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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?"
That's a tad melodramatic don't you think?
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
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.
I'm a professional game developer and have been for nine years, my entire post-collegiate life. As you might expect, I'm also a dedicated gamer and on the one hand, I really agree with what you're saying. We rely too much on rehashed ideas, license tie-ins, clones, knockoffs and sequels. I'm sick of it, and I just don't buy those games anymore. So I can sympathize and agree with where you're coming from.
That said, your comment is awfully naive. It's really, really easy to sit outside the industry (or pretty much any creative-based industry) and complain about the lack of originality. Big-picture creative ideas for games are cheap; practically worthless. Just about every single person I've worked with, every kid I meet that finds out I make games, my friends, etc. has ideas for some weird, creative, potentially fun game. But the vast, vast majority of those ideas would collapse under the crushing weight of the reality of game development. Got an idea for a game? Great. Now, is it going to make money? (The large majority of games don't justify their existence, financially speaking). Is it technically feasible? Is it appealing to a wide audience? Will it sell overseas? Can you get capital to finance its development? If so, can you get it without giving up the rights to your idea? Not likely. Can you find money and people to actually build the game? How are you going to market it? Who pays for marketing? Who's competing with you? Is your idea fun to play for 10 minutes? 10 hours?
It's not as simple as pulling your head out of your ass, and presto, crazy new creative games start showing up on shelves. Like everything, money speaks loudest.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Don't even get me started on the watering-down of "puzzles" in modern games. The modern idea of a difficult puzzle is one that requires you to find eight levers (hidden beyond reflex-based "jumping puzzlre" obstacles) and push them all up (changing a red light to green) to open a door somewhere. You punks would WET YOUR PANTS if you saw the kind of monstrously devious crap we had to solve in our day. Plover's egg emeralds hidden beyond a crack your lamp doesn't fit through? Try THAT on for size!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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.
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
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
yes, but now we seem to be getting to the point where in most entertainment media, truely original ideas have almost no chance of getting through the bean-counters to ever be seen. It ain't just the game industry, it's movies and TV as well. The propblem is that our production values for entertainment is so high that just about any entertainment product MUST gaurentee the producers that it will make millions, because a loss isn't just "oops", it can be bankruptcy, or at least major cutbacks.
.NET.
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
A year ago I would have agreed with you. But with Steam finally getting some momentum under its belt, suddenly, it's been a lot easier for indie developers to find an outlet. It was a rocky start, and there were problems, but we owe a great deal to valve for taking such a big risk and fuck-starting steam's role as a content distribution system by putting their crown jewel, Half Life 2, on the line. The gamble worked, and the result is that millions of Half Life fans now also are exposed to the work of these indie developers. Think about it from a developers point of view. When millions of HL players from around the globe log in, they see their game, smack dab in the center of the Steam Storefront's main window. It's an IV directly into the pulse of their target market, and I guarentee you that getting such exposure through conventional means would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
What happened as a result of this? The developers of Darwinia sold more copies of their game in a couple days than their run of Darwinia or Uplink in a box by itself. Now, Introvision is on solid financial ground and also has the leeway to keep creating new games such as DEFCON. This basically opened the door to other indie developers who now market and promote their games online. And because you dont have to go out to a store and buy the game itself, it's a lot easier to make impulse purchases, which is good for developers at least. Of course, some of the indie games are sucessful, some of them not, but the point stands that it is a LOT easier for indie developers to get exposure now than it was a couple years ago.
This is to say nothing of the strides that free software, with its vast array of mature and free compilers and libraries making serious programming accessable without having to fork over hundreds of dollars for Visual Studio
Digital content distribution is the way of the future. There will always be titles of all shapes and sizies being at the whims of the publishers, but now with digital content distribution, the indie developer is no longer relegated to living on the margins, scraping out a living on a small fanatical fanbase...if that.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
"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...