cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13809164
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
The thing about updates is that they weren’t needed that much. Games didn’t release half broken at 3FPS because “we’ll just fix it later, maybe”
Same as they don’t often do today.
Most games are in early access in the state you mention. But that’s the thing, it’s most often clearly labeled and you are free to wait until actual release.
That’s just plain better imo.
Not talking about EA games, I mean games released in a terrible state like Cities Skylines 2 or Cyberpunk
Eh. As someone who plays MANY games, I can’t say that I agree with the notion of old games being inherently better. The interface, bugginess, or lack of QOL often hamstrings the experience.
IMO, it would be best if old games are remade. Arcanum is a pain in the rear, because the text and images can be small on my monitor, plus crashing if I click too quickly. Technical issues are my #1 killer of games, because it takes the wind out of my sails if I try to get into something.
Developers didn’t really know what would work and what wouldn’t, so they fucked around until they found something. No endless clones of the same idea. Extremely weird gameplay, often utter bullshit, sometimes a gem. It was great.
No endless clones of the same idea.
:-/
In the 70s and 80s, video games were so simple and straightforward, usually due to limited computing power, that it was trivial to create clones of games for other systems. Many of the most popular games of the early years of gaming such as Pong, Frogger, Arkanoid, Centepede, etc. were cloned heavily or were clones themselves.
Case in point, six different Tetris knock offs released between 1989 and 1997.
Another notorious instance was The Simpsons: Road Rage, which was a simple reskin of the then-popular Crazy Taxi.
I’ll admit to having done a simple reskin myself, for a high school English project, that involved swapping out PacMan for a boat and the ghosts for angry natives. I christened it “Heart of Darkness: The Video Game” and got an easy A for my trouble.
easy A, huh
“No online play” sounds like a console peasant. But yeah, the manuals were the best part.
l am pretty sure he talks about pre-online times (which were also largely pre-home-console times).
The instruction manual of my first bought game, a flight simulator on the Atari ST, was basically a printed pilot crash course.
I also had some thick copied instruction folders from the more… unconventional acquired games, often because the copy protection was like: “Enter the 5th word of the 13th line on page 54!”.
I remember pouring over my grandpas falcon3.0 manual.
Also a DOS manual he had. On one hand it was cool but on the other, things are so complex that they wouldn’t fit into a manual. And they go out of date as soon as they are printed due to changes.
Mine was the first Falcon game!
Also, my first Linux distro in 1997 came on CD and had a nice Linux introduction book l still used as a quick reference years after l had moved on to newer releases.
I remember playing Sim City, Rollercoaster tycoon, Dark forces, Yoda stories, and countless others on the PC with no online play.
Quit being a fucking edge lord.
With that logic there is no online play today either.
Like people were playing online on 56k.
I did try it as a small under informed child. Do not recommend.
MUDs worked great on 56k.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Or like PC before internet connections at home were widely available.
Do you remember a bunch of geeks bringing their computers, heavy, to a single location to play LAN games? I do…
Of course I do. And even that was rare and special because it was so much effort to carry everyone‘s gear into one place.
We had a rule that everyone had to carry their own monitor themselves. Punished the rich kids with their 19 inch CRTs.
I wish I’d done that more. It was so much fun the few times I did it.
Many years ago, you read an instruction book without knowing it was going to be your last.
Treasure every moment.
Why make people sad when you could just not?
whoopse I tripped and dropped my https://finji.itch.io/tunic link
the same developers as A Night in the Woods you say?
Older games were a lot simpler too. No loot boxes, multiple forms of currency - some of which could only be bought with real money, invasive DRM, season passes, content pulled back by selling it to you as DLC, extremely long game times artificially extended by things like mapping gimmicks, giant and almost barren worlds, unoptomized graphics requiring top of the line graphics cards that would still turn your room to a furnace, and massive amounts of bugs and glitches that may or may not be patched out at a later time.
That took me right back to picking up an A5 box of Goblins 2 at a radio rally and reading the booklet all the way home.
Vivid af
There’s no doubt that most new games are much better than most old games.
I and everyone else has the possibility to play the old games whenever they want. Most run on your phone.
Why don’t we do it? Marketing of course, but also, has anyone ever actually tried one of the old games that they haven’t played before? For example, I tried to play Ocarina of Time, and the controls as well as the graphics are terrible. So much shit is just plain annoying and clunky. Everyone decries it as “one of the best games”, but I can’t see how it is better than almost any modern action RPG.
