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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Hardcore Gamers - Living In The Past? 121

Posted by simoniker from the go-back-to-1982-already dept.
Thanks to NTSC-uk for their editorial arguing that overly nostalgic gamers are failing to appreciate the videogames of today. The writer suggests that "...this breed of 'l337' gamers refuse to look at today's games", and complains about their unjust criticism of titles such as Final Fantasy X, saying of these retro-focused gamers: "It seems, to them at least, as time passes, all the faults and niggles of yesteryear's games mysteriously vanish, as age irons out the flaws. Rose-tinted glasses donned, we can forget the 'far too flawed' modern games, because the 'golden era' of gaming did it better."
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Hardcore Gamers - Living In The Past? More

Hardcore Gamers - Living In The Past?

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  • hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PeteyG ( 203921 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @03:41AM (#7356034) Homepage Journal
    We shun nine out of ten titles and place the remaining one percent on a pedestal.

    10 - 9 = 1
    1 / 10 = .1 .1 = 10%
    10% != 1%

    !!!

    (fp)

  • Crank that gear... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Absurd Monkey ( 713003 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @03:48AM (#7356056)
    There's nothing wrong with following the mainstream, and liking the same things as everybody else. Nothing wrong with that at all.

    Yeah, so fall into line, you fucking independent thinkers! And while you're at the mall shopping at "Game" store, stop by the mall and pick up the latest Britney Spears album for when you are happy and Linkin Park album for when you are sad, read Time Magazine, and watch FoxNews!

    Wait, was that article ironic?

    • I just had to reply to my own comment to say that this article is like Vogue telling its readers to stop being fashionistas, Spin telling its readers to listen to more Top 40, Cigar Afficinado telling its readers to smoke more Chinese cigarrettes, etc., etc..

      Nobody wants to be like the "common" people. Which is why absolutely everybody in the world is better than anybody else. We're all unique, just like everyone else.

    • There's nothing wrong with following the mainstream, and liking the same things as everybody else. Nothing wrong with that at all.

      Yeah, so fall into line, you fucking independent thinkers! And while you're at the mall shopping at "Game" store, stop by the mall and pick up the latest Britney Spears album for when you are happy and Linkin Park album for when you are sad,

      Seriously, there's nothing wrong with actually liking modern games. Personally I enjoyed Final Fantasy X. I don't wish that all games w

      • Seriously, there's nothing wrong with actually liking modern games. Personally I enjoyed Final Fantasy X. I don't wish that all games worked in exactly the same way, mainly 'cos I likes FFX as it wasn't like any game I'd perosnally encountered before.

        There's nothing wrong with modern games. There's just an increased signal-to-noise ratio in people's perceptions when they've been playing games for a while. Everyone tends to forget how many bad games were on the shelves in the past, primarily because only t
      • As a slackdotter, I have to clarify that I do enjoy modern games too. It just seemed that the article was implying that people with personal preferences should throw them out the window because they are wrong. People should play what the like, and if they want to try something new, good for them.

        And I just threw those zingers at popular culture for the fun of it. I can't deny that I enjoy a lot of aspects of it as well. It's all just bread and circuses anyway, right? I like Linkin Park too, after all, it'

  • Only Different (Score:3, Insightful)

    by X-wes ( 629917 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @03:49AM (#7356058)

    The author of this article misunderstands the point of the nostalgic gamer. The gamer who enjoys the classic game does not hate the modern game; he or she is merely more accustomed to the classic way of gameplay. This is not to say that the new game is of horrible quality. However, the nostalgic gamer is, sadly, not often the target audience of a game. With the notable exception of Nintendo, gaming companies simply want 'fresh meat' (new players). While this sometimes causes some classic gamers to grade newer games somewhat harshly, one must also consider that the newer game raters have less experience, and thus are easily blinded by a game's glitter.

    Take all viewpoints with a grain of salt.

    • I am not sure if most of the game companies are looking for "fresh meat". They just seem to get a broad public.

      Therefor it's strange that they wouldn't think about the nostalgic gamer. I for one play alot of old games still (long live virtual pc and emulators) and I do have a problem with alot of modern games (some excluded). I've noticed from my younger brothers that they are hardly as "picky" as I am, and they really tend to lean towards graphical oriented games.

      Gameplay is what I am looking for, graphi

    • Re:Only Different (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
      My kids are too young, they missed the SNES/PS/Atari games. Even computer games like "SuperFrog/Zool/Hybris" of the Amiga or Karateka/Bards tale of the C64 days.

      So, I have an older SNES and other systems, my kids love Mario Brothers. So while my kids have the chance to play Xbox/N64 to SNES, Mario seems to be the favorite. We still seem to play Mario Kart on the N64, even the snes sometimes. Some games are still fun, even the old Tanks on the Atari 2600 has some replay value.

