Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

Some back info, I've been a PC gamer since I was about 14/15, so going on for two decades soon.

They had PCs 20 years ago? I feel old now. Somehow I thought everyone was still beepity booping on ZX Spectrums and BBC micros back then.

Off by about 15 years. My first was an Apple ][ circa 1981. Spectrums (1982) and Micros (1981) were about the same timeframe. The C64 hit the market in 1982. Even the Vic-20 was out in 1980, along with TRS-80s (1977), TI-99/4As (1981), and other alphabet soups of early 8-bit personal computers.

I know this may be painful, but 20 years ago was 1995. Star Wars: Dark Forces, Full Throttle, Command & Conquer, Heroes of Might & Magic, and Warcraft II all came out that year. And now if you'll excuse me, I'll be crying into my Jello while I watch Matlock.

[itisnotlogical]

I just got over realizing that Battlefront II was a whole decade ago last month. Now you're saying that one of the first games I ever remember playing is 20 years old?

... I'm a few months shy of being 20 years old myself. When did that happen?

[RedKing]

It gets worse.

Ultima VI and Wing Commander are 25 years old.
Ultima IV, Gauntlet and Super Mario Brothers are 30 years old.
Ultima I will be 35 years old next year.

And yet, I'll always be older than all of them. Hell, I bought Ultima III in the store when it was new. Oh, that glorious swag -- cloth map, finely bound and lavishly illustrated spellbooks....I miss fine gaming swag. Mobius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony came with a ninja poster and ninja headband. And yes, I wore the headband when I played. How could you not?? It was a fucking NINJA HEADBAND. When you're ten years old and you wear a ninja headband, you become a ninja. That's just a well-known fact.

[itisnotlogical]

I miss when buying a retail game mattered.

First, you had to buy the game. You had to pick it out and spend money to get a physical thing in a box. Then once you got home, you could read the manual and look at the art on the discs. Then, it was an event to install a game. You had to shut down anything else you were doing, for fear of corrupting the installation (actually happened once because my brother was doing something while I was installing a game, true story). You'd have to type in a long CD key, and sit and watch the concept art scroll by and change the discs out as the installer demanded. Then, once you were at peak excitement to play the game, you could finally sit down and be blown away by something you were truly excited to experience, like waiting in line for a movie premiere at the theater.

Now, the disk barely even matters. Even if the disc has game data it'll probably be out-of-date and need patches by the time it reaches you, so you have to install Steam or Origin or Battle.net or whatever the fuck online service anyway, so why even bother? And installing a game is an unobtrusive background process that you barely even notice, so there's no build-up to play the game. "Eh, Skyrim's finished, I might check it out in a week when I have time."

I don't care if it's irrational nostalgia, this is the irrational nostalgia that I choose to have.

[miauw62]

haha man if we're doing nostalgic gaming anecdotes i guess i do have one

when i was even younger there was this video rental store in our town (it's gone now rip ;-;7), and you could also rent video games. so every friday afternoon after school i would go to the store with my dad and rent a PS2 game for the weekend. it was great, really.

[itisnotlogical]

Wait, you read the manual when you got home?

I read the manual all the time. I was a reading monster when I was little, I'd read safety labels and ingredient lists because I was curious. I once read the entire Metal Gear Solid manual aloud, to myself, for no reason other than I was curious what it said.

Nowadays games don't even have digital manuals.

I wish I'd owned Warcraft III as a younger child, that game's manual is practically a novel. All the Blizzard manuals were great, as a matter of fact.

[nenjin]

I think the pressure to release is a lot higher than it used to be. Seems like turn-around times on development are shorter than they used to be. Kickstarter and EA are largely responsible, I think.

[RedKing]

I miss when buying a retail game mattered.

First, you had to buy the game. You had to pick it out and spend money to get a physical thing in a box. Then once you got home, you could read the manual and look at the art on the discs. Then, it was an event to install a game. You had to shut down anything else you were doing, for fear of corrupting the installation (actually happened once because my brother was doing something while I was installing a game, true story). You'd have to type in a long CD key, and sit and watch the concept art scroll by and change the discs out as the installer demanded. Then, once you were at peak excitement to play the game, you could finally sit down and be blown away by something you were truly excited to experience, like waiting in line for a movie premiere at the theater.

Now, the disk barely even matters. Even if the disc has game data it'll probably be out-of-date and need patches by the time it reaches you, so you have to install Steam or Origin or Battle.net or whatever the fuck online service anyway, so why even bother? And installing a game is an unobtrusive background process that you barely even notice, so there's no build-up to play the game. "Eh, Skyrim's finished, I might check it out in a week when I have time."

I don't care if it's irrational nostalgia, this is the irrational nostalgia that I choose to have.

Yep, pretty much.

Even better, remember when you didn't install games? You just played them from the floppy disk. You'd enter a dungeon and get something like "INSERT DUNGEON DISK #2 AND PRESS RETURN".

