f13.net

First they make me shake the nunchuck for my spin attack.

Then they make me hunt down a component cable for the Wii like it's part of the Rambaldi device.

Then I finally find a Gamecube copy of Zelda and OMFG. NO TARGETING RETICLE IN FIRST PERSON, BROKEN Z-TARGETING, NO WAY TO FIX THE Y-AXIS (AUTO INVERTED), AND I CAN'T USE THE GODDAMN D-PAD IN OPTION SCREENS.

FUCK YOU NINTENDO. YOU'RE DEAD TO ME.

Nintendo won't let me love them. That's the only possible explanation. They want me to hate them. THEY WANT ME TO.

THEY CAN'T HELP IT. THEY NEEEEEEEEED TO SHOVEL SHIT INTO MY MOUTH.



GRAAGHHIAGAWDFIAASHDHGHHHH

Breathe!

Why are you playing the GC version of Zelda?

The Wiimote is Not Fun for a game like this. I can see party games, I can see sports games. Zelda? NO. So I bought the GC version. Hell, they look Exactly the same. But everything is inverted because they had to make Link a righty in the Wii one (how fucked is that). Goddamnit.

Dude.  Lame.

So you bought two versions of the same game which have virtually identical graphics on either platform?  Yeah, way to show Nintendo who's boss.   :roll:  Fuck, you're the guy who bought duplicate DSes because you wanted a red one.  Who the hell do you think you're kidding with this "dead to me" bullshit?

I bought the cube version so I could use a real controller, wiseass.

GC controller doesn't work on Wii games?

Apparently Nintendo is being... insistant on most titles using the Wii controller only. It has resulted in the actual destruction of the Metal Slug game - it's horrible.

If they had simply included an option for me to use the Wavebird with Wii Zelda, and they fixed those niggles like the Y-Axis shit (which is a bigger problem than I'm giving it - there's simply no fucking excuse) - I probably wouldn't have really complained at all. At worst the complaints would have been "Bleh, water dungeon too big" or "Keep recycling enemies, it sure was fun the 4th time." But nothing that would have resulted in my losing my shit. I'm still angry.

Twilight Princess is the game that I had the most fun with this year, it even broke my WoW addiction. It is a better game than even ocarina of time in my opinion and the Wii controls work very well.

Well it just shows once again that we have totally incompatible preferences as far as gaming is concerned.

Well, you were coming from WoW. Barbie Makeover Studio would be impressive at that point too.^*


* It's a joke.

No it's not. God of War and Resident Evil IV broke me off of MMORPGs. That's exactly what it is. It's kinda like reexperiencing something for the first time.

Metal Slug uses the pointer?

New systems usually have some goofy rules attached to the games. Nintendo made *every* game use Mode 7 effects on the SNES at first, even if just on the title screen. Sony had a no 2D graphics rule.

In a way it makes sense, you don't want people being lazy and not using the Wiimote at all or people making a bunch of Genesis games for your Playstation. I would guess the requirements will relax. Clearly some games are not meant for the Wiimote, especially ports of stick-based arcade games.

Why is shaking the nunchuck an arduous task for you?  I agree that the Wii's controller is not optimal for every game ever made, but I haven't had any problems or grief in using it for Zelda.  And for that matter, Wind Waker didn't have any crosshairs for aiming, either.  You had to sight along the weapon and have a general idea where it was going to go.

Shaking a stick and nub around didn't feel like Zelda. Had it enhanced it in any way whatsoever, I'd have been either indifferent or favorable to it. IMO, random shaking of your right hand for preset attacks, and pointless use of the chuk is just a waste of my time - also, less fun. At least for me.

-

Margalis, SCEA has a rule for no-2D. Sony Japan does not. Even SCEE has let some 2D shit slip through the cracks. SCEA? Not unless it's a collection of substantial games. And even then, it took them about 3 years to let that become common place. Honestly, this is the single biggest thing that annoys the shit out of me with the console makers. I realizee they should want to keep quality up - but who gives a shit what form quality comes in.

If Nintendo wants to use the Wiimote for all their first party shit, I'll understand. But shoehorning it into classic series without actually making damn sure the Wiimote is better is just insulting as a gamer. They should come up with new IP for the Wiimote, it's just that simple - though I'm not sure they have enough creativity left to create a new "mascot." The system has become about the Wiimote - it needs to switch focus to the games; if the wiimote is used, well great. If it isn't used, who gives a shit? They learned quickly with the DS that useless touchscreen operation took away from games (Dawn of Sorrow anyone?). They'll probably learn quickly with the Wii as well. Unfortunately, with how horrible Nintendo is at making sure they have a steady supply of games on home consoles, I'm not entirely sure it'll matter at all. They might as well change the system name to the Nintendo Emu as far as I"m concerned.

I was stretching a bit with the Makeover thing. There is a Barbia GBA platformer that's better than WoW though.

I'll be the judge of that! I'll have a full report on this platformer shortly. Having run two dwarves to 60 and gotten friggin sick of the game, I think I can safely make the comparison. Now, what is this Barbie GBA title?

The sequel to...

(http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/5842/mkaofuckahorsedj5.jpg)

Barbie and Magic of Pegasus.

It's not really worth playing though (do I really have to tell you that?). It's only a better game than WoW because it really is a game. It wins by default.

I choose to make fun of you for prefering to use the D-pad in menus.  I guess people like you are who gave me the menus from Dirge of Cerberus and FFXII.

Yeah, what he said. The Zelda Wiimote controls worked just fine for me. Why would you pay twice for what you knew was the same game with crippled controls? You know my address, send me the money and I'll send you insults in a DVD box for half the price.

Someone really needs to play that DBZ game. I want to know if it's as complicated as it looks.

And please, don't comment on the DBZ cartoon. I don't care. I just want an impression of what fighting games in general could be like on the Wii. I think that I've been indoctrinated with standard gamepad/joystick controls for too long.

From what I've heard, the DBZ game is not a good indicator of what fighting games will be like on the Wii. No one I know of has given it good reviews, and I have an allergic reaction to DBZ material of all types, which has led me to avoid renting it. That and I'm enjoying Call of Duty 3 too much.

Thanks

Forgot to ask as well:

How's that Madden game working for ya? Better or worse than previous football game experiences?

I haven't gotten Madden yet. I keep waiting for Gameznflix to get it so I can rent it before I buy it, but the fuckers haven't even listed it yet. I'll probably buy it after Christmas when I get some gift cards. I will certainly blog on it when I do.

Funny but everyone on Something Awful seem to like the game a lot.  I bought it and its actually pretty fun.  My friend WHO HATES FIGHTING GAMES AND HATES ANIME loves it.
I had to explain the characters I knew to him (quit the anime before they ever fought the gay horned boss guy) a bit, but other than that its a pretty fun game.  Not very deep and totally unbalanced, but good dumb fun.

Piccolo was cool....But I could never keep up with that show.

[edit] Damn, seems like it'll be a while until any other Fighting games will be out for the Wii.

That's who I use.  You have player 1 and 2 colorschemes.  For Piccolo P2 scheme has his turban and cape with the pointy shoulders on it so of course thats what I use.
According to the strategy guide he is an upper tier character, but the low end of it.  Some of the GT characters can pretty much mop the floor with him.

Hell, we tried a fight between thirteen year old Gohan and Krillin and Gohan just STOMPED ASS.  Im no fighting game master and like all competitive gaming I hate the people who like it and participate it, but I am halfway good at these sorts of games.  My friend sucks and hates them.  He turned my poor Krillin into a punching bag.

Oh yeah.  According to Gamerankings and Metacritic, its got a high 70s average score so I wonder where the bad reviews are from.  (Or are people now using the Famitsu scoring system where even shitty games get 8s and anything not ranked 8.5 or above is the suck?)

I apparently was wrong. I was thinking it got reviews in the 5's (50's) and it hasn't. I must have been thinking of something else.

Not true. For you see, I have just played and beaten Barbie and the Magic of the Pegasus. Here is a small review:

Story: Wenlock hits on you. Turns everyone to stone. Turn them not to stone, and then drop chandeliers on his head. And smite him with your wand.
Gameplay: You are a Barbie-like character. You can wear dresses. You can jump. The main gameplay mechanic here is your magic wand. Your wand can turn people from stone into not stone, and stone blocks into not stone blocks. Along the way, in each of the four worlds you pick up an additional power, enabling you to jump very high, float horizontally, freeze enemies (by turning them into moving plant platforms or stone), and melt ice. In each world there is a level with a hidden door and hidden key. Within that room is a minigame which will unlock another dress for you. They are decorative. Your sister is a pegasus. Between worlds she collects coins to give you an extra heart. What.
Enemies: Most enemies are one shot wand kills. Some enemies you have to freeze first, because they're actually people you have to then unstone. At the end of each of the four worlds (and at the last world) there is a boss battle which requires you to whore the power you gained in that world.
Difficulty: I beat this in two hours. On the hardest difficulty (normal).
Fun Factor: To be honest, you could palette swap this into a fantasy or Metroid-like game really easily. And it might suck a little less. To be honest, I kind of enjoyed the game, searching for stoned citizens, and item collection. It wasn't terrible.

Comparison to WoW:
No multiplayer. Beaten in two hours. Next to no difficulty. For all it's faults, WoW has more than four areas, has way more than two hours worth of play, and has much in the way of cooperative and competitive multiplayer gameplay. Plus, you cannot mind control a guy to jump into lava in Barbie and the Magic of the Pegasus.

You Lose! Good day sir!

HEY!  Spoiler alert, please!  Geez!

Amateur. You're supposed to MC them in mass PvP and watch the poor sap get ganked by a rabid flock of fucking floppy-eared mangina elves. :evil:

I realize there are a lot of jaded people here (me among them, I'm subscribed to no MMO's), but I think you're all forgetting just how hooked we all got on UO, EQ, AC, or whichever flavor of game we happened upon first.  Yeah, we've all seen enough now to understand that these games boil down to essentially the same things, but most people haven't yet.  They're still stuck in that glorious, gauzy world that we used to inhabit before we started nitpicking and dissecting everything about the MMO-du jour.  Don't denigrate their choices in gaming because we've lost our sense of enchantment.  It stinks of bitterness, and it's kind of pathetic.

I'd play a My Little Pony MMO.  In a heartbeat!

I already said as much in another thread. But I'm not bitter - those newbies just don't know better.

Yet.

I just spoiled the first minute of the game. My bad.

Still, if they repainted that game with a better story and graphics, made it incredibly Japanese, and threw in some more levels, they could call it "Jericho Grain Silo H: Block Holocaust". Because you destroy a lot of blocks in that game, and everyone's a sucker for cheap DBZ-like anime.

To be fair, I realize WoW's just an overglorified Diku MUD. That didn't stop me from running two characters to 60 before getting utterly sick of it. It didn't stop me from getting at least some enjoyment from it. Most of the people who complain bitterly about WoW have played it for ages, and got at least more enjoyment from it than they would playing Barbie and the Magic of the Pegasus. I'm as jaded as the rest of you, I just wanted to prove your exaggerations wrong. I succeeded.

Why are you guys fucking up Schild's Nintendo hate thread?

You didn't prove anything to me. All I said was that that Barbie title was a better game. As in, it had more game and puzzle principles behind it than even the best example of a diku MMO (i.e. WoW).

Your criteria for saying WoW is better basically came down to Barbie not being a better MMO. And I wouldn't disagree with you there. WoW is a better MMO. But I was talking about games.

Whether you consider one or the other more fun is out of the scope of this thread though.

Because Nintendo hate is about as stupid as WoW hate.

Hardly. Nintendo makes games. Hating WoW is about as important as hating Pine-Sol.

From some reason I don't equate the smell of Pine with cleanliness.  In fact the smell of Pine-Sol reminds me of Christmas tress being left up long after they're dead and brown.  It's not a smell I'm overly fond of (it doesn't make me gag like the smell of cloves though).

Returned both Zeldas as "Defective" to Walmart. Got my money back. Paid off Lost Planet for pickup in early January and picked up my preorder of Super Swing Golf. As I said in the other thread, the latter is the best title I've laid my hands on for the Wii. It makes Wii Golf in the Wii Sports pack look like a goddamn joke. And given the design, it looks a lot better than it should - even though it's still only a notch better looking than Ribbit King.

I've only got a handful of first party Nintendo games from the Cube to get rid of (Sunshine, Smash Bros and uhm, I think that's it) and I'll have purged my damn house of post SNES 1st Party Nintendo console games. Let the boycott begin. Welcome to the EA-Zone, Nintendo.