      Of course the article is mos

  • cost/enjoyment (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Basje ( 26968 ) <bas@bloemsaat.org> on Friday October 31, 2003 @04:02AM (#7356089) Homepage
    There surely is a bit nostalgia about this all, but that is not the only reason. The cost of playing those games, both in money and in time, is often much lower than modern games.

    Money: to play these older games, one doesn't need the latest greatest hardware. A lot of us have other priorities now (married, unemployed, children). That, and the fact we don't want (cannot) pay premium on the software itself.

    Time: as I get older, spare time is my most sparse commodity. While I do enjoy games, I often don't have the time to spend weeks, or even days to get acquainted with a new game. Modern games tend to be more complex than older games. Older games are often finished in 15-30 minutes. I mean, you only have 3 lives.

    These are the reasons for me to play mainly older games. It's not that I do not enjoy many newer games, but lack of time and unwillingness to participate in the 3d arms race left me behind. Do not pity me, for I still enjoy those older games...

    • Re:cost/enjoyment (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PawnII ( 720562 )
      I believe Time is the reason why most ppl who have been playing games for a long time doesnt play the new ones.

      You either need to be a college boy to play 8 straight hours of the new FPS or RTS on your couch, call for a pizza and not worry about anything the next day (night).

      I can hardly think of a day that I have 2 or 3 hours free to play any game (and I still purchase them but hardly play them).

      I remember playing the original Wing Commander for 6 straight hours without remembering to eat or sleep.

      How

    • Bingo. It's also the reason why I'm content to play so many sequels--I did a mental inventory of all the games I've bought, or want to buy, and they all include sequels of Tomb Raider, Homeworld, Command & Conquer, Deus Ex, Half-Life, etc.

      It may seem a bit formulaic, and indubitably it would be, if I had time to spend countless hours playing a given game; as it stands, I don't play any game enough to get tired of it.

      In my experience, sequels are often as good as the originals in terms of gameplay, a

  • No you morons. Most new games suck. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @04:03AM (#7356092) Homepage Journal
    Subject says it all. I love games as much as the next man but the "good old days" of gaming had a lot more gems than today's bunch. Gaming wasn't as popular a thing back then. To sell a title, you had to put serious effort into it's gameplay, especially because graphics at the time were marginal. These days, teams of hundreds of people work on eye candy and very few develop the actual gameplay. Go beat FFX and look at the credits sometime and see how much manpower is used in each developmental aspect. I assure you graphics are most heavily focused on. Sure, some new games are works of art. But like punk rock, gaming is becoming mainstream. And when something cool becomes mainstream, it can deteriorate.
    • with the increased amount of games now being developed due to the large market, there are a TON of crap games. however, there are also a TON of great games as well. the fallacy of your argument is that you simply aren't aware of the good games-- all you know is whats popular. look at your punk rock analogy, yes punk is and was mainstream, and a lot of the mainstream punk bands are absolute shit. but theres still a TON of punk bands that aren't mainstream and that fucking rock, its just that most people have
      • Well, I am sorry, but he has not committed a fallacy. The closest fallacy that I can identify that would support your claim is "argumentum ad ignorantiam". Surely he is not being ignorant of games of fresh calibur, and thus he has a legitimate point. For you to claim that his argument is fallacious, > would certainly have to present something to argue.

        You have presented crap. You have in my opinion definitely stated that you are a knowledgeable person on the topics of:

        a) all computer games
        b) punk rock
      • It isn't that their is more shit coming out, it is that since it is more mainstream, the shit is also going mainstream. The arguement about all games/punk bands coming out now sucking while the old ones were awesome is ridiculous. There was just as much shit back then, it is just that since it all isn't as popular, you didn't notice it all.

    • Re:No you morons. Most new games suck. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I love games as much as the next man but the "good old days" of gaming had a lot more gems than today's bunch.

      This is exactly what the article said. You view the past through distorted, nostalgic beer-glass eyes. You remember Mega Man 2. But what about Cliffhanger? If you look back at the games then, you'll realize that a lot of them were complete crap.
    • Oh what rubbish. Old music seems like it was crap because depending on the individual's taste, we remember just the Beatles, Led Zeppelin or the Ramones. We don't remember the crappy novelty records which actually filled up the charts. Likewise, we remember stuff like Pacman, Donkey Kong and Streetfighter and conveniently forget the Custer's Last Stands, ETs and games of that ilk. As a few people pointed out in the debate on a gaming Canon earlier in the week, it's nice to be able to judge what's good a
    • These days, teams of hundreds of people work on eye candy and very few develop the actual gameplay.

