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"I liked it before you other bastards"

Started by Purple Tentacle, November 06, 2005, 01:45:25 PM

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Purple Tentacle

Quote from: "On the games thread Purple Tentacle drunkenly slurred, before falling over, in other words..."ALL NEW COMPUTER GAMES ARE SHIT.
Anybody who bought a Playstation (including me) is a traitor.
edit: Sorry, I just played Kokotoni Wilf and got a bit emotional. I'm going to start a thread about this.

Why do I get in such a huff about modern computer games?  It's simple.

Back when I was a little boy, while my contempories were playing "foot-ball" and "British Bulldog", I was very happily (and, ironically, breaking the law far more reguarly than my classmates who would later go on to bite babies to death) copying and swapping Spectrum games with my friend (even the SoftAid tape containing Kokotoni Wilf), going round eachother's houses and playing them.  And videoing ourselves playing because my mate's dad had hooked the video up to the Spectrum, and nearly shitting with excitement when we got to the 2001AD level on The Wilf.

Or, we would get one of those magazines with a 5 page BASIC listing and spend hour upon hour typing in the code, only to finally type "RUN" and find that the thing didn't work because they publisher had forgotten to print a semicolon on line 475.

Or, on the way to the weekly trip to the fucking communal football field we would work on our plan for the great text adventure we were going to build, but couldn't because we lacked the sufficient coding skills.


Essentially it was our equivalent of airfix modelling, or trainspotting, or stamp collecting, and most people thought we were geeky wankers... .AND THEY WERE RIGHT!

Needless to say this pattern carried on throught my teenage years, buying a NES, an Atari ST (yeah yeah fuck off) then a SNES (denouncing all MegaDrive owners as wankers, and vice versa)... and then the Playstation came along with fucking Fatboy Slim and everything in fucking 3D (3D innovation began and ENDED with Mario 64) and digital cretin joypads and fucking Ridge Racer and suddenly computer games went from being a bedroom play-and-wank device and moved into the living room and became a lifestyle accessory.

And my little world fell apart.  And they released Fifa Street.

All the hhhilarious jokes about "nerds and joysticks" in every magazine ever published evaporated and were suddenly replaced by an army of Wallastons reviewing "the latest addition to the franchise" and pretending they loved Sonic for years despite not being able to identify a Master System if I beat them to death with one, let alone being unable to explain why the Master System version of Sonic was better.

Even worse, the term "retro gaming" was born, and suddenly pretending to enjoy playing Skool Daze for 5 minutes before going out and wearing shirts was "cool", and magnificent projects like www.worldofspectrum.com become a "haha, look what we used to enjoy playing before Resident Evil, haha!" site, despite the fact that the same people were throwing my copy of Ollie and Lisa into the school guttering.


Why didn't I write this in the gaming thread?

Well, everybody feels the same way about their hobbies of choice don't they?  I've never been one for obscure music (I simply don't have the energy for it), but friends of mine are constantly moaning about how bands go shit everybody likes them, or get arsey at people loving the fourth series of Shooting Stars when they remember watching Big Night Out before Matt fuckiing Lucas liked it (actually that's me as well).


Is this attitude simply about wanting to feel special and important?  If I post a thread about really really liking the band "Dangerous Marmalade", the hottest new band to come out of South Acton, and nobody has heard of them, doesn't that just serve to make me feel smug and superior?

Is everybody guilty of this attitude? Doesn't everybody get wanky once other people like what they like?  Or am I just being selfish and weird?

Me too. Curiously though, I'll get protective of old bands whose first wave of fans died before I was born.

I had a CPC464 with Harrier Attack which I played to death, my dad would fly it, I'd do bombs and missiles (Space and hash, I think). If anyone else thinks they liked it, you may well have but not as much as me.

I also am one of 4 million people who think they're the best Sensible Soccer player in the universe.

slim

I was typing in games on a Vic 20 before you were born, sonny.


