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Was Videogaming Better Back in the Day?
An anonymous reader writes "Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs looks back at the dawn of videogaming, when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of BASIC at a time. And he finds the present lacking: 'The dreamers became assets instead of leaders, and the rockstar designers became, well, Rockstar ... or Blizzard, or Valve. Publishers with cash-rich money to spend bought the creative process, and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola. So, how dare I be surprised that the price of today's gaming blitz is a little piece of last generation's soul?' Do you agree? Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?"
Why does it have to be either or? Can't both types of gaming be good? We have complex games now, but simpler stuff is available on things like XBox Arcade. Just relax and enjoy.
Were cars better "back in the day"? Guess it depends what point of view you take.
It was certainly easier to be impressed, back in the day.
99% of the titles I played on C64 were shit, and the Atari 2600 or NES could only dream of a good/bad title ratio like that.
Gaming today is as it's always been. If you prefer the older titles (and to a certain extent, I do), go ahead and play them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"Was simple gaming better?"
Depends. There's games that are compelx and terrible, and there are games that are complex and amazing (Supreme Commander, hopefully Spore)
there were also simple games that were and are amazing (Tetris) and simple games that were just horrible (Amagon, Super Mario Bros. 1 by today's standards (I'll elaborate if anyone cares))
"Are you a story in games fan?"
Yes I am. But it depends on the story, and the game. I just picked up Wing Island last night for the Wii. If I had known about the story, I would probably have thought twice. Gameplay is okay, but it's no Pilotwings (what I was hoping for). On the other hand, I absolutly love Hotel Dusk. Maniac Mansion continues to be one of my all time favorites, and the Half-Life series are great because of not only the story, but how that story is told. Wing Commander showed that cinematic games can be fun, if done right.
There's lots of examples of good story driven games. Not all of them new. And there's lots of examples of games that are fun without much story (Super Mario Bros. 3 continues to be a favorite of mine) and even some examples of decent games *dammaged* by the inclusion of a story (Super Monkey Ball, Bomberman, Wario Ware, etc, etc.)
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
That's the answer to his complaints right there. You want to see good creative games that didn't cost multi-millions and may have been made by a single person go look at indie game areas. I for one am very glad that gaming has moved past the point where a 12 year old could build games that matched the game industry, if such a day ever existed. Modern games are sometimes uncreative but that doesn't mean the old days were somehow better. The difference is that nowadays more creativity is required to make a creative game as all the genres have pretty much filled up.
This guy really needs to see my sig. And by the way, I'm one of the people he doesn't believe in anymore. A gamer who wants to make games. Am I discouraged by the big money games? No, because I don't want to make those.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Pick up an old game, and you'll realize two major facts:
#1 The game is hard. VERY hard.
#2 The control sucks.
Yup, #2 is sad but true. The old school games do have a completely different feel to them, and adding in the physics that came around during the 8 bit era lead to "slippery" feeling games. But #1 was because games weren't MEANT to be beaten by most people. When you beat a game, that was because you were a hard core badass gamer. They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
Does that make them better? You can argue both ways. Pick up Ikaruga and you'll be able to appreciate how getting level three is an accomplishment all over again.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Things change. I don't think games today necessarily have less soul than games before.
On average, maybe, but that's not because indy developers can't make small and fun games; it's because games that they couldn't make are dominating the visible industry, with huge budgets and little soul. There's still indy developers writing neat stuff, they just don't get as much of a share of the market... But the market's bigger. Fine by me.
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Logical fallacy: False dichotomy. Simple games can have a story, and old games aren't all simple. Unless you plan to go back before, say, the NES. And I don't think anyone can claim that in video game terms/technology lifespans the NES is not old school. Anyone who says it ain't has a date with me with a NES controller cord wrapped around my wrist in a dark alleyway.
But it looks like he really is talking about the 2600 and prior. And then he says the following on page 2 of TFA: "Were the games actually better? Well, no, of course not."
Is it a slownewsday already?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Honestly, these crotchety articles looking at the past with rose-colored glasses are really getting old.
why? forty-two.
No kidding. "Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?" What the Hell kind of question is that? Story-wise, something like Unreal Tournament Foo has about as much story as the booklet that came with a Berzerk cartridge, while games like Ultima V (playable on Apple II, CGA-equipped PC and other beyond-elderly hardware) kick the unholy Hell out of cliched fantasy crap like Neverwinter Nights' original campaign.
I know when I was gaming on my C64 I never had to listen to spoiled pre-teens fling insults at one another or had to rely on an ever growing list of ignored players just to try and enjoy the experience I'd forked out for.
The games might have been garbage, but I recall the experiences with more fondness than anything I've picked up recently.
I don't even need to go back that far, the 90's had a lot of fantastic games that I still play and have a lot more fun with than running another damn WoW instance, or another round of Countersrike: OMGSNIPERFAGZ!!LAWLZ Edition.
One thing I will note is that...about 15 years ago a friend of mine polled his classmates about "Super Mario Bros 2 or Super Mario Bros 3" and everyone, everyone in the class (male and female) had an oppinion.
Nowadays games have become very audience-specialized. For instance, the two top-selling franchises right now are Grand Theft Auto and Pokemon--how many people can you find that play and enjoy both? Off the top of my head I'm actually struggling to think of a single accquaintance who enjoys one and doesn't turn up their nose at the other.
Too many games now days are the same from year to like the sport games that are mainly just roster updates.
There are a few games that do get better over time like Heroes of Might & Magic, RTS games, Sim City games, other sim games, TBS games, a lot driving games now let you drive any where, and 3d shooter have been adding cool things to them but now days many of ones out right are the same. Pc pinball games still can't beat the free visual pinball + vpinmame and when they try they are way off in the rom part as well not giving you all of settings that are in the real games settings / test menu Pro pinball did do a good job with that.
I did miss the non looping path in need for speed one.
Side scrollers where fun back in the day but too many of them relied on spike abuse like the mega man games.
There's more choices today, tons of games coming out, and a huge backlog of old games to entertain yourself with if you feel so inclined. Big budget publishers allow for the creation of games way bigger and more complex than ever before, and we also get lots of neat things like shiny graphics, more realistic physics, and hopefully some better AI in the future.
Meanwhile, if you and your buddy want to lock yourselves in a basement for a week and hammer out a crazy game idea that you have, you can certainly do that. And there's this neat little invention called "The Internet", which you can use to distribute and even sell your game, without even needing to get a publisher involved. There are many people who have done very well this way.
The rise of big gaming companies has not killed the small group or individual game developers. It's just that now they're only a part of a much bigger ocean of games. If anything, new things like the Xbox Live marketplace could make that method of game development even more lucrative, by opening it up to the huge world of living room consoles.
I guess that maybe back in the atari days, small developer teams were making games for the home consoles, but that was such a small industry back then, the opportunities now are much more interesting.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I hate to say this, but every time I bring out a classic on an emulator or old DOS Box I am sorely disappointed and now I won't even try to keep from ruining the nostalgia of games like Populous, Syndicate, or even Castles II.
When I played this games, I was amazed and they sucked hours out of my life.
But now... I realize how clunky game play was back then and that I put up with a lot more to play a game. Maybe the new games (and my DS) have spoiled me. I remember going through boot disks and extensive 100 page manuals just to get by and I liked it.
Now... The controls seem unintuitive and the game play lacking in a sense that it isn't bad, but it isn't how I remember playing it in high school.
To be fair, I will pull out a SNES emulator or the old DOS War In Russia (Hex Games are clunky no matter how good of a GUI you put on them) and play them for a bit.
Again... Maybe I'm getting old, spoiled, or the novelty of old technology is wearing off (I remember when I felt I was like a movie hacker the first time I sent someone a BBS message on a 1200 baud modem), but I won't play old games mostly to keep the nostalgia from being ruined.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I admit it's a task keeping up with the latest news in video gaming because of how commercialized it's become. I was just thinking the other day how/why Sony decided to get into the video game market, other than the obvious all might dollar and market-share. I find it hard to believe they actually CARE about the art-form of video games.
If I had my choice, I would like to go back to a simpler time when only Nintendo and Sega dominated the console market, and you had a few weeks to properly digest a new game, instead of new titles coming out literally every day. Even if I quit my job I wouldn't have enough time to play all the games coming out. "Bring me back to a golden time, from 85 to 89" -- Anthrax
90% of everything is crap. As time passes you remember the good 10%. It is doesn't matter if it is movies, cars, TV, or video games. So yes the old games we remember are better than most of the video games on the market today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
First of all, 99% of stuff now is also shit, so toss out that argument.
The packaging was better. Real effort and imagination were put into it. Does anything come with a microscopic space fleet now?
The manuals were better. I've still got glossy, 300+ page manuals on my shelf that are practically history books, that came with Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Red Baron, etc.
But most important, the game play was better. Go down any list of "Best Games Ever", and it's freakin' dominated by old titles. Railroad Tycoon, Civ, Wasteland, Zork, X-Com, Monkey Island, Wizardy, Ultima...
The graphics have gotten better, yes. But the story and gameplay suffered along the way, as more time and effort were put into the graphics. Sadly, it seems like it was treated as an either/or by most developers.
'Better' is to vague to answer.
It was easier and was easier because technology wasn't that far that a lot of skill was needed to produce something acceptable. Everybody can mess around with a "paint" program and create something that doesn't look half bad. But for 3D modeling applications you need way more skill to even create something remotely usable.
Quality standards were low back then due toch lack of technology, now with the technology the standards are much higher and skilled people are needed to create base assets. With some `wit' you can use those base assets to create the rest of your world. Not every characters has to be uniquely modeled, just some change in color and resizing can be enough to fool the player.
Problem is that I'm not interested in a driving game (GTA or whatever) nor a first-person-shooter (ala Quake). What's left in modern stuff?
My favorite games are still Master of Magic, Starcraft, and XCom: Terror from the Deep. I like the MMORPGs, but not enough to have played one in the last couple years. They end up being more of a chore than a game, and I'd rather go running.
I guess the issue is that the market changed, and people now buy games I'm not really interested in. Civ2 was better game-play-wise than Civ4, and was certainly less preachy. The only game company that has seemed to stick to the "control-large-armies" style of play has been Microsoft, and I just can't bring myself to buy anything from them. Fortunately, I still find MoM to be fun (despite the constant crashing).
The answer to almost all nostalgia-motivated questions like this is no, things were not better in the past. The human mind has an amazing capability to remember good things and forget bad things, so while there were many good games in the past, there were also many terrible games in the past and the percentage of good games is a constant.
Comment of the year
but does that mean games were better back in the age? What about asking the question, who are we today that we were not then?
Memories are great, just don't try and find out if they are accurate. I remember shows I loved when I was younger and purchased many on DVD only realizing that what I remembered wasn't what was. In other words, I am a little more critical and fail to always see the magic anymore that once caught my eye.
Plus back then there wasn't much choice so the good games really did stand out. There are many games these days that are good but its hard for them to stand out, especially considering the platform choices as well
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You are comparing a single player experience with multiplayer. Your post has nothing to do with new and old as you would get the same difference if you weren't playing online.
And if you hate WoW instances and morons in CS...why are you playing them?
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You're not comparing the games of today with the games of yesterday, you're comparing the you of today with the you of yesterday and, big surprise, you liked being young.
There were some good games out at the beginning of the epoch, henceforth known as 'the Dawning'. I haven't seen anyone mention Karateka, or the original Prince of Persia. Some good games.
There are some good games out now, henceforth known as 'the Nowening'. God of War 2, Fight Night Round 3, etc. Some good games.
But most, and I'd spew out a highly unreliable 70%, of the games are crap. Just like everything else mankind produces.
Don't give in to nostalgia, it makes you sound even older than you are.
Excellent point. New games aren't replacing existing games, they're adding to the body of games out there. Anyone with an old console, a Java-enabled phone or PDA, a service such as XBox Arcade, a "greatest hits" modern console port, or the wherewithal to grab an emulator and some ROMs will find it at least as easy to get hold of an old classic as it is to buy the latest console or PC game.
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Get some friends to play, and add them to your friends list (if that's ever been fixed -- fscking Valve). Set up your own server, or find one which is typically filled with decent players who don't act like pre-teens, and bookmark that.
Or play games like Natural Selection, where the OMGSNIPERFAGZ do not stand a chance at actually learning the game, and get a mic (because you really do need a mic to play NS well).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You might as well ask an old man if music was better when he was younger. :-)
I'm going to have to fight the nostalgia and say, "hell yea gaming is better now." I spent my fair share of time typing in games in BASIC line by line from a book. And you know what? Those games sucked ass. The ONLY reason I spent any time playing them was because I didn't want to feel like the time I spent typing was wasted.
I don't really see anything special about games "back in the day." Sure, you can say that programmers were forced to be creative with limited resources, but I am not sure that is necessarily a bonus for the end user. Really, most games 15, 20 years ago were just plain simple. Maybe they had a good idea that could keep people hooked, but really, they were extremely repetitive (I'm looking at you, Atari). They just have nothing on some of the depth you can get in games today. Even overlooking tge fancy graphics (which is a bonus in and of itself, IMO), you can spend a fair amount of time just learning how a modern game works... learning strategy, etc. It is much more than hand-eye coordination these days.
That said, I don't play many games any more even though I could. The really old game just plain bore the crap out of me within 5 seconds and the modern games just take about a couple hours longer to bore me. But that is just me getting older. I don't think it should reflect on the quality of gaming.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Short answer: Yes!
Back in the 8-bit days you frequently saw games written by one or two programmers, maybe a third would write sound routines and the music.
The costs were low, the ideas were much broader and you would very rarely see a sequel.
Games were often created by youngsters, geeky types, hippy types or just people who loved creating something.
These days games are developed in huge teams, each game is a large IT project requiring project management, meetings etc. A failed project can finish off a games company.
Control methods for games are too complex, Nintendo has the right idea. How many more buttons can you fit on a controller?
People play older games using emulators for many reasons, however they were fun and the learning curve was pretty much non existant.
Online multiplayer can be a great thing, and not only really fits some gametypes, it also makes a lot of new gametypes possible. But it takes much of the experience out of the hands of the designer, which can be dangerous to the quality of the game. I do find it mildly frustrating that online gaming has sorta become the new "fad" , to the point where it gets applied even to games that don't really need it, and especially when it's substituted for something else. It blows my mind that Motorstorm for the PS3 has online multiplayer, but two people cannot race against each other sitting on the same couch and watching the same TV. Is the ability to play online with random people so compelling that it's worth trading away the ability to play against your friends, or your brother, or your kid?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
What really killed gaming complexity was 3D. We still haven't entirely recovered from the "need" to have everything in 3D.
