Retro Gaming: Why Was It So Better Back Then?

Just a place to post declarations of love for gaming of old, revisionist history, examples of why modern gaming sucks, etc.

Also jokes like this

http://www.geekologie.com/2010/05/06/mario-1.jpg
http://www.geekologie.com/2010/05/06/mario-6.jpg
http://www.geekologie.com/2010/05/what-if-super-mario-bros-was-m.php

thought this thread was going to take a different turn - why are the memories of playing those games so much better than the actual games?

not to trash Mario 64 at all but I was actually kind of stunned replaying the game at the age of 25 and realizing that all the worlds were so much smaller than I had remembered

Oh yes, totally, please put those up!

The idea for this thread came last night when i was playing Castlevania on NES and was breezing through until i got to a point where flying Medusa heads kept knocking me off platforms to my death. It was so intensely frustrating and i went through three continues before just giving up entirely. Older games were harder than new games in most every respect, but I for one am glad that is the case. In many ways the difficulty of those games is just due to arbitrary cheapness. On the other hand once you have played through the same section a dozen times and have developed a sixth sense for the exact machine timing of the obstacles and can finally dodge it with ninja skills it is EXTREMELY gratifying to say that you have conquered in an hour what amounts to 2 or 3 screens worth of game world.

Infinitely respawning enemies (which always seem to resurrect the moment they leave your line of sight) is one part of old games I am pretty glad doesn't exist anymore. I'm trying to imagine a modern version of this but it's quite difficult.

I blame nintendo for doing whatever they're currently doing instead of making games for smartphone

games suck because they're designed by people who think that if they make this next cutscene really cool roger ebert will appreciate them

yeah there are a lot of things about say, the original TMNT game that I'm glad we don't have anymore

back in those days the carts could barely hold enough information for 30-40 minutes of gameplay if the game was easy!

if I'm not going for dumb jrpg comfort food, I want something that I can pick up and play and start having fun pretty much right away. no soul-draining tutorials. this is the way games were (mostly) designed in the past and modern games (mostly) aren't intuitive enough to work this way anymore.

also first person shooters suck and are lame and boring

Those classic Nintendo games are crap compared to a masterpiece like Dig Dug.

polyphonic otm

What's the story to Monopoly? Who is the banker? How did all those properties end up on the board? You don't know and you don't need to know, and yet Monopoly is still fun.

FPS are not lame. Doom & Doom II changed my life, and probably staved off many more school massacres than it was said to inspire. Personally I was an intensely anti-social teen with lots of medical & psychological problems and going home and playing videogames is literally the only thing that kept me from getting into drugs, crime, or suicide. Well, videogames and music.

I really hate how in old games when you get hit you fly backwards, uncontrollably. This is something that doesn't ever seem to happen in new games. You get hit, the screen goes red and gets covered in blood, and you just have to use the cover mechanic until your health is recharged. What if in Skyrim a Draugar hit you and sent you flying across the room?

i'm the most nostalgic gamer of all, but overall, games are way better now. feel like i made this same argument in one of the TV threads...

I don't like FPS's in general as they're all so samey and frustrating in their own ways, but I do have a soft spot for Timesplitters 2, which IMO was one of the few FPS games that really got the balance right, so to speak

I love RPG's but the characters in those old ones WALK SO SLOW. Like you probably spend as much time just leaving buildings as you do actually fighting monsters.

http://kotaku.com/5982367/here-are-the-top-30-games-japanese-gamers-are-looking-forward-to-in-2013

gameses

I really hate how in old games when you get hit you fly backwards, uncontrollably. This is something that doesn't ever seem to happen in new games. You get hit, the screen goes red and gets covered in blood, and you just have to use the cover mechanic until your health is recharged. What if in Skyrim a Draugar hit you and sent you flying across the room?

clearly you never ran up on a giant in Skyrim

older games were better because when i played those i was a kid, now i'm an adult and i don't care about video games

what needs to stop is new games that use the same look and feel as old 16-bit games, there's a way to make something graphically simple without literally looking like it came out of the SNES era guys

There were a few articles pointing out that lag time in modern console to HDTV hookups destroyed shootemups.
But we can play arkanoid with google glasses now so it's a draw?

