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General discussionAnti-nostalgia ... what do you *not* miss about old games?(290 posts)(290 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted October 18, 2018
Loading times on the Commodore 64, I definitely don't miss that.

Having to delete a game to install another because of the tiny hard drive my PC had on the early 90s. This was really annoying if you wanted to play both games.

Being stuck on old point and click adventure games and not knowing if you had yet to find a puzzle solution or you messed up earlier and now the game couldn't be completed.

Level codes, instead of saving.

PC speaker music. Ugh, my ears! Going from the SID chip to PC speaker was disappointing; I was so happy when my father upgraded to Sound Blaster.
Posted October 18, 2018
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xSinghx: So you think aesthetic design adds nothing to a game? And you've studied design for how long?

False. There are studies that have tested this. Your other senses effect the taste of your food. So turning off the lights may indeed effect the taste of your steak.
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Lucumo: We are talking about graphics here, not "aesthetic design". (What's with people always trying to move goal posts?)
There's no one moving the goal posts. That's why you were asked a question. If you find yourself needing to accuse others of moving them perhaps you haven't done a adequate job explaining what you mean in the first place.

Feel free to elaborate on what you define as 'graphics' given you were clear about not meaning screen resolutions and basic tech. Dryspace was clearly talking about graphics as design in his example of Pac-man which you engaged him on. So if there's confusion - you seem to be at least partly responsible for it.

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Lucumo: There is a difference between the perception of something and how it actually is.
This is an irrelevent distinction. What effects perception is what influences the experience - and the experience is what is at issue here.

Do you mean to tell me you're arguing for something that is completely irrelevent to what people are experiencing?

To be clear before moving on - your own article argues against your steak position on taste. "To our brains, "taste" is actually a fusion of a food's taste, smell and touch into a single sensation." So yes turning off the lights could impact the flavor you experience. And again that is what we're talking about.
Posted October 18, 2018
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Lucumo: We are talking about graphics here, not "aesthetic design". (What's with people always trying to move goal posts?)
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xSinghx: There's no one moving the goal posts. That's why you were asked a question. If you find yourself needing to accuse others of moving them perhaps you haven't done a adequate job explaining what you mean in the first place.

Feel free to elaborate on what you define as 'graphics' given you were clear about not meaning screen resolutions and basic tech. Dryspace was clearly talking about graphics as design in his example of Pac-man which you engaged him on. So if there's confusion - you seem to be at least partly responsible for it.

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Lucumo: There is a difference between the perception of something and how it actually is.
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xSinghx: This is an irrelevent distinction. What effects perception is what influences the experience - and the experience is what is at issue here.

Do you mean to tell me you're arguing for something that is completely irrelevent to what people are experiencing?

To be clear before moving on - your own article argues against your steak position on taste. "To our brains, "taste" is actually a fusion of a food's taste, smell and touch into a single sensation." So yes turning off the lights could impact the flavor you experience. And again that is what we're talking about.
Or it's the simple fact that you hijacked the discussion without apparently knowing what we are talking about? We are talking about this, considering I replied to that post (and even mentioned it again earlier):

"Socratatus: Hard to think of one since I don`t miss it, but I guess it`s crappy graphics. I like that that we can really see what we look at now wherer before, when I was a kid, graphics was tiny pixelated stuff that made you feel like you were blind. This made some games pretty bad as I liked my flight war sims, but flying an Apache and all you see are black dots and green triangles with a blue paint for sky didn`t really help for immersion."

The fact that I replied to his Pac-Man example is me being polite. I still pointed out that it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, however.

What? We are talking about the game and whether older or newer graphics add anything objectively to the game. We are talking about whether a tree looking like it's taken from a 1998 game is objectively different from a tree taken from a 2018 game. I said it's not. I said it's for superficial people. Dryspace brought "experience" into the discussion but at the same time confirmed that it's just a subjective thing...which proves my point.

