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Nightmare Doom

Will another video game crash happen again?

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I'm not aware of any newer FPS game that has made possible the same fast paced, adrenaline-filled HR-style action that Doom did. Granted, Serious Sam tried with its hordes o' monsters, but the action was significantly slower and the sillier monsters and locations hurt it.

That today's teens hate Doom is irrelevant. "Little ignorant kids" tend to hate anything that's technically inferior, unless it has some blatantly obvious special value for that particular group of people. Wait until they get over that irrational hate of "worse than Halo 3" graphics and you should get very different response for Doom. It's no different from how immature kids tend to shrug off old movies just because they're old and they might have visual artifacts, poor colors, or whatever.

Programmers and artists' skills have no actual impact on designers.

Might be so, but publishers certainly have their impact on designers, and the designers either do what the publisher tells them to do or get their funding cut off.

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Joe said:

Making money was a part of it but they started as hobbyists and gamers. You get games on the spectrum/c64/amiga, for example, made by a total of 2 people, a programmer and an artist. They're a bit shitty by today's standards but there was probably a lot more love put into them.

What makes you think developers today are some kind of zombies that have no virtue nor passion for what they do? Don't you find this terribly unlikely and frankly insulting? Do you realize most of the people who were doing 'garage' games back then are still active developers? The industry is not nearly as old to allow for some kind of Tinseltown nostalgia involving dead people. In fact, your BASIC and Assembly coders of yesterday are your Lead Designers' of Today. You know, the guys you people think are ruining games.

More love put into them? Do you realize they churned these things out at the rate of one per week/one per month to fulfill BBS and other distribution channels' demands? Are you telling me games done in days have more attention and love put to them that projects spanning multiple years with meticulous project management techniques to ensure quality and that the vision more or less survives the mindset of many developers? Do you know what it is to work on a project for years, even survive a crunch time during the final months? What makes you think you can do this unless you terribly love your game AND the whole gamemaking arts?

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Jodwin said:

I'm not aware of any newer FPS game that has made possible the same fast paced, adrenaline-filled HR-style action that Doom did. Granted, Serious Sam tried with its hordes o' monsters, but the action was significantly slower and the sillier monsters and locations hurt it.

It's not that they tried and failed. It's a formula no one cares for anymore. You're a dinosaur, and you should be proud of it and stick playing the games you enjoy rather than think FPSs today 'completely miss the point'. Truth is, no one wants to buy Doom-clones anymore except a vocal minority here who have no relevance in the main market or gamer culture.

That today's teens hate Doom is irrelevant. "Little ignorant kids" tend to hate anything that's technically inferior, unless it has some blatantly obvious special value for that particular group of people. Wait until they get over that irrational hate of "worse than Halo 3" graphics and you should get very different response for Doom. It's no different from how immature kids tend to shrug off old movies just because they're old and they might have visual artifacts, poor colors, or whatever.

Do you enjoy Pong to the point Doom provides?

Might be so, but publishers certainly have their impact on designers, and the designers either do what the publisher tells them to do or get their funding cut off.

You do realize there are wildly successful exceptions, and there ALSO are many examples of publishers actually knowing what the community want and cleverly axing/retooling projects that are not going anywhere. Who are you to say how much influence Big Bad Publishers have in games considering you have no guidelines but the occasional rant and lawsuit of some egomaniac designer? It is their money afterall, and if you want to go all artsy experimental, you have tons of developers trying new things with self-funding, not to mention small companies penetrating the market thanks to digital delivery. This point is moot.

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but with the increase of popularity in gaming there's a lot more people looking to make money with shit

How can you tell? Really, I'd love to hear your argument involving facts and numbers.

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oh yummy! A myk/Zaldron argument! :)

Funny how you both have sound and unsound arguments.

I just totally agree with Zaldron when it comes to nostalgia. The best game ever really is a question of generation. Even myk can't disagree with it unless he suddenly became objectivity incarnate... wait... nevermind, he WILL disagree :P

Now, as much as Zaldron's argumentation makes sense overall, I think you cannot forget western game industry shifted from one model to another.

Back in the days, it was a bunch of hackers (not programmers -- Carmack was an extra-terrestrial at the time and his code was not that good in retrospect), sitting together with friends and family (just look back at the video on rome.ro, it's quite instructive). I mean, the whole point was to make a game THEY liked. Personal opinion was very important in that the team was small, so the music guy could throw opinion about a level or a feature (pretty much like what happens in the modding community actually). As a counterpoint, the "tech" guys were here to say "there is a limit, guys, we just can't do that". Again, think mod team.

