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Games Entertainment

Classic Gaming Gets Recognition 317

Posted by emmett from the inky-pinky-blinky-and-sue dept.
citizen_bongo writes: "A great story by MSNBC about classic gaming and the people that keep playing them (I do too, I admit). It also talks about 'Video Game Player of the Century' Bobby Mitchell, who scored 3,333,360 points in Pac Man. I can still play Super Mario Brothers, but I have trouble playing Starcraft for 10 minutes without getting bored. The classic games always have had something that modern games seem to lack, and that's simplicity and fun." I still love the classics, I even own a few. The games are still great, and it's a fun hobby, too.
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Classic Gaming Gets Recognition More

Classic Gaming Gets Recognition

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  • There are a lot of places to play games on the Web, but I'm wondering how many people sit and play them, and how often. I have a site that I'm modeling after the "free content with ads" sites that some of my friends have, and that seem so "successful" on the 'net, but how much room is there for them?

    I'm in the process of fixing up my game site to be more attractive and accessible, (it pretty much sucks now,) but I'm not sure what the goal of a free gaming site should be. You have to have so much traffic (for me, 20,000 views/month is huge) to even get paying ads, but I don't know if that many people will even find the site, much less ever spend any real time playing the games! I don't really know how to make this thing pay for itself, much less earn a profit of any kind.

    Now, of course, the games have to be fun/interesting to play, but how often do people really tend to visit these sites?

    ...(this is hard to answer, but I'm fishing for comments/opinions at least.)

  • Of course nostalgia is part of it, but I think a lot of it is more about simplicity, as opposed to the relative complexity of "modern" games. Many modern game designers seem to focus on designing games that are, well, masterpieces of design. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it does represent a shift from games of 10-20 years ago when you couldn't design complex games (by today's standards) because of hardware limitations.

    I think many of the people who enjoy "classic" games enjoy them because of that simplicity. As much as I liked Final Fantasy 8, it's not something I'm going to go back to for an hour or so when I feel like just sitting back, relaxing and playing a little bit of something; FF8 is a complex game and takes a good deal of involvement. With games like Pac-Man or Tetris, on the other hand, I can start the game up, play for a little while, and then switch it off and go do something else, without having to try and remember what I was doing last time I played or spend 5-10 minutes trying to think how to overcome the next obstacle. For me, that's a big plus; there are times when I just want to have a little fun, and those "classic" games are perfect for such a situation.

  • Best side scroller: Sidearms
    Best "flight simulator": original wireframe Star Wars
    Best sports game and best GPA killer: Super Tecmo Bowl for NES
    Best game ever: Asteroids
    Honorable Mentions: Archon for C=64, Space Harrier, Missile Command, Outrun, Galaga, Centipede.
    I probably forgot a game or two....

    ....

  • Yeah, I installed it yesterday - I stopped at 1 o'clock in the morning after reaching the Siberian stage, 'cause those goddamn tanks keep killing me...

  • And I just found a site that has a bunch of old C64 games for download:

    http://arnold.c64.org

    I just played M.U.L.E. again for the first time in 10 years. I really missed that game. For those of you who don't remember, upto 4 players could play at the same time and it involved colonizing a new planet, bartering, setting up your property, and good health capitalist competition.

    I am trying to find a good copy of Elite, a wire frame space trading game where you bought and sold cargo and carried it to other solar systems in order to make more money. You fought pirates and had to dock in rotating spacestations.

    I also played a lot of infocom games and a bunch of other games.

    I am using the vice emulator which is very good, and I am going to try the css emulator as well.

    I also don't have to worry about being illegle, because I still have most of the original game disks for the games that I am playing. Fair use is a great thing.

    Anyone know where I can find any of the old C64 manuals in html or pdf formats?

  • I agree - very few games from the 90's will still be played in 2010.

    Probably the original Quake will be one of them. It spawned a whole community, hundreds of web sites, and the concept and practice of professional video game players actually making money to frag.

    Now that it's been GPL'ed, it can never die, despite the inevitable changes that will come to hardware and operating systems.

    I just had a chilly moment of foreboding... In 10 years, some kid is going to see me playing Quake and say: "Hey! that's one of those old games, like... uh... Brother Mario, right? That was for a... um... Nuntindo Main Frame?"

    (sigh.) I should be too young to anticipate feeling that old.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Commander Keen may have been good, but Raptor was of course the 'best' classic game of all time because of its intense gameplay and most of all, the soundtrack!
  • Who the hell marked the previous post as a troll?? He's totally on target. Most games today are seriously lacking in gameplay. They're built almost completely around flashy graphics. The game itself is an afterthought. Even worse than the PC game space is arcade games. Has anyone walked through an arcade lately? They're filled with dreck. There are really only three arcade games left; it's either fighting, driving, or shooting. That's it. How many iterations of Mortal Kombat do we need? In terms of gameplay, the vast majority of games today cannot touch classics like Pac-man, StarCastle, Rip-Off, Galaga, Defender, Missile Command, Robotron, Etc. (Notice how all seven games I just listed cannot be classified under one genre other than "arcade game?" Today you can classify virtually every arcade game as either a shooter, a driver, or a fighter)

    -Vercingetorix

  • We're living in a great time for games. Diablo II (You can call me DAME Annika, thank you very much), Counter-Strike (which I suck at, but it still kicks ass), Deus Ex, The Sims (which allows me to torture all my ex-girlfriends in their lesbian love-shack), Daikatana (just kidding), and Shogun:Total War all rock, and those are all going strong right now.

    I understand the appeal of classic games (Jumpman, M.U.L.E, Ultima IV, Telengard, now I'm getting all nostalgic) but don't ignore the fine gaming goodness going on right now.

  • Bravo. Best I've seen in a long time.
  • Civilization has to be the greatest example of a great game turned bad by a gaming company, trying to mold a once simplistic, entertaining game into a unnecessarily complex and difficult one. After the creators of Civilization got hired by Microprose, it took them about 3 years to release Civilization 2. When Civilization 2 finally hit stores, it didn't come with any internet/multiplayer support and featured no built in scenarios or tools that were a staple in the original Civilization. Civilization 2 also had little to no difference then the game play from Civilization, and else then tactful icon changes and simple added game options, it was practically the same as Civilization.

    My other major gripe was that Civilization 2 was shortly followed by 3 add-ons (all costing 30 to 50 dollars). Just to play with my friends I had to buy the sequel (Call to Power), and just to play any worthwhile scenarios, I had to buy the Gold Edition. i mean what is this? In addition to this, the game literally came with a book trying to explain everything it had modified from the original Civilization (the original game took me 30 mins to pick up, this game about 30 days). I mean, shit like this just proves why things are moving from the PC market to the console market, because the PC games rape themselves by trying to get profits by making cheap add-ons just to make the game playable!

    It appears today that games aren't about entertainment or fun, but about reading a novel to get into the game just to get some miniscule joy from understanding it--only to be ruined 10 seconds later when some kid has a hack that lets him obliterate you. (sighs like charlie brown)

    Writen with ampthy and contempt,
    Bongo
    Amoureux des jeux, Hater de merdre de Bull
  • Yep I hear that. I've finished Final Fantasy VIII already so now I'm just using it as a busy box when I'm bored, hehe. Other than that I just use my Dreamcast. I've got my DSL masqueraded all over my house too (SyGate)... too bad my Dreamcast doesn't have a NIC, just a 56k. Even worse is I can't use a free ISP on it since you need to download an application to use it.