I used to get annoyed when obscurities I liked garnered mass popularity but now I find it warm and satisfying, especially if I've been fervent in promoting it to friends.

Purple Tentacle

Quote from: "The Boston Crab"
I had a CPC464 with Harrier Attack which I played to death, my dad would fly it, I'd do bombs and missiles (Space and hash, I think). If anyone else thinks they liked it, you may well have but not as much as me.

Mrs Tentacle says "Oh yeah, I bet you didn't complete it, and I completed it BY MYSELF without any of this 'somebody else helping me' crap."


Those were her exact words, she's fucking rude isn't she?

High Roller

Quote from: "The Boston Crab"Me too. Curiously though, I'll get protective of old bands whose first wave of fans died before I was born.

I had a CPC464 with Harrier Attack which I played to death, my dad would fly it, I'd do bombs and missiles (Space and hash, I think). If anyone else thinks they liked it, you may well have but not as much as me.

I also am one of 4 million people who think they're the best Sensible Soccer player in the universe.

Scary, I've just dug out my CPC128k from the loft and a box of games with that games. Was thinking of setting it up for a trip down memory lane.

The Duck Man

I liked Adolf Hitler before he became popular and did all that Nazi shit.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: "slim"I was typing in games on a Vic 20 before you were born, sonny.
Trumps that with a Commodore PET 3016 and a ZX80 (roughly contemporaneously).

Then trumps himself by remembering how back in 1977, at the age of 12, he filled in loads of punch cards - EDIT: only not actually punched, obviously - with a 2B pencil in order to get a minicomputer 30 miles away to print out a parody of the old 70s PEPSI advert in chunky writing.

Now spends every evening wanking on the internet.  Such promise, eh?  Where did it all go?  Spunk, that's where.

Mr Flunchy

I feel the same way about, appropriately enough, Chris Morris.  My dad bought me the 'On the Hour' tapes when I was about 12 or 13, and I loved them.  Fast-forward through the nineties, not many people in my school saw Brass Eye, no-one will listen to Blue Jam, no-one's HEARD of Jam.  

Get to university, the Brass Eye special comes out, and suddenly everyone's bleating Morrisisms constantly.  It gets worse with Nathan Barley, the very people who I'd got into Morris are blindly hoovering it up.  

It's sad when you seem to be alone when you're enjoying something that's great, but when everyone gets into it, it turns to shit.

Frinky

Quote from: "Purple Tentacle"Those were her exact words, she's fucking rude isn't she?

S'why you love her.

I've touched on this before, but I have ground several mm from my molars over the last two years as the De Lorean gains cult popularity outside of Back To The Future, thanks to this 80's retrohash thing that's being going on. Especially since it's an ironic popularity - "Haha, the De Lorean, it's so shit it's great does anyone have any cocaine!?!!?!!!", which is red rag to a bull with me, especially since I find myself lumped in with the Irony Brigade. Patrick Kielty, Chris Moyles and whassiface from Busted buying them in the last year has helped none at all, either.

You know, I wouldn't mind if they were so popular in a good way, because that's what I've been helping do for the last 4-5 years. It seems it gone from cool notoriety, to ironic, aviator shades and shoulder pads retro monster in a very short space of time.

I was supposed to be doing the meet and greats and the NEC this weekend, but for the amount of 80's Idiots that are around now, I decided to stay in and wank.

Quote from: "Purple Tentacle"
Quote from: "The Boston Crab"
I had a CPC464 with Harrier Attack which I played to death, my dad would fly it, I'd do bombs and missiles (Space and hash, I think). If anyone else thinks they liked it, you may well have but not as much as me.

Mrs Tentacle says "Oh yeah, I bet you didn't complete it, and I completed it BY MYSELF without any of this 'somebody else helping me' crap."


Those were her exact words, she's fucking rude isn't she?

Well, I was 4 years old...

Quote from: "High Roller"
Quote from: "The Boston Crab"
I had a CPC464...