Consider the set of verbs you might have in a late-generation 2D game, like Civilization or Starcraft. You might have tens, or hundreds depending on how you count. (Note modern Civs may use 3D hardware, but they are still fundamentally 2D games. The only effect is that I can't play Civ 4 because I have a laptop, whereas I could probably run tens of instances of the engine itself.)
Now, compare that to the set of verbs you have in Quake. The movement commands, jump, change weapon, and shoot. That's about it. That's about all you can afford in 3D, especially on a console because that set runs you right out of buttons.
3D made every feature immensely more complicated, both to create the assets and to implement user control, and as a natural result, we usually lost features in the jump to 3D. Result: Simpler games. Even now, the average blockbuster of today may be far prettier than a 1999 top-ten hit, but the 1999 top-ten hit will be much richer.
I think this is what actually killed the adventure game genre. Is it that nobody's interested in playing another Day of the Tentacle, or that there isn't a company out there that can afford all the requisite 3D animation work?
As my canonical example of how hard 3D is, imagine Nethack in 3D, with no compromises (except for anything that may be literally impossible due to being a play on words or something). Every monster, every polymorph, every item, every effect, everything in glorious 3D. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I'm not saying all games are crap. They aren't. But we jumped to 3D before we were really ready technologically. Except for FPSs, I still don't think we are; it's all too expensive.
No.
Testified by a veteran gamer (started with atari 2600 in the 80s).
When you were playing on a Commodore 64, you didn't even *have* Internet multiplayer. So it seems to me that the fact that the Internet multiplayer feature exists at all makes the game much better than its C-64 equivalent.
Additionally, you don't *have* to play online now. You choose to. (Sure, there are some games that require online play, like MMORPGs and some FPS games.)
I don't even need to go back that far, the 90's had a lot of fantastic games that I still play and have a lot more fun with than running another damn WoW instance, or another round of Countersrike: OMGSNIPERFAGZ!!LAWLZ Edition.
So don't play those type of games. You act as if the entire game industry consists of Counterstrike clones and MMORPGs.
Comment of the year
Face it, pushing a game out the door is a risk. Because games are invariably very, very expensive pieces of software.
This isn't what it was in the 80s, where 2 college students come together and hash out a game over the time of a year in their spare time. If it flies, great, if it doesn't, so what. In the 80s, making a game was "easy". Now, hold your horses, of COURSE it is way "easier" today to code a game with DirectX (which pretty much takes the burden of actually placing the graphics onto the screen off your back, with perfect algorithms that you'd need to study 10 years of advanced maths to get close), but back then the computers sucked so badly that even a hint of graphics was already something that inspired awe in your player. Take the average 80s game. "Pole Position" anyone? With some blocks resembling cars and a "pit stop" that consisted mainly of you moving an unanimated sprite across the screen.
Doesn't need an "animation artist" to make, does it?
Sound? Yeah, it squeaked. We have sound. And when the gun fires it makes "taktaktak". Perfekt.
Story? Yeah, someone of the crew wrote a 10-liner for the manual (since in the game there was no room for story anyway. Remember, 64k is a lot and 640k more than anyone would ever need). Here's your story. Go along the lines of "bad guy hijacks something we think is cool, princess or some gem or something, and you gotta go and get it back. Make it about a page".
Physics? What for? Gravity is "lower sprite a dot every 2 seconds".
Of course, a few crafty coders can hack that together in a few months.
The huge advantage of it is simply that you can take risks that way. You can leave the used and tried paths and try something new. If it blows, well, you tried and you didn't break your neck for it.
This is no longer possible today, with games that cost a few million USD to make possible. Can you imagine sinking about 10 manyears of highly qualified artists into a bomb? 3 bombs like that and EA is a goner.
For a small studio, one such bomb is already the torpedo it needs. And I think we all know a few studios that sunk because they couldn't get their wonderful game (which would have been wonderful, most likely) done before they ran out of dough.
So studios stay with the pathes they know. So we get NHL 200x, Command & Conquer Part 18, Doom 200 and the millionth fantasy MMORPG. Because it works. Because it sells. Because it is no risk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then again, there's a selection bias; only good games of old get remembered. Same with most culture; the 95% of crap is forgotten, and we end up thinking of a golden age that never really was.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The average game today is an unintuitive, unoriginal, mindless piece of crap. The average game fifteen or twenty years ago was a cryptic, derivative, frustrating, and unplayable product of madness that only a child could figure out how to play.
The difference is that the best games of yesteryear were simpler and newer than the best games of today. Back then, as a game developer, you were exploring a concept with very few examples to follow. You had to invent the conventions yourself. A great game developer was able to make absolutely certain that all parts of the game fit together perfectly. Today, I have no doubt that the games are technically better and the design much more refined, but because there's a growing legacy of conventional design decisions, certain parts seem a bit out of place. This makes it easier to be able to pick up any game and figure out what to do with it, but it also encourages the inclusion of elements that may not serve the game as well as a less conventional solution.
We only remember that the old games are better because back then, we didn't have much choice. There were only a few we cared about and we probably had time for all of them. These days, there are so many that we become indecisive and obsessed with a game's flaws, regretting that the time we end up spending on one is time that another one won't get.
...but is it art?
IMHO, the simple BASIC games of the past were better if you were an aspiring computer programmer, because it gave you a fun way to experiment with making the computer do what you want. (Assuming you were paying attention to those lines of code you copied from COMPUTE! or other magazines.)
The early commercial games for 8-bit computers and 2nd-generation video game consoles were good in their day, and had the advantage of creativity -- limited by CPU and memory capacity, but not by special-purpose hardware, there seemed to be much more variety in game genres. Today by comparison, game consoles provide accelerated 3-D graphics, so most games are 3-D FPV action or adventure games and focus on "realism". They provide much greater detail and depth, but it seems not as much variety. How many simple board games or 2-D puzzles can you find on a modern console? Of course the PC, being a general-purpose machine, still has a decent varienty of games. And the Wii's virtual console gives it the advantage of having both old-style and new-style games.
So were those old games better? I think it's almost impossible to evaluate through the dewy-eyed nostalgia filter. The closest comparison to old-school (pre-NES) games are probably the "casual games" of today, and certainly Xevious or Galaga compare well with Heavy Weapon or Bejeweled. But comparing Gauntlet or Ultima to KOTOR or Diablo is like comparing a cave painting to a Picasso. They're so different, and so much products of their time, that it's dfficult to say one is better or worse than the other.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
>They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
This is the most insightful point of a highly-moderated post.
Why on Earth would a game company want you to play over and over, and keep enjoying your single purchase? Of course what they really want is "the next purchase," every time and on a continuing basis.
It's kind of like movie previews. They used to be a teaser, promising more and better, but now they pretty much show the best bits, and promise only more. Movies used to play longer at theaters, and it wasn't unusual to go to a really good movie more than once. Today they hope to get that once, and maybe the DVD, especially with the "extra" crap. But by all means let's get another movie onto that screen, to get that one sale + DVD on that one, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We tend to remember the classics. There were hundreds of horrible NES games that few peopple remember (or at least care to remember).
One thing that is disappointing to me is how easy many RPGs are. Back in the NES days and early 16-bit (SNES) days, they were fairly difficult. Nowadays they are nearly so easy that you have to go out of your way to even make them a challenge (either by limiting yourself to not using the most powerful abilities that make the games easy, or doing the ridiculously long side quests that don't matter to the main plot).
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I don't think the majority of games put out today seem as fun because the entire activity is FAR more mainstream now. I can list a helluva lot more great games from the 8, 16 and 32bit eras than I can anything past. I think this is largely due to the general shift towards three dimensional games at that time though. While I have nothing against 3D games per say, the idea now that EVERY game has to be in 3D has ruined quite a bit of what gaming used to be and still could be. It's destroyed entire franchises (like Sonic, and even Mario to some degree) and made fun genres almost entirely obsolete. A nice side-scroller could be great nowadays with high resolution sprites and full-on particles effects. But that's not very marketable, and I'm not sure if it's merely because the industry thinks that way or if the lot of people introduced to gaming through Madden on the Playstation would instantly dismiss such (despite Madden having been 2D at one point)...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
...looks back at the dawn of videogaming, when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of BASIC at a time
Why, back in my day, we used to have to enter our games as opcodes in binary, using toggle switches, and our 'screen' was a set of Blinkenlights, and we liked it that way. Whippersnappers.
The games themselves are still there, waiting to be played on an emulator or legacy hardware. Even the communities are still there, albeit in the form of niche fan clubs. What has changed more than anything is ourselves. We have developed an appetite for high-budget creations that weren't previously possible, and that has made it difficult for many of us to look back. And that doesn't even consider the fact that we've grown up, and our lives 10-20 years ago are nothing but one big nostalgic blur.
Let's not allow nostalgia to blind us from what's being offered up as we speak. There are plenty of great small-scale games being developed and published right under our noses. Just the other week I picked up Puzzle Quest, a fun and deep game that could have easily been created by a small number of people, if not one person alone. Coincidentally I also picked up God of War that week, and the contrast could not have been greater. One had merely serviceable presentation, the other had Hollywood aspirations. And guess what? I've been playing far more Puzzle Quest.
There are plenty of other examples, even from big companies like Nintendo. The WarioWare games come to mind, and how many people could it have possibly taken to develop Wii Sports? PC development is doing just fine, too. Mod development has created a small-time development explosion. And some smaller games, like Serious Sam, are even sporting custom graphics engines.
I think we have a tendency to only look at where most of the money is going (large development houses) when considering the state of small-scale gaming. The money is not being distributed the same way it used to be, but the small-scale developers and small-scale games are both still here.
No doubt, good games are still around, but what I often miss these days are the experimental games, those that don't really fall into any genre and instead just are what they are, back in the day of the C64 and Amiga there where plenty of them, today on the other side to many games just try way to hard to fit into genre clichés. Games these days are often void of personality and more often then not I end up thinking about games in terms of 'yet-another-FPS', 'yet-another-RTS', etc. instead of thinking about them as uniq games.
Its kind of the same thing that bothers me with Hollywood movies or TV series, sure technically they might be well done and I am sure a lot of craftsmanship went into them, but often that craftsmanship annoys more then it helps. Shaky cameras can be great for some things, but when every second movies/series does them they start to get annoying very quickly. The effect ends up not helping what the production is trying to do, but the effect stands out on its own, its the trendy thing to do and so everybody does it. In games its basically the same, somebody comes up with a nice new genre (say GTAs open city environment), and a few years later you have ten games that all do the freaking same thing. I wouldn't mind sequels much, but when not only the sequel is repeating past gameplay but half a dozens other games as well, it really becomes annoying and boring. Especially because those new games often don't expand on the gameplay, they simply repeat it. This gets especially scary when games end up looking so much alike that I no longer can tell them apart (Quake4 looks like Doom, Saints Row like GTA, etc.).
This all wouldn't be so bad if it would be because we already tried everything and are kind of running out of ideas now, but the sad part is that there are still tons of ideas floating around that nobody ever tried or didn't try in quite a lot of years.
Some might argue that XboxLive and similar services allow experimental games again and to a certain degree they are right, but more often then not those services are abused for rereleasing old classic over and over again instead of actually new games, Nintendos Virtual Console being the worst offender in that direction.
Its all about nostalgia. Some games we remember being better than they actually were and some games (for example, FF7) we never really let go of. Also, many games left a lot to the imagination. Sometimes what we fill in for ourselves is what makes the game great. Games today are representations of someone's vision. So much is done for us, but we still get great games from it.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
I have a homemade MAME arcade machine, and an X360 running in 1080i. All I know is when company comes over, the X360 sits idle and the arcade machine doesn't.
I'm a HUGE fan of retro gaming. For me, when I think 'retro,' I think of the NES when it comes to consoles and Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Prince of Persia for computers. The big thing about old computer games (namely the *Quest games) was that they were very clever. They required more thought than simply walking around the border of every room hitting the action button (think: resident evil), and although they had reading involved, it wasn't overly complex or distracting.
The big problem I see with many games today is that very few of them are pick-up-and-play style, and when they are, they either require a investing a significant amount of time to play or they're a puzzle game. I find that my most favourite contemporary games are Geometry Wars (which can take me 35-40 minutes to play a single game), Lumines (which I can play for hours, but I have the advantage where I can just turn off my PSP when I'm done), racing games like Burnout Revenge, and Crackdown. These games are great because they all have a very simple premise, and don't require too much thought from game to game. When I've got a lot going on in life, it's difficult to pick up a game that I haven't played for 3 weeks and remember where I was, what I was doing and how to get everywhere (Final Fantasy XII was like this, that's why I stopped playing it).
What happened to games like Super Mario Brothers 1-3/World, Megaman (the original bunch; namely #2), Q*bert, Centipede, Prince of Persia, etc which had a clearly defined gaming path with clearly defined goals? The original GTA had a feel like that, but it was ruined with all of the sequels.
The elegance of a great game is in its simplicity. We need to get back to those primitive concepts and apply our current technologies to make them better.
I could go on and on about how Nintendo and the Wii is on the right track, but is kinda doing it wrong and how many consumers are blind to shitty and redundant gameplay by spectacular graphics. Surely the industry hasn't run out of ideas!! They've got to be able to come up with new non-gimmicky, non-remake, fresh games.
As a supliment, some additional games that did it right in recent memory: the various Castlevania DS games, Shadow of the Colossus, the original couple Warioware games, Starcraft (when you play a quick zergling rush game, especially), Narutimet Hero (PS2, Japan), Quake3, Counterstrike, and Desktop Tower Defense (handdrawngames.com)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
"getoffmylawn": Best. Tag. EVER.
...just different. With all the money and technology that goes into games now, it allows developers to more closely bring their vision to reality. With more advanced tools brings about "better" graphics, more depth, and more detail.
Back in the day, they weren't better...just different. Gameplay was number one soley because graphics were unable to be number one. It is my firm belief that had the technology and money of today had been available "back then", the gaming industry would have been exactly what it is now.