      That's one way to look at it. Here's another:
      On a lot of old games, you only had one or perhaps two persons working on all gameplay.
      Today you most often have several specialised people; a team doing the maps, a couple of persons writing the story, a team devoted to gameplay mechanics, someone doing the AI etc.
      It could be argued, that with all these specialised people, gameplay is/should be much better.

      Thou
    • Amen, and additionally, I wish publishers would stop making games that are cool to the majority. Games like Soul Calibur are great fun to play, but they aren't what I would consider an enthralling video game. Something that requires me to think, be logical and, maybe, a little 'outside the box' are what I'm looking for. Not something that just requires a lot of time to get through a linear story line.

      The closest thing to unique that the gaming industry has spit out in the past couple of years is Morrowi
      • The closest thing to unique that the gaming industry has spit out in the past couple of years is Morrowind

        A sequel...

        Fallout would be my runner-up pick, and I wish they would produce another one.

        A sequel in everything but name...

        Don't get me wrong, I love those particular games, but unique isn't quite the right word. Unfortunately, it looks like the Fallout series is doomed to yet another sequel in a completely different genre with little to no gameplay in common with the original 2 games.
    • These days, teams of hundreds of people work on eye candy and very few develop the actual gameplay

      Please go find an old pc review magazine from say the 1990's and I'm sure you'll dig up this quote in some form or another back then. Back then, they spent just as much time working on those "primative" graphics as they do now (probably alot more now actually), but either way, the "you fuck up gameplay by wasting your gime on graphics" is getting a little tired and old.

      We know, they know, everybody knows,

    • Arcade games suck (Score:2, Interesting)

      by t0ny ( 590331 )
      I try going into an arcade every few years. Aside from Virtual Cop, I cant recall a single arcade game which was entertaining and didnt require at least $.25 per minute, or requiring me to learn some complex string of motions.

      Most of the successful arcades in the area (including kids places like Chucky Cheese) still have a lot of these 'old nostalgia' games. I would say it has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with quality; a child can still be entertained by a game of PacMan, same as they could ha

    • Here's a thought...

      If the one guy writing a game all by himself in the "good old days", having to divide his attention between graphics, gameplay, story, and sound, can make a game that is suposedly so much better than todays games...

      then surely a game that has at least 1 whole person looking at story and gameplay aspects must be able to produce a good game _regardless_ of how many hundred people are doing the graphics.

      it's that stupid one dimensional thinking again

      a does not imply !b

  • Pong R0xx0rs (Score:4, Funny)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @04:04AM (#7356093) Journal
    Pong is the only game anyone EVER needs and that's that.

    There are all these new fangled so called "games" like Unreal and whatnot but they are all just the same concept! you are all being conned!

  • My 2 pence... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by KNicolson ( 147698 )
    I see two reasons why people complain:

    1. They are spoilt. Way back in time they maybe just had the one machine, and had to pay for most of their games, so they forced themselves to like it more. Now, with more money, all the consoles, warez by the gigabyte, no time to play anything properly, they pick on any little fault, remembering the golden days when they had no choice but to enjoy the little they had.

    2. They are snobby. These guys will no doubt be the ones getting modded up in this thread, about how

    • Re:My 2 pence... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by n0wak ( 631202 )
      Exactly. There are a lot of great, classic games that I love to still play every once in a while. But for every one of those that I remembered, there were some five to ten really lousy games that I have -- luckily -- forgotten about!

      The thing with modern games, is that the lousy games are really immediate. We get to see them in the stores; we get to see the 2.0 reviews; we get to make jokes about them. But give them a few years, and we'll forget about "MTV Celebrity Boxing" and, instead, fondly remember "

  • I am stubborn! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magiluke ( 629097 ) <magiluke@mad.scientist.com> on Friday October 31, 2003 @04:16AM (#7356130)
    I am personally one of the stubborn gamers that doesn't accept very many new games. And I can tell you why. They suck! I do admit this is a generalization; there are actually many games that aren't all that bad that come out nowadays, but most of them are just bad for one reason or another.

    One of the biggest complaints that I have about todays games is the fact that they all (again a generalization) have to be in some sort of 3-D environment. What happened to side scrollers??? Some of the best games ever made were plain old side scrollers. I probably wouldn't mind the 3-D style that much if someone could perfect, or at least slightly improve the camera angles of most games. Very few games are actually playable as far as the cameraman is concerned. I recall Lakitu to be a very good cameraman, and he should become a teacher. Resident Evil could have definately used him.

    I used to be a fan of first person shooters, but really, how many times can you remake Doom & Wolfenstein. There are five thousand FPSs out there, and they just aren't fun anymore. I was on a Counter-Strike kick for a bit, I did like that game, but it just seemed to get old after a while (although I'm sure I wouldn't mind playing it again).

