Limitation is the secret of interest in retro games

[o.pwuaioc]

...This isn't a bad theory, although it's rather simplistic and misses out tons of other variables, such as the increased size and budget restrictions of game developers and the lucrative appeal of appealing to the underage masses and gun-obsessed college males rather than the games made for those wanting more substance...

There is something about that stance that bothers me and I think it is that you are assuming that what you (and I suppose OP and others) like is better than what other people like. A game's 'goodness' is a subjective quality.

Whereas you might hate what those 'gun obsessed college males' like (and I would probably agree with you) the fact is that there are enough of them who like specific types of games that simply saying 'oh, they don't know what a good game is and what I like is better' is a bit of a logical fallacy.

I think this entire thread is an exercise in trying to quantify something that cannot be. Either that or patting ourselves on the shoulder and agreeing with one another that our taste in games makes us elite somehow. It smacks a little too much of the whole 'PC gamer master race' nonsense I hear about far too often.

Way to be irrelevant.

[Flake]

...This isn't a bad theory, although it's rather simplistic and misses out tons of other variables, such as the increased size and budget restrictions of game developers and the lucrative appeal of appealing to the underage masses and gun-obsessed college males rather than the games made for those wanting more substance...

There is something about that stance that bothers me and I think it is that you are assuming that what you (and I suppose OP and others) like is better than what other people like. A game's 'goodness' is a subjective quality.

Whereas you might hate what those 'gun obsessed college males' like (and I would probably agree with you) the fact is that there are enough of them who like specific types of games that simply saying 'oh, they don't know what a good game is and what I like is better' is a bit of a logical fallacy.

I think this entire thread is an exercise in trying to quantify something that cannot be. Either that or patting ourselves on the shoulder and agreeing with one another that our taste in games makes us elite somehow. It smacks a little too much of the whole 'PC gamer master race' nonsense I hear about far too often.

Way to be irrelevant.

Quoted for irony.

[o.pwuaioc]

There is something about that stance that bothers me and I think it is that you are assuming that what you (and I suppose OP and others) like is better than what other people like. A game's 'goodness' is a subjective quality.

Whereas you might hate what those 'gun obsessed college males' like (and I would probably agree with you) the fact is that there are enough of them who like specific types of games that simply saying 'oh, they don't know what a good game is and what I like is better' is a bit of a logical fallacy.

I think this entire thread is an exercise in trying to quantify something that cannot be. Either that or patting ourselves on the shoulder and agreeing with one another that our taste in games makes us elite somehow. It smacks a little too much of the whole 'PC gamer master race' nonsense I hear about far too often.

Way to be irrelevant.

Quoted for irony.

There's a reason I blocked you before. Now I remember why. Thanks for saying the absolute obvious and proving yourself irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

[Flake]

Okay, that's crazy rude. Let's see what I can do without dropping down to that level though.

We are talking about something that is entirely subjective - the quality of retro games from the perspective of a gamer. I am sure if you and I wrote out lists of our favorite games, we would definitely see a title or two on the other persons list that we felt was a stinker. There is no universal rule for judging a game good.

OP is trying to quantify this, to frame it in terms of the technology of the time vs what developers have now. You seem to agree with him, at least in part. I am disagreeing by saying that it is an oversimplification and depends on a logical fallacy.

Now, if my disagreeing with you is simply too much, I'll be happy to divest myself of this conversation. I've only posted a couple of times and I am not that committed to taking part. But please, if you can, avoid derailing the conversation with personal attacks, huge pictures, and other assorted nonsense. If you honestly feel that I am irrelevant to a conversation, use that little button on the left of my post. That will alert a moderator to your complaint and, if necessary, they can set me straight.

[o.pwuaioc]

OP is trying to rationalize why certain games appeal to him and to others who agree at least in part with him. It's no different than asking why is Beethoven better than Britney Spears, or why Van Gogh is better than Thomas Kinkade. It's already obvious to everyone - except you, apparently - that it's subjective, that it's based on tastes, but to think that opinions are created ex nihilo and not ultimately from some shared experience is so wrong to be laughable.

[AppleQueso]

Sound is a good way to demonstrate this. Now sound can play all kinds of music , but we hardly can remember any theme music of any game. Yet we remember many of the SNES generation music and maybe earlier with their Midi like sounds. I still remember Tetris theme from 1992(last i played probably) on the gameboy for example compared to Bioshock and Oblivion which I played like last year.

Limited sound forced you to come up with great tunes .

This is like saying you can't make memorable music with a symphony.

I'm not sure how one could reach that conclusion based on the quoted text. I feel that simple and repetitive melodies of cartridge-based games are clearly more memorable than the movie-type scores you hear in modern games. However, it is not clear if this is due to the nature of the music itself, or the play-once-and-move-on feel of modern games.

It's pretty obviously the latter. Games are trying to be more hollywood-esque so they're adopting more hollywood-esque scores, which for the most part aren't all that memorable and are only there to set the mood. It's certainly not because they have the ability to make hollywood-esque scores.

I don't believe hardware limitations have anything to do with whether or not modern games are good or not. It boils down almost exclusively to modern approaches to game design.

EDIT: And as far as this other dicussion goes... I don't know, I get the sense that most of the board just dislikes modern gaming culture, not necessarily modern gaming itself.

Saying retro games are better than modern games feels a little unfair to me. We're talking 35+ years worth of retro gaming (and i'm being very generous here and only starting from the Atari 2600 onward) vs 8 years of modern. Besides, modern games will all eventually become retro games anyway. Might as well play what looks interesting, right?