You're returning the games but keeping the system? Isn't that a bit inconsistent?

Words escape me. You return stuff as "defective" just because you don't like it?


Eh? You are overreacting. Are you still five years old?

If EA made a system and Atlus, Natsume, Tecmo and such made games for it - I'd have no choice but to own the system. As such, I've made a very, very specific boycott. 1st Party Console titles which include titles such as Mario Galaxy, Metroid Corruption, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Also, Mii/Animal Crossing and Mario Party n.


When you buy 10+ games a month on average and roughly 150 a year depending on release activity (at full price, on release day), you don't feel even an iota of remorse when you return things for any reason. I especially don't feel bad when that return involves Walmart. There's a reason I chose them. Fuck Walmart.

And no, I'm not overreacting. The Gamecube was by and large a piece of shit (especially when compared to the PS2). I got rid of most of my N64 stuff years ago, including the console. So, that didn't exactly take much effort. When I do something like this, I see it through. I don't go out and buy Burnout no matter how much I like it, simply because it's from EA. My EA boycott has been in place for YEARS. The only EA games I've spent even a dollar on are from Maxis, whom - while owned by EA - still proves to me they deserve my money. The new west coast studio they stole from UBISoft has many of my favorite UBISoft employees and is dedicated to making original IP.. Pretty connfident I'm going to break down and get Army of Two to see if EA put their money where their mouth is on the IP promise.

Oh, the humanity.

Okay that makes even less sense than your Nintendo thing (at least that's a hardware/software split). That's like saying "Boycott Nike cause they exploit their workers! Except for Air Jordans because Michael Jordan is cool". If you are still buying stuff from the company you are "boycotting" that's not a boycott.

It doesn't make sense, but yet, I completely understand it. Who in their right mind would want to boycott Maxis?

While I admire your stance, I don't get the logic...you are still going to buy assloads of Wii games, not to mention all the DS stuff you have.  You are still Nintendo's idea of a dream consumer, no?

And you aren't really screwing over Walmart either are you?  They let you return games on shaky grounds with smiles on their faces (while they might just tell the rest of us to fuck off) because they know you'll be back 10 more times this month buying shit from them.

"Yes" would suffice.  Zelda is one of the top games of the year.  You don't like it, and that's cool, but the amount of hostility makes you sound like you've gone off the deep end because GC Zelda didn't include a targeting cursor?   Honestly?   Not to mention it sounds like you're going to spend more filling Nintendo's pockets with the license costs than the average gamer would by buying Zelda, and you really want to call that boycotting? 

I find your disposable income disturbing.

You could feed an entire village in Africa on that type of dough. Sure, they'd convert to Islam and then blow your ass up in appreciation, but still.

I salute you and your support of capitalism. :)

Me. Sims is boring. Spore doesn't really interest me at anything other than a conceptual level. SimCity was the last Maxis title I wanted to play and I got over that years ago. Will Wright makes great conceptual sim ant farm toys but they aren't games in the sense I want to play them. I'd prefer other people to take his concepts and make decent games out of them.

The DBZ game is alright.  Rent, don't buy.  Better yet, talk a friend into renting, go to his place, play it for two hours, get bored and leave.

I played it at a friend's.  That was ideal.

Suffers from "Fight this guy! You win! Here's a cutscene showing you losing and him dominating!  Fight him again!  You win!  Here's another cutscene of you getting owned!  Fight him again!  You win!  Here's a cutscene of him finally being destroyed and you just barely escaping alive!"

i'm weak, my boycott of EA has now been limited to boycotting Madden football, even though I LOVE ME THE FOOTBALL.

So I don't see that boycott lasting too long either. The road to Hell is paved in good intentions... or Carebear pubic hair, I forget which one it is.

I'm not boycotting anybody.  After the PS3 cornholing I took, the Wii isn't likely to bother me much, but time will tell.

I typed a lot of words but I don't think I actually said anything, so I deleted them.  Maybe I meant to say something about software being the deciding factor, not the console hardware.  Of course, the new patchable consoles are changing that.

I don't really boycott anyone anymore. I boycott specific games, as in I just don't give a shit about them. My boycott of EA got me nothing, they are still the only ones making fucking football games. They are the only socceer game in town (that I like). I never was much for the rest of their shit franchise lineup anyway so it isn't like my boycott was going to have much effect either way. Madden on the Wii looks like the way to go, even though I was very meh on the X-Box version.

I tend to boycott MMOG's in specific. I boycotted SOE for the longest time, until EQ2 got to be good, but really that boycott didn't hurt because they put out shit during the time I was boycotting.

EA, Ubisoft, Vivendi, all of them are in this shit to make money. They don't care about my feelings on the game or the industry and so my boycott means fuckall to them. It doesn't touch them at their level. Meanwhile, I could be missing out on great games like FIFA 07, so I'll just buy what I think is a good game and give not a shit who makes it. Good games > indignation over shitty (and now standard) business practices.

I like Ubisoft. Out of those big three companies you listed, I think they give a shit the most.

Ill be over in the corner happily playing my Xbox 360. Dont mind me. Im having fun.


Rage on brother!!!!! Dont let the man keep you down!!!!

This week, I'm mostly boycotting Sega consoles.

Oh, and Pickled Herring. It smells funny.

Schild, I don't mean this in the harsh way that it may read on the internets, but you're fucking crazy, man.  Loco.  Permanently out to lunch.

Speaking of Sega consoles. one of my roommates found a Sega Dreamcast metro bag of sorts at work. It's mine now. it's pertty sweet.


Irony of ironies, I only go to Walmart to abuse them. I do not "shop there" as a consumer. It was bad enough even being in that store with the Walmart brand Christmas Shoppers. Had they told me to "fuck off," I might have snapped. After a bad run with trying to find HDDVDs last month, I've actually kinda boycotted Walmart also. But they had it a long time coming. One of my roommates is allergic to Walmart anyway.

My, my, I'm just full of boycotts.


It's cool dude, but I disagree. I'm more of a permanently at lunch kinda guy really.

Thats cause you use your lunch break to go buy new games.

fNah, I use my lunch break... break to bitch about them here. See, here's the rub. I don't get angry at the BIG PROBLEMS with games and gaming. It's those little things that fucking build up and make me explode. I can rationalize a giant fuckup because I can generally point a finger and blame the designer and write a couple sentences on the internet and people just get it. Big fuckups are easy. Articulating the ongoing anger I've been bottling since the N64 just isn't something I'm prepared to do. It's just not easy. It's been little tiny thing after little tiny thing. Just hundreds of thousands of little tiny things. And the new Zeldas finally made my blood reach a boil.

Aren't games for fun?

Let the hate go, man. Even the irritations. You'll live longer and be happier.

Games are for fun. So after I posted a bit on here, I went and played some other shit. I don't really stress for more than 2-5 minutes at a time. Trust me when I say that what kills me will have nothing to do with games.

I still have my money on a freak wiimote accedent.

I don't see why you guys are so bent out of shape at his boycott. His level of and capacity for rage and holding grudges is inspiring.

Did no one else here play games on the N64 and Gamecube? It's like I'm talking to people who haven't played a Nintendo system or game since the SNES. Once again, SNES = best sytem ever. That Nintendo is dead. I don't like the new Nintendo. They enjoy fucking with me and my childhood. If a truly good third party game that makes the Wii great comes out for the Wii, I'll be the first to admit it as such. Super Swing Golf, like I said, is pretty fucking awesome. Other than that, the system has been a lollercoaster for me. Needs More Cowbell.

I enjoyed my N64 plenty. I didn't own a GC, but I had a lot of fun with that too.

Your views might be slightly skewed, as someone who buys more games, per month (50+), than I own in total.

Yep... Certifiable.

I played a lot of good games on the N64:  Mario 64, two Zelda games, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Conker, Paper Mario, Banjo-Tooie, etc...  It was a good system that had the drawback of using carts instead of CD's, making the games more expensive.

Goldeneye, M64, and Banjo Kazooie alone were worth the N64.  Also, the version of Mario Kart w/all the map glitches that allowed you to complete races in 15 secs.   

[/agree] I loved the Gameboy cartridge thingy you could use with SNES.  Cowbell indeed!

N64 was pretty damn close, though.  Lots of good times drinking beers and playing games on it were had. 

If you buy 20 games a month Nintendo systems probably aren't for you. If you buy one a month you are ok.

I've just gotten used to the fact Schild and myself have totally different views on videogaming.
(I bitch about shitty gamestore policies and he thinks I am a dick for it, yet he is totally purging himself of ALL Nintendo games because Zelda doesn't have some targeting crosshair.  Yet I am the crazy one...)

But that SNES era Nintendo?  SHIT.  (With a couple really great games.)

I was a Genesis/Commodore gamer.  Nintendo was EA and Sony combined back then.  Oppressive , evil, and arrogant as all fuck out.

Since then they have made some really great games.  To say they haven't made anything good since the mid 90s is beyond fucking wrong.
Its BUSH ADMINISTRATION WRONG.

But it is good comedy of a sort.

What?

Super Metroid
Super Mario World
Link to the Past
Donkey Kong Country
Earthbound
F-Zero
Pilotwings
Super Mario All Stars (arguable)
Super Mario Kart
Super Punch-Out
Tetris Attack
the Kirby Titles
Star Fox

Not to mention the stuff in Japan.

N64:
Mario 64
Goldeneye (I'll give that up since I put DKC under SNES)
Ocarina of Time
Mario party
Paper Mario
Smash Bros.

Gamecube:
Animal Crossing
Eternal Darkness (Silicon Knights)
Wind Waker
Smash Bros. Melee
Paper Mario
Pikmin 1/2
Wario Ware

F-Zero not listed under Cube because it was made by Amusement Vision, a Capcom company. I didn't really want to list the Rare or Silicon Knights stuff, but I figured they deserve the spot despite them having no possible chance of making anything for the Wii. To even imply that anything on the 64 or Cube even remotely compared to Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Super Metroid or Earthbound is just astounding. Those games still hold up today - even graphically due to their simplicity. I can't stand to play stuff on the 64. Even Dreamcast stuff is aging - but I long for more fantastic 2D stuff from Ninty. It's one of the reasons I'm hoping Atlus doesn't pull the plug on Odin Sphere for the PS2 (assuming Sony approves it...)

Anyway, considering the GRAND TOTAL of all my nintendo games post SNES adds up to a total of... 6 titles, it's not exactly genocide here. I wasn't really supporting them as a game dev house at all. And you think Nintendo has changed their policies for home consoles? Pffft. Everything still has to be licensed by Nintendo and still has to adhere to much stricter rules and testing than the other systems.

Anyway, you were a Genesis gamer back in those days. I don't see why you'd give a shit. I feel sorry for you. I had both systems and the SNES between Squaresoft, Nintendo, and Capcom proved to be the much better purchase for Every Genre short of Sonic the Hedgehog titles. Wouldn't that be a fun argument to bring back? SNES vs. Genesis. Man, in hindsight, I can only begin to imagine how silly the Genesis owners felt. Ironically, I somehow ended up enjoying the Saturn and Dreamcast more than the 64 and Cube. Though, it's not fair to bring the Saturn into the equation since the PS1 outperformed the 64 in every genre also.

I don't even remember what I was going to get at here. But saying SNES era Nintendo was Shit just makes you look like an idiot.

I was a Genesis fanboy, but the SNES definitely wasn't shit. In terms of consoles wars, that's as best as it gets.

Personally though, I think just about everything Sega did was more inventive and more varied than what Nintendo did: They could make the jump from Afterburner and Outrun to Sonic and Ecco to Shinobi and Strider to Gunstar and Streets of Rage to Phantasy Star to Herzog and Shining Force. There isn't a company in the history of gaming with so many good titles as Sega had back then. Nintendo just kept churning out variations of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong.

Third party wise, the SNES probably had better RPG's and a better Street Fighter. The Genesis had better sports games and a more gory Mortal Kombat.

Plus, the Genesis looked cooler than the SNES did.

There's no question the SNES had better RPGs, you only need to look at Square and Enix's back catalogue. Nintendo had the third party support to be #1 back then. Ever since then - because they treated their third party folks like shit - they have not have the firepower to be #1. There's a good chance they never will. Hell, EGM is even making fun of them again for fucking up the third party support on the Wii. If I were a developer, I'd want to get my back catalogue on Xbox Live simply because you don't need to hook the goddamn controller up to another one to make it work (possibly the biggest design flaw out there for the new system).

