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E3 2015: A Lot of Nostalgia For Old Games
_xeno_ writes: E3 2015 saw a lot of game companies banking on nostalgia, but much less hype for new games. While the biggest thing coming out of Microsoft's press conference was undoubtedly the Hololens, the biggest buzz from E3 was probably Sony's announcement of Square Enix's announcement of a remake of a two decade old game (Final Fantasy VII), seconded by the announcement of a sequel to a fifteen year old game (Shenmue). Nintendo announced mostly new sequels as well. Ultimately, though, it isn't surprising that the biggest buzz is around old games. Old games are a known quantity, while truly new games are — well, new. Who knows if they're going to be the next classic or not?
Well, it's worked really well for Hollywood, if by really well, you mean a safe bet but nothing groundbreaking
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Yeah, you missed a few huge ones, Fallout 4 released announced with date.
Doom remake announced, with game footage.
Why you skip Bethesda for those other crap games?
"Transform your world with holograms. Microsoft HoloLens, together with Windows 10, brings high-definition holograms to life in your world." I don't normally say this, but this is idiotic. Suddenly we're erroneously calling Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality holographic despite the fact that these systems have been around for years? Making a good AR system would be a significant contribution without mislabelling it as a marketing gimmick. A hologram in the physical sense involves recording a light field, and in the popular/science fiction sense it involves projecting three dimensional objects in space so that everyone can see them -- not projecting things into a particular person's eyes through a headset so that only they can see them (which has been done for decades). To the best of my knowledge we still have no idea how to make a three dimensional "holographic" projection in the popular/science fiction sense.
They are making a sequal to shenmue?
Are they at least going to release the previous two parts on PC?
Also, sequals can be fun under certain circumstances.
For instance: shenmue was written with a story spanning multiple games.
GTA franchise just has a completely seperate story each time with similar gameplay elements.
There is a reason this works.
It's the same reason tv series and book series work.
People read something and they want to know more about that particular universe.
Can't come up with originals, so do what had already been done 20 years ago. They can just refractor some old code, string search and replace 1983 with 2015 and bam! You suckas gonna pay!
Seriously though...I've been dying to play Oregon Trail on my 4K Trash 80! Later bitches!
Hipsters (aka Millennials) are into "nostalgia". With hipsters now making up the largest demographic group, thanks to more and more Baby Boomers starting to die off, it's no wonder that the producers of all sorts of products, from clothing to food to video games, targets this group of people. It's where the profit is to be made. If they like faux old shit, then give them faux old shit!
Mod me off-topic, but wtf is happening to /.? I haven't been able to log in for at least two weeks, lots of ads when I was signed in (with excellent karma), now a "share" button instead of the comment count. And don't get me started about the new, "dumbed down", non-controversial stories being posted. And now /. is too ashamed of most stories low comment count (compared to before the big backlash to 'New-Slashdot' occured.
I'm a five plus year user/ contributor here, but it's a weird vibe I've been getting here lately...
When Jumpman or Racing Destruction Set comes out.
Star Wars are also a good example of this endless rerun of the same old but known franchises.
you are now THAT old.
Let me share this:
.comment-bubble, .popularity {
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
display: none !important;
}
}
Nothing speaks louder than a deafening silence.
Going live in 3, 2, 1 ...
Put a share icon in the upper right, like everyone else does. Don't replace "read comments" with "share".
Jeez Dice, why are you trying so hard to drive your users away?
I played Jetpac on an Xbox One at E3 yesterday, which looked exactly like it did on the ZX Spectrum.
And Cuphead looks unchanged from the original 30's version.
If only some group could bring back one of the old versions 2.3, 2.5 or 2.8.5 combined with bringing back the thousands of players they used to have online any time of day I would be happy.
I would even take the v3 before they crippled it, put flares on all players backpacks and the players all left.
Who would of thought people would enjoy sequels to long beloved intellectual properties?
Star Wars VII set to make millions? Colour me surprised. Do people really still see games as something 'other' from traditional mainstream entertainment?
