Old Games vs. New Games

[Sephiroth]

Assmaster said:

I prefer games that dont suck. Their age means nothing to me.

i think i will agree with that. however it seems that many new games do suck. however i dont think it is like the attack of the doom clones.

[dsm]

Sephiroth said:

i think i will agree with that. however it seems that many new games do suck. however i dont think it is like the attack of the doom clones.

I'm not so sure newer games suck - they just appeal to a different audience than us oldies.

[Amaster]

Sephiroth said:

i think i will agree with that. however it seems that many new games do suck. however i dont think it is like the attack of the doom clones.

There are lots of old games that suck too. I think the reason we notice it more now though is because games are more publicised than they were 15 or so years ago. So crappy games simply didnt get as much attention.

Furthermore our experience has grown over time, and we're stricter on what we label as "good" or "bad". I know back in 1986 I hadnt played many games yet and was thrilled by the mere ability to control an object on a television screen. So any game I played at the time was "good".

[unknown imp]

I think old games to me stops along 1994/95 with games like DonkeyKong Country and Chrono Trigger. Around 1996 games started to become polygonal, developers were leaving the Genesis and Snes "wars" and working on PSX, Saturn and N64 titles obviously. But thats where i draw the line, when games were made more for the new consoles. I like both equally, but i do have my phases of playing snes/nes or genesis games strictly for a while, then i go and play newer consoles and newer pc games for a while. Seems i cant play both at the same time. In short i like both, a bit of old games, and new, and some old school(atari, coleco).

[999cop]

S1lent said:

Here's how I figure it.

Preferances:
Online Play = New Games
Offline SP Play = Old games

If you following that line of interpretation, then like myk said, Doom falls in between new and old that you can play Doom online on Zdaemon or whatever in these days of time. The way I interpreted it is division of 2d and (true)3d games.

[JamesEightBitStar]

Assmaster said:

There are lots of old games that suck too. I think the reason we notice it more now though is because games are more publicised than they were 15 or so years ago. So crappy games simply didnt get as much attention.

Furthermore our experience has grown over time, and we're stricter on what we label as "good" or "bad". I know back in 1986 I hadnt played many games yet and was thrilled by the mere ability to control an object on a television screen. So any game I played at the time was "good".

I don't know about that. Unlike others, for the longest time I never set my standards down in stone... it was just I found I gravitated more towards older games than newer ones. After awhile, I started to pick up on subtle changes that had occured over time in game design, which is what I use now when I say with confidence that I feel newer games are inferior.

Take, for example, RPGs. Starting in around 1995 or so, it became a big thing that RPGs had to all have these big, involved storylines that seemed right out of a Japanese manga. It got to the point where the players of those games thought of storylines as more than an interesting gimmick--they started to think of it as a requirement. Heck, I actually met someone who said "you can't enjoy RPGs for their gameplay. Let's face it, without storylines, RPGs are nothing but tedious battles and number-crunching."

Now, to put this in terms I believe everyone here will understand, how would you feel if someone said "First-Person Shooters can only be good if they have Half-Life style scripted sequences, and in fact without them they're nothing more than tedious key-hunts where you run around shooting things"? That's how I feel about the above statement on RPGs (even moreso since I ROUTINELY play RPGs that are fun for their gameplay yet have almost no real storyline).

Yea, games today are made for a different audience... and a far more gullible one. I've seen the "modern gamer" in action. They're people who base their judgement on magazine scores. If EGM says that Crappola 2: Revenge of Boogaloo is a good game, they'll go out and buy it without bothering to rent it first, even if they never really intend to play it--it's just "the magazines say it's good, so it must be good." Also remember that a lot of today's gamers are people who have not been into the hobby for generations like we have, but rather got into it when it became big, so they have no solid foundations for their tastes, they don't know what is "good" or "bad."

Hopefully gaming as a big thing is just a passing fad, but I doubt it... be prepared for a wave of mediocre games.

[pritch]

A nice mix of both. Taste all of life's many-fangled fruits.

That's my catchphrase for today.

I'll stop being a hippy now.