Retro Gaming Gets Hot 280
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."
Retro Gaming *Gets* Hot? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I'm the exception.
(BTW: these 5.25" floppies from 15 years ago *all* still work. They just don't make 'em like they used to.)
Anyone find these gadgets to be useless? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be more interested when one of these devices offers a faithful emulation of Baby PacMan. I loved that game, and I always wanted to get good at it, but the machine at the Showbiz Pizza(the only place that had one around here) was almost always broken.
The market (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a trip back to the early to mid-90s, or whenever you were a kid, and try to recall all the public service announcements and news stories that all had the same message, "Video games are bad, get out more."
Now suddenly, video games aren't so bad anymore. Especially the older ones; those who are intrested are making the moolah.
Secret of Mana (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who is writing a 2d RPG on OSX. He is pretty far in the programming, and no, i dont have a website, but i'm sore the
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It's worth mentioning (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course with the number of C64s still out there and available for $2 from goodwill stores, you may as well go buy the real thing and get to play Impossible Mission instead.
Retro Gaming Divides (Score:5, Interesting)
Something I've noticed is that retro gaming means different things according to where you're from. Generally this is met with ignorance from the Americas, as they've not been exposed to our scene as people on our side of the pond have.
American retro usually means old arcade games, such as Pacman. Old consoles like Atari and NES are also common, whilst young, overly blog-keen teen Internet wasters think that their SNES is the most retro thing since sliced bitmaps.
European retro tends to mean Sinclair Spectrums and similar computers, with strong emphasis on the programmers and sceners involved, particular in smaller countries where more people know each other.
Amiga and C64 seems to bring common ground to us all, as most countries featured these as popular machines.
Games of Pacman Weren't that Quick (Score:4, Interesting)
Pac-Man could be played for a very long time on one quarter if you memorized the patterns. And once you got to the key levels the pattern never changed. At least that's how it was with the Pacman ROM at our local grocery store. Of course, after most of the kids learned how to do this they changed the game out. And every time someone lost a pacman they'd hit the machine and blame it on the joystick. 'This f***in joystick sucks, man!' I guess it's the guys like me making retro games big business.
Linux gaming... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because of this, retro games tend to come to the rescue for entertainment while using Linux.
Let's face it, Frozen-Bubble and Tux Racer get old real quick, whereas Super Metroid and Zelda (for example) are interesting for quite a longer period of time. Besides, I've always preferred the original Puzzle Bobble in xMAME anyway.
What's with Nintendo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retro Gaming *Gets* Hot? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've managed to find disk images of most of the games I had and be able to play them in AppleWin and MESS, but there's still a few elusive ones. Plus, all the BASIC programs I made as a kid are gone (The disks went with the computer).
Emulators... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an Apple II emulator running on a notebook computer, so I have that with me - not just for gaming (downloads of Apple disk images are available), but for playing with the old system. You can do a "call -151" and drop right down to machine language. Boot an (emulated disk) with Integer basic, do a call -151 and then an F666G (I hope I got that address right), and you are in the mini-assembler... You can play with these systems in many ways - not just on the gaming side.
Also, you can look up Apple CE. This program lets you run an Apple emulator on your handheld pocket PC. All the disk images on your emulator can be brought right over. The Apple emulators tend to support a Monochrome mode, and there is a nostalgia to the warm green monitor feel that is produced. Besides, when you save off your spreadsheet at work for someone, and they have trouble reading it, you can always just tell them that it's in "Visicalc."
There are often some (technical) differences between emulated environments and the "real thing" - sound a delays of disk devices, the number of supported expansion devices may differ from the simulated and "real" systems, including how shared resources / critical sections may be handled (if anyone really wants a technical example of this, they can e-mail me).
Anyway, emulators are really expanding the use of "orphaned" platforms.
There are emulators for IBM 370, Apple, Commodore, and many others. At the University of Pennsylvania, they did an "Eniac on a chip" project. For many, the emulator itself is the game.