The new Doom really shows this nostalgic trend all by itself. The gameplay footage shows that they were definitely looking to approximate the feel of the original even to the point of abandoning more contemporary elements (regenerating health, weapon inventory limit). It will be interesting to see how the retro gameplay is received by younger gamers who haven't played the original, and whether this kind of nostalgia will affect the way that future, new franchises are designed.
On a side note, the game looks pretty awesome and brings me back to my childhood, but I will personally miss the survival horror style of Doom 3.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
2015. Also the year for nostalgia for the old slashdot without the dumb Share button after every story.
Square finally gave into the fanboys for the FF7 remake? They've resisted it for years because they didn't think they could make money at it, and with how pricy modern graphics are I tend to agree. Maybe Sony backed it as a marketing stunt...
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Call me a Bioware whore, but the best news out of EA was the new Mass Effect and the class-driven expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Just saying. Barely gave any shits to the FF7 remake because it's a silly idea...
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
Yes, but the new Holographic Oregan Trail includes multi-layered story features. It will take whatever country the GPS says you're in and correct classic story features to suit your present whereabouts. For instance, "You just died of dysentery" can now be, "You just died of Ebola", or "You just died because the police officer thought your Pez dispenser was a taser."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The topic is about E3's love of nostalgia and you didn't even mention Mario Maker..!? That is a game specifically about... nostalgia!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Attack of the Mutant Camels FTW! That is all.
The long held dream of Privateer 3/Wing Commander: Online is what started all this. Frankly it's a good thing. Many old games deserved good HD remakes. Remaking a Dos game using HD is like reshooting a black and white film in Colour. Nothing wrong with that. The main thing to ensure is that the originals aren't trampled with too many modernisms. Dune2000 was a lot better than Dune 2. I'd like to see more of the old artwork adapted/modernised same with music. Some games had excellent soundtracks that deserve a refresh like street fighter 2.
What's the hate over the 'share' button? To me it makes sense to have all the hyperlinks together, even if it isn't tradition.
What annoys me is the disappearance of the 'read comments' link. It's not obvious that the title bar is a hyperlink. Worse, they take one link off the title bar and put different one on it. What is the fucking point? Dice is deliberately emphasizing the "Tell your us your friend's names" links and de-emphasizing the subscriber's comments. We went through this with Slashdot beta: The subscriber's comments are the point of Slashdot, not a summary page of white-space and adverts. Now they're sneaking their dumb white-space typography into the traditional Slashdot home page.
Some old games really are better if you like a certain type of game mechanics. For instance if you like crpgs with tactical combat there just isn't much being made like that now. The console gamers prefer a different type of game and that is the type that is being made now most of the time. Faster, twitchier, and imo more repetitive. Popamole. I guess it's really more about faster non-tactical combat that is the problem for players like me. I prefer combat that is more like chess where you have to carefully consider all of your moves and search for an optimal set of moves to win.
I am currently playing Icewind Dale for instance. If you like that type of game there really is not much out there anymore. I have had to resort to replying Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale I and II, Planescape Torment, Temple of Elemental Evil, Fallout I and II, and Arx Fatalis just because these sorts of games just aren't being made anymore. I suppose the most recent games that I like are Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and Fallout 3: New Vegas.
I can't speak for everyone, but I don't have any nostalgia for games just because they are old. I don't seek out the first games I played from the late 70s like Super Star Trek that I played on my friend's DEC PDP-11 or text adventures like Colossal Cave or Zork or Atari 2600 games like Adventure or Combat. I don't care about the games from the early 80s like Archon, Castle Wolfenstein, Crush Crumble and Chomp, and Choplifter either. Yes I used to love playing them. They were fun to play at the time when nothing else was available, but I would have much rather played modern games with their far superior graphics. There are games that I know I would enjoy replaying but can't due to the graphics. Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8 for instance I used to really enjoy but can't anymore and of course games like those are not being made anymore either.
Only certain types of gamers are being catered to now. Only certain play styles. If you are not one of those people you have no choice but to replay old games if you want to play computer games at all. It's not nostalgia. It's desperation for any computer game you can actually enjoy and that means saying no to popamole twitch style combat if that isn't what you like. If I actually want that style and sometimes I do it is easy to find, but what about a more thoughtful style where you carefully plan your moves? You just don't see it much at least in crpgs.