I love how in that quote there is nothing written about sight, yet you include it. And furthermore, it's funny that you want to tell me what we are talking about, despite me actually starting this discussion with another guy...where then someone else came in (Dryspace and I were pretty much finished, it required probably one more post from him and one from me) and now you.
Posted October 18, 2018
Password system and loading times. In the case of PC Games some long instalation times due the CD ROM speed back in time and others 90s PCs features. But even that was glorious compared to my brother's ZX Spectrum game recording into the memory.

In terms of gameplay I can't complaint.... at least not right now. Nostalgia is everywhere.
Post edited October 20, 2018 by nicohvc
Posted October 18, 2018
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LootHunter: One thing, I probably wouldn't miss, is a lack of tutorials or any instructions what so ever. And while sometimes learning controls by trial and error was fun... still, I will not miss it.
For older games, tutorials weren't necessary as games were so simple.
For a bit newer games, they came with a (up to) 200 pages long manual and a couple of reference cards, which again, made tutorials unnecessary.

The window for games that weren't very simple, didn't come with a manual, but needed a tutorial mode which didn't exist, is actually a very small.
Right now, I can't even remember a single game like that.

Perhaps you can give a couple of examples?
Posted October 18, 2018
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Lucumo: Resolution and frames per second are not graphics...
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis? With due respect, you seem to be using your own definition of the term 'graphics' instead of the one that the rest of the world uses. The term 'graphics' can encompass both the aesthetic and the technical, but in my experience, it is quite uncommon that a person is referring to something like art direction when complaining about bad graphics. At any rate, Socratatus was clearly referring to technological constraints and not stylistic choices.

But if you are talking about technology you confuse me, as you insist that you are not talking about aesthetics, yet you claim that resolution is not 'graphics'.

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Lucumo: There are no "poor graphics"...
Just because not everyone will agree exactly on what constitutes poor graphics does not mean that poor graphics is a myth. These judgments are made on a relative basis. I am capable of both enjoying King's Quest and also of acknowledging that the graphics are poor. It seems that you might be conflating an assessment of 'poor' with aversion.

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Lucumo: Colors are a whole different issue that I wouldn't put under "graphics"...
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Lucumo: The fact that I replied to his Pac-Man example is me being polite. I still pointed out that it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, however.
You do realize that color is dependent on both artistic choice and technology? My Pac-Man example referred to that technological aspect. The bright, vivid colors of the arcade game made for a very different experience than the drab, dull colors--and far lower resolution--of the Atari [2600?] version. That difference was not an artistic decision--it was a technological limitation; the difference in graphical capability between the Atari console and the arcade unit.

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Lucumo: We are talking about whether a tree looking like it's taken from a 1998 game is objectively different from a tree taken from a 2018 game. I said it's not. I said it's for superficial people.
Well, of course the two trees are objectively different. And that objective difference is directly related to the ability of a player to become immersed in a game. Although it is easy to think of the passage of time as the factor responsible for a game becoming less impressive overall and less capable of immersion, it is actually nothing more than the progression of the state of the art, and the rate at which it progresses.

As the state of the art improves, our standards rise accordingly. What kept us engrossed before no longer has the same power. If the core gameplay is solid, we may still be able to enjoy the game, but the overall experience will never be the same as it was when the technology was the state of the art.
Post edited October 20, 2018 by Dryspace
Posted October 18, 2018
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PixelBoy: The window for games that weren't very simple, didn't come with a manual, but needed a tutorial mode which didn't exist, is actually a very small.
I think his point was exactly that he doesn't want to read manuals but wants the games themselves to present all important information which has been pretty much the rule for almost twenty years.
Posted October 18, 2018
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Lucumo: Resolution and frames per second are not graphics...
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Dryspace: Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis? With due respect, you seem to be using your own definition of the term 'graphics' instead of the one that the rest of the world uses. The term 'graphics' can encompass both the aesthetic and the technical, but in my experience, it is quite uncommon that a person is referring to something like art direction when complaining about bad graphics. At any rate, Socratatus was clearly referring to technological constraints and not stylistic choices.