Scary, I've just dug out my CPC128k from the loft and a box of games with that games. Was thinking of setting it up for a trip down memory lane.

Do you have Tubaruba? That was classic stuff. Amstrad all over it.

slim

Quote from: "Ambient Sheep"Then trumps himself
It's yer age, don't be embarrassed.

Suttonpubcrawl

Quote from: "Mr Flunchy"Get to university, the Brass Eye special comes out, and suddenly everyone's bleating Morrisisms constantly.  It gets worse with Nathan Barley, the very people who I'd got into Morris are blindly hoovering it up.

When people talk about Brass Eye it's always "hahahaha yeah, Brass Eye Special was hilarious!!!". They don't seem aware of the originals, or if they are they're not away of the fact that they're better.

I feel like this about New Order, everyone used to take the piss out of me for liking them back at school but now everyone seems to love them and they're all cool and popular. It's annoying because suddenly people think they like New Order and know about them when they haven't bought all the CDs and listened to them for hours and downloaded loads of bootlegs and rarities and read up on the history of all the tracks. They just downloaded Waiting for the siren's call and like it because it sounds a bit like the Killers.

Purple Tentacle

Nostalgia is only pleasurable if you were there in the first place, doesn't it?

For instance, I played CJ's Elephant Antics so much, all the subtle nuances of  the loading noise are indelibly etched onto my brain, and whenever I hear the noise of a loading Spectrum I get a little shiver of anticipation. This is only because I was there and genuinely loved it at the time.... simply having an "ironic" Spectrum screensaver and going "ha ha ha listen to the noise, wasn't it horrible?" is what gives nostalgia a bad name, it's the DeLorean effect.



has become



(I actually had to go to School Disco in Hammersmith for someone's birthday and it was one of the worst nights out I'd had.)

chand

Quote from: "slim"I was typing in games on a Vic 20 before you were born, sonny.

I did that too. However, I don't look back fondly on those days of typing in games that didn't work because you made a mistake or the magazine made a mistake, and even if by some miracle they worked they ended up being shit anyway.

I played stuff on the Vic 20, the Amiga, the Spectrum, the PC, the Master System, NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Atari, PS1 and all that, and to be honest I actually enjoy games just as much, if not more, now. I'm playing Resident Evil 4 and I can't honestly say I'd rather be playing Jetpack or Beekeeper or even Alex Kidd. I work in a catalogue company and I was looking at some old items and one of them was 'Zool' on the Amiga and I thought wow! And then I remembered I didn't even really like Zool. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of old games, like the original Sonic and Frogger and Doom and Duke Nukem and all that, and I have fond memories of playing Kick Off and SWOS and Magic Pockets and whatever, but I think there's a lot of great games these days too.

Mr. Analytical

I touched on this in the gaming thread but the geeks of the world have had something taken from them.  We've had our culture and our hobby usurped by big business, simplified, dumbed down and flogged to the masses leaving us with everything.

As a teenager I used to trade Amiga games, I had a huge network of contacts and would receive dozens of packages a day.  I only stopped when the Amiga started to die and the other pirates decided that trading games was "lame" and trading shit demos was much better.

Defender of the Crown, Wizball, TV Sports Basketball, Turrican, Powermonger, Populous, Mousetrap, Midwinter, Lemmings... these were my teenaged years.

The same people who used to take the piss out of me and call me a nerd and a shut in are the same people who now own consoles and are arguably the target demographic for most videogames; people who aren't really looking for anything new or challenging, don't want the videogame to evolve as an art form and have no memory of how new and different styles of games would pop up all the time... completely different styles of games, new genres never seen before.  Now if Halo 2 allows you to use 2 weapons at the same time it's considered ground-breaking while whole genres have essentially died out.

Big companies have taken a hobby I used to love and turned it into something from which I feel utterly alienated and marginalised from.

Purple Tentacle

But the "pioneer" spirit of games has gone.... games now cost $1 squillion to develop and [hack spit]market properly, and there's no point trying to struggle on your own because fucking EA Games will buy you out anyway.