In parallel, you had Japan and its industry. Together with some western copycats, they grew teams by an order of magnitude and started to try and guess what it was that made popular games work (hence creating the quite blurry "designer" -- and only designer, not graphist or whatnot -- role). Surprisingly, this industry managed to create gems, mostly because of individuals who had a vision and were lucky enough to have it passed the "process". Most of the time we had shitty games like Zaldron pointed out.

Where are we at now?

Well, I don't wanna sound pessimistic but... what new genres do you guys think the gaming industry will suddenly find? Interestingly, the only one that comes to my mind in recent history is MMORPG (which is still derivative somehow). Huge success... for one company. Others struggle mainly because they try & copy WoW (including its flaws and rarely its qualities). But the state of the gaming industry is one of enhancement overall.

Well, Doom was an enhanced Wolf3D, wasn't it? Lots of technical advancements, lots of new possibilities (deathmatch/co-op) and that's probably the reason of its huge success. But, then again, the game itself has been reviewed by every one in the id team of the time while it was being made, which makes a huge difference. Now when it comes to longevity, well, we ARE a bunch of nostalgic guys that manage to keep having fun with the game.

I don't expect much of the gaming industry these days really. When 2 hundred people gather to make a project, no matter the subject, you know communication will be a big issue and it will most probably end up unpersonal and segmented (as in graphics thought by graphists only, features by coders only, music by composers only and design decision by a bunch of financially-oriented guys). In the end, an all-too-familiar PRODUCT.

But then again, gems can be produced that way too.

Interestingly, the industry seems to self-regulate itself with the notion of Studios. That is small teams that actually make a game for a distributor. It's all about finance in the end, from the big companies point of view, but it's funny to see how it basically comes back to the basis that way.

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Zaldron said:

What makes you think developers today are some kind of zombies that have no virtue nor passion for what they do?


I didn't say that, mainly because i'm not an idiot, but thanks for assuming it anyway.

My point was that the fact 2 people are working on it, as opposed to a couple hundred, will mean they are more emotionally invested in it as a whole. I'm aware it's possible to put a lot of love into things. I've written, programmed, drawn and composed. I'm just don't think that someone who is only writing the renderer or the sound code or the ai will love the game as much as someone who wrote the entire thing.

Who's to say that everyone working on the game wants to love it tenderly? They may love making games and gaming itself but what if they don't like what they're working on currently? What if the game itself is being churned out for the publisher or the design is shit and so on. All speculation, but it'll happen.

I'm fully aware people can love the stuff they're working on, but at the end of the day you're working on the designers' baby with 200 other people. You are not going to love it as your own.

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Bear in mind I in no way think large groups of people actually have a positive impact in a game's design. I also don't think having every joe in the group act as a designer will result in anything but a shitstorm. Developers should always have a say in how a game's coming along, even if it's about something outside their field of specialization, but let's not confuse some dreamy hivemind of collaboration for what really end ups being, a battle of egos and contrasting expectations on what the game should be.

Good studios do have afterall, a 'play time' of sorts were everyone plays together and pitches ideas and reviews on how it's coming along. This model of software development even has a name and it's quite successful, alas I cannot remember it at the moment.

But getting back on subject, I don't think games should be made by a hundred people. I don't think they should be made by more than thirty guys, the amount of people you can actually remember the names for. This posits a problem regarding content generation in relatively short timeframes, given the exploding man-hour costs of every asset that needs to be built, but far more clever people than I are already tackling this problem, and their findings are common subjects in the industry's tradeshows and conferences.

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Joe said:

My point was that the fact 2 people are working on it, as opposed to a couple hundred, will mean they are more emotionally invested in it as a whole.

May be so, but what's the point? The two man army model has so many problems when facing every game design brief but the simplest of them that they exhibit no strong positive qualities. If small teams of people made games more critically acclaimed and better received than the ones pitched by bigger studios wouldn't publishers and even actual studios shift to smaller groups?

Sure, you have your Crayon Physics, your Gish, your Garry's Mod, but I'm just hand picking noteworthy small team games, a much easier to do job if you let me pick noteworthy big team games.

No one's going to love a game project more than a lonely daydreaming Designer, but that's hardly conductive to any actual product.