As I recall, the C64 version of Ultima V had 8 disks with Side A and Side B, for 16 total data disks. Crazy. I remember the first time I was at a friend's house and he had a hard drive. It took me like an hour to wrap my head around how it worked. 

[nenjin]

Every time I open up a PDF game manual and am greeted by black text font on a plain while background, I die a little inside. I adore illustrated game manuals. I think I still even have some of them around from buying Final Fantasy for the Game Boy. The art was actually nicer than the in-game graphics!

Now, you're lucky if you even get a shitty PDF game manual.

[Biowraith]

If we're going to reminisce over loading up games in the bad old days, I'd like to take a moment to get nostalgic about waiting 15 minutes for Daley Thompson's Supertest to load from cassette (replete with that screechy modem-esque loading noise the whole time) on the 128K version of the ZX Spectrum, all so I could destroy a joystick trying to get past the first race.

[itisnotlogical]

Every time I open up a PDF game manual and am greeted by black text font on a plain while background, I die a little inside. I adore illustrated game manuals. I think I still even have some of them around from buying Final Fantasy for the Game Boy. The art was actually nicer than the in-game graphics!

Now, you're lucky if you even get a shitty PDF game manual.

For me, it was when I looked at a friend's copy of Dark Souls 2, the first modern physical game I had ever seen.

The "manual" was a single sheet of paper showing the default button mapping.

[Neonivek]

One huge thing is that the market changed

The market has always tried to appeal to general audiences but because the general audience has transformed from "gamers" to "People who have played a videogame before" it thusly has transformed into a lowest common denominator game.

Which is one of the major contributions IMO to the "Triple A games are boring now" (triple A refers to cost to make it)

---

Several Genres have died dead and the exploration of settings, themes, and genres have slowed to a snail's pace while the few games that do attempt it tend to be of low quality.

Dungeon Keeper for example has been copied 3 times so far... and all three of those games SUUUUCK!... they don't even approach mediocre.

---

Games now adays generally aren't "bad" but they generally aren't "Good" with most games hitting a sort of bland middle ground.

---

I am trying to think of a few plus sides other than "you know what your getting into now" but no... Games haven't really become deeper, more engaging, more meaningfully vast, fun, or anything the technology could have brought.

Mostly because like the graphics wars... Gimmicks are meant to replace genuinely working hard to make a good game......

I think the only fun game I can think of that is coming out next year for PC is Xcom 2... One game

---

On the bright side the graphics wars have mostly died...

MOSTLY because graphics wars was because games had a variety of graphics and thus a game that focused exclusively on graphics stood out. Yet the majority of games have a strong graphics focus and we hit a firm rock in "how good it can get" as well as a general community of people who are tired of upgrading their systems.

---

There are a few things about older games you would THINK I could say modern games don't do... like Doom clones? Nope! a lot of games clone others (Hello Civilization and Beyond Earth)

---

Ps. This is just for PC... Console wise... SHOOTERS SHOOTERS SHOOTERS SHOOTERS SHOOTERS SHOOOTERS SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTERS!!! DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH SHOOTERS!?! WE NEED MORE SHOOTERS!!!! COMMERCIALS FULL OF SHOOTERS!!! WE NEED ABSOLUTE SHOOTER SATURATION!!! ohh and Nintendo still makes really fun games.

[RedKing]

Yeah, yeah...and in my day, you had to grind for rupees in a snowstorm uphill. Both ways.

I think there are some amazing games out in the last 5-10 years. There was a lot of derivative and/or badly-designed shit back in the day too.

[Neonivek]

Yeah, yeah...and in my day, you had to grind for rupees in a snowstorm uphill. Both ways.

I think there are some amazing games out in the last 5-10 years. There was a lot of derivative and/or badly-designed shit back in the day too.

I already said that RedKing.

Ohh wait sorry let me translate that to the stereotype you assigned me

SERHznkdgnmDGTFH ADJEFGT aeFgljghkln rklaertk jWERL;T GMJklegnKLGFNKLAEGKLZSDFJGHKLZSGFKLZDNGMKLZNSDF  how do keyboards work I'm so old!

---

In fact, I am so into this. I will respond to every single person who references what I said. JUST because of RedKing.

[RedKing]

....I'm pretty sure I'm more ancient than you.

Besides, my point was valid -- you *did* have to grind like hell in Legend of Zelda. I see that as a major complaint from a number of posters in this thread, that games are too grindy. Guess what? They always were!

As to the latter post of the post, all I saw was talk about how "games these days with the graphics and their fancy shooter stuff", and no acknowledgement of things like Mass Effect or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft or Terraria or any number of games that are amazing compared to what I grew up with. I'm nostalgic for the old classics, not necessarily some rose-colored memories that every game was wonderful in the 1980's.