    I'm enjoying old Genesis and Neo Geo games though :) Gunstar Heroes, Castlevania 2, Super Metroid, Samurai Showdown 2... excellent games. Also since I don't have a PlayStation anymore I use Virtual Game Station... very nice and puts Bleem! to shame (went way too fast for any game on my PC, and the speed was jerky, would keep shifting from fast to slow...). I love Castlevania: SotN. Excellent modern sequel to a classic.

  • Lots of animations, sounds, etc at: The Dragon's Lair Project [dragons-lair-project.com] --mark
  • I like game like Crazy Taxi, which mix the old (racking up points and pulling off cool maneuvers) with the new (great graphics). I played this game for hours.
  • I love my Mame. I can get my fill of Crazy Climber and Scrambler. All those games that I could never defeat are now my bitches forever!

  • Re:The *worst* game of all time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check this out http://pocket.ign.com/previews/14300.html Dragons Lair, complete with animations, on the gameboy color.
  • FFV was definitely the best of the series. Bteer graphics and a tighter storyline than IV, and more involvement than anything that came after it. I still think the profession-switching system was the best thing that ever happened to the series - why did they only use it for FFV?!?

  • You seem to misunderstand. Those are my comments, not emmets. I think that simplicity is a necessity, becuase I don't want to swim through a 30 minute bull shit storyline just to play a game I paid 60 dollars for. I'm more for instant gratification then for wading through a book just to understand the game, let alone play it. But it's just my 2 cents.

    BTW, all Emmet adds is "I still love the classics, I even own a few. The games are still great, and it's a fun hobby, too. ", everything else is my personal comments.

    Thanks,
    Bongo
    Amoureux des jeux, Detester de merdre de Bull
  • Let's face it; the only people that are playing these "classic" games these days are playing them via an emulator

    Bullshit! There are quite a few of us that have collections of them. Have a look at VAPS [vaps.org] to see how many people collect. --mark

  • 2D = compelling gameplay (Score:4)

    by gribbly ( 39555 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:03PM (#886639)

    I think a lot of it can be attributed to a 2D viewpoint, which of course most "classic" games have. This is similar to, but more specific than, the "limitations of technology make you more creative" argument.

    A 2D viewpoint means that the designer of the game can force you to play from the optimal perspective for that type of gameplay. For example, Atari 2600 Combat works really well top-down, as does 1942, Xevious and Frogger.

    Imagine playing Combat from a side view perspective, or Donkey Kong from a 2D top down perspective...

    While I believe we are getting better and better at it, it's still fairly early days for the 3D perspective. We often give the player too much freedom, or make that freedom to difficult to understand and control. This usually makes the game harder, less direct, and -- I think -- less satisfying.

    Currently, the most successful 3D games limit either limit the degrees of camera freedom available to the player, or use a first-person perspective (which has the advantage of being very similar to RL).

    A lot of this comes down to interface. I don't think any game but Quake does a _really_ seamless job of immersing you in a 3D game world -- the kind of immersion that, say, Defender gives you effortlessly. This is, of course, highly subjective.

    An _excellent_ case study is Konami's brilliant "Metal Gear Solid" on the PSX. If you analyse the gameplay, a lot of it is Pacman. Although the world is polygons, not sprites, the camera is often locked to an (almost) topdown perspective, and the map layouts are very grid/maze like.

    Of course, MGS features many sections with different perspectives(including first person), but I believe my point is valid.

    One last point: "classic" gaming is alive and well on the Dreamcast. Chu Chu Rocket [dailyradar.com] is new-school 2D puzzling of superior quality. Puzzle Bobble [dailyradar.com] (aka Bust-a-Move) 4 is a fantastic "classic" puzzle game. And Namco have just released Mr. Driller [dailyradar.com], a total old-school arcade throwback.

    Enjoy!

    grib.

  • And there is only 3 posts!
  • In English, that game was called Wolfpack.

  • What about today's simplicity? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I mean, forget the simplicity of PacMan and Tempest....

    How about today's games, like Final Fantasy VII/VIII? I mean, who else agrees that junctioning magic and guardian forces to your vitatlity stats to increase your hitpower is a piece of cake?

  • Re:I agree...but... (Score:3)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @07:40PM (#886644)

    The thing is, these days, I only want to play a game for 10 minutes. I periodically buy games, load them onto my computer, and abandon them when I can't make much progress the first few times I play them. I got half-life a year-and-a-half ago as a present. Sweet looking game, especially after I got the hardware to play it. But I still haven't gotten into it, since i have to master all of these damn controls. I seem to have lost the quick reference card for the thing, so I'd actually have to memorize the command to crouch and run forward (probably quacking like a duck, to boot).

    I'm simply not interested in investing time in a game. I don't want a new career. I don't eant to develop new skills. I'm just here to blow shit up. Which is exactly what I get to do in classic arcade games. Gimme Rampage or Galaxian. Move left. Move right. Shoot. That I can handle.

    Now, if I can just find some games that combin classic gameplay with cool new graphic eyecandy... I bought my neice that new version of Asteroids for the Playstation. Now, that is something that I could manage to get into.

  • As someone who owns 30+ classic coin-op arcade games, I can say with conviction that these games (in their original, full-size form) do have an enduring quality that can be endlessly fascinating.. However, it must be said that the whole concept of "emulated" classic arcade games is bullshit. Without the original controls, monitors, sound amps/speakers and cabinet art, you're not playing the game- you're playing a pale shadow of it. While I realize that owning the real thing just isn't practical for most people (it's not practical for me, but I do it anyway), and that MAME provides a chance to get reacquainted with these old games, there's a world of difference between MAME and the actual classic gaming experience. Just try playing Robotron or Sinistar on MAME for a truly sad example of this. http://www.sinistar.com for more classic game info...
  • Man, I could wax nostalgic for hours about these games. I still love the music...there's something to be said for a 60-second loop that didn't get old after months of pounding repetition.

    (I replayed several 8-bit games recently and mpegged the music, sans sound effects...if u r lucky, u can download them some nite on napster or gnutella :)

    The flood of ideas that we witnessed during the birth of video games was incredible. I think that there are many good ideas still to be implemented, but the market has grown younger and more reflex-oriented, and the really good programmers are working on other things. In the years between Dune II and Age of Empires, what did we get? Unit-building pipelines. Whoopee. Compare that to the conceptual difference between Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. I mean, christ.

    Instead of listing all the really sweet games for all the different platforms, I tried to compile a list of novel game concepts along with games that really showed them off:

    automapping and multiple game paths in d&d for intellivision
    plot and character building in wasteland
    monster and level design in blaster master
    bionic arm (no jumping!) in bionic commando
    fancy weapon system in space megaforce
    interaction with the environment in ultima 6
    secrets and tricks in super mario brothers
    atmosphere in metroid
    music in megaman 2
    length and challenge in gauntlet
    sensory overload in contra 3
    attention to detail in Castlevania:sotn
    simulation and responsiveness (control) in gran turismo
    sheer audio-visual experience in darius coin-op (3 screens wide, hi-res, stereo sound)
    depth of gameplay in civilization (until you realize the computer is cheating :)
    on-line multiplayer character building in tradewars2002 (bbs)
    navigating a 3d environment with ease in mario64 (magic carpet deserves a nod, too)
    multipliers and multiball in any pinball game (the first powerups...)