Edit:: Not that HUNDREDS of people participate actively in any given game, mind you. Sure, the credits may seem long, but the core studio is always much smaller, never leaps and bounds above what used to work in the '90s. There's a couple of churn-houses with many, many developers contributing to the same thing, but we're usually talking about sport games and other crap no one's going to bother defending, they're just crappy games. I wish I could post some old titles and names to show you how this used to happen back then too, but as it often happens, you forget everything about old shit.

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Zaldron said:

It's not that they tried and failed. It's a formula no one cares for anymore. You're a dinosaur, and you should be proud of it and stick playing the games you enjoy rather than think FPSs today 'completely miss the point'. Truth is, no one wants to buy Doom-clones anymore except a vocal minority here who have no relevance in the main market or gamer culture.

Okay, so the Doom's gameplay schemes are bad because the game is old. Thanks for telling everyone that you really don't know what the fuck you're talking about. And no, having fast paced HR-action has got nothing to do with Doom-clones; in fact ever since Build engine games and Dark Forces FPS games were already moving towards more realistic environments, more hitscanner enemies and more which are anti-HR features.

Which is what I'm trying to tell you here: Doom, despite all the "clones", is unique as a FPS game, and positively so. You seem to be thinking that somehow fast paced action is a bad feature a first person action game. Which is completely retarded.

It is their money afterall, and if you want to go all artsy experimental, you have tons of developers trying new things with self-funding, not to mention small companies penetrating the market thanks to digital delivery. This point is moot.

Yes, there are indie games that manage to avoid the publishers' witch hunt of titles that they deem risky. And it's a good thing, too. But too often indie games are either very lopsided (the developers lose interest, can't afford polishing the game, etc) or they try to go too artsy or "special." I could make a poor food analogy that everyone will enjoy tearing down: The published big titles are like the processed, tasteless microwave food you buy from the supermarket, indie games are like fine French cuisine (in style, not in price :P) yet almost no one seems to be making any good, hearty home-made dishes.

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Jodwin said:

Okay, so the Doom's gameplay schemes are bad because the game is old. Thanks for telling everyone that you really don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Can you read? Or do you smash quote based on planetary alignments? I said no one cares for them anymore. Notice the lack of relativistic terms such as 'good' or 'bad'.

Which is what I'm trying to tell you here: Doom, despite all the "clones", is unique as a FPS game, and positively so. You seem to be thinking that somehow fast paced action is a bad feature a first person action game. Which is completely retarded.

Eh? I know Doom is unique, it was and is successful/critically acclaimed even today. When did I say it is not?

Yes, there are indie games that manage to avoid the publishers' witch hunt of titles that they deem risky. And it's a good thing, too. But too often indie games are either very lopsided (the developers lose interest, can't afford polishing the game, etc) or they try to go too artsy or "special." I could make a poor food analogy that everyone will enjoy tearing down: The published big titles are like the processed, tasteless microwave food you buy from the supermarket, indie games are like fine French cuisine (in style, not in price :P) yet almost no one seems to be making any good, hearty home-made dishes.

Yes, as I said before, there's tons of problems with the 'six guys in a garage' model. Not for nothing the Industry moved to '100 guys in tall glass buildings'.

But if you think no one's making hearty good games then what can I say to you? You obviously don't believe me on account of your own capacity to judge whether something bores or entertains you; I am simply presenting the fallacy behind thinking everyone here was born at such age you all played The Best Games Ever[TM] right about when you were impressionable kids. If the coincidental and paradoxical nature of your temporary allegiance in this thread do not make you raise your eyebrows then there's simply not much I can do.

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Julian Hope said:

Well, I don't wanna sound pessimistic but... what new genres do you guys think the gaming industry will suddenly find? Interestingly, the only one that comes to my mind in recent history is MMORPG (which is still derivative somehow). Huge success... for one company. Others struggle mainly because they try & copy WoW (including its flaws and rarely its qualities). But the state of the gaming industry is one of enhancement overall.

Actually, while WoW does have a much larger amount of subscribers than any other game, there are several other MMOs that are doing pretty good. Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, and EvE Online just to name a few. Actually, if you can get just a good size chunk of subscribers, you can make a fair bit of profit from it. That's why so many MMO companies give away free trials or even the whole game free to download. This is a good article on the subject, actually.

