Let me go on the record as saying that I don’t understand the retro game craze.
Theoretically, I am the retro game pusher’s target market: an aging gamer who remembers the “Golden Age” of video gaming in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The problem is, I do remember the “Golden Age” of video gaming in the ‘70s and ‘80s. If I want to get in touch with my youth, I’ll date younger women. I expect a bit more from my video games.
For one thing, story is very important to me, but many games at the time simply had no room for a storyline—in fact, they never had much room for an endgame, either. It just went on until you either died or broke the game. The plot of many arcade games made about as much sense as a Mentos commercial. A quadriplegic (yet somehow mobile) compulsive eater is chased around a maze by four disembodied spirits that become corporeal (and thus edible) after the consumption of some sort of megavitamin. A lone spaceship makes big space rocks into little space rocks, and little space rocks into space dust, until it becomes overwhelmed and turned into space dust itself. Video games in the ‘80s were exercises in tedious repetition with no reasoning behind them. If nothing else, they prepared us for a Kafkaesque existence in minimum-wage bondage.
I am by no means a power gamer. I don’t cream in my jeans over processor speeds or frame rates. But I do require more from my video games than most retro games had to offer. You have to understand; I came from an era where load times for computer games could take over an hour and console controllers consisted of a joystick and a single candy-red button. I feel there is a reason we evolved two opposable thumbs: dual analog joysticks. Nowadays I demand that my games don’t have screwy camera angles and lack-luster voice acting (problems that would have been considered futuristic in the days of text-based adventure games). Now, I’m not knocking nostalgia. If playing Donkey Kong was the only shining moment of your youth between periods of eating dog food while locked in a closet, fine. But those collections of “classics” usually include about ten games no one is ever going to feel nostalgic about. I work in a second-hand store, so I’m not fooled by the semantics of calling something “classic”. Would you buy a 386 as a gaming computer just because someone called it “vintage”? Yeah, you probably would. But I wouldn’t, and I’m the one ranting here.
Sometimes you don’t want something epic and life-changing—just something to keep your brain from shriveling under the entropic forces of boredom and neglect in the dentist’s office. Games don’t have to have stupendous graphics (or even my beloved storyline) to be fun. Nethack is a great little freebie that I enjoy immensely due to its simple game-play yet complex and clever use of game elements. That being said, I prefer the GUI version to the ASCII version because let’s face it: if radio was still all that, we’d close our eyes whenever we watched television for the authentic “retro experience”. Puzzle games don’t need a lot of frills to be entertaining, and they can be a bit repetitive, but at least there’s some thought involved beyond “how fast can I mash this button and jiggle the joystick” (no innuendo intended—this time).
Of course, I still think about the games that I liked to play in my youth. My friends and I would spend hours on our Commodore 64s playing Mail-Order Monsters. I recently thought about how fun that game was and after much searching (and with mounting excitement) I found a ROM of that sparkling jewel of my youth. Let’s just say after playing it again, I realized the jewel was merely glass. Despite having several choices of monster types, additional mutations and weapons/equipment (which always appeals to my inner accountant), it lacked the little touches that modern gaming has spoiled me with (such as fighting monsters moving fast and being able to shoot more than once every three to five seconds). I just kept thinking how cool it would be if someone updated it and re-released it (hint, hint). There were several little tweaks that would have made the game better, but a complete re-haul with new graphics and perhaps a 3rd-person perspective would bring me to heights of nerdgasmic euphoria only known to the closest disciples of Saints Roddenberry, Tolkien and Lucas.
In closing, let me say that it is Tayo’s job to flame-bait, not mine. And if you really feel the need to rant about my questionable parentage or how I should surgically extract my brain-basket from my processed food chute, please send all missives to pissoff@dangerouskids.net. But if you want to defend a favorite game or debate the merits of retro games, then consider me a cornfield, baby, because I’m all ears.
Good points all around. There’s a reason that they don’t make games like they used to: because they can make them better now.
The thing is, I think “retro gaming,” as it apparently has been titled has a time and a place. I would say the time is occasionally, and the place is in compilations, bonus content and novelty products. A child of the nineties, my first exposure to video games was the Sega Genesis. I still have one, and pull it out at least a couple times a year. The thing is, I think the fact that I can milk so much enjoyment out of the system even today, is that when I bought it, I paid a lot of money for it, and it was the best there was. Ecco Junior cost me back just as much as Fallout 3 would when it came out, but now that it’s been out a few months, it’s even cheaper.
That’s right, kids. When I was your age, if I wanted to pour 6 hours straight into a game, I could do it with the Lion King for SNES, and I would like it. None of your fancy-pants 3D graphics, or stupid save files for me!
A few years back, I bought an Atari collection for the Dreamcast out of a bargain bin for $10. Was it worth it? certainly! I logged a fair amount of time with it. Would it have been worth the $50 you would normally pay for a Dreamcast game? Probably not. Would I pay even the $10 for Warlords, my favorite game on the compilation? Absolutely not! That would be a total ripoff. Nowadays, that wouldn’t keep me entertained long enough to make it even close to worth it. Had I bought the game when you had to pay the full price of an Atari cartridge to play the game, however, I probably would have felt differently.
