Retro Gaming - a general discussion thread — Page 3

compyislife said:

 Heh, it's funny how the pictures spoof too much sharing on facebook, and yet the site hosting them is covered in 'like' and 'share' buttons... xD

I don't think the article is questioning sharing and liking in the context of websites, but in the middle of a game it pulls you out and breaks the feeling of immersion. What it's really picking on is hand-holding tutorials by modern games.

This is one of the best rants/analyses I've ever seen about what is wrong with modern games and so right about classic games, and it perfectly ties in with georgec's link. If you're a retro gamer, you have to check it out:

http://youtu.be/8FpigqfcvlM

Tobar said:

That was both interesting and informative though I could have done without the expletive heavy Plinkett with a dash of Peter Griffin impersonation. =P

That's been egoraptor's style for years now. Nothing new, he was doing it long before Plinkett. I'm convinced he uses "fuck" so much because his fans think of it as almost a trademark.

compyislife said:

It was a bit random, but I made good points.

The humor is a little random because that's his whole schtick, but I think the actual argument he makes is anything but. There's a pretty clear point being made and he supports it well.

By the way, as a professional designer, I can't resist pointing out that the Space Jam website is one of the worst site designs of all time, lol. But at least it's not covered in social networking links and an obnoxious loading screen, both of which are equally frustrating to me.

Although most of Nintendo's consoles, at least outside of Japan, are pretty hideous design-wise, I will give them credit that they are built like tanks. I've never heard of a SNES or N64 breaking. I've seen kids throw them across rooms and they play as if nothing happened. Nintendo designed these to be like toys, so they look like hideous Fisher Price playthings but they handle like them too. Usually if you buy a 1990s Nintendo console you have it for a long time. If you have kids I'd just get the real thing.

I'm currently playing the fan translation of Mother, the 1989 Japan-only precursor to the beloved SNES RPG Earthbound (titled "Mother 2" in Japan). Absolutely loving it. It's basically a Dragon Quest clone, but set in the present, and extremely charming and funny, as it was written by a well-known Japanese author, Shigesato Itoi.

If you don't know, Earthbound has one of the most loyal fanbases of any game ever released in America, partly because the game is so wonderful, and partly because American fans have been so horribly shafted by Nintendo of America over the years in trying to get the two other games in the series localized. It's the kind of thing I think a lot of originaltrilogy.com folks could relate to. There's a hard-luck story, a community coming together to raise funds to promote the games in the States in the hope of release, getting so tantalizingly close more than once only to have the rug yanked out at the last minute, and an if-they-won't-do-it-we-will spirit in the community that I just love. Fans even produced a player's guide for Mother 3 that is absolutely gorgeous. This is serious devotion for a game that totally deserves it.

Has anyone else here played Earthbound or any of the other Mother games? If you emulate on your PC or Nintendo DS, I highly urge you to give the series a try.

RRS-1980 said:

Aww... hotlinking pics is bad manners. If you don't want to link to source site, at least reupload the pic to a free image host.

zombie84 said:

Also, dammit why did Lucasarts make the Super Star Wars games so difficult? They are some of the best games ever made, but I would call anyone who said they beat them without using passwords a dirty liar. I had to cheat using save states on emulators to finally beat Super Empire Strikes Back. On the actual consoles it's a big deal when you get to the third levels.

Me and my buddies beat Super Star Wars and Super Return of the Jedi. We used the password saves thing to start back where left off the time before. For some reason none of our little group of friends got Super Empire Strikes Back until a lot later, and I guess we were over it by then and onto bigger and better things and didn't spend much time on it. I do remember we made it to Vader in Cloud City though... I wonder if that is the very end of the game? Now that I think about it, it probably is, I don't recall us ever beating him though. 

Something I find amusing. I don't ever remember us making a huge deal about those games being ridiculously hard back when they were new. We just played them and loved the hell out of them, and when we got frustrated we'd pass the controller. We'd spend hours and hours on them and couldn't put them down. Now when I pick one up and play it, within five minutes I've died a few dozen times and am bored with it.

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games. It's like how cellphones have taken away our ability to remember phone numbers using our minds. We've lost a skillset in game playing, and I think it's because adults started getting into games, starting with the Playstation but mainly in the X-Box era. As gamers got lazier, programmers catered to them, which meant gamers got even more lazy, so then programmers had to lower their standards again, and this just goes in an endless cycle. It was a big deal when you beat a game back in the day, now it's a big deal if you own a game but haven't beaten it.

The Super Star Wars games were known to be really challenging back in the day though. But they were so good you wanted to keep playing so you learned how to master the game.

