Retro gaming

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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Alex79
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Alex79 »

It's the same reason I spend far longer adding things to my Netflix list than actually watching them >_<
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by ratsoalbion »

This is one of the reasons that Cane and Rinse - and its complete the game rule - exists, so that I actually play games properly and to the end!
Joshihatsumitsu

Re: Retro gaming

Post by Joshihatsumitsu »

KissMammal wrote:It's the paradox of choice. It's the same reason why, when your phone is loaded up with thousands of songs, you find yourself endlessly skipping to the next track. We're so overloaded with media now, and free time is relatively scarce it can be hard to pay attention. I often find that when I get a (rare) evening to myself, I end up getting this nagging unease and flitting between watching the first twenty minutes of a movie, turning it off, then playing a videogame for twenty minutes, turning it off and so on.

I almost miss the old days, when every piece of media was scarce and precious. Almost, but not really. I used to watch and play some right old crap because it's all that was available...
I almost miss the old days too... almost!

In the "digital age" (to sound like a very old man discovering technology and computers for the first time), the only example of scarcity in gaming (NES Classic Mini not included) is when games get delisted. There were a few Konami games that I wished I got at the time, like The X-men and Simpsons arcade games, which have since been delisted for many reasons. I'm glad I got Scott Pilgrim and TMNT at the time, as they're gone too.

At the time I didn't get it because I mistaking believed that because it was available at the time, that it would always be available, and that I could just get it later. At least with physical titles there is the option to hunt it down, even if it'll cost a pretty penny.

Of course, there is the argument that if I really wanted it, I would have just bought it at the time, so subconsciously I didn't want it until it became scarce, and now because of it's scarcity it has a very desirable value. Humans are such strange creatures! :roll:
hazeredmist wrote:Focus is a huge thing when you've got thousands of games to choose from. I strongly recommend listening to the Retro Game Squad podcast which has now finished but is still online to download from iTunes, Soundcloud etc, they choose a selection of retro games per episode and go through them, follow that and you will see a good range of classics across many systems.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation too. It's been an odd month of gaming, US election coverage, design decisions, comedy and bad movies in my mix of podcasts that have become my preferred choice of media.
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KissMammal
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by KissMammal »

Alex79uk wrote:It's the same reason I spend far longer adding things to my Netflix list than actually watching them >_<

Oh yes. In my house it's 'sit down to watch a movie together, spend literally an hour skimming through the Netflix menu and arguing about what to watch, eventually settle on watching an old episode of a sitcom we've seen dozens of times instead'....

Don't even get me started on Steam sales...
In the "digital age" (to sound like a very old man discovering technology and computers for the first time), the only example of scarcity in gaming (NES Classic Mini not included) is when games get delisted. There were a few Konami games that I wished I got at the time, like The X-men and Simpsons arcade games, which have since been delisted for many reasons. I'm glad I got Scott Pilgrim and TMNT at the time, as they're gone too.
Haha, yeah. I do this sometimes - convince myself I need something because it's hard to get hold of - these days generally a hyped, out of stock board game - pay way over the odds to get a copy, then never get around to actually playing it.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Omegapoo »

I too have recently become a little disillusioned with modern console gaming, and have resorted to digging out my PS2, original Xbox and Mega Drive.
For the past week or so i haven't so much as looked at my PS4, instead I've been playing Kessen on the PS2, listening to Retro Asylum (as well as C&R/SoP) at work, and hunting down the best retro gaming deals i can find on Ebay/Amazon etc.

For the past few year's i have always had a few emulators (MD.emu for Sonic, yoYabause for Panzer Dragoon/2/Saga) installed on my phone as a means of entertaining myself on the commute to and from work, recently however i have found myself picking up the PS4 controller in order to marry it with my phone as opposed to instantly getting shot in the mouth as soon as i log into GTA Online.

I'm finding it increasingly hard to get excited about anything related to modern gaming lately, so much so that i have been actively trying to block out modern gaming news and resorted instead to watching episodes of GamesMaster on YouTube ha! Mental!