The Genesis had a large number of good games, but the best Genesis games didn't compare to the best Super Nintendo games and at the end of a generation that's what you look at. I absolutely love Phantasy Star, and god knows I've had my complaints about Final Fantasy - but the entire collection of Phantasy Star just doesn't compare to Final Fantasy IV or VI. As good as Sonic was, it's not fun to go back and play it - not compared to Super Mario World or Super Metroid. Hell, Super Castlevania. And no one can even pretend the Genesis had a title even in the same realm as Link to the Past. Like I said, I positively love Nintendo. I'll always love Sega for giving me the Dreamcast. But there's just no question, the SNES was - until recently - the single best system to ever pop into existance. It pains me to say it, but I think the PS2 has taken that spot now.

If Nintendo gets over the "it's about the controller" bullshit their pimping, maybe I'll take another look at their shit. But if they keep shoehorning in controls for games and not give me an option to play with a regular controller, my boycott will still stand. I don't want to wave my hands around and shit ever again to play something like Zelda. I don't and won't do it for Mario or Smash Bros either. I could really care less if people think I'm crazy for wanting the OPTION to play what some people (...wiibois) would probably call "old skool" style.

The SNES was a fine system. I never really caught on to Genesis games until later, mostly because it's godamn sound chip had the downs. Not kidding here. I can forgive a lot in videogame sound, I grew up loving NES music. But the damn staticy bullshit you get from an actual Genesis system? Just... fucking... terrible. And the color palette was miserable. It's like they made a videogame system out of static. Don't get me wrong, they had great games. Altered Beast, Sonic, SoR 1-2 (3 is abomination), and perhaps a half dozen others.

Schild, I have to ask... your Nintendo Boycott, will it extend to the DS? Because that won't really affect things, most of the DS's best stuff is 3rd party. But you might miss out on some good titles. I don't know if you'd count Tetris DS or Mario Kart in there. I respect a grudge more than most, but, think of the DS man, think of the DS!

Only first party console titles. For a long time I've felt that given the ass whooping Nintendo has gotten in homes (not in terms of profitability, but simply install numbers and lack of third party shit) should have made them get over their goddamned pride and just shut down the hardware side. Simply make third party games for Sony and Microsoft. Or pick one of the two. Shit, they have killer apps. People buy a third system just for the 5-10 games they make each generation that are worthwhile. They could swing the pendulum between the MS and Sony consoles like some sort of evil feedbag. They could point their finger, sign an exclusivity contract and rake in the fucking money. Sure, they'rr profitable now. But I bet they'd make a shitton more money just making software for home consoles rather than making all of us fuckers buy a 3rd system just to enjoy their stuff.

I've no gripe with the DS. The DS would have to fail horribly and get beaten out by two other units for a couple generations and then Nintendo would have to come out with OTHER handheld devices year after year and have no third party support for me to extend this to the DS.

So, really, it's not a boycott.

The problem is actually that you aren't as enamored with the control scheme of the Wii as you thought you'd be and are mad that you can't plug in the regular/standard controller on Ninty-made games?

A boycott would imply that you're not buying any of a company's products, not just some.  It's like me saying, "I am boycotting Sony!" because the PS3 is way too expensive, but still buying PS2 games.

I am not whipped into a froth about it, but Schild does have a point about the Wiimote.  Only recently have we seen DS games that don't shoehorn stylus action into a game simply because there is a touch screen.  He mentioned Portrait of Ruin, which I suspect someone is getting me for the winter solstice gift celebration and therfore I don't have it.  I am, however, currently playing Dawn of Sorrow.  It is a great game, totally awesome, BUT one big thing that keeps it from reaching Symphony of the Night status is the god-damned stylus gimmick.  I don't have a problem with the stylus, it's fucking great in menus and shit, but don't make me stop playing a button-oriented game to whip out a stylus, which I probably am holding in a place a cigarette would go.

I am sure that the day will come when there are Wii games that use the Wiimote intelligently and games that avoid gimmicks, but that's not today.

By the way, I did not have a N64 during its supposed lifetime.  I bought one in 1999, I think, for $80 with Mario Kart.  I also have some wrestling cart with Goldberg on the label.  That's it.  I played Ocarina of Time on the Cube.  I played Majora's Mask on the Cube.  Anal rape averted!

I am pretty sure Schild never thought the Wiimote was a good idea.  I might be misremembering.

Well to be fair, lets say there were a whole bunch of Schilds out there, who played the DS, but didn't buy anymore Wii games. It'd still indicate something to Nintendo.

I guess that's just a boycott of the Wii. Not of Nintendo per se.

I played some Mario64 in electronics at walmart when I was working there. We had weekly Goldeneye sessions at the eqholic's pad.

That's it. When the rest of the band was playing the NES I was playing Ultima 5 on the C64. I've always been the pc gamer. I did own a Genesis for a while, mostly for Joe Montana's Sports Talk Football.

I'll go where the games are. I liked the Genesis more than SNES, but it was because of Sega's games.

PC's are disappointing me immensely. I see no reason to hold on to them just for the sake of it. I've had more fun out of a 6 year old console (PS2) than anything on the PC in the last 3 years. That's pathetic.

The Wii, while cool, just seems too radical a change for what I want out a general gaming console. It's nothing that I'd want to buy a lot of games on. I'll eventually get it though.

Just wanted to toss in that Pilotwings64 was Tons of FUN. Had that shit on release, and kept it up until I got rid of the system...which I actually wish I never did.

No.

Up until the focus on the Sega CD/Saturn, the Genesis was hands down the better system. It was the PS1 of its day. It had more games, and even though technologically inferior to the SNES (only by a hair), it had better games until they threw too much effort into CD-based games. Really, until Street Fighter 2 came out for the SNES, it was a hard sell. I should know, I had to sell them. SF2 was the killer app that brought the SNES within sniffing range. Had Sega not screwed the pooch with the CD add-on and then the Saturn, they'd still be around as a console manufacturer. The SNES system was harder to program for and had an inferior controller.

As for Nintendo games, meh. I don't buy consoles nor do I measure their worth by first-party titles. If I did, the X-Box would be a smoking hole of shitty shit shit shit. So would the PS2. Nintendo only gets noticed because their first-party titles are usually superior or more popular than third party. The Wii is no exception, as Zelda is the best game on the system so far. Luckily, the Wii has a number of other quality titles like Red Steel and Call of Duty 3. Had the SNES had a game the quality of Zelda on release day, it would have taken a lot less time for the system to hit it big and Sega would have been hurting that Christmas instead of the one two years later.

You didn't like Zelda. That's ok. I think you are high, but hey everyone has their opinions. But to say Nintendo is dead to you because you made the conscious mistake of buying the same game twice when you didn't like it the first time. Seek help.

The Genesis had more quality games? I'm sorry man, I've got all of Segas consoles outside my door and I had all the prime games for each one and unfortunately, the Genesis was so far behind the SNES it was disgusting. I SUPPOSE if you removed RPGs from the equation COMPLETELY it would have been a tie. But then, if you call Red Steel and Call of Duty 3/Wii good gaming, god onloy knows what sort of shit you were playing on the Genesis.

I didn't like the control scheme in Zelda the first time. I bought it a second time because I wanted to use a CONTROLLER. Not a magic fucking wand and testes sack. There was NO reason for me to assume the controls would suck on a standard controller. They need to put that shit on the box.

Compared to the 360, the original xbox is a smoking hole of shitty shit shit shit. As for the PS2? You did not just knock the first party titles. Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, God of War? Sony Corporate's internal studios create some of the best first party titles in the history of gaming. And they're not afraid to make stuff for people over the age of 13. In fact, I own and enjoyed more Sony first party titles this last go round than I did Nintendo first party titles. The only Ninty one that got major play time was Smash Bros.

I don't care if it's WWII or not, Call of Duty are solid games, man. All of them have been.

Don't know about the Wii version though, but I don't think it makes that big of a difference. The strength of CoD is the scripting.

[EDIT]

As for trying to paint the Genesis as shitty, you're not even "out to lunch" anymore. That's just fuckin' wack. I'd be in gaming ecstasy right now if there was an equivalent next gen system with an equivalent next gen catalog.

[EDIT]

That word..."Next Gen"....

I really hate using it.

I'm not trying to paint the genesis shitty at all! I wouldn't have owned it back then if it was. I didn't have a 3D0 and I took a bad gamble on the Jaguar. The Genesis was Very Very Good. The SNES simply had the better library at the end of that generations lifecycle - by far. That's all I'm saying. it's not a fucking dig at the genesis. It's fucking reality. The Genesis was Still Worth Owning and Still Worth Buying a Bunch of games for. Especially if you like sports titles.

Schild makes wacky/borderline crazy/totally crazy/opinionated statement! News at 11!

Seriously though, the method and very specificness of the EA (not Maxis) and Nintendo (not DS or hardware) boycott makes no sense to me at all, but then again it doesn't hurt me one iota where Schild decides to spend (or not spend) his money, so more power to him.

The Mega Drive/Genesis was a good console, but overall the SNES had more gaming goodness that I liked to play, so I preferred it in as much as you prefer one system you own to another. I've still got mine and a select few games for it. Mario Kart/Bomberman series FTW~!

..and Super Double Dragon.  :evil:

Schild's last post on those two is right on the money for me, at least. My bad gamble was on the 3DO, not the Jag, but hey, it still had it's good games and I even have the thing set up again. It doesn't get a lot of action, but it's set up again.

Also, went to buy component cables this morning. The shop had the box, but hadn't had them in stock at all yet. Not sold out, but "we haven't had those arrive yet, sorry." WTF is that?

The Genesis had a fuckload of quality titles, many of which were not wankjob anime hentai Japanimation linear boring as fuck RPG's. Hell, the first Sonic game was a better platformer than all Mario games combined, because I actually enjoyed playing Sonic and can't to this day stand more than about 15 minutes of any Mario game. The SNES only had a good number of quality games by the end of its lifecycle by which point it was a dead machine. Until Sega dropped Genesis development for the Saturn, there were just more and better games for the Genesis. The SNES had good games, just not as many and had the Saturn fiasco not happened, Genesis would still have had more quality games than SNES.

Call of Duty 3 is a damn fine shooter. Red Steel is as well. I'd put them both up with some of the better PC shooters I've ever played, only losing points for lack of multiplayer. The 360 makes the old X-Box library a smoking hole? Considering there are less than 10 games I'd pay money on the 360 for, even less if you take out the crippled versions of EA Sports titles, and I have at least that many X-Box games on my shelf that I haven't traded in, I'm going to say you are wrong on that one.

Yeah, it just comes down to tastes (but of course). In my mind, the Genesis is the best thing to ever happen to gaming -- in the same way Schild thinks the SNES was. Both were great either way though.

To Schild: Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying.

Who cares, most real gamers had both anyway.

Ah, so you do like consoles after all.

Lol, you're broken and don't know the SNES library.


What?

It's what I said. Call of Duty 3 was as good on the Wii as earlier COD shooters were on a PC, with the only fundamental negatives being lower resolution and no multiplayer. As a single-player game, both COD 3 and Red Steel have as high a place in my memory of quality shooters as the first Half-Life, the first Unreal, and Doom. Again, YMMV, but I think they hold up just fine.

OHHHHH EARLIER CODS? Yea, when I play new games I wanna take a time warp.

Go play Gears of War and then tell me about Red Steel being good.

Gears is great.  But it's short.

Anyway, I think most of this is just nostalgia run rampant and an inability to adapt.  SNES?  Great at the time.  Sure.  I'm with you there.  Now?  There are only a few games from that era that I could still seriously play for very long.  Standards have gone up.  Not just graphics.  For all the talk of Chrono Cross or whatever RPG's from that era, if you cut the nostalgia kick, they all have stories that we'd laugh at if released today.  If you were 12 now and the Wii was your first big console then in 20 years you'd be talking shit about the latest "next gen" whatevers and talking about all the amazing titles your Wii had back when.

Wrong.

It isn't nostalgia. I can play FFIV, V or VI today. Every year when I go home I beat Super Castlevania again. Last Christmas when I got home my sister's fiance was downstairs playing Actraiser! (A game he had never played before and he isn't a gamer in general)

Graphical standards have gone up. Other standards - largely have not. Chrono Trigger is certainly better than a bunch of generic RPGs that come out today. I played Tales of Symphonia for about 2 hours before deciding it was dull as shit. Tactics Ogre is still the best SRPG game available on any system. Hell a couple years ago my friend and I played through a 2-play SMB3 (from All Stars) together. And it was really fun.

