I’m thinking about the AVGN and how Nintendo makes you pay to play shitty emulator games from like 50 years ago.
Especially for the very old games like atari lol
I mean that's hit or miss with people in general. I have a 19 year old coworker who's really into the SNES, and I know a 37 year old who refuses to play anything that isn't Call of Duty.
Retro gaming is already a niche hobby, but I don't think it's entirely driven by nostalgia, because to say that implies retro games are somehow less valid or less engaging than modern games, which isn't true. Older games have different design decisions that can hook different people. Like if your favorite type of game is a 2D platformer, you're gonna be into retro games by default.
The biggest hurdle for some people seems to be when graphics aren't what they're used to, like I have relatives who can't visually interpret 2D sprite graphics or early 3D games, but can see what's going on in a modern realistic HD game like RDR2.
But yeah, lots of retro games are enjoyable on their own terms, so I've met people of all ages who still like them.
Ludology has advanced by leaps and bounds since back then. Games today are far better, because we know what people like to do. Games used to be hard as fuck for no reason, but now they're easier because it turns out people don't want to feel bad when they play. They like games that give them good feelings. So work backwards and end up with a game state that gives the player a good feeling instead of a bad feeling.
I will note that: "Games used to be hard as fuck for no reason, but now they’re easier because it turns out people don’t want to feel bad when they play. They like games that give them good feelings." definitely is generally true, in that you'll get more game sales. But there absolutely is a market for 'hard games'. Dark Souls is the obvious jerk, but a lot of indie games with cult followings have that too: Enter the Gungeon, La-Mulana, Spelunky.
And like, yeah, those games will always be niche. But for those who like them, there's nothing else on the market quite like it.
they weren't hard for no reason, they were sucking quarters in arcades and spiking difficulty to mess with renting
I'm just quoting the person above me. But as much as you're right for a lot of games, the same doesn't really hold true for a lot of early PC games on tape or floppy.
Yeah those types of adventure games were cryptic from a combination of extending playtime, lack of technology to parse sentences, and a lack of understanding on how to explain stuff to players.
The extending playtime one is probably most important. These designers knew how small their games were and put a lot of obstacles in the way to keep players going with it. I played Zork as a kid and it took me weeks to finish. The current world record speedrun is 2 minutes 46 seconds. Zork was considered an enormous game when it came out.
In fairness they've managed to get even Morrowind down below 2min 30 these days.
Haha yeah I remember brewing potions to jump halfway across the map and give me high enough stats to one shot Dagoth Ur with a javelin. That game is amazingly broken and I adore it.
Here's what it's like to play a hard game.
Games changed to easy for a reason. Turns out, when people have some spare time, they don't want to spend it feeling frustrated and angry.
Nah, that's just dogshit game, that wasn't even particularly liked at the time. There are plenty of old, hard games that hold up, even in the adventure genre.
Still, I'm not saying that toning down of difficult is bad by any stretch. It definitely made games more popular. I'm just saying there is a niche audience that likes that.
Yeah, The Longest Journey might still be my favourite game of all time and the puzzles can be quite opaque. (though with Syberia it was probably the last of the great adventure games)
You can go and read the rest of the articles on that blog. There are a lot of them, going back years, and try to find the good games. They're few and far between.
And with no internet, how were you supposed to know? The box promised jungle adventure with tigers and gorillas. Not hours of frustration.
try to find the good games. They’re few and far between.
:astronaut-1: same with all pop culture. you remember the good movies/songs/whatever from eras past but not the garbage (which was most of it)
But, that's not really what we're discussing. We're discussing playing retro games, today.
You can look up reviews. You can look up 'best games from the year 1984'.
I'm absolutely not saying 'games were better back then!!!!', I'm saying that the 'retro games' still offer some great games that were never topped, for various reasons (often because that had niche design choices that only appeal to a minority of gamers).
I'm well aware that, as an average, retrogames were overly hard shovelware garbage. But there are still great games throughout those decades.
shovelware garbage
If you are into that sort of thing, there is an entire Youtube channel dedicated to going through a CD of the Softkey 2000 Shareware Games collection week by week. It's six years old and shows no signs of stopping. They're about halfway through the CD by now.
I typically prefer fair but challenging games. I really enjoy touhou and super meat boy. I usually only play easier games if they have a good story or atmosphere (Yakuza for example) but I can see what you mean too.
I'm really enjoying that article lol. I love the part where the text gets inverted after an explosion. I have no idea how people were supposed to play those text based adventure games without looking at the source code. Like I can't type "walk north" it has to be "go north" and I'm supposed to simply intuit that
If you liked that you'll love this classic from the year 2000 by Old Man Murray. It had a huge impact, and it's strange, if you read the Wikipedia article about the game it's the creator playing defense and trying to fob off blame from herself to everyone else.
