A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come 427
Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting:
"Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
Re:Doom3 (Score:3, Informative)
Tweak the gamma -- If the game is too dark for you and cranking up the brightness slider doesn't suffice, you might try playing with the gamma setting from the console.
Pull down a console with ctrl-alt-~. Then type "r_gamma 1.2" and see what you think. The game's default is "r_gamma 1", and I've found something between 1.2 and 1.4 works for me.
Re:Crazy DRM and Phone home games (Score:2, Informative)
"Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation"
Both games are by Chris Taylor. SC is the spiritual successor to TA. So it is similar because the gameplay in the original worked, and you don't fix what is not broken.
The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.
DRM has been a problem but demos are still released for software. Crysis, Bioshock, Portal etc had a demo. The death of small independent software house is just ignoring the huge indy game scene.
Only starts at Doom? (Score:3, Informative)
What about California Games? Leisure Suit Larry? Wasteland?
Yes, there were graphical games in the 80s. They were CGA, EGA,
and even VGA, but they existed.
Re:Shame it's dying (Score:5, Informative)
From that link:
"The stats are based on retail sales. Online game subscriptions and digital distribution are not included. And that online gaming market is increasing rapidly, especially with PC gamers."
Just look at here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/20/develop-09-is-digital-distribution-the-pc-saviour/
Re:Doom (Score:5, Informative)
It's not so much as a history of PC gaming, but a history of PC FPSes. It makes only a passing mention of other genres, like platforming (Braid, which, ironically, was released on consoles first) and based adventure games. It makes mention of hybrid FPS/RPG games like System Shock, Deus Ex and Bioshock, but no matter what genre the guy is talking about he always winds up back at an FPS.
Where are the RTSes, like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation? Where are the God Games, Civ, Black and White, Evil Genius? Totally ignored. RPGs are mentioned in passing and the main focus was on MMO vs MUD rather than the likes of Diablo and Baldurs Gate.
as for Gun wobble, that may have been an ID invention, but I'd quite like to know who first put a gun in the players right hand, rather than in the middle bottom.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Do that include Digital downloads?... this one NO (Score:3, Informative)
The PC market is moving to digital downloads, so most sales stats are wrong.
"The stats are based on retail sales. Online game subscriptions and digital distribution are not included. And that online gaming market is increasing rapidly, especially with PC gamers. UPDATE: Starting with 2005, NPD tracks online PC sales."
Like this one.
Good post, mate, but wrong. Please mod parent down :-)
Re:Doom (Score:2, Informative)
Well, if the PC and Amiga versions of Civilization look the same to you, i guess at the time you found that Atari ST graphics looked as good as Amiga's. Our group didn't. Plus, lack of loading time thanks to that little thing called hard drive was quite marvelous for us at the time, but yeah, i'll grant you that it was available. Inferior but available.
As for WC, note that i mentioned Wing Commander 2. Sure, seen today, it's just a glorified arcade sim/shooter with cheesy storyline and videos, but back in time, it was mind-blowing. My mistake if it was available on Amiga/Atari and looked just as good. Finally, i wasn't shooting for a complete list, just taking a few examples. If you want to nitpick, go ahead and tell me you were playing Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld on your Amiga in 1992 too.
I'm sure it's unfathomable for some people, but there's a reason why the amiga owners in our group all wanted (and ended up owning) a PC.
Re:Doom (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doom (Score:3, Informative)
Ultima Underworld was 3d, a much nicer engine then Wolfenstein.
Re:Doom (Score:3, Informative)
>>>tell me you were playing Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld on your Amiga in 1992 too.
Nope. Were you playing Dragon's Lair or Space Ace on your IBM PC in 1990? Not likely. Amiga also had the eye-popping visuals of Myst. Images (262,000 colors) - http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/myst_09.png [lemonamiga.com] http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/screenshots/full/myst_10.png [lemonamiga.com]
Amigas were also used to create the CGI for television shows and movies, like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, seaQuest, and Babylon 5. There's a reason it was called the first multimedia computer.
USB gamepads, HDTV, and mods (Score:3, Informative)
Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard
That hasn't been the case since about 2000. By that time, every new PC came with a port for a multitap that takes four controllers [wikipedia.org].
and a tiny crt
Tiny CRT? It used to be the case that TVs couldn't use a PC's video output because CRT SDTVs ran at 15.7 kHz (480i) and PC monitors ran at twice that (480p or higher). But that changed in 2008 when LCD HDTVs with a VGA input displaced CRT SDTVs in electronics stores. At the start of the 2008 holiday shopping season, HDTV had already entered one-third of U.S. households. Two aspects of the "far to go" that I mentioned involve 1. the major labels of PC gaming noticing the increasing HDTV market share and 2. PC game developers educating the market about HTPC possibilities [pineight.com].
The big drawback to consoles is that console makers like Nintendo and Sony have historically been dead-set against people who develop video games as a hobby or as a part-time business. Either it's your day job from day one, or you're not allowed in. They don't even allow mods developed by members of the gaming community. Microsoft and Apple, on the other hand, provide downloadable SDKs to all owners of an authentic copy of their respective PC operating system (Visual Studio Express for Windows or Xcode for Mac OS X).
Re:Doom (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doom3 (Score:3, Informative)
GAMING HISTORY FAIL.
Doom 3 release date: August 3, 2004
Gears of War release date: November 9, 2006
Spring is buggy as hell (Score:5, Informative)
Spring is buggy as hell. I reported several bugs on the forums, and I got
* denial
* accusations
* "if you aren't using Ubuntu, you have no right to complain that it doesn't work in your distro"
* "if you don't like the manual, change it yourself, it's a wiki." Except that it is buggy and that the devs are pretenious pricks, I don't know anything that I could add to the wiki.
Spring is not worth anyone's time.
Re:doom didn't need a story noob! (Score:3, Informative)
Bungie's Marathon was actually the first FPS to be story-driven, and it was a contemporary of Doom. It was one of those rare Mac-only A-list games.
The story was told through the computer terminals, since it was mostly about how the ship's AI had gone insane, and was sending you on various missions. The nice thing about it was that you didn't have to read the terminals if you didn't care about the story, you could just click through them quickly.
Re:doom didn't need a story noob! (Score:3, Informative)
Not every IBM PC game was a sim. Ever heard of Lemmings? Or Populous? Or Shadow of the Beast?
Kind of bad examples. Those were all Amiga games that got ported to the PC after they became hits. Its coincidece enough to make one wonder if the GP wasn't right.
Or Wolfenstein?
OK, ya got me on that one. That wasn't an Amiga game...that was an Apple II game.
Re:doom didn't need a story noob! (Score:1, Informative)