    I could lament about the poor quality of modern video games all night, but I just don't feel like it, I'm sure there will be plenty of people complaining for me. Pretty much, nine times out of ten, I'd just rather pick up my Nintendo controller (or even my Super Nintendo one) and play a good old Castlevania game.

    Oh yea, Game Boy Advance games aren't that bad at all, they seem to pretty much stick to the old style, and I like that.

    • Re:I am stubborn! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Siener ( 139990 )
      One of the biggest complaints that I have about todays games is the fact that they all (again a generalization) have to be in some sort of 3-D environment. What happened to side scrollers???

      I agree. At the time when everyone was making either Tomb Raider clones or FPS's, Abe's Odyssee came out - a 2D side scroller. It was brilliant. Innovative game play. Very addictive.

      I thought it would be the start of a revival or the genre - wrong. No matter what type of game you make these days, it seems like it's a

    • Re:I am stubborn! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Bulln-Bulln ( 659072 )

      What happened to side scrollers???

      They moved almost completly to Nintendo (especially to the GBA - as you also said).
      There are also games like Viewtiful Joe (side scrller) or Ikaruga (vertical shooter) for GameCube. The world isn't lost. ;)

      I probably wouldn't mind the 3-D style that much if someone could perfect, or at least slightly improve the camera angles of most games.

      IMO the best transition from 2D to 3D was made with Metroid Prime. The gameplay is classic and fresh at the same time.

      I used

      • Yeah, Metroid Prime made an excellent transition from 2D to 3D. Nintendo designed a good control layout and a beautifully rendered environment.
      • While it's not the newest game anymore, there's also a 2D Castlevania game for PlayStation 1 (called Symphony of the Night, IIRC).

        and it's a 'Greatest Hits' title, so there should be quite a few more copies available now. I picked it up at Costco a couple months ago.

        On the other hand, the GBA games with the GB Player seem to look better to me, and the gameplay is roughly the same.

    • I used to be a fan of first person shooters, but really, how many times can you remake Doom & Wolfenstein. There are five thousand FPSs out there, and they just aren't fun anymore. I was on a Counter-Strike kick for a bit, I did like that game, but it just seemed to get old after a while (although I'm sure I wouldn't mind playing it again).

      Well, I for one don't think the genre is dead. The novelty value of the game mechanics is gone - but that doesn't invalidate the genre. I agree with you that most o

    • Re:I am stubborn! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by johannesg ( 664142 )
      Agreed. I grew up on 2D games: horizontal shooters, vertical shooters, platform games, overhead "arcade adventures", hell - real adventures. And guess what? I still _like_ all those game types!

      But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style), with a very small number of exceptions (I'd count Deus Ex and System Shock 2 as worthy successors to the adventure genre. Too bad the game industry doesn't seem to 'get' that it isn't about shooting, it is about th

      • Re:I am stubborn! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @07:38AM (#7356672) Journal
        But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style), with a very small number of exceptions (I'd count Deus Ex and System Shock 2
        Try Revolution [revgames.com] - I think Broken Sword 3 probably counts as a rather "realer" adventure game than Deus Ex.
      • But noone is making "real" adventures anymore (either of the text type, or in the Sierra/Lucas style),
        Well, there are text adventures still being made. There's a competition [ifcomp.org] on right now, and an archive [ifarchive.org] of other games.
      • I know gradius V is in the works. Ive seen screenshots. Talk about disturbingly sick. Imagine all the play control of the original NES/SNES games.. but with the graphics of a ps2.

        Most anticipated shmup ever.
      • This is not entirely so. The introduction of the Gameboy Advance has introduced a new generation of gamers to 2D gaming. Granted, it's not the most sophisticated gaming platform, but I'm delighted to be able to play Mario Bros. 2, Mario Bros. 3, Advance Wars, and Metroid Fusion - all of which are 2D games. True, the flagship consoles and the high-end computer games are leaving behind 2D gaming, but as long as the Gameboy remains popular, nostalgic gamers will have a reliable, if small-screened outlet for th
    • What happened to side scrollers???

      Viewtiful Joe [capcom.com] happened to them - and all I can say is damn!

      Score one for Capcom. Maybe they're trying to make amends for the Super Street Fighter Alpha II Championship Ex garbage they were pulling before.

      --Dan

  • It's not that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by M3wThr33 ( 310489 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @04:17AM (#7356134) Homepage
    But people just enjoy complaining. We feared the XBox because the industry never supported 3 consoles before.

    What happened? Well, none of them faded away, instead it gave each supporter twice as many competitors and turned their fanbase into overly supportive, defensive and blind customers shunning anything that doesn't match their demographic.