Is anyone else feeling a little deflated with the games industry lately or is it just me?

Also if anyone knows how to play NTSC games on a PAL PS2 without having it chipped, it'd be appreciated!
I want to buy a copy of Front Mission 4 but i don't really want to have to buy another PS2 in order to play it?

Cheers!!
Joshihatsumitsu

Re: Retro gaming

Post by Joshihatsumitsu »

Omegapoo wrote:Is anyone else feeling a little deflated with the games industry lately or is it just me?

Also if anyone knows how to play NTSC games on a PAL PS2 without having it chipped, it'd be appreciated!
I want to buy a copy of Front Mission 4 but i don't really want to have to buy another PS2 in order to play it?

Cheers!!
I think, for me personally, with modern games it's a matter of time and distance. By that I mean I rarely get games day one, as most of the time the price (with Nintendo being the exception) tends to drop very drastically not long afterwards. And also, as hype can be a bit of a killer for me, allowing a bit of time to pass before getting a game means I can experience on its own merits.

But yeah, that deflation I can understand, though I wonder if it's more in regards to heavy, occasionally obnoxious marketing, more than the game itself.

And as for playing NTSC... you'll either need a chipped PS2 or a Japanese PS2 (plus a step down). I managed to hunt down a pretty affordable "region free" PS2 through eBay, and have a few Japanese only titles, so that's my personal experience. That being said my region free slim PS2 won't play Japanese PS1 titles, so hey, can't win them all!
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KissMammal
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by KissMammal »

Is anyone else feeling a little deflated with the games industry lately or is it just me?
Yes and no. I no longer really have much interest in what's going on in the AAA scene, I think in part because of the trend towards linear 'cinematic experiences' rather than pure games and the trend towards online - neither of which I'm fussed about, but also in part because the same staid genres (FPSes, third person action/open world games) have been dominant for so long now. It feels like there hasn't been much innovation in the last ten years - we're just getting the same types of games, but prettier.

On the other hand, there's a huge amount of interesting and influential stuff going on in the indie scene, which is really exciting, as the indie scene was all but dead ten years ago.
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Alex79
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Alex79 »

I'm not, I think this has been a brilliant year for games, and next year is looking equally brilliant. I think the quality of games we get rises exponentially every year!
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by MagicianArcana »

I'm sorta in two minds about the industry today. While there are still a lot of games coming out that feel very samey, I'm still seeing a fair amount of innovation. More so in the indie scene, but certain AAA companies have been very on point as of late in my opinion. Blizzard with Overwatch and WoW Legion for example. Legion might not be very groundbreaking, but the consensus among WoW players seems to be that it's the best expansion in a while. And I'm definitely having a lot more fun in Legion than I did in the last two expansions.
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by ratsoalbion »

I mean this in the nicest possible way (heck, I subscribe to Retro Gamer magazine for goodness sake), but I hate the term 'retro' gaming.

Some games are just more recent than others.
I don't get the idea that there's some arbitrary cut-off point where a game goes from current to "retro".

I completely understand the purpose of a thread like this however, and feel free to think me grumpy and/or picky.

But if you watch Casablanca, Duck Soup or Alien do you say you're watching a 'retro' movie?
Possibly 'vintage' or 'classic'. Much nicer I think!
;)

As you may have worked out from the podcast, I play old and new games with equal enthusiasm, and while the industry has changed quite a bit, I don't think overall the games we play have gotten 'better' or 'worse' necessarily.
Or at least, it's not as simple as that anyway.

As far as I see it it's just as it's been with films and music for a long time, in that there are amazing records and wonderful movies being made all the time - you sometimes just have to look a little harder to find the stuff that offers something different, or that you really fall in love with (even if you get a huge kick out of a 'tentpole' cinema release or a charting album by a well known artist).

For me it's no different with videogames.

