 players with modems, or an expensive LAN setup), and the best multiplayer came from hitting re-dial until you were able to get through to play your daily turns :-)
:-)
There was another door game I can't remember the name of, but basically it was space-based where you would roam around the galaxy, trading different goods to various places, killing enemy ships, and at times being in turn killed. Anyone remember what that was called, I'd love to find it online at some telnet-based BBS
i love the older games ;)
;) it got me all misty from the extreme nostalgia ;)
;)
im gonna force my kid to play them
i recently started playing some old games (not THAAT old though) on SNES
i recently rebeat super mario world
legend of zelda for SNES
i played thru parts of FF3 and rebeat that, that game is sooo amazing
FF7 somehow DOES look like ass though i remember at the time it was amazing, but going back to it after the incredible 3d we are used to today really is difficult
i guess its harder to go back to old 3d games cause 3d has improved so much, tile based 2d scrollers are still great fun though
also mario kart for snes is still completely totally RULES
red shell ftw!!
I've heard these arguments before and in some cases they have truth to them. I could say this about a game like Altered Beast, which when it came out on the Genesis was sold on it's graphics not it's game play. So when the draw was the graphics, and now those graphics are dated, there is no draw.
Not all games get their fun from graphics though. Why is it that every system and cellphone has an Arkanoid type game? Because Arkanoid is fun to play and requires no time commitment. Play and put it down, no logging out or spending hours leveling your chracter.
Castlevania 1, 2, and 3 on the NES were all excellent games because the gameplay was both challenging and rewarding. You kept playing to see what would happen next, what would the next boss look like? And in their own way, the graphics and sound contributed to it.
Sometimes less is more. One of the charming aspects of the old 8 bit games is that the rasterized rendering engines relied on simple block like textures repeated and varied to form the game world. This was cruder than bitmapped graphics but it forced you to use your imagination more. The box art and the user manuals for the game is where the art was. Those told you what the game was supposed to look like.
Any 10 year old can loose themselves in the world of Legend of Zelda with it's water falls and dangerous ascent to mount doom with it's falling boulders, and explore an entire world. And the map that came with the game showed you what that world was really like. So when you played the game you didn't see raster blocks stacked end on end, you saw woods and rivers. And since your mind was filling in so much, the real world, and hence real world realism, could never possibly be as fantastic as the one in your head.
There is no better example of this than reading a good book. You have nothing to go on but your imagination and the words of the author. Any bookworm here can tell you that the movie never lives up to the book. As fantastic as Peter Jacksons movies were, they can never capture the raw fantasy of reading the books themselves.
So rather than be disappointed by playing older games, they remind me of the shortcomings of newer games. As the graphics become more and more realistic, the imagination and fantasy elements took a back burner to the eye candy.
I can't look at a full moon in a clear sky to this day, without remembering the opening cinematics for Ninja Gaiden. And I absolutely lost myself in the world of Castlevania. In particular, Simons Quest was especially fulfilling to play over and over to get the different endings. I wanted to live in that world, and playing the game was the closest I could come to it.
Some people like nice rendering and graphics, they prefer photo realism to impressionism. Some people like Monet and some people just see little paint daubs.
The old games that are worth saving, are still completly viable games that continue to hold my attention and I only wish there were more games that sucked you in so bad that you dreamed about them.
I have spent the past week playing Duke Nukem 3D, using JFDuke3D. It amazes me how much fun it still is. It also saddens me how DN4 has been constantly delayed if it will ever ship. If they would have just have taken the orginal Duke Nukem 3d and made it all pretty and network friendly it would have sold, well.
People point back at the old classics because back then, pretty much anything new was truly innovative. At least, in retrospect. Games now are no longer such, and it's sad. It didn't take much to innovate and still be fun; now games struggle to try to be more than one genre and it ends up ruining the fun. The industry right now is in a very deep state of mediocrity, and back in the day, it very much was a golden age.
space is pretty cool.