But if you are talking about technology you confuse me, as you insist that you are not talking about aesthetics, yet you claim that resolution is not 'graphics'.

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Lucumo: There are no "poor graphics"...
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Dryspace: Just because not everyone will agree exactly on what constitutes poor graphics does not mean that poor graphics is a myth. These judgments are made on a relative basis. I am capable of both enjoying King's Quest and also of acknowledging that the graphics are poor. It seems that you might be conflating an assessment of 'poor' with aversion.

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Lucumo: The fact that I replied to his Pac-Man example is me being polite. I still pointed out that it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, however.
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Dryspace: You do realize that color is dependent on both artistic choice and technology? My Pac-Man example referred to that technological aspect. The bright, vivid colors of the arcade game made for a very different experience than the drab, dull colors--and far lower resolution--of the Atari [2600?] version. That difference was not an artistic decision--it was a technological limitation; the difference in graphical capability between the Atari console and the arcade unit.

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Lucumo: We are talking about whether a tree looking like it's taken from a 1998 game is objectively different from a tree taken from a 2018 game. I said it's not. I said it's for superficial people.
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Dryspace: Well, of course the two trees are objectively different. And that objective difference is directly related to the ability of a player to become immersed in a game. Although it is easy to think of the passage of time as the factor responsible for a game becoming less impressive overall and less capable of immersion, it is actually nothing more than the state of the art.

As the state of the art improves, our standards rise accordingly. What kept us engrossed before no longer has the same power. If the core gameplay is solid, we may still be able to enjoy the game, but the overall experience will never be the same as it was when the technology was the state of the art.
That's not what we are talking about however. We are talking about the "graphics" as it's commonly used by the people (and thus also by the original poster). As you say, the term can also include the aesthetic design but comparing such a thing would be impossible and is as such of no relevance.
Exactly, he was referring to the graphics (the visuals if you want, minus the aesthetics) possible at the time, nothing else.

Hm, I guess it's more of an issue with the English language here. Because looking at your last sentence, you meant "poor" as in "not as many details" and not "poor" as in "bad"? If it's the former, I agree. If it's the latter, I certainly do not.

Yes, it is and it was. You said it yourself: "I used the example of Pac-Man to show that graphics do in fact change the "flavor" of a game. Very much so." And I said early on: "I never denied that there are people that care about the graphics but it still doesn't change the fact that it adds nothing (objectively) to the game."
Colors clearly fall under the "aesthetics"/artistic design section, however, I do agree that it does not necessarily do so when we go further back, when things were more limited. But...I also wouldn't put it under the graphics/visuals we are talking about. Dunno, this one is rather specific and kinda impossible to put in any broader category. (Granted, I have never seen both compared to each other, so maybe the difference is actually negligible.)

A constant can't be tied to a variable, that is mathematically impossible. The ability of a player to become immersed depends on so many different factors: time available, other things in mind, preferred genre, superficiality etc etc.

You speak as someone that is impressed by graphics/visuals. But, you have to realize that not everyone is like you. There are enough people that don't care about the graphics. They can play a new game and one from the back then and have the same amount of fun, be as immersed and have generally the same overall experience. As someone who is exactly like that, I can tell you that I've never been impressed by graphics at any time during all my years as a gamer. Sure, I can acknowledge that new games have more details in their visuals but still, there is no difference when I play that game and when I play some early 3D game (obviously apart from things like controls and limitations on where you can go and stuff like that). A good example of that is Shenmue for instance (although it is only from 1999). I played the game for the first time in 2012 and it completely blew me away. It was easily the best game I had played in years.
As for standards...they are agreed upon by the majority by definition in this case. That does not mean, however, that everyone pays that standard any attention because for a good number of people it is not relevant.

