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.
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.
Games were definitely buggy and I honestly think people forget how much better the quality is nowadays.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice. If you only have one game to play then of course you’re going to replay it to death. If I have a steam library of 1000 games then I’m much less likely to.
A lot of this is just nostalgia for the past and the environment as opposed to games being any better.
I mean technical wise, games are better now and could easily be patched, but I think that’s why games had better gameplay in the past to make up for the lack of gamer accessibility to patching.
You’re saying that because games couldn’t be patched, they had better gameplay? That makes no sense at all.
Lots of games had crap gameplay. There are more junk vintage games than good ones. The gameplay was simple because it had to be. The consoles didn’t have the power to do more. Chips were expensive. So they had to invent simple gameplay that could fit in 4k of ROM. If dirt simple gameplay is your thing, great. The Atari joystick had one stinking button for crying out loud.
You think Space Invaders has better gameplay than Sky Force Reloaded? Or Strider has better gameplay than Hollow Knight? You’re insane.
E.T. for the 2600 had gameplay so bad it crashed the entire video game industry.
Double Dragon on NES had a jump that was impossible to make forcing the company to make a new cart and give refunds.
I might be misremembering what game it was. I was just a kid when I learned about it. I can’t seem to find anything about it other than an impossible jump in the PC port of TMNT.
It’s a nostalgia thing - I don’t remember the games where I got stuck on the first level and could never finish the game (which happened). Or were just boring so I quit after a half hour.
I do remember donkey Kong country, super Mario bros, sonic Etc. Which all worked well and were fun.
Yeah quality has improved massively, maybe not the initial release but 90% of games i recently played were regarded as buggy messes on release. After years of updates they mostly work.
I’m unfamiliar with that game. Was World Games buggy or just bad? The quality the OP referred to was bugs, not gameplay.
Even the worst AAA game today has better game play than anything from 30 years ago. It’s the nature of extreme complexity that allowing players freedom makes complete debugging impossible.
Actually, OP very explicitly said to ignore bugs and was only talking about gameplay. Which is why they talk about extreme replayability being the requirement on old games.
I just realized you were talking about who i responded to, not OP. But still, they weren’t only talking about bugginess.
The basic mechanics of a game (eg. Mario) better be fun, and those first couple of levels better be fun, because that’s what you’ll be doing a lot. It’s similar to how the swinging in Spider-Man better be fun because you’ll be doing it a lot. But the it also has more complex fighting, side content, and a story. You can mess up a lot more while there’s still enough to keep it entertaining.
But people don’t remember the majority of games that were not very good. World Games was just a game that came to mind on the NES as being not very fun, but more importantly forgotten.
Hehe. World Games was an Olympic event type of game for the NES and other systems back in the late 80’s.
It was actually a well reviewed and enjoyed game, so I’m not sure why he decided to use it as an example when there were so many other actually bad games back then. It also caused a “spoof” game to be made on the NES called “Caveman games”, which did a similar game style, but set in caveman times with caveman events. I preferred caveman games as a kid, and still do. Racing against a friend on who can rub sticks together and blow on the smoke to make fire first is still a blast. So is beating the other guy with a caveman club. Good times.
World Games was so good they made a spoof sequel of sorts called caveman games. A lot of people remember world games, it was a well received game. You had so many actually forgettable garbage games to choose from…
I have never heard anyone talk about that game, ever. But I remembered hating it as a kid. But social media wasn’t a thing back then. So I don’t know if it was talked about elsewhere.
If that was a well received game, I guess it speaks volumes about the rest of the NES library.
It’s because it wasn’t really a young kids game. It was aimed at a bit older of a crowd. They made a later version of it called caveman games that was geared more towards kids and it was a lot of fun, with mostly the same game mechanics.
What games were buggy for you? I’ve been replaying a lot of older games I used to play from my childhood (SNES to Xbox 360/PS3/Wii era) and not coming up with a lot of bugs except from emulation.
They weren’t as buggy. People making excuses classify exploits as bugs ignoring that modern games have more bugs and exploits.
I played Atari 2600 games like space invaders, adventure, and pitfall for thousands of hours without ever running into a bug. The only game with an exploit was Combat where you could put your tank muzzle into a corner and make it loop across the map. But both players could do it.