One of my strongest memories of Bard's Tale was how all of the houses in the town all looked the same and you practically needed a AAA map to find your way around (the compass spell helped alot). Then you could open doors like Monty Hall and reveal a few monsters. Who'da thought monsters would live in condos?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'd still plunk down a quarter or two for Smash TV and Rampage. Though with MAME I can play it at home even if I could find the original machines anymore.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
i disable sigs
But when the fully 3D, story-driven sequel fails, they point at the original on its lofty pedestal and demand an experience that lives up to their memories. It's a double standard that's next to impossible to satisfy.
I Nostalgia 11:13 "When I was a child, I played as a child, I gamed as a child, I bought as a child. Now that I have become a prime demographic, I demand sophistication of my childish things."
When we say we loved an old game, we forget that our then selves wanted something very different for entertainment from what we desire today. It's not that the platform has changed or the game design -- it's us.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Speaking of getting together with friends to drool over games. I remember the weekly trade-a-thons my friends and I had who had Apple IIs at home. We would go to someone's house with our 5.25" disks and a mess of blanks and start copying. We always used the trick of cutting a notch out of the other edge of the disk to use both sides. I got some pretty obscure games that way. I especially got a kick out of how the "crackerz" would alter the title screen with their boasts and I'd even see the same aliases come up again sometimes. I still bought games too so I wasn't a complete pirate. ;)
"...maybe its just me, but I do miss Origin, Bullfrog, Micropose and the LucasArts of the old days, a lot."
I'd also add in the eye candy from Sirius Software (Nasir Gebelli), Sierra On-Line and Scott Adams adventures, Sir-Tech (Wizardy), Muse (the ORIGINAL Castle Wolfenstein), Broderbund (Choplifter, Lode Runner, Sky Blazer), Warren Schwader (Threshold), and Bill Budge (Raster Blaster). I fondly remember cruising across the plains of Sosaria in my land speeder in Ultima I.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Wow, someone finally realizes that "the good old days" weren't so good after all. There are classic games for modern consoles and old consoles alike; everyone knows that. The thing that most people forget is that there were some really crappy games back then as well. Unfortunately most people forget that
The voice of the next generation. "In this tower, in my mind..." Babble - Tower
Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?
I'd say no. Nintendo has done a great job of reviving the classics. Mario Bros, Tetris, and Castlevania for the DS are quite fun and different enough from the originals to still be fresh.
Personally, I play a lot of old SNES games like Legend of Zelda... I find the old NES games to be way too blocky and painful as far as dying and loosing lives.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think many of us here are capable of recognizing a game for its merits rather then its impression on us. Castlevania is actually a perfect example of a series that, for the most part, has produced great games. Though I will always say that the best one is II. And III comes in a close second! I still play those two games and many others (Megaman X/2/3, Chrono Trigger, etc.)
There are games though that we have fond memories of and are aware that we would not play them now given the chance (Doom, i am looking at you). One of my favorite games in the past was Might and Magic 2. Man, I remember when I discovered a hidden entrance to a mountain full of Berzerkers. They would go berzerk and self destruct. If you survived, they were so high level that you leveled up 20-30 times each time you killed them. Anyway.... Falling off track. MM2 was a fond memory and I wouldn't play that game again now if you paid me. It was mostly dungeon crawling and grinding exp.
I feel the exact opposite about older games. Going back and playing Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. or Castlevania I and II, they were a lot more entertaining than a lot of the boring run and shoot games now.
And then there was E
Until that happens, enjoy Madden 2007, 2008, 2009,
I don't know why there are so many complaints about Madden producing a new version every year when there is a new football season every year. Heck, people pay $200 a year to watch 16 out-of-town games on DirectTV. At least with Madden you get your money's worth in multiplayer and online.
Its not like every people people are sitting around going "Boy, I'm not watching the Super Bowl this year! It is the same boring game as last year, maybe with different teams.". Madden tries to add new features besides personnel updates, but these are routinely ignored by those saying "It is just a roster update.". As if doing 3D models for 100+ new individual players every year is not worth something itself (assuming each team signs at least 4 draft picks).
Oh, and you know what I did Thursday? I gave a 12 year old girl my Gameboy and let her play Super Mario Brothers III. Know what? She had fun. She wanted to play with it, it was her choice. Later on, she picked it up and played it again. No nostalgia involved.
