No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.
Sure for the most part it’s nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We’ve seen games get much better than old games and we’ve seen them much worse.
Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.
That was a large part of the charm for me in Tunic. The core mechanic was collecting pages of the instruction booklet as you adventured so you could learn the mechanics of the game. The other part of that being the manual was written in an unknown language* and you’d need to infer what the instructions meant using context clues. It was an absolute blast and hit the dopamine button when I figured out some puzzles.
Comparing modern game with games from the olden days is a little bit like comparing a savery steam pump with a modern internal combustion engine. Sure the general principles are identical but the complexity of the system is a manifold of the other.
I really love retro games, i have very fond memories of the C64 and SNES, but i am not a fan of the glorification of those games. Only a small part of the old games are still fun today and lots of them have bugs. Secret of Mana on the SNES for example has a fun bug where leveling all weapons and spells to max can create a overflow error in the final fight of the game, which removes the mana hero completely from the game, rendering the last fight impossible because only the mana hero can damage the mana dragon significantly.
Yeah. I mean there was shitty stuff back then, of course.
Arcade games, games designed to not be beatable without their guides (it’s why moon logic is a concept in the first place), that kind of stuff. But it’s a whole different level nowadays.
<span style="color:#323232;">Into my heart an air that kills
</span><span style="color:#323232;">From yon far country blows;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">What are those blue remembered hills,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">What spires, what farms are those?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">That is the land of lost content,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I see it shining plain,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The happy highways where I went
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And cannot come again.
</span>
Games back then were also typically made by two dudes: one programmer and one artist. Heck, the original doom was made by five dudes: two programmers, two artists and one designer. I wonder what kind of nes games could be made back then if they had AAA budget like modern games.
One of those programmers was John Carmack, who happens to be ridiculously talented, and actually revolutionized PC gaming multiple times throughout his career.
A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being ‘meaningful’ in ways I don’t see it today anymore.
Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there’s a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I’m slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.
Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn’t even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There’s like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you’ll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.
I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad…
When I was a kid, some piece of computer hardware came with some game demos. There was one called Taskmaker. It was not good graphically, but I really enjoyed it. It allowed access to three areas, I think. I played so much that I was able to beef up my character significantly. I was eventually given the full game. I played it so much. I tried bribing all of the NPCs to see what they’d say/do. There was a text box where you could type spells into. The normal progression of the game didn’t really give you many of them, but bestowing stuff to NPCs was one way to learn some.
Anyway, I found an abandonware version of it a while back and installed it on an old Mac virtual desktop. It still holds much of the same magic for me. I don’t have time to bribe every NPCs now, but I remember a lot, and google helps me with the rest.
lemmy.world
Aktywne