The earliest computer companies WERE formed by bedroom coders, people DID get stuff into the shops through sending off demos to WHSmiths and there really WAS a sense of empowerment....companies like Ocean were positively frowned upon for producing expensive shit and nasty games.

This is, of course, the same argument that ANY early adopter of technology whinges about,be it the Internet, the aeroplane or cinema..... but does that make it invalid?

edit: Ha, Mr Analytical got there before me. And said it better.

High Roller

Quote from: "The Boston Crab"
Well, I was 4 years old...

Quote from: "High Roller"
Quote from: "The Boston Crab"
I had a CPC464...

Scary, I've just dug out my CPC128k from the loft and a box of games with that games. Was thinking of setting it up for a trip down memory lane.

Do you have Tubaruba? That was classic stuff. Amstrad all over it.

No, I never had that. I was more of a Rolling Thunder man, myself.

http://www.cpcgamereviews.com/r/index7.html

The first time I finished it my CPC crashed. I was most annoyed. I loved the jerky movements when bullets were fired at you.

Emergency Lalla Ward Ten

There's a difference between a new generation getting into The Early Stuff (always heart-warming), and a new generation lapping up The More Recent Stuff and assuming it's just as good as The Early Stuff (not necessarily heart-warming). A 15 year old watching and enjoying the original The Day Today is a lovely thing, but a 15 year old loving Nathan Barley and calling you 'nostalgic and biiter, grandad' for saying Brass Eye is much better - that's irritating.

Because, much as we might be worried about appearing snobbish, the fact is that some things (most things?) were better in their Early Stuff period. There are, after all, reasons for this, aren't there? The early work was usually a result of a burst of creativity, where the artist had to be really good in order to get noticed. Once they're famous, they can let themselves go a bit. This is why Rock Profile is better than Little Britain Series 2.

I don't see what's wrong with being proud to know of someone's Early Stuff, anyway. Why is that a bad thing? It means you sought out something obscure, rather than just lapping up what was put in front of you - that's a good thing. I find the opposite stance, where people jump on the bandwagon in an inverted-snob 'I've got no problem with things being popular' way to be far more smug.

Also, the habit of sneering at Manics fans who say 'I liked them when only three people had heard of them' suggests that those Manics fans don't have arguments why the ultra-early stuff was better. There's this idea that they can only be doing it to show off.

People who scoff at fans for liking Early Stuff are just jealous that those fans have leftfield tastes. That's all it is. They want to bring everything down to a level where you're only allowed to like something if it's been on CD-UK.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I'm just as much of a games enthusiast as PT really, though he's obviously been around for a lot longer, the old fox. I'm not sure whether your recent lunge into thinking that all new games are shit is just a result of you realising that you no longer share an identity with the people that play them. Perhaps that goes partly towards explaining it.

To some extent I think games just get better and better when I look at the Peter Molyneux style of things, and then other things like FifaStreet just make me want to hang myself by the neck until dead. I mean I even typed it out like 'FifaStreet' for fuck's sake. Next I'll be typing out 'Driv3r' instead of Driver 3.

On the games page I've had plenty a rant at EA and Sony, neither of whom I particularly like as they patronise and then exploit their customers. Microsoft are also equally guilty, and as these big 3 control nearly all the home console market there has been a few too many racing games and a few too many shoot em ups.

However, for every generic vroomvroom bangbang you get a Halo and a Half-Life and you get a Project Gotham Racing 2, and a Gran Turismo. Plus, you get the kind of games that I'm particularly fond of, and have only come about through the evolution and advancement of technology- the games like Morrowind, Shenmue, Ico, Fable. Games that try and place you in a fantasy scenario but otherwise try and act as anthropomorphically as possible. That's a great reason to keep faith with the games industry.