Living With a Nerd
Sometimes I like to play Doom3/Quake4 with a resolution of 800x600, or 640x480, because it gives that pixelated look that I remember so well from the games of yesteryear, when I first started playing (games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Descent).
The simple answer is yes, or maybe it's no. It really depends on if you choose to wear those rose-colored glasses or not.
For the yes crowd, we tend to remember great games from our youth. We remember growing up on franchises (before the term franchise meant ingame ad deals and a yearly roster update) that grew with us. We tend to remember the first time we played a video game, whether it was Pong or Tetris or Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter 2. We look back at those experiences as good and positive.
For the no crowd, we tend to remember the utter crap we had to go through. Whether it was dying in Ninja Gaiden or Contra for the thousandth time and throwing the controller at our little sister, or just wasting 15 weeks allowance on an absolute piece of crap. Those moments can linger with us and we don't soon forget.
Personally, I tend to drift between the two. I can recognize how gaming has changed over the last 20 years because I've been paying attention. I am continually making mental notes about games and the industry and I have the (un?)fortunate aspect of my brain that acts like a database of this knowledge and stores it forever (I can remember quicker the day Ocarina of Time came out in the US than the day I was married). I did a lot of research as a child, reading Nintendo Power and Game Players, etc. so I wasn't exposed to many "very bad games", though I did own a few, so thus, I generally have a wave of nostalgia flow over me when I think of playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time or when I received a Super Nintendo for my birthday.
But I am still playing games. And I am still doing my research generally before I play them. I have a wide range of interests so I play everything nowadays from Pokemon to GTA to Civ 4 to Okami. And I tend to enjoy them all for what they're worth. I don't waste my time with bad games because I don't have a lot of time to waste. Much like when I was a child and I didn't have the money to waste. So many people here complain about stories in games nowadays, that's great, that's your opinion. But stop playing mainstream crap and branch out a little. Chances are your favorite story-based game as a child was a niche product when it was first released and there were plenty of crappy plot driven games when we were younger too.
Anyways, I'm starting to digress, but my main point is that I feel bad for people who can clearly say "yes" or "no" to the original question. If you say "yes" I feel bad because there IS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help. And if you say "no" I feel bad because there WAS a lot of great stuff out there and if you need help finding it, I can help.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Back in the early 80's I have no doubt that I wasted countless hours (that turned into weeks) playing Adventure on the ATARI 2600. By the standards of those times it was pretty cutting edge. While the enjoyment I derived playing a game where my character was a blurry pixilated dot (and the dragon-opponent that more resembled a duck) was immeasurable there's no way that I could go back and extract the same amount of pleasure from the same game today. Perhaps I could play about 15 minutes of the game just for the sheer nostalgia alone, but that's about it.
So how does this answer the question posted by the headline in this article? The answer is both yes, and no. The games of those times were better, for those times.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
30 print tab(30); "LUNAR LANDER"1 5);"*" .5*(v+v1)1 5);"*" .5*(v1+v)
31 print
50 print tab(30); "by Dave Ahl"
35 print chr$(7)
40 for i%=1 to 10: print: next i%
100 input "Do you want instructions",a$
110 if (left$(a$,1)"Y") and (left$(a$, 1) "y") then 390
160 print
200 print"You are landing on the moon and and have taken over manual"
210 print"control 1000 feet above a good landing spot. You have a down-"
220 print"ward velocity of 50 feet/sec. 150 units of fuel remain."
225 print
230 print"Here are the rules that govern your APOLLO space-craft:": print
240 print"(1) After each second the height, velocity, and remaining fuel"
250 print" will be reported via DIGBY your on-board computer."
260 print"(2) After the report a '?' will appear. Enter the number"
270 print" of units of fuel you wish to burn during the next"
280 print" second. Each unit of fuel will slow your descent by"
290 print" 1 foot/sec."
310 print"(3) The maximum thrust of your engine is 30 feet/sec/sec"
320 print" or 30 units of fuel per second."
330 print"(4) When you contact the lunar surface. your descent engine"
340 print" will automatically shut down and you will be given a"
350 print" report of your landing speed and remaining fuel."
360 print"(5) If you run out of fuel the '?' will no longer appear"
370 print" but your second by second report will continue until"
380 print" you contact the lunar surface.":print
390 print"Beginning landing procedure..........":print
400 print"DIGBY WISHES YOU GOOD LUCK !!!!!!!"
420 print:print
430 print"SEC FEET SPEED FUEL PLOT OF DISTANCE"
450 print
455 t=0:h=1000:v=50:f=150
490 print t;tab(6);h;tab(16);v;tab(26);f;tab(35);"I";tab(h/
500 input b
510 if b30 then b=30
530 if b>f then b=f
540 v1=v-b+5
560 f=f-b
570 h=h-
580 if h0 then 490
615 if b=0 then 640
620 print"**** OUT OF FUEL ****":print chr$(7)+chr$(7)+chr$(7)+chr$(7)+chr$(7)
640 print t;tab(6);h;tab(16);v;tab(26);f;tab(35);"I";tab(h/
650 b=0
660 goto 540
670 print"***** CONTACT *****"
680 h=h+
690 if b=5 then 720
700 d=(-v+sqr(v*v+h*(10-2*b)))/(5-b)
710 goto 730
720 d=h/v
730 v1=v+(5-b)*d
760 print"Touchdown at";t+d;"seconds."
770 print"Landing velocity=";v1;"feet/sec."
780 print f;"units of fuel remaining."
790 if v10 then 810
800 print"Congratulations! A perfect landing!!"
805 print"Your license will be renewed.............later."
810 if abs(v1)50 then print "You totalled an entire mountain !!!!!":goto 830
816 if v1>30 and v110 and v15 and v1"N") and (left$(a$, 1) "n") then 390
870 print:print"Control out.":print
900 end
You got M.U.L.E for Linux !
T /Arcade/M-U-L-E-7431.shtml/
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/GAMES-ENTERTAINMEN
I'm still playing Super Mario Brothers 3, you insensitive clod!
Seriously. I never did get past 8-1.
This sig is intentionally left blank
It's "cliché!"
"Cliché!"
"Cliché!"
BLAM
Videogaming was new and fresh back in the day. Now we're used to it. Next question!
I was a big gamer back in the 80s/early 90s. I loved my NES/SNES/Genesis and would play for hours a day and had tons of games.
Then I lost interest, from Saturn and on games were boring to me. It seemed all about graphics but not fun. Since I had a 200mhz PC up until 2001 I never played any PC games either.
But for the hell of it I got a Wii a couple weeks ago, I feel like a kid again. These games are fun. Super Paper Mario is a great example. It's a side-scroller yet it has 3D, it's a perfect mesh of all the previous mario games and it's fun.
The controller is great too, in fact I think it should become a standard for TVs and not just Wii. It makes more sense to point-and-click through your cable box program guide or your tivo menu. It would also be nice just to program your TV with a Wii style remote rather than using the usual volume +/- to navigate (and accidently click channel +/- and have to start over!)
Yay for Wii
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Planescape, Xenogears, Fallout 1&2, FF 4&6&12, Vagrant story, Warcraft III, Starcraft, etc ... all kicked the crap out of what passed for a story back in the day, but these are the gems of their respective eras. Looking back thats all we see. It's easy for nostalgia to cloud our thinking. Ultima underworld was interesting and fun, but it pales to games liek oblivion which basically take the same idea and run with it. There is a lot of crap today, but there was back then too. Except we're comparing the 80% of todays games that are crap to the 20% of the games fromt he past that we remember. It isn't a fair comparison. We should compar ethe top 20% now with the top 20% then or the bottom 80% now with the bottom 80% then.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The problem with comparing old vs. new games is people tend to stretch things.
Pick the best 5 games of 2006 and compare them to the best 5 games of 1976, 1986, or 1996 but not 1976 though 1996. It's like comparing the music of the 60's (1960 - 1969) with music produced in the last six months.
These damn kids these days! Why back in my day...!
Wait 20 years and someone will write this same article but instead of talking about old dos games they will be takling about GTA3 and how much better games in the 2000s were than games in the 2020s
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I miss that period of my life when I killed time playing video games and dreaming and thinking big thoughts.
I've discovered that my second childhood has come around just as the Wii has been delivered and life has never been better!
Are the old games better than today's? While there is no accounting for taste, be happy that all the oldies can be played on modern platforms, if you like. Makes it fun to host a retro party.
Try and find a good ... turn-based strategy game.
that made me think of the first two xcom games. oh god, it's a wonder I graduated college given all the time I spend killing aliens. And when xcomutil came out and suddenly I could create missions where my squad had to battle 50 baddies at a time, oh boy, I was screwed (or not screwed really).
I'm sure there are good games out there today, and this is just selection bias because I don't have time to play as much anymore, but I have never enjoyed a game as much as I enjoyed xcom.
(and yeah, I've played laser squad nemesis)
Yes video gaming back in the day was way better. Sure we didn't have the graphics, or the joysticks with 5 buttons for each finger, but the games were fun and challenging. I was a wee lad in my single digit ages when we got our Atari 2600 and I still remember games like Target Fun and Combat! Featherweights by today's standard of shooting games, but we used to make up or own games to make Combat more challenging, like you had to ricochet off of 3 walls before hitting our opponent. Now games are all graphics and special effects, you don't even have the challenge of having to play the game to beat it with all of the cheat codes and mod devices, if it gets too hard just pause, type in a combo and skip the level or become invincible. It wasn't until the minigame in Donkey Kong 64 did I finally sit down and beat the original DK, and that was much harder since they only give you one life. And I had more fun playing the DK mini game than I did playing the N64 game. I love seeing the retro Atari 2600 with the 30 or so games pre-loaded, I haven't gotten one yet, but it did make me dig out my old system and hook it up again. Raiders of the Lost Ark anyone?
I am 40 years old. I had a wood-grain pong unit. I have played almost every console out there. Have been PC gaming for years as well. Gaming is better period. We have more options than ever before. I can now play with friends and family remotely. I can download games instead have to go to a B&M store. The quality of games is better now as well. Higher budgets and production values don't automatically mean a better game, but it helps and when a game is well done it's still as much fun to play as any game in the past. The list goes on. I tire of these "things were better when" articles. Even if they were, we live in the present, not the past. Grow up and move on.
New games use a frustrating amount of buttons and button combos to accomplish things in 3d.
It's not the year or the genre or anything generalized. Good games have always been good games. Here's my own personal top ten games. Note that there's simply no pattern. Some are old, some new, some famous, some not. But they all were/are a blast to play. By the way, these are in no particular order.
1. Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny
2. Red Storm Rising
3. Indianapolis 500
4. Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
5. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
6. Tecmo Super Bowl
7. SimCity 2000
8. Microsoft Flight Simulator (whatever the latest version is)
9. Grand Prix Racing Online (www.gpro.se)
10. Face Off! by Gamestar
Now, tell me what these have in common?
J
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
I think people have a natural tendency to think things were better "back in the good old days". I don't think it was better, we were just more easily amused because we were younger. I remember as a kid in the early 90's on my 386SX20 with 4 mb of ram playing games like Police Quest, King's Quest, The Colonel's Bequest, Leisure Suit Larry, Wolfenstein 3D, Captain Comic, Duke Nukem, etc. I also must've spent thousands of hours on NES games like Super Mario. And back in those days PC and console games weren't quite the same experience as going to the arcade, so I must've spent hundreds of dollars a quarter at a time on games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Daytona USA, etc. Fun times!
I dunno. I suppose it is one perspective to be older, in that you've seen firsthand the evolution of video games, but, then again, you are looking at the old ones with more of an adult mind vs the child mindset when you saw the early games.
Personally...and I'm a bit older, I'm of the opinion that the early game designers had to work more on making gameplay itself FUN since they had so little in the way of tech to work with.
My personal favorite is the old arcade game Robotron 2084 . A very simple game, but, very intense. Hell, my friends and I still get a bad case of 'tennis elbow' after playing it for too long. I've got a MAME cab. with access to virtually every game made that I'd ever want...and yet, I primarily play that and Tempest (the mame machine is in an old Tempest cab).
Funny thing is...I've had parties, where friends bring their kids...some of them have been pretty young, but, raised on current PS and Xbox type games. They really freak when they see and play some of the old games. They might not be super interested at first, since the graphics are a bit crude, but, they see us old fellers crowded around playing and see how much fun the game play is...and then they really like playing it.
Don't get me wrong..I like exciting sound and graphics as much as the next person...I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)..my first video game system I got was the old Fairchild one..played cousins' Atari 2600..fell in love with Wolfenstein, and Doom and Descent....play a chipped PS 1...etc. So, I've seen games evolve over the years. While many of these games are great, in the past few years, well, my perception is....game designers have seemed to settle on 'safe' gameplay basics, and only seem to generally work on graphics and the like.
I don't see much innovation on gameplay itself...at least not that much.
But, what do I know...I'm gettinig to be an old guy. Actually, I just rediscovered Zork and got it to play on my old iBook on an upcoming vacation (great for playing on the plane)...just an old txt game, but, fun.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was with you until this part. Ultima Underworld pales next to Oblivion? Oblivion is one of the most retarded, "streamlined" RPGs ever made. It's an example of the modern-day, marketing-driven tech demos that this article is criticizing. Go play Daggerfall from 10 years ago and remember that it came from the same company!
"Sufferin' succotash."
Everything mentioned here could equally apply to a discussion on operating systems and word processors. Has Vista really made anything better with its flashy graphics? Compared to the simplicity (?) of a BASH or C-Shell command line? Or compared with Windows 95? Why has MS Word not improved over the past 10 years? And how would you say it compares to Wordperfect 5.1 for productivity? I don't think there is a clear-cut answer to any of these.
/. so there's no need to answer those questions here. But the point is that flashy graphics do not necessarily make an improvement.
I know these are age-old questions regularly visited on
Did I really have as much fun playing Hack and Rogue compared to PvE in DAoC or WOW? Probably. But it was the advent of networked play that really stepped things up. That's not to say that I haven't stood and watched sunrises in DAoC, or marvelled at the realism in BF2.
And what about sound? I can remember hearing stereo from a PC for the first time and being amazed.
http://www.angrynesnerd.com/
His reviews, while comically over-the-top, put the lie to the notion that the 8-bit era constituted a mythic golden age or edenic period at the dawn of the videogame industry, largely populated by auteur game designers who produced output in line with the bohemian values of truth, beauty, and good gameplay.