    You think paying $500 for a castle in Ultima Online is a big deal? I would have died to keep my character alive in The Pit for more than a week at a time.

    So who has the time or the energy these days to give us intelligent soldiers in the next incarnation of *-craft, or RPG character-building that involves more than just killing monsters? I wish it was me, but alas, the video game industry has been MTV-ized.

  • ..So its almost midnight, I've got to work in the morning, and now you've got me BREAKING THE LAW, downloading ROMs and launching into a game of Gauntlet, that I damn well know is not going to end within the next few hours:

    "Valkyrie is about to die!"

    Well, of course I'd be Valkyrie.. Who else?
    I DEMAND that slashdot remove those links to those MAME sites before MORE innocent country & western-pop-stars are lured into a life of SIN. Its too late for me.
    -

  • You get what you pay for: game as lifestyle (Score:3)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @11:43PM (#886653)
    That's what people are paying for these days: a game you can live in.

    Sure the old games were great when you wanted to have a little quick fun, but you couldn't just pick one and play it for hours every day for months without getting bored.

    People want games with huge worlds to explore: Final Fantasy N (where N is a sufficiently large integer), Zelda 64, even (dare I say it) Pokemon.

    Strategy games that take days to play through a single game, and endless games to master: Civilization: CTP, Alpha Centauri, MoO.

    Games with network play and replacable components: Quake, umm... those other games that play like Quake.

    Games that are whole worlds unto themselves, complete with real human population: Ultima Online, Everquest.

    Nothing less justifies the $60 price tag, and more importantly, nothing less justifies the effort of searching out and choosing which one is worth spending the money on. Sure, you might want a fun, simple arcade game, but when was the last time you shelled out for one?

    You don't just play games anymore, you move in and adapt to prosper in your new environment. You want a nice home, don't you? That's where the money is, so that's where the development is.

    ---
    Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
  • Well, I quite like nethack (http://www.nethack.org) but I much prefer Angband (http://www.phial.com/angband) and even better than that, Zangband (http://www.zangband.org).

    Games that, for once, don't depend on the fillrate of my Riva TNT.
    --
  • The games where the system didn't just come out, had some pretty good endings. Of course zelda's ending sucked, and so did mario brothers.. but as the system stuck around, the endings did get better. Unfortunately, newer systems are coming out all the time. Gotta use the system's new capabilities than using your imagination...

    ---

  • Re:The thing about classic games.. (Score:3)

    by codemonkey_uk ( 105775 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @12:15AM (#886669) Homepage
    ..is they had to do more with less
    Which is why PalmOS games is where its at.

    For some reason PC games have to be grossly over engineered for people to accept them. On the smaller platforms people want games to be fun, and small. Bloat is doubly bad, so people accept "cheap" looking games if they play well.

    Games such as SFCave, DopeWars, and piemansimon [palmgear.com].

    Thad

  • I couldn't DISAGREE with you more =] (Score:3)

    by Matt Ownby ( 158633 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @12:33AM (#886673) Homepage Journal
    I was in attendance at the Classic Gaming Expo 2000 mentioned in the news article. One of the ONLY reasons I went was to play Dragon's Lair again (and Space Ace!). And I had a blast. To feel the joystick in my hands again, to press the buttons, to hear the little *beep* that the game emits when you make a correct move--it was all worth the price of the plane ticket!
    Dragon's Lair's gameplay was all about memorization, it's true. But don't ignore the incredible animation created by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (who went on to create such movies as An American Tale, Anastasia, and most recently Titan AE). Many animation experts agree that the animation in Dragon's Lair and Space Ace is of incredibly high quality. Also, Dirk the Daring has personality.. great personality.
    For many laserdisc collectors (such as myself), Dragon's Lair is all about reliving childhood memories. A ton of information can be had on the Dragon's Lair Project website (http://www.d-l-p.com) and I have written a Dragon's Lair emulator called DAPHNE which can be downloaded at the DAPHNE home page: http://daphne.rulecity.com .
    As you mentioned in another post, Dragon's Lair is available on DVD now, but as you surmised, its gameplay is fairly useless. Whereas the original Dragon's Lair relied on timing (which presented somewhat of a challenge!) the DVD version relies exclusively in memorization, and no randomization. Hence it is rather dull. However, my emulator is true to the arcade version and I recommend it to everyone *shameless plug* Hehe. You do need the original laserdisc to play it though. But I've got it working with DVD at the moment (unreleased) and I just started messing around with mpeg1 yesterday. Progress is being made.

    Anyway, to summarize what I've been trying to say here... to many of us, Dragon's Lair and other laserdisc games ARE what classic gaming is all about (the early 80's). The other vector/raster games are cool too (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc) but it was Dragon's Lair which blew EVERYONE away. Can you imagine playing on a game with the graphic of Donkey Kong and then seeing a game that had CD quality sound and NTSC quality "graphics"? (basically a movie). Everyone was blown away. Dragon's Lair rules!! Hehe. And as far as replay value.. well... I still play it from time to time just to relive the old memories. And also what you didn't mention is that Dragon's Lair has a "very hard difficulty" setting in which incredibly precise timing is involved. So the game isn't just about memorization but it's about timing. The timing can be QUITE challenging.

    Laserdisc games rule =]

    PS - I would be interested in buying that Dragon's Lair that is sitting in your friend's garage.
  • The game you are talking about was called Street Rod. My brother used to play that all the time. :)
  • And that is why I liked the game Subspace so much. It was the first really massively multiplayer game, made by Burst (gone Bust, now known as Harmless Games) and financed by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (also gone Bust). But Subspace still lives. It's four years old, totally abandoned by the creators, but the players still keep very good servers and leagues going. Subspace too is easy to learn, and hard to master. The general controls are a bit awkward, but learn very quickly, and the physics of the game are very simple, but to become a master takes ages, because you're always playing against other humans, never (NEVER) against bots of any kind.

    Four years ago it was the greatest thing out there. A truly online game, with centralised servers. A 2D top-down view space shooter, kinda like Asteroids, but with over 100 people in one zone, and lots of mods available. I played that game for 3 years (2.5 years of beta and then half a year after it went retail). That's longer than I've played any other game except Civilization...

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity
  • I've just recently discovered Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator) and have been busy rediscovering the games of my youth.

    I never remembered just how low-tech these games looked and sounded. I remember that Asteroids for the 2600 was a disappointment at the time, and I still feel that way compared to MAME's Asteroids (and Asteroids Delux).

    Still, to finally play Adventure again is a great joy. If I could only remember how to find the secret key...

  • Re:Tetris! (Score:3)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @12:48AM (#886678) Homepage Journal
    Many classic games have been cloned in java and you can play then from the web, or from your java enabled system.

    Tetris [uni-karlsruhe.de] Tetris [mit.edu] Tetris [wickedmoon.net] Pacman [tu-berlin.de] Asteroids [bitwise.net] Centipede [ambergriscaye.com]

    And for you people that grew up on the kaypro, cloned Ladder [f2s.com]! (Shameless self plug)

    I'm sure you can any of the most popular games just with a quick search on google. :

  • ... and Rainbow Islands too!