There is nothing magical about the passage of time that makes games magically better. Comics from the 70s are as good as comics today.  F-Zero for the N64 is better than the Cube version.

Sure, there are plenty of games you go back and play again and they kind of suck. But then again there are plenty of games as good today as they were back then.

Aliens is a better movie than Starship Troopers.

Margalis is absolutely correct here. My choices of game would be different to his, but fun is fun is fun. Some games now suck, but often those were the ones where the shiney of graphics played a major part of their fun-ness. Anyone here remember Last Ninja for the C64? Try playing that thing today and see if you don't want to gouge your own eyes out with a rusty spoon.

Actraiser...man, that brings me back.

ActRaiser was the sheeeeeit.  Super Duper.  ActRaiser 2, not so much.

You know, I recently started playing the original Final Fantasy again.  Well, the PS1 update, since my NES is tits-up, but I do have the actual NES cart.  It's pretty good, really, in the retro vein.  I also started on some Bushido Blade last night, until the wife intervened.  Fun is fun.

The game I remember really enjoying on the Genesis was, uh damn I forgot the name just now.  The Running Man game-show video game.  Total Carnage?  Oh wait... it worked better on the SNES thanks to the controller.  keke.

Smash TV?

Yeah, that's what he was thinking of.

Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis was better though.

Oh God that was the greatest game ever.   (http://www.appolo.com/projects/smashtv/smash_tv.htm)

BIG MONEY.  BIG PRIZES.  I LOVE IT!

(http://www.classicgaming.com/shmups/reviews/smashtv/level1_4.gif)

That was it.  One night a few of us sat up all night in a dorm room and beat it on the Genesis.  I wished I had my SNES the whole time, or rather the pad since it actually looked better on Genesis, IIRC.  Still loads of fun.

I still play Actraiser like once a year, and I actually bought a copy of SNES Smash-TV in college from EBay. That was sufficiently awesome. Hard as hell though. Damn bomb-fattys everywhere.
I guess the summary here is "The Wiimote is like a wang attached to a nutsack by a rope, and Japan is playing another cruel trick on us. They even called it the Wii. They're definitely mocking us. Every new Nintendo system is another phallic controller to mock us with.".

That's not that big of a "time warp." The COD formula of gameplay hasn't changed much since the first game. The only significant difference is story and graphical shiney. Much like the Zelda games or any of the franchise games we are still playing. Is Mario Kart Double Dash on the GC that much different than Mario Kart on the 64? Nope.


Gears of War is probably a decent game, and the first game that's made me want a 360. I've no doubt it's probably as good as Red Steel, even with the gamepad controls. But, you know, $400.

$460

I agree with schild that the Wiimote is a hassle for Zelda. Too much arm-swinging just to get your damned sword out. But I tolerate it.

You hardly even need to swing. It's more like flicking.

SmashTV was great.  The sequel, not so much.  There are some modern equivilents that managed to capture much the same feeling of carnage, but not the same feeling of tongue in cheek gameshow trappings.  I have to say that I liked this demo (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/alienshooter2/download.html?sid=6163465), although it isn't quite as slick of an implementation as it could have been.  (Yes, I'm aware of Crimsonlands and Shadowgrounds.)

SmashTV was the second thing (behind Geometry Wars) I purchased off of XBL. I love that game.

I saw they had a stack of those little Classic Controllers at Best Buy last night when I was finishing up my last minute Christmas shopping. I picked up two of them, and then threw down on some Gunstar Heroes (also just got last night) on the Wii - just as good as I remember it. It sorta makes me feel good that I'm being legal about it now, as opposed to getting ROMs, and it's still a fantastic game.

Lasers + homing is the most broken weapon, still.

See, you can do that and I cannot.  FFIV through FFVI were made inferior to me after playing too much Bioware/BlackIsle stuff.  The stories are childish.  I loved them the first time because I was a child, loved them for some time after because of nostalgia and now I'm over them.  If an RPG (of any generation) can't offer me at least a somewhat mature plot then I'm done with it.


And I disagree and label that difference of opinion "nostalgia".  There are some games that have maintained their "fun" but largely the bar has gone up.  You are cherry picking examples, choosing the best maintained games from prior generations and pitting them against the trash of this generation.  Generally the average gameplay value has increased significantly (but there will always be outliers).  Wolfenstein was great fun at the time but it just isn't the same playing a game like that after playing Gears of War.  Chrono Trigger was a fantastic little hack'n'slash RPG with some a 12 year old's cartoon story but it isn't the same after playing Planescape Torment, KotOR, Oblivion, etc.  The first Super Mario Brothers was amazing back then.  But compared to Jak & Daxter or other great platformers of the recent generation it just falls short.

A lot of genres are still there and a lot of what has changed has been the graphics.  But there has been a lot more refining going on after that.  Every new generation of games for those genres has added a lot of different features.  Many of them sucked.  But many of them didn't and got carried forth into future generations.  Plots got more sophisticated and gamers grew up.  That last bit is important.  Gamers Grew Up.  We are in our 20's now.  Plots for 12 year olds made sense when most gamers were ... 12.  Now we're 25+ and we want real stories that compete with the best TV/Movies we can watch and you know, some of the time we get that. and it's those games that end up being loved by a lot of us these days.

I don't see how you can find the story in FF VI childish, it was quite some time since I played it but I remember it being pretty dark at times. You mention kotor, and while it was quite some time since I played that game too, I recall the story in that one being fairly crap, even though the gameplay was great. It was even longer since I played Chrono Trigger, but i remember it being awesome, dunno what I would think of that game if I played it today though. In fact I probably should give it a whirl.

We seem to forget (thanks to the pablum of children's TV) that it was only in the latter half of the 20th century that children's stories were made so childish. Grimm's Fairy Tales, the real ones, were a collection of dark shit, morality tales made to scare the shit out of children. Not all children's stories have been Disney-ed into a bland paste.

StGabe can't tell the difference between childish graphics and a childish plot. Give FFVI modern graphics and people would be raving about the mature plot. I mean one of the last scenes in the game is a guy who has nothing to live for and dies rather than even bothering to try to escape.

But really focusing on "mature stories" is a red herring. Jax and Daxter has a mature story? Gears of War has a mature story? In the vast majority of games story doesn't matter at all. Who gives a fuck why Mario is trying to beat up a giant spiky turtle? Why was pacman eating pellets? It doesn't matter.

Focusing on plot is moronic because only 5-10% of games are plot-driven. What is the plot of Tetris again exactly? Or monopoly? Or poker? Or charades? Games don't have to have plots at all! The mature plots Gabe is holding up aren't any more mature than all-text Infocom games. I played a Super Famicom Sound Novel game written by a well-known Japanese mystery writer that was better written than 99.9% of plots today.

---

How come it is "nostalgia" to think that many old games are good, rather than say "graphic whoring" to think that no old games are good? Old movies are good. Old comics are good. Old TV shows are good. Don't the same arguments apply? Movie making is so much more advanced! Movie watchers have grown up! The plots are more mature! The effects are better! The state of the art has advanced tremendously! That's why "Rocky Balboa" is better than "Rocky" and why King Kong is better than...King Kong...which was better than, you know...King Kong.

I'll take Super Mario 3 over Jax and Daxter any day. The bar has not gone up at all.

I want to agree with both of you. On the one hand, I don't think liking old games can be chalked up to just nostalgia. On the other, I believe new technologies can improve gaming in more than just superficial ways. I would surmise that a 3D Super Mario, done with all the sensibilities of the original, would be better than the original. Simply because it's the same good game, but with more options.

Being 36, I was in my 20's during the 16-bit era and had no trouble at all enjoying the games being referenced in this discussion.   I'm crazy like that.  *shrugs*

Umm...Has anyone linked this before?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q93PvyKUa2I

Funny  :lol:

Now you're cherry-picking quotes instead of cherry picking the best games of the last generation to compare to the worst of this one.  I said mature stories mattered for me with RPG's.  For Jak & Daxter and Gears of War it is certainly an evolution, not of story, but of gameplay which makes these games more interesting to me than their counterparts in past iterations of the genres.

Regarding the "childishness" of FF6, I can't remember it well enough to defend that assertion.  I can remember the story of Chrono Trigger though which gets praise all over the place and yes, it was very, very childish.  And the gameplay is pretty crappy too.  Each character has an attack or a few "techs" and that's well, it.  It's a very, very flat game.  We've come a long way since then and I'm glad.  There's nothing wrong, of course, with being nostalgic for the game, but a lot of people seem to want to translate that nostalgia into an assumption that the game, itself, was deep and "just as good" as games nowadays.

To assume that nothing has been learned in the last 20 years of gaming is to assume that game developers are complete idiots.  They're not always perfect but they aren't nearly as stupid as you would have to assume in order to think that the only thing to change in gaming during that time has been graphics.

I've said before that I just don't think games are a good medium for telling stories as it is.  It's fine if you just want to set up a simple backstory for your game with a few cut scenes like say, God of War, but beyond that if you have a story you really want to tell, there are better mediums to do it with.  One of the problems I have these days with games like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy is that there are a lot of times where I just want to play the game and I'm forced to watch the story, and there's times when I want to see more of the story and I have to play the game a couple hours to get to more of it.  Sometimes I don't get to play a game much for a week and by the time I get to the next story segment I've forgotten the details of what happened previously.  That's especially a pain with a game that has a lot of minor characters running around doing stuff.  Neither the developers nor the players are in total control of the pacing of the story and the game.

Games do a much better job att immersing than for example movies imo. If the game is really really good it can capture me way more than any other medium could. When I played FF7 ( which is one of my personal favorites ), I could go a whole day without feeling hunger, just grinding away at the game. Then I'd take a look at the clock and would be suprised that it was like 5 hours later than I thought it would be.


I think you're wrong here, I don't see more mature stories now than I used to do when I'm playing RPGs. I can name a bunch of RPGs which I would classify as having a fairly dark story. Also, what do you qualify as a mature story?

If you compare Chrono Trigger to most of todays JRPGs it's not so far behind in character development systems. It had a bunch of diffrent stats, it had skills / magic and a combo system. Sure enough there weren't a bazillion diffrent paths to choose from when developing the character as in for example NWN, but a lot of todays JRPGs aren't far ahead of Chrono Trigger in this department.

Again why doesn't this line of reasoning apply to other mediums? Surely movie makers have learned something in 20 years, right? Which is why Starship Troopers was better than Alien and why King Kong was better than King Kong...

Attention to detail, craftsmanship, dedication, vision - these things are immune to technological evolution.

StGabe's post was almost entirely about "mature plots." Then when I point out plot is irrelevant in most games he claims that wasn't his point at all...whatever.

SMB3 is a better game than Jax and Daxter. It just is. Look at the popluarity of the GBA and DS. Those games are all basically 16-bit era games. Advance Wars isn't very different than Earthlight and Nectaris from 1994 or so. Fire Emblem isn't much different than the SNES ones!

Another strike against nostalgia: I can play 16-bit era games that are *new* to me and enjoy them. I didn't play Feda: Emblem of Justice until 2001 or so. (Super Famicom game) I used to play Super Baseball 2020 in the Cornell computer lab, but I'd never played the Neo-Geo game in the arcades. Super Baseball 2020 is better than World Series Baseball 2k series.

It isn't nostalgia to think that just because things are older they can't be good. That attitude is really quite silly. Newer != better. I'll take Aliens over Alien:Resurrection, FFIV over FF9, SMB3 over Sonic for XBox360, 70-80s X-Men over 90s X-Men, etc etc.

You're right that newer!=better as a rule. If the underlying mechanics of a game are crap then the game isn't going to be fun, I can't think of a single example of a game that played awfully but was saved by incredible graphics and an incredible storyline. Graphics can save a game to an extent, the problem being that as soon as the graphics begin to date they stop saving it and everyone realises it was a shiny turd that the gold foil has rubbed off of. However there are some games which are better than they could have been previously because of the improvements in technology, I don't think Half-Life would have been nearly the game it was if it hadn't been for 3D engines for the FPS. Sure the graphics are dated now but it's still a fun game to play through.

The problem modern games face is that it is expected of them that they will be more complex and sophisticated than old games, they have the capability now for better graphics, menus, weapons. Even if these don't necessarily make the game better developers add in more complexity because the general meme is that simple games have less to keep people interested in and so won't be played as long and not regarded as well. It doesn't hurt of course that you can bury shitty mechanics under pretty graphics and all sorts of interesting other features so people don't realise quite as quickly that what's under all the fancy wrapping paper and scented flowers is still an old fashioned turd.