A considerable number of the NES era titles, even those published by major companies like Konami, were utter shite, and would not make it past the comparatively rigorous QA standards of even cynical, moneygrubbing behemoths like Shit-A. Even titles beloved of kids at the time, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the first NES game, not the arcade game), contained level-design gaffes approaching Daikatana levels of awful, like "that is so stupid, no freakin' way you'd expect a little kid to figure that out".
So no, the videogames were not better by any meaningful objective standard way back then. There were the standouts like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and later Mario and Zelda, and then there was the long tail of crud. Crud that even managed to earn the Nintendo Seal of Quality by being minimally non-shitty. We just think it's better for the same reason some people think Men Without Hats were better than Nirvana: it's what we grew up with.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Games today look a million times better than they did back in the day. They control a hell of a lot better. They sound absolutely beautiful. While all these things make games today "better" through deeper immersion, they require no imagination.
There's a reason we all look back at the games of old and have such fond memories. We remember them by how we experienced them then, not how they looked/played compared to today's games. The old games required us to use our imagination to the fullest degree; the graphics sucked. They weren't meant to be realistic, they were meant to merely give us an idea, a place to start.
All the fancy graphics in the world will never immerse me as much as a deep trip into my imagination and that's what games of old gave us.
Two of the things I miss the most about the older games were ( a ) the originality of the concepts, and ( b ) the 'game like' feel.
In the case of ( a ), there are very few games released today with off-the-wall concepts like Skool Daze or Trashman. A possible exception to this would be Bully, and some of the weirder Gamecube titles such as Cubivore. Another thing I liked was that it was easy to dip into a game for a few minutes and not feel like you were being sucked into a story... Not that I mind story games, but with the limited time us aging gamers have these days, I have to ration my time carefully... Games such as Ikaruga and Castle Shikigami (sp?) are such games. While I love playing God of War II (and similar games such as the Prince of Persia series), I often find myself returning to Mutant Storm Reloaded, Jetpac or Geometry Wars simply because I don't have the time to invest in a long game. If I do try, I often find that I have to put it down for so long that I forget where I am when I come back to it, which kind of destroys the continuity of the story for me.
Having said that, a lot of Wii games do seem to have odd concepts, but for some reason they feel forced, but that may just be due to the maturation of the games industry...
For point ( b ), I guess I have a preference for games that are unashamedly games, a good example being Moonpod's Mr. Robot, which apart from the updated presentation, almost feels like an old ZX Spectrum game...
There are other games that exhibit this, of course - including those I mentioned above.
Frankly, I enjoy both the cream of the modern crop (e.g. Half-life 2, PGR, God of War II, PoP:SoT) and a fair bunch of the best of the older games (e.g. Manic Miner, Quazatron, X-Com etc.)
I should point out here that I'm pretty biased towards the retro side of things though, having written and edited a couple of "showcase" coffee table books on retro games for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 books...
(And that's all the pimping I'm going to do here on that - if anyone is interested in looking them up, I would suggest a search for "ZX Spectrum Book" or "C64 Golden Years" in your search engine of choice.)
The ZX Spectrum Book 1982-199x
way back, with C64 there were some good games but the stuff was too expensive to share, but I remember best when networked games started to come out for HOURS of fun with each other.
Everybody had some kind of computer, and we installed our NE2000's, ran a coax to each other, terminated it and installed Red Alert, RA Counterstrike and Aftermath on everybody's computer, fired up our IPX/SPX network and we had tons of fun building and destroying using weapons and techniques everybody thought were possible during the cold war.
Or Warcraft I, II and Starcraft. We would cry out hell as soon as we heard *pssh* Ghost Reporting from one of the players speakers. Fun for everybody in the family, even the little ones. The games weren't overly complex but they were based on simple mathematic models and they required you to create a little LAN-party in your house, since internet was slow and not available everywhere.
If you were a single player, you could have fun with Carmageddon, Duke Nukem 3D (also fun multiplayer), Unreal (not the Tournament, although they were also fun), Thief and other such games that had simple yet innovating gameplay. In Unreal for example, we had our first example of 'translucent water' instead of a shocking blue plate, fog as well as 'AI' (monsters would run off, turn off the lights and then attack) and ambient music. Thief had water arrows to darken the places, and with the music up high in a dark room really scary (shackles, guards around the corner).
Nowadays, I think most developers try to reiterate on past titles but can't get there or focus too much on multiplayer capabilities. They're trying to put all kinds of goodies in to make it look better, but the gameplay isn't the same. Unreal Tournament for example was good multiplayer since it was simple enough to develop extensions, the 2004 version is just the same ol' shoot everybody up, and since the games get more complex, so does creating levels so people don't develop as much.
What I'm playing now is Wesnoth (open source) and the gameplay is simple enough, there are numerous extension that change everything and add more units (for example Under the Burning Suns has 2 suns and a darkness in rotation like the planet in Pitch Black) and creating levels and extensions is simple enough.
Still I miss the IPX/SPX functionality where you were forced to get together to play. Now, you just fire up your internet connection and you play against god-knows-who.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It seems this comes up every 3 weeks or so but...
My simple answer is no, games were not better. If they were I'd simply play them with an emulator and leave today's offerings behind.
A while back I downloaded some Atari 2600 emulator with something like 870 games. I thought this was going to be fantastic. My experience with it was lukewarm at best. While I did get into playing some old classics I loved I came to realize that it was more me being 10 or 12 years old that made the game good. Not that they sucked but it just wasn't as good.
Now the big thrill was playing all the games I never owned but use to ogle over in the catalogs that came with games. Stuff I begged my parents to get me. After spending a few hours going through some of these "classics" I wanted to go an apologize for ever bothering them about it. Again, if I was 10 again and had just gotten BurgerTime it would have surely kicked ass but as a 30-something it was pretty lame.
Who knows, maybe I'll feel the same about CounterStrike when I'm 50 or 60.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I was beginning to think I was the only person on the face of planet Earth who felt that way. As I once quipped on Slashdot: "Oblivion is an RPG for thumb-bashers who want to play an RPG but without all that gay story and s---."
I mean, come on. You get 30 seconds of dialog then spend 5 hours trying to accomplish the quest, 4 hours of which was spent trying to build up enough cash and/or magic in order to complete the quest. Ultima IV, you had to change the way you played the frakking game to win to stay in synch with the story.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The videogame market in the 80s was measured in millions of dollars. Today it's billions of dollars several times over. When you have that kind of money available to be spent on some medium, it means that someone has to produce crap just to keep sales going. Look at movies. There are something like 2,000 movies released a year. How many are actually good? Five? Ten? Yet no one in Hollywood fools themselves into thinking that movies have gotten worse since the heady days of the Great Train Robbery
What actually happened is that the number of great games has remained relatively constant. In the 80s, say there were 5 great games per year. Today, there are still 5 great games per year, except hundreds/thousands more are released. This is why it seems that games aren't as great today as they were 20 years ago, yet we don't think that about movies -- we've just been around to see that ratio of good-to-crap drop quickly.
Just as movies began as expensive, time-consuming labors of love and became throw-away money-makers, so too video games. It's pure money-driven economics. A beautiful, handcrafted item is more expensive, but mass produced junk is the key to profit.
In the early days (I'm talking Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe,) the player was required to extended their imagination into the game. A person who wasn't interested in imagining a fantasy world wouldn't be very interested in text adventures, or rogue-likes. Those that were willing to make that investment created an emotional attachment to games that spoke to them.
Nowadays, and especially now that consoles are driving the market and graphics are awful pretty, the imagination demand isn't there. Also, the entrance fee has been lowered (with cheaper hardware, with no technical ability required) and the industry must play to the common denominator in the same way that B splatter movies packed the drive-ins.
Thankfully, some developers do take pride in their craft, and we can expect new gems to come out, though this will come at a reduced pace.
<what I really think>
FU you freakin' paddle-slapping monkeys! You suck!
</what I really think>
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
If you remember and liked Master of Monsters from the Sega Genesis then you're likely to enjoy Battle of Wesnoth since it embodies much of the gameplay of MoM. A came across it a few months ago, great game with community support for add-on campaigns.
In the 1980s, there was often a direct path between the vision of the designer and the end result. Jordan Mechner, for example, not only designed Karateka, but he created every single part of the game.
When you're looking at modern games with 10+ million dollar budgets, teams of 50-100 people including a whole layer of do-nothing management, all the pressure from sales and marketing and various executives to have a mega-hit...that's hardly the same sort of creative process. The way modern games are created is insane.
Games aren't worse than they used to be. Neither is anime. (I often hear this one too.) There are two forces at work here: Selection bias: Someone probably introduced you to games, and they showed you the cream of the crop. Once you got more experienced you started noticing the chaff that was always there, but that you didn't always know about. Selective memory: You tend to remember the spectacularly good and the spectacularly bad and forget anything that's just mediocre. Usually the spectacularly bad games are avoidable, with notable exceptions. When you play a mediocre game now, you forget all about the mediocre games you played in the past and compare this lame game to all the classics. Replace game with anime (and verbs as appropriate) and you get an insightful post on another topic too!
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
As game systems become more powerful developers try ever harder to recreate reality. This is unfortunate.
One problem with reality is that it's insanely complex and the harder you try to resemble it, the more the human mind can find fault with it. There was an article awhile back about how people relate better to abstract humanoid robots than they do robots that are meant to look human, since the human-looking ones look akin to pale sickly zombies. Same deal goes on with games, no doubt.
Another problem with reality is that it's boring. Would the cracked-out shit in Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros ever have been thought of it the designers didn't have so little to work with? The whole light-world vs. dark-world thing and how they interact is so brilliant a concept that, even given the explosion of the market over 20 years, no other developer seems interested in exploring. Floating bricks that you smash with your hands and a mushroom pops out that makes you 3x bigger? That's retarded. But players accepted it face value.
Super awesome technology should have made twisted fantasies like Mario and Zelda more vivid, but instead developers are working hard on making reality less vivid. :(
They're just not the big expensive productions, they're in flash and java and run in your browser and cellphone.
Too bad my points expired yesterday, I wanted to mod this up.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Although games certaintly haven't gotten any better or worse certain genres are losing players. I was and am a big fan of MUDS. Not all MUDS have lost their fan-base, but in general a particular MUD I liked, usually had around 30 people on and now seldom sees 3. What can we do to repromote these games?
Have Played through GTA as well as Pokemons Blue, TCG, Fire Red & Sapphire. I've got a copy of Crystal, but haven't started it yet.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
There are probably an equal proportion of good and bad games in both "era's" but without doubt for me the higher proportion of the more memorable and imaginative games (gameplay/originality) for me are the older ones. Todays games seem to focus more on gloss like graphics/sound than actual gameplay while older games focused more on gameplay because the graphics/sound options were rather limited.
As someone noted in another post with older games you used to play them again and again, even in single player mode (hell most did not have multiplayer) where as todays games single player is, play it though the campaign/storyline once and thats pretty much it, game over because you will never play it again unless you are REALLY bored
If we could have the designers of yesteryear with their attitudes, imagination and ethos intact and give them the tools of today it would be a gamers heaven
Can you really compare Pong or Pools of Radiance to something like WoW or CoD? Most early video games relied on your imagination for graphics, and a bit of hand eye coordination. Most modern games rely heavily on hand eye coordination and less on imagination. Dose this make one better than the other? Hell no. You just can't compare the two. I'm blessed enough to have seen the beginnings of this form media (the Internet and video games). Games evolve in lots of ways, eye candy, more adult plots, rudimentary response time. You can take my word for it, games don't get better or worse, they just look better, or play more intuitively. You really can't compare the two.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Law of Diminishing Returns.
Katamari Damacy, Guitar Hero, Nintendogs, DDR, Brain Age, Taiko no Tatsujin, Electroplankton, the Wii... These might not all be your cup of tea, but I think we're beginning to see a lot of innovation. If the market has stagnated, it is because developers have been targeting one demographic to the exclusion of all others. With that market nearly saturated, we're seeing some very interesting games again.
Repo man's always intense.
I used to play video games *all the time*. Of course, I stopped around the Super Nintendo era.
Why? I think they got too involved. To me, video games are supposed to be easy to play, not take days/weeks to get accustomed to so you can actually play.
Double Dragon, Super Contra, Tetris, these are all games that would take you about 2 minutes to figure out, then it's all game. If I tried playing WoW or some intensely complex game, I'd get frustrated in the first 2 minutes and give up. Call me simple minded, but that's how I am - and I suppose I'm not the only one out there like this. I know for a fact that my nephews LOVE the NES emulator on their computer I put on for them...and they've got XBOX and all the other latest, too. Still doesn't stop them from playing Mike Tyson's Punch Out and loving it.
Video games are for entertainment. A lot of gamers today seem to use them as a complete escape from reality - and the rabbit hole goes deeper each time a new game comes out with it's complexity and involvement.
Gimme my simple shoot-em-up/beat-em-up or two-button gamepad and I'm good.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
World of Warcraft. Today wins!
This is a viral signature. You are now infected!
All the technology is better today (sound/graphics/AI) and even story can have more depth. Most 8 bit games are nostalgia. The were great in there context but today they are something like web/cellphone games.
:-)
But today novelty is somewhat lacking for the reasons you cite. Similar to Hollywood. Big game studios are risk adverse, so we are stuck in sequel hell. The occasional gem does slip through.
Unfortunately we are also suffering from the hammer owners philosophy of everything looking like a Nail. FPS engines are being used for everything.
Unfortunately for me, they are ruining one of my favorite genres. RPG - I am big fan of Baldurs Gate (1&2), Planescape Torment, NWN etc... Biowares next game will have First or Third person viewpoint like most new RPGs. I can't play from either perspective because they give me motion sickness (skip your folk remedies, there is no cure except excessive play time, I can no longer manage-getting my FPS legs as it were). I would be buying and playing these games if they didn't make me feel like puking. Instead I will fire up Baldurs Gate 2 again, not out of nostalgia, but because it won't make me ill.
So my favorite Genres:
RPG: Ruined (for me) by FP/TP view.
Adventure: Basically dead.
Practically nothing left for me. Though it is saving me a lot of money on hardware upgrades.
Given the current level of investment in gaming, there is real economic pressure to sell and sell well. This is a disincentive to innovate (think of the effects of the comparative economic pressure in the music and movie industries).