    This is scarily true - my GF was over the moon when I gave her a copy of Mame and a pack of roms for those games (yeah, yeah - I know!! Shouldn't be doing that!). Anyhoo, she's now WAAAAY better than me at those platformers - though I kick ass at Mr Do and Qix :-)


    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • DARIUS!()*)(^$*)

    That's my favorite F&SL (Fly and Shoot Lasers; acronym (c) Dr_DOS/VicViper) series. Too bad Darius Gaiden and other games using the F3 System chipset aren't supported by Raine (which was, as you may recall, discontinued due to lameness - it was a Taito/Jaleco 680x0 board emulator).

    And besides the arcade Darius games (Darius, Darius 2, and Darius Gaiden), let's not forget Darius Plus (for the PC Engine) and Darius Twin (for the SNES). Darius Twin has awesome music, by the way.

    *sigh* The days of the NES and the SNES were definitely the best days of video gaming.
  • OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084.

    I never rated the original myself. For some reason, it just didn't have the appeal of other games at the time. Now Llamatron [magicnet.net], on the other hand, had me hooked for ages. Strange...

  • Tetris! (Score:3)

    by Rob Kaper ( 5960 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @09:55PM (#886690) Homepage
    Shame on you if this post isn't already redundant.

    Tetris kicks ass! Just happened to play it again with a roommate.. until 7am. We concluded that a computer platform is not worthy unless it has a Tetris clone. (high-load servers are excused, although tetris for terminals won't bring your system down)

  • Unfortunately if you dialup a 56K Analog Modem from another Analog Modem(like your dreamcast has in it), your best throughput will be around 33.6 since the compression needed for k56/v90 is only attainable through a digital RAS box... However all is not lost. Since you will be connecting at v.34, your transmit and receive rates will be closer to a 1:1 ratio which will mean less apparent "lag"...due to interpretation of the games' sense of lag. So you might even be better off than someone who is connecting at a 53K download, but is only uploading at 24000.
  • are we just harder to impress because it just ain't new and different anymore?

    But that's entirely the point. There aren't any new, original games, these days. It's either another first person shoot-em-up, a driving game or yet another sports sim. Where are the original ideas these days? Games like Jetpac, Wizball, Paradroid and the like? These weren't rehashes of old ideas. They were new and interesting, and that's why we played them. Of course, the fact that they had gameplay helped, something that most modern games have forgotten about in the rush to get more polygons on screen and better 3D sound.

  • Great PR move of the Linux advocates!

    "Hey, Linux hardly has any new, cool games!"
    "I know, what can we do?"
    "Let's advocate classic games!"

  • Re:I agree...but... (Score:5)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @08:09PM (#886699) Homepage Journal
    The thing is, Centipede's _actions_ are as simple as you can get (almost- see 'pong' or 'target fun') but the 'game space' is much more complicated than that. You have the little mushrooms which seriously affect the motion of the centipede, you have spiders, all sorts of things can affect the shape of play. It's like shooting all the invaders in the middle of Space Invaders and then there are only two left on opposite ends of the screen and they rocket downwards at a sickening pace- the _pattern_ of the gameplay can be more involved than your actions.

    When you look at a Q3A the complexity is certainly great- it's single combat (or multiple) against other individuals, but that doesn't mean it's a high point in gameplay depth. It's a very well realised but essentially direct sort of game. Compare it to, say, WarBirds (MMOL WWII combatsim) and you see a lot more constraints. In Warbirds you're in a propeller-driven warplane. It's powerful (and very realistically modelled) but it's no F15- you cannot point up and hit 'go', you'll stall and crash- or end up muddling around at low speed, unable to maneuver effectively. When you evaluate an enemy, you gauge their 'e' state (energy) to see whether they are slow or fast, high or low compared to you. You register what plane they're in- if they're in a hot ME109 and you're not, you don't try climbing away from them. If they're in a P51 Mustang you don't dive away from them, etc. These constraints have a profound effect on what you can do and expect to survive- now, imagine 20 different planes all in the sky around you, some nearer, some attacking, some far or fleeing or doing other things. It is called SA, or Situational Awareness. Your ability to survive and fight depends on maintaining a mental model of all these interactions, plus being able to handle a big hunk of steel with a roaring engine whirling a big prop (or two, or four).

    Compared to this, Quake is far more physical- in Q3A the differences among players are minimised, it becomes a straight challenge of reflexes. This is one extreme of gameplay- in some ways Warbirds in full realism is another. In Q3A having uber-reflexes may be the ideal quality, in Warbirds a person with uber-reflexes but no SA will typically lose to a person with OK reflexes and greatly superior situational awareness- because that person can get reflex-man into impossible situations. For instance, if the reflex player is in a FW190 pursuing a ME109, he is already hosed by lack of climb ability, and can be doubly hosed by use of a climbing spiral on the ME109's part. The ME can do this- the FW190, on the other hand, not only cannot match the ME but also has very nasty departure characteristics, tending to go into violent spins and sometimes flip into inverted spins spontaneously. All the ME has to do is entice the heavily armed FW to try and pull angles for a desperate shot- and then swoop down on the helpless butcherbird as it tries to recover from the resulting spin.

    There is no reason games can't be both simple and possessed of this depth of consequences- but you can't have that level of inner complexity without some very good design. It's a lot easier to set up balanced players to ensure no bitching, and work to make everything equalised. To introduce 'situational' elements such as the realistically modeled warplanes of WarBirds will tend to cause competitive gamers to pile onto what they feel is the strongest 'game piece'- in WWII flightsims, this has changed madly with different sims and versions, with everything from the FW190 to the Spit to the P-38 Lightning being, temporarily, the 'uberplane', sometimes for very dicey reasons (at one point in Air Warrior, you could spin a FW on purpose and recover pointing whatever direction you wanted, in normal flight attitude. This got fixed and the players who racked up high scores doing it got well and truly hosed when the 'bug' got fixed...)

    I think perhaps Pac-Man is (in the set-top-score mode) not properly complex in this way. Unless you have to make judgement calls based on how the ghosts are likely to move, it's just a Zenlike repetition of memorised patterns- not SA. Centipede is actually more like SA. Tempest tries to be, but not effectively- (the spikes are mere obstacles to clear). Missile Command is more like situational awareness because of the distributed nature of the bases and the need to focus on protecting certain areas if you start getting flattened :) In general, a game can only have situational awareness if it has a situation. Some games like the descendents of Warcraft are very good at establishing situations beyond the player's ability to fully perceive, and then developing them and forcing re-evaluation (where did that guy come from? For that to happen there would have to be a base over _there_, etc)

    Think about designing games not only in terms of defining the neat stuff on screen, but defining what is unseen. For SA, the 'game space' needs to be more complex than the player can entirely grasp- but little bits of it need to be immediately abstracted, formed into concepts or generalisations, ideally so that information leads to better performance. ("That TIE fighter's a long way from home.. how'd it get out here in the first place? Those are only short range! Look, it's heading for that moon.." ;) )

  • the problem is, not enough people are making new ones on PC
    Oh, people are designing origanal games. Some people are even developing origanal games. The problem is that no one will publish them.

    Try taking an origanal game design to a publisher and see what happenes. They may well tell you they like it. What they won't do is fund it.

    Try taking an origanal game (compleated) to a publisher and you *might* get a publishing deal, what you won't get is decent royalties, (because if they "take the risk" they want decent profits), and you won't get a decent investment in PR, it'll go out on the cheap, and if your lucky a brave reviewer will go against the norm and give it a good review, and you'll get a vocal fan base, and it'll turn in to a slow-burn profit maker. Assuming you got a royalty deal.