The main reason why everyone likes it and other old games is nostalgia, almost nothing else.
Want full games without online play that are hard, you die, you try again? Play something like hollow knight/silksong. There’s so many easter eggs in so many games. You got more diversity in style of games now than ever.
No doubt there are also much more shitty games now. If you have a problem with games today, you’re just bad at picking the right one for you.
That depends on the definition of “better.” Don’t mistake me, I LOVE modern games but there was something magical about needing months to beat one game. And while old games didn’t have online components they were definitely a community effort. Siblings, neighbors, friends from school, all coming over and collaborated with to beat each game. Together we discovered every secret place and learned every trick. If someone figured something out it became local game lore and everyone would try to replicate it. We used to all pile in a room to play Mario bros and work together to knock out every level in an afternoon (if you you know), then run it again with the worp whistle trick because we could. There were games we never beat. Simon’s Quest haunted us (I looked it up as an adult and beat it on nesticle - screw you garlic merchant). But that was part of it too, we didn’t have the safety net of a search engine to bail us out when we got stuck. Frustrating? Yes. But it forced us to slow down and think about the challenges in front of us. It wasn’t better or worse, just different then now. (Also please try to keep in mind part of the reason your controls might feel clunky is the game was designed for a different controller then you are using).
That being said I will never miss that hinky as fuck Nintendo cartridge nonsense that required a ritual involving alcohol, prayer, and the breath of life to get it read a game cartridge. Fuck the NES - again if you know, you know.
OoT hasn’t aged the best, but it’s still a solid experience for a game that pioneered mainstream 3D graphics. The Ps1/N64 generation was all about innovation and experimentation, so it’s a bit unfair to judge those games so harshly. Now the Ps2/Gamecube gen was when things became refined. In the same franchise, Wind Waker is a retro game and still one of the absolute best in the series.
It’s a case by case basis. I’ve heard the Dynasty Warriors Origins is really good but I can’t speak for that since I haven’t played it. Other than that, compare the Ps2 musuo games to more modern ones like DW8/9, or the Pirate Warriors series. The classics are way more fun and engaging.
Or just look at Square Enix. Some of what they do now days is good, but most of their stuff is gacha-laden garbage now. Even their Pixel Remaster collection traded in a legacy of their own source code for a toy built in Unity, for a pseudo-classic experience that doesn’t even have the additional content of previous remasters.
Or, in the fps genre, I dare you to find a modern fps that’s as packed full of amazing content and features as Time Splitters 3: Future Perfect.
These older games also pioneered a lot of things that are taken for granted in modern games. People decide to try these games and since a lot of mechanics and types of storytelling are the norm know, they don’t get the appeal.
Exactly. For their time, all these games were incredible, just not always compared to today.
No updates, that’s actually a plus in my mind these days, considering how many games they’ve taken down. You can’t take a disk from someone’s game collection, but you can certainly remove it when it’s been purchased digitally.
No bullshit. You gamed, you died, you tried again.
Dark Souls baby
I replayed Space Quest II recently. I was reminded of Save Early, Save Often.
Game design is better today than it’s ever been. For most of us I think it’s just nostalgia for our childhoods and for living in simpler times that makes us think otherwise.
I mean have you ever gone back and played a classic game that you didn’t grow up with? It’s rough. I’ve plumbed the depths of the NES virtual console and found that all the best games just happen to be the ones I’ve already played. That’s probably not a coincidence.
Even when the game is genuinely great, there’s still a mountain of bullshit and bad game design to get through, which is just unnecessary today.
With that said, everyone in this comment section needs to check out UFO 50. It’s a collection of 50 “retro” games by a group of indie games designers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
It’s a loving recreation of playing games how they used to be played, except it’s cleverly laced with subtle, modern design features that make the retro goodness so much better. It’s like combing through old ROMs trying to find a diamond in the rough, except there’s more diamond than rough.
Speaking of Easter eggs, UFO 50 also has a hidden meta-narrative buried deep in the collection, detailing the dark history of the fictional company that made them.
The biggest pain point of the oldest games is that they came out of the arcade era, so they were specifically designed to lack save features, and be so punishing that you would spend more of your quarters playing them.