I agree with the assertion to a point. There is way too much rehashing and rehashing, I mean, if someone releases another FPS I might just have to shoot someone (ha, ha). But look at games like Okami, Katamari Damaci and Jade Empire. There is not way we could have had games with such rich and interesting storylines and worlds back in the day. What develpoers need to do is take on Atari's old motto for designing games: "Make original games."
My favorite games of all time! I still play them with Nestopia and BSNES emulators. I'm not sure what it is about them that I like so much, but whatever it is, most new games just don't have it.
You can do anything in a game, it's one of the few areas where physics can be thrown away and you can let your imagination completely rip. So why is gravity down and 10mps2? Why does everything 'walk' or 'drive'...
Games are so boring today.
But other games that completely lack a story can be just as fun. Fun for other reasons, such as open endedness. Or technical gameplay.
A great example of open ended and technical gameplay would be Gran Turismo. I played GT3 for hours and hours. I like cars and racing a lot, so it was a great game for me. The physics are pleasing. The cars were fun. The modding aspect, while highly unrealistic, was still enjoyable. When I did everything there was to do in the game, I could still continue to play the heck out of that game by thinking up new games to play with it. My roomate and I would play GT for hours, seeing who could make the best replay of drifting or fancy driving instead of time trials. Or we'd race eachother in the crappiest cars we could make or a myriad of other games we made up in that game.
The point is I guess if you lack a story but have compelling enough gameplay and open ended gameplay, it's just a toy. Toys don't come with stories, you have to make them up yourself. Which can be just as fun as being guided through a wonderful story that someone else wrote.
Imagination, it is not just for game developers anymore!
Probably most do not remember the original wing commander games. I spent hours flying around the universe killing cats. The series only improved with each episode as more sound and features were added. Then came the Privater series, man what a set of games. To me after these disappeared. The newer genre of games sucked, same old scenario just diffrent scenes. Only bit of brightness recently have been the WW II based fps. Other than that if you have to live vicariously thru a game you really need to get out more.
IF you can't be famous be infamous. But for GODS sake be something
The "problem" with gaming nowadays, IMO, is that it is too realistic. Everything is basically a simulation now. There are no sports "games", they're all league simulators. There are no racing "games", they're all driving simulators. For some genres, realism is good (horror, FPS, suspense games). For others, it's not so much.
Where are the games like Basewars (robot baseball where you have to fight to determine safe/out), Baseball All-Stars (where you get super-powers), all the racing games where you could go full-throttle around the course bouncing off walls with impunity, the aerial combat games like the Tie Fighter series or Secret Weapons Over Normandy, where you could fly without worrying about the laws of physics and whether or not your ailerons are up or down, and the like? Games that did not simulate reality, where you could escape reality, and just have fun for a few hours?
Simulation games are nice, like the original SimCity, but things have been taken too far to the "uber-realistic" extreme where you end up micro-managing everything.
Game systems of yore didn't have the CPU/graphics power to simulate reality, so the games were more imaginative, breaking free of reality. IMO/E, that made games a lot more fun to play.
Oblivion lost me at the very beginning when the priest(bishop?) was murdered and I got killed/arrested for getting on the wrong horse afterward. I was starting to get irritated with the game already, but come on.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
In no particular order:
Zaxxon (and Super Zaxxon)
Karate Champ (the one true martial arts control system!)
Joust
Rygar
Sinistar (Run, Coward! I Live...*rawwwwwwwrrrrrr!*)
Xevious
Stargate/Defender
Ghosts n' Goblins (Ghosts n' Ghouls)
Shinobi (!)
720 degrees (SKATE OR DIE!)
There are currently just a few types of games. The downfall of the arcade started with the release of Mortal Kombat, a game designed to hide maneuvers so they could sell books with the 'secret moves' in them. Ugh. If you were stupid enough to memorize all those idiotic button/joystick moves, you're a moron (sorry to the the one to break the news to you). All games now seem to be Mortal Kombat ripoffs, a racing game or a FPS.
Is it any wonder that people still buy the latest Super Mario whatever games? There's still a market for that kind of stuff, despite how many fight/race/fps games the put out. You'll note that arcades in the U.S. are mostly a thing of the past.
by donating $1 for each game sold to make up for the financial loss they suffered when they lost their jobs in the video game crash.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer, I'd be happy to handle the distribution of your most welcome contributions.
You also have Galactic Civ II, as well as the expansion pack for Civ IV (Warlords).
Not a huge number, but they're out there if you look.
What turn based games were great 10-15 years ago?
So sometime in the mid-80s, my boss needed to get a mortgage, and he and his wife and 3.5-year-old kid went to the bank. The kid saw a keyboard, went over and typed "BASICA GAMES", and nothing happened! And he couldn't find the screen, either!
He'd never actually seen a typewriter before, but the concept of 3-year-olds being computer-literate was still fairly radical back then. He mostly liked to play the donkey-crossing-the-street game.
Back then, it was fairly rare for my coworkers to have IBM PCs at home - we'd use terminals to talk to Unix machines, and some people had C64s or whatever for their kids; a 10-year-old playing games wouldn't have been surprising.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
the entire gaming genre has devolved into a first person 3D shoot-em up, with game-storyline and quality of content being the only purchasing criteria.
Back in the golden age of gaming there were many more games comning out in other genres: platform games, abstract logic puzzles (tetris etc), business games (xxx tycoon), text adventures, dungeon crawlers, space operas, etc etc.
It seems first person 3D shoot-em ups is the only thing these days because EA has bought everyone else out and can now get away with reusing the same game engine over and over and just changing the artwork/storyline.
Gaming was headed down a slippery slope of mediocrity. EVERYTHING on consoles was a 2D side-scroller. It took games like Mario 64 to finally inject some fresh creative thinking and get the industry out of the 2D side scroller rut.
Question: Some random slashdot users likes a different game to you do you?
a) Make no comment as people have different tastes
b) Politely disagree but realise people have different tastes
c) Rail on the user using words like 'retarded' and hark back to a mythical golden age of computer gaming that just happens to coincide with when you had the most time to play games.
And its simple as that.
Read radical news here
I mean, come on. You get 30 seconds of dialog then spend 5 hours trying to accomplish the quest, 4 hours of which was spent trying to build up enough cash and/or magic in order to complete the quest. Ultima IV, you had to change the way you played the fucking game to win to stay in synch with the story. Fixed that for ya. I'm not a big fan of profanity and I try to keep it to a minimum. But if you're going to, just do it.
Apparently nobody ever introduced you to BBSs.
Some of us have been gaming online since before the internet.
I think you're confusing 3D with the point of view. You're comparing third-person strategy games with first-person shooters. If anything, in the shooter category, 3D has MORE than extended the verbs for a shooter - think quake versus berzerk. In dimension alone, you have now left, right, up, down, and forward, backward - in 2d that's just l,r,u,d. Then we add Jump. We add fall. Climb. Freelook (!!). In the strategy genre, 3D or 2.5D has added MANY new verbs. Including, but not limited to, strategies using high ground. Walls. Flight. Line of sight. No, we haven't wasted power on 3D where it could be used on more actions. There's just so many actions to take place before the game is awash in 'things to do' and not enough 'things to enjoy'. Micromanagement in a 3D First Person Shooter is a BAD thing.
What are you talking about? Obvlion was all about letting the player do any quest no matter what level they were. I've played my share of RPGs, and Obvivion is definitly NOT one that you had to build up/grind before going on quests. Though collecting plants for alchemy, to make potions and such, was a bit of a pain. The only thing really wrong with Oblibion IMO was the leveling system. It is the only game I've ever played where I didn't look forward to leveling. What really annoying thing was doing the "exercises" before leveling so you coudl get decent stat gains. Like I'd put on some heavy armor and go tank a crab for 15 minutes to build up strength. Or cast utility spells over and over again to exercise intelligence (ha!). I also didn't really like how the world adapted to you rather than you adapting to you. Otherwise Oblivion was pretty cool.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I have a Wii, PS2 and xbox, and just recently reconnected my SNES play Mario and Zelda again. I like the idea of injecting my imagination into a game. My daughter, 6, commented as i played mario world, "wow, that game is hard".
At present, my wife and I own an XBox (a new addition for us - we generally wait for the new platform to come out and buy the old stuff cheap), a GameCube, and a Nintendo 64.
We've mostly used the Nintendo 64 and GameCube for fun, social gaming - things like Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, etc. When we first got the GameCube, though, my wife asked me a few questions:
1) "So, how do I get some gold coins?" - She wanted a simple, side-scrolling, fun game, preferably of the Mario franchise, that she could pick up and play a little without spending much time to learn it or beat it. She didn't want a lengthy RPG - just some fun chucking turtle shells and getting gold coins. Nothing like that exists, to my knowledge.
2) "Are there any games like Secret of Mana/Zelda a Link to the Past?" - She used to like the occasional RPG when it was a more simple, 2d affair from above (a difference from number 1, I realize). But now the controls are much more complicated and it's all 3d - which, in her opinion, just doesn't really translate well to a flat screen with limited periphery vision (I can't help but share her opinion from time to time). The learning curve is too steep, the games too complex and lengthy, and in many cases form has taken over function.
So, other than a few social games, my wife is largely out of the video game world. Games became too complex for her, or took on themes she wasn't too interested in - too much violence, too little story, too much story, etc.
I guess you could say that my wife never really got past the Super Nintendo stage. I still wish for some of that simplicity myself, so we'll be buying one before too long to relive the glory days. What's truly funny is that a used SNES with a bunch of games will cost about as much as the used XBox I just bought - and we'll probably have a better time with it.
If "they" refers to "the gamers who voted with their wallets and didn't buy those games", then you'd be right. If "they" is supposed to be Bioware, keep in mind that they are a company that needs to make money to survive. If nobody's buying a certain type of game, they have no incentive to build another game of that type.
Did you try KOTOR or Jade Empire? That's pretty much what Mass Effect should be like. If those gave you motion sickness, then it sucks to be you.
They're not quite dead yet. The new Sam & Max games seem to be doing quite well. I was disappointed that the Bone games didn't do better, but SM makes up for it.
Nope; I played Tradewars and a bunch of other games on BBSes. I also played MUDs before MMORPGs came out. Thanks for assuming I'm an idiot though.
The reality is that the Xbox Live real-time voice-comm experience doesn't compare at all with the text-based turn-based communication on BBSes. There's also a limiting factor, in that only a small subset of the population had computers, modems, heard of BBSes at the time, and knew how to connect.
You're comparing Apples to Oranges. I think the main purpose of your post is to say "wow you young turks are idiots who don't know anything about BBSes, and I'm so cool I do"... since it doesn't really refute the original post.
Nitpickers corner: Considering how old the Internet is, I seriously doubt anybody was gaming online before it. Before the popularization of the Internet, sure.
Comment of the year
First, a good game is one that draws you into the storyline and doesn't require 30 keys to play the damn thing. Graphics are either enhancements or cat litter to cover the crappy code. Like the original poster, I had Oompute Magazine on my monthly list of purchases in the 70s-80s era and learned more about programming trying to fix the syntax errors to get a game to play than in any classroom since.
......
Second, there are some great old games out there. Master of Orion, Panzer General, the Mario franchise, etc. that are timeless and as enjoyable today as before.
However, there has been a tidal wave of crap over the years nobody wants to remember. My personal list of disappointments is below:
Outpost - I probably put $40 of long distance calls in to the sierra bbs(pre internet) to download 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. I never got a monorail built and it never ran for more than 45 minutes without crapping it's pants.
The Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Arcade Game - total crap. Indy frees the little kids, rides down the rail cart, steals a stone from the altar.......then goes back to freeing more kids, going down another rail cart,
PacMan for the 2600 - While the audio is still used whenever anyone on TV is playing a video game, this was probably the most disappointing arcade port of all time.
ET for the 2600 - Painfully bad
Indiana Jones for the 2600 - Bad, bad, bad
The Star Wars Games for the original NES - George Lucas owes me $20 for ep1 & ep2, and $80 for these pieces of crap
The Coleco Adam - The entire platform and every game
Master of Orion 3 - WTF! How could you fall so far from grace?
My point is that what's good is good and what's bad is bad. Nostalgia puts a rosy spin on things, but pull down an emulator and try to play some of the games you loved as a kid. I got the Atari collection to play Star Raiders again and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did I ever piss away a couple of years of youth on that game.
STFU & GBTW
I'm not a huge fan of Oblivion myself either. However it's a comparable game style to Ultima:underwold. Both are first person perspectives with a complex "Reagent" system, food, and dungeon crawls. Both have stories and could be compeling if your into that sort of story. They're both partly hack and slash. Quality wise, Oblivion has 10 years of graphic polish, controls and much better AI. Although Oblivion is much much glitchier and it's expansiveness comes at the expense of pacing and focus. I chose it because of these facts. I suppose you could compare Ultima under world to WOW would also be appripriate for the same features but WOW is a whole different animal.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Hunt the Wumpus 3D. Now that's where it's at, baby.
--- What?
Excellent analogy - both may have great value but from totally different era.
Some commenters have said they like modern high quality graphics. Others have said the old games were hard. We are all different in what we like but how about what we like to watch, and re-watch? Maybe we can be more objective with this kind of question.
In other words, are high quality graphics enough to enjoy watching someone else play? Not for me they aren't -- unless they make the game harder to play for the average player (e.g. R-Type or Raiden).
How about game difficulty -- is it more fun to watch someone ace a game that is very hard than one that is easy? You bet it is. Also, if the player playing is many times better than us (e.g. a great player on Gauntlet, or Mr. Do!, versus myself).
Modern games are like modern action flicks -- ok the first time, but not worth a re-watch. Old classic games like Defender/Stargate, Tetris, Missile Command, Centipede are interesting to watch when a master is at work -- including when you are the master. On one sales trip I drove "up country", passing through several towns along the way. On the way up I played one game of Arkanoid on a game I had not played before. Before playing I bought an ice cream cone and played one while I ate the other. An hour later the game was done and I left. On the way back down I got another cone and popped in another quarter. As I started to play I heard someone behind say "That's the guy!..."
Modern games reflect modern life, where the schools don't give out grades any more. At least not the ones our three go to -- they get slashes, hyphens and single letters not in the range from A to F. Just participate, doodle and consume -- growing up to become good consumers and good sheeple.