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Nostalgia does play a part in what games people like. There is no question of this. (I know it's true of myself and my gaming tastes.) But I was two years old when Doom was released and didn't really play it until it was 10 years old. By then, there were much more expensive, elaborate games available, but I nonetheless found Doom much more engaging. My other favorite games, such as the Super Mario Bros. series, Commander Keen, and Rogue, were released before I was born. What I like about all of these is their simple, straightforward gameplay, which for the most part is unimpeded by story and all that. Furthermore, I like the aesthetic of bold, pixelated graphics (not to say I don't like impressive photorealistic graphics of course :P )

But...I admit that I really can't characterize games like this as "better" than the newer, more complicated games. The fact that countless people play these modern games doesn't mean that countless people are shallow idiots obsessed with pretty graphics more than anything else. Likewise, the people who like older, simpler games aren't all nostalgic, stubborn old farts either. It's just a matter of taste and differing interests, and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Don't forget that amidst the things that brought the market to its knees in 1983, was the quantity of shitty games. The games that today are considered "classic" and "memorable" for their eras, were unmistakably the product of single people or at most small teams of people that had a rare combination of coding, gameplay design and artistic ability.

Even coding/developing was harder back then, so that thing alone cut down a lot of the potential shovelware (although there were tons of shitty games back then, too). It may have also cut someone's brilliant idea for the ultimate game, we'll never know.

Unfortunately, since video games are still a form of software, evolution in compilers, IDEs, programming languages and even game genres made it possible for companies and people that normally wouldn't stand a chance to enter the market. This gave us atrocities such as FMV games, licensed engine games, and 3D versions of classic games with dubious playability (try playing Bubble Bobble 3D and see what I mean), just because it's shit-easy to slap your own material on a pre-built engine or just shoot a movie instead of coding a game.

Contrast the development of Doom with the development of e.g. Corridor 7 (a shitty techbase shooter with a Wold3D engine): Doom was a combination of innovative programming techniques, applied science/mathematics (the BSP algorithms) and novel techniques for spriting/graphics/etc., while Corridor 7 was just slapping some new sprites and sounds over a licensed engine (and no wonder, you probably never heard of it). If you move this scenario forward in time, and replace Doom with Doom 3 and in place of Corridor 7 you place some game using e.g. FPS Maker or the Pie-in-the-sky engine, you'll get my point.

Anyway, in my country we have a saying: "If violins were clarinets, even the Gypsies would able play them".

And game development/industry today is clearly a case of violins allegedly turned into clarinets. And there are a lot of "gypsies" around, too.

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'no one cares for them anymore'
What about... the people at doomworld?

I havn't played pong specifically enough, but I probably like the gameplay of breakout (atari) better than the gameplay of a lot of modern games. And pong was maybe the first game ever made, so obviously one can wait until a library of games exists to select their favorites.

For me, the games that have clocked the most play time due to being fun are doomII/wads (pc)/street fighter (genesis w/ 6 button controller)/puzzle fighter (ps1)/roadrashII (genesis)/command&conquer(pc). And I can logically come to the conclusion that I prefer those more than newer games without some sort of 'nostalgia parasite' completely overriding my brain and decision. They are all fun and fast paced. When you look at the controller input, you see complex skill based fast paced input is required to win (I mean I just saw a silent hill speed run on youtube and the gameplay appears to be 'point the analogue stick in a long tediuos direction', though that's unfair since I havn't played that game).

But often watching speedruns for modern/3d games is boring/slow (mario sunshine has so many game-haulting menus/cutscenes and such to bypass and doom3's pace appeared quite slow and boring in the youtube run I saw (I never played it)). When there are a lot of interacting fast paced units on the screen at one time you have to think quick, adjusting your strategy for their current arrangement, and make split second decisions. By contrast, modern games (wolf 3d for example) only have 1 or a few slow paced enemies at a time. And its so linear that every replay is nearly the same (I guess the market would prefer to not have replay as that makes more games sell). I guess command & conquer is kinda slow, but there are tons of units on screen for the brain to deal with and each replay allows for lots of strategy/nonlinear/on your toes adaptation to new situations.

Modern games are more about experiencing a 3d environment than gameplay and generally have a slow pace that doesn't require split second decisions.

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StupidBunny said:

Likewise, the people who like older, simpler games aren't all nostalgic, stubborn old farts either. It's just a matter of taste and differing interests, and there's nothing wrong with that.