It's less an issue of StGabe saying that newer=better so much as he seems to be saying more complex=better. Having more options offers deeper gameplay and in some cases this can be true. Games like Gears of War are certainly a lot deeper than Doom but it doesn't necessarily mean that the game itself is more fun (ok that may be a crappy example but the fact that a game has more complex rulesets doesn't make it better than a simpler game). It largely ends up being opinion but there are plenty of old games that are still great fun to go back and play, if they weren't the NES emulation scene wouldn't have started or at least wouldn't still be around. It's not really nostalgia when you can still happily sit down and play the games for a few hours.

Shortly after I played HL2:Ep1 I started working on an article about that phenomenon, and couldn't make it come out right so I ended up abandoning it.  I'm curious whether you played Episode 1, though, and what you thought of it.  My contention was (is) that it hit some sort of magical sweet spot where the story was the game and vice versa.

I quit caring about Square games around the PS1 era, but nobody better dare talk shit about Chrono Trigger and/or FF6.

I haven't tried it yet since I don't play FPS games too often.  I might pick it up for the 360 when they release that pack with Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress, and Portal.

If you don't think that moviemaking has improved as a craft over the past 80 years (yes, 80 years, moviemaking has been around a lot longer than video games) then you are smoking crack.  Yes, a lot of improvements have been technological but there has been much groundbreaking in writing, directing, acting, etc.

A good place to look for evidence of this look at is TV.  20 years ago you couldn't have had such great dramas as Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Dead Like Me, Battlestar Galactica, (the original was cool and all but the new one is a far deeper enterprise), Alias, Lost, Heroes, etc.  TV wasn't there yet.  This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with changes in the market, changes in the audience and improvements in the craft.

Your argument, AGAIN, is to cherrypick the worst movies from one generation and pit them against the best from a prior generation.  That's great and all but there still has been an overall increase in the average depth and maturity of the movies we watch, especially if you realize that actually, Aliens is pretty recent in the overall lifetime of moviemaking. 


As far as Chrono Trigger's gameplay, I think you've forgotten it or that you are still in a nostalgia-induced altered reality.  There is absolutely zero character customization.  A very paltry list of possible actions you can do in combat.  Of the list of things that you can do, most things are just repeats.  You basically have either: a way to do damage, a way to do damage to more than one person or a way to heal.  That is IT.  Nice game, great for the time, huge nostalgia kick ... yeah, all that's true.  And it's also true that we've moved quite a bit beyond that now, and thank goodness for that.

I'm trying to say that "deeper" is better.  Go, for example, isn't a very complex game (I can teach you the rules in a few minutes).  However, it is a very deep game.

I think that over the lifetime of videogames, there has been a lot of trial and error with developers trying to take an existing genre and add some twists to it.  A lot of that has failed and there have been many shitting games made.  However, a fair bit of it has also succeeded and has been incorporated into the genre.  A game comes along and does something different and it works really well and then that becomes a staple of the genre.  Also, some genres become obsolete and some new genres show up.  Overall this has lead to better games with time.  That's not to say that there still aren't plenty of shitty games being made, that goes without saying (but there were always shitty games being made, you can't talk about games from older generations and only talk about the SMB's without talking about the ET's, etc.).

Overall, my claim is, that the best games from this generation are significantly advanced from and superior to the best games from the generation of 15-20 years ago.  Yes, some of those older games are still great games and yes I do play some of them still.  However, a lot of games have a reputation they've carried over from when they came out and are compared, not to games now, but where games were at then.  We owe a debt to those games for helping to get us to where we are at now.  But I think an honest and frank comparision will make it clear that you know, we've seen quite a bit of improvements overall.

I won't get into the retro arguement thing except to say that with a few tweaks some older games are not only the equal of most modern games, but are their betters.
And bitching about Chrono Trigger for having a generally all ages appropriate story and OMG NOT ENOUGH CHARACTER OPTIONS is not only retarded, but REALLY REALLY RETARDED.
Its like whining that Wing Commander doesn't have Newtonian Physics and thus is an inferior space dogfight game to say Jumpgate which does.  (I would say that realistic spaceflight games are completely unfun and missing the fucking point of getting in a hot space fighter, making the pew pew laser sounds and blowing away space kitties.)

But what I wanted to mention was more back to the original whines in this thread (or one similar) where Schild cried because he couldn't control Metal Slug Anthology the way he wanted.
If he had taken a minute of his time to open the lovely color manual he would have seen multiple control options for the game, including one where you use a Gamecube controller and no grenade flicking is required.

It's improved in 80 years, but sure as hell not in 20 years. Or even 50 years. What storytelling innovations have been brought to the table? Everything still has a beginning, middle, and end act. Most narratives still follow the protagonist-within-a-struggle-meets obstacles-resolves crisis formula. Non-narrative/portrait pieces still haven't improved upon James Joyce. Even seemingly innovative ideas like Dogme95 aren't doing anything different than confrontational "reality" theater popular since the art itself began. Acting theories are still based on and will be perennially in debt to Stanislavsky and Chekhov (and that's turn of the century shit). What director has been improved upon the photography and spaciousness of John Ford, the room angles of Welles? Who works with actors better than Kazan? And don't even get me started on Hitchcock or Kurosawa.

The only thing that's changed are themes. But that's about as significant as changes in wardrobe and hairstyle. That's not innovation. That's just the passage of time.

[EDIT] And personally, I can't think of any sci-fi shows or movies that are significantly better than the Twilight Zone or Metropolis. And Deadwood has jack and shit on Sergio Leone (film/tv differences aside). I won't find a sexier babe in a threesome story than Rita Hayworth in Gilda, a better WWII flick than the Young Lions, a better corporate warfare + kidnapping story than High and Low, or a better self-parody of Hollywood than Sunset Blvd (as good as the Player was....).

Well pretty much all of your comparisons I just completely disagree with.  No, most of those TV shows were not in the league of the stuff I am watching today.  I'm not a huge film junky but those I've talked to can't stop talking about all the innovations in directing that have happened over the past 20 years.  Things like scoring for movies, which is a very important aspect of setting mode, has completely changed.  While you can maybe point out a dozen or so movies from 20 years ago that stand out as "just as good" as similar movies today I think they are the exceptions not the rule.

But whatever.  You have your taste, I have mine and so I guess I will agree, if you will, to disagree.

On to Chrono Trigger: character development is an important aspect of RPG's for me.  Proabably the most important one.  Chrono Trigger had none of that.  It also had exactly the same combat system that nowadays we pile nothing but scorn upon.  WoW's combat system, which a lot of people think is boring and played out, makes all the combat in Chrono Trigger evident as extremely shallow.

Maybe those things aren't important to you but they are to me and I am very glad to have seen the genre advance to where I can have some of that stuff (and I am still critical of JRPG's in general that they haven't come far enough, but fortunately we also have the descendants of SSI and the original Pool of Radiance in Baldur's Gate, etc. along with a lot of other subgenres of RPG's that have advanced with time).

By the way, the largest change in science fiction in general, that has also made it's way into Sci-Fi on TV and in Film is characterization.

The Twilight Zone is very typical for a period in sci-fi that was fundamentally about ideas and not people.  Sure, some of those ideas did interesting things with characters and people, but nowhere near what, for example, Battlestar Galactica does with its characters.

And there has been a trend in general away from black and white, archetypical characters to "gray" characters with realistic and mutable motivations in almost every field that involves narrative.  That is evident in just about every brand of fiction and in video games it has come through in a movement away from "good guy vs. bad guy, save the world" stories to stories where you can actually choose whether to be good or evil, whether to save the world or not, etc.

This is a Good Thing.  It is progress.  And I'm very happy about it.  I can't watch all that crap with lopsided, unrealistic characters anymore.  I also don't read Terry Goodkind, et al, anymore becuase I have George RR Martin and Steven Erikson.  Science Fiction has changed tremendously in the last 20 years and if you can't see that well ... I don't know where you've been.

You could find that the modern take on orchestral scoring reached a peak of sorts with Morricone and Bernard Hermann. Some 40 years ago. Watch the closing gunfight scene in For a Few Dollars More. Or the entry of Henry Fonda's character in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Even the use of popular/rock music in scores was already being done with the Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and Mean Streets some 30 years ago. And to great effect. Look at the intro to Johnny Boy (De Niro) in Mean Streets, when Scorsese kicks in Jumpin' Jack Flash. Half of the directors who cram rock music into their films these days don't even use shit that's relevant to the scene. Scorsese did it better way back when (and still does).

Lost and Alias are supposed to convince me? Lol.

I'll take The Avengers over Alias any time.

Let me make myself clear: I'm not saying that old things are better. There are plenty of old things I liked and then I go back and see them and yeah, they kind of suck. But there are plenty of old things in all mediums that still kick ass. To think otherwise is silly. The argument that the state of the art has advanced really doesn't hold weight for books, movies, painting, sculpture, architecture, tv, comics - why should it for games?

As others have pointed out, new technology can often distract. John Carpenter's Thing is awesome in part because the effects are all done with animatronics, models, etc. Make The Thing today and there is no chance it would be as good. Science fiction literature peaked in the 50s-70s. Shouldn't todays science fiction be better? Well it isn't. Things are more complicated than newer = better.

Now video-games are heavily tied to technology, so tech improvements do often lead to game improvements. I don't think there are many games from the Atari era you can truly say are fun today. A handful but that is probably it. But from the NES era on you can find plenty of fun games.

I went to the Museum of Televsion and Movies (I think that is what it was...) in New York over the summer with a girl I knew, we spent about 20 minutes playing the original Asteroids and Combat. (She kicked my ass in Combat...I was ashamed) She had never played either before. That isn't nostalgia. Asteroids is fun! It has funky high-res vector graphics that leave weird after-images, an interesting control scheme that takes a lot of skill...

---

To say that old RPGs were simple if wrong on many levels. First, aren't the Bethesda CRPGs of today basically the same as they were ten years ago? Daggerfall and Oblivian really are not very different at all. Second, one of the reasons the FF series started to go downhill was adding complexity for the sake of adding complexity, where each game had to have some new "systems" for the sake of having them. And as for the childish plot...what gives away the childishness? Is it when you go to a village to deliver some gift in good faith and it ends up killing everyone in town? Is it when the twins turn themselves to stone to save their friends? Again, dress these games up with modern graphics and sensibilities and we would be hearing about the awesome dramatic story. It is pretty remarkable that these are all-ages games because some truly messed-up shit happens in them.

---

We have reached a point as a medium and as an audience where we are past newer = better. People are realizing that Street Fighter 2 might just be better than Street Fighter 3, that Aliens vs Predator is better than Final Fight: Streetwise. That N64 wrestling games were more fun than any games that followed it. That isn't to say that all old things are better. Silent Hill is a lot better than Friday the 13th for the NES...

Look at how the DS is doing. The DS is basically a portable SNES. Games like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Super Robot Wars, Castlevania, New Super Mario Brothers - these are all essentially 16-bit era games. Tactics Ogre is still the most deep and complex SRPG game ten years after it came out.

---

It isn't "nostalgia" to say that Raiders of the Lost Ark is better than National Treasure. Or going back much further to say that Casablanca is better than The Good Shepard. The ancient Greeks knew the world was round in 500 BC. Newer just isn't better.

Open-minded people with an eye towards quality and an appreciation for history don't limit themselves to the newest trends. Recording tech improvements mean that KMFDM and Iron Maiden pale compared to Shakira? Materials science makes the Chrysler Building an eyesore now? Hardly.

I'm not some crazy wide-eyed loon raving about how Defender is the best game ever made...I'm just pointing out that games like SMB3 are still quite enjoyable. Contra 3 is better than 99% of games that come out today.

Personally it makes me very happy to see things like the Virtual Console, re-releases of classic games, compilations, etc. People are realizing that you don't have to limit yourself to what came out in the last 6 months. To me that means the audience is becoming *more* sophisticated.

I dunno. Disgaea 1/2 is more complex than Tactics Ogre (and I adore tactics ogre). It may be more complex in a shallow way with a heftier grind, but the class system + item world (especially Disgaea 2), really complicates the shit out of stuff.

Still cherry-picking.  Both of you.

I know Alias was a borderline choice, but what of the other ones.  Say what you will of Lost but it spent way more time developing characters than any TV series could have done 10, let alone 20, years ago, and has far more sophisticated/realistic motivations.  You couldn't put stuff like that on TV 10 years ago even if you wanted to, the audience wasn't there yet.