    "It's not on the _console I bought_, therefore it sucks" is the main attitude today. People are blinded by their fervor to save a couple hundred dollars. Look at how many people flock to complain about exclusive titles? You've seen it all here before, even I'm guilty of it.

    You'd have to live in an incubation chamber to not be sick of discussion about GTA or Halo by now. They're both years old, but the hardcore people refuse to move on, because like most humans, they fear change.

    The sooner we get Sony or MS to leave the console industry the better, so we can all get back to our normal complaining lives devoid of blind debate and focused back on a simple version choice rather than a tri-fecta of nerd-criticism.
    • "the industry never supported 3 consoles before"

      Excuse me?

      Sega Genesis , Sony Playstation 1, Nintendo 64
      • lol! Do you really mean Sega Genesis or did you mean Sega Saturn? Regardless, once Sony entered the market, Sega could not keep a system on the market (Saturn, Dreamcast), unfortunately.

      • You mean the Sega Saturn. The Genesis was a 16 bit console contemporary to the SNES, while the Saturn actually had 3D graphics like the PSX and N64.

    • Atari 2600, ColicoVision, Intellivision, and at least one other forgetable game system from my youth.

    • We feared the XBox because the industry never supported 3 consoles before.

      From a crusty old-sk00l gamer:

      Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Intellivision.

      If you want to add more to the supported platforms of the time, add in the C64, Apple II, Atari 8-bits, Odyssey 2. The big software houses at the time, if they were producing for both consoles and computers, would most likely support 4 or 5 of the 7 I listed above.

      True, the computers aren't consoles, but the market at the time didn't limit itself to just

    • We feared the XBox because the industry never supported 3 consoles before.

      Actually, we feared the Xbox because our bone structure never supported the weight of its controller [penny-arcade.com] before.
      • Which they've gotten around to fixing with the Controller S.

        Hell, I love my Xbox, but dear jesus I can't stand those God- Forsaken Controller F's. I guess it's just a matter of preference, some of my Halo playing buddies use F's and can't stand S's...

        (By the way, by Controller F I mean the origional Xbox controller...Fatbody's.)

  • movies and music are just the same, and the only reason we notice this as gamers is because we all knew the days when gaming was a niche. I think that a lot of people don't dig mainstream because they want do differentiate themselves from the rest of the world, define themselves in some way. I have always had a problem with following the same direction as the masses, I like having my own ideas about stuff wether it's about music, politics, movies and games. So why should we all follow mainstream again??

  • final fantasy x (Score:2, Insightful)

    by oskillator ( 670034 )
    Look, I love many modern games. In fact, I love more modern games than I do classics. But Final Fantasy X?

    Ignoring the luscious graphics, the brilliant musical score, the huge lifespan, the charming mini-games and secrets, and story that for once isn't a simple afterthought - it's too 'cinematic'. Not enough speed, not enough skill, not enough hammering at the 'fire' button and dodging swathes of bullets.

    No. Ignoring the luscious graphics, brilliant musical score, ``huge lifespan,'' ``charming'' mini

    • But hey, if you have to work to watch it, that must mean it's good, right?

      And yet people still like it. Depending on your definitions, everything is work. Who wants to spend hours memorizing the layout of a map, the spawn locations of ammo, the best sniping spots, etc, just to add another digit to the frag counter sitting on your screen?

      I know I don't, and that's why I don't often play FPSs. What I do like is playing a game where characters have personality, where the gamer empathizes with the characte

    • And this "work" is different from the original Final Fantasy how?

      That one, I seem to recall, involved mega-levelling. Gold was in short supply early on in the game, too.

      • In FFI, there was an actual game- you didn't ever walk 5 steps just to see another cinematic screen.

        FFX was more movie than game. YOu spent more total time in the movies than in all the battles, exploring, taling to npcs, or anything else combined.
        • No, in FF1 you walked into another random battle every 5 steps, a rate which will quickly drive you insane. Without a storyline to encourage, it's really hard to continue facing all the stupid battles.

          Don't get me wrong, I love old school RPGs, especially the Final Fantasies. Just not FF1.

          AS for FFX, storyline is very important in an RPG. So, it's not surprising that modern RPGs have a lot of movie time. But FFX was no slack in the gameplay department either, as everyone seems to assume. It's like me

        • FFX was more movie than game. YOu spent more total time in the movies than in all the battles, exploring, taling to npcs, or anything else combined.

          See, this is what people say to try to sound smart. No, you spend more time playing the game than you do in movies. It's not even close. You don't spend ~40 hours in movies. Got it?

  • An opinion piece crappier than the games he's talk (Score:4, Insightful)

    by E1v!$ ( 267945 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @05:06AM (#7356250) Homepage
    ing about.