    Games publishers want games with proven formats, its to expensive to gamble on an unusual idea, and thats why all you see, and all you'll ever see is clones, until the public stop eating the shit their beeing fed.

    Discalaimer: I'm a published computer games developer.

    Thad

  • You do know that Raptor now runs on Linux [mking.com], don't you? It's exactly the same game, rebuilt on top of SDL, which means it runs under X or fullscreen on the framebuffer console. I bought it (again - I have a DOS copy as well!) and it rocks!
  • ..is they had to do more with less - the limitations of the technology in some ways enhanced the good games. You couldn't rely as much on eye-candy to sell the game.

    I for one am very grateful for the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator [mame.net] and themame.dk [www.mame.dk] rom archive -I can finally play these old games again.

  • The classics are also getting recognition in the form of a stamp [stampsonline.com]. (Defender, on the Atari 2600 to be specific. Perfect choice IMHO -- that could be a photo of me 20 years ago...)
  • What I really enjoy about the 20 or so year old games is the fact they were simple but provided enough challenge to make you want to keep playing. My friend has an old NES and we play Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Jr. for hours trying to top each others' score. Games started getting longer and more complex to play. Sometimes this can be good in the case of Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior but in adventure or action games you need simple stuff. I'd like to get ahold of an old Atari console, those were some very fun but simple games. I'd play Pitfall for hours when I was younger. Many games around now are just too much at once, if you're blood starts pumping for a minute and then subsides, you're going to get bored right after the action stops. This is the reason arcade games are pretty straitforward and simple. You are playing for short periods but you're replaying a large number of times. Duck Hunt has to be one of the best old games ever.
  • True, but some of us like complexity. I'm like the original poster, I get bored to death playing the "classic" arcade games. I have trouble understanding how anyone could be amused by them. I am a huge RPG fan, and I like games that create a virtual world that sucks me in. When I'm playing a good RPG I am my character. I live in that world. I care about what happens.

    Perhaps that last part is the most important thing for me. When I play pacman I couldn't care less what happens to pacman. He's just a big yellow dot that eats little dots. Some people try to go for high scores, but that just doesn't interest me. It's a number that's all.

    Now, I'm not trying to force anyone to share my viewpoint. If you like going for high scores then good for you. More power to you. I just want to make it clear that not everyone shares that opinion. Yeah, there are a lot of unoriginal games today, but if you think there was ever a time when that wasn't true then your memory is playing tricks on you. You've simply forgotten the clones an knock-offs because they're so...forgettable. There are original games being made, unfortunately most of them don't do so well. System Shock 2 was an incredible game, but hardly anyone bought it. You can find in in the bargain bin these days for like $15, and at that price you don't have any excuse not to get it. There's also Deus Ex, which I haven't played yet (I don't think it will even run on my computer :-( ), but I have heard some very good things about it. If you've got a good computer, check it out!

  • Here are some of my favorite classic gaming resources on the web:
  • What about nethack? Is that a classic game or a modern game? It's still being distributed and maintained. (try buying a new copy of Cadash)
    What's the status on that? Classic, modern, the ascii equivalent of heroin? Any ideas?

    I know nethack isn't an arcade game so it's a bit offtopic, but that's for the best really. I'd have blown $4000 USD in quarters if it was.
    --Shoeboy

  • OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084. (heh).

    But my vote for the worst game of all time, that combines the most money spent with the worst game experience has to be Dragon's Lair. All that expensive animation, a video disk player (that wasn't cheap back then), etc. Too bad the gameplay stunk. It was total no-skill memorization.

    To those who never played it, Dragon's Lair was developed by a former disney animator (I believe). You played as a midieval character who trys to rescue a maiden. It would play a certain video animation, and at a critical point you had to make a choice using the joystick. For example, you might hit a fork where you had to go over a drawbridge, or jump in the water or something. The problem was that there was little or no hint what the right answer was. You had to guess, and then remember it for next time (a bad guess used up a life, and you got three lives). After choosing, it would play a video of the outcome of your choice, either moving on or dying in some amusing way. It was novel, but got boring pretty fast.

    A great lesson in how not to design a video game. Ironically, it was so new and "innovative" at the time that I had some friends who invested money in buying one. They lost big $$$ on it. I think it's still in someone's garage.


    --

  • There is a bit more than nostalgia to the appeal of classic games. The ways in which people play games have changed. Classic games emulated real-world games in the sense that they were repetitive and score-driven. The appeal was attaining a high level of skill (reflected by a high score) in a deceptively-simple task. Most games had no real end; a successful player could continue forever, and the closest thing to beating the game was rolling over the score counter, thereby proving that you had attained a higher level of skill (or at least patience) than even its designer believed possible.

    As computer technology developed, designers realized that they could offer an additional type of reward: novelty. Do well, and you will be rewarded with new things to look at, and new types of tasks to master. And generally, there is an ending, rewarding the player with some extra-special last bit of novelty.

    Most modern games are almost exclusively novelty driven. There may be no score at all, and players often pay little attention to it. The drive is to get to the end, to beat the game. Obviously, this is a very successful motivating strategy, and has played a big role in the great popularity of videogames. But something is lost. When you are thinking about getting to the end, you aren't strongly motivated to play one level over and over to truly master it. And once you have gotten to the end, and wrung every bit of novelty out of the game, it loses a lot of its appeal. The goal in the classic games was mastery; the goal in most modern games is to be just good enough to see the end.

    But as much fun as the new games are, they don't provide the level of challenge that the classic games did--the challenge of mastery--and many older players miss that. Of course, the old style of gameplay has not vanished utterly. It survives mainly in sports games, which emulate score-driven real world games. But even here, novelty has crept in as a motivator. A racing game with only one track is no longer competitive. Players are motivated in part by the desire to see more tracks. Team sports games have to include a lot of different teams, stadiums, and play modes, so they provide adequate amounts of novelty to appeal to the novelty-motivated player.

    Still, occasional games bring back memories of the older style. Sega has a game in the arcades, and for their home console, called "Crazy Taxi." It has the graphical glitz of modern games, but fundamentally it's as simple-minded as a classic game. You pick up a passenger, drive as recklessly as possible through a city to his destination, let him off, and do it again. You have a limited amount of time (although you can extend it by doing well enough), and the object is to make as much money as possible. You see most of the city pretty quickly, but it takes a lot of practice to attain a high score. Not surprisingly one often hears the complaint, especially from younger players accustomed to novelty-driven play, that it is "too repetitive--you just do the same thing over and over." Nevertheless, it has done reasonably well--as have the re-releases of classic game compilations for home console--demonstrating that there is still a demand for skill-driven gaming.

  • All those old trackball based games taught me that if your parents are too cheep to buy you are a real trackball you can substitute by moving the joystick back and forth really quickly. Course then they have to buy a joystick, but a $5 joystick is more accaptable then a $40 trackball.

    PS, I've only tried this trick on a Atari 400, the best machine ever made. Users of lesser machines (This means you C= guy) may not have luck.

    PPS, sorry about the last line, I got carried away in nastalga.