I did a playthrough of both Castlevania 1 and Megaman 1. After a while I gave in and started using savestates, and suddenly both games became amazing. Jumping over Dracula’s fireballs is a lot more dramatic when you have to do it with pixel precision.
This discussion always makes me think of Super Meat Boy, which is a perfect case study for how punishing difficulty can be incorporated without poisoning the experience for the player. SMB is hard as fuck and demands impossible precision from the player, but there’s no punishment for failure. You die, you try again immediately. It makes the two second door animation in Mega Man feel like an eternity.
And when it came out, it felt strangely innovative. Like, it’s obvious in hindsight, but just reducing the punishment to 0 turns it from an exercise in frustration into a game that trains the player to perfection without holding their hand.
If I remember correctly, I think one of the Rayman games were one of the first to try a gameplay loop like that. They definitely tend to feel better, but I think it depends on the game too.
Like some of the Souls games can have fairly punishing boss battles, where losing comes with the penalty of a painfully of a relatively long and dangerous trek just to get your ass handed to you again. If they did that for every boss I would hate the games, but that they throw usually just one of those in there makes them just frustrating enough to be extra spicy.
Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.
I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?
And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.
Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.
But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.
And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.
Cest la vie lol
I’ve actually begun a quest to go back and finish all the games I didn’t play / didn’t finish from the past. NES, SNES, N64, and PSX. To my surprise, I’m actually enjoying some of these games much more than I did as a kid.
The gameplay is quite simple but it’s really well executed. There are a lot of games that just try to do one or two interesting things and then explore how far they can go with that. Nowadays, games seem to take more of a “kitchen sink” approach which tends toward some features being much better developed than others, and first-order-optimal strategies abound.
Sure, there are also plenty of retro-inspired games (like UFO 50), but I view those as a return to the design principles of old, rather than a refutation of them.
That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.
But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.
Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.
Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.
Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks you ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.
Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.
There definitely are seriously janky and just plain bad games for all systems in the past. The difference is that there is a much higher proportion of good games from that era due to the smaller number of games overall.
There were 675 games released for the NES in North America during its lifespan. If you take the top 100 games you’d find that most are good games worth revisiting and many are great games considered widely to be classics.
On the other hand, well over 10,000 games are released on Steam every year since 2021. How many of those have you even heard of, let alone could you say are worth playing?
Sure, it’s not fair at all to blame the developers of great games coming out today for all of the slop and endless clones they have nothing to do with. But discovery is a huge problem now and it’s only getting worse!
For context, the NES library was actively curated by Nintendo, that’s what their “seal of quality” was about. There were a few bootlegs, but unless you had a niche for that bootleg (see that Bible game) I suspect the complexity and cost of developing for the NES heavily discouraged bootlegs.
I think we gain more than we lose by the lower barrier to game development and publishing, quality indie games can get much more traction (unfortunately many do get buried in the slop) and games with niche marginalized audiences are more able to exist and find that audience now. YouTubers have been a big source of finding indie games for me, and sometimes recommendations from people on social media. I guess I have the opposite problem - I’ve got so much stuff on my wishlist and owned game backlog that I want to play that I’d probably have to spend the next decade of my life just playing games to get through them all.
None of what I’m saying should be taken as an argument that game developers should give up or something like that. The situation is much better now than it was. Heck, a lot of NES game developers had to design their sprites on graph paper and input them into the game’s ROM file by hand, by typing in the raw numbers in hexadecimal! Clearly we now have a lot better ways of doing graphics than that!
I just want to push back against the general notion that “old games are outdated/obsolete/etc” or that new games are always better than old games by virtue of having more features, flashier graphics, better sound etc. There’s tradeoffs with everything and I think the kitchen sink approach to game design isn’t obviously correct.
We went through the same historical trends with painting, music, and movies. Now if you look at more recent trends in classical music, there’s a lot of focus on minimalism, compared to the opulence of the baroque and classical periods.
see that Bible game
I had this game growing up, and it was actually pretty good.
The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.
Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.
That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.
In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.
I disagree. I’d much rather play FF1 than play the latest FF game. Modern Final Fantasy games are way too easy for my taste. They’re more like movies with a load of very soft mechanics, with all the sharp edges sanded off.
That’s really common across the board. I know a lot of people love modern Soulslike games but I much prefer the fast, crunchy combat of a game like Zelda II over the smooth, floaty, anticipation-based controls of Dark Souls.