I'll repeat, nobody wants a 3D Castlevania, and if Konami (at the behest of S--y) wants to keep shoveling money into that hole, I say more power to them (in my very best Emile Lizardo/John Whorfin voice)... as long as it doesn't stop the DS Castlevanias.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It should be noted that this holds true for TV you watched as a child, especially cartoons. I watched an episode of Thundercats a while back, and was repulsed by, well, everything about it.
Keep your nostalgia, reminisce with your friends, but DO NOT go back and watch them again.
It's for your own good.
NEWSFLASH!
:)
New games better than old ones!!
color me surprised!
When we talk about Castlevania, I reach in my bag and pull out Symphony of the night and Castlevania 3, both are excellent games. I don't go pull out Castlevania and I'm hestitant to pull out Castlevania 2.
When I talk about Zelda, I look to Link to the Past, and then The original before Ocerina (though that's a fine job)
Just because some of us talk about old games doen't mean we wouldn't play them again. Some people just want to complain and name bad games or just games they think of fondly, and that's fine, that's them, but some of us remember great games that we really love. Stuff like System shock, which immersed you in interactive story, but also didn't force you into long drawn out cut scenes. A game that basically was exactly perfect. Want to just follow the known path, that's fine but for the most part the story is pretty important to know what you're doing. You can hear the story at any time, but it's up to the player. That game is still the number 1 in my book.
Personally I only talk about games that I would be willing to forget completely and replay through again. But the question is why haven't games grown exponentially. We have over a thousand times the space as Final Fantasy VI and Link to the Past but nothing has cleanly beaten those two. It's not because people arn't trying. It's because people are wasting that space with FMVs and graphics, where as those two games couldn't contain great graphics, they didn't have the room for it. FFVII might have appeared to be amazing but in that single game it set the entire industry back years which we have yet to climb out of. The entire opera scene is more impactful than the famous spoiler. Kefka's betrayal is more amazing, and yet both are done with 16 bit graphics that aren't even pre rendered. The classic games had limitations so every addition to the game had to be carefully planned out and that might be why they are great.
The problem becomes people keep yelling for better graphics, but the fact is better graphics have never meant better games. Better gameplay, immersion, and story is what gamers really want. It's a case of gamers not knowing what they really want in the end.
So is buying a movie you've already seen stupid? Is buying a CD when you probably have the cassette you already heard somewhere in your closet stupid? Is buying a Dark Phoenix trade paperback when you already read the comics in your childhopod stupid?
Two days ago, I jumped out of bed 5:30AM to download my beloved SF2:HF from XBLA. I have a lifetime of memories and wanted to relive them again, especially since my roommate was also a socalled SF2 fan. We played it for 3 hours straight and got bored with it. It took us an hour to get used to the analog and we wanted to play against each other more than online so we didn't have any major complaints. We haven't touched the game since and I'm wonderinghow did our interest wane so quickly
Just because the Lord of the Rings trilogy was amazing, doesn't mean that loving the Back to the Future DVDs is only because "you long for nostalgia."
Funny, I just rolled through Zork last night for the first time in 20 years. I had a great time. Yes, some classics are really good.
I have to totally agree with the comments and article. Having worked with Age of Wonders in all three carnations that hit the market, one of the most common criticisms we received was "It's ALMOST as good as Master of Magic (MOM)". Even after the third release (Age of Wonders; Shadow Magic) which had so many unique and interesting ideas in it, and a completely different concept of magical domains, etc... there were so many who wanted to turn the game into MOM. While I personally believe AOW:SM was leagues better than MOM (having played and liked both), I think folks get hooked on nostalgia and forget about clunky blocky unintelligible graphics, poor AIs, and relatively poor gameplay, in favor of remembering that when they were ten years younger they had a lot more free time, and what they really want is to go back to a time when things less complicated. --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Castlevania 1 is one of the best games of all time. I spent a long time trying to get good at it, and so far I've been able to kill the first form Dracula without dying. Just try that and see if you can do it. Boomerangs are good for every stage's boss except the first where you can't get it. Castlevania 1 is timeless especially if you try and speed run it. Whats worse is that there is a harder 2nd stage to it after you kill both Dracula's forms. I've made it there, but not on one life. Today's modern games are a snorefest to me. WOW? Grind until you're 60, and roll some dice for who gets special equipment in raid dungeons? No thanks, that requires no skill at all. I want a MMOG that requires action skill to play.