I’ve grown up with a PS1 and a handful of pc games, and I don’t remember any of them being any more bugged than modern gaming. The only exception being Digimon World 1, a notoriously buggy game (but to be fair, half of those bugs were introduced by the inept translation’s team).
I know people nowadays know and use a bunch of glitches for speedruns and challenge runs (out-of-bounds glitches being the norm for such runs), but rarely, if ever, those glitches could be accessed by playing through the game normally, to the point that I don’t remember finding any game breaking bug in any of the games I played in my infancy (barring the aforementioned Digimon World).
A couple years back I found my old Gameboy advanced. I tried to play Kirby on it and I was taken back by how much it sucked. The screen was way smaller than I remember it being and there was no backlight which meant I had to play the game in a well lit room. I don’t think I could ever go back to those days.
Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends
I think it’s because people only remember the good games and not the stinkers.
I played a lot of shit games I can’t recall because I played for 30 minutes max. There was one game I never passed the first level as I couldn’t figure out what to do, I think something to do with jelly beans and a blob. How is that good gameplay lol?
But of course myself and others can tell you about the games we played for hours like Super Mario Bros which didn’t really have bugs and were good.
A boy and his blob! That was a great game! But it did not hold your hand at all, you had to figure out what every different jerky bean did to your blob. It was a good enough game that there was a modern remake I think it’s on Nintendo virtual console.
But yeah, that was a legitimately hard game for a kid. And with nothing, it wasn’t buggy, the gameplay was just different from anything else people were familiar with and it didn’t explain itself.
The difference is back in the day the great games were the highly advertised “big ones” and the “stinkers” usually fell flat. Now you have a mountain of AAA stinkers and have to go scavenging for indie gems.
Not sure that’s right - before the internet I had no clue what was supposedly good or not. I’d rent games from blockbuster and just try them one by one. Lots of shitty games and I had no idea that Mario or sonic or anything was meant to be good.
Now it’s a lot easier just based on metacritic or steam reviews to figure out if something is good or not.
Well yes, maybe going that far back it was kind of a shot in the dark, but the late ‘90 to early ‘10 period was a time where you had internet (or at least tv/magazines) to know which games were “popular”, most of those were actually well done, and you’d rarely have an AAA title launch as a bugridden mess.
Reviews are also a hit-or-miss because they’re highly subjective. The Steam review system sucks as well, being only positive/negative and with troll reviews always at the top.
I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.
Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn’t force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can’t seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I’m never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)
When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I’m not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.
It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.
Genuine question: why does bedrock exist? What does it bring? Why is there the choice between java, bedrock and “Minecraft for windows”?
How do you fuck up this badly?
I tried using the launcher to move a java install from C: to another drive and it just points there and doesn’t do anything? Steam had this stuff figured years ago
Minecraft rewritten for better performance with platform interoperability in mind and so on. Essentially what could’ve or should’ve been a replacement to Minecraft if done right. It was not done right. Quite the opposite.
What’s that got to do with making things cross platform? Java programs only need to run in a Java runtime environment of which there’s one for basically everything. If you make something that runs in a JRE, it’ll be able to run on any device with a JRE that’s up to date for it.
given how many targets are supported by llvm there’s really little difference in cross platform support asides from building artifacts for the specific target platform. wrapping package delivery in a package manager removes the additional complexity to the end user.
Oh yeah that totally explains why it’s always been perfectly fine for me as long as I’m not looking at a giant wall of those shelves that display their contents from whatever modpack that was.
I wasn’t strictly talking about cross platform. I was talking about performance, which is tangential to the cross platform thing.
If you’re planning on making a game cross platform, you should choose a language that performs well for gaming on all platforms. Java ain’t that. Which answers your question:
In what world is c++ better for cross platform than Java?
Because Bedrock runs on phones, tablets, consoles, and a host of other random crap, and does so relatively well. Because of that the install base and playtime especially among younger players is actually massively skewed toward Bedrock being the more used. Add to that rumors that the Java codebase at least was a terrible mess, and the performance issues Java edition still has to this day and it’s no wonder they wanted to do a full rewrite, especially after having to make things like the console editions and even one for the 3DS.
