Your Gaming Past/Pres/Futu

[LibertyCabbage]

I wonder what it's like to grow up in the 2010's. Specially in the gaming sense.

I'd like to think that today's kids would still enjoy the classics. It seems wrong to assume that every kid's a Halo/CoD/MW junkie.

[McDuffies]

Eeeh... I know quite a lot of folks who won't watch black&white movies because, well, why when there are the ones with colour?

[IVstudios]

I think a large part of what makes old "Classic" games classic is our nostalgia for them. I wish I could remember where I read/heard it, but there was a guy who argued that what made those old games fun and special was less the games themselves and more the way we as children perceived them, and that children today perceive modern games in much the same way.

Also: I got Portal 2 for Christmas and it is awesome.

[K-Dawg]

I wonder what it's like to grow up in the 2010's. Specially in the gaming sense.

I'd like to think that today's kids would still enjoy the classics. It seems wrong to assume that every kid's a Halo/CoD/MW junkie.

Based off my own experience of course but my nephew and cousins that are around age 10-12 only care about the Halo/COD/sports games. Although I think it's on us "grown folk" to introduce these kids to the older games. I know at least with my nephew when I showed him my SNES and Genesis and what I used to play he was pretty entertained by the games.

Also sidenote these kids man, these kids are different. My nephew will spend all day killing people on Call of Duty but he watches me kill one spider creature in Skyrim and he's disgusted at how gruesome the kill is.

[Bustertheclown]

Yeah like I'm gonna let microsoft implant something in my body in forseeable future...

People would do it if it were Apple.

[Terotrous]

Question is, how would it hold up with today's kids.

It's too hard for my nephews. Once you get to the stages that aren't just "run right, jump over stuff" they get totally lost.

I think a large part of what makes old "Classic" games classic is our nostalgia for them.

In Super Mario World it's more that it controls extremely well. It's true you can use it to skip big parts of the game but the cape gives you an ton of freedom and it still remains very controllable even when you're rapidly ascending / descending. The speed and control in SMW is still a fair bit more than the newer 2D Mario games.

[Yeahduff]

^Yeah. Nostalgia isn't unrelated, but the fact is things like Super Mario, Metroid, and Legend of Zelda are marvels of game design that hold up today. It's not the immersive experience of a lot of today's games but no serious gamer can dismiss these achievements.

But yes, difficulty is a barrier.

[Yeahduff]

Also Skyward Sword is much better than Majora's Mask.

[IVstudios]

In Super Mario World it's more that it controls extremely well. It's true you can use it to skip big parts of the game but the cape gives you an ton of freedom and it still remains very controllable even when you're rapidly ascending / descending. The speed and control in SMW is still a fair bit more than the newer 2D Mario games.

Yeah, but that's how an adult judges a game, not a kid. As a kid you probably weren't thinking "Hmm, this game has some really tight controles and a very well thought out level design." You were thinking "Oh my God YOSHI! I can ride Yoshi! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod jump! Get the feather!"

I'm not saying the old games weren't good and don't still hold up. But game design has advanced so much since then and games have gained a lot. Everything old games were capable of is still possible, and still implemented. Not all modern games are Halo and Call of Duty, there's also your Braids and Slenders and Angry Birds.

I just think worrying that kids are "missing out on the classics" is overlooking the fact that there are plenty of modern classics to go around. And sure, kids like some shitty games now, but we loved some shitty games too when we were kids. I loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES and that game was awful (fucking damn level ).

As adults we just see them as games, but as kids they were huge fucking adventures and the only things that mattered in our lives. It's that perspective that made them so special, and it's that same perspective that modern kids have about modern games. And why the stuff from our childhood will always look better to us than what's out now.

[Yeahduff]

Well, sure. If the question is "Are great games still being made?" then the answer is "Of course." But I enjoy Led Zeppelin and Rear Window because they are great.

[IVstudios]

True, but comparing video games to other mediums doesn't correlate very well in my opinion because unlike music and movies and books video games have only been around for a short time.

With video games, more so than with any other medium, it simply wouldn't be possible to create a lot of what we have now 20 years ago. Games with the personality of Portal or the massive world of WoW or the level of being Batman of Arkham City just simply couldn't exist.

Granted there have been all kinds of advancements in the way music is made and recorded: electric guitars, keyboards and er… auto-tune . But most of those can only really be said to make music "different," not quantifiably "better." Movies are a better analogy, being relatively new and very much affected by technology. But while advances in technology can change the flavor of movies, the core stories they tell have been around for a long time.

[Cope]

Speaking from my own experiences, I'm far less likely to be impressed by games made before 1990.

