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Old Computer Games

Started by hpmons, October 30, 2009, 09:26:59 PM

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TedCunn

Quote from: session9 on December 20, 2009, 09:17:56 PM
I, too, wanted better games than the ones that were being released. However, I took the added crucial step of attempting to write said better games, and found that it wasn't as easy as it might have seemed.

Yeah, but I was happy to rely on games companies, with all of their employees, resources and finances to make the games. True, Spectrum games were sometimes made by people working in their back bedrooms, but that was what I wanted to get away from. I wanted to build up from games like Outrun and I'm pretty certain that wasn't an amateur production.

spanky

Quote from: thecuriousorange on December 20, 2009, 02:35:59 AM
I'm all about this:

Best wrestling game ever made as far as I'm concerned.

session9

Quote from: TedCunn on December 20, 2009, 10:31:46 PM
Yeah, but I was happy to rely on games companies, with all of their employees, resources and finances to make the games. True, Spectrum games were sometimes made by people working in their back bedrooms, but that was what I wanted to get away from. I wanted to build up from games like Outrun and I'm pretty certain that wasn't an amateur production.
I prefer the bedroom coder to the EA sweatshop, but fair enough, opinions differ.

NoSleep

Quote from: TedCunn on December 20, 2009, 10:31:46 PM
I wanted to build up from games like Outrun and I'm pretty certain that wasn't an amateur production.

Designed & produced by Yu Suzuki for Sega, as was Space Harrier and a number of other 80s games that appeared (as side games) in his later works, Shenmue 1 & 2. Of course Outrun et al first appeared in the arcades (as they are in Shenmue) before they were seen on computers or consoles.

dredd

Quote from: hpmons on December 20, 2009, 01:47:23 PM
I also played a bit of Creatures 3 the other day. I never owned it, though a friend did when I was younger.  The world itself is really cool, you can connect loads of items together and the ecosystem seems to work quite well.  The actual handling of Norns is pretty poor though, you can't seem to see confusing pages of data about them like you could in Creatures 1 and 2. I love confusing things I don't understand!

Have you tried dwarf fortress? Not technically an old game, but a bit of a throwback to the age of bedroom coders:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/features.html

TedCunn

Quote from: NoSleep on December 21, 2009, 03:09:22 AM
Designed & produced by Yu Suzuki for Sega, as was Space Harrier and a number of other 80s games that appeared (as side games) in his later works, Shenmue 1 & 2. Of course Outrun et al first appeared in the arcades (as they are in Shenmue) before they were seen on computers or consoles.

I don't really understand this response. It doesn't counter what I said and is stuff I knew anyway. Yu Suzuki may have designed and produced, but he still had the financial and technological backing of Sega. Hell, apparently they even paid for him to travel all around Europe to research Outrun.

TedCunn

Quote from: session9 on December 21, 2009, 01:23:35 AM
I prefer the bedroom coder to the EA sweatshop, but fair enough, opinions differ.

I don't understand this either. I never mentioned EA. Are all major video game developers 'sweatshops'?

Also, given that EA published two of my favourite new IPs of the past few years (Dead Space and Mirror's Edge), I really have no problem with them.

NoSleep

Quote from: TedCunn on December 21, 2009, 11:03:40 AM
I don't really understand this response. It doesn't counter what I said and is stuff I knew anyway. Yu Suzuki may have designed and produced, but he still had the financial and technological backing of Sega. Hell, apparently they even paid for him to travel all around Europe to research Outrun.

It confirms that it was a big-budget game not written in a bedroom. What's hard to understand?

Phil_A

Quote from: TedCunn on December 20, 2009, 02:23:07 PM
I remember going to the arcade and playing Outrun. It always annoyed me that the most exciting stuff seemed to be way off in the distance. I always wanted to reach that city and be able to drive through it. And not just down one road, but be able to explore it. Maybe get out of the car and be able to go into buildings.

Well, you could've done if you'd played Hunter, or any of the Mercenary games. Admittedly the environments are pretty sparse compared to something like GTA 3, but that freedom you were craving was there.

It's a silly generalisation to say "old games were shit". I have more respect now for programmers working during the 8 and 16 bit eras because of what they achieved within the limitations of the time. Games like Elite and Captive worked on such an impressive scale, giving you(more or less) a whole galaxy to play in. True, there were any number of crap, lazy titles produced then to make a quick buck, but then that's still the case now. Just look at the amount of worthless tat that gets put out for the DS.

hpmons

Quote from: dredd on December 21, 2009, 10:48:12 AM
Have you tried dwarf fortress? Not technically an old game, but a bit of a throwback to the age of bedroom coders:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/features.html

Oh yes, I played that obsessively for three days and then...never again.

TedCunn

Quote from: NoSleep on December 21, 2009, 11:44:47 AM
It confirms that it was a big-budget game not written in a bedroom. What's hard to understand?

Why you bothered to write it when it added nothing to what was being said.

TedCunn

Quote from: Phil_A on December 21, 2009, 11:52:38 AM
Well, you could've done if you'd played Hunter, or any of the Mercenary games. Admittedly the environments are pretty sparse compared to something like GTA 3, but that freedom you were craving was there.

I certainly played the Mercenary games. It certainly had freedom, but the buildings were basic and spread what felt like miles apart. Combined with some utterly dreadful controls, it was far too much effort to get anywhere.

Quote from: Phil_A on December 21, 2009, 11:52:38 AMIt's a silly generalisation to say "old games were shit". I have more respect now for programmers working during the 8 and 16 bit eras because of what they achieved within the limitations of the time. Games like Elite and Captive worked on such an impressive scale, giving you(more or less) a whole galaxy to play in. True, there were any number of crap, lazy titles produced then to make a quick buck, but then that's still the case now. Just look at the amount of worthless tat that gets put out for the DS.

All generalisations are silly to a certain extent. It's not really a generalisation when I say that I played lots and lots of video games as a child, on several systems, and that I thought they were shit.

Back then, lots of people worked on their own to make games and they were released cheaply. It was impossible to find out if most of them were any good.

So now that games cost millions to make and you can pull up multiple reviews very easily, there may still be rubbish floating around out there, but it's a lot easier to avoid.

Also, that's why I don't own a DS.

NoSleep

Quote from: TedCunn on December 21, 2009, 04:47:13 PM
Why you bothered to write it when it added nothing to what was being said.

Fuck you, too. You said you were "pretty certain", in other words, not entirely sure, and I added certainty. Fuck.you.cunt.