There’s also the fact that Bedrock patches bugs that the Java community freaks out about patching. Several chunk update glitches and undesirable redstone behavior are exploited by the Java players, and they go nuts over the idea of fixing the issues. Bedrock, being a new codebase, obviously didn’t port over old crusty bugs and therefore doesn’t have to carry over those expectations.
To be fair I’d call it a wash. Bedrock fixes a lot of weird stuff like quasi connectivity and being able to push things like chests with pistons but also introduces it’s own bugs like weird timing things and randomly taking fall damage. There’s also weird differences like being able to do things with cauldrons or just like minor texture differences that they are slowly bringing into sync.
Yes exactly. Java runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and any x86 compatible operating system that supports the Java runtime environment. Minecraft bedrock removes support for all of those but Windows.
Go into desktop mode, there’s a bedrock launcher in the package manager store thing, I forgot the names of both of those things, but search “Minecraft” and you should find it. Anyway, it basically loads the Android version of the game. It works pretty well. I play bedrock because everyone I play with is on Xbox
Also swapped performance issues with more bugs that were there years ago and still persist because they are almost impossible to fix.
In the end, we all know it was done either because they wanted to shove microtransactions down our throat and/or had some kind of deal to maintain the Java edition without microtransactions.
Or, maybe, just maybe, they though “it’s just a block game, what could be so hard to rewrite it?” and absolutely failed what a single person got right almost immediately back in the day (like not falling through the floor all the time).
I haven’t modded as of yet but I started off with Java and am now a C# Dev and the transition wasn’t too hard since most of the same principles apply to both languages. Unity games, that are often written in C# to me are the most moddable ones, especially considering that there’s a ecosystem for Unity mods out of the box
Minecraft. Runescape. Mindustry. Slay the Spire. Project Zomboid. Doodle Jump. Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Delver. Lots of mobile games. Also It’s rediculous to say Java is inappropriate for games when C# is used for games via Unity (unity is the value proposition there - c# is very similar to Java)
Only if you’re incompetent. Otherwise just not optimal.
Starsector, Rise to Ruins and Project Zomboid run well and are made in Java for example. It’s harder to pull off but it can be done. (still needs native libraries though)
Is there even a choice? You now get both games when you buy one(and you get the other game for free if you already own one) and you can play on bedrock on java servers with geysermc
I accidentally bought Minecraft for windows for someone when I wanted java… so that was fun.
The launcher just says “here are the options” it doesn’t say why you might want to choose one over another. Ive played since day 0 so I’ve always gone with java.
Just felt like if bedrock was meant to replace java they should have just done it and dealt with it instead of having so many choices.
Honestly? Most large companies are more like high school. It’s all, friend groups, people rubbing each other’s backs, and in-fighting between departments.
A lot of VERY LARGE decisions get made for the stupidest reason.
Yea, back in the day I dreamt about a Minecraft that didn’t run on Java and thus better on the low end hardware I had. In my dreams it just still had all the benefits of the Java edition which is why I now dream of old Java Minecraft
Yeah the infuriating part is not the mere existence of bedrock, but the fact that they purposefully made it suck. It could have been much better than the java version if they did it right.
So just fuck everyone who doesn’t play on Pc? There are aspects about bedrock that should be gotten rid of, but it’s existence is for the ability for cross play to exist. I play both versions but bedrock made making a cross platform server for my friends and I (who all play on different consoles) possible.
I will not touch Bedrock edition,
especially not since it requires you to sign in on your Windows with a M$ account, while my Windows KVM is Ameliorated, which strips the ability to do so, nor would I want to if I could.
you don’t need to sign in, you can just sideload the appx package (it’s likely to fail due to license verification, there are ways around it tho, like stopping the licensing service)
The mods are shit too. I don’t know what their API is like but it’s clearly not good if you have this entire legacy of modded minecraft, a game which is (presumably) way better programmed and they’re actively paying people to do it, yet they can barely accomplish a 10th of the quality.