Plus, whilst the console market publishers eat themselves with unneccessary sequels of the one good idea they ever had, the PC market plods on. Football management games get more and more realistic- and whilst they naturally take up more of your time as a result, them enjoyment you get rise in proportion. Plus with the PC you get games which are far too avant garde for most console releases, or too 'boring' to consider making.

The main drawback has of course been that games invention has abandoned the home, and with it the imaginations of a wider schlong of people, but even that is coming back what with internet games.

Maybe your bitterness is just the natural result of seeing people enjoy something you've been enjoying for years but doing it 'the wrong way' and then resenting the fact just because you used to be seen as a nerd or whatever.

Plus, you can knock 'Retro' gaming but it's helped the appreciation of games that many people would not have otherwise come across. For instance, I used to have a BBC Micro as a kid, but I was never able to play How To Be  A Complete Bastard. And now I can. It's shit, but very funny.

Purple Tentacle

Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"Maybe your bitterness is just the natural result of seeing people enjoy something you've been enjoying for years but doing it 'the wrong way' and then resenting the fact just because you used to be seen as a nerd or whatever.

Maybe... but that would mean that modern computer games AREN'T repetitious, lazy and dull.  With very very few exceptions (GTA3 and therefore GTA:SA) I'd say that games all blend together nowadays, because almost everything's been "done".

I can play Gotham Racing as many times as I like but I'll never feel the exhilaration I felt playing Outrun in the proper cabinet, or playing SNES Mario Kart two-player for the first time.

The thing about GTA3 that makes me hard is the freedom, which was something I had dreamed about since I was little.  The ability to get completely lost in the countryside and spending ages trying to walk back to a sideroad was perhaps the pinnacle.

Of course I'm a certain age, and my Mario Kart epiphany can be another person's Ridge Racer epiphany.  

My epiphany is the correct one though.

Frinky


Purple Tentacle

Twenty-five-and-three-quarters.  Two years older than the ZX Spectrum and two years younger than Space Invaders, which is why I'd love to get into an argument with someone over whether Asteroids fed in on punch-cards was better than Horace Goes Skiing on bourgois tape.

Frinky

Funny, that, since most of what you said applied to me, but I am a sprightly 21 and a half.

GTA 3 was the best game ever.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Well that freedom with GTA is something you also get with the likes of Morrowind. I really enjoy that too, as it basically just provides you with a sandbox to act out most of the things you're far too rational to do in real life. As a result, I'm looking forward to the sequel to Morrowind, Oblivion with a sort of frothish anticipation as it's the most open-ended game you could imagine. Hopefully they'll have the fighting sorted out, as that was the only thing about it that wasn't great.

Plus you've got to give games such as Shenmue and The Nomad Soul credit for being terrifically original games. They haven't sold particularly well but people in the know acknowledge their importance.

I can understand how games like Outrun and Doom were unique experiences at the time, which you aren't going to recreate- I imagine there won't be any more outstanding improvements in driving games- that's a genre that's pretty much done apart from graphics, but there are still games out based on original ideas, and that use ideas from several types of genre.

Plus, I think I've still had a few wow-factors in games these days, such as when in Fable I accidentally showed a group of children this head that I'd cut off, and they all ran away screaming, apart from one little blighter who looked up and said "You got that by being a bad man!" It's moments like that, that will stick in my memory.

And, the sort of graphical jumps in consoles were much more noticable in the past. Remember when you thought it literally wouldn't get any better graphically than the original Gran Turismo. Oh dear. There are still people who claim that about the latest GT even though GT and GT3 are the only two games of note. Plus, the first time I played Splinter Cell on the Xbox I was actually taken aback by the level of realism. The lighting effects are so lifelike you actually have to stop to take them in- and that had never been done before, and that atmosphere turns what is a linear and systematic game into a wonderfully tense and lifelike experience.

Modern games aren't all repetitious, lazy and dull- but some of them are- and some old games are too- I'd wager a similar amount are. In many ways you've lived through most of the major advancements in gaming evolution- I've lived through the second half of it, so without wanting to put it bluntly- is it just an age thing, and I'll be saying a similar thing to you when I'm your age?