/edit: Seems like your many quotes broke the post, hehe
Post edited October 18, 2018 by Lucumo
Posted October 18, 2018
Not sure if anyone mentioned this one already, but all them old PC games where you could increase your resolution (that's good) but not scale the UI or menus (that's bad). So you end up with "MUIS" (Micro UI Syndrome). It's so bad that it makes a lot of games unplayable at high resolutions despite the games supporting high resolution. I only just remembered this yesterday when giving No One Lives Forever a go at 4K. It looks runs just fine, but the UI and menus are unreadable and make it unplayable. Even back in the day playing games at 1600x1200 even had this problem.

Even a lot of newer PC games still don't do this, but at least a lot do.
Post edited October 18, 2018 by CMOT70
Posted October 19, 2018
I don't know what kids Lucumo has ever dealt with, probably none, but all of my mate's kids would never take their Dad's first console, over their first console.
If I sat those kids infront of a Atari 2600 and their PS4, they would take the PS4, EVERY SINGLE TIME. To say graphics don't matter, is just hilarious, and doesn't belong in the real world. One offers 5 minute gameplay, per cartridge. The other (PS4), offers months of gameplay per Blu-Ray. I mean, who would take Pitfall, over Uncharted 4 ? Or Night Drive, over Gran Turismo Sport ? You would have to be a complete moron to take the former.

Did GTA V, offer anything over the original GTA top-down game ? Of course it did, and one of those is the amazing graphics, especially modded on a decent PC. To say the graphics in GTA V don't matter, would be nuts.

And resolution DOES matter. The original question was this - "what do you *not* miss about old games?"
Well, one thing I wouldn't miss is 240p. Brilliant for retro gaming, but utter shite for modern gaming. The higher the resolution the better, in my own opinion. I would NEVER go back to 1080p, or 720p on my PC. Once you experience 4k gaming, you won't go back.
Other things I would never miss are loading times, magnetic tape-based media, floppy disks, CRT commercial TVs (I do love professional CRTs like Sony BVM/PVM), Black and White gaming, RF/Composite gaming, shite 9-pin controllers with cheap leaf contacts, or worse - cheap, loud micro switches. EGA, VGA 256 colours, DOS gaming - sooooo much hassle back in the day - thank god for Dosbox. Windows 95/98/SE - all 3 were a abomination.
I also don't miss the 3DFX days when standards were all over the place, so I don't miss old 3DFX games - they also look dreadful on today's modern LED monitors.
Posted October 19, 2018
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PixelBoy: Perhaps you can give a couple of examples?
Goody, for one. Quite old. Maybe simple. But I hadn't manual for it and hadn't figured how to beat it.

Metal Mutant - same thing.

Dam Busters - had a heck of a time, figuring out plane's controls. And was never able to drop a bomb properly. Why? I don't know - maybe I missed something.

I must admit, however, that back in the early 90-s in Russia we didn't have game distribution per se. So, maybe those gamed DID have manuals, but copies I got were pirated and came without one.
Posted October 19, 2018
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F4LL0UT: I think his point was exactly that he doesn't want to read manuals but wants the games themselves to present all important information which has been pretty much the rule for almost twenty years.
I can't recall ever needing to read a manual in order to get through a game, but I'm not claiming such a thing has never happened. However, I question whether it's unacceptable that even what one would consider "important" information is imparted outside of actual gameplay, which is what I understand your point to be.

I would think that an allowance would be made for genre. For games that are inherently more complex, such as strategy or 4X, RPG, and perhaps the 'immersive sim', I personally wouldn't think it unacceptable that gameplay information is imparted outside of proper gameplay, though I don't see any reason that this info is not provided in-game, as opposed to externally, via a manual or website. As an aside, a lack of info in settings menus is a persisting issue around which I think there is an aspect of laziness.