As far as music, you're on crack still.  Sure, some movies made ok uses of music more than 20 years ago.  How many?  Very, very, very few.  Now even that guy using a few random rock songs that he likes has far more effective scoring than well 99 out of 100 movies 20 years ago.

Except that most of these have advanced.  The older arts advance more slowly or through creating new subgenres but they still advance.  At some point a given technique does tend to plateau.  But games are still very new.  Some things (like platformers) have plateaued to some extent but a lot of genres are still under tremendous change.


Hell no.  See my above post.


Asteroids is fun.  Sure.  And yet the genre of shooters is far deeper today than that.  An aside: just the other day I saw an asteroids game where you play the asteroids instead of the ship.  Cool idea.


Stop cherry picking already.  Do you think proves anything at all?

And stop talking about the "newer = better" mentality.  That's not where I am coming from.  I don't care about graphics one iota and there are lots of crappy graphics games that I love.  I loved Hack/Rogue for a very long time.  It's not about that.  It's about 20 years of taking the ideas that we had and evolving them.  Game developers would have to be complete idiots not to have learned from that.  Here's a hint: they're not.  We can still make asteroids and super mario brothers today.  But we have a lot of other options and tweaks that make those genres even better.  Everything we did yesterday we can still do today.  The difference is, that there are now a lot of new things that we didn't know to do yesterday that we can do today.

People will still be whistling the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly theme, imitating the Shower Scene Screech from Psycho, doing a cover of Knockin' On Heaven's Door, jam to Shaft, bobbing their head to the Third Man soundtrack, instantly recognize the 007 theme, or EVEN (and I hate to say this) singing the tunes from West Side Story 50 years from now more than some bullshit Good Charlotte soundtrack for the latest That's So Raven! episode.

And for the record, the 70's had the most kickass sitcom title songs ever. Hello? Barney Miller? Fat Albert? Sanford and Son?  :-P

You should really get out more.

(http://helterskelter93.1.free.fr/alphaville/alphaville4.jpg)

Nobody can deny that Repo Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/) has one of the best movie soundtracks (http://www.amazon.com/Repo-1984-Film-Various-Artists/dp/B000002PF7) evar.   :-D

If that's cherry picking, then so be it.

No, the Repo Man soundtrack is the shit.

Been jonesing for a Plugz album forever. Those guys kick ass. Whoever they are.

You guys are obviously confusing the quality of the music used for the quality of how the music IS used.  I love the graduate soundtrack because I like Simon & Garfunkel.  I don't think that was a very good example of actually integrating film and music, however.  It used to be that good integration of sound and film was an exception, now we take for granted what would have been amazing a while ago.

I think that's at the core of why we get all nostalgic about this stuff.  First impressions matter big and you know, those few movies that were exceptions a while ago stood out.  Nowadays we just expect all that stuff and so we take it for granted when we get it and don't give as much credit.

But anyway, time to start cooking Christmas Eve dinner.

No, that Mean Streets scene is done exactly how good pop soundtracks are done now. Johnny Boy's intro into the bar is meant to give you the impression that he's a wild fuckup - and the Stones have that line bursting through "I was born in a crossfire hurricane...." Scorsese deliberately integrated the song's message into the scene.

It's the same way he makes soundtracks today (say, in Good Fellas). The Graduate, I'll grant you, doesn't integrate music as well (except at the end, with Hoffman's frantic rush towards the wedding, and Mrs. Robinson playing in the background), but Scorsese is the prototype of all that came afterwards. Most people think it's Tarantino or some stupid shit.

As for orchestral stuff, Morricone and Hermann. Like I said. There is no argument here.

Hahaha. Fucking YouTube. I can find anything.  8-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNZ9s00tKBQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNZ9s00tKBQ)

Nearly every entrance in a 60s or 70s film (all the way up to the mid 80s) felt like a softcore porn.

But then, most of them were.

When I was a little preschool age shit, my favorite show in the world was Barney Miller.  I still find that song oddly comforting.

Man, that scene is the money shot. It's hardcore.

Johnny Boy owes a fuckton of money to loansharks. Charlie's pissed 'cause Johnny Boy hasn't showed up to settle things. Cue Johnny Boy coming in with two babes, a new suit, a new hat, a new coat, that song blaring, and no money left to give. Charlie's pissed to high hell now.

Context or not, still looked like softcore porn. I've probably seen any movie you throw down with and even if I like them and can place exactly what's going on, doesn't change what it looked like. Of course, clothing back then was just horrible.

Porn and funny collars aside, this clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z6NCNXDN4) is probably up Gabe's alley, since it's a bigger sequence (10 minute long paranoia sequence from the end of Good Fellas, which I'm sure everyone's seen). Technically, it was made 19 years ago, but what the hell...Same old director. He was adding atmosphere and mood through rock music before....Whoever the hell does it now.

1986, 20 years ago, Michael Mann made Red Dragon. Pivotal scene used In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida if I remember correctly. It was not softcore porny.

Some people still do it, but it's few and far between since most rock doesn't quite fit the bill. Though the Stones stuff in Fallen worked nicely.

Apparently anything we can possibly say is "cherry picking." Mentioning the new Battlestar Galactica however is somehow not cherry-picking. Very self-serving logic.


Is this an attempt at humor? Lost has basically zero character development at all. Crappy flashbacks do not equal character development. As far as sophisticated and realistic - lol? Two words I would not associate with Lost in a million years. If you like Lost like it for what it is - a pulp serial.

Another point you continually gloss over - how is it nostalgia if you've never played the games before? I got into Deep Purple and Rainbow in 1998 or so, having never heard them before that. Is that nostalgia? How can it be? I didn't see the first Alien until about 5 years ago. Nostalgia again? Shouldn't I be nostalgic for Event Horizon instead? Was I nostalgic for Super Baseball 2020 even though I'd never played it before? Odd.

My dad recently died and today I was looking through his computer. Guess what I found? A Genesis emulator. Guess my dad was full of the old nostalgia - you know, having never played any games past the Coleco-vision era. What do you call nostalgia for things you've never done before? Deja-nostalgia?

I've already mentioned numerous examples of games I didn't play until well after release. How can it be nostalgia when you are encountering something for the first time?

Your entire argument seems to be that no matter how many counter-examples we can throw out they are ALL "cherry-picking." Whereas you can make vague statements like "film scoring is more advanced now" without *any* examples and that passes as a real argument.

How many examples do we need to not be cherry-picking anymore? 10? 100? 1000? This is just weak. And it doesn't even support your argument. If we can list numerous cherries that means those games are not about nostalgia at all!

You: "People only like good games because of nostalgia!"
Us: "What about X, Y and Z?"
You: "Those don't count."

Um...ok. So your point appears to be that some people like some old things because of nostalgia...or something...

I'm not going to touch the whole TV/Movies/Music/Whatever subject, because I don't know that much about it, but I think that with regards to video games, at least, there is a general trend towards better games.  Not as fast as some people would like, maybe, but I do think we make better games today than ten, twenty years ago.

For example, there was a remake of the original Final Fantasy for the GBA, I think.  It was pretty much identical to the NES version, except that the level grind was cut way down, the UI was reconfigured a bit to be more user friendly, some bonus dungeons were added, and the graphics were updated.  It came on the same cart as a similar remake of FF2.  If it's ever possible to objectively say "game X is better than game Y" then I think this would be one of the clearer cases you could make.  And this kind of thing is not unique; if there was a game that was even remotely successful back in the day, there's a pretty good chance that someone, somewhere, has either updated it or ripped it off and improved on it just a smidge.  Most people probably won't like it as much, because it's not as impressive seeing it for the hundredth time with one more cherry on top, but the new game is still better, from a certain point of view (which I assume is the one Gabe is advocating).

A lot of game design revolves around the technical restrictions of the hardware the game is running on, and a lot of game design (especially the niggling little user friendliness aspects) is iterative.  Both of these are progressive.  If you take the original Metroid, it's got a ton of areas for improvement.  Some of these are technical (graphics, basic design, some control issues), some are just a result of us knowing what people find fun (apparently people don't like to have to sit around shooting spineys for an hour to fill up their energy tanks) or intuitive (why can't Samus duck?).  Today, game designers know this (which is, for example, how we get things like Metroid: Zero Mission) and they can do their jobs accordingly (hopefully).

I don't think that all old games are inferior to all new games, though.  I do think that we have the capability to make better games today than we did a while ago.  A lot of old games are still really good simply because nobody has done it better, for some reason or other, or they've screwed up when they tried to.  Daggerfall, in my opinion, is an example of this.  It's not something I've seen done better anywhere.  But I still think it could be done better today.  And while there are a few times when that "could" doesn't translate to an actual product, there are a lot of times when it does.  I can count the number of NES titles that I really love today on one hand.  As the release date gets closer to the present day, though, the number of games I like goes up.  So it's not like I hate all my Genesis games, but the number of Genesis games I actually enjoy is much lower than the number of PS2 games I enjoy (and the PS2 is my least favorite of the last gen systems).  That, to me, suggests that games are getting better.

I don't think that's a valid example imo, if valve took HL1 and threw in a new weapon and release it today they wouldn't get away with it. However if took the exact same formula and updated it to fit todays market  and tech they would, in fact that's exactly what they did with HL2. They even kept the freaking load times between areas, it's virtually the same game with updated technology.


This is where you're wrong, I can name a bazillion games from "back in the day" that was really popular and haven't been updated or ripped off, at least not for ages. Lets name a few: Syndicate, Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Speedball, Death Rally, Strike series, Dungeon Keeper, River city ransom etc. I bet you there were way more diversity and waaaay more genres back in the days.


If you compare Super Metroid from the SNES to the new ones to nintendo hand helds, the SNES one is still better in pretty much every regard.


If you count number of good games vs number of bad games for PS1 and PS2 I think it would be somewhere around the same for me. If you count it for games from the past I think there were more good games per bad game. I played a lot more in the past than I do today, A LOT. Is this because I've grown tired of games in general? No, I really hunger for games, but there's so very very few that can satisfy me today.

Manhunter, but based on Red Dragon, with all of the references to Red Dragon removed in post. And the footage lost/destroyed.  :cry:

Right. Manhunter. I should watch that again. I didn't think much of him when I watched it, but I've since grown an appreciation for Brian Cox (he still wasn't better than Hopkins though).

What people will do get a Wii (http://www.lolitron.org/2006/12/24/mom-offers-250-and-a-blowjob-for-a-wii/)!

That's kind of the point.  If they took HL1 and added a few new weapons, who would care?  Who would consider it better than the original?  Almost nobody who played the original would.  But if you took someone who hasn't played the original, who can objectively evaluate both games, then they'd probably say the new one is better (because it's got more stuff).  And while I can't flat out say that this new person is right and the old one is wrong, it seems like the new person would be less suceptible to nostalgia.

Although you do make a good point about there being more diversity back in the day.  I kept trying to rationalize it ("River City Ransom is really just a poor version of... um... X-Men Alliance, maybe?") but yeah... I suppose I'll concede that one.

edit: for clarity

I certainly agree that some old games could use some cosmetic/interface updates. For example in the (one of the?) FF remakes they upped the walking speed. Very simple change that makes it much more playable. I'm all for making those sorts of changes in re-releases. Some other changes like adding jobs to FFV seem to be messing around just for the sake of messing around.

If there are very simple things you can do in a re-release to make the game play better I'm all for that. But there are plenty of old games that are playable without any tweaks at all.

---

On same level it makes sense to think that we *can* make better versions of old games, and in fact we can. But that doesn't mean we always do. I liked F-Zero X better than the GC version. (Mostly because of the number of cars onscreen and I love games that have you drive in traffic) Nintendo could have made the GC version an upgraded N64 version, and in many ways the GC version is much nicer with a story mode, customizable cars, etc. But in the end the N64 version is just more fun.

Many people prefer old wrestling games to new ones. Again, someone could just make newer versions of those old games - but often they don't. The same is true in all mediums.

Technology improves ever-upwards but artistry does not.

Features and tweaks don't qualify a better "game" to me. It's whether the core gameplay has changed or not that makes the biggest difference. And it's that area where I think many old school games haven't really been improved upon much.

I do think that technology has opened up the possibility of gameplay ideas, but not by much. First Person Shooters, for example, brought new ideas -- but then again, not anything totally revolutionary. Rail and scrolling shooters (from Operation Wolf to Duck Hunt to Space Harrier), flight sims, and space sims offered some of that experience already.