ok glass, move paddle to the right
ok glass, move paddle to the right
ok glass, move paddle to the left
ok glass, move paddle to the right
ok glass, move paddle to the left
ok glass, move paddle to the right
ok glass, move paddle to the left
ok glass, move paddle to the left
ok glass, move paddle to the left
ok glass, move paddle to the right
ok glass, move paddle to the left

older games were better because when i played those i was a kid

older games were better because i had the time to sit there for many hours on end, without any guilt

^^^yeah

There were a few articles pointing out that lag time in modern console to HDTV hookups destroyed shootemups.

you mean if you hook an old console up to an hdtv, right? that never really works right for me but cave ports on xbox 360 or w/e seem smooth & responsive to me

Maybe it's outputting at native resolution on Xbox so it's better? There's still issues with just rhythm/music games getting out of sync as well.

haha my guilt was crushing! i mean it's worse now, sure.

OK, giants, Skyrim, bad example ;-) At least they don't respawn immediately after you kill them and leave.

Old games are sort of like Pavlovian training rituals. A player death can happen at any instance, and at times you are confronted with a unforgiving puzzles, with dole out just a little more game. Feeding the sprites and background art slowly over time in response to learning the game systems. Modern games WANT us to LOVE them SO MUCH they cram themselves in our face with STORY and VOICEOVERS and META COMMENTARY and CUTSCENES and CHARACTER DESIGNS and so much content it becomes suffocating, lowering the value more and more of each new piece of the game that is revealed. Playing old side-scrolling platform games, you would catch yourself wondering WHAT THE NEXT SCREEN LOOKED LIKE. You are fighting for every inch in those old games. Maybe you saw the next screen for a half a second before getting killed for the 10thtime and turning the game off. You can imagine what that part looks like, that part you saw so briefly. You wonder what comes next. This imagination-based playing is far more immersive an experience than any MMORPG.

I think that's a great point that "what's next" played a big part in why games were so engaging when I was a kid vs. now. I think the retro games benefited purely through being the 'start' of it all. Lode Runner and Chucky Egg had a limited appeal of 'what does the next screen hold?' which was taken to a whole other level for me when I played Manic Miner and everything was just SO different in each screen. The Mario kicked that up a notch with all these crazy power ups and different worlds filled with different environments, Turrican, Wizball, and R-Type offered me a variety of crazy guns where I didn't have any idea what would be next, because I'd never played a game like that before, and didn't even have a notion of what sort of things could possibly be next.

That I don't love new games in the same way I loved new games back then isn't so much to do with the lack of people making the kind of games I like(d back than), it's that when they do there's nothing there to excite me. New power ups in the latest Mario games are fine, I guess, but they're all a bit like a power up I used in Mario 3 or whatever, so they don't feel new, just re-skinned. Like when you played Eternal Champions on the Megadrive or Body Blows on the Amiga and you realise this dudes move is just Blanka's shock, or Ryu's fireball, etc. They had no charm because we'd seen it all before.

If I pick up a fighting game, I know a quarter circle plus punch is going to do something. If I play a platformer I know I'm going to have an Ice level, and a watery level, and a lava/fiery level, and there will be a variety of wacky power-ups that will all just be plagiarized from a tonne of games I've played over the last 25 years or so since my dad bought us a Commodore 16+4. Don't get me wrong, I've played platformers that are fun, like Super Meat Boy is great fun, but it's empty of anything else for me. It's just a puzzle game I can zone out to and batter through. Limbo came a lot closer to being something important though.

Games still provide me with enjoyment, and I still hold out hope for more games that I'll love in the same way I did when I was a kid, I just think it becomes increasingly less likely. The last game that I played that really affected me like that was probably as far back as Fallout 3 - the Fallout games had somehow skipped by me growing up, so I wasn't aware of that universe, and I hadn't played anything that could be classed as an RPG probably since Final Fantasy VII, and it blew me away.

Or, to undo those paragraphs, maybe it is just because I don't have the guilt-free time to spend on games these days, as Z S said. I feel like Skyrim could have earned itself a significant place in my gaming history, if I hadn't got myself hemmed in with walking around crypts instead of being out adventuring, so I gave up probably 16 or so hours in, as I just don't have the time (or I'm not allowed to/won't allow myself) to sink and entire weekend from finishing work through Sunday night into just really getting into a game. I've really been charmed by Kentucky Route Zero, but it strikes me that it could be quite gimicky, or that they'l never finish all 5 chapters. XCOM was my game of the year last year for C&P, but while I really enjoyed playing it, it was ultimately quite a procedural game that I enjoyed playing, but it hasn't hit those parts of my brain that Retro Gaming occupies.