Even if they were good you’d have to interact with that horse-shit mobile game premium currency model (which absolutely should be made illegal) where you have to buy currency in packs with bigger packs having a discount and are never in sizes that are usable for a single purchase. Having to pay for mods is contentious enough as is, but putting it behind abusive MTX is going to be a deal breaker for the rest.
We’ll see if the trend holds in a month, a year, and a decade. I think the flaws holding it back will prevent any growth, charging money for mods is radioactive to the community as Railcraft had proven before they were forced by law not to paywall their updates.
Best case scenario we get the Google Play Store where people don’t make stuff because they want to, but because they want to make money, but like I pointed out that MTX scheme is absolutely going to result in bad and confusing payouts which will drive away even those people. If it turns out they’re paid in scrip- I mean minecoins, than at best you’re getting a bunch of kids who don’t understand labour exploitation yet.
EDIT: I looked into it and it’s mostly just kids who don’t understand how exploitative the whole thing is. The API is also extremely lacking.
Someone else linked one related modding but there are several other Minecraft communities that are more niche. There’s one specifically for seeds for example.
Edit: To be clear this comment was referencing what OP’s post was likely trying to convey. Of course Minecraft has been moddable on Java for years but as the Minecraft help page says it isn’t officially supported. I know about data packs and their support/limitations.
Yeah what I was asking about is official support in Java; that’s probably what OP is referencing. I looked it up and the answer is no.
It’s a bit like saying Skyrim didn’t have mod support in 2011 when it released until 2017 when Creation Club content was added. Of course there were mods in 2011 but not officially supported ones.
He says a lot of stuff, including a lot of stuff he shouldn’t. Jokes aside, his intentions were made clear when he bought out Bukkit than proceeded to tear it apart for the crime of being a better server hosting software than the garbage they had. Pretty cut-and-dry.
For those paying attention that was the first hint the guy might be a little bit of a nazi before he went completely mask-off on twitter.
What are you on about mate. The one who brought the whole bukkit project down was one of the bukkit developers not Mojang. The bukkit developer had contributed 1/3 of all code to the project iirc and protested that Mojang now owned bukkit and DMCA’d the entire thing to hell and back.
At that point it was easier to kill of bukkit and start over rather than to de-tangle and re-write 1/3 of the code.
You think they might have had a reason to do that, something that had to do with them completely stiffing them out in the agreement? You’re acting like they were being unreasonable but this is just a continuation of the white man’s treaty, a tactic where you take a minority of a community, whoever’s the cheapest and buy them out, and then have them represent the entire community. That’s exactly what they did and if it wasn’t for the fact that they had a controlling stake in the project they would have gotten away with it too. Is it at all surprising that one of the developers who ‘played ball’ in the scheme ended up becoming the CEO?
As with all things, if you zoom out and squint you can see the reality of the situation; and what you see is a capitalist organization shutting down a project that wasn’t even competing with them or even a threat because they weren’t under their absolute control. All capitalists do this, and it’s the biggest reason why capitalism is such a dysfunctional and shitty system where inferior products end up as monopolies, by simple dint of hunting down and killing or assimilating anything better than them.
“Mod Support” means (or at least, it used to) the game has structures in place to allow modifications, not that the company is paywalling mods that they “approve”. I’m not sure what the latter is called, but I’m quite sure there’d be a massive uproar if MS/MJ did that for java edition. I know I’d never play the game again, that’s for sure.
I never thought adding a paywall was necessary. I was more thinking along the lines of a game being made easier to mod and its developers embracing the idea of modding like you kind of mentioned. This could be done by releasing tools to make it easier like Cities: Skylines 2’s recently released editor and Hatred adding Workshop support. I don’t know if official mod support Java would entail something like a built in mod manager, updates to improve modding capabilities, or some kind of universal package for mod files.
This doesn’t need to be done through a service that the developer has any control over. SimCity 2000 had a Build Architect Tool players could use in the mid 90s and sites like ModDB and the Nexus exist.
I’m not sure what the latter is called, but I’m quite sure there’d be a massive uproar if MS/MJ did that for java edition. I know I’d never play the game again, that’s for sure.
There will always be the option of raw dogging files into the game directory or developing external tools like people did with Mass Effect.
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