There are some smaller independent and mostly crowdfunded developers now that are at least claiming to try to cater to that style of play but so far there hasn't been much in that regard and at least one attempt, Pillars of Eternity, failed utterly in terms of the combat imo. It ended up playing more like Dragon Age: Origins or other modern Bioware games. Again, catering to what the majority of gamers like despite being funded by gamers like me who wanted something that played more like Icewind Dale or Baldurs Gate II.
It is unfortunate that some developers seem convinced that nostalgia is everyone's reason for replaying old games because then you end up with games that intentionally go backwards and try to emulate things that were done solely because they had to be done that way because computers were so much slower or because rendering techniques at the time just weren't advanced enough. They are copying not only the good things about the older games but the limitations as well. I'm sure the developers who actually made those games would have loved to have been able to use more realistic graphics and smooth, continuous movement, but they didn't really have the choice back then.
This is the danger of attributing our love for older games to nostalgia. Maybe for some people that is all it is and they are perfectly happy with modern games, but that is not always the reason.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Games don't get worse as they age. Don't hundreds of years of chess and poker teach us that? How about Scrabble or Monopoly? Is Tetris no longer fun? Prettier graphics aside, if games are outdated after a few years, they're either poor games to begin with, or the game was deliberately designed to be obsolete and no longer fun after you "solved" it, or it's a completely illusory perception encouraged by game makers who want to sell you more stuff.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance by makers of Mafia, Operation Flashpoint, ARMA and others.
Try converting BASIC Games into a modern programming language. I'm doing that with Python to learn the finer points of the language while remembering the tricks needed to get PITA BASIC to work back in the day.
Instead of doing countless ports and remakes of FF7, how about giving us Einhänder 2?
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I don't game much anymore. Too much other stuff takes my time, but it does appear that gaming is reaching a point that it cannot sustain itself as it has for several years now. The numbers say its shrinking not expanding and with some gaming developers either doing less game titles, or simply getting out of it altogether. Its pretty clear that the costs has become a negative for everyone involved. From the game developer to the end user who needs frequent hardware upgrades to keep up with the complexity of the games. My personally view is that I would enjoy getting back into gaming more if titles were cheaper and they ran well on cheaper hardware. This too me seems like a no brainer as plenty of smartphone people seem very happy playing those cheap games on a small screen.
The question has become, does everyone really want the high resolution games with all the bells and whistles? Or is there a ignored market of low and mid level hardware users that might buy more games if their systems ran them?
From the vectorpoem page: "Contrast all this with Doom Guy, who runs at about 50 scale miles per hour – nonsensically fast by modern standards."
This incidentally is one thing Doom shares with Animal Crossing. I measured the outdoor run speed of the AC villager as 1 cell per 16 frames (at 60 fps). To transform this to scale, I assumed an acre of 16 cells on a side, as the GameCube version's menus imply. (The DS and Wii versions abandon rapid scrolling at acre boundaries, but they have graphical artifacts where the river crosses a 16x16 cell boundary, and the DS version's save file was discovered to store the outdoor map as a 4x4 grid of 16x16 cell units rather than a flat 64x64 cell map.) A real-world acre is defined as 43,560 square feet, or about 4,047 square meters, meaning an outdoor cell represents roughly 4 meters on a side. So we have enough information to convert cells per frame to familiar metric units: 1/16 * 4 * 60 = 15 m/s; 15 * 60 * 60 / 1000 = 54 km/h.
The other thing Doom shares with Animal Crossing is the game ID. Doom for Game Boy Advance is AGB-ADME, while Animal Crossing: Wild World for Nintendo DS is NTR-ADME (standing for Doubutsu no Mori, lit. "Animal Forest", the Japanese name of the AC series).
small mailbox here...
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Hey - it worked for Hollywood.
The greatest game of all time: http://www.newser.com/story/18...
"While the biggest thing coming out of Microsoft's press conference was undoubtedly the Hololens" False
The biggest thing coming out of Microsoft's press conference was xbox ones backwards compatability. More nostalgia.
Isn't what it used to be...