were games better "back then" discussion topic

Topic: were games better "back then" discussion topic (Read 4669 times)

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Vellfire

#61 January 10, 2010, 09:32:29 pm

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Quote from: EColeman24 on January 04, 2010, 05:30:58 am

I am not sure if I can say the games were better (they were certainly rocking at the time) but I do know the system stability of consoles were better. Sure they didn't do all the stuff newer ones do but you didn't have to worry a red ring of death on your SNES...lol

nope you just had to worry about mild amounts of dust

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Frisky SKeleton

#62 January 10, 2010, 11:04:10 pm

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when you're spending a billion dollars on making a game you want to be assured it'll sell, that's why they tend to go with safe rehashes that people won't mind and indie dudes can make crazy stuff because they're not selling it anyway. this is why japan has weird games, because if they mess it up and it only sells to 1% of their market, they've made a killing.

i feel completely inundated with games though. i remember on dial up spending several hours downloading a gameboy rom and i'd play it regardless of whether it was good or not. then i got broadband and downloaded one of those massive rom sets and didn't play a single one for more than a few seconds.

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Ragnar

#63 January 11, 2010, 01:43:31 am

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yeah that too, but I'm sort of convinced now most games were fun because they were just INEXPLICABLE shit going on all the time like I'm not even sure if I understood what Japan was when I was 5 so any reference/level set in Japan was like whoa. And I think I mentioned just very little things like why are all the good guys small in Final Fantasy while the bad guys are so big even if they're human (probably just some workaround to do with limited memory but yeah this is hard to grasp at that age but I sort of noticed something was up with that)

so not necessarily that games were more fun but they were more UNPREDICTABLE at least while there are many clear formulas and stuff now. And now they can just realize things exactly how they want it/make games look exactly like the concept art but I'm sure game developers then met a lot of DISAPPOINTMENT when they were like shit why can I only give the guy's face 5 pixels of detail why are her boobs all triangular why do the colors look like ass (sorry original NES's color palette was weird imo but like could you imagine if the colors were just normal RGB and every game had this day-glo palette) but probably these limitations led to a lot of random shit that was a lot more charming than Gears of War lol everyone looks like an ultra-gritty version of Rescue Heroes

Edit: I dunno why I singled out gears of war it just seemed to encapsulate the cliches of modern games perfectly it's all like sci-fi + military shooter I think I dunno I don't have anything past PS2 but even PS2 was getting like this

Edit: I also think any sort of work of art kind of falls apart when you think you can write a better story/make better designs than the guy who made it. When you're a kid everything is like 'whoa these guys are geniuses' and in reality it's like a fighting game where they're fighting in Paris but at that age you might think they INVENTED Paris so yeah (like the entire IDEA of paris came from their mind and they didn't just look at some photos and throw a mime in the stage or some other random French thing)

really back then if you had anything with PYRAMIDS in them probably 99% of kids minds would be blown by your incredible creativity (this applies to Super Mario Bros. 3 btw)

Last Edit: January 11, 2010, 01:58:42 am by Ragnar

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EColeman24

#64 January 11, 2010, 02:02:56 am

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Quote from: Ragnar on December 17, 2009, 09:58:30 pm

* I dunno about you guys but I was addicted to the game rental place when I was younger. Combined with the lack of comprehensive information via internet and the cell phones and the like, maybe not all the games were very fun at all, but every time I went it was sort of an adrenaline rush, because you could find some game you've never heard about ever. Some games just didn't make it into Nintendo Power/etc. and even if they sucked it was so interesting because all you have then is this boxart to go by. So maybe a lot of people remember the THRILL of this even if their time playing the game was terrible frustration/boredom. Also something back then that you can't do today, oftentimes you'd rent an RPG/something else with savegames from the last guy who rented it. This was probably as exciting as a kid as TIME TRAVEL is to the average person. It was kind of mindfuck skipping ahead to the exciting conclusion of the game in some weirded-out scary castle with a bunch of maxed-out dudes

* Again like I said did anybody have more than like 2/3 friends who were big into videogames? I remember it still being pretty obscure back then.

I remember those days well (my NES/SNES days) I loved going to this rental place called Dot's video and it was a rush every time I went in there. I probably spent the bulk of my allowance in that place foe a few years, but I loved every minute of it.

Also I only had one neighbor that played video games as well. Most of my friends didn't even have a console. So when I spoke of video games I got a lot of blank looks.

GAMEAUCTIONS

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EColeman24

#65 January 11, 2010, 02:09:51 am

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Quote from: Marge on December 20, 2009, 02:15:56 pm

Somehow new games fail at this. Some of them are pretty difficult, often in a lot more sensible ways than the old games (I mention this because some people argue that it's just that old games were challenging, it's not that) and mostly I just find it annoying. A lot of them are straight pipes or rides where you just push forward through the one door that's not permalocked, but so were many of the old games. Some of the newer games create amazing open worlds, but that still doesn't do it. There's something (let's call it the X Factor) in those old games that just makes you look at it and think "let's see what this one is made of" instead of "let's see what kind of an experience they have prepared for me today", and I can build a web of related things around that factor but I can't point out the core of it.

I think you are on to something here. I for one will admit to going back to older games and playing them. I have no idea why and like you it's something I can't name but I "get" something out of those games I don't out of the one's play on my XBox 360.

GAMEAUCTIONS

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ReloadXPsi

#66 January 15, 2010, 02:44:33 am

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I decided gaming had fallen in the toilet around when I played Donkey Kong Country, which painfully introduced me to the "style over substance" revolution that awaited me. Fortunately, its very excellent sequel came along and shut me up for a while.

