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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?"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.
Of course, I would not want interactive 3D dysentary.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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.
Sure, there were terrible games 15 years ago, but the shear number of bad games today is the difference.
I disagree - I think it's all perspective. 90% of everything is crap, consistently. It was then, and it is now. But with older games, you're comparing the 10% of non-crap over a long period of time - because that's all you really remember - to the entire volume of current crap/noncrap that you notice on a daily basis. So it seems like there were more good games back then.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
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.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
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