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Lucumo: Colors clearly fall under the "aesthetics"/artistic design section, however, I do agree that it does not necessarily do so when we go further back, when things were more limited.
No, they don't. This limitation still exists. I assure you that once you begin using a very large display with a black level that is a complete absence of light, and an extremely high contrast ratio, you will quickly become disappointed with the limitation of 8 bit per channel color. In dark scenes, banding is egregious.

When true contrast ratio increases, those 256 levels of brightness become "stretched out" more and more, and the actual brightness difference between each step becomes bigger. There are ways to alleviate this without increasing the bit depth of the display, or even necessarily the signal, but it doesn't matter if they're not being utilized.

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Lucumo: There are enough people that don't care about the graphics. They can play a new game and one from the back then and have the same amount of fun, be as immersed and have generally the same overall experience. As someone who is exactly like that, I can tell you that I've never been impressed by graphics at any time during all my years as a gamer.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "the same overall experience". You appear to equate being uninterested in graphical innovation with an ability to appreciate and enjoy old games.

I dearly wish for a revival of the AAA PC game industry, in part in order to see mind-blowing innovation in graphics again, as well as physics, AI, and audio simulation--areas which have stagnated or regressed since the Great Consolization of 2008. At the same time, I regularly replay such games as The Longest Journey, Unreal, the King's Quest series, The Legend of Zelda, and Text Adventures going back to 1978.

In the past ~4 years, games I played for the very first time include:

* Deus Ex (enjoyed)
* Fallout and Fallout 2 (the core gameplay doesn't hold up imo)
* Oblivion (enjoyed, ended up with a higher play time than I did in Skyrim)
* Max Payne & MP2 (enjoyed, looked forward to replaying)
* Red Faction (enjoyed)
* American McGee's Alice (an example of a game that I would have exclaimed over at release, but is frustrating today)
* Amerzone (enjoyed)
* The Secret of Monkey Island (enjoyed, looked forward to replaying) EDIT: I played the original graphics, not the "enhanced" version.

So again, it depends upon what you mean. I play old games because I enjoy them. But they do not provide the same experience to me as a game that has good gameplay AND new, impressive technology. As I said earlier, video games have always been unique among all types of games (board, card, sports, etc.) as a marriage of gameplay and technological innovation.

You may not care about an aspect (I suspect though, that graphics matters more than you realize), but that does not mean that anyone who does is superficial.
Post edited October 19, 2018 by Dryspace
Posted October 19, 2018
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markrichardb: Having to read the manual to learn how to play rather than being taught through the game design. If the entire crew of an airliner fell unconscious and I had to land the plane, I still wouldn't read the manual. I'd just wing it.
On manuals, i`m one of those rare guys who actually likes reading a manual, especially if a game is quite extensive. Also having a meaty book made me feel like my cash was well spent as I had something substantial to look back on. Some of my old game manuals that I still have are worthy of small hardback novels! They still look good.
Post edited October 19, 2018 by Socratatus
Posted October 19, 2018
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Dryspace: I can't recall ever needing to read a manual in order to get through a game, but I'm not claiming such a thing has never happened.
Well, off the top of my head I can't remember a game that is entirely impossible to finish without reading the manual (obviously excluding ones where the manual was used for copy protection) but I can think of a whole number of games that had pretty obscure features and mechanics which you just won't discover or quite understand without reading the manual.

For instance, I never even knew that the Command & Conquer games had a "guard" order until I bought The First Decade and discovered it in the first game's manual (after I had beaten the whole game many years ago!). Then I discovered that guard mode is pretty much essential to playing the games effectively. Until that point I had always complained that the AI has insane micromanagement skills - then it turned out that guard mode makes your own units behave the exact same way.