    We shun nine out of ten titles and place the remaining one percent on a pedestal. 10% is a pretty good margin. I'll only own one out of about 500 cars.

    You see, that's the problem with gamers today. We're so picky. That's not a problem. That's a GOOD THING. If we weren't, we'd still be playing Mario Bros and be all happy about nokia's horrible little paperweight.

    they look into the past. It seems, to them at least, as time passes, all the faults and niggles of yesteryear's games mysteriously vanish.. (etc, ad nauseum) Um, no. The best games were fun back then, and there were good parts and bad parts. The issue here is repetition and change of focus. Because so little had been tried before, it was easy to come up with a 'unique' idea for a game. Game play was more important than graphics (because the graphics were going to suck no matter what you did). With improvements in graphics hardware people DEMAND something 'pretty' or 'stimulating' to look at. That takes some of the dev teams focus away from game play. With limited production schedules, these factors combine to increase the likely-hood that game 'foo' will be just as crappy as the movie 'foo'. I mean really, how many renditions of Lara Croft are people going to take?

    In ten years time, what will today's gamers be playing? Why, the software they failed to appreciate today. I doubt it. If a game sucks, it sucks ok?

    Try playing Medal of Honor Frontline or The Getaway some time, with a clean frame of mind, untainted by the thoughts of superiority and not specifically looking for faults. Boo Hoo, what's with this guy? Someone must have given him a wegie at a ROM lan party or something.

    I'd like to know where this retro 'modern hate' gamer crowd is. NONE of my gamer friends shun modern games. Different people have different tastes. I wish this guy would bitch about teen angst or terrorism. "Try eating at McDonalds or White Castle some time, with a clean....." oy.
    • I am a "retro gamer" who fondly remembers the acorn and sega master system. I currently play way too many games these days in addition to reviewing them

      http://www.videogames.co.nz/

      and one thing that has struck me thru the ages is that the same mistakes get made time and time again. That is the frustrating thing. Retro gamers have seen it all before and are stunned the new games have the same flaws as old ones. It's almost as if the industry is going out of its way to not learn.

      I don't want the old days b
      • Think about it. If someone released pong/mario 64 today and tried to sell it for full price (or anything at all) it'd be the laughing stock. We have come a long way, just not in all areas, and unsurprisingly its gameplay, the hardest one to pin down that is lagging the most.

        Yet Nintendo has been selling 4 of the Super Mario titles (SMB2, SMB3, SMW, Yoshi's Island) for $35/each in the last year or so and they're selling quite well. They are planning on releasing most of the old Zelda games as a bundle with

  • jesus fuck, man... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @05:10AM (#7356253)
    Have you even been to a video game arcade lately? It should be obvious to everyone that the state of gaming has gotten worse on many levels--after all, entire *genres* of games have disappeared entirely.

    I was and am a big fan of various different side-scrolling action/adventure/space games. Now, don't tell me that that genre is too old to make new games or something, because the fighting games in the arcade are even simpler. Back in the day, we had Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Shinobi, X-Men... you name it, we had it, and they were all great. Now, we have... what, Gauntlet Legends? There's simply no comparison.
    • Golden Axe, oh the memories it brings back. Perhaps I should fire up my Amiga again.

      My personal opinion on this whole deal is simple, games today tend to be too serious. I guess I should explain what I mean. A lot of the games released for PC today is ment to be played over the net. I dont know about the rest of you but I tend to be a bit too competitive. I hesitate to play a game online if Im not good at it, better than the average player that is. It takes time to train on a new game, time that I no long
  • I have been gaming since I was one (no shit). I have seen the rise and fall of the arcades and have owned every game system out there. Here is my view on this (stupid) article. Everyone my age plays both new and classic games. I personally think that there will be no equivalent to playing games in the arcades in the 80's. That was THE Golden age. It was also a different time. Eveyone views their own childhood age as "Golden," but the "Generation X" had the best of ANY age. We saw the invention of th
  • An unusual article to say the least. Seems more like a passing entry in someone's 'blog. And since it's awfully light on which old games the "1337ists" are veering towards, it's tough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

    At any rate, comparing the games of today to the games of yesteryear is, rather counterintuitively, not comparing the same things. It's like comparing Fritz Lang's Metropolis to The Matrix.