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Urge to Compete. (Score:4, Interesting)
Once I moved my MAME system into my new apartment, our competitiveness really showed, you wouldn't think you'd see people our age getting pissed over the high score in Pooyan, but it happens.
Games don't have to be old to be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Games that YOU can make (Score:4, Interesting)
Old games had decent gameplay (Score:5, Interesting)
But they did have gameplay. I remember sitting on the couch playing my old dick smith vz-200 with my brother, becuase the game encouraged co-operative play. And it was fun. I don't enjoy playing some tekken clone where the sole point of the game is to beat up the guy next to me.
Sure I can see my blood splattering everywhere as my avatar gets the crap beaten out of him, but it winds up leaving me with very little empathy for the guy i'm playing with.
The difference really comes down to the fact that the current titles are all derived from traditions coming out of the hyper-competitve japan school boy environment, whereas the old games came out of a very different co-operative environment of the old silicon valley.
Except..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Play every game that ever existed (Score:5, Interesting)
You take in a culture if you remember what date one game came after another.
The new kids can't really experience what it was growing up on a trim diet of video games, they got them all at their hands.
Today it takes a lot of time for a good game to come out, so we're still forced to play old games or nothing at all. I recently just beat Dracula on Castlevania 1 without dying the whole game. Mame lets you save your replays
Of course, if you know video game culture, and what's came out before, you really really know how BLEAK things look out there, especially with the corporatization of sequel ideas over new ideas.
The best thing we have to look forward to is a better PlanetSide, or a Virtua Fighting World Online. Games that take whats known and make an intensive RPG for longer game lasting play, and online games give great dynamics for competition and cooperation.
Dungeons and Dragons by Turbine should be cool, as well as Lord of the Rings by Turbine. World of Warcraft looks semi cool. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas looks cool.
My favorite RPG of all time still remains Legacy of the Ancients for Commodore 64:
http://www.legacyoftheancients.com/
I'm really a sick video gamer too, I've competed in world championships and did well. I'm famous through Starcraft/Warcraft3. I really know what I'm talking about on this stuff.
People think theres unlimited ideas for a video game, but theres only so much you can do, and you see lots of video games being the same. Take River Raid for example, it was copied in all those side shooters, Gradius/LifeForce/etc. Theres hundreds of side shooters. Once you play one style of video game the bar is raised, if another game can't give you at least as good as features, then it loses out. Not a lot of people see this.
Right now theres nothing worth playing, so I'm writing up my own video games. www.pathofdreams.net/crazyj
I'm still trying to get a foot in the door of the video game industry, but it seems like I'll have to code a whole game myself before that'll happen.
Bullshit! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bunch of suckers (Score:5, Interesting)
Data point - Donkey Kong franchise (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Games don't have to be old to be good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Power Joy III (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Emulators... (Score:3, Interesting)
you could access memory locations and make the speaker click (0xC055?), or start the disk drive motor. the x and y axis on the joystick (or your koala pad) was another memory location, as were the buttons. add a mockingboard, and you could get to the synth channels with a few STAs. tie them all together and you could 'draw sound'. you were on the bare hardware.
thanks for the memories.
Too bad the all-in-ones suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
They flat out suck.
I am horrbily disappointed that, in this day and age of microcontrollers and well-written emulators, a better product could not be produced.
TVGames is slaughtering at least my memory of these classic games. Amongst other things, I found that all three are lacking a noise generator (makes explosions sounds like "boops", especially in Missile Command,) the colors are off, and the Namco arcade joystick is locked into four positions but includes Bosconian -- an eight-position game. In their defense, the game play for most games are identical to the originals.
What it comes down to is that if you DON'T have the console or a good emulator and rights (term used loosly) to the ROM image, it's not a bad $19. Otherwise, stick with the emulators and, of course, the original console; the former posessing much more longevity.
Re:Except..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already been tried (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Games of Pacman Weren't that Quick (Score:4, Interesting)
Close but not quite. A one-byte variable doesn't magically become a two-byte variable just because it's incremented past 255. What happens is it wraps around to zero. Pac-man numbered its boards starting at one, so it wound up displaying unplayable gibberish on the screen instead of the missing board zero.