There’s a lot of other comparisons like this. The original Metroid is very rough, lonely, and lacks an automap which makes it easy to get lost. Later games in the series surround you with helpers that eliminate all sense of isolation and bombard you with hints and automaps that make it impossible to lose your way.
Lots of modern players would call these systems “objectively better” and I won’t contradict their preference, I only deny the objectivity of it. As I see it, many of these improvements are actually tradeoffs. Many modern players, for example, hate getting lost. Well I like getting lost and a lot of modern games simply won’t let me! I like getting stuck in games and having to do serious problem solving to figure it out. Many modern gamers get impatient and give up on games like that. They might even call it excruciating, as you do.
Anyway, none of this is intended to convince you to be a retro gamer like me. You love what you love and hate what you hate. I just hope it’s a little bit clearer why folks like me have all this nostalgia, as depicted in the comic.
I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.
But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.
So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.
I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.
Believe it or not, some people like grinding! There’s an element to grinding-based RPGs that you don’t really see anywhere else: the ability to tune the game’s difficulty level on the fly, through your own gameplay. If you’re stuck on a section of the game, you can decide to grind a lot until it’s trivially easy to pass, or you can grind less and try to push your luck.
FF1 is really nice for this because you can’t just save your game anywhere, you need to stay at an Inn in town or spend a tent/cabin/house to save on the world map. You can’t save your game in dungeons at all. This means your expedition into a dungeon must be completed in one go.
Since grinding is the way you make your party stronger (and hence the dungeon easier), you can decide how much grinding you want to do before taking a shot at the dungeon. If you mess up and the party gets wiped, well that’s too bad! This really does give the game a push your luck mechanic and allows you to try to conquer the dungeon with a minimal amount of grinding.
Later games in general tend to go out of their way to avoid this at all costs, with the exception of Soulslike games that I mentioned earlier (as well as Roguelikes, which I happen to be a huge fan of), because game developers are often quite afraid of players losing progress (and players have become accustomed to this).
Metroid is also like this. You can spend a lot of time grinding your energy back to full or you can push your luck and try to explore without getting hit. It’s a challenge that later games in the series heavily mitigated by providing abundant recharging stations.
Final Fantasy XVI was good though… Not even the same genre as FF1, really, so dunno if I’d compare them.
I’m sure it was, my comment was just stating my preference. That’s the main direction this whole thread seems to have taken: me defending the validity of preferences for retro gamers.
It seems a lot of people are puzzled by this and actually just believe that these old games are objectively worse. To me, that’s really sad, because it represents a failure to communicate and understand one another.
Dunno if you’ve seen this, but you seem like a big fan: https://www.fangamer.com/collections/ufo-50/products/ufo-50-players-guide
I got a copy, it’s really cool. Pretty reminiscent of old video game guides, but set in an alternate universe where these games and consoles were real.
I did get it! Also most of the other UFO 50 merch on that site, like the t-shirt and the pins. Great t-shirt. Better fit than the Tunic one I got from there.
I was slightly disappointed that the guide didn’t reveal another layer of the meta-narrative like I’d hoped, but it’s still a neat object and very well made.
UFO 50 gives me nostalgia for something that never really existed. It’s weird know that it’s 100% new, but feels like I was playing it 40 years ago.
Barbuta scratched an itch I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. Piecing it together in the dark was one of my best gaming moments last year. I love how almost everyone who beat it came to the same solution and got out a pen and paper to draw their own maps.
That sounds great, gonna have to give this UFO 50 a spin.
There’s literally 50 games there; I’m sure you’ll find something that speaks to you!
Graphics are better than ever, but design itself has been moving at a glacial pace for decades.
Yeah I don’t have any idea what you’re referring to. There are still a huge amount of new and innovative games every year. It’s possible you’re just not playing them.
Pizza boy and melonds
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned one of the most amazing things of pre-internet games: No wikis or video tutorials.
Sure there were some magazines if you were lucky and they might offer some hints or maps that could help but that’s nothing compared to the full playthroughs you can find hours after a new game releases today. You might think that made the games harder and more frustrating and you’ld be right. You could struggle for weeks to get past a single level.
But that also meant that every victory you had was your own. That was a feeling that is very hard to obtain today without a lot of self discipline.