Infinitely respawning enemies (which always seem to resurrect the moment they leave your line of sight) is one part of old games I am pretty glad doesn't exist anymore. I'm trying to imagine a modern version of this but it's quite difficult.

I'm always going on about Dark Souls, but DS does use re-spawning enemies in a way that fits in with the mechanics and the game world, and though sometimes infuriating never feels arbitrary.

^^^

lots of truth to this; for most of us casual gamers an original and fun idea is generally preferrable to something that is masterfully done but inaccessible and complex. because I know that the level of the FPS or MMORPG or strategy games out there is incredibly high right now. but they don't strike me as being all that fun. something like Halo is the kind of game that seems like it could be a lot of fun if you were winning but if you suck at it and everyone's just sniping you from afar or beating you in every close up combat, it's just no fun at all nor does it motivate you to get better. IMO that's not really good design.

by that token I'd say the Katamari games are probably the best thing we've gotten in a while - totally new concept that is easy to grok (you can explain the whole concept in about 20 seconds) but requires some level of intuition, skill, and memorization to really get good at, and when you fail a level you immediately want to give it another shot. what always struck me about that game was how much less fun it became when they added a new, complex wrinkle (like - pick up the items with the highest $ value without growing too big)

that was an xpost btw

it seems like there's a school of design that holds that "inaccessible and complex" is just incompatible with "masterfully done." i just read the 100 rogues guy's book though so maybe it's on my head; also whenever tim rogers starts talking about games with one gun or games that are like a rope.

he's also totally against 'story' (which is in itself unsurprising) and also totally against tests of your ability to input commands quickly and accurately (which, huh)

the rogues guy, not rogers. he's also against 'fantasy simulation', i.e. anything about 'hey holy shit my guy's wandering around another world and stuff'.

it's interesting that two of the things we most talk about with retro games are i. them being Properly Hard and ii. the sense of discovery

people who claim Games Are Worse Now with a mind to i. have a point, i think. -- so mcgonigal etc talk about 'flow', the mindset where you take pleasure in exercising your development of a skill in this slightly unconscious way. and a lot of modern gaming wants to motivate every player to have this experience in a sort of harrison bergeronish way. (it's worth noting that there are 8 bit, 16 bit games that are 'hard' without being 'unfairly hard'. castlevania's medusa heads being a moment that push it from the former to the latter quite effectively.)

ii. is more interesting because it's about a sort of affective response which is (for some; for keith burgun the 100 rogues guy, say) totally outside what game-playing is for. (though it's a feeling that can include mechanics as well as world-imagining -- the mario power-ups, the sf2 moves.)

katamari is a great example of how hard to disentangle the sense of a world and the sense of a mechanic can be.

I don't think old school game enjoyment is completely based in nostalgia. my son's gotten obsessed with MAME and sega genesis games w/ very little encouragement from me. something undeniable about the gameplay in frogger, mr do, sonic, etc.

that said, I've had as much fun playing skyrim + borderlands 2 since the halcyon days of feeding quarters into tron and joust...

some of that attraction might be the ability to play a limitless selection of new games forever for free. at least it was for me when i got into emulation, every game, no matter how bad or good, was an instant curiosity

(hell, it was even like that when I would rent the crappiest movie tie-in games from the local video store when I was a kid)

i'm not saying there aren't plenty of classics from way back when, but as a whole i do think games have iterated and improved on their predecessors. i'm not sure we have games that will really stand the test of time the way certain films from the 1930s have, for instance. forget Citizen Kane for now - I'd like to see something more on the level of Shop Around The Corner... but that may be neither here nor there

as someone who loved arcades i have this suspicion that that style of gameplay, the culture, etc. will kind of die out with our generation. this article we talked about in another thread got me thinking about it a little bit:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcade-for-amusement-only

i'm not saying there aren't plenty of classics from way back when, but as a whole i do think games have iterated and improved on their predecessors. i'm not sure we have games that will really stand the test of time the way certain films from the 1930s have, for instance

You mean you don't think there are any old games that actually stand up on their own merits as brilliant games? Seems like there are a number of indisputably classic games that are still tons pf fun to play - Super Mario Bros 3 will always be one of the best games, for example.