  • Tetris is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC. [tetris.com] Slashdot once ran a story [slashdot.org] on one developer's legal problems, which have since been overcome [8m.com], freeing me to create the ultimate clone and release it for Linux, DOS, and Win32 under GNU GPL: freepuzzlearena [8m.com]. I figured out how to add depth to Tetris without adding too much more complexity: gravity combos.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Don't forget System Shock 2 and Thief, epecially Thief! What a breath of fresh air that was. If you haven't played this game, you owe it to yourself to play it. Not only was Thief a great game, but people all over the place have developed additional single-player add-on missions, some of which are as good as the originals. Some are even a bit better.

  • Old style games (Score:3)

    by Sayjack ( 181286 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @06:16PM (#886745) Homepage
    The other day I started playing an old version of Galaga. I forgot how enjoyable a simple shoot-em-up arcade game could be.

    The old games were sort of like checkers, easy to learn and hard to master. The new games seem to be more like Chess, hard to learn and hard to master. The learning curve to most of the new games is much larger than the classics that got us hooked at the video arcades.

    I still feel a tinge of nostalgia every time I see the original version of pac-man or galaxian.

    I also miss the simplicity of the old style atari joystick, wish I could find a joystick like that for my pc.

  • I agree...but... (Score:3)

    by ChristianBaekkelund ( 99069 ) <.draco. .at. .mit.edu.> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @06:16PM (#886746) Homepage
    I love old arcade games. As an avid computer and video game player, I regularly pull out MAME and play a round or two of an old Galaga ROM or similar...however, still, I can't play them for any long periods of time any more.

    Perhaps this is sad, perhaps this is a sign of my mind getting riddled with the "blip-vert" super-short form of entertainment, even so, I where as emmett gets bored when he plays Starcraft for 10 min., I get bored now when I play Pacman for 10 min.

    Emmett remarks: "the classic games always have had something that modern games seem to lack, and that's simplicity and fun". While I definitely agree that more 'modern' games are usually more complex, to me personally, that's a GOOD thing! I want a complex, rich, detailed world to play in -- Centipede just doens't cut it in this respect. In fact, I would encourage game designers/publishers to put even MORE though and depth into their games...for example, in using movie genres, there have been some damn 'horror'-ific games, there have been some hilarious games, but we still haven't figured out how to do a good 'drama' yet.

    So I personally don't think necessarily that "simplicity and fun" are definitely linked. Are games more complex?...definitely. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Definitely not. Will there always be place for another Tetris variation? Sure.

  • freepuzzlearena [8m.com] for GNU/Linux, DOS, and Windows is the premier open-source Tetris clone for PC.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • I didn't say that the classics weren't cloned. My point was that you could walk into an arcade 15-20 years ago and see a lot of diversity. There weren't any "genres" per se. The gameplay in the seven games I listed was fundamentally different from each other. Missile Command was unlike any other game, before or since. It was a great game, and very popular. Same thing with Crazy Climber. Today it is totally different. Your only choices are fighting, shooting, or driving. Mortal Kombat is SoulCaliber is Tekken is Karate Champ (which is the game all of the fighters derive from, and IMHO, was better than any of the current crop of fighters). They are all the same game, but with different graphics.
    -Vercingetorix
  • I haven't seen any lately. There was nothing like the old Aladdin's Castle. Dimly lit, cramped spaces between the games. The cool bleeps, blips, and other sounds the classics made, not the dorky speech tracks and explosions they put in them now. The game attendant was usually some twenty-something, who'd walk around wearing the red Aladdin's Castle vest carrying the big key ring with the keys to all the games. You would always plot how to get him to give you free credits. If you were lucky, he was really cool and would often rack up 20 or 30 credits for the regulars when there weren't a lot of people around. Life in the summer revolved around scraping together enough money to spend the afternoon at the mall playing games. You became expert at conning your parents into forking over $5.00 for some imagined excuse; "but Mom, I'm going down to the mall today with Brian and I need to eat lunch!" Lunch my ass. Every last quarter from the fiver was going to be slipped into the bowels of StarCastle, Zaxxon, or PacMan. Those were the days.

    -Vercingetorix
  • ...are these still around?

    Nothing like the old early bird specials where the first few people in the doors got zillions of tokens for every dollar. Really helped a poor kid like me play alot more games. :)

  • Re:Bored of Starcraft... and Quake 3... & everythi (Score:3)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @06:45AM (#886758) Homepage
    Console games seem so dull, like going back to Bard's Tale or Might and Magic, where you fight stacks of monsters. The graphics might get better, but the magic and combat system are just as shallow as they were back then.

    And console RPGs tend to be so low on the interection scale... Zelda 64 had like 200 or so text responses from enemies and every time you came back to an area it was exactly like it was before. Yawn.

    Mario 64 (and most other crappy 2d->3d copies) have probably the worst controls ever invented.

    Ugh, console games are pretty crappy when compared to what you can get on a PC.

    Sure, a ton of PC games suck, but there are ones that are masterpieces. Sure they may inspire tons of crappy clones, but who cares if the original game is good.

    What sucks is when people copy the crap, just because it's got cute marketable characters, etc.
  • Is that they're all the same... Quake, Unreal Tournament, Soldier of fortune... Civilization, Age of Empires, Diablo... Need For Speed...

    It seems as tho game designers are trying to woo their customers with fancier graphics. And it works, the graphics sure are perty. I picked up a copy of Deux Ex. wow. Nice game, but it really requires a lot of preparation and focus. I want to have fun, I don't want to work on a game.
  • Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we just banned children outright.
  • Ah, my first computer, back in late 1979 (a Christmas present). I found that of all the different joysticks out there, the plain old Atari one with the short joystick and the one orange button at the upper left corner held up the best over time. I tried the latest-and-greatest whenever something would come out, but always drifted back to the old standby.

    Talk about your clever use of limited technology - in the game "Kingdom" (a Hammurabi clone), as the game loaded from cassette tape, it would hit a section with a slick introduction to the game, with music and instructions. I was pretty impressed at the time!

  • I said 20 years as a reference to games past, not saying Donkey Kong and such were 20 years old.

  • Starcraft (Score:3)

    by Nicolas MONNET ( 4727 ) <nicoaltiva&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @11:00PM (#886794) Journal

    Starcraft as a solo game is crap. I mean, it's not even worth mentioning. HOWEVER, as a networked game, it's probably one of the best available today. It's *perfectly* balanced, it's fast paced yet requires strategy, and after having played for a few years you still wonder how some people are so much better than you (no, it's not trainer they don't help *that* much).

  • You forgot the best game of all-time (Score:3)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:31AM (#886796) Homepage Journal
    But can I get an original, mint-in-the-box copy of Custer's Revenge [classicgaming.com]?

    I just downloaded it yesterday, and the ROM was well worth the 0.8 seconds it took to download over my 33.6kbps modem. Absolutely hilarious.

  • What is enthralling? (Score:4)

    by laborit ( 90558 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:37AM (#886816) Homepage
    As the discussion has gone on, people have described both Defender and Quake as being enthralling, enveloping games that bring you effortlessly into their world. How can it be that a primitive 2-D game and a modern graphical tour de force share this quality?

    I'd like to bring up Scott McCloud's [scottmccloud.com] "simplification" paradigm from the seminal Understanding Comics. Simple, uncluttered cartoon images like Charlie Brown and Mickey Mouse have an immediate appeal that realistic drawings and live actors lack. A line drawing is just as compelling a face as a photo of a face. McCloud suggests that detailed images are what we see, but line drawings are what we feel -- my face looks like a photo of a face, but your face feels like two eyes and a mouth. Simple characters give us a place to insert ourselves into a comic's (or a game's) world.

