Are Older Games More Satisfying? 300
Kwirl asks: "While the computer and console gaming industry is growing at a remarkable pace, the focus is usually on better graphics as opposed to stronger gameplay and plot development/story arc. I personally have several titles (Sims2, Half-Life2, Doom 3, MSFS2004, Unreal 2004) sitting on my shelf that were amazing games, but just couldn't hold my interest for long enough to really be considered a worthwhile investment. In the last couple of years I had thought that the answer to my gaming needs would come in the form of MMORPG's. I have purchased and played many of them, but all seem to come to a stagnant point where I recognize that only addiction would drive me deeper into the game, and not better gameplay (Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Everquest II). In truth, I have found myself spending more time playing old MUD's (TorilMud, Medievia) again, or even amusing web-based games ( KingdomofLoathing, PimpWar, NeoPets). I am curious to know how many other people here find themselves walking intentionally backwards along the technological timeline of games for your personal expenditure of free time? What games/sites do you feel give you the best return of satisfaction versus time spent playing the game over the long haul?"
Thanks, Emulation! (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest games are good, and have a wow factor the first time I play each of them, but they don't have any staying power. I always seem to go back to my megadrive/SNES games, and ScummVM.
Part of it is probably reminiscing, but mostly I think older games couldn't rely on great graphics, so they had to make up for it in other areas.
Games (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a 2D platformer at heart. The extra dimension allowed developers to get lazy, while the games that came from the 2D era had to be creative to set themselves apart from the hundreds of other 2D platformers.
Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, I think that a lot of people like older games because these they evoke memories from a more innocent/carefree time in the player's life (e.g. teen-age years, or college), rather than better gameplay.
Older games and commercialism (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, the newer games get more attention than the older games. Companies spend a lot of money convincing people to keep track of the new games and that technology drives "fun". This is how the companies make more money.
This is actually a very backwards way of thinking of some games. For example, online RPGs (aka MMORPGs) actually get better with age. A game like my own Meridian 59 has had several expansions and tweaks done to the game over the years. These games tend to be very bug-free and well-balanced. The game grows and expands over the years, and the game you can play now is often quite different than the game it originally was.
Finally, sometimes games change. I'm a huge fan of computer RPGs, but the games released these days are hardly RPGs. Instead of being able to create a character (or party), I'm forced to deal with a pre-made character and run him (or rarely, her) through a pre-set adventure. Sometimes I just have to fire up a Wizardry game or the original Final Fantasy as an antidote to the mostly passive games that are released these days. I guess they sell really well, but it's not the type of game I want to play.
I'll post the slides to my conference talk on my professional blog (http://blog.psychochild.org/ [psychochild.org]) when I get the chance.
Some thoughts,
Emulation is my gaming god (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure there are others like me out there who have let their passion take them far enough to the point where they make their own game [allacrost.org] in the "old-school" style. Of course I doubt anyone is out there making loads of money off of making new games that look like they could have been released in the 90s, but I bet there are quite a few like me who spend their spare time working on their game as a hobby.
On a side-note, I bet you kids these days wouldn't give such "ancient" looking games a second glance, since they've been suckered into the game media hype machine of "better-looking game = better game". *grumble grumble* Rotten kids!!!! Why I remember back in my day, we only had one button on our joypads, and that was damn well enough for us!
Simple answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
- The set of all new games; let's say "from 2002 onwards" for concreteness.
- The set of all games from before 2002.
Now, consider your standard of "goodness". The questioner uses something he calls "satisfying"; there are many possibilities here. This is a meta-argument, so I really do want you to substitute your personal standards.Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?
Is this really surprising?
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
That said, there are some ways modern games are legitimately better. Linear RPGs are one strong example, I think (though non-linear RPGs are, for a variety of reasons, effectively dead). I'm not saying all standards will have this result... just the vast majority of them.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:long haul? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope most people designing games don't have that attitude. I'd much rather buy a game that I know I can enjoy multiple times than one I'll never want to replay. I can play Super Mario 3 over and over again, even though I know where all the stuff is. There are a lot of SNES games that I've played multiple times through - I just have to give myself a few months to forget some of the details.
If I'm only going to play a game once, I'd rather just rent it.
Re:Emulation is my gaming god (Score:2, Insightful)
"
I was thinking just the opposite of that.
The young generation is still familiar with 8 and 16 bit games only they know them form handhelds and not from consoles.
It's the gameboy/pokemon generation.
And Nintendo is said to be offering all those older games on their upcomming revolution.
So they must think they can sell these games to kids (their major market).
symbols (Score:5, Insightful)
Old games used symbols to display things on screen almost of the time, because the machines couldn't do more. But you didn't treat the things displayed on screen as if they were realistic drawings anyway, you knew they were just symbols which meant tree, kobold, or whatever and all the real action had to happen in your imagination.
So everyone in fact had a different, and extremly rich perception of the game.
Constrast that with 3D. The things you're looking at are generally not symbols, they're literally what you, or your character, see. That means your imagination can't interface with what is displayed. Those realistic, tangible objects aren't compatible with it.
That means that if the illusion isn't 100% perfect, the charm will be broken.
Now, you're just consuming a world someone as prepared for you, the same as everyone else. Before, your brain had to build it itself, but it was incomparable.
Re:Thanks, Emulation! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One word answer for me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been playing Civ since it was just Civilization, and I can assure you that Civ3 was a huge improvement over Civ2. While there was certainly a graphical upgrade, a lot went on underneath too. If you played SMAC (Alpha Centauri) you'd see it was a sort of testing ground for Civ3, a lot of things that debuted there showed up with Civ3 (and some that sucked, didn't). Things like Culture and Resources are major changes, for example, and fundamentally alter how you play. There are also plenty of small changes that generally balance out some of the more annoying things about combat and city management and make an all around more enjoyable experience. I have absolutely no interest in going back to previous versions or to FreeCiv, and that's in spite of having to play Civ3 through Wine on a PIII-866 with crappy onboard video. It's that much of an improvement.