Or take Ico, for example. Great game, but it doesn't feel that different to me than Out of this World or Flashback. The basic idea is the same, despite technology or perspective changes.

Katamari Damacy or Gish, on the other hand, seem like totally unique ideas. I can't think of anything from the past quite like them. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Gish was a platformer with some neat physics based attributes.

KD on the other hand shockingly original. Line Rider is fairly original as wel.

Maze Wars, written back in 1974 (for the networked version), was the first FPS.

Lord, reading all this "old games rock/suck" stuff is really making me pine for The Goonies 2. That was a game I loved on the old NES. Give me that, Zelda 1, and Metroid 1 and I'm a happy camper. Hell, if it was avaialble on the virtual download list for Wii that'd tip me towards buying the system.

They are very different. Each generation gets more simplistic and shiny.

I'd like to see Arena and Daggerfall in Oblivion's engine, though.

Were we playing the same games? Daggerfall was much more simplistic than Oblivion. NPCS? Literal cardboard cutouts with cut and paste "dialogue". Dungeons? Totally random. Quests? Sort of.

About the only thing Daggerfall had on Oblivion is that the world felt bigger, but it was also extremely shallow.

Daggerfall is more complex than Oblivion in some ways at least.  Hard for me to recall, unfortunately, but I do remember going crazy as a werewolf without buying an expansion.  I seem to remember a greater diversity in equipment and character options.  The Morrowind spellmaker was not more complex than the Daggerfall one.  Morrowind had light/medium/heavy armor types while Oblivion cut that down to light/heavy.  If there's a way to fly in Oblivion, I haven't found it.  Of course, they are spending more resources on making the world pretty and fitting it into a console these days.

If you take up the stance that Daggerfall was buggy as hell and very generic, you are correct.  We can compare Morrowind to Oblivion instead.

When the 360 came out there was an ad on Craigslist in which a single mom offered her anal virginity for a 360.

She was lying.

About the virginity, I mean.

Damn, that's one expensive blowjob!

The thing is she is apparently giving the head and 250 for a system, which is kind of opposite.

And even if its a joke its still a sad commentary on sex and greed and consumer whoredom.

But I am one of those wierd people who thinks sex should mean more than just sex otherwise why not just rub one out and not worry about diseases, pregnancies, or another person which makes me a freak with old fashioned values or something.   :oops:

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me that when the giant that holds up the earth dies, we are screeewwwed!

And reference a genre-wide movement towards character-driven storytelling.  I'm not the only person mentioning that by the way. Talk to well, basically any modern Science Fiction writer.  Yes, there was Roger Zelazny 20 years ago and a few other examples but they were the ones breaking the trend that set us up for we are now.


You seem to be making my point into: "if it is older than 5 years than it is crap."

Tell me where, once, I said that.  I haven't.  There are lots of games that were made well years ago and are still fun to play.  I referenced Go as a great example of a game made thousands of years ago that still stands up.  That doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot of nostalgia for past games.

Instead I have said:

Generally we've made a lot of discoveries over the past 20 years.  If we want to make SMB now, you know what, it isn't that hard and you know, we can and do go a lot further. Game development, as a craft, has improved tremendously.

And, a lot of games that get a lot of rabid fanboyism get it only because of when they were made and really, don't stack up very well to modern standards.  That's nostalgia.  Enter Chrono Trigger, a great game for it's time, which has a non-existent plot and non-existent gameplay by today's standards.

Meanwhile we have genre-wide trends like trends towards character-driven plot in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  New techniques that significantly augment past genres.  Take a look at the rock-skipping scene in Amelie and tell me that it wouldn't have been a big deal to do that in a movie 20 years ago (and now it's expected).  To keep on gaming, consider how it's now possible to prototype quite sophisticated 2d games in mere days (which means that your design cycle gets try out a lot more possibilities and is responsible in part for the dramatic growth of the casual games market).

Note that a game like God of War is really the direct descendant of a game like Double Dragon and that it's pretty much impossible not to notice a significant increase not only in graphical capabilities but game making.

If you weren't entrenched in a certain mindset I'm not sure why any of this would be the least bit controversial.

That stuff 20 years ago got credit because the competition wasn't there.  It was easy to be revolutionary and different in that scene.  Now it's a lot harder to do.  But that is an indication of just how far we've come!  Stuff that was awesome 20 years ago is just old hat now because we've covered so much other ground in the meantime.

That isn't what you said at all. Stop trolling. Is this a fucking Geldon "cross your fingers and pray nobody can scroll up" attempt? Everyone here can read what you said, and it wasn't confined to obvious statements about craft.

Here is a question for you: why isn't someone making a SMB3 game? At least for the DS? New Super Mario brothers is not even close to SMB3. Why isn't someone making a better Aliens? A better Casablanca?

The craft has improved but making games is not simply craft. You can't seem to wrap your brain around that. What games have you made that are better than SMB3? Please list them or stop talking. You do work in games right? So you don't have any excuse when your list has zero items in it. With all the fancy tech and craft you should be able to make something really great. So why aren't you? Why is it that every game you've worked on is far worse than the old tech we are all so nostalgic for? Feel free to prove me wrong. We both know you won't.

Sorry to make it personal, but if you are going to claim that anybody can make something that good and you work in games the followup question is rather obvious.



Is having trends by itself a great thing? No. In twenty years are you going to be telling us that the awesome new trend in sci-fi is plot-based stories and how everything that isn't plot-based is lame? I would assume so.

As for the rock-skipping scene in Amelie -

Ok. You got me. You win. That scene is the single greatest scene in cinema. Your other examples were all weak but you've now shown you are a true film and arts scholar. Other movies may have better plots, characterization, dialog, pacing, set design, lighting, effects and cinematography but Amelie has rock skipping. WOW.

It is really a shame that 20 years ago nobody could make a film as good as Amelie. It is obviously entirely safe to say that any film made before Amelie was in fact crap compared to it, due to a lack of rock-skip technology.

Amelie, on the day it was released, was the greatest film of all time. Only recently eclipsed by Happy Feet which could clearly never have been done 20 years ago. Did you know that the computers used to render a single frame of Happy Feet could compute all the effects for Citizen Kane in 20 nanoseconds?

Edit: You've consistently demonstrated that you can't distinguish between art and craft. Your world-view simply does not fit with the actual world around us. The best science-fiction is not being written today. The best comics are not being written today. The best movies are not being filmed today. The best paintings are not being painted today. The theory you've espoused is that all these mediums should be at their ever-increasing peak in the present, because technology and techniques evolve and people learn over time. The best architecture is right now? The best sculpture is right now? The best playwrights are writing right now, as we speak?

Your argument is logical on some level but fails the very important "get your head out of your ass and look around" test.

Watch that scene.  Watch the director's commentary to see all the crazy shit he did.  And tell me it wouldn't have been a "holy shit" scene 20 years ago.  And now it's so blaise in comparision to everything else we're accustomed to seeing (i.e. our expectations have risen to such an extent) that you can bitch me out about it and think you're somehow not an idiot. 

That's all nostalgia is.  Something blew your fucking mind 20 years ago and you still remember that feeling.  Nowadays it's easy to reproduce that and in fact it's even boring to reproduce that level of quality but you still have that feeling from when it was new.  New stuff comes out and you know, it's good, even better, but you don't have that "oh my god" moment with it and it's easy to dismiss it as nothing.  Like the Lost storytelling.  You know I don't even like Lost that much compared to other stuff out there.  But I'm open-minded enough to understand that it still represents a trend of much greater characterization in narratives and it says a lot that this finally reached, mainstream, network TV.

Whatever.  We disagree.  Not really a surprise.  I'm not sure why I expected someone to try and have a greater perspective on their SMB3 fanboyism.

As for Science Fiction, well fuck your Science Fiction of 30+ years ago.  I can't stand any of it.  Why, again, am I supposed to think that yet another book about blowing up aliens or robots is interesting?  If you want to talk old-school, concept/idea-based Sci-Fi then I'm sorry but I still really don't think that any of the old guys hold a candle to guys like Greg Egan, David Brin or Vernor Vinge.  After reading George RR Martin, Steven Erikson or even Terry Pratchett there is very little fantasy older than about 15 years old that I can get through the first chapter of.  Fuck your effeminate elves, your grizzled but jolly dwarves and your annoying little hobbits.  And that isn't even to mention all the fantastic character-based Sci Fi that started hitting the scenes 20 years ago and actually is the norm these days.  Neil Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Greg Bear, just the first 3 names I hit on my book shelf....

Prediction.

Schild:  Nintendo, you are dead to me motherfucker!

Nintendo:  Announcing new lime green scratch-and-sniff Nintendo DS!

Schild:  Ooooo shiny!

He's not boycotting hardware, though, only software, and only Nintendo in-house software that he doesn't like.

If you are meaning to tell me the novel Starship Troopers sucks I WILL SKULLFUCK YOU WITH YOUR OWN DICK.
Are you also trying to say Dune, The Forever War, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the works of Jules Verne are shit or at least inferior to modern novels?
Are you trying to say HP Lovecraft, Tolkien, Bloch, and Moorcock are lame?
Is the Illuminatus! Trilogy shit because other folks have written mad conspiracy novels since then?

I say no.
Well, that and you are a fucking MORON StGabe.

Even many creators made their older stuff better.  Old Anne Rice beats her new pretensious quasi porn.  Master of Puppets Metallica still rips the shit out of anything they have done post Black Album.  Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns beats anything he has attempted to do with Batman since.

Did you really just put SMB3 in the same paragraph with Aliens and Casablanca? BTW, citing movies that were amazing in their genres doesn't support your theory that nothing good is done today, it only points out a couple of bright spots.


You realize that almost every argument you have made here is nothing more than your opinion stated as fact don't you? Frankly, some of the older science fiction was pretty good, especially Aasimov and Heinlein, but the vast majority of it was crap, much like today. And like those days, you can find good science fiction if you sift through the crap.

Some comics of today, have had runs that were better than the so-called Golden Age and Silver Age. Again, gems in a sea of crap.

The best movies have come and gone huh? Did you even see the LOTR trilogy? There is some good shit out there. Yes, it too is in a sea of crap, but that's just like the old days. Guess what? The year Casablanca was released? A whole lot of shit that really sucked got released too. But all you know about is Casablanca so you put on these rose-colored glasses and pine for the good old days of film making.

Etc, etc with the rest of your rant. You keep cherry picking good stuff from the past, and drawing the conclusion from that, that it was all good stuff. SMB3 may have been a good game, but there were just as many shitty games around then as there are today.

Are you getting the point yet?

Dune was pretty good. Each book in the series got progressively worse as Frank Herbert gradually lost his mind. I never read the Forever War. Dracula and Frankenstein were decent, but not worth reading more than once. They were too much a product of their times and very simplistic in many ways compared to modern novels. Especially Dracula. Frankenstein has IMO aged much better because Mary Shelley was better able to see the world in shades of grays rather than the simplistic black and white of Dracula. Jules Verne was imaginative as hell, however, his books are very difficult to read these days due to being fairly dry. Good, but in a more intellectual sense, than in a "god I love this and can't put it down" sense.

Out of the fantasy authors I only read Tolkien. His books were good, but they had flaws. The man couldn't write action scenes to save his life and sometimes got bogged down in a bit too much description and prose. What saved the LOTR trilogy, was his strong characterization, and world-building skills.


Ummm..Anne Rice's novels have always been pretentious quasi porn. Usually pretentious bisexual quasi porn. No comment on Metallica as I only ever liked one album of theres. (The one with Of Wolf and Man I think the song is called.) No comment on Frank Miller's Batman other than to say Batman Year One seems to be pretty good.

The DS is actually a nice piece of equipment.

Aren't you supposed to be arguing at some point that Amelie was actually a good movie?

You are like the EQ2 guys who rave about their graphics tech then put out crappy graphics. Despite all the tech we have today the overall quality of movies isn't improving. In fact due to a cash grab at certain demographics it is likely regressing. What happened in Amelie may have been technically impressive but that is as far as it goes.



I have pointed out 50 fucking times that people can enjoy old games they have never played before. You fail. You also still refuse to distinguish between art and craft. Craft can be reproduced, art not so much.

I'm going to ask again, what have you made that is SMB3 quality? I'm guessing nothing. It should be easy to reproduce right? But I would bet anything you could never reproduce it. Note I'm not saying make game that is "the SMB3 of today." I mean make a game that is the SMB3 of back then.