God spoke to me.
Most of the original games from the early 80's will not hold up to much scrutiny at all, mostly due to the limitations of the systems at the time and hence the limitations of game play. (e.g. Space Invaders, each level was basically the same but faster, etc.)
A few really ground breaking ones still shine a light into the darkness, e.g. Elite.
Now, on a BBC micro (2MHz? 6502) with about 10-12K free after the video memory had eaten into the 32K of RAM you had an open ended, fully 3D space faring and trading game (with one or two "missions"). Now that was a miracle.
Today, in this time of tightly scripted games where your complete journey from the point you boot the game up until the end titles is so firmly in the hands of the developers that it feels like a straight jacket I miss that freedom.
Of course, today you could do the game better, maybe multi-player and using the strong anthopic principle to generate the universe (at the detail necessary at the time) on the fly.. add inter-user commerce and it'd be a whole world of its own. The important thing though would be that other than the possibility of a large backstory arc taking place in the background, there should be no scripted story.
Further, remember, playability (and one or two people's vision) were the key. Today it's a boardroom committee and accountants who are pulling the strings in the publishers with the games software houses picking up the crumbs and begging at the master's table. Hence, forget about innovation, it's just like the film industry, sequals and regurgitation rule.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
it seems that someone suffers from digital speedblindness. It's just like when you're driving in 200mph and breaks down to 20mph, and everybody is like "oh this speed sucks, this is sooo fracking boring". Well, getting hit by a car doing 20mph is far from boring, and the thrill of going from, lets say, 4 colors to 16!!! can't be touched by going from 100 megaquadrillion pixels to 200 megaquadrillion pixels - far from it. When I was a kid, I could get goosebumps just thinking about an Atari 2600, no amount of 3D photorealistic bloodspattering is gonna top that, just admit it :)
Anyone who's been to Milton Keynes.
Because ROMs aren't "cheap and plentiful". You have to own the game cartridge and own a copier. Copiers for any cart format before the Game Boy Advance are rawther difficult to find and expensive, to put it mildly.
Blame trademark and copyright owners. Superstar drivers' racing teams ask too much money for licensing the drivers' names and likenesses. The automakers license the car logos and designs to the game publishers on the condition that the cars are drawn with less damage than they would have in real life, so that the screen always shows the FORD® automobile the way FORD® intends, not the way it would end up in a crash test. FORD® wants players to walk away with the impression of "first on race day", not "fixed or repaired daily" or "found on road dead".
I will take the original Castlevania with all it's boring gameplay and craptastic low-res graphics over those atrocities with 3D graphics they keep slapping the "Castlevania" name on these days.
Thank for the GBA and DS, I can still play quality 2D Castlevania games that continue the spirit of the original (and now apparently humble) game.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
You're sitting on your couch, playing video games. Shooting a gun would put you several steps higher up the evolutionary ladder.
"For $5, $10, you download Mario 1. Then another $10 for 2, 3, Mario Kart, etc. You play these games (as is the point of the post) for a short period of time, and then download more"
fuck, no!
I own the original cartridges, they are mine!! My SNES still works, but it's much more convenient to store backups of said games in my HD and play them in an emulator. I don't give a fuck to the legalese Nintendo will sprout once they are profiting from the old gems again: they are still mine!
I won't pay for them again, Nintendo! You hear that?
They'll try to close down legitimate open-source software projects like SNES9X or ZSNES, but it's too late because the source is already out there. It'll also probably get harder to get ROM dumps from the web, but they can't stop me from owning my cartridges and a ROM dumper...
fuck, no! Time to move on and profit from new franchises, Nintendo...
I don't feel like it...