[Terotrous]

Yeah, but that's how an adult judges a game, not a kid. As a kid you probably weren't thinking "Hmm, this game has some really tight controles and a very well thought out level design." You were thinking "Oh my God YOSHI! I can ride Yoshi! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod jump! Get the feather!"

As a kid, I was thinking "this is a lot of fun!"

Even though the analysis wasn't there, there's no question that it was some of those factors that caused me to enjoy it so much. Good controls lend themselves to accessibility, which is often essential for a kid to enjoy it. Very difficult and technical games like Super Ghouls n' Ghosts are not things kids tend to enjoy. Mario games also usually have very well-balanced difficulty curves that ramp up slowly so you don't get overwhelmed at any point.

I'm not saying the old games weren't good and don't still hold up. But game design has advanced so much since then and games have gained a lot. Everything old games were capable of is still possible, and still implemented. Not all modern games are Halo and Call of Duty, there's also your Braids and Slenders and Angry Birds.

It's actually pretty surprising how well some people understood game design even way back then. The Mario games, for example, are designed to gradually introduce platformer gameplay elements as you progress through each stage, and this is present even in the original game, which was effectively the first of its kind. Contra is another example of a game that has a very well designed difficulty curve, it's hard as hell at first but then quickly gets easier once you know the enemy placements, allowing you to get better at the game very fast. Chrono Trigger is still one of the best examples of pacing in an RPG, owing mostly to non-random battles that incrementally get harder as you get closer to a boss, rather than just fighting the same things again and again in the hopes that it will wear you out.

On the flip side, there's surprisingly many modern games that get wrong things that games got right a long time ago. Looking at something like Contra 4, it doesn't have much of the appeal of the original game at all. The difficulty starts off too high and most of the challenge comes from the wrong reasons, like attacks you can't see coming because they're fired from the deadzone between the DS's two screens. You now absolutely have to memorize the location of every enemy, but that turns what was once a subtle improvement process into tedious memory work.

True, but comparing video games to other mediums doesn't correlate very well in my opinion because unlike music and movies and books video games have only been around for a short time.

You can also say this about movies and TV, the time period is just slightly longer. Certainly, anything made before 1960 is very different from anything being made now.

With video games, more so than with any other medium, it simply wouldn't be possible to create a lot of what we have now 20 years ago. Games with the personality of Portal or the massive world of WoW or the level of being Batman of Arkham City just simply couldn't exist.

This is likely not as true as you think. By the early 90s, games were already starting to experiment from an artistic standpoint. Games like Castlevania, Sweet Home, Deja Vu, Shadowrun, Live a Live, Treasure of the Rudras, and Earthbound show that you can actually convey a setting or tell a story pretty convincingly even with primitive graphics and sound. And there are old games with vast worlds as well, such as Starflight and Uncharted Waters.

Creativity can sometimes arise from limitations. I find that a game that can convey just as much with significantly less to work with is in some ways even more impressive than a game that does it with modern technology.



That's not to say that some modern games aren't great. I play some modern titles too and I can appreciate some of the new things that they can do. But I don't think that precludes enjoyment of older titles. It's interesting to see how we got where we are now, at the very least.

[Yeahduff]

Granted there have been all kinds of advancements in the way music is made and recorded: electric guitars, keyboards and er… auto-tune . But most of those can only really be said to make music "different," not quantifiably "better."

In this way video games are very much like music and movies.

[Yeahduff]

Also, there is nothing wrong with autotune.

[IVstudios]

I think auto-tune is going to be to the early 2000s what synthesizer music was to the 80s. It sounded cool at the time but now it makes the music feel dated.

Granted there have been all kinds of advancements in the way music is made and recorded: electric guitars, keyboards and er… auto-tune . But most of those can only really be said to make music "different," not quantifiably "better."

In this way video games are very much like music and movies.

There are a lot of advances in gaming that are quantifiably better than what old games were capable of. More storage space, more RAM, better processors, graphics that let you identify what the thing your looking at is without an instruction manual to tell you the orange thing is an Orc. These things are of course not a guarantee of quality (The Jaguar) but they allow for a much wider range of creativity.

With video games, more so than with any other medium, it simply wouldn't be possible to create a lot of what we have now 20 years ago. Games with the personality of Portal or the massive world of WoW or the level of being Batman of Arkham City just simply couldn't exist.

This is likely not as true as you think. By the early 90s, games were already starting to experiment from an artistic standpoint. Games like Castlevania, Sweet Home, Deja Vu, Shadowrun, Live a Live, Treasure of the Rudras, and Earthbound show that you can actually convey a setting or tell a story pretty convincingly even with primitive graphics and sound. And there are old games with vast worlds as well, such as Starflight and Uncharted Waters.

Creativity can sometimes arise from limitations. I find that a game that can convey just as much with significantly less to work with is in some ways even more impressive than a game that does it with modern technology.



