Whippersnappers Bad-Mouth Old Games 699
1up.com has posted the second in an article series called "Child's Play", where they invite youngsters to experience the joys of classic gaming to hilarious effect. From the (sob) article: "Bobby: After you beat the Death Star level, there should be a snow level, then a small speeder bike level. They should make a Matrix game in the theme of Star Wars. So then you take out your sword and run up to a guy and go, "Chiiing!" And after you saw through his head, you fly inside your X-wing."
what about the best clasic game ever... (Score:3, Interesting)
Understanding Games. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Like the first one... (Score:5, Interesting)
11 year olds can be EXTREMELY intelligent, so long as they've not been told to shut up all their life.
This does not bode well for the current generation (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, kids engage in auto thefts, mass murder, and first person real time role playing where they can be anyone they choose to be (be it good or evil). There is no longer any need to exercise ones imagination, as that has been replaced by stunning graphics which is slowly approaching a level of realism which will make any differentiation between the real world and the arcade world difficult.
That is why there will always be a special place in my heart for the classics. They encouraged my sense of imagination. Todays games lack that.
Re:Like the first one... (Score:3, Interesting)
The oldest kid on here is 11 or 12... and they're making Mike Tyson rape / ear biting jokes? Those happened quite a long time ago.
Not to mention the one kid knew everything about Blanka's bio... very unlikely, especially when he said Blanka was his brother's favourite character of all time.
Then there's the Adventure crack about ducks. Clearly ripped from Homestar Runner.
I call Shenanigans.
Re:Nostalgia is overrated. (Score:3, Interesting)
'cuse me, but at 27 you are still considered by many to be a "whippersnapper" and by quite a few to barely have achieved true adulthood (now considered around 25 or so). At that, the term is "young adult". Don't confuse the legal definition of "adult" as it pertains to smoking, drinking, sex, voting, conscription, etc. I'm talking about the commnunity/society definition and recognition among "older" adults. Of course there are differences among individuals with some achieving adulthood much sooner, but sadly, others much later.
For you to talk about "nostalgia", reminds me about one time when I was in an arcade and I heard a couple of 17-ish "men" say, "yeah dude, I remember way back when, like a year ago, that ..."
All the kids I know love old games (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a collection of arcade games in my basement Asteroids, Centipede, Star Wars, Pole Position, Major Havoc, etc). http://www.westnet.com/~chris/arcade/MyBasement [westnet.com]
My kids (aged 2 and 4) love them. All the kids in my family, ranging up to 13 years old, won't come out of the basement at family gatherings. Pole Position seems to be popular with really little kids. Star Wars (one they specifically pan) is popular with just about everyone though.
Re:Like the first one... (Score:2, Interesting)
WHY I OUGHTA!! (Score:1, Interesting)
thats why, whenever I have a kid, his first computer will be a C64... just like me.. he/she will learn to appreciate the true meaning of computers and technology by seeing how it evolves..
however, i do plan on being a very bitter old man simply because I will not remember, nor care what it was like to be young..
Re:Wel (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Wolf3d and Doom created a genre, but modern FPS games are far, far better than they are in terms of graphics AND gameplay. The intensity level is way up, and the games are far more exciting to play.
I would never badmouth these classic games based on what they meant to the gaming industry, and hoe they pushed the technology forward, but if you want me to play one of these really old classics and one of the new modern games, and get me to choose which one I'd rather play right now, I'm going to go for the modern game almost every time.
Re:Downhill After Sierra's Classics (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that might be Peasant's Quest [homestarrunner.com]
Re:Yeah, so what (Score:3, Interesting)
I still smile when hearing the words that closed out each episode of The Phantom: "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows..."
We still had vivid images (Score:5, Interesting)
I also played the hell out of Wolf3D the day the shareware was released. (We downloaded from BBS's in those days). But I can't say I have the same vivid memories from that game. I can't say I have any sort of emotional attachment to that world at all.
Which makes me wonder if nostalgia will even exist for current games. *Is* there a level of emotional attachment to worlds / characters / situations in today's games? There have been very few games since then that have blown me away on a story / personal imagination level. ("The Dig" from LucasArts was totally underrated on that level).
Looking back on it, *all* of my favorite games have one unifying factor. The graphics weren't really that important. I challenge anyone to name a greater single player RPG than Baldur's Gate II. (Ok mayble Planescape). Those graphics were pretty lame even whent the game was released.
The way I see it, we're doing a lot of things with graphics today _because we can_. We're going through a sort of adolescent flexing of muscles in the gaming industry. There's been so much change in the technical department, that graphics have caught everyone's attention. And we all know where they're going: They're going to look like films. Not just a little bit, they're going to look *exactly* like films. And then we know where they're going to go next: They're going to go Helmet VR. And then when we're all done thumping our chests and graphically beating the pants off last month's graphical wonderkind -- we can get back to writing compelling fiction.
Not to say that its not happening today. Half Life II is currently my happy place. But that's one title in a sea of 3D trash that no one will ever have any emotional attachment to at all.
My two cents.
Popo
Re:This does not bode well for the current generat (Score:1, Interesting)
I can tell you that when I'm playing, say, donkey kong I'm not imagining that I am a guy jumping over barrels. I'm concentrating on when exactly to hit the jump button, when to climb a ladder and when to wait, etc.
Face it, 99% of video games are not in any way educational. If you want a kid to use his imagination buy them a book, not a game console.
Learning history from games (Score:5, Interesting)
If your child's video games aren't teaching them valuable lessons about World History who is?