As soon as the Wii comes out, the first two retro games I'm buying for it (assuming that they're available) are Super Mario Bros. III and Sonic the Hedgehog I and II. Those games were just so much fun to play. Because many of us who grew up with those games now have kids of our own, that gives us an opportunity not only to introduce our kids to this oft-forgotten thing called "gameplay", but it allows us to have our bit of nostalgia as well. At least the Wii will supposedly give us the opportunity to do so without having to buy a used NES or Genesis.
Personally, I think that the article was a bit short-sighted. There are a number of games that follow the simplicity of the great 8-bit and 16-bit classics and sell well - Bejewelled and Zuma being the two most popular that I can think of. There are times when we just want some simplistic fun, then there are times when we want to have complex global battles or intense brain teasers. The article seems to imply that newer and older games are mutually exclusive to a point, which I think all of us can agree is nonsense.
I have a PSP and I've used it to beat two SNES games. Zelda: A link to the past and Chrono Trigger. I usually play on it on the train for a half an hour at a time. When I was a kid I never played Chrono Trigger and I never got very far in Zelda. But as an adult I found that playing them a half an hour a day on the train was very satisfying.
The problem is that if you look closely at the two latest games, they are just like the newer DS games, and the older NES/SNES games, it just has 4 walls around the character. The problem with the next gen Castlevania games is with Iga, he just uses the same game play model with every Castlevania game regardless if its 3D or not.
Don't get me wrong, Symphony of the Night and the rest of its 2D sequels are excellent, he should stick to those. But Konami needs to put another team together for its next 3D excursion into Castlevania. I know a lot of people want a Resident Evil style game, but I'd actually like to see a more Metal Gear approach. Not necessarily a stealth action game, but a game that has the capability of a lot of high action (in situations the player gets him or herself in), but more focused environmental and story interaction.
So I realize it's not the rule, but it is a notable exception. In this one case, specific to the Castlevania series, they made a truly great modern-ish (Playstation 1, but compared to the NES that's incredibly new and super awesome) extension. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Their first attempt at a 3D Castlevania failed miserably among the series's fans, then they went back a step and found a way to make a better more engrossing game without bothering with the uselessly applied 3D graphics. Symphony is a side-scroller and a damned good one. The main character was very easy to like and felt like he had depth without needing the third dimension to provide it. The story, though simple-ish, wasn't stupidly childish and managed to maintain the feel of something deep and urgent throughout the game. It's one of the last console games I bother keeping around.
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Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
Translation: The games we make now suck. Please stop playing the good old games so ours will look better by comparison.
Truly good, new(er) games (even new incarnations of old games) will take their place as classics if they deserve to. In 10 years we'll look at The Sims, World of Warcraft, Civ 4, etc. as classics and yearn to play them as much as the games we call classics today.
A classic Portland joke, and me with no mod points.
NES. Blaster Master. Level 5. Boss. (Blaster Master was the first game to start calling the big monsters 'bosses').
This game still rocks - it has gotten easier as I have gotten older.
That's why there was a map of the town, with all the streets labeled, inside the album cover. It was a subtle "piracy check". Instead of stopping you and asking you to spin a code wheel or look up a word from the manual, it just made the game a lot harder if you didn't have the original documentation.
It should be "Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by demanding for more?"
Maybe I'm a luddite but I still play NetHack and spent some time last weekend trying to get my Atari 2600 running. I get together with my friends to play NES games and nobody's complaining about a lack of fun.
I hope this analogy isn't rediculous: if making things more complicated and detailed was really a path to more fun then why hasn't Magic: The Gathering killed bridge, poker, and solitaire?
MTG players don't sit around moaning "52 card games are holding the industry back!"
For those of us who remember the rogue-like games, from Ken Arnold's & Michael Toy's original, through moria, hack, larn, omega and arguably perfected in nethack (probably the first game ever developed over the Internet by various programmers), we know that gameplay mechanics, especially in interfaces that require an active imagination to fully express, were the games that lasted and are still forever playable.