    Oldschool twitch-Shmup fans are, fairly predictably, not going to like RPGs. Pac-Man enthusiasts a

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • a modern Squaresoft RPG drama, joining a bunch of ragtag characters as they embark upon an epic adventure, or an old-style "twitch" game played on reactions alone, no story to speak of, no reward besides beating an arbitrary high score, and "game over" if I lose concentration for so much as a millisecond

      You are comparing two different genres. The "Fast twitch" games of yesteryear compare more to todays FPS. I would venture to say that oldschool twitch games (ie Ninja gaiden on NES) had better storyli
    • a modern Squaresoft RPG drama, joining a bunch of ragtag characters as they embark upon an epic adventure, or

      Dude, it's called Final Fantasy X for a reason: they made freaking nine other ones before they made that game! Sadly, in Squaresoft's transition from Super NES to Playstation, they seemed to have lost all of their game design abilities and replaced them with incredible visual design and narrative design. They made a great many of incredible looking PS1 and PS2 games, and some truly amazing stori

    • Mod parent down (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Scrameustache ( 459504 )
      Given the choice between:
      1. a modern Squaresoft RPG drama, joining a bunch of ragtag characters as they embark upon an epic adventure, or
      2. an old-style "twitch" game played on reactions alone, no story to speak of, no reward besides beating an arbitrary high score, and "game over" if I lose concentration for so much as a millisecond,

      I'll take the modern game any day of the week. I didn't like classic games back in the day, and I don't like them now.


      He compares an RPG with a twich fighting game and his concl

  • We shun nine out of ten titles and place the remaining one percent on a pedestal.

    Ok, to begin with, I'll be nitpicking that 1 out of 10 games is 10%, not 1%. And compared to my "good ol' days" (which is, for me, the 8-bit time beginning 1980), many more games come out each month for the PC alone than for all the 8-bit computers (in a month) back then. Not counting consoles, even if some titles are published for both.
    So back then I accepted almost every title, because there were no others. And they were
  • Why do these asinine articles from NTSC-UK keep getting posted? The last one was laughable - asking that bug testers move on to reviewing gameplay instead of "just testing bugs" at a time when they haven't been able to keep up with the bugs in big releases like Enter the Matrix, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, GTA3, GTA: Vice City, and KOTOR. This one isn't much better.

    Did it ever occur to the author of this article that the people around him aren't complete fucking morons and that they might be buying
    • they're written by some kid who's just insecure about himself or something.. and then posted again and again until they get through(and let's face it, games.slashdot.org doesn't really shine on good content anyways, i can't imagine it to be that hard to get something through).

      the guy sounds like some guy who only watches new movies(because they have cooler effects and celebs that are on top now).

      a lot of old games are crap.
      a lot of new games are crap.

      are all new games crap? no. all are old games crap? no

  • xpilot (Score:2)

    by Pierre ( 6251 )
    Has to be one of the first networked games with graphics and is still being played today. Feels more like a pinball machine than modern video games (which is a good thing).

  • Classics. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @07:26AM (#7356640)
    The thing is, this tends to happen among all entertainment mediums.

    You get the people who think the best movies were made in the 30's and 40's and everything now is crap.

    You get the people who won't read a book that was written this century.

    All the same, you do find some people that believe that modern games are atrocious compared to the "classics".

    It's just a matter of taste.

    Myself? A lot of those games have aged very poorly. They didn't have enough interesting gameplay to really make themselves compelling in a larger marketplace. Look through the MAME lists sometime, and see just how many duds there were. How many stupid Galaga clones there were without any fun gameplay. How many silly beat-em-up games there were.

    Now, there are some games that have aged well I think. Bubble Bobble, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, pretty much all of Capcom's CPS-2 games, and the Konami licensed games. (TMNT, Simpsons, GI Joe X-Men). SMB 3 and Yoshi's Island for platformers. All the FF games, pretty much and DW 4. SFII is still a great fighting game.

    But all the same, they are making some pretty damn great games today. Without thinking too deep, Viewtiful Joe, DDR, Metroid Prime, Wind Waker, Halo, GTA 3/VC, Dynasty Warriors series...etc.

    All of those games give me an experience that wasn't possible a few years ago. An experience that is wonderfully fun.
    • I only own a PS2, so I can't comment on most of your list of quality, modern games. However, I would certainly like to add Jak and Daxter to the list. It has been ages since I've had that much fun playing a video game. I'd also like to second your mention of Dance Dance Revolution. It really is a revolutionary game - so much so that I'd hardly consider it a "game". As far as I'm concerned, it's the world's most entertaining, interactive workout program. That it is fun causes the player to continue to work o

  • You know what i mean: being in a lonely quest to save the world - or some princess - all by yourself, exploring countless labirynthic, hypnotic dungeons all the while. Old Metroid titles were like that, Castlevania was like that - especially SotN - and the last game i played like that was Zelda: OoT on N64 - Celda, by its on nature, doesn't feel eerie enough...

    Today you look around and see lots and lots of flashy racing games, FPSs and, of course, gorgeous-looking fighting games which gets old real fast.

  • but the music in them has always been beautiful.