And if you like, every single episode of Cane and Rinse is 'retro' in the truest sense of the word, in that we are always looking backwards, even if it's only 6 months or a year or so.
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Alex79
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Alex79 »

It's easy when you're in the moment to look around and think there is so much rubbish being released and feel dismay at the state of the games/movie/music industry, and look backwards and think things were better in the good old days, but people forget that the crap gets forgotten about. You could go back to any year since 1950 (an arbitrary pick) and find just as many awful releases in any given media as there are now. People only remember the good stuff when they're reminiscing.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by ratsoalbion »

Alex79uk wrote:people forget that the crap gets forgotten about
Beautifully put, and I agree with the sentiment entirely.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by MagicianArcana »

Alex79uk wrote:It's easy when you're in the moment to look around and think there is so much rubbish being released and feel dismay at the state of the games/movie/music industry, and look backwards and think things were better in the good old days, but people forget that the crap gets forgotten about. You could go back to any year since 1950 (an arbitrary pick) and find just as many awful releases in any given media as there are now. People only remember the good stuff when they're reminiscing.
Very true! This is something I forget from time to time. It's something gotta remind myself of any time I start thinking things like "the PS2 era was so much better!" :lol:
So this is probably something I'd wanna mention when talking about how I feel about the game industry of today. There are certain trends today that I dislike, but that's not to say previous eras of gaming are flawless.
I try to be as open minded as possible. So I know that "new" doesn't mean "bad."
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by KissMammal »

This is very true. I've got to admit, it's one of my pet hates when people say stuff like 'Music/art/design/movies was better in my day'. No, it wasn't. You were just younger then, so everything seemed relatively fresh and vital to you.

Some people would have you believe that in the past everyone used to listen to The Clash and Jimi Hendrix, when a quick glance at the music charts from various time periods show that this clearly wasn't the case. Every era has had the mainstream dominated by largely disposable fluff, just as every era has had mad creativity going on in the margins. People have very selective memories.

I broadly agree with everything Leon says - I don't tend to distiguish, and a classic is a classic. However I'd argue that videogames are a little different because it is such a young medium and one so reliant on technical innovation and novelty, and kind of 'iterative' vs literature, or even film. In that sense time can be a little less kind to older material - I tend to find a lot of older titles unplayable, especially from the early 32bit era.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by ratsoalbion »

As to your last point, I do acknowledge that, but I hope that our podcast shows that it doesn't always pay to paint any particular era with too broad a brush. Even within a super-narrow niche like say, PS1 launch titles, I still find some of those great fun to play, whereas the enjoyment offered by others may have diminished substantially over time. Every game is its own creation.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Joshihatsumitsu »

While I do agree with you guys theoretically, at the end of the day for practicallities, when I'm buying an older game on an obsolete platform, the term "retro" just casts a wider net in the search box, and I'm more likely to find something.

It's just a very broad general term, like back in Ye olden days when I used to by albums from a music shop. Trying to distinguish whether something was "rock" or "pop"... "retro" is pretty much the same thing: just an easy label to chuck on it, separates it from the new releases.

This years releases will ultimately become very appealing to me in 2 years time. I only just got Arkham Knight last week (PS4 version... I wanted it to actually work)! So yeah, the golden years of gaming will be a purely subjective thing, like "how rock attained perfection in 1974", to quote one Homer Simpson.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by KSubzero1000 »

Well, I for one disagree. The golden age of video games was the 6th generation era, in my opinion, so it may not quite count as "retro" per se. But I do see a clear decline in the sheer quantity of great games released today as opposed to 10-15 years ago. Now that's not to say that the great games of today are inherently worse than the older ones, of course, just that they are few and far between in comparison. I think I understand why that is: rising development costs have made publishers wary of investing into risky projects and prefer sticking to established formulas in order to play it safe. That's also where all these unpleasant current business practices have come from. Be that as it may, I do think that there were less classics released in the last three years than in 2003-2005. Coincidence? Delusion?
KissMammal wrote:People have very selective memories.
I agree that a lot of people tend to be blinded by nostalgia when they're merely reminiscing about stuff from the past. But I don't think that argument holds true for those who are actually playing or watching older stuff and still enjoying them today.