Actually, I learned a lot of interesting history from some old Microprose PC games. Sid Meier's Pirates! (original version), Colonization, and Darklands were all historically accurate and taught me lots of anecdotal stuff about world history that was never mentioned in school, like for instance the first permanent European colony in the New World was not on the mainland but in Cuba if I recall (Colonization), or that medieval alchemists were not just looking for ways to turn lead into gold, they were looking to cure disease and prolong life (Darklands).
Admittedly I am the kind of person who took an interest in this stuff and read further, but computer games did contain a lot of history that was just ignored or glossed over in school. I see no reason why even today's plot-light, graphics-heavy games can't incorporate accurate historical settings.
Re:Like the first one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Baby Boomers: Damned kids and your keyboards! We had to punch holes in cards for machine specific instructions and do everything on mainframes, and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!
50s/60s: Damned kids and your object oriented programming and your Virtual Machines! In my day we used assembly and, later, C, on mainframes and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!
70s/80s/90s: Damned kids with your do what I mean to function. Back in my day we actually had to use logic instead of having the machine be psychic, and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!
That isn't the Nazi symbol (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps it is you that needs a history lesson?
Re:Like the first one... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Like the first one... (Score:3, Interesting)
And people older than I was couldn't make change in their heads; everyone seems to need a calculator or a cash register nowadays to figure that out.
To this day, people my age or older will say "Where the hell did you learn that?" if I drop a fact that we were all taught in 4th frickin' grade, like who wrote the Declaration of Independence or the order of the planets.
So yeah, I see today's generation and say they're retarded. But every generation is, just in it's own special way.
Besides, I still think it's good idea for people to learn assembly.
Just history repeating itself (Score:5, Interesting)
You sound almost like you time-warped in from about 20 years ago, or you took a quote from the era and replaced "Atari" and "2600" or "5200" and replaced them with "Nintendo" and "N64". Anyone else remember that era?
I remember getting my Atari at the height of the craze (1982 or so?) and there were some awesome games (Yar's Revenge, Missile Command, Circus Atari, almost everything from Activision--amazes me what those wizards could do with 4k of address space and only enough RAM to hold your scores, lives and *ONE SCANLINE* of screen data). I also remember the side-effect of the craze--by Christmas 1982 it was already happening. Everyone was caching in on the craze. I clearly remember ads in Archie comics touting crappy games featuring that walking Koolaid pitcher, Bubblicious gum and Quaker Oats (WTF!? yes I'm serious).
Each and every one of these junk games was some kind of poorly executed variation on the adventure
Consoles didn't die though--a couple years later the NES took the world by storm. Technically it was only a modest step upward from what Atari and Coleco had offered to that point (still had a CPU based on 1970s tech) but it had excellent marketing and ORIGINAL GAMES--at least for awhile (side-scrolling platforms were nearly nonexistent on home systems to that point, much less ones as well executed as Super Mario).
Things are a BIT different now, since todays console owners tend to already have PCs (so computers aren't likely to steal marketshare from consoles). The crucial thing is that we're at a peak now creatively and the economic curve is following (game sales were brisk this record-setting year). There will be a saturation point where more people will be like you and say "I'm tired of the n-teenth sequel that is the same game except for more detailed graphics". That'll probably give the industry the kick-in-the-butt it needs.
At any rate did anyone else notice a new phenomenon this year? It seems to be the start of a retro-craze: Atari has re-released the 7800 with the best of the 2600 and 7800 games built right in, and there was a big pile of "system-in-a-controller" units out there (from legitimate retro systems to 100-in-1 bootleg NES to the Spongebob Joystick with original games). It's bigger than just Jeri's "64 in a stick" toy for nostalgic geeks too--those bootleg units at the mall kiosks got a lot of attention from teens who weren't even born when the NES came out. I see that as an early indicator that the "same old new thing" is losing its appeal.
Re:Get real (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several extremely simple old games that will never get too old. True, they don't catch everyone's taste, but I guess at least some of these kids would enjoy them.
I "discovered" Zork some 3 years ago and enjoyed it immensely. I spent some nice time on roguelikes when QuakeII was on top. I killed Sepiroth for the first time about when FFXI was released. Was I impressed? Hell, yes! And I guess most of kids who aren't complete idiots, given a little patience to get through first impressions, would be impressed.
Re:Perhaps they should have played Wolf3D! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wel (Score:3, Interesting)
Parker: You wasted quarters on this?
EGM: Yeah.
Parker: That's so sad.
He does have a point...
I dunno. There's something about an arcade game that makes it easier to plunk quarters into than a "normal" modern video game. I guess It's that the overall game doesn't have a plot to follow through on. I wouldn't start playing Doom in an arcade because I would just be like "well I wont get very far since the game's so long".
Last night I was at the laundromat, washing some rugs my own washer can't handle, and there was a Galaga machine. I have Namco Museum for my Gameboy Advance (it was at home) but still, even though I could have played Galaga for free at home I must have put $2.00 in quarters into that machine while I was there. And I put up with the fire button with the worn out spring (the ship was always firing, and when I got onto the highscore list twice my name came out as 'AAA') and the dusty screen (I couldn't clean because it was UNDER the top cover) and I still had a good time playing it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.. (Score:3, Interesting)
These kids aren't trashing my gaming history - they've given me a stack of new ideas for the kind of games that I can write the bare bones of in a week :)
Playaholics: Free online games: Driving Mad [playaholics.com]Video game violence (Score:3, Interesting)
Rachel: I really like this game, because I can do all these things that are so against what I'd ever do in reality...
Garret: That's the whole point of videogames.
EGM: Do you this game is a bad influence on people?
Anthony: No, because only some people actually believe you should do this stuff in real life.
Those kids seem to have an understanding of the difference between fantasy and real life that a lot of censorship-loving adults have trouble grasping.