    Chrono Trigger MIDI's, anyone?

  • One of the reasons why so many "old school" gamers are critical of new games is the expectation of better gameplay with better hardware. Things like a credible AI tend to take a backseat to flashy graphics and sound.

    Back in the day, the complexity of our games was limited by the hardware we had available to us. Most games on the market pushed every piece of the hardware to the limit. Back in my Amiga days, some games and demos came with their own OS on the disk to avoid the overhead of Amiga's deskto

  • Two words to the gaming industry (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hecubas ( 21451 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @11:21AM (#7358076)
    Market Saturation.

    I don't recall a time when more and more people were into games, and gaming has become so mainstream you see the gaming culture intermingled in everything else. In the old days, there were fewer gamers and fewer genres of games. When Wing Commander came out it rocked our world, there was nothing like it. When Wolfenstein 3d and Doom hit the scene, we all fell out of our chairs. The old school gamers remember those moments watching in awe at a buddy's house as they loaded those ground breaking games for the first time.

    Now 10, 20 years later, we're on the Nth iteration of everything. Inovations are measured in minor graphical updates and "physics models". Even online gaming is quickly becoming saturated with titles that are just knockoffs of a handful of pioneers (how many Counter Strike clones can you name?).

    So it basically comes down to this to get old school gamers attention: re-release a classic title on a new platform (i.e. the upcoming Zelda classics on the GameCube), release a sequel of a known classic (i.e. Metroid Prime), release a really inovative game (i.e. Wind Waker).

    --
    hecubas
  • "So if this breed of 'l337' gamers refuse to look at today's games, where do they go? What do they do? The answer - they look into the past."
    That sounds to me more like a bunch of OMG-1337-g@merz (a minority group amongst actual gamers, I hasten to add) from some random forum or another who desperately wish they could have been old-skool gamers, but weren't around at the right time, or are too young to remember those days.

    "In ten years time, what will today's gamers be playing? Why, the software they fa
    • 'If people find a game to be non-entertaining now, I doubt they will find it entertaining in a decade's time.'

      That is, assuming you can still find a copy of the game. I'm sure anyone who doesn't make a habit of buying games within the first 6 months of release knows how difficult it can be to find aging games. (Anyone got an aging copy of Fire Pro Wrestling D for the Dreamcast?)

  • The guy who wrote this article must have been beat up at some LAN where everyone was playing Nethack while cursing DirectX to hell. By his logic, we gamers who chose to play older games, actually go out of our way to do so, and thus label our-selfs 'retro-gamers' or some crap. This is pretty stupid, since any gamer who is 'retro-gaming' for the bravura of it, is not a gamer, but a jackass.

    I've yet to meet one of these rabid anti-new game people, and as someone who plays both, it seems like this article is

  • Crap article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday October 31, 2003 @01:30PM (#7359864) Journal
    Articles like this are damned easy to write when you simply assert the existence of a stereotype. By immediately disconnecting yourself from reality, you are then free to spout whatever meaningless rant you want.

    I defy you to find someone who actually behaves like the gamer this article is ranting about, who never plays new games and never thinks they are good.

    Some of us may look crotchety, but after playing games for 20 years some of us do have higher standards. And some games meet them; many don't. Guess what percentage of movies I see in the theatre, though... am I "elitist" for only watching the best (in my opinion) 1% or so?

    What a pointless article. I think I'll write an article about how stupid people who eat dung as their primary food source are. Sure, they don't actually exist, but I'll get a great, if pointless, rant out of it.
  • old school gamers are NOT close-minded, 8-bit game-worshippers! i happen to have a Colecovision with Frogger, Donkey Kong and the like. the old games still have something going. as for the new breed of games? it depends solely upon the idividual. IF THEY WANT 8-BIT, LET THEM SHUN 3D!
  • SIMULATOR SICKNESS
  • I went to a party, they had a clown, the clown wasn't very good so everyone ignored him. The clown got mad and yelled at us. This kinda feels like that.
  • For anyone that rips on 8-bit gaming, YOU NEED TO STFU!!! We are not outdated. For the record, I have both an original GameBoy, a PSone, AND a PS2. Hows that for enjoying a wide range of gaming experience. I am not narrow minded like some of you criticising SOB's. Graphics are not everything. If the game has a good story line then who cares if it's 8-bit or 64-bit!!!
  • My policy for games is to not even look at a game that is less than a year old. I've found that this filters out 90% of the crap, and reading a year's worth of player reviews gets rid of most of the rest.
  • Anyone that's been gaming since before the crash of the early 80s knows what a good game looks like and what a crap game looks like. We also know when someone is lying when they claim their game is original. I see little of merit in the current batch of computer and video games.

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