Also the early Bullfrog games were riddled with really obscure mechanics that you just won't even know exist unless you read the manual. Or more recently I beat Battlezone 98 Redux where you can "link" your guns - without that feature you basically have only half the firepower you should have and I believe that command is neither bindable nor otherwise documented in the game itself, I only discovered it by reading the manual after finishing a good portion of the game. The fact that the game has a decent tutorial but that one doesn't cover everything from the manual kinda made it only worse because I didn't even know there could possibly be essential matters not covered by the tutorial.

Then there's of course games like the early Ultima and Might & Magic games where you pretty much need the manuals and/or reference cards to even fully figure out the controls. Not to mention military and space combat simulators.

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Dryspace: However, I question whether it's unacceptable that even what one would consider "important" information is imparted outside of actual gameplay, which is what I understand your point to be.
Well, it's unacceptable today. Personally I actually always liked reading manuals but come on, it is pretty crappy when, in order to really understand a game, you need to not play the game but spend time reading a manual instead. And having the information presented in context in-game is a much better way to learn a game than read something that's entirely detached from it. Even in-game wikis and such are shoddy compared to that (but, if implemented sensibly, still much better than having to tab out of a game or grab a physical manual).
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Socratatus: Some of my old game manuals that I still have are worthy of small hardback novels! They still look good.
Indeed. I particularly loved the manuals of StarCraft and Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption (the latter is also impressively bulky for a game manual). So much awesome lore stuff in there.
Post edited October 19, 2018 by F4LL0UT
Posted October 20, 2018
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Lucumo: Graphics are really just for the superficial people.
I just noticed your discussion (between Dryspace and you) and was so blown away by some of your statements that I had to go backwards through the whole thing until I stumbled upon this one sentence that captures the essence of it all.

I understand where you're coming from, you're not the only gameplay elitist out there (or on these forums, for that matter). There's many people who insist that mechanics and balancing and the geometric design of levels or any other form of hard data is the only thing of essence in games and everything else is just trivial coating. But that is not correct in the slightest and such an opinion is not a sign of sophistication.

The truth is that the appearance of things fundamentally affects how we interact with them (the same thing goes for audio or any other feedback games can provide us with). There's pretty trivial scientifically proven examples like the fact that on average red team wins more often than blue team in multiplayer titles because red is more intimidating than blue (there was a study on this matter, conducted using Unreal Tournament, many years ago). We can't even begin to understand what effect far subtler or more complex graphical details have exactly.

Then there's of course this whole discipline of user experience design where even the subtlest of things are used to affect the experience and performance with a product, whether it's a home appliance, an industrial machine, an app or a video game. Ideally UX designers actually utilise scientific knowledge, e.g. about neural psychology, to optimise the effect of even the smallest things - in case of video games, in my experience, most typically the looks of things (well, after the positioning of GUI elements, I guess). If something like the appearance of a button or weapon or enemy or whatever can and often does have as much of an impact on the player's odds of success in a game as the actual properties of these objects, there's simply no denying that graphics do objectively matter, even if the exact impact differs from player to player and even each individual player's exact state of mind at any given time.

Surely there are people, e.g. autistic people, who are much less affected by such factors than the average gamer but even then: in the end graphics do provide factual data. Maybe not actually about the mechanical properties of an object in a game but data that affects our decision-making nonetheless. In the end the length of the spikes on the sprites of Doom's imps most definitely will have a statistically provable effect on the kill/death ratio while fighting these guys, at least given a big enough sample size.

And that argumentation only takes graphics' effect on measurable player performance into account (and not even the fact that graphics directly affect the clarity with which we perceive a game's state). It's ignorant not to acknowledge all effects on the player's psyche, which don't necessarily feed back into the game, as an essential part of the experience with games and of the medium as a whole.

Anyway, seriously, this whole "graphics don't matter" thing that some gamers have going on is pretty much like claiming that the actual words used in poetry don't matter, just the hard information provided by them does.
Post edited October 20, 2018 by F4LL0UT
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionAnti-nostalgia ... what do you *not* miss about old games?(290 posts)(290 posts)
(290 posts)