One of my most memorable moments was getting a serious score on ST:TNG pin -- 10Billion+. No sooner did I finish the game but the techie came along, turned it off and started to clean it, as clean pins are tougher pins. The ST:TNG pin was so tough, yet so cool, that I surfed the 'net in 1994 to learn more about it (and ended up contributing to the FAQ I found). Today we might look for cheats, or cracks, but just end up like cheaters or crackers when we use them. At that time is was a true mission (to stop the owner from taking this, my very own, quarter until I have played for an hour or two) and success was shared.
Classic arcade games are meant to be tough coin-suckers. Anyone able to conquer one of them is a hero. Heck, I've even gave one guy a quarter just to see him play a game again after watching him get 9xx,xxx on Centipede.
Today, thanks to MAME I can watch great replays without leaving the house. And I prefer that to playing any modern console/commercial games. They are not my style and don't interest me. I'd rather throw a football. I should say that some flash games carry on the tradition -- Super Collapse comes to mind.
Classic games were more physical and that was good. They were tougher and that was good also. They weren't all flash and no substance like modern games. They were truly tough nuts to crack and anyone that did was cool. They made us want to improve ourselves. Modern games are addictive, but not in the way that programming is addictive -- more in the way that TV is, putting us into that coma-like state for hours at a time.
I come here for the love
I have been wondering why new games aren't that good and I think you should blame consoles for simple games. Why?
Multi platforming! Playing these frigging simplified games on PC is like trying to push cactus into your ass. Some games even don't allow using mouse or mouse support is somewhat retarded. Few more reasons...
1. Theres only few buttons you can use when playing any console. (Wii goes here too. Mouse + keyboard give more controlling possibilities than wiimote.)
2. Gaming style on consoles. Most of console games are like for zombies. "Hurr... enemy... shoot... another enemy... shoot... must run through this pipe like game..."
3. Hardware limitations. Just check the amount of memory on these 'next-gen' consoles. Uh, theres 512MB and its even shared with GPU. You just cannot store enough stuff into 512MB. See oblivion and its 128x128 textures.
4. Commercial side of console gaming. Only those companies that have money can do games for consoles and when they do have to pay dearly for making games they just cannot take risks.
5. Censorship... We want sex, nudity and everything in the games! For example see daggerfall. Theres nudity and its logically added into the game. Theres no sex movies like sex or anything like that, but nymphs are nude in game as they should be. In nowadays games, if theres a harpy, it will definitely have bras or something else to cover up sensitive areas. That thing is a game breaker for those who seek out immersion. (This is the one I blame US culture about.)
Theres even more, but rant is over for now...
The next Bioware of interest for me is Dragon Age (not mass effect) which is supposed to be a lot like Baldurs Gate 2 (many consider one of the best RPGs of all time as do I). It sounds like the game will have a top down view when in combat. It probably would have been easy to allow this view while exploring to expand the users, strictly optional of course. This does afflict a significant number of people. Not the FPS crowd of course, but it represents a barrier of entry for many. One of best friends has the same problem. I understand the appeal FPP but it would be nice to keep the option for the motion sickness afflicted.
No I didn't try Kotor/Jade Empire because they appear to be the type of games that gives me motion sickness. Was there a demo. Dropping $50 to get motion sickness is out of the question.
All FPS games give me motion sickness. View from behind shoulder, with camera following games like old tomb raider are just as bad, maybe worse. From what I have seen KOTOR is like tomb raider. Classic bioware and NeverWinterNights are both fine). I see a lot more NWN in my future. NWN gives you extensive camera control and this is what keeps it motion sickness free. Once the camera goes into follow mode in 3rd person, or FPS mode, it is puke city.
>>The problem with comparing old vs. new games is people tend to stretch things.
Personally, I had more fun figuring out how the old Beagle Bros. two-line programs did their magic, or typing in fifteen pages of code from the back of Nibble magazine into my Apple ][ than I've had with many new games.
P.S. the CAPATCHA is "apathy"... how suitable.
First, GTA isn't a driving game.
I'm not going to list games you would like, necessarily, just titles from my shelf (possibly virtual) that deflate your non-point about modern genres.
Geometry Wars
Boom Boom Rocket
Uno
Crackdown
Guitar Hero
God of War
Shadow of the Colossus
Dead Rising
Katamari Damacy
Rez
Warioware: Smooth Moves
Super Monkey Ball
Technically, Gears of War also fits the list since it's not an FPS, but too many people who haven't played it will argue about it.
I'm leaving off a bunch of stuff because I'm lazy. That's just the games I've played recently that I have to reshelve (and new XBLA stuff).
So, you were saying?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Greetings, programmer! You are a female human codemonkey.
Quaff what [abcjf]? j
You drink a potion of booze. The world spins and you pass out.
You wake up. You have a severe headache.
Identify what [abcfnop] ? f
f - potion of coffee
Quaff what [abcf]? f
You drink a potion of coffee. You feel wide awake!
You fall down the stairs.
Drive which direction? l
Welcome to Initech!
You hear a faint typing sound.
You hear a boss screaming orders.
You hear a water cooler gurgling.
Commit what code [np]? p
You summon a boss!
The boss hits!
The boss hits!
The boss yells at you for breaking others' code!
The boss hits!
Read what [o]? o
You read a scroll of taming. Nothing happens.
The boss hits!
The boss shouts, "Document your code better!"
The boss hits!
Really quit [yn]? y
Do you want your possessions identified [yn]? n
You escaped the Offices of Doom with $23.36 in cash and $14k in non-redeemable stock options.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
Gaming was really pretty horrid before the 32-bit days. First, games were buggy as hell. I can't tell you how many screwy NES game bugs I ran into, but it was a lot. Second, the games were short, but most of them were way too hard for the kids playing them, so few people ever beat many of them. Third, if you think tie-in games, sequels, and knockoffs are bad now, go back and look at all the crap from the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Long-dead TV shows had games, and any game that sold well was turned into a crap knockoff.
Sure there were some bright moments, but I could write them all down on one side of sheet of paper. The other ten-thousand plus games were utter turds that today's worst publishers would be ashamed to release. I may not like every game that comes out now, not even the really hot popular ones, but there are still enough great games for me coming out every year that I don't have time to play them all. That sure as hell never happened in the Atari/NES/SuperNES eras.
For me, what really makes the DOS oldies great, was that beautiful pixel art most had. That coupled with good gameplay (I want a new The Lost Vikings! =P) was what made the games I playedso great.
Though I was very happy with classic games, like the Sierra suite (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest For Glory, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.), the Wing Commander games, Civilization I, Master of Orion, Warcraft II, Star Control II, Kung Fu for NES, etc. I wouldn't say modern gaming is any worse. It's true publishers are pouring money into soulless marketing people so there's a lot of crap out on the videogame market (much like the film industry), but some of today's games are truly and unquestioningly amazing, such as Civilization III-IV, World of Warcraft,and Half-Life (I'd say Half-Life 2, but, like any sensible person, I switched to Mac, and stupid Valve is stuck on PC, so I haven't played it yet).
Yes Sir, you totally got the point.
I can stop reading the other comments from here on. There is nothing more to say.
The games today try to be too realistic. Whenever you find a flaw, it breaks the illusion. In EOB, for instance, the illusion never broke, as the mechanism was the same all the time and dialogs were separated from the gameflow.
And then there were things like level design, creature design, special abilities, and the weapons, etc., were balanced. Crap you found from the chests was interesting and put in there for a purpose. Each new weapon mattered, etc. Not anymore. Oblivion is so "free" that you'll find exploits very quickly. It's so "free" that nothing in the game world really matters. (Oh wow, I just lockpicked a hevily guarded chest with two gold coins!!!)
Or probably it recycles all the "collect 8 crystals and line them up at the midnight and the rays of the moon will reveal a hidden passage / summon a daemon / break the curse" shit that was already there in the 80's. Without adding anything.
I mean, even the NPC are boring and annoying as hell.
Probably the idea of these games is to simulate a boring and annoying hell where the PC is put into. It's like a fucking paranoiac nightmare, where you are having these simulated conversations with robots without being able to clearly pinpoint the source of the problems. It's immersion alright: If you're MENTALLY ILL.
Games used to be computer programs telling a story and/or testing your reflexes instead of being a cheap attempt to simulate a boring alternate reality with robotic people.
modern games have become so increasingly complex they have already started crossing the line into chores rather than games.
research shows the average human can juggle about 7 or 8 things at once.
to contrast this, WoW has you juggling between 20 and 40 tactically disperate actions in the heat of battle (and in pve youre dealing with utter mayhem in instances), fighting engines require you to pull off rediculous botton combos to attain any effectiveness.
the only thing which has not really changed all that much is fps and turn based rpgs.
the one common thread among the most popular games which ive seen is the simplicity/intuitiveness of control, something many developers have lost sight of, making many games which feel more like a stressful customer service job than actual fun.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The games that we used to play back in the day won't run on today's top-of-the-line 64-bit OS. To do that, you need an emulator which drags your overclocked, state-of-the-art rig back to the gutter, all to get a glimpse of yesteryear.
If you want a good example, emulate the C-64 Seven Cities Of Gold and see that crating a world disc takes just as long as it did then.
It's like a digital Darwin is filtering out the past, making the group of survivors of one computer generation to the next smaller, and smaller, and the survivors more likely to be the most popular.
This article is just lame and defeatist. If game developers listened to this kind of argument, no games would ever get written. If you've got a cool game concept, work on it. If it's good, eventually you will take it to the point where it can go commercial. Even if it doesn't get that far, you can enjoy following your vision and learn valuable skills. Many game developers started out playing with a concept for kicks with no hope of ever taking it to market.
I wrote my first game on a C64 in the late 80s. It was a text based adventure game written in BASIC, a fan tribute to Star Wars. Gave it to a few friends to play, then accidentally formatted the floppy with the source code. Oops. But I enjoyed writing it and it got me started as a programmer.
For the past 2 years my hobby project has been a Windows arcade style game, Sol, a sort of Galaga 3D. Not only has developing the game helped keep programming fun rather than just being wage-earning drudgery, but also I've learned marketable skills in graphics, interactive design, build systems, coding techniques, etc. After writing a video game from scratch, creating simple 3D GUIs and many other types of apps seems easy.
As an individual developer, you can write your own games. It would be tough to match the amount of creative content in commercial games: complicated levels and scenarios, large amounts of artistic graphics, hordes of characters, libraries of sound effects, etc. But you can create a game that is playable and fun. You can achieve the same sense of satisfaction as in the old days. If your design and marketing skills are good, you can sell your game and make money. Simple web-based or phone games are still within the reach of one developer. If the type of game you're creating would require a larger team, you can still be a lone wolf: create a playable prototype, then sell or license the concept to a game studio or publisher.
Check out the current prototype of Sol and some free screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/. Feedback welcome.
- Spike
Anyone who says it ain't has a date with me with a NES controller cord wrapped around my wrist in a dark alleyway.
Have you even seen the controllers for the Colecovision? My younger brothers will attest to the fact that those coiled cords can stretch for miles. When I'm done, you'll be trying to dial 911 on its numeric keypad.
Hell, you can bring your little Gyrobot, too.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think you're on crack.
I played Ultima III (first Apple ][, then C=64, then Ultima IV (C=64) Ultima V (Amiga and PC) and Ultima 6 (PC)
Great games, all of them. Pinnacle of the art at the time.
Then the torch was passed to Dungeon Master 1 and 2 (Amiga)
Then a loooooong dry spell.
Then Neverwinter Nights (Linux) which, while flawed in some ways, more than made up for it in others; particularly some of the community content.
And then I tried Oblivion... and I'm still hip-deep in it... and this is easily the best RPG since the Ultima days. There is some absolutely stellar writing in here, more quests than you can shake a stick at, and nearly unbelievable freedom of action. And it is freakin' GORGEOUS.
It's not perfect; the levelling and experience portions don't come off quite the way I think they were intended. There could be more variety in the voice acting. There could be more individuality in the cave systems etc - but those are minor quibbles for what has been, for me, the most immersive RPG in a very, very long time.
My wife will sit with me and watch me play - because to her, it's a movie to watch, and the story keeps her sucked in. What better endorsement than that?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
A very simple game, but, very intense. Hell, my friends and I still get a bad case of 'tennis elbow' after playing it for too long.
Same holds for some Artworx games...
Hmm. Pong vs. World Of Warcrack? (or even super mario bros.) I think I know where I stand on this one....
"I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)"
While it may be slightly off topic since I doubt they'd compare in any sense, but one thing I like about pinball is it -forces- you to be absolutely creative to accomplish what you're trying to get through in the game. Kinda like a movie where if you want something to happen, you have to find a way for it to happen, whereas with a cartoon you just make it happen. That's the way I see the difference between games and pinball, somethings are actually impossible in pinball, so it limits what you have to work with, so if you get an outstanding result its due completely to your own skill. In video games you can make anything happen.
That being said, I was never a real FAN of pinball, more of a console gamer, had a pinball machine at one time which was fun and all, but nothing spectacular. Recently I found (I live in Vegas) a pinball museum/arcade with about 250 games (and old machines, like Robotron you mentioned) which, with being able to play these things, machines from the 40s up to some brand new games, I've really grown to appreciate pinball as more of an art, and it's nice that it's different every time you play it. (oh and not to whore out an advert or anything, but more information is at http://pinballmuseum.org/ hey, it's for charity!)
And for some ON topic ranting, I love a lot of the new games, they're a lot of fun, but I always loved the old sierra games. Hero's Quest I, Space Quest, LSL. I loved those ones. They were tougher in a sense that you had to really think about stuff to know what to type where "pick up rock" "throw rock at target" "make thieve's guild sign" or whatnot, that and you couldn't just google "qfg1 walkthrough" if you got stuck either. I think the old games and the new games all have a lot of merit, there's a lot of genius in some of the old games, then again, some of the new stuff is a whole lot of fun and some require the same amount of thinking and puzzle solving, I think God of War had a lot of that to it.
It's quite the stretch going from me pointing out the inaccuracies of your post, to me being an egotist who's main goal was to advertise how "cool" I am. Who's assuming here? I'd also like to point out that you're the only one of the two of us who has called people who never played MUDs or BBS games 'idiots'. Pot, meet kettle.