    The advent of RT3D that mimics our own perspective may eventually trump this abstraction. But it helps explain why classic arcade games could offer something we are only now recovering.

    - Michael Cohn

  • I don't know if it's a classic game, but one of the PC games I remember playing was this game called "OMEGA." There are still some copies out there on the net if you want to look for them. Here's one omega page. [atlantic.net]

    Now that was a game. It has it's own little programming syntax you use to program your tank. You can then pit your tank against anyone else's in a simulation. It programmer vs. programmer.

    Might even be kinda fun to have a little tournament...? (Not like I have the time for it :) )

    baldeep

  • Chicks dig Bubble Bobble!!
  • I was a depived child. I had a TI-994/A so I didn't get to play all the hip modern games(ultima,etc) at the time.

    My favorite game for the TI tho was always Tunnels of Doom. Took forever to load on cassette, but it was an aweseome RPG.
  • Sorry, add sports games to the three genres already listed. Firefighter is just another shooter (point the water hose instead of a gun. wow.), and I would categorize the skateboarding, skiing, kayaking, etc. as driving games. I would also classify the flight sims (haven't seen any new ones lately) as driving games, since they don't really simulate flying at all. Horse racing (you're talking about the first person thing where you sit on a model horse, right?) is just another driving game.

    -Vercingetorix

  • A lot of us wax more than a little nostalgic for the games of yore, remembering just how much time and effort we sunk into playing them and how we couldn't get enough. Likewise, we do quit a bit of criticizing of newer games, calling them "boring" (Emmett's editorial blip about "Starcraft" being a perfect example) for their inability to capture us with the same simplicity.

    I'll be among the first to admit that simplicity has a seductive and effective elegance to it, but I've got to wonder how much of our captivation with (and resulting rose-colored lenses for) the classic games stemmed simply from the novelty of video gaming? As time has gone by, and games have grown (or not), and gaming has gotten more demanding and jaded, are we just harder to impress because it just ain't new and different anymore?

  • > It happened a couple of years ago for the PlayStation, and has been going strong ever
    > since. There are about a dozen or so 'collection' games of old arcade classics, and
    > there are a bunch of 'new' versions of old games

    The problem with that is the user interface. I own the PSX versions of a bunch of old arcade games, including Centipede and Crystal Castles, two of my favorites. Both of those games had a trackball on the original arcade upright, and I managed to get so used to it that when I picked up the PSX controller, I could not, for the life of me, summon up my old 'mad skillz'.

    Likewise Asteroids. My parents used to have the arcade upright of Asteroids, and I could go for about six hours on a single quarter by the time I was 15. The PSX version? Forget it. It doesn't match the reflexes that I've learned deep down, and having to relearn them would be a bitch and a half.

    Likewise the new "3D" remakes of classic arcade games. They, nearly unanimously, suck. 3D Frogger -- blech! Frogger is not supposed to be a 3D platformer, dammit, it's supposed to be a green blob on a black screen, and I don't care who tells me otherwise.

    What *I* want is an arcade around me somewhere (upper central NJ) that has the classic games, well-maintained, without all the shoot 'em up and ninja games that overrun arcades these days. While I like, say, UMK3 (which is moving onwards towards 'classic' status itself) and Area 51 (ditto), nothing can beat the old Atari games. Anyone know of one such arcade?
  • I think perhaps Pac-Man is (in the set-top-score mode) not properly complex in this way. Unless you have to make judgement calls based on how the ghosts are likely to move, it's just a Zenlike repetition of memorised patterns

    Not if you get into the game. When i play, i do things like "hover" (move left and right really fast so as not to move at all) and watch the ghosts run around until things are safe, or dive into a group of ghosts to get the last few pellets. If you play enough (especially Ms. Pac Man), you turn into a Pac Man Houdini, escaping from what appear to be hopeless situations by watching the ghosts' eyes, hovering, predicting where they're going to go, and squeezing through an opening.
    --
  • A billion points may be nice, but there's no standard as to what a "point" is. In Outrun and other early Sega racing games, you got 10 (100?) points for every pixel the car moved, plus bonuses for checkpoints and speed, etc. In pinball games, you can easily rack up a few million points by hitting a few targets, and then you get the encouraging "EXTRA BALL AT 5,000,000,000" message when you're on a roll.

    But still, 2 1/2 days straight is pretty damn good nonetheless.
  • Might be the worst, but c'mon, how many quarters did you pump into it? To me, that was the game you played because everyone crowded around the damn thing and you wanted to show em how good you were :) When it first came out, there must have been 20 people standing around the thing. In fact, that ws the first game I remeber to have an additional monitor on top of the box so more peeps could see it.

    Anyhow, Don Bluth is the guy who did the animation. He now has his own software company and is working on a 3D version of Dragons Lair.

    http://www.dragonstone.com/index2.htm

    Lates!

  • Commercialisation imminent? (Score:3)

    by rodgerd ( 402 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @06:30PM (#886852) Homepage

    It will be interesting to see how much longer it takes for the games industry to catch on that there's a serious market for classic games.

    While there's been a few jumbo-sized compiliations published, they are currently (IMO) missing the boat. Classic games could end up as a solid niche in much the same way classic movies are. Sure, not everyone wants to watch silents or black-and-whites, but a lot of people are happy to pay for TNT so they can watch Lillian Gish and Casablanca.

    Of course, having this happen in the game industry could be a mixed blessing. Making it heasier to get at the great hits of the past would be a fine thing; however, it will most likely end up being accompanied by a crack down on ROM trading, which doesn't especially bother me, and a horde of clueless lawyers trying to kill tools like MAME, which does - because the free emulators are streets ahead of those that have been bundled with any of the compilations released to date.


    --
    My name is Sue,
    How do you do?
    Now you gonna die!
  • Oh, people are designing origanal games. Some people are even developing origanal games. The problem is that no one will publish them.

    I don't think that's true at all. Spend time poking around the web, looking for stuff done from a different point of view than "I wanna be like company X." There is almost nothing. I want to say "there is nothing," but after a long while you might actually find one.

    Amateur game development once seemed like it could be an art form similar to fiction writing or music, but instead it has become something more like hobbyist carpentry than sculpture. There's discussion of the merits of different band saws and belt sanders, studying of books about how to build birdhouses and coffee tables, and the practitioners seemingly enjoy building birdhouses and coffee tables, with the emphasis on the crafting rather than creation. It never occurs to anyone that there's more to games than Tetris and Asteroids and Quake, just as it never occurs to birdhouse builders that they should be sculpting works of art instead.

    Amateur game development is creatively dead, but it lives on as a craft for tech-oriented hobbyists.
  • The basic controls of M64, in an open field, were okay, and it had some funky stuff like the triple-jump and wall-bounce. The problem was the camera and how it would swing around you. The same problem that Tomb Raider had... stand next to a wall and the camera swings away to a completely useless position.

    The problem with Maria is that the controls are relative to what's shown on the screen, not relative to Mario... So when the camera swings away, your controls change.

    Ugh.
  • Who needs ROMs? Seriously.. there's nothing like the feel of a controller in your hand, and 27" of screen. I can't imagine playing NHL 96 on an emulator would be even NEAR the same experience.

    It's all about getting the buds together, and settling in with some booze for a nice night of Combat on the Atari 2600. A joystick breaks here and there, which you don't have the problem with with ROMS, but they're only a dollar. And I don't have friends vomiting on my keyboard, which I consider a plus.