Or did you mean something else by that?

That is what i'm getting at. I personally find Super Mario Bros. 3 to be a playable eternal classic of the medium, but will people 10 or 20 years from now find it completely incomprehensible? I'm not sure.

but does it stand the test of space

yes

better than that of time, probably

That is what i'm getting at. I personally find Super Mario Bros. 3 to be a playable eternal classic of the medium, but will people 10 or 20 years from now find it completely incomprehensible? I'm not sure.

if my son could really get into frogger (a game that came out 20 years before he was born) after growing up on 3D wii and xbox games I'm guessing ppl in 20 years will be able to figure out mario bros 3

they'll be the kind of ppl who like, still listen to vinyl, but y'know

actually mobile gameplay is not all that diff from old NES platformers - jetpack joyride, temple run, etc

http://atariage.com/2600/screenshots/s_Pitfall_2.png

otm re: mobile gaming

my son's been into some SNES action for years, the best games from that generation of consoles are always gonna hold up i think

feel like one of the things that makes smb3 an eternal classic is how impossible it would be for it to become incomprehensible; like, we would almost have to be an entirely different species.

saw some kids a little younger than me (... like probably the best part of a decade) (god i'm old) playing battletoads in a coffee shop a while back. however they looked like a self-selecting sample.

keith burgun also claims that gameplay should almost always never be in 3d, is another thing he claims. (i think the more interesting claim that mobile gaming has brought 2d back is one he also addresses, or at least glances at.)

they were probably pawn stars fans

eh, most of this is prob personal preference but what game is gonna date better than mario 3 from the last 5 years?

Angry birds: super Mario 3 edition, revenge of the tanooki

who is this burgun he sounds like an idiot

totally against 'story' - idiot
totally against tests of your ability to input commands quickly and accurately - not idiot
against 'fantasy simulation', i.e. anything about 'hey holy shit my guy's wandering around another world and stuff' - idiot
gameplay should almost always never be in 3d - idiot

tbh i think there's only two kinds of games i would rock with these days - puzzle games with proper puzzles that make you think ie not pattern matching like bejewelled, and 3d fantasy simulation with story. and i don't feel like i want to devote the time required to the second type any more.

retro 3d games that rock: star wars arcade, outrun, populous, driller, ant attack, 3d monster maze.

virus aka zarch, marble madness

he's the 100 rogues guy. he also insists that puzzle games aren't puzzles. i don't really agree with him but it's interesting to see someone try and isolate this v specific definition of 'game'. (he also claims racing games aren't games.)

hmm. as a game designer i'm guessing he thinks his theory has important real world (ok video game world) implications but it looks to me like a classic semantic argument - even worse than that, a semantic argument where his chosen definitions are clearly insane.

ok ok "i'm guessing that as a game designer he thinks"

i love a classic semantic argument

the book is a little self-important and silly and WAKE UP SHEEPLE but there is something like a real design philosophy underneath it. i'm not sure it eclipses kieron gillen's def of a good game as one where you make a certain number of meaningful decisions per second.

Semantic arguments *were* better twenty years ago but I hate new ones done in the style of a classic semantic argument. The stuff we put up with when we were kids just doesn't cut it now when I don't have hours and hours to pour into something completely pointless and irrelevent.

brb checking site new answers

we had more time

Gameplay was much more simple and the control was far more intuitive. I can pick up a game I haven't played in 20 years and instantly ace the hell out of it, whereas I haven't played GTA: San Andreas seriously in a year and whenever I do I have no idea what any of the buttons do and it takes me a while to get back into the swing of things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjikLCPeUdo

yeah, even a game that has fairly intuitive controls, like skyrim, can be difficult to return to after an extended break. I tried to resume my quest a few weeks ago am totally failed I couldn't remember what my strategy was, or what quests I was focusing on, what items I was trying to craft, anything. I could have just winged it and kept going in a new path, but I had the nagging feeling that I was fucking everything up and I quit in bemused failure. Also, I had no time.

Whereas, when you put in SMB3 after 5 years you know exactly what to do.

xp ha!