Finally, I like the idea of Megaman 9. I don’t own it, but it’s a fun concept, and I’m told it’s fun to play. But that’s because it’s a novelty. After it’s relative success, it seems a lot of companies are rushing to make “new retro games,” but I’ll tell you right now, that will kill it. If there are too many games in a retro style coming out, than they will stop being retro, and start just being games, and people will realize that there are better ones out there.
…That was way longer and way more rambling than I intended. Oh well.
I think part of the reason why people are into reto gaming is because of the difficulty. Have you ever tried to play the original Donkey Kong? The average Donkey Kong game (more of an attempt, really) is less than a minute. Pac Man is also insanely hard. However, despite the difficulty of these games they are also very simple and easy to pick up and get right into. Having said that, I find that most “retro gamers” are just hipsters who weren’t even old enough/alive to even an enter an arcade in the 80s (just check out Ground Kontrol). The real retro gamers, guys such as myself, can remember playing arcade games at every corner store in the Free World. That’s really what it is for me, I miss playing in an arcade or hitting up a minute market and playing Galaga while I drink a Slurpee and playing those old arcade games fills in that void.
Personally I find games that mix up that old school arcade flavor with new gaming technology to be the most fun, plus some of them are pretty difficult (Team Fortress 2, Street Fighter IV).
I just wanted to add that Crysis shouldn’t be used as an example of how new games are better than retro games. Sure, the visuals in Crysis are amazing but the game itself is complete crap. The only reason any PC gamer has that game installed is to use it for benchmark testing. I know that you were just using that screen of Mail Order Monsters to display the shoddy sprites and you merely bringing up Crysis to demonstrate how far gaming technology has come in terms of graphics and physics, I just wanted to make the point that Crysis is an awful game and there are a host of retro games that I would rather play than that overrated waste of hard drive space. Bad Dudes comes to mind.
I have to disagree with this entire article. You’re on a game website writing articles, and you don’t understand the retro aspect of gaming? Consider your childhood dead. Shocking really. Sorry if I sound cold, but I shook my head when I read this. It’s like teaching a bible class and stating that you just dont get this old testament stuff. The story in the New Testament is a better updated version. Wow!
Most of us, and particularly Tombstone, lived through the era when those games were the newest, hottest thing in computing. It’s not that we “don’t get” the old testament stuff, it’s that WE WERE THERE.
To be frank, I don’t completely agree with the article either, but I see where he’s coming from, and he definitely knows what he’s talking about.
*sigh* I’m glad you got the part about me being on a game website writing articles. It’s too bad you missed the part about me not trying to flame-bait and where to send all such missives. However, it being a slow news day for me…what the hell. Maybe I can resurrect my childhood by doing something inane and potentially without end–like respond. (Note to future trolls: I cannot guarantee that I will have the time reply to you all. In fact, there’s a good chance I won’t. Please don’t think that I consider your clever retort any less worthy. I just usually have better things to do.)
I suppose the first volley should be the obligatory picking apart the minutiae of your statement to ridiculous extremes:
(1) How can you possibly disagree with the entire article? Do you really believe I would not date younger women? Does that pie chart not look like Pac-Man to you? Do you think pissoff@dangerouskids.net is not a real email address? I assure you that these points of the article are facts, sir. I can see how you may argue certain parts (such as whether the ship in Asteroids is blown to space dust or reincarnated as a jousting ostrich), but to discount it wholly smacks of, well, insincerity, if I must be so blunt.
(2) The biblical reference is an apt one, considering that the New Testament IS considered (by Christians) to be a better, updated version of belief–thus the reason they do not perform animal sacrifice or guilt their children into marrying a nice Jewish girl (<–here’s your chance to label me antisemitic if you can’t think of anything off the top of your head). Now, if you mean to tell me that most devout Christians fully understand the Old Testament, I would ask you (assuming you count yourself among them) to explain the biblical wisdom in chopping up your dead wife after sending her out to be gang-raped in your stead (Judges 19:22-29). How have you applied this Christian value to your life? Also, why are Christians, theologians, and damn near everyone else in disagreement about the Old Testament if they understand it so well? (And please note that despite the lack of agreement, they still teach it–perhaps there is a lesson in this?)
Let’s see…I think I’ll skip the “your mom” statements that usually get thrown around in these situations and just go into what I disagree with. I assure you my childhood is very much alive. I still read comic books (although not just superhero titles). I still play board games (yes, even the ones I enjoyed as a child). And I still play video games (I enjoy strategy games and RPGs as much now as a I did then).
Please reread the part about me enjoying Dragon’s Lair and wishing they would update and re-release Mail-Order Monsters. Just because Donkey Kong no longer gives me a prepubescent boner hardly means I’ve died inside and have no soul.
Hmm…I think we’re at the part where I have to close by insulting your intelligence in as clever a way as I can. Well, let’s get it over with.
I never said I don’t understand the retro aspect of gaming. I don’t understand the overall retro gaming craze–why people buy into the hype and feel compelled to purchase collections of games just because they were the games of their youth. I understand why those of my generation found them fun then. I don’t understand how they can find them to be fun now, but that is just my opinion–just as I am sure you wouldn’t understand the appeal of some of my hobbies, such as reading.
(Note: I do not really think you are an ignoramus. It is merely the protocols of the Geneva and Hague Conventions of Modern Flame War that require me to insult you thus. Thanks for the response. Sorry we don’t see eye-to-eye, but that’s life.)
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