For what it's worth, I don't think OP was trying to say that all retro games are better than all modern games, he's just trying to figure out why they still have such wide appeal. English isn't his first language after all, so we all should cut him a bit of slack.

[noiseredux]

it's odd to me that my comment which was basically supposed to say "all games are good in some way" would start such a riot.

[J T]

I don't believe the limitation is quite as important as the innovation that is needed to adapt to a limitation. I think modern games are still quite good when they innovate (whether that is adapting to a limitation or not), and there are certainly games from the current gen that are superb in most every way possible. Most of what was great about older videogames was that there were not established genres, so innovation was all around. There were lots of knockoffs, but the big companies were more willing to invest in games that would come to define a new genre.

Limitation is important here largely because it made innovation more affordable. The budgets of modern games are so astronomically high that few companies are willing to take a chance on anything that is a real game changer. But now that this is the case, we have an indie scene, and that indie scene can create things like Minecraft, World of Goo, or Braid that are so unique that they help the industry evolve. Yesterday's Narbacular Drop is today's Portal 2. DOTA started a new genre that has lead to League of Legends recently reporting more users than World of Warcraft and DOTA2 soon to see a release on Valve. I'm sure in a few years we will see the big wigs in the industry trying to cash in on Minecraft-clones with amazing HD graphics that never would have been possible for Notch and crew.

I guess I never understand the opinion of many of our Racketboy members that seem to believe that all the good games are in the past and that there aren't good modern games. If you include the indie scene and combine it with the big budget releases, the videogame industry is more alive and vibrant than it has ever been. The games that simultaneously excel in both innovation and production are few and far between (especially now that the bar for good production is so high), so I guess that's why so many people on this forum express a dissatisfaction with modern gaming, but really if you try to follow everything that is happening in videogames right now, you'll find something that blows you away. Most of the people bitching about "games" in general are only bitching about a limited scope of games. There are so many games of so many styles released across so many platforms that it's impossible to even come close to playing it all and the amount of variation across games is immense.

[RCBH928]

He said no such thing. You can neither read that in OP nor read it out of OP.

I must have made up this part then:

Thats why we had better quality games back then , than now, or so I think.

When I said that I didn't mean "all retro games are better than all current gen. games" . What I meant that the way I see it, is more thought and care was put in older games than current games producing better quality, thought and care we do not see much of now. I am fan of both retro and current gen. by the way.

I think the limited hardware pushed innovation. The statement of "I wish we could...." forced people to get imaginative and excited about building a game putting more thought and effort.

Let me give an example. Games from past made us so excited and immersed in them , there not many games out there that match the excitement of Mario 64 when it was released. its so good, people still go back to play the game. On the opposite, Halo took the world by a storm, but I hardly hear any one who pops in Halo and feel all that excited over it any more or says "God, I wish I can play Halo the original" . You can think of more examples, like Final Fantasy on SNES and a current gen. RPG. Doom vs any current FPS , I know COD sold more , but almost 2 years later no one will be playing Black OPS while doom is still being enjoyed and ported. I have I made my point clear. Games back then were so good they continue to live with us, current generation games are not made with such passion. And I think the limitation of the hardware back then is what pushed the innovation to create such games. Think how Sega vs Nintendo were pushing to get the better graphics and better game on their console be stretching their hardware capabilities putting out great games.

I do not deny that "some" games on current generation consoles will meet such innovation but they are few and far between.

I am currently reading "The Doom Masters" where it says that John Carmack in id made Captain Keen because PC hardware was weak and unable to put a scrolling game like Marion on the NES. So it pushed him to invent a new way to use programing language to make a scrolling games possible on the PC. Now we have Captain Keen which was met with great response when it was released back then. According to the book, some described it as BETTER than Mario. So I guess here is a good real life example that explains my point of view.

[J T]

Your examples of games like Halo and Call of Duty are of games that came out in a well-established genre. I think we often get nostalgic for the games that were the first games to popularize a genre- those games did not. I think people will be excited to come back and play certain modern games that did start a movement. For example, I could see people coming back to play a game like Plants VS Zombies or Minecraft, which both popularized their respective genres.

Another thing about your examples is that they are games with a major story component. There are very few movies or books that I ever want to repeat, largely because once I know the story, it's never as exciting the second time around. Games that are strictly gameplay focused (which most of the older games were) are easier to come back to play again in the future. Modern games like Street Fighter IV or Team Fortress II are gameplay focused, so they are more likely to be played repeatedly over time than say a story focused games like Uncharted or Bioshock. The only story-driven games that I can imagine wanting to play again in the future after I have already beaten them in the past are ones where the world is so fascinating and unique, that I simply want to go back to the game to revisit it.

Again though, it's not the factor of "age" that makes the game better and more replayable, it is a matter of design decisions. Theoretically, any modern game can be made with similar design decisions and retain all of the properties that you believe inherent to older games. The only thing that really sets apart the old games from new ones is the popularity in their era. Back in the 80s, the most popular games were ones that were simpler and gameplay focused. Now the most popular games are cinematic and full of action and realism. The social aspect of talking about games and feeling like you are part of a collective movement that others are all simultaneously participating in and currently enjoying has changed. To that end, I can understand missing the older culture of games, even though I don't think we have lost the attributes of the games themselves, we have lost the popular culture surrounding those types of games.