I mean in general sure, there's more quality of life stuff in most modern games. There's a lot less cryptic puzzles that make no sense, and a lot fewer situations of getting lost. But you I could say Cookie Clicker and Genshin Impact are the epitome of modern games then, because they offer quick and consistent satisfaction to more people. They hit the nervous system right and keep people playing in ways that games 30 years ago perhaps didn't.
People are different too. A lot of people like hard as fuck games, even if they didn't grow up with them. The popularity of Dark Souls should show that at least. Some people might latch onto how a game like a 2D Castlevania feels. Also most people I meet aren't even into games in general, they're into specific types of games, like there's fighting game communities, there's people who prefer FPS, there are some people I know who only get interested in VR. And so I've met people who only get interested in retro or retro style games.
Also older games had to rely on shit like backtracking to make the game artificially longer and seem bigger. Games still do it but it's an old annoying practice.
Atari games just objectively suck, they barely worked and you could only think they were good when there was nothing to compare it to. I'm not criticizing the people who made these games, they got paid like 2 bucks and had to make a game with pong as the only reference pint for what a game was, and it had to run on a dollar store calculator. but there's just no reason to pick up adventure for the atari 2000 unless you are interested in the history of video games.
Once you get to the NES there are things worth playing. The original Legend of Zelda is terrible, and the second one is worse., but is interesting to play if you are big on the series. Mega Man, Metroid, and Mario mostly worked at that time. You're better off playing Metroid Zero mission instead of the original, but Mario definitely was fine the way it was, really made something special that holds up, same for Mega Man(with some frustrating exceptions). Outside of nintendo there's the original metal gear and sonis going on, which definitely show their age but are still fun and cool for some people. SNES was when games actually started being playable, sometimes even fun, on a consistent basis, but that's after the timeline you discussed.
I am a zoomer, albeit a kinda weird one, so take all this with a grain of salt.
It is. Half the puzzles are just knowing what to do, or the game doesn't progress. They don't even require thought, you either know to burn down one random tree or you don't, or you just push every block until something happens. Enemies have waaaaay to much health for the most part, which especially bad in the last couple dungeons. guards should not have that much health and need to be hit from the correct angle and just move around randomly. It's infuriating. It was revolutionary and essential and had some really good ideas, but the execution sucked hard looking back.
Totally accurate. I grew up on NES but only Mario and a couple other games are good. Super Metroid is great but Metroid 1 is honestly fucking dog shit.
Going way back, Pac Man and Tetris hold up and that's like fucking it.
Tetris is the youngest game you mentioned. It's younger than the SNES.
Oh yeah true, forgot. Yeah it's just Pac man then.
And there are a few other fairly good mid 80's games that were arcade exclusives at the time back when they were 10 years ahead of home consoles, so basically Super Nintendo level technology.
Edit: Oh I think Tetris is actually like between the NES and SNES though, also I just looked up some dates and it's like, after the Japan release but before the NA release of the console, but then the actual NA/non-Soviet release of Tetris was later
Super Metroid is the only one there that's way after
Depends on how far back counts as retro. Your thought that no one plays Atari games is more or less true, and I would even say most NES titles aren't particularly known or popular. SNES territory is where we see a lot of games that are just as playable as modern indie titles.
Absolutely! And some of them like Chrono Trigger are still gorgeous
For sure! A lot of them are getting remakes too, I thought the recent Live-a-live rerelease was really excellent. Doing the fantasy chapter in iambic pentameter was :chefs-kiss:
2D graphics went though the same weird uncanny-valley growing pains as 3D, kinda like how the PS1 has this janky "bless them they're trying" charm to it but the N64 just kinda looks bad. Super old vector graphics and lots of colorful arcade games still hold up, but the Atari looks like pastel ass.
N64 looks bad? Conker looks so good, banjo, Mario games. They had the limitations defined by hardware and made that shit look awesome within those limits. Just full disagreement about those. Games that wanted (or even want now) to look realistic never hold up and are kinda boring. The good art knows it's limits and defines the art by what is fun and nice within them
PS1 even at the time was usually embarrassingly ugly because it came right after the sort of pinnacle of 2D graphics and it was an aesthetic downgrade for the most part.
N64 games didn't have the little pre recorded videos but the graphics themselves hold up better
i do but i am not a good sample i am like the oldest zoomer possible and also i was born in latin america which meant that i was mostly behind gaming for a lil bit of time, so i have a lot of nostalgia for old ass games like i was born in 97 and we only got a nintendo 64 when i was like 5 or 6, but we did have a mega drive and a super nintendo so i can get into games of that era and so do most of my friends who are into games and are around my age, also a lot of nostalgia for arcade games is a thing, but if we go real retro it gets rough i never even saw an comodore 64 or an atari and i go to street fairs where people sell antiquities here in rio, i've seen actual soviet stuff being sold but never anything gaming related from before the original nintendo console
Was the NES officially even released in Latin America back in the 1980's/1990's because i never saw a real NES/Famicom only those knockoff consoles.
