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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.
"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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.'"
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.
Certain genres are lacking today though. Try and find a good adventure game, or a good turn-based strategy game. 10-15 years ago there were plenty of quality options to choose from, and today there are few, if any. Platformers have also suffered, but to a lesser extent. Enough, though, that re-releases of old Castlevania and Super Mario Brothers games are best sellers *now*.
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)
There are quite a few turn based strategy games: Advance wars (GBA, DS), fire emblem(GBA, GC and Wii), field commander(PSP), Disagea(PS2), final fantasy tactics 2 is on the way
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.
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
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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If you like turn based games you've probably already heard of it, but in case you haven't check out: Battle of Wesnoth Lots of fun, and it's free.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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.
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."
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!
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
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.
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
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
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!
### I'm not sure how you even expect there to be anything new in such a narrowly defined genre.
Look at Gish, LittleBigPlanet or YoshisIsland, there is a lot you can do with physics that you couldn't do in any of the earlier Marios. The jump'n run genre is far from being out of ideas, it just happens that few care to but them into action.
### As for your dislike of the double jump,
Double jump simply isn't fun, its a stupid low cost workaround for bad camera work, so that I can correct a jump mid-air when it doesn't turn out as intended. Its just lazyness on the side of the developer, proper game balancing such as seen in Mario64 wouldn't need a double jump. The presence of a doubte jump simply is a clear signal that somebody didn't care enough, and well, most platformers have them these days, even the few 2D ones.
To elaborate some more, the fun in jump'n runs comes in large part from the speed and chaining of actions, the double jumps however destroys both, since it takes the speed out of a jump and it also makes chaining rather boring, since hitting an enemy just is way easier with a double jump instead of a single one. Double jumps simply destroys the single most important element: the jumping.
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
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