Actually now that I think about it Lucasarts didn't make the Super Star Wars games, JVC did. Not sure why they outsourced those, maybe the staff was too full with Dark Forces, X-Wing and all the PC adventure games being made at the time.

georgec said:

Everything was better in the early to mid 90s.

:(

For myself, I would say 1987-1993 is the high point of the 2D era, when games were fast, furious, complex enough and also graphically and acoustically advanced, and 1996-2002 is the high point of the 3D era, where it was kind of the same situation but in three dimensions. Since then, other than technical sound and graphics upgrades, the only new gamechanger to come around is motion technology (Wii, XB connect, etc.), but so far these are gimmicks rather than fully developed new genres (and more often than not badly designed). It's also a bit of a shame because motion-technology games are incredibly fun when done right, but they haven't quite figured out how to make product good enough to inherant the mantle that light-gun games occupied (since they are basically equivalent, relative to their respective times).

zombie84 said:

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games.

Exactly. Back in the N64/PSX days, I remember one of my friends watching his youngest brother playing some 64 plat-former game he played constantly and still sucked at. My friend sighed like a warbler and made a comment about how the poor kid is never going to be good at video games because he had just missed the 2D era and was stuck finding some silly 3D game we found ridiculously easy overly hard.

Didn't think much about it at the time, but he pretty much his the nail on the head. This was probably back in 1997 or 8.

I didn't realize it would make me suck at games too, though. Bought Mega Man 9 for the 360 a few years ago, have played it for hours, and have still never managed to beat a single boss. I was playing those games back when I was in first grade (I seem to recall a phase where I ran around the playground during recess with a blue sock on one arm making annoying pew pew sounds as I shot my friends), and was fairly decent at them.

CP3S said:

 My friend sighed like a warbler

ALOL

CP3S said:

zombie84 said:

I think it's because in the 80s and 90s we were just better gamers. Repetition, memorization, pattern recognition and tons of practice on nothing but hard games, by todays standards. The mainstream explosion of gaming in the early 2000s has progressively dumbed down the standards of difficulty in games.

Exactly. Back in the N64/PSX days, I remember one of my friends watching his youngest brother playing some 64 plat-former game he played constantly and still sucked at. My friend sighed like a warbler and made a comment about how the poor kid is never going to be good at video games because he had just missed the 2D era and was stuck finding some silly 3D game we found ridiculously easy overly hard.

Didn't think much about it at the time, but he pretty much his the nail on the head. This was probably back in 1997 or 8.

I didn't realize it would make me suck at games too, though. Bought Mega Man 9 for the 360 a few years ago, have played it for hours, and have still never managed to beat a single boss. I was playing those games back when I was in first grade (I seem to recall a phase where I ran around the playground during recess with a blue sock on one arm making annoying pew pew sounds as I shot my friends), and was fairly decent at them.

This is going to make me sound a bit out of touch, but up until a few years ago I hadn't played a game system since about 2001. Never owned a PS2, never owned an X-box, never owned a PS3 or 360. If I was hanging out with friends I'd play some multiplayer like Halo or Marvel vs Capcom or Guitar Hero, but up until about two years ago I never really sat down and played anything on my own after I lost interest in the PS1 around 2001 or so.

Well, a close friend moved in with me, and he works in game design. He owns about every console ever made from 1995-present, so by extension that meant that I did too. So I started puttering around with his X-box, PS2 and PS3 and catching up with a lot of the games I missed out on.

I beat every single one of them. Quickly. And it was pretty easy.

Everything from Return to Wolfenstein, Oddworld: Strangers Wrath, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, Brutal Legend, whatever game it was that I picked up, within about two weeks I was done. Beat the game. My friend/roommate is about 6 years younger than me, and grew up in the 32-bit era mainly. He always talks about "finishing" a game, as though it's inevitable if you just keep playing it, like how a movie is. You "finish" movies, but when I was growing up you "beat" a game, it was a struggle against a challenging opponent. It was cool to see the ending of just about every game that I tried playing once I got into the modern consoles, but back in the day that was a real treat, a privledge. When I was growing up I only beat a handful of games. Still have no clue what the ending to Mario 2 looks like. I got close a few times, and haven't tried again in a long while, but the point is the game beat me, and it's not even that hard of a game. But I noticed that starting with PS1, I beat most games I owned except RPGs or things like Resident Evil (i've come this close to beating the first three but gave up. I have the save files, but I doubt I will remember what to do or where to go).

EDIT

I will say one of the more challenging games I played was the Xbox Shinobi game. It's the one game that I played, liked, but found too difficult to beat. I probably could have if I stuck at it. Everyone was like, "oh, this game is good but it's really, really hard," but to me it just seemed normal. At least I think it was the Shinobi game. Whatever it was, it was good and I should probably take a second crack at it to see if I can beat it.