Contrary to the notion in the article, it's the lack of realistic graphics and sound that make these complex games long-lived. Were there stinkers in the past? Hell yes. But nothing will ever match the groundbreaking creativity behind some of the true classics. After all, demand for eye-candy hasn't obviated the deck of cards, the checkerboard, the chess board, the backgammon board or dominoes. Truly "classic" games (whether played on UNIX terminals, 80s arcades or early consoles) demanded good and inventive game play precisley because the graphics sucked.
Many of today's games are proof that photorealistic and awesome physics engines can't substitute for lack of plot, strategy or complexity. In 100 years, nobody will be talking about Quake IV, but there will still be articles about Zork, Gauntlet and Zelda.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned the reference.
Hardware pushed to new limits has pretty consistently been what drove games to blockbuster status, with a few exceptions (like say Tetris).
Pong with its VIDEO "ball", centipede with its trackball, Mortal Kombat with photorealistic sprites.
Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?
_Only_ if we can use a double-barrel shotgun.
http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/unityfallacy
Why do you think that the same people are guilty of this hypocrisy? I would imagine that some gamers like the old stuff, while others prefer new stuff.
It takes a special kind of dedication to think that just because two mutually exclusive conclusions have been reached in the wild, everyone must think exactly the same way.
I realize the industry is consolidating into a greedy enterprise that demands maximum profit through appealing to the largest possible market, but sometimes the market doesn't all want the same thing. Get over yourself, and try specializing.
Complete set of MAME roms
Complete set of SNES roms
Complete set of NES roms
Etc, etc.
You can quibble about whether ROMs are "cheap", since you often can't buy them, but they certainly are plentiful. The three links above will give you tens of thousands of roms in under a week.
Hypothesizing about what we might think if we could look back easily is ridiculous. We can look back easily. The only question is whether we will. Maybe for you that's a legal question, but it's not a practical one.
I struggle with my imagination in newer visually-perfect titles. Re-playing Metroid, Super Metroid, Quake and Half Life in light of, say, Half Life 2, the realism of the game grates until you remember to suspend disbelief. When my imagination smooths over the lower detail of the games I play, the fun remains. When I expect the technology to pick up and improve older games so that they're like the new stuff -- an unreasonable expectation, I think -- the older games suck. (Caveat: I haven't yet played Half Life: Source, but wonder how it will affect my experience of the story.)
While gaming is a visual experience, I've recently realised that the impact of imagination in how you experience the story. Get your brain to fill in the details of older and lower-detail gaming, and it's just as much fun again. Kind of like reading a thrilling book can be an exhilarating experience...
I bought the game, I was just in the habit of getting lost and couldn't find myself on the map!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Some of us do go back and play. Things such as the latest advances in graphics may kind of spoil us over the years so that way may not be able to necessarily go back to CastleVania 1, but, the fact remains that even the spoiled can usually find one among the classics which they can play through. If not NES (1 may be a bit much, but, look at 2 and 3) then SNES or PC-Engine/Turbo Duo (Dracula X -- on the PC Engine, the SNES version was a poor excuse for a port, so I recommend that those who have only played the SNES version find the Dracula X cd for PCE and an emulator and see what you were missing -- and CastleVania IV on the SNES are hard to beat.) And don't forget Bloodlines for the Genesis/Megadrive, which is also quite enjoyable. Can't stand a mere 16-bit system? Try Symphony of the Night on the PlayStation. Despite the limitations of the system, the Gameboy Advance has also provided us with some fairly decent CastleVania games similar to SotN, but, they tend to be more lacking due to trying to just clone SotN's model a little too directly and for also scaling things down to be more suitable to a portable game system.
Actually, I can't stand where the modern games have gone. Companies have become obsessed with the 3D concept, but, some games were meant to be 2D. I have played the newer CastleVania games and have troubles beating them because they get so much more boring by comparison. I get tired of playing and stop long before the end, which is quite the contrast compared to the way in Symphony of the Night I spent whole days searching both castles for every little nook and cranny trying to get as much completion as possible. Trust me, when I played later CastleVania games, such as Lament of Innocence for the PS2, I did not spend any amount of time searching every nook and cranny, I just wanted to grab what I needed and get out of that tedious area with its moronic camera angles.
