Adventures in Retro

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Look, old games are fantastic and all, but can we stop using the term Retro? It makes me feel like we're playing them to be cool scenesters or something. Whenever I read 'Retro' games magazines they have a painful air of "Of course we're far too sophisticated to be playing these new games" and apart from just appreciating old games for their merits, they slag off new games and never have anything constructive to say.

EDGE had an article on Turok the other month, and it struck me that very soon 21st century games will be seen to be 'retro'.

[Consignia]

How about the unofficial FF7 remake for the unofficial Chinese version of the NES?

That's not the actual Chinese remake, I don't think, as the text is all Japanese. The Chinese bootleg was a bit different to that IIRC.

FAKE EDIT:
He's the "real" one:
FF7 Famicom

[Still Not George]

Look, old games are fantastic and all, but can we stop using the term Retro? It makes me feel like we're playing them to be cool scenesters or something. Whenever I read 'Retro' games magazines they have a painful air of "Of course we're far too sophisticated to be playing these new games" and apart from just appreciating old games for their merits, they slag off new games and never have anything constructive to say.

Yep, quite agreed. When we set up the Spectrum/C64 side of Mutant Caterpillar I vetoed using the name "Mutant Caterpillar Retro" specifically for this reason - we went for "Vintage" instead.

[I accept the terms of the]

Retro is particularly annoying because people born in 1996 are using that word now, to describe Playstation and N64 games. If the word can be used to describe both FFVII and Galaxian it's broken.

Edit: Just after writing this post I read this:

"Created by John Lee and Vernon Chatman of MTV's Wonder Showzen fame, Xavier: Renegade Angel features old school video game inspired animation"

BULL HORSE.

[Cerys]

Sniffle.  I only used it a a quick way of saying I was having a retrospective gaming experience.  Bah, etc.

[madhair60]

"Retro" is fine, you tits.  Do you want to have a fucking fight about it

You know what game is fucking great?  Fucking Lemmings.  Why are all the sequels such pump?  Lemmings 2 is a baffling ordeal, Lemmings 3 isn't fit to polish my shitty boots, Lemmings 3D as far as I'm concerned doesn't exist, Lemmings Revolution was just Lemmings again but worse and unfinished.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

That Top Spin 4? Just Shufflepuck Café for cunts.

That Shufflepuck Café? Just Mario Tennis for cunts.

That Mario Tennis? Just Pong for cunts.

[Consignia]

That Pong? Just flicking a ball of paper on a table for cunts.

[Cerys]

That flicking a ball of paper on a table?  Just blinking.  For cunts.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

There is a certain retroness to early PS1 and N64 stuff. Back when polygons were still relatively new and primitive looking. My memory may be a bit fuzzy, but I reckon there's a larger difference between the first and last wave of games on those systems than on subsequent generations of hardware.

It was also the age of conspicuous pre-rendered cutscenes, which is something that looks really anachronistic if it crops up in this day and age, e.g. Portal 2.

[Jemble Fred]

It was also the age of conspicuous pre-rendered cutscenes, which is something that looks really anachronistic if it crops up in this day and age, e.g. Portal 2.

Well, that goes for almost every single game in the current gen, never mind Portal 2. For almost any 360 game not having conspicuous pre-rendered cutscenes is a major feature, and a rarity.

[The Masked Unit]

I think he was referring to in-engine cut scenes being the norm now. Surely you don't get many cg cutscenes with visuals far in advance of what's actually playable these days?

[The Masked Unit]

Retro is a funny term though isn't it. You wouldn't apply the term to literature. I would also hope people wouldn't refer to music or film, but I'm sure there are many lol 80s types who would.

[MojoJojo]

Hmmm, but now for the most part, they make a reasonable effort so the cutscenes look quite similar to the normal gameplay, even if they aren't in game-engine. Unlike FFVII say, where the cutscenes look completely different.

A lot of that's just because the in-game stuff looks a lot better now.

[Jemble Fred]

Well I do see pretty much every game that comes out for 360, and I'd still say that jarring cut-scenes were statistically the norm to be honest. If a game has smooth in-engine cut-scenes, that's a plus – they tend to be the big-hitters.

[The Masked Unit]

Fair enough, I thought it was funny coming from you given that you see more games than most. I just really thought those kind of cut scenes were a thing of the past. Interesting that they're not.

[Jemble Fred]

Well there's a syndrome I note in many gamers and indeed my colleagues, which you might call... hmm... 'Optimistic Tech Blindness' – they only see the very top-end of the current gen (muggins here has to slog through Thor and Kung Fu Panda 2 and the like), and therefore lose sight of where we actually are tech-wise, and what current consoles can realistically do, without the massive amounts of money and development time which AAA games receive. I get it too sometimes, you see a game and think 'This is really the best we've got?' because your brain is filled with images of glorious rendered scenes and the kind of performance-capture visuals which a small number of top games have.

It's a bit like when you reach a birthday, you've been thinking you were that age for months anyway, so it means nothing. So many current gen games look old hat before they're even released, because it's easy to mistake signs of the future for the current norm.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I don't get that many games so this is quite a surprise to me. I thought FMV cutscenes were mostly phased out in the PS2 generation. CGI can be pretty expensive, so I would have thought that even crappier looking games would have been better off keeping everything in-engine.

Having said all of this however, I've just remembered that two of my favourite current gen games, Red Faction: Guerilla and Batman: Arkham Asylum, both use pre-rendered cutscenes, even though they could quite easily get away with not doing so.

I guess the Portal 2 example was so conspicuous that it threw me for a loop.

[Jemble Fred]

I'm currently loving Ghostbusters (well actually the final Library ghost is being a cunt so I turned it off in disgust yesterday), and those cut-scenes are from a totally different world to the game's visuals. Doesn't really spoil my enjoyment though.