The reality is that XBox Live and the introduction of voice communications to mainstream online gaming along with the profiteering of episodic content has, in my opinion, ruined gaming online. It's completely intolerable. It's AOLers getting access to usenet all over again. I don't understand how comparing interactive online entertainment to newer, higher bandwidth interactive online entertainment is comparing Apples to Oranges.
I'm right there with you on every point you made... except with regard to Outpost.
As far as I can tell, I'm one of three people in the world (I know the other two) who loved Outpost. I didn't just love Outpost- I was consumed by it, and it vacuumed up all of my free time for a year (amazingly, my then-girlfriend still ended up marrying me). I own both hint books for it, and at one time could quote spectral classes and distances to the major star systems in the game.
Admittedly I also never got the monorail to work, but for me at least that was the extent of my technical issues, and the rest of the game shined for me. In fact, less than a month ago I picked up a copy of the Mac version so I can play around with it on my PowerBook. It's not C&C 3, but given its age I think it's held up well.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I started in on computer games back in the days of the now-defunct magazine, Creative Computing. We (fellow geeks and I) used a PDP-8 in the high school computer room to enter (converting and modifying) BASIC and Fortran programs, saving them to 8-inch floppies. Some of us learned Assembler, just to speed up the games. We were lucky - some schools were using paper-tape. Anyway, there was always a feeling of accomplishment when we could devise a conversion from one dialect of BASIC into another, and then think of improvements, and implement those. Graphics were just ASCII on a 24x80 monochrome monitor, but it's all we knew, and it was wonderful. We used our minds in games like Wumpus, Adventure, Space Wars, and learned mathematics in programming various search-and-destroy games. What I see seriously lacking today is that the kids are just Users, not Programmers. It's as if the schools and society have lower expectations of youngsters. Many high school curricula on what they call Computer Science is nothing more than learning Microsoft Junk. No logic. No exploration. No accomplishment. Just entertainment.
you drive a car in GTA, right? so um, yeah.
/. article. You might figure out what I was saying, then.
I play UNO with cards and real people. I play a real guitar. I haven't heard of the rest of those games.
What I was saying is that game types have changed. You don't see a thread between Starcraft, Civ, MoM, XCom:TFTD, etc? One that is different than the popular games of today, sans a few games that MS puts out?
Sorry if you're too busy playing a pretend guitar to understand the difference...?
To me it's like pretty much everything else. Is "pop" today better/worse than "pop" 20 years ago? Well, it's not apples and apples..."pop" itself has changed. How do you compare Britney to INXS? The type of games we play now are different than the type we played "back in the day" so there's really no good way to compare them. Now, take that statement, and look at the
I think the industry has cycles.
I grew up with NES and SNES. I played Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake 1. When I picked up the N64, Counterstrike, PS2, ect, I was usually dissapointed. The controls were too difficult to learn, and the games weren't much better then what I grew up with. Even the fighting games didn't seem much better then Street Figher 2 or Mortal Combat.
Everything changed when I bought Zelda for the Wii. Each level is as immersive as an entire Zelda game on the original NES. It really is a true improvement over what I had when I was younger.
No, I will not work for your startup
I wouldn't want my kids to play the games of those cash-industry-guys... they manipulate the mind of their players to play on.. instead of making a good story, that makes you play on... they rather calculate the ratio of boringness and stress than creating something that is fun... they'r ill.. as their games are and their players will be....
Easier to be negative...
For example, the much anticipated Doom 3 was merely a complete rehash of Doom I, which was a marvel because low end boxes could do 3d.... but everyone expected something different gameplay wise with regards to Doom 3, and all it was was a pretty face on Doom I. Very sad.
Artwork and graphics definitely have taken precedence over gameplay (IMHO).
Savor those first hours with Oblivion, because it's the best game you've ever played for the first 10-15 hours. I remember when I first blew a goblin across a cave with a lightning staff, and how good that felt.
But once all the wonderment at the eye candy has worn off, you'll come to some sad realizations (which I won't name because I sincerely hope you enjoy it as long as you can). But by the end, at least if you're like me, you'll spend the last 10 hour's of the game invisible because you're so tired of it.
And btw on game balance issues, if you're invisible, NOTHING will see you. So you can literally run carefree through most of the "important" parts of the game- i.e. the gates (to no penalty as I might remind you level scaling ensures you don't need anything from them except maybe one good 25 frost damamge on hit stone). That earns Bethesda a big WTF.
Anyhow, cheers.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
But it does not translate well today. My buddies and I have one set up for nostalgia when we play poker. When someone goes out (runs out of money), they are sent to play Atari. It's fun for about 5 mins, but I find I kept swapping out cartridges hoping for the excitement of my youth. Never happens. I am not a "gamer", so I can only imagine how bored an avid gamer would be with Pac-Man, Combat, or Yars Revenge.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Most "retro" games are somewhat less involved than modern ones, especially in the action genre. You could start it up, play, and put it away. Now most of the games I play are still like that - The Burnout series, the Guitar Hero and Beatmania games, fighting games.
When I start a game and it goes "ok, now watch the makers' logos for 5 minutes. Now a 10 min opening movie! Now you start a game and... watch a 30 minute opening cutscene. Now walk around in a big empty 3D space looking for a clue. Now do some redundant tutorial bits for 45 minutes... now watch another cutscene! Now beat a boss... AND NOW YOU CAN SAVE YOUR GAME... Well, those games get tossed. I don't have time for that crap, regardless of how "good" the game might be when played in 3 hour sessions. I want gameplay, period. It's not much to ask, but it always gets diluted in the "creator's vision" of the game now. Maybe spending $3-5 million to make the game they figure they'd better pad it with enough filler to make X hours minimum playtime...
Were the games actually better? Well, no, of course not. I may be nostalgic, but I'm not stupid.
/.
RTFA guys..
Oh. Wait... this is
I personally consider World of Warcraft a great game. It's one of the first games I've played for more than a few days in years. I think it's enormous player base is a testament to how good a game it is.
I think there are just as much good games as there used to be, which means to me that good games average about one per year, maybe a little less. Different people would draw different lists of which titles would be that 1/year game. I don't even get around to playing a new game/year anymore, but there are some I have to pass on that are realy good.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The biggest complaint I have right now is the new/upcoming games are announced so far in advance of their release, and by the time you but the game, you've seen reviews, screenshots, movies, wallpapers, etc and there really isn't much to look forward too. There aren't any surprises left.
I think the N64 drove developers to acheive that balance of next-gen and old school gaming, because at the time it was fairly advanced so games could look good, but the limited cartridge space didn't inspire superfluous FMVs and such. Unfortunately, the high costs associated with cartridge manufacturing prohibited this balance from being used to its full potential and being used beyond a single generation. It's a pretty artificial (and quite possibly unfair) limitation, I know, but the match of high-quality visuals and SNES-style coexistence of complexity yet overall tautness made for some great games.
> Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?"
When the generation after mine got old enough to reminisce about how great Transformers were, or Micronauts, or god knows what, all stuff I was too old to be "into" when it was hot and original, I realized that nothing ever changed.
Nostalgia: The veneration of that which formed us.
There are kids who think of Halo as the hottest game evah! I could never get it, and I love many 3D games, especially online FPS games.
Sooner or later another will come along, and those kids will look at the Halo lovers and think, sheah right pops, do you start that thing with a crank?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Indeed ... fires up Doom. Hmm a thousand wads ... which shall I play???
We can go beyond opinion a little, too.
Classic arcades (my favs being Asteroids- most fun per megahertz, and a spaceship that behaves like it should, Xevious- most sweat when playing, Joust- best 2 player interaction and silly) needed to hook the player and entertain him for 3-10 minutes- of course champions went on for way longer but were a minority. Gameplay had to be optimized for enjoyment / time spent.
Nowadays games are kind of interactive movies where graphics kinda make you forget the old taste for playability per se, and they want to keep the player hooked. To justify the initial cost of buying the game or, worse, for the online live stuff. I gave up on them, can't afford three months of free time to finish deus ex.
They are a different experience anyway (the multiplayer dimension, and accurate 3d are awesome). Their educative potential is untapped. It would be nice to have a driving simulation with "reality mode" where after you crash you gotta go repair the car and have victims' lawyers at the door, a combat simulation where you get on the wheelchair for the rest of your life and so on. Instead of those parent advisory I'd put WARNING: unlike videogames, in life there is no second chance.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of BASIC at a time."
;-)...
Sorry, but not all of us were kids when the first video games came out
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
People wouldn't store 50+GB rom collections.
and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola.
I was a game programmer, back in the mid-eighties, and we did not subsist on doughnuts and any kind of "generic" cola. We drank only honest-to-God Mountain Dew and Jolt (all the sugar and twice the caffeine) Cola.
"Generic cola". Ha.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Reminds me of the old Sierra "... Quest" games where one wrong move would get you killed or trapped or otherwise cause you to lose the game for usually some silly, arbitrary reason.
That aside, I play both modern and classic games all the time. When I want a fun, fast action game, I still dig out Kabuki Quantum Fighter as often as not. I can sit down tonight with my genesis or snes and not see the light of day till I've run through a Phantasy Star or a Shining Force, or any snes Square game. Turn around and I've got God of War or StC running or any of the newer FF games, or a few people are over and it's any one of a slew of new and old multiplayer games: puzzle, sports or misc.
New or old, a game must be compelling for someone to play it, whether it's story, visuals or gameplay there is always a 'killer app' that draws a player back to a game.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
The problem with games is even the humor is programmed and ridiculous. Can you imagine Takeshi's Challenge coming out nowadays?
Xcom is still far superior to any other game in its genre out there. And Ultima IV was definitely a pinnacle.
Graphics have their role in story play... but if you can't take a current game and reduce it to blocky animations and find it fun, then the gameplay itself is fundamentally flawed. I would love to see how Gears of War and God of War stand up without the graphics. I think they would do okay. I don't think a lot of the sports games would do as well.
Let me preface this by pointing out the fact that I am 17.
I started out playing a SNES when I was five years old. I've never had more fun. The SNES was and continues to be my favorite game console.
Granted, I continue to buy new consoles and handhelds, but, fun though the Wii and DS may be, I really am not having as much fun as I was on the SNES, Genesis, and even the Playstation (not to mention old PC games like Starcraft and Diablo II). And Nintendo is the only company doing anything even CLOSE to beating those old systems.
I suppose the phrase "they just don't make 'em like they used to" applies here.
I'm surprised that nobody brought up the problem of "committee think" to this... Having one person control everything resulted in a more artistic effort, in the sense that it was a reflection of the individual. The creator's personality came through the game. The games I've been involved with all suffered from an abundance of compromise. Put 2 smart people together who are close friends and you can get a good team, put 20-50 people who barely know each other on something creative... you get crap. Obviously the good games today still manage to reflect a strong vision, somehow. Combine the lack of conceptual integrity with the broadening target markets and ugh... It's just different now I guess.
Helping my son to write a game on Scratch was one of the funnest things I've done in years. It reminded me of how much fun it all *should* be.
--
Franklin Brauner
... in that game companies had to focus on making gameplay mechanics interesting becuase they couldn't rely on graphics to sell the games. Most games today unfortunately are really focused on the graphicsal / cinematic angle a little too much. Although games like Gears of War give me a little hope where Cinematic presentation doesn't get in the way of *actual game play mechanics* you dont sacrifice gameplay to cinematic presentation.
Although at some point I think the game industry is getting dangerously close to boring its audience to death because they've allowed costs and their whole tech-obsessed culture to drive their costs out of control.
Graphics are ok, gameplay is better.
The truth is, I'm tired of many modern games. When RPG's evolved into MMO's they lost a whole heap of learned lessons from single player RPG's. Great gaming conventinos like town portal, and other travel-boredom reducing items were purposely broken to extend "the game" in MMO's. Most MMO's are bad singleplayer RPG's wrapped in semi-decent to good graphics. I can barely tolerate World of warcraft as it is. The monsters are too far and in between, the variety is severely lacking and they are for the most part too dispersed for a *game*.
After playing a game like God of War or God of War 2 and then playing a game like WoW where everything you character does is automatically controlled by the computer and way too much time is spent simply doing nothing but boring navigating. You can see that gaming has taken a step back in major ways...
I feel the game industry is getting closer to peddling useless merchandise that people buy but never play or really enjoy, then actual games. The expansion packs for Guild wars in my opinion are the two biggest signs that made be even more suspicious of "expansions" to original games.
God, yes.
Back in the days, you got a manual. Some might say now "Because you needed it to understand the friggin' controls", but at least it was a manual worth that name. Pages and pages of content, statistics, background stories, whatever. Especially strategy games (especially the historical kind) often came with tomes, filled with information.
Today the "manual" is a folded card with installation instructions. If (rarely, but occasionally) they went through the hassle of actually writing a few words, it comes as a PDF on the DVD.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Here's the ultimate question: Was the game fun? That is all that really matters. You can have all the story line you want, the best graphics in the world, but if it isn't fun to play, then it's no god damn good now is it? Ocarina Of Time is PHENOMINAL game with an awsome story line, great graphics(for the time), and was an absolute BLAST to play. Then again, so was the original Super Mario. Both games are a complete blast to play over and over again. But they are nowhere near the same game. The true questions are: Was it fun back in the day? and Is it still fun now? If you can answer "Yes" to both, then it is a great game...
great song
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/
"Stellar writing"...? Where!? Name one scene. After the opening bit it was "go get this, go kill that. Don't bother me until you do it."
Quantity != quality. What I found playing 50-60 hours of the damned thing (I ended up just playing it to kill time. Great way to kill time is go close a portal which become a sleep-walking affair after awhile) is that 90% of the quests were low-quality filler of the fetch-n-slash variety. No story to figure out an immerse in.
And why does freedom of action == interesting? There's no time pressure in the game. I literally abandoned the main quest for like a year in game time. What's the point? Yeah, pretty graphics, but so do a lot of games. Hell, Assassin's Creed blows the doors of Oblivion. You haven't convinced my of anything.
And the "conversation" part where you sweet talk characters into telling you things becomes PAINFULLY tedious after about the 10th time you do it. It's so ridiculously simple and automatic that I wonder who had the bright idea to put that into the game. I just got one of the Charm spells and saved myself half an hour of buttering up per character. Also, the weapon system sucks. Magic weapons deplete so damn fast and it's really, really hard to find any kind of non-magic weapon that's useful in the higher quests. You waste so much time doing the Oblivion equivalent of gold farming I just got bored and uninstalled it because I got "Company of Heroes" which actually IS an interesting game to play.