FreeCiv, sadly, is stuck in the past and flat out refuses to implement most of the Civ3 improvements. I suppose if you like Civ2 then you'll like FreeCiv with the Civ2 modpack, but frankly, if you like Civ2 you probably already own the real thing anyway. FreeCiv seems to be mostly popular with people who like to screw around with options and settings (like most OSS projects), rather than people who just want to sit down and play a good game.
The one thing Civilization had going for it that was lost in Civ 2 and 3 was the "conquer the world before lunch" aspect we would always go for. Game have become a lot more like epic weekend adventures. Civ4 plans to address this though, and I have a lot of faith in Sid Meier as a game designer (though I have no idea how I'll play it on this box). I also liked the unit building aspect of SMAC, but I don't expect to see that back soon.
Re:Thanks, Emulation! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no need to make many new games (Score:1, Insightful)
First person shooters, on the other hand, can always use good new graphics. Final Fantasy hasn't really changed much from it's old days, either. Console RPGs were never deep, in depth games anyway.
There really is no rush to make new games anymore, at this point.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's just nostalgia. I think a big part of it is that over the course of years of development on certain platforms, people found some types of games that were really fun, but in the last five years or so we've gotten rid of them because they're "old technology". Getting rid of the 2D side-scroller because we have 3D games with "better graphics" and "a bigger world" would be like letting all the chess, go, and Monopoly boards rot on the shelves in the '80s because Pong and its wonderful "new technology" is somehow infinitely superior to all board games.
I think that little by little, the industry is starting to realize that games like 2D sidescrollers, isometric strategy games, and simple-but-deep (think Ico or Katamari Damacy) games aren't obsolete forms of gaming. There are plenty of GBA games that are totally new, but are done in the older style of a lot of beloved games, and a lot of those games have been really successful. Hopefully those won't go away with the slow death of the GBA and its somewhat older hardware.
Re:Thanks, Emulation! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thanks, Emulation! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Oh my god... all my base belong to WHO!?!?!??"
While FF3 (FF6j) and to a lesser extent FF2 (FF5j) for SNES did have some of the best stories and cinematic qualities to them, their predecessors left a little sump'n sump'n to be desired. I mean cmon, freggin 4 identical red-haired fighters can save the universe in FF1 for NES and nobody thinks this is strange!? Let's talk about games like Metal Gear when guards yell "I FEEL ASLEEP!!" when they fall asleep.. This isn't exactly 4th wall, wow I'm watching something magical unfold, stuff we're talking about here. Don't get me wrong, my favorite game of all time is Dr. Mario, where for some reason Mario has gotten his M.D. in internal medicine and is qualified to dole out painkillers and sweet, sweet chill/fever music... please don't judge me.
Console vs PC: Instant vs Long-term (Score:2, Insightful)
*pokes*. I'm not trying to start a flamewar here. These are just my observations and how they relate to the parent's question.
Most console(Xbox/PS/etc) carry mostly instant-fun (almost arcade-like) games. Most of those games have a short *wow!* effect. You usually play those games for a couple or days or even hours before doing anything else. Of course there are some exceptions, but, it's what most people generally expect from a console; that you can sit down and just have fun for an hour or so, sometimes with your friends.
PC-games are more of the long-lasting kind of fun. The fun is spread out over a couple of weeks, sometimes even months. Cities need to grow, characters need to be leveled, progress needs to be made.
At least, that's how it used to be (think of all those old PC games you played for ages!).
Something has changed.. Gameplay has become less important, and Graphics and all those other 'goodies' such as real-time physics simulation have become more and more important, why? Who knows! It probably sells better in the first few months.
Also, more and more and more games are being developed in a "multi-platform" way; ie, they make the same game for PC/Xbox/PS2. So what? That's only good! More joy for everyone! Well, is it? Take a look at the game Deus Ex [wikipedia.org], that's one excellent game. Now, its successor, Deus Ex: Invisible War [wikipedia.org] was a multi-platform game and it all went wrong. Why? Because while Deus-Ex was a typical long-term-fun PC-Game, the sequel was a typical instant-fun short-term game; that's what its design elements reflected. Now, this is an extreme case, but I believe that more and more games are becoming the 'instant-fun short-term' kind of games for various reasons; multi-platform, better sales, more focus on graphics.
It's a shame really, but there's still hope. I'm pretty sure that this is just the zeitgeist of gaming, and it probably acts a bit like a sinus-wave, y'know? In a couple of years there might be more long-term fun-games than the instant-fun ones, it'll reach the top and then it makes way for short-term instant-fun arcade-like games, once again.
One studio that holds my interests in particularly is Lionhead Studios [lionhead.com] . Black & White II [lionhead.com] seems like a typical PC-game, and hopefully its not as bug-riddled as its predecessor. Also, they also seem to try and change the definitions of gaming, or at least experiment in its boundaries, take a look at The Room [pqhp.com] (Scroll down to "Gameplay Moves Forward into the 21st Century" and click the Register button, register or fill in any dummy info and watch the video, skip through to the "The Room" part).
So there's hope, but right now, I'd say yes; old games are definatly more satisfying. But right now, you got to know where to look and what to look for. May I recommend Psychonauts? An excellent multi-platform adventure game for all ages?
oldest game in the world (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:One word and a Roman Numeral (Score:2, Insightful)