That's not to say that some modern games aren't great. I play some modern titles too and I can appreciate some of the new things that they can do. But I don't think that precludes enjoyment of older titles. It's interesting to see how we got where we are now, at the very least.

I think that exposure to modern titles is exactly what makes older games less enjoyable, especially for kids who don't even have nostalgia to help them enjoy it. A lot of that impressiveness of old games stemmed from the fact that that was all that people knew at the time. It's like how a special effect from the 90's looked great when it came out, but looking at it now after seeing modern effects they just look cheesy. A good example would be Forrest Gump and the way they inserted Tom Hanks into old historical footage. At the time it looked like he was really in those old videos, but today it looks awful.

[Yeahduff]

I think auto-tune is going to be to the early 2000s what synthesizer music was to the 80s.

Completely agree.

It sounded cool at the time but now it makes the music feel dated.

Oh.

More storage space, more RAM, better processors, graphics that let you identify what the thing your looking at is without an instruction manual to tell you the orange thing is an Orc.

But none of that makes a game better. Just gives you more possibilities.

And if you were doing it right, you wouldn't need an instruction manual to tell you what you were looking at.

A good example would be Forrest Gump and the way they inserted Tom Hanks into old historical footage. At the time it looked like he was really in those old videos, but today it looks awful.

And yet The Birds is still better than most movies being made today. Just like Super Mario Bros. just simply is better than most games made today.

[IVstudios]

I dunno, I don't buy it. I've gone back and played a lot of old games (both one's I played as a kid and ones I never got to play) and most of them are fun for about a half hour and then the novelty wears off and they get boring pretty quick. But I find that as each console generations passes there is a much higher percentage of games I can play and still enjoy past the point of novelty.

I just think insisting kids "respect the classics" when it comes to video games has a lot more to do with people trying to validate their own nostalgia and less to do with the actual quality of the games.

[spoonyliger]

Well, here's another interesting topic, still involving the younger generation. My gf's 10yo nephew, Nicholas was playing an NBA game. Sports games have never been my thing and I've always thought of them to be pointless and a waste of a game. Except for motorized sports games. Nevertheless I decided to play with him. I had no idea what was going on and I was getting my ass whooped. It was fun playing. But it was hurting my soul looking at these character models and realizing how stiff they were and how their faces were horrible. I think it only goes to show how little effort is put into generic sports games. I kept complaining about it and stuff, eventually I told him what games he should try playing instead of pointless games. "But I like sports games." He's big into sports, he has actually played quite a variety of sports, part because his parents forced him to, part because he actually likes it. So it would make sense that he likes sports. But I didn't realize that then. So I told him that he should try the classic franchises - Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Metroids, Pokemon, Spyro, etc. But I didn't tell him to play the very first games of those franchises. I told him things like Mario Wii U and Skyward Sword. In other words, the classics, as they are today. What I should've realized back then is that the reason he plays video games is not the same as mine. It's not for the actual video game itself. The only games he has are sports games, so I think he plays them because he's truly addicted to sports, so he plays the video games when he's in places where he can't physically play sports, like at home. In other words, if he can't get his fix in real life, he'll get it virtually.

Now, the reason why I don't like sports games is because I think they're pointless because you can just go out and actually play them. The reason why I made an exception for motorized sports, like car or bike racing is because it's not like you can just go outside and car race. But I wasn't thinking of people like Nicholas who play sports games just to get their fix when not physically possible. And of course, there are the lazier people who play sports video games but don't really play them in real life. But that's another story. I mean, I can see how sports video games can motivate one to actually play the sport if they already don't... but that's another story.

So my conclusion - sports video games are for people who play for the sports and not necessarily for the visual, design or technical aspects of the game. So I had no business complaining about the obvious poor quality and stiffness of the characters' models.

[Yeahduff]

I dunno, I don't buy it. I've gone back and played a lot of old games (both one's I played as a kid and ones I never got to play) and most of them are fun for about a half hour and then the novelty wears off and they get boring pretty quick. But I find that as each console generations passes there is a much higher percentage of games I can play and still enjoy past the point of novelty.

Well, that's just you. I played Metal Gear for the first time last spring and I didn't ever want to stop playing it. It is a great game. Y'know what else is? Chess. And despite all of the technical advances over the centuries, we're having trouble besting that one. I am right. You can tell from the liberal use of emphatic typography in my explanations.

I just think insisting kids "respect the classics" when it comes to video games has a lot more to do with people trying to validate their own nostalgia and less to do with the actual quality of the games.

This definitely happens, but it's not limited to video games by any means. Don't let anyone tell you Pink Floyd is any good. Strip away the drugs and nostalgia and all you have left is boring nobodies singing songs for old men. But Super Mario is for real.