    I've recently (past 6-8 months?) bought an Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Nintendo, and a Gauntlet II arcade machine that's in my living room. I love games, and playing them on the console that they came out on provides the best playing experience, IMHO. Even if the Blue controller doesn't move diagonal very well anymore. :\

    BilldaCat
  • I remember the evening news trotting that one out for a segment on how appalling the video game industry was and how it was corrupting our youth etc etc. Decades before Quake and Columbine.

  • Bored of Starcraft... and Quake 3... & everything (Score:4)

    by Halcyon-X ( 217968 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @06:34PM (#886876)
    The reason you got bored when you played Starcraft is because you got bored of it back when it was called Dune II... Same with Quake3/UT/Halflife = Quake...

    This might sound a bit off topic at first but hasn't anyone realized that ever since the advent of 3D, PC developers have gotten really redundant (i.e. unoriginal)?

    I remember when I could play Commander Keen, Raptor, One Must Fall, Tyrian, Terminal Velocity, Descent, Doom, Hocus Pokus, Duke Nukem, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Wipeout, Earthworm Jim, damn good versions of Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, all on my PC.

    These days all it seems I can play is Quake or Dune II clones or some shoddy sim game. The only original games as of late are Final Fantasy 8, Deus EX, and Half Life... and two of those are still stemmed from Quake.

    No wonder emulators are so popular. PC developers better get on the ball otherwise consoles are just going to overshadow the PC. Think of it, why shell out any amount of money to buy a PC when you can get a console for much less that all the PC games worth playing will be ported onto, *plus* you get a lot more variety with the (or so it seems) console-only game genres.

    I for one, in terms of gaming, only use my PC for emulators and once every 6 months maybe a decent PC game.

  • The thing about classic games is that they're good. My equivalent to Warsaw's closing comment is: They're not good because they're old, they're old because they're good.

    I.E. for the oldies, we remember things like 'American Pie' (the original, not the Madonna cover). We forget about things like 'tourist leggo short shirt' [just pulled that on off the back of an old album].

    When you compare the classics against the currents, it's like comparing 'american pie' to the current Brittany Spears hit. We haven't had a chance to filter for the best of the decade yet. Probability favor the classics in that context.

  • When it first came out, there must have been 20 people standing around the thing. In fact, that ws the first game I remeber to have an additional monitor on top of the box so more peeps could see it.

    Oh, I remember that well. That's what convinced my friends to put money into buying one ("Look at all these people! How can we lose?"). The trouble was that the novelty wore off real fast. What did it take, like, a month for the fad to be dead as a doornail? There's no question that the animations were really well done, but judged as a game, it stunk. :)

    By the time my friends actually got the machine in their hands and in an pizza place (they split with the owner 50/50 I believe), it made a ridiculously small amount of money, like $100 or something. It was a complete disaster.


    --

  • It becomes painful to play them on my 19" monitor. Each pixel becomes incredibly huge, and I am looking at a once gorgeous world of Civilization, and realize i just really can't do it because it just looks WAY TOO UGLY. The same happened with other games. I tried to play with my ancient miraculously salvaged copy of Death Track, and as soon as I launched the race, I was dead because all the other cars have run already had time to run around the entire track a few times and frag me like there's no tomorow. Old games often don't anticipate newer hardware...
  • i think the biggest draw to old school video games is that they're really fun when you're drunk.

    have you ever tried to play Gran Tourismo 2 after a 6 pack of Coors? It's not happenin' - although when you wake up in the mornin' is IS pretty fun to see the cars you bought the night before ("boy did i trick out that volkswagen")

    Additionally, there was more of a feeling of fraternity (you too ladies) with games "back in the day" - even up to a few years ago. Now when i play computer games like half-life and its various mods...i can't go 30 seconds without someone complaining that someone else is cheating. Whatever happened to the days when, if someone beat you, you said "damn...that guy's good!"??

    shit - i gotta go...the space invaders are coming...and they're black and white!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Rip-Off [klov.com] I've never seen anything like it before or since. Incredible concept, awesome game.
    Rampage [klov.com] Just plain different.
    Rip Cord [klov.com] Try to land a parachute on a platform
    Reactor [klov.com] Just plain interesting.

    And that's just the R's.
    -Vercingetorix

  • I've been in my parents' basement, playing Pac-Man over and over and over, determined to get the highest score ever. I dropped out of college and haven't seen the outside world in the past ten or fifteen years or so .. but I think I finally did it! A score of 3,332,950! NO ONE could beat that, not even that Bobby Mitchell guy I heard my parents yelling about once...

  • Actually, it's not /.'d, but rather, it's Junkbuster/Cookie-Dropping/Netscape incompatible. On my machine, it just keeps reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading, reloading in the background with an endless series of redirects to an ever-lengthening URL.

    Quite annoying.

    --Joe
    --

  • Racing Destruction Set. First real game I ever played. Hooked instantly. That and international karate :)Looking at that ECA logo rocked. :)

  • I've always figured that Tetris was a Soviet plot to immobilize the US. ;) I know that I've spent hours upon hours mesmerized by that game...

  • A dissenting opinion... (Score:3)

    by carlfish ( 7229 ) <cmiller@pastiche.org> on Tuesday August 01, 2000 @07:07PM (#886911) Homepage Journal
    I've been playing computer games regularly for about the last sixteen years, and I can happily say that I can play StarCraft and Diablo II all day. I love playing Unreal Tournament, System Shock II and the Final Fantasy genre.

    Pac-man, on the other hand, bores the pants off me. Getting three billion points in it seems to be more an exercise in how to maintain concentration in the face of near-terminal monotony.

    Space Invaders likewise. MAME held my interest for all of three days, before the nostalgia value wore off, and I started to wonder just how easily amused I must have been when I was fifteen.

    There are _some_ games I'd like to play through again (the original C-64 Wizball springs to mind, although that's probably a little "post-classic"), but a lot of classic gaming seems to just be nostalgia for things that were only good because they were the best that could be done at the time.

    Charles Miller
    (Woo, gonna lose karma over this one...)
    --
  • Hate to brag (OK, not really), but I was the first person to finish Dragon's Lair back in 1983 at the Aladdin's Castle in the Burnsville Center mall in Burnsville, MN. Even had a crowd around me when I did it. One of the highlights of my life, actually.

    -Vercingetorix
  • Perhaps I'm a purist, but I can't imagine playing Combat with anything other than regular Atari controllers, or playing Breakout with an Atari Paddle. It wouldn't be the same.
  • Your gorgeous Civ is now ugly? Well of course, with all the pollution and terraforming going on, you've ruined the countryside and created an industrial wasteland. He he, too bad that I developed the Hoover Dam first, and now I have the equivalent of a non-polluting Hydro Plant in every city. But my scientist keep warning me that because of **you** there is a chance of global warming occuring and the icecaps melting. Nah, it will never happen. Aha, my SS MODULE is complete. Lets call it ISS ZVEZDA.
  • I remember going to a friend's house, setting his Atari 800 to load a game from the *tape drive*, and then going outside to play for 30-45 minutes while it loaded. Often we'd come back it, and find that it had failed. Repeat.

    That's what's wrong with kids these days, they're not forced to play outside while their games load.

    (In best Granpa Simpson voice: And that's the way we liked it!)

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