Then I played Mario 64, and I've been horrendously disillusioned since :P I mean I've played games since then but when you hype yourself up over what you're hoping will be the best game you ever play and then after like two years you realise you can't stand it your passion tends to die. I'm so dispassionate about gaming now that it scares me. The last game I beat for the first time was Zelda II for the NES and it was way more satisfying than beating any superbosses in any modern day RPGs :/

Sadly I've become a retro gamer. This means I either play games illegally or spend forever scraping eBay and the occasional game shop.

P.S. I've done the Mario 64 rant in full many, many times before on here and I ain't doing it again. Be grateful :P

Last Edit: January 15, 2010, 02:48:53 am by Psi

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Ultimaweapon9

#67 January 15, 2010, 05:19:25 am

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I pretty much don't play anything made after 2001. My PS3 is just a dvd/blu-ray player and my Wii is only useful for the games I bought on the Virtual Console.

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Vellfire

#68 January 15, 2010, 02:32:37 pm

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Quote

I pretty much don't play anything made after 2001. My PS3 is just a dvd/blu-ray player and my Wii is only useful for the games I bought on the Virtual Console.

i don't see how either of those are worthwhile purchases if you don't play newer games

why didn't you just buy a bluray player and get some emulators?

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EvilDemonCreature

#69 January 15, 2010, 02:49:08 pm

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Do they even make a blu-ray player that actually costs less than PS3?

Because last time I checked, they didn't. They might have one or two now, but I don't care two shits about blu-ray so I haven't checked. It's funny because if I do ever get a PS3, I wouldn't even play blu-ray on it. Although I didn't know the PS3 still works for DVD's though, I might end up getting one sooner than I thought.

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Lyndon

#70 January 15, 2010, 03:00:19 pm

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I think you can get a bluray drive for your PC pretty cheap

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Vellfire

#71 January 15, 2010, 03:36:00 pm

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you can get a standalone bluray player for a little over $100

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Ultimaweapon9

#72 January 15, 2010, 05:05:34 pm

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Quote from: Vellfire on January 15, 2010, 02:32:37 pm

i don't see how either of those are worthwhile purchases if you don't play newer games

why didn't you just buy a bluray player and get some emulators?

True, but I got them both when they first came out, hoping I might to be able to get into them, it just never really happened.

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Alec

#73 January 15, 2010, 05:10:32 pm

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yeah when it came out the ps3 was the cheapest bluray player but that over 3 years ago

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Lyndon

#74 January 15, 2010, 05:11:06 pm

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Quote from: Ultimaweapon9 on January 15, 2010, 05:05:34 pm

True, but I got them both when they first came out, hoping I might to be able to get into them, it just never really happened.

didn't you say in a previous topic that you are gonna buy FFXIII regardless of bad reviews?

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Ultimaweapon9

#75 January 15, 2010, 07:20:57 pm

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Quote from: Lyndon on January 15, 2010, 05:11:06 pm

didn't you say in a previous topic that you are gonna buy FFXIII regardless of bad reviews?

Yeah, that's the main reason I bought a PS3 when it first came out, actually. It'll be the first game I've bought in a couple years.

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Biggles

#76 January 15, 2010, 08:48:30 pm

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Fig 1: What?! PIKACHU is evolving!

I definitely feel nostalgia for when game developers were unafraid to fuck up. I don't know if games are better now or not, and frankly I don't care much either. I feel compelled to react against all the safe shit developers put out regardless.

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hobomasterxxx

#77 January 16, 2010, 05:00:25 am

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Quote from: Biggles on January 15, 2010, 08:48:30 pm

Fig 1: What?! PIKACHU is evolving!

I definitely feel nostalgia for when game developers were unafraid to fuck up. I don't know if games are better now or not, and frankly I don't care much either. I feel compelled to react against all the safe shit developers put out regardless.

Old pikachu is the best.

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Vellfire

#78 January 16, 2010, 01:46:39 pm

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don't ge tme wrong i really do like current pikachu but old pikachu is definitely my favorite

also is it just the angle he's standing at or are his stripes gone now???

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Ragnar

#79 January 17, 2010, 06:01:10 am

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Quote from: Biggles on January 15, 2010, 08:48:30 pm

Fig 1: What?! PIKACHU is evolving!

I definitely feel nostalgia for when game developers were unafraid to fuck up. I don't know if games are better now or not, and frankly I don't care much either. I feel compelled to react against all the safe shit developers put out regardless.

yeah that's definitely part of it too, the unafraid to fuck up part. I actually miss the playstation days now where anything was sort of automatically amazing because it had 3 dimensions and in reality if you look back at it it was the most awful inexplicable shit (from what I've seen of Jumping Flash it's impossible to even see what's going on half the time) and I always got the feeling like the developers were like 'wow we made a tree high five' like not even worrying if it's a well-designed tree or not just the fact that they successfully made a tree made it good enough to use

Edit: I absolutely love Mother 3's battle sprites because they probably didn't try to make it look exactly like the concept art (unlike that pikachu that tries to be more and more like the anime until it's almost imploding with this idealized pikachu-ness). I mean I severely get this feeling like the Mother 3 designers just made it look as best they could at that resolution, and not in a tracing way like doing any dithering bullshit to preserve detail (again pikachu) then again it might be super-purposefully done in a certain matter but in that case they create a great illusion of the sprites being carelessly done but looking good anyway

this

http://earthbound.wikia.com/wiki/Baked_Yammonster

http://earthbound.wikia.com/wiki/Artsy_Ghost

Last Edit: January 17, 2010, 06:22:40 am by Ragnar

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Eltee

#80 January 17, 2010, 07:30:07 pm

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it's really hard to see what's going on in jumping flash yes but the game is so pitifully easy it doesn't really change a thing

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