Maybe gamers are calling for the old ways because the old ways weren't actually that bad? Frankly, most gamers will tell you precicely what the problem is because we all know it. Companies are concentrating on making the graphics prettier with the theory that it is more immersive (and therefore more fun supposedly) if it LOOKS more real. While they are concentrating so hard on making each game into a pretty bauble to try to catch and hold a couch potatoe's eyes for a minute they are forgetting to concentrate on gameplay. Nevermind the fact that with good gameplay a game can be more immersive (after all, those NES and SNES games could draw you in, and they sure as heck didn't look that realistic now did they?) Companies are so lost in the "make it prettier or the competition will" war that they've forgotten the old "make it so fun they keep renting until they decide it's cheaper to just buy it" war.
..for a while. Good games were good games for the time. It was part of the experience, your age, the technology. We remember them as classics and we remember them fondly (the same as old records or TV shows). Mechanically some of them still stand up as "fun" today but many fail. Especially irksome is the modern condition of blaming technology as I discussed in my article comparing old and new games; "don't blame 3D" which can be found here: http://sharpfish.realityfakers.com/?p=47 if anyone can be bothered ;)
The problem is if a modern game is rubbish, it's easy to blame 3D (or the technology) and assume that the 2D (or old tech version) was inherently better because it lacked bells and whistles... in reality it is just because that older game made better use of the technology available at the time and was still a good game with good gameplay (the most vital aspect).
www.atomicpond.com | www.draperview.com | www.realityfakers.com
...type 'idpac' (for peperony and chease) to open the cave with the BFG hidden in it.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
It's interesting, because I disagree with the article mostly, as I replay numerous old games and they're still as excellent as ever (R-Type, Relentless 1 and 2, Prince of Persia 1, MDK, Samurai Shodown 2, Panzer Dragoon Zwei to name a few), yet I had the same experience with the remake of Conker's Bad Fur Day as the person in the article. What is it about that game that makes it so update so bad? I would just assume that I'd grown out of the humor and gameplay mechanics, but to be honest I played Conker for the first time on an emulator a year before the remake came out :) Perhaps many games are only good once, much like movies that are good in the theatre but not when you buy them.
I duuno..i almost feel desensitized to it all now...all the games with their great graphics, wonderful storyline(s) and (some) great gameply/replay value...only a handful of companies can keep me playing their games..or actually make me want to buy their gamse based on their long history of serving up great ones, altho companies like that are few and far between (depending on the type of gamer..IE sports/RPG/RTS/simulation/adventure/thriller).
:D
The best example i can give about my gaming experience, is when my buddy bought his xbox 360 and got it modded.. we BARELY played any actual xbox games...we always ended up playing old school games that came with it!!( a fond 3-5 hour play of RBI Baseball/contra/blades of steel/altered beast comes to mind..lol) any old 8/16 bit game we imagined we played... i do miss the times of old..where the game itself mattered..companies prided themselves on their ability to make a great game back in the day, and their a tested and true company still, games like Final Fantasy/ Metal Gear solid/Gran turismo/Zelda/Mario/Metroid (to name a few) keep us coming back for more, and willing to shell out the $$$ to buy them cause we STILL think about how great the old game was..and we hold that game near and dear to our fastly aging lifestyle.. We think about how amazing the game COULD be with the things they can/plan impliment. So in hindsight we all go back to "memory lane" when playing/purchasing a game...it all boils down to a combination of how well the gamer actually remembers the games they played as a child and how much they are willing to expand their horizons and get seizures with all the flashy ones of today... and if you are in the industry, or an avid gamer... you understand exactly what im saying, and if not..go play a game and get your mind off this topic.
I played the Xbox version and I played it every waking minute over an entire weekend. The N64 graphics were more blocky and the voices were more aliased and "8 bit" sounding. But the humor and the interesting puzzles, like how to make a cow get the screaming shits, are the draw.
The brits just have a maliciously twisted sense of humor that makes any of those kinds of games an instant classic.
Any game that has a boss who flings giant balls of poo at you while singing along gets an A+ in my book!