It sounds like the old fashioned games you used to play instead of following foorball or whaterver and were mocked for are still being mocked now in a 'ha ha look at this crap old stuff, bring me Halo 9' way. So you're okay, you can still retain your geek status by ignoring all the new stuff and continuing to get horace to safely avoid the park keeper. Believe me people will still mock you, you'll be well happy.

Purple Tentacle

Hehe fucking hell I'm only 25 .. ."The things I've seen.... C-beams off the Tanhauser gate" etc.


I dunno.... maybe limitation is what makes innovation.... compare the graphics of the games released on the Spectrum in 1982 and in 1992, both running on the EXACT same hardware (128k upgrade irrelevent, 99% of games still ran on the 48k hardware), but a whole world apart. (I can't find any screenshots of Street Fighter 2 or Double Dragon 3 on Google at the mo)

Now the lifetime of a console is about 4 years and decreasing, computers even less.

Computer game music was FAR more memorable when limited to 20 looping bars... MagicLand Dizzy, CJ's Elephant Antics, Kwik Snax. Super Mario Bros 1 than anything released today.... how many times do you find yourself humming the in-game music for Splinter Cell 3?  Of course I blame bloody CD-music on the Playstation.


Hehe I am sounding so cantankerous now, but it comes back to what's wrong with the games industry now.... money. Too much of it owned by too few.   Even casual news journalism reports that small games developers are finding it impossible to write for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

And why is there so much money? Popularity.

Gah, I'm spending that million pounds of verbwhores money of developing a DataCorder-powered time machine and going back to 1985 to play Bak 2 Skool without Sam Wollaston lying about liking it over my shoulder with raised eyebrows probably.

slim

Quote from: "Purple Tentacle"The thing about GTA3 that makes me hard is the freedom, which was something I had dreamed about since I was little.  The ability to get completely lost in the countryside and spending ages trying to walk back to a sideroad was perhaps the pinnacle.
It's a shame you're already married, y'know?

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Actually wasn't CD music first on the Atari Jaguar?

Quotehow many times do you find yourself humming the in-game music for Splinter Cell 3

You say that, but I actually own the soundtrack to that game, as Amon Tobin is a hell of a musician. Plus, I own the soundtrack to Halo and Shenmue. Your argument is similar to saying that Ndiana Jones would be a better film if the music was done on a casio keyboard rather than an orchestral score. In the end, the music just mirrors what you see on screen, and is very rarely inappropriate.*

QuoteHehe I am sounding so cantankerous now, but it comes back to what's wrong with the games industry now.... money. Too much of it owned by too few. Even casual news journalism reports that small games developers are finding it impossible to write for the Xbox 360 and PS3

I do agree with you, and I worry about the siutation, but then if there's a games industry that is still making games I am looking forward too then I'll be fine. I'm a little worried that the Xbox360 lineup doesn't have that many games I like the look of, and PGR3 might not even be out by launch.

*The exception to the rule, Dino Crisis 3- is appalling.

Go With The Flow

The thing about "I liked the early stuff, the later stuff is shit" is because (I'm going to use Music as the example) that album that you heard is the reason why you like the band, so that album would be the standard, so any other albums won't be as good. It's the same with liking the later stuff and not the early stuff.

For Example - I loved Queens Of The Stone Age's Songs For The Deaf, so I went out and bought all their other albums, and then bought Lullabies To Paralyze when it came out, but I've never found any of them as good as the SFTD album, as that album is the reason why I love the band in the first place.

You can use the same theory with other stuff.

chand

Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"
Quotehow many times do you find yourself humming the in-game music for Splinter Cell 3

You say that, but I actually own the soundtrack to that game, as Amon Tobin is a hell of a musician.

Yeah, I own it too. You simply can't have a cheery, catchy 'Monkey Island' style ditty over Splinter Cell, it's a different type of game.