Did I mention the sheer tedium? The game play is largely doing the same things over and over again until you can do them in your sleep. Need to close a portal? Give me a couple hours and it's as good as done. And the tedium of going from place to place. Not to bad if you've visited there before (the map lets you click on a location and elapse the clock appropriately), but if I have to do another stupid @#$! sweep-n-search mission, I'm gonna HURT someone. I never thought I'd say this, but Diablo II gets pure RPG action right. And the story is a hell of a lot more interesting than Oblivion's so-called story.
Immersed in what!? Oooh, a large world I can roam around in! I bet you find Second Life absolutely riviting.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Eh, everything was better "Back in the Day".
yes it was better.
much better.
Settle down, Beavis. Not everybody likes the same games. Nobody is trying to convince you to like Oblivion. For some people it's the best thing since sliced bread. It doesn't mean they're retards.
I'm of the opinion that the early game designers had to work more on making gameplay itself FUN since they had so little in the way of tech to work with.
It's an easy argument to make, but I think it's a little misguided. Sure, the technology of the day was less than we have now, but there were plenty of people trying to push it and squeeze the most out of any system they were working on. Whether it was writing better AI routines for enemies (Moebius on the C=64), finding out new ways of improving graphics (Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga was a graphical wankfest of a 'game'), or emulating speech synthesis in systems that had no speech synthesiser (on the Spectrum, I forget the game), there were programmers wanting to do things with the hardware that no one else had managed.
We still see this today, as it is persistent in the gaming world. It may not seem like it, but that's because everything looks better than it used to on the older platforms. It's 'easier' to create a game that has great graphics and sound, but there are still people who want to push the envelope one way or another, like with Doom 3 for example. There are also people who want to create fun games, like Introversion.
I think the only thing that has really changed is the technology, which allows developers to create games that are better looking and sounding than their predecessors. The same could, and probably was, said about going from 8-bit to 16-bit gaming platforms, and from the early consoles to the 8-bit computers. There will always be fun games, just as there will always be technology demos presented as games.
Ocarina of Time was absolutely amazing. It brought back all of the wonder missing in adventure games that I played as a youngster. My son was three when we started playing it. For his 9th birthday, I bought him an actual ocarina and it was his most favorite present.
Yes, people get caught up in nostalgia, but it is true that there are not as many wonder-inducing games being created nowadays. How old is Ocarina of time now?
strike
(captcha is luxury)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_in_video_gaming vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_in_video_gaming
Oblivious is the most hyped and crappiest rpg I have ever had the disgrace of playing. Once you go past the candy it starts tasting really really stale. Lots of quests? I imagine people will have to play a bit more games to get tired of the "yet another errand boy game". So what is obvlivion? It is a beautiful landscape where you can walk around and go into really tedious caves (go play Arena: TES and come back) that are all the same, idiotic NPCs (more than a decade later Ultima hasn't been surpassed), "quests" for retards, crappy railroadeded game design that has been attempted to be hidden through open spaces. Lets not forget the insta appearing omniscient guards, or the brilliant GOOD DAY! HOW ABOUT THAT! GOOD DAY! spam dialogue that's supposed to be "inmersive" and a breakthough. Or horses.. I'll stop now, its too painful.
Oblivious has proven without doubt that a really dumb and broken game can be seen as a brilliant masterpiece by licensing the state of the art eyecandy engine around (the one used to generate the landscape). You only have to look at the game script editor to see the mindnumbing "intelligence". State of the art my ass. This is 2007, not 1990. I can't understand what the programmers have been spending their time on.
Did Ultima V allow players to create their own modules? To have persistent multi-player modules? Could players hack the story or the mechanics of Ultima V? UT wasn't meant to have a story, it's a killfest. Try to compare apples to apples. UT prolly should have LESS story than it did.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Some genres from "back in the day" hardly exist anymore, and there are some new ones that we didn't have when we were kids. This isn't news. The classics will get improved upon if they are still marketable. Take the "breakout" genre for example. People are still making play-alikes (not clones necessarily) and there are some really high-quality flash-based ones out there. It's funny that the only games we had as kids are now known as "casual games". They live on now with a wider audience than before, really.
Civilization is an excellent turn-based strategy game and a new one came out recently (Civ IV & Warlords expansion). I'm sure there are several other good ones.
Whuddayaknow, here's a list of graphic adventure games. :)
Examples of stellar writing?
OK, how about the quest where buddy sucked himself into his painting, and you have to go in and rescue him - complete with the game world rendered using an oil-painting shader?
How about the quest where you follow the merchant back to his supplier, and discover he's (unknowingly) buying stuff from a grave robber?
How about figuring out how to infiltrate the Mythic Dawn stonghold - after which the word goes out and their sleeper cells start activating and hunting you down?
It's not the *game's* fault if you lack imagination and turned it into just a "timekiller". I've never had to "gold farm" in Oblivion, and once you get the refillable soul gem thingy, keeping magic weapons powered up isn't a problem - just enchant a weapon with a 1 second soul trap on strike in addition to whatever effect you want.
And you complain about repetition, and then uphold CoH as the antidote? I enjoyed CoH as well, but once I played through the official campaign, there hasn't been been any reason to revisit it - it's just the same old same old capture the point, build the resource grind.
I'm not claiming that Oblivion is *perfect* but it is very, very good. Me and my wife are enjoying the hell out of it, and it is laying the groundwork for future games in a similar vein the same way Ultima did.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Katamari Damashii, PS2, the yoshi game for Nintendo DS, "secret code, two memories" for DS, Electroplankton, DS. Animal Crossing, DS. any Wii game. Yes I'm sort of a Nintendo Fan. I still miss Syndicate, Myst, and Doom2 and Monkey Island is still the best game series ever made and to be made
Those 2d computer games were based on board games. The 2d console games were based on arcade games.
The major problem with 3d games is that they tried to become cinematic experiences. The game industry then began to imitate the Hollywood business model (and they complain about skyrocketing costs!?).
3d gaming was good for the FPS and any game using the first person perspective. But 3d gaming really saved racing games. Before 3d, racing games were in a top down perspective (where you could hardly see the road) or from the back in a 'Pole Position' type view which looked corny.
But other than that, I agree with you about 3d gaming making games less fun. From observing how young people play 3d gamers, they don't really PLAY them, they prefer to "soak" into them like a hot tub, to immerse themselves in the 'environment' and all. It is entirely a cinematic experience for them.
We, old schoolers, play games simply TO PLAY. But they, the new schoolers, play to FINISH THE STORY. We used to jump from one game back to another. They just keep one game in their system and tend to play it until they beat it (and then toss it aside for a long while and maynot ever play it again). We loved hard games and bragged, "I got to level 5! I got to level 5!" They love easy games that are LONG and they say, "I have put in 30 hours already!"
Listen to PS3 and Xbox 360 gamers for a moment. They are obsessed with immersiveness, of creating an electronic bath for them to "soak up". They look at the old school games and shrivel with horror. "How could you be immersed in that!?" To them, games are not meant to be played but only to be *felt*.
I purchased a copy of Oblivion hoping to enjoy some time in another world. I asked for the advice of people at Best Buy and some other stores and was assured Oblivion was great. I was just getting interested after a few minutes when I was torn apart by rats. After a while it came to me I would have to learn to hack and slash if I wanted to survive long enough to experience the Oblivion world. The thing is, I am not a hack and slash kind of guy. The violence puts me off. Games for me would have to be fun. Losing is OK, dying is bad. Having more fun if you can be more nimble and clever is good. Games intended to be fun should allow for players at all levels of experience and talent. I am really hoping that I haven't made a mistake buying a game console and that I will eventually find games that aren't first person shooters. I purchased two driving games. In one, gangs were after me, and in the other, I scored -1 because I didn't kill anybody. I am still waiting for the "fun" part.
Don't get me wrong, I play modern and classic games regularly - but it feels like most protagonists you control after in games produced after 1999 don't engage me as much.
- future(and-also-past).
I'll use Half-Life as an example. It's hard to pass off your FPS protagonist as a strong afterthought after you leave a game, but heck, Gordon didn't even speak but he had depth.
Now, I don't want to state a modern FPS because I don't want to upset anybody, but it feels like companies are just trying to impress too many demographics at once, which gives you Mr. Uber-strong-but-gentle-war&peace-machine-from-the
It wasent better, it was just fresher
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
I'm definitely with you to some extent. Some of the old games are amazing and Tempest is one of the best. The speed of that game is outstanding. However, I played a game a handfull of years ago for the PS1 called N2O that was kind of a modern day version of Tempest with a soundtrack by Crystal Method. I don't think that it ever sold that well but it blew the socks off of Tempest. Sometimes the integration of the higher end graphics and good sound onto an otherwise elegant concept can really add a lot to the experience. The problem is adding lots of flash onto a crap idea doesn't stop the crap from stinking.
Well...I've been going back and playing a lot of old games, and think that games in the 80s and 90s were in general much better than modern games. People keep telling me to chalk it up to childhood innocence...so I went back, and I played them through.
:p
Action-Adventure. Legend of Zelda vs. Diablo 2: Zelda, hands down. Hell, the opening booklet has more plot than D2 ever will, and play control in D2 is just horrid. People played it because it was The Bandwagon Game. Funny thing is, Zelda was the bandwagon game back in its day, but...it was a lot better. Much can be said for Diablo 2's magic item system, but when you get down to it...everything does the same thing. Items in Zelda always had different and interesting functions, and could do more than just waste bad guys. Diablo in general missed out on that.
Fighting. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo vs. Capcom vs SNK 2: Super Turbo. There's a reason there's a remake coming, and that's because it's hands-down the more balanced and more interesting game. CvS2 has a reasonably wide upper tier, but they still put half the characters in the useless bin, and that's with their "best" groove option. Out of over 1000 possible team/groove combination choices, you know how many you see in tournaments? Oh, about a dozen, two dozen tops. Super Turbo...well, go watch what happened at X-Mania last year, when two guys with Old T.Hawk came 4th place...in a 3-player tournament. "Bottom Tier" indeed - Super Turbo prides itself on having such narrow tiers. Newer games don't care, regardless of who made 'em.
Space Sim. Wing Commander Privateer vs. Freelancer: Priv wins hands down. All Freelancer, with its terrible controls and thrown-together plot has over one of the progenitors of this genre is some flashy graphics and nice meshes, and Wing Commander Universe (a fan-remake using the new Vega Strike engine) is even going to beat it at that.
Flight Sim. Honestly...I haven't played a modern jet sim, so I can't tell you. Last one I've played was F-19 Stealth Fighter back in the 80s...and I STILL look back fondly on that game, having played it again on my old DOS rig a few years ago. I doubt there's anything that handles aerial stealth missions like that engine did...and if there is, I WANT IT.
Turn-based Strategy. Warlords 2 vs. Fire Emblem 8: Uhmmm...ouch. Warlords 2 wins for combat engine and an excellent system of control and mechanics. Fire Emblem wins on graphics and storyline. Music is a tie. I give it to Warlords because I've never come up with a way to play strip Fire Emblem, and a game that gets my girlfriend naked is a winner for sure.
Real-Time Strategy. Starcraft vs. Dawn of War: We know where everyone's siding on this one. If you want to go back farther, Red Alert and even the original C&C kick the crap out of DoW...and don't get me started on how fun Z is.
Raw, brutal ACTION. DOOM vs. Unreal Tournament 2004: Sorry, but UT takes this one. Shooters have come a long way, and nothing's really been pure "classic". I won't put Duke up here, because it's in a category of its own.
Adventure. Full Throttle vs. Anything: Goodbye, whatever. Full Throttle is the best adventure game ever made, go play it. Arguments for Monkey Island and Grim Fandango will be heard, but we all know pre-1998 Lucasarts rules the world of adventure and probably will for decades to come.
RPG. The category most of you weeaboos are waiting for me to "huzzah" for Final Fantasy in. Guess what? IT'S NOT HERE.
Fallout 2 vs. Oblivion: Sorry, but Fallout 2 kicks the shit out of Oblivion by just being cooler story-wise. The engine's not bad in FO2 either, and patches and improvements along the way only made a better game. Oblivion? I don't think anyone's going to give a crap about it in two years, they'll move on to the new shiny thing. Fallout 2? Damn, that game's 10 years old, and it's still kicking ass and chewing bubblegum.
Oh, and if you want me to mention Final Fantasy, FF6 > FF4 > newer crap. People could ALMOST writ
I'm old enough to have grown up with DOS and 8-bit Nintendo, but the reason I stopped playing a lot of games has as much to do with them getting less interesting as it does with me getting older.
On the FPS front, I played Doom, Wolfenstein, Heretic, and Duke. By the time I got to Doom II, I was getting bored. Run around, shoot stuff, get blown up in a frenzy and come back to life. When Quake came out I was horrified, I thought "the only color this game has is brown." Team Fortress and shopping mall mods kept me going for a while, but ultimately a homemade shopping mall couldn't replace the settings of Duke.
On the RPG front, the last game I played was FF7. That game was so popular, we talked about it in bars. But after 40-60 hours of collecting orbs and attaching them to weapons, I realized Yuffie was stronger than everyone, and the orbs didn't do jack.
WOW is nothing more than Ultima VI - that was 15 years ago. People who play WOW are fascinated by the idea that they can level up, grow their stats, carry weapons and armor. No kidding! WOW proves that Ultima in 1992 had the right idea.
Zelda I, II, and SNES were hardcore action games. You got into fights, and you died. Look how that turned out. In Zelda 64, you wandered around an empty plain and rode a horse.
The Gamecube doesn't even have a Mario game. It has Super Smash Bros. The best game of all time, Mario 64, never had a sequel. Not even bonus levels. Mario 64 just got dropped, like it never happened.
The best Castlevania game of all time, SOTN, is still 2-D. A decent 3D Castlevania game never happened. You could see that in the 3D era, the programming was getting much, much harder.
Super Mario Bros was a more revolutionary game than anything released in 2005, although Guitar Hero is not a bad contender.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
And what about Tetris? The Oregon Trail? Ghosts and Goblins? Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Gauntlet? On the other hand, the vast majority of what was released in 2005 was yet another sequel.
I am teh(the) noob(not noob) cheese(human).