I do remember seeing Sega consoles and the SNES and n64, but never a real NES.
wasn't the nes released after the super nintendo was released in brazil? i am like 99% sure it is something dumb like that, i have seen an old ad online for the nes so i feel like they released at least here but it didn't pan out
Famicom was a thing but they had to be imported, so they were expensive af.
Am an older zoomer, can't really get into anything older than PS1/N64 games. Love the PS2 and early PS3/Xbox 360 era though.
Understandable, am dead-center millennial and my limit tends to be late NES.
Also >PS2 >retro :walter-breakdown: :yes-honey-left:
Understandable, am dead-center millennial and my limit tends to be late NES.
This definitely depends on the type of older game. Text adventures can still be very playable and Monkey Island is amazing for a game that was available on the Atari.
Asteroids and Pacman on the other hand get boring in like 5 minutes. Space Invaders on the other hand for some reason has staying power for like 20 - 30minutes.
Oh for sure, especially text and good writing don't get dragged down by the growing pains graphics were going through at the time. I'm much more of a mechanics and "gamefeel"-minded person so I can't quite cheat the technology like that, there's this stretch of time between late arcade and SNES where it feels like devs were still getting a grasp on the changing tech and there's a certain stiffness to everything.
Okay 2d Mario and space invaders are exceptions. And snake for the Nokia phones of course
yeah, feels like it’s about on par with being into classic rock or 80’s punk stuff
Future generations are going to have 90s JRPG kids instead of Led Zeppelin kids.
I am just going to assume that the answers below are things like "I play retro games like Diablo 3 all the time actually" and crumble into dust when I get a free moment
I'm an old millennial and I wouldn't say I hate retro style games but they have a much higher bar to clear to be worth my time.
the good shit is amazing, but it feels like there’s ~5 games a console that are actually worth my time
There's a lot to recommend classic video games, in terms of design and playability.
You have to remember that the original NES/Sega/Neo-Geo line of games were originally designed as cabinet quarter-eater machines. All the economic drivers in the game were different. Games were necessarily intended to have replay value. "Secrets" embedded in games encouraged players to develope a sophisticated understanding of particular titles and to cultivate certain rarified skills as a means of outperforming. Games were longer and more difficult to encourage you to keep feeding the machine.
Once the games migrated to console, you could explore and refine your skill at the game without emptying your wallet. So the replay value aspect no longer carried an economic penalty.
Modern games no longer play well as arcade cabinet games. They're more cinematic, so they have less replay value. Or they're "always online" to force you to buy subscriptions. Or they're F2P, with lots of soft ceiling you have to effectively pay your way past.
Older games never needed those mechanics to extract people's money. So, despite worse graphics and more archaic systems of play, they can still capture an audience fascinated by a design style that no longer really exists.
New games are also quarter-eaters. If Space Invaders was made today it would be free but you would pay for random chance boxes to get the ship that is your favorite color.
Right. Newer games also no longer have you "unlock" the prized content through play. You only get it as DLC.
And "always online" kills a lot of the modding communities, which flourished during the early '00s game era.
Most atari games suck tbh. The NES was ok, I really liked the Master System and Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US). But I love the PS1 and early PS2 era of games, really creative and janky. Then all video games became grey and boring for a while until the Indie market grew.
Not a huge fan of new games typically though idk if I'd say I prefer retro games. My sweet spot is like 2006-2014. My younger sister and her boyfriend apparently love going to an arcade though.
To be clear I don't consider those retro, although I guess the older end of that spectrum could be. That's just when all the games I like came out.
N64 to Ps1 era, not really. I've played a few but the it doesn't feel like they've figured out 3d games yet. PS2 and up is great.
I love 16 and 8 bit though. I emulate old snes and nes games instead of playing shitty mobile games. Since I don't want to spend money on an actual mobile console, I just play older games on my phone. But I wouldn't consider them worth emulating on my main computer in place of my free gaming time.
This falls in line pretty closely with my take.
Anytime a game falls into the experimental new tech era (PS1 and N64 3D graphics being one, "first generation" VR games being another more recent example), I find that these systems have considerably less titles I'm interested in playing because they're usually less-refined or leaning harder into the technology's "gimmick" appeal rather than delivering a good game.
For consoles where they were basically revisions/evolutions of tech (SNES/Genesis for 2D, PS2 and onwards for 3D, generation TBD for VR) I can find a lot more of the library that interests me.
Even on Xbox I remember a lot of janky weird control schemes, it wasn't until later that it settled down into "left thumbstick move right thumbstick aim"
I had one of those plug and play retro consoles as a kid so now Mappy, Dig Dug, and and Pole Position are some of my favorite games
I think it's just for us nostalgia driven millennials. I don't hang out with zoomers though so idk
People still listen to "cardboard tone, recorded on a tape deck" punk, i think they can actually like playing these games