And I don't know why I expected reading comprehension from an internet troll. Let's go over this one more time:

If you can play an old game now, for the first time, and like it, that is not nostalgia. It just isn't. You can't grasp that at all can you? This is 3rd grade logic.


You are basically a know-nothing. Do you realize that elves, dwarves and hobbits are fairly modern? Apparently not. I hate that shit too, but guess what - the whoring out of elves and dwarves is a modern phenomenon.

if you read things by Robert Howard, L. Sprague De Camp (and pals, that entire circle of guys), Lovecraft, Philip Jose Farmer, etc etc, you aren't going to see any Dwarves. It is hilarious to see you raging against that old-timey garbage when in fact that garbage is recent! You aren't going to see any elves in To Your Scattered Bodies Go. (Although you will see a caveman)


Greg Bear is hard science fiction. I don't think you even get the terminology you are using. I was actually going to mention Bear earlier as a counter-example. Bear is one of the main drivers of the moves towards hard science. To characterize Bear as character-driven sci-fi is absurd.

I think you have a very shallow understanding of the history of various mediums. Clearly you don't know much about science fiction or fantasy. You knowledge of movies seems to be what your friends have told you. "Modern directors have a lot more tricks up their sleeves!" "Film scoring has come a long way!!" (Who scored Titanic? The same guy who did Aliens...you've yet to say what about film scoring today is better...)

It is easy to wave your hands and say that old sci-fi is about fighting robots and aliens and old fantasy is about Elves and Dwarves, but neither of those is at all accurate. Sure, stuff like the E. E. Doc Smith's "Lensman" series is classic alien fightin' sci-fi, and those books are nearly unreadable today except for a laugh. (Spoiler: The ultimate enemy is - a giant brain!!) Old science-fiction has a lot of that, especially in the 50s. (?) But that is hardly all old science-fiction. If you pick up a couple of "Fantasy and Science Fiction" monthlies from the 60s and 70s you see a huge range of topics and writing styles. The diversity of voices is really incredible.

You sound like a guy who read Dragonlance books in the 80s and that's your exposure to "older" fiction. I feel sorry for you because you are missing out on a lot of good stuff.

But that isn't my point! Plenty of good things are done today. My point is only that plenty of good things were done yesterday as well. That's it.

I'm not raving that the golden age of everything was years ago and mumbling about "kids today..." Plenty of great stuff comes out today. George R. R. Martin is great. Silent Hill is great. (The game, not the movie)

Over the life of a medium quality can wax and wane, it doesn't just increase upwards. And there are always gems from the past, that stand up not because of nostalgia but because of quality. To me it seems crazy that anyone could think otherwise.



Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me? Again, my argument is not 'older = better.' My argument is just that newer isn't always better, just because it is newer. In something like computers that is true because computers are almost purely technology driven, and technology does increase upwards pretty steadily. (At least in the short term ignoring say the middle ages...) Artistic mediums don't follow Moore's Law. The technology behind the art may increase but that doesn't make the art itself automatically better.

Walk around Cornell campus and compare the old buildings to the new ones. There is no contest, the older buildings are *far* more impressive.


I find Golden Age comics unreadable.

I don't think you are disagreeing with me. Perhaps in my fervor my argument is a bit obscured. Again, I don't think older things are better, I don't think newer things are better. It depends on the medium, the genre, etc. And of course there are good things from most time periods. Of course I do think that some old things stand up favorably to modern ones and that to dismiss that as nostalgia is silly.

I agree, although I did like God Emperor of Dune. Heretics of Dune hurt my brain.



His short stories (I think I am not mis-remembering here) are quite good and very readable.



Year One came out before DKR I think, or at the latest a couple of years after. I actually prefer Year One to DKR.

I like the Metallica example. If you look at the history of metal it is quite clear that much of the great stuff was done long ago, and that the current metal scene somewhat pales in comparison. Of course there are good bands today but scene was a lot more vibrant and original years ago. You have bands like Iron Maiden leading the NWOBHM, American speed metal from Metallica (I think they are classified as speed metal, I forget), Thrash/Speed from Napalm Death and Slayer, European Power Metal from Helloween followed by a huge host of guys like Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian, etc. You have classic metal from Deep Purple, Raindbow, etc, original Doom-rockers Sabbath. In the mid-90s you get more Doom, Black and Death Metal. (Corrosion of Conformity, Cradle of Filth, Emperor, Opeth, Cathedral, etc - I could be a bit wrong here, not my thing) and also industrial with KMFDM, Fear Factory, FLA, etc.

For the past few years we've been in sort of a "what next?" mode full of knockoffs and hybrds. I would fully expect a list of the best metal bands, songs and performers to be heavily in favor of older things, not because of nostalgia but because those older things just plain kicked ass.

I don't know nearly as much about other forms of music but it sounds at least reasonable to me that The Smiths could be considered the premier, um, emo band even today. (I have no idea what The Smiths are classified as) Or that the best Southern Rock was made 20 years ago.

Some people would classify the Smiths as shoegazers, but.....They didn't really shoegaze. Morrisey acknowledged his audience. Heh.

It's just good guitar driven Britpop to me. Johnny Marr is the shit.

Once again, not "what I don't like" - ALL Nintendo 1st Party console titles. I said it last generation, they need to stop making a third console and stick to portables and be a 3rd party software dev for Sony and MS.

Except that their console has been kicking ass so far. At the rate they're going, they might surpass the 360's numbers soon enough, and that's with Microsoft's head start. I see no reason for Nintendo to turn into Sony's buttboy just yet.

I do agree with you on some things though.

The Gamecube burst out of the gates also. Nintendo consoles always do.

The Wii is NOTHING like the Gamecube.  It did nicely out of the gate.  The Wii is a frigging grandslam out the gate.
It also has the benefit of the DS which started slow yet still frequently sells out in Japan.  (And if it hadn't already won that nation, the Dragon Quest 9 announcement just made it the machine everybody in Japan gets after they pick up their xth generation cellphone.)

Its got the price, its not the same old shit Microsoft and Sony are pushing, its cheaper to develop for, and it even has the retro audience locked up.  The press loves it.  Nearly everyone except the Sony fanboys loves it. 

You don't need to sell 500K copies of a Wii game to cut a profit.  Its easy to develop for basically being an upmoded Gamecube with a new controller. 
Software drives hardware and price drives them both.

Wii would have to seriously fuck up.

So how easy is it? Have you developed for it? afaik a very small fraction of the overall budget is spent on hardware related programming anyway, most is spent on generating actual content for the game.

Yes you said that about EA as well but then you carved out a bunch of exception for yourself -- i.e. you are boycotting all EA games except for the ones you really really want.

Yes, it pains me to say I have purchased one EA game in the last...forever. Sims 2. It pains me that EA has one decent dev house under it's hood and there's only one way to support them. Even then. I'm voting with my wallet... properly.

Good thing for them that they didn't listen to you.

I'm the same way - DICE is the only company I'd want to throw money at, and even now with Battlefield 2142, I don't want my dollars anywhere near that voluntary spyware box.

And yet by buying the Wii but boycotting their console software, aren't you sending them the exact opposite message?

Yea I know, or else they might've saved up the money from portables to do some actual R&D.

The Wii/new Zelda is what drove me to the xxxtreme.

And you have consistently failed to realize (even when I tried to specifically point it out) that I was never saying anything that contradicted this point.  Only that the general level of craft has increased and that a lot of love for past games/movies/literature comes from nostalgia (but not all).

My point about Amelie is not that it's an amazing movie (although it's #35 on the IMDB list of best movies of all time, but hey who's counting) but that there is great cinematography and craft (not just technology) in there that you would have thought was fucking amazing 20 years ago but that you take for granted nowadays and even sneer at.  Because you can.  Because that's how far the state of the craft has advanced.  That was the same point I was making with Lost but you just went into "oh my gosh I'm way too much of a snob to listen to anyone who would cite Lost" mode.  You can't compare Lost to your favorite cult classic, niche hits of the 80's.  You have to compare it to the mainstream hit TV shows of that time.  And if you do you'll see that we now take for granted a whole lot that would have been amazing back then.  Lost may not be a masterpiece or even something that you would watch today but if you compare it to well, all of the pre-1990 hit dramas well, it's obvious that there has been a significant improvement in the ability to create real, lasting stories.  The notion of a drama that dedicated entire episodes to one characters back story, or had series spanning narratives, didn't exist back then in any mainstream format and now it is, "duh, obvious".

You're just pointing out that yes, some good qualilty cult classics exist that managed to deviate from overall trends of the time .  That and you're sniping: I may have been right about 9 out of 10 of the authors I cite but, because I accidentally quoted Greg Bear in the wrong part of a hastily written rant post, I must be 100% wrong.  I agree he's hard sci-fi and I just misedited that section.  Oh noes,  you win 8 points.  Of course if you were trying to listen to anything I was saying you might have gotten past that but no -- you'd rather completely ignore a paragraph because you find one part you disagree with. 

My own snipe: Farmer came way after Tolkien.  He's also the only sci-fi author you mention that is the least bit interesting for me to read these days.  The other guys, and yes I've read at least some of most of those guys, had great historical impact but are just pulp fiction compared to Erikson or Martin.  99.5% of the sci-fi 30 years ago was about blowing up robots and aliens.  And 99.9% of the fantasy has had completely flat characters.  But hey, whatever.  You're a snob.  I mean that's really what all your posts are about -- snobbery.  To you that cult classic is the only thing that matters about 30 years ago and any overall trends in the mainstream are inconsequential.  And so you're completely talking past what I'm saying.  Stuff today is way too damn mainstream to be of interest to a snob.  Amelie, oh my gosh, how could I even go there.  Don't I know that it was loved by millions of people still young and trying to be cool today and therefore is way too mainstream to even be mentioned by any true snob?

Amelie is cool, but it isn't because of mass increase in craft, or because of it's "rock skipping" effects. He could have done the same movie with Tautou, but with the technology and budget of Delicatessen, and it would have still been equal the film. The quality the of film isn't summed by those superficial things.

I got Twilight Princess for the Gamecube for Christmas and am enjoying it so far.  After having played some of Wind Waker and the Ocarina of Time, the controls were pretty much instinctive.  My only real complaint about the interface is that I can't have ready more than two items at a time.  It's not really that important I converse with Minda that she should take up my whole Z-button.

I resisted the urge to name Epona after overly bitter F13 posters.

(http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:hmGEUg_ekKGeTM:http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/oliphant/oa048.jpg)

I'm not referring to the effects but the scene itself.

edit: which as I recall, and maybe I have my scenes confused, has this amazing camera swoop, combined with a lot of color manipulation combined with yes, some digital effects, to make a great movie moment out of what was really just Audrey Tautou and someone else from the crew throwing rocks into water.

I'd rather be a snob than a know-nothing. Being called a snob actually makes me smile, if being a snob means knowing something and having an appreciation for a wide variety of things instead of "LOL Britney's music is the bestest evar!"

This is what you said originally, response to people talking about SNES and Genesis games:


This is what you are saying now:


Yes, the general level of craft has increased. Yes, some love for things in the past is nostalgia. No shit. Also, the sky is blue. You've made your argument much more benign. Originally people were saying "man, SNES and Genesis were great" and you came and in and essentially said "you guys are wrong, you are just looking through rose-colored glasses."

"Man, I like SNES games."
"No. You don't. Or if you do you have an 'inability to adapt.'"

It seems to blow your mind that people can like things that didn't come out yesterday.

I'm a "know nothing" because I mistyped one author's name in a paragraph?  Or because I use mainstream entities as examples?  Or just because my taste is different than yours?  Elucidate, please.


That's entirely true.  There are very few SNES games that I can play for very long right now.  Some of those games I *can* play for a long time which, you know, means that I'm allowing that yes you can cherrypick some examples of specific games that still hold up just fine.  Not sure what isn't clear about that except that you want to pick a fight with the "know nothing" who dares to state that maybe, leaving nostalgia aside, we have actually moved forward quite a bit.

So yes, several times I've allowed that some games from that era are still good.  And yet I still think that most of them (95%+) don't stand up to today's standards and are glorified exactly because they were mind-blowing way back when.  I cited specific examples and the response to that was pretty much just, "dude, FF6 had some sorta dark themes in it" (and I said I didn't remember it well enough and maybe it did).  That doesn't mean those games aren't good games or playable today.  It means that largely what makes them good and playable is taken for granted today.  It's the baseline now instead of being an elusive goal.