PS: At the end of the day, quality is all that matters. Rejecting modern classics out of snobbery is just as silly as considering anything that isn't the newest and flashiest inherently outdated.
Joshihatsumitsu

Re: Retro gaming

Post by Joshihatsumitsu »

Its certainly comparable in some ways to the film industry, in that the bigger the budget the less risks get taken (though GTA V is a 18+ game in our country at least, so that actually limits the audience a bit, so that comparison doesn't quite work...). Actually, now I think of it, that's a terrible comparison, because you want to release G rated games and widen the audience as much as possible, yet Call of Duty, etc, all mature rated titles, still sell a ton, so it's very different in that way to films.

I would say that while the shift from 2D to 3D (4th to 5th generation) opened up a lot of possibilities in gaming, it also presented a new set of design problems, and also required more resources, and as we've seen over time considerately bigger budgets.

For the life of me I cannot see where I'm going with this! It's an industry that has its own unique set of problems and strengths, so comparing to others doesn't really work. Maybe I was trying to say that the limitations of 2D gaming forced more creative work arounds, and creative solutions (certainly not always... there are plenty of 2D games that don't). Maybe I was trying to say that 3D game design, without a strong sense of direction, or maybe discipline, can lead to very bloated game experiences (again, there are many games that get it so, so right).

Anyhow, I guess my message is a bit confusing, but I'm trying to put my finger on something that doesn't have a definite answer or solution. The attraction to "retro" is partly nostalgia and partly simplified game design, and the appeal of modern and future gaming is pushing the boundaries, of exploring what could be done. Like what everyone is saying, "quality" is all that really matters, regardless of when those games where released.

So, maybe the question I should ask is: is the reason some people are feeling a bit "meh" about modern releases a reaction to the actual game design itself, or the gaming culture and marketing? (Personally the last COD I bought was Modern Warfare 2 from 2009, and I haven't felt to desire to invest in any COD after that. It was becoming a bit like a yearly FIFA/Madden release, which is something that... yeah... I get the appeal, but it's a bit much).
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Suits »

Yearly sports games are essential, if they stopped bring those out yearly that entire market would be miffed.

Genres for one nowadays are less distinctive I feel, with more genres crossing over into other genres or taking key aspects from one and injecting it into another and such. Not that's that is a bad thing perhaps but I certainly think it levels the playing field a bit in overall scope of things coming out on the big consoles, things tend to feel more samey than they used to I think.

As for the term 'Retro', it is a bit naff, I suppose I prefer the term Classic.

My love and draw to the SNES (in particular) was originally built on nostalgia being 32 years old the 16-BIT era is my first serious love. Then discovering games I'd never played, then getting the best picture out of my console (RGB) then research into the quirks (Satellaview) and then just general knowledge.

Regards playing the actual classic games, in some cases things feel worse than you remember, or you think you remember. That's a given but then there's the true great classics. Things like Super Metroid, Super Mario World, Z:LTTP to name the obvious, that actually play better than I remember. I swear playing them on the actual hardware they were built for, gives them more of a solid feeling and just brings out the flavor of them better.
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Re: Retro gaming

Post by Flabyo »

Tangent time!

Was discussing the upcoming Cyberpunk game from CD Projekt Red with a colleague the other day, and we realised that that vision of the future is basically retro now. When created it was a sci-fi vision of what might happen in the next twenty years. But we're twenty years on now and it seems very, well, 80s.

It's comparable to the 50s sci-fi version of the future. I guess all sci-fi is like this really, it's about the present through the lens of the fantastic. Always a product of the time it was created than any real attempt to predict the way the future will really be.

The most amusing thing that 80s Cyberpunk got wrong was the ubiquity of the mobile phone. It just didn't seem like something that could happen. So you've got lots of people going to public terminals to 'jack in' and so on.
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