Here's a page with patterns and a screen shot of the "level zero" bug. [fateback.com]
Re:Data point - Donkey Kong franchise (Score:3, Interesting)
Jumping and missing those ropes gets me too many times, and the close-up angles can be really annoying when you want to do some platform jumping; IIRC Banjo Kazooie was better for that but I'll have to replay that to see, and Mario 64 to see if it was as incredibly cool as I remember (except for a couple of annoying camera angles).
But IIRC DKC for SNES was much less "dense" than e.g. Super Mario World and also a major selling point for it was Rare's SGI workstations prerendering the art, so that was part of the franchise.
Of course I can't say that any 16bit games I wrote were marvels of gameplay :-) but I would suggest looking at some other SNES games, such as "ActRaiser" which is wonderful especially for the music!
Legal retro emulation (Score:5, Interesting)
The slashdot crowd might want to check out Console Classix [consoleclassix.com]. They've taken the game-rental business model and applied it to emulation. Nintendo knows about CC, and has left them alone. For each copy of a ROM they have available, they have a matching physical cartridge. So, if they have 3 ROMs of Tetris, they pulled the ROMs from three individual carts they have on-site.
The emulators are all open-source, and they are encouraging porting from other platforms (currently it's Win32 only). Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis are availble, with other platforms coming soon. The NES and 2600 are free, but the SNES and Genesis clients require a small monthly fee to play (like $5 or something).
Anyhow, go check them out, and if you have any old carts lying around that you don't want anymore, consider donating them to CC so they can have more ROM images available for "rent".
Well, that's not the only problem (Score:3, Interesting)
But I guess the more disturbing thing is that the interface isn't that easy to get into for a new user any more. With PacMan, it was obvious. Even someone who's never played it before, could just jump into it.
By contrast, most modern 3D games take quite some getting used to the interface. Now for those of us who pretty much grew up on Quake, WASD comes naturally. Doing rocket jumps, shooting rockets at someone's legs (instead of head) and switching weapons in mid-flight is our second nature. But for a casual gamer it can be quite a put off.
E.g., I've recently coaxed/coached mom into playing a new 3D game. (Let's just say fairly standard over-the-shoulder 3rd person game and controlls.) Now mom isn't stupid, but she's never played more than PacMan/Tetris/other old games before.
So it went something like this. I'll quote only my lines, from memory:
"Now talk to that guy. Uh, click on him... Yes, you need to be closer to him... Umm, no these keys here... Hmm, yes, I guess if you really want the arrow keys, you can always reconfigure it that way. I wouldn't recommend it... Uh, see, yeah, if you have the right hand on the arrows, now you'll have to move it to the mouse to click on him. Told you... Yeah, you're supposed to click on that answer to get a mission... Yes, you need to get a mission first... Uh, you closed it without getting a mission. Try again... right, now go in the direction on your compass... No, of course not through the building. Go around it... now jump over the fence... yeah, the jump key... uh, no, sorry, I meant press the jump key _and_ the forward key... no, see, just keep pushing forward while you jump... yes, keep pushing forward and press the jump key... ugh... yes, that's the guy you need to kill. Click to select him... yes, click on him... told you the arrow keys with the right hand were a bad idea... uh, no, you're too far away to attack... umm, well, either you start using the mouse for that, or you could press the '1' or '2' keys... yes, press 1 or 2... no, mom, you're pressing 3 and 4... don't worry, you'll get the hang of it, we all occasionally have to look at the keys instead of the screen... right, so keep going where the compass points you... yes, it's behind a building again... uh, ok, you remember that right, but you can't jump over this... no, mom, stop jumping... yes, I told you to jump before, but that was a lower fence... jeeze, no, you can't jump over the _building_. You're not superman... no, honestly, you can stop trying..."
And it went like that for some more time.
Guess that was quite a lesson in usability.