People can like whatever they want, I don't care. It's just the majority people who like older, simpler games tend to be "nostalgic, stubborn old farts," who sit here and make ridiculous posts about developers not putting love and effort into their games or whatever other bullshit they come up with. It comes off as very delusional and ignorant.

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Even we are kind of looking at Doom's development with nostalgia. There was a lot of butting of heads and features cut. If you look at the Doom bible, the resulting game is a lot simpler than what was originally planned. Was the resulting game better for it? I can't say. There was a lot of goofy shit in the Doom bible, but it's still possible the game could have been just as revolutionary had none of the features been cut.

However, the game could have crashed and burned, much like ROTT did, which I feel is more fun than Doom at times. Doom's success can be attributed both to visionary design as to luck of the draw. Id had just published a very successful game with Wolf3D, and there was little competition that could match id. Even with good designers and good tech, games such as Heretic, Hexen and Strife would never see the success Doom did.

It wasn't until Quake that shooters really exploded again. Let's face it, id's reputation was pretty much what catapulted the genre to where it is today, probably more so than visionary design. Doom was even pretty basic given the standards of the time, tech notwithstanding.

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Zaldron said:
Nostalgia warps everything. Absolutely everything. You're all a loose congregation of Jaded Gamers Anonymous simply because you're not listing your end it all games. Your wildly differing ages and backgrounds will reveal contradictory opinions that only arise from having been marked or defined by certain games of your past.

Define nostalgia. I did above, and on many posts have pointed out how my association to DOOM is not based on it. I may be nostalgic about old games like Intellivision games, Decathlon, Wizardry, Zyll, Prince of Persia, Duke Nukem or even DOOM in ways I used to associate with it. Even now we're planning a DOOM DM mini-tourney with my buddies because we enjoy dong that and I'm involved with various DOOM activities as a hobby. Football is old. I'm nostalgic when I go play a game with my friends at the club?

As for "contradictory opinions" are you saying your argument is "you're all nostalgics because you don't have the same reasons to stick to DOOM"? We stick to DOOM because it's a) good enough for us to care about it, b) popular enough for enough of us to know about it and keep it in mind. Most of us even share the basic ideas behind why it's good (and thus remained popular past its heyday when it was "state of the art"). It's cheap, quick and action packed, highly moddable, rather simple, has stylish artwork, and it's associated to open source culture.

Don't you live in Bs. As?

Eh? I visit the Internet and I'm familiar with the gaming scene and I've played video games since childhood.

What possible visual contamination the industry may have on you?

Now, little, in the past, more.

It's not like old games didn't do this anyway, AND they were even more of a pants on fire liar than today.

If someone said that in the past the industry was different in this respect, that wasn't me. The point about spam is simply that you get fed up with it or cease to want to bother sifting though it and end up paying less attention to newer games.

Why is simplicity a measure of fun whenever x and x+y are pitted against. Why is x always somehow better off? Have you played Pong lately? Or like the poster below said, Spacewar!?

I don't have a system that plays pong as an immediate game nor friends to share the passion for playing it. I never had the habit of playing it, either. Unlike DOOM.

They're so mind numbingly stupid these days they can't hold your interest for more than, at best, a full hour reminiscing with a sibling or friend.

I still find Intellivision's Nightstalker or Astrosmash more fun than Half-life or Civilization.

Why being a genre founder is better than being a game?

A genre founding game is a game that gets something right in a way that makes it be acclaimed and emulated by others. It's not necessarily better (more fun or whatever), but its a point in favor. In addition to the quality that made it merit its place among games, the game is a point of reference, and thus more meaningful and less liable to be forgotten. Games are social elements. In addition to their mechanics they acquire value in how we use and share them.

You all seem to be playing OpenGL-enhanced Doom, not DosBox'd Maze War.

Maze War may have contributed something, but it was just part of a prelude. The OpenGL use should be expected given it's possible and it's a feature games use because it offers certain technical advantages. The community however contains people who use the game in various forms, from advanced OPenGL ports to Chocolate or DOSBoxed DOOM.

The very fact the DOOM community is so strong clearly shows there's a spot in our hearts for games that added many things to the genre, most of them technical and graphical.

There are many reasons why the community is strong. The game's moddablity and portability are certainly among them. How is that an argument against the genre factor I pointed out? It's would only be less possible if the game weren't a genre-maker.

forgotten has no bearing.

The point is some end up classified as "abandonware" and thus not just cheap but even free (legality aside; some are legal and some are not).

However, none of these games were actually cheap back then, just as modern games will be given a decent amount of time has come to pass. This is not a plus of old games intrinsically, you're just unfairly pitting a game that has to make a profit to support a company against a piece of consumerism that has seen better days.

Are you not trying to define what a good game is while eliminating various factors that help define why people use or like it? You cannot judge a game as an isolated mechanism, and much less reduce all liking not attributable to supposed technical superiority as nostalgia. The games are cheap now. Their cost back in '93 doesn't affect that.

which skews our view of old games simply because you play the very best few of a bunch spanning more than two decades of games to choose from.

Does anyone think all older games are necessarily better than newer ones? No. People a) like certain old games or classics (what what you're replaying to was saying), and b) point out certain factors that may tend to make older games interesting (some of the guys already made some good points in this respect).

In fact, considering how any tard could make a game in the early days,

That's one nice thing about the simpler and more rudimentary nature of older games; it's easier to mess with them and even make things of that sort. It allows creative or innovative people to participate without having to bother with huge costs.

Well you may grow jaded, I retain that childhood glee of mine I got from watching falling leaves from Hexen's dead trees when I see carriers stuck in gigantic frozen waves of pristine, Rayleigh-blue ice.

Enjoying an old game, are we? Sounds nostalgic! Note that my point was that we've seen a lot of things and actually expect technology to make leaps. Early on, if you ask me, we weren't as familiar with this sort of rapid development. If we don't have a reason to get as excited anymore, we might not have as much a reason to pay attention to newer games.

Sure, why play a game that seems derivative? You can't say, however, that more or less the same is just like playing the original one and there is no incentive at all.

It might be, especially to people who have not played the original. After all, it's more or less that original but using much of the tech that the younger or newer user is expecting.

After all, I'm pretty sure you enjoy these Doom mods we get every week that bear almost no resemblance to the formula and/or setting of the IWAD.

Not necessarily :p

Some kid half your age HATES your old shitty ass games and will defend to dead modern 'derivative' games to young rebellious punks in the Future like the pinnacle of Human achievement.

I'm sure, and it's part of the reason why old schoolers or however we may call them may sometimes end up sounding blunt or extreme. Are you implying, though, that these people are making some sort of mistake by sticking to a game that suits their specific aesthetic and gameplay perspectives?

So you were all born exactly in the Golden Age of gaming, huh? What a coincidence, specially considering your varying ages.

Your point? If anything, that shows it's not generational nostalgia that's bringing us together but the game's qualities and value.

What makes you think developers today are some kind of zombies that have no virtue nor passion for what they do?

I'm sure many have their passions and aspirations, but it doesn't mean they will avoid being sucked into a rather monstrous industry where those aspirations are turned into crap. I think this has always been a problem but that it has increased in some ways. If what Jodwin said is a critique of what new developers and designers need to get into to make their games popular, it's not necessarily a critique on people trying to make quality games. The first thing you replied to my post above was programmers and artists' skills have no actual impact on designers, but the problem is that the means of production of games does have an impact on design (as well as on art and programming). Might an industry that is getting unwieldy and costly not impact badly on the development of games?

It's not that they tried and failed. It's a formula no one cares for anymore.

Now that's bullshit. Much of the change in game design has a lot to do with finding some new profitable game niche and it's not because some forms of play have suddenly and magically become unfun. With a multitude of (often free or cheap) games already in existence and use that behave like DOOM, plus DOOM itself, it's not easy to successfully and profitably offer such a game to the public.

Julian Hope said:
I just totally agree with Zaldron when it comes to nostalgia. The best game ever really is a question of generation. Even myk can't disagree with it unless he suddenly became objectivity incarnate... wait... nevermind, he WILL disagree :P

Nostalgia plays a part in any big event, and I've seen nostalgic elements in the community, but nostalgia is not the same as habit and one's particular perspective, which is the main factor being analyzed here. We aren't nostalgic about DOOM because we are involved in present activities around it, which we enjoy directly. Well, at least I'm not. As far as I know, Zaldron has largely moved away from DOOM. Attributing nostalgia to us is a projection from his own perspective. He's one of the people that see DOOM nostalgically, not the ones arguing otherwise.

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myk said:

Nostalgia plays a part in any big event, and I've seen nostalgic elements in the community, but nostalgia is not the same as habit and one's particular perspective, which is the main factor being analyzed here. We aren't nostalgic about DOOM because we are involved in present activities around it, which we enjoy directly. Well, at least I'm not. As far as I know, Zaldron has largely moved away from DOOM. Attributing nostalgia to us is a projection from his own perspective. He's one of the people that see DOOM nostalgically, not the ones arguing otherwise.

I SO knew you would counterpoint me. You never disapoint ;)

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I hope the game industry crashes (as well as other industries), but like StupidBunny I probably won't even notice until someone posts here about it.

Also Pong Sports for Atari is fun but it's no Doom.

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The truth is that, much to Zaldron's delight, even if the industry did crash most of the people here (including me) wouldn't notice. We'd just keep playing Doom and whatever other nostalgic games we play, as the retro/nostalgic/outdated/geeky no-life misers we are.

I personally care for the modern "gaming industry" as much as I care for the high fashion and show-biz "industry". Even if those were gone tomorrow, nothing would change in the long term for me.

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Julian Hope said:
I SO knew you would counterpoint me. You never disapoint ;)

You're welcome! I can thank you for triggering a rather pertinent insight at the end there.

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Heh. Wasn't there a post once from someone who wanted to build his own graphics card? Can't find it though...

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One point why a video game crash might not happen: Exactly because people buy new games of the same so that they could keep playing "the same stuff." It might sound weird, especially for someone who plays Doom engine games regularly, that someone else might buy the next generic FPS exactly because it's the same old stuff, but graphics aside, I'd say a big reason is that the new game, whatever it is, has something new to play, as in levels.

We keep playing Doom because there is an active community creating new maps all the time. Certainly, if the mapping community didn't exist and all we had were the IWADs we'd still play them every now and then, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the same. Doom's mapping capabilities allow us to enjoy the game for free (not including paying for the game in the first place) unlimitedly (virtually so). But if you happened to be a huge fan of, say, Halo, if you want to keep playing more of your favourite game all you can do is buy the next title. Else you'll just have to stick to the same old levels.


Now someone make up a conspiracy theory about publishers who are secretly fighting user made content for games to increase demand for shovelware. ;)

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The "more of the same stuff" theory may explain why people keep buying and playing soccer and sports titles as well. Well...to be honest, they are not always "the same" because in all those years no major title was able to stick with a simple tried and true control scheme but they have to fuck them up a bit each time :-p

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Maes said:

The "more of the same stuff" theory may explain why people keep buying and playing soccer and sports titles as well.

Well actually, those games would be kind of an exception. :P With sports games you don't usually have concepts such as "levels" and "maps", rather you play either single matches or some kinds of tourneys, and those tend to stay the same between titles.

Rather, people who buy new sports games are probably huge sports freaks and just want to have the current real world players in their games (at least in licensed titles) or something.

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I happen to own an Xbox 360, and I recently went on Google to search for a complete list of games by genre. First, I happened to search for a list of games for the Sega Genesis, one of my favorite systems. It had a whole lotta platformers, and I am a fan of a platformer genre. However, I happened to take a look on the Xbox 360 library for platformer games, and... well... take a look.

Pitiful. Even its predecessor had more platformer games! Even more pitiful is the number of first person shooter games on the market.

MY GOD. PLEASE STOP ALREADY. WE HAD ENOUGH.

And don't get me started on the Wii.

The point is, game developers today care too much about slapping pixel shaders, lighting styles, bloom, and the whole "Real is Brown" crap on the latest shooter and touting it as the second coming of Jesus than trying to get their creative juices flowing and putting their heart and soul into their games like they did in the days of the NES and Sega Genesis. I think there's only one game nowadays, LittleBigPlanet, that came out with the same kind of enthusiasm, charm and charisma the games of yesteryear had. All the others are like "OMG GAME LUK GUD ASUM SHUTR!!1!one!!". Personally, I can care less if a video game crash does occur. What do I have to worry about? "Oh no, there's gonna be no more MMOs or Shooters. Boo hoo."

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Isn't the wii just a plot to get people to exercise more? Sounds about as fun as educational games. I thought the analogue stick and shoulder buttons were a big downstep from the genesis 6 button controller and D-pad, so can only assume this bad controller idea will catch on and be in every future console as well. (i never played wii, but I just felt like complaining about something)

edit: I'd like to lodge a complaint about my custom title.

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Heh - looks like the Easter Bunny's dropped by and handed out some custom titles - want to swap?

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