Videogame Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To be 88
Thanks to GameSpy for its 'Pixel' column discussing the dangers in letting videogame nostalgia run unchecked, as the author explains: "Number one: Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's particularly good. And number two, loosely based on Sturgeon's Law: 90% of all video games ever made are either mediocre or crap." He gives an example: "Case in point: A little PlayStation game called Gunners Heaven. It was a very early Japanese release by Sony... [and] the American import magazines covered it a bit and described it as a Gunstar Heroes clone", but the game, once acquired, "was thoroughly mediocre", showing "the dangers of unchecked nostalgic anticipation."
Unchecked anticipation (Score:5, Insightful)
True, true... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a big retro-gamer, but I agree. I love the NES and most of the other systems from that time period, but I admit that many of the games that were made then are for historitcal interest only. (Deadly Towers, anyone?)
However, I still think retro-gaming is important for the industry. Older games, like old movies, should be respected, studied and preserved for future generations.
Damned wipper snappers (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's broke but generating adviews, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that nostalgia is somehow to blame for lame knockoffs is as retarded as claiming Richard Simmons is responsible for bombing Iraq (well, maybe he is, that PRICK).
The "90% of everything is crap" rule certainly applies to old games, but we didn't waste our childhoods on the crap games, so we don't get nostalgic about them.
Re:True, true... (Score:3, Insightful)
Defender and Frogger remakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Frogger's remake tried to do things a little differently, but there's only so much you can do with a jumping frog.
Re:Damned wipper snappers (Score:3, Insightful)
The Quaility Quota (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll agree with this statement. Although I will add that the signal to noise ratio on gamestore shelves has gone down in recent years.
The retro gaming phenomenon is more than just simple nostalgia though. The truth of the matter is, today, a random sample of 20 NES/MS/SNES/MegaDrive games, would probobly fare better than a random sample of 20 PS2/GC/XBox titles. It turns out that just 'having' better graphics, more buttons and more music does not a better game make. A lot of recent titles would not hold a candle to the best of 8/16 bit gaming. But that's to be expected. Dispite whatever era a game is made in, the fact that it's good won't change.
Retro gaming is really picking up recently. Perhaps it's due to the availability of emulators, or a ready supply of old SNES cartridges. However I think it sends out a signal that people aren't very impressed with the current lineup of games out there. If customers are willing to seek out 10/15/20 year old titles in preference to your spanking new one, I think that should get some people thinking. Were these game actually better? What made them so? Are people dissatisfied with games whose primary selling point is a Hollywood atmosphere of better graphics and music?
Games in the 80s and early 90s could offer only poor 2D and pretty awful 3D graphics. Their music was shackled to the limitations of MIDI tunes, and even the controllers offered little enough buttons for control. Without having the cushion of cinematography to fall back on, there really was only one place developers could engage the player. In the gameplay. Add most of them made a fair stab at it. Contrast this with *shudder* Gran Turismo or FIFA, whose sole selling point is graphics and snazz.
There will always be great games that shine out through the layers, but I feel the percentage of such games has decreased, simply due to the fact that there are more games being made. The quota of quaility games does not increase linearly with the amount of developers, alas. I just wonder how this will affect the outlook game players have on the industry and games in general.
I suppose it's like the evolution of cinema really. Initially you needed a danm good story and actors for a play/movie to be successful. Although these still help, and the best movies by definition have these, they are not a requirement for movies to make it big time. So I guess it's the same for games in a way.
Re:Gamers today are spoiled (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been doing a lot of retro gaming these days. I recently played the old school FInal Fantasys on an emulator. Loads of fun. I also remember not even finishing FFX because it got so annoying (walking down a street from 1 cutscene to another with no gameplay between).
Then I pulled out the Marios. Super Mario 3, Super Mario World. Damn they were still fun. Mario 64, Super mario Sunshine- eh.
To be fair, I pulled out the Zeldas too. I'd put Ocarina of Time up there. Probably better than the original, on par with Link to the Past. So it is possible, just not easy to beat the old games.
I think the problem with todays games is exactly the fact that their too produced. They put so much into it, that they can't afford to fail. So they stick to the formulas to avoid risk. There's no new ideas to be had in gaming. Or they stick a bunch of sideline crap for you to do to pad out the content (Sunshine is an example of this. Ok, the plots not moving along- lets do random levels until it does. Oh, we have nothing to add here- lets add a 3D jumping puzzle!)
The other problem is that because they're so produced, they feel the need to add every gee whiz feature. Lets face it- most of the games coming out today would be better in 2D. 3D adds to some genres, but definitely not to all of them. Check out the recent Marios for example. Lovely- 3D jumping puzzles. Not the most fun thing even in 2D. Now not only can I fail because I overjump, underjump, or miss my timing, I can also miss to the left, to the right, or because my camera wasn't quite straight and due north wasn't. Oh, or because of the "realistic physics" the surface was too cuved and I slid off. Yeay, I get to start all over again.
Give me the old school Marios. Give me the old school Final Fantasys. Tekken, Soul Caliber? Pah, give me Street Fighter 2 in any of its incarnations. Developers these days have become so woorried about graphics, mmatchhing features, and buzzwords that they've lost the magic. And a lot of people are feeling this, thats why the retro craze is occuring.
Wow, its an old game, and yet he didn't like it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, its not nostalgia if you didn't play it first time round.
Thirdly, do people really expect every old game to be good? I merely hope that the ones that were great still are, and that seems a lot to ask sometimes.
But this game was a PS1 title, under 10 years old. Is that even old enough to be 'retro'? Is it considered irredeemably nostalgic to buy a DVD of SE7EN or Heat now?
Re:Gamers today are spoiled (Score:2, Insightful)
The "FFX is all cutscenes" argument is pure and simple nonsense; the worst kind of the one-upmanship I talked about in my original comment. The cutscene density is fairly high as you go along the "main plot", but there are huge gaps between a lot of the scenes and there's more stuff to do away from the plot than I've seen in any of the other FF games (well... aside from X-2 and XI). I tried playing the early Mario games again the other month and really couldn't understand what I'd ever seen in them. I was bored after 10 minutes. In fairness, I don't particularly like the newer Mario games either.
If you're complaining about lack of content, classic games are often truly awful. The older Final Fantasies demand you spend much more time fighting the same monsters over and over and there's generally less plot to relieve the monotony. In fact, if you're complaining about a lack of new ideas, you'd also do well to steer clear of the Final Fantasy franchise for use as illustration, given that they completely rework the combat and character mechanics for every game and that FFX had one of the most innovative character-development systems I've seen in an RPG.
Every one of the arguments you use is a typical "l33ter-than-thou" so-called gaming purist cliche.
Re:True, true... (Score:5, Insightful)
One might argue that it's due to technical reasons, but [scummvm.org] that's [sourceforge.net] no [mame.net] excuse [zsnes.com] is it?
Why do we find ourselves donating our precious time hacking away at emulators and virtual machines when it should be the people who made the games in the first place that should be supporting them? Does the game industry hold their own products in so little regard that it has already decided that future generations can't enjoy them?
Sure, there's the odd overpriced nostalgia pack put out every now and then, but that's just a drop in the ocean.
Re:If it's broke but generating adviews, don't fix (Score:2, Insightful)
So, while the quality of the average game produced back-in-the-day may been the same or lower, the quality of game actually played by gamers was higher. Or so I suspect.
Variance is good for consumers, but bad for marketing executives who love consistency. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and people paying the piper can't stop calling for the Lullaby of Mediocrity.
Re:Gamers today are spoiled (Score:4, Insightful)
Recently I went back and played some oldies, some of them held up, some of them didn't. Some games just "work" even if they aren't perfect. And that applies to games of any era.
My Opinions:
It's a rare platform game that works well in 3D. Super Mario 64 doesn't, but the Spyro games did.
3D seems to be working better for adventure games.
RPG's and adventure games age better than other games
1 hit and you're dead shooters not fun: Zanac
Shooter with energy meter and similar gameplay, fun: The Guardian Legend.
Free roaming and exploring helps a game it's why Super Metroid has aged so well. (Still my favorite SNES game)
Hack n' Slash dungeon games never grow old and they have found their true audience on the consoles.
Music is an important part of the game experience. Catchy memorable music can make a good game, great.
Analog sticks are a good thing as are 100% remappable controls.
Final Fantasy VII is the best FF overall, pay no attention to those "the older ones are better" fanboys. However VI, IX, and X are right behind it.
Ports of games are not necessarily bad things. The NES version of Might and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum is an excellent game.
Sequels can be better than the originals. I liked Dark Cloud but hit a brick wall in character advancement and the game became tedius. I was having to spend all my money on water, healing foods and repair powder. I was also having to sell weapon upgrade gems to help pay for stuff. The UI also needed work, with some very small and hard to read fonts. Dark Cloud 2 does not have these problems and is simply a much better game. I've actually told people to ignore the first game and just play the second.
UI is VERY important. If a game is hard to read and or too complex for it's own good it is less fun: Saga Frontier or to a lesser extent Final Fantasy XI
There you have it.
Re:The Quaility Quota (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously. But what about the best recent titles?
I think that Sturgeon's Law has always been in full effect, past and present, and the only reason there appear to be more good games in the past is that the bad ones have been so well forgotten they're hard to find even with research.
The truth is (Score:3, Insightful)
Nintey percent of music, books, video games, movies, televison, and at least 90% of web pages are totaly crap.
Frankly I like the reto game movment but I find the emulator old game combo to be much more fun than the new twist on old games.
Re:Gamers today are spoiled (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuse me? Are you serious?
I mean yeah, sure, I played the hell out of Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, Marvel Vs Capcom, KoF, and all those kinds of games way back when, but for you to seriously claim that Street Fighter 2 and it's old-school clan are anywhere near the quality of Soul Calibur, Tekken, and Virtua Fighter, as straight up fighters, you're deluding yourself.
I mean hey, I don't care if you like them more, but to say that the fancy graphics is all the newer fighters have to seperate them from Street Fighter 2 is ludicrous.
Yes, in some cases the graphics detract from the gameplay. Dead or Alive is the only truly aggregious offender I've run into. Great skill intensive system completely and utterly overshadowed and forgotten about thanks to boobs, boobs, and more boobs bouncing all over the screen. I mean hey, it's cool, but it's a useless distraction when you're trying to play a FIGHTING game. Not a rough sex game, or whatever. Try porn, it's more realistic...sometimes.
However, the other major series, SoulCalibur, Tekken, and Virtua Fighter, the graphics only serve the game. The fighting genre is one of the few where increased complexity is more often than not a better thing, and these games are leaps and bounds more complex than any game that ever bore the name Street Fighter. Yeah, it's harder for the novice to just learn the few moves and go to town, but that doesn't make the game worse. Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, etc, just plain aren't fun enough to be more than a trip down memory lane for me and my friends. We'll drag out the SNES or Genesis, put them in for awhile, reminisce over how we used to sink hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in quarters on these things in the arcades (which is where most of us became friends), and then go back to playing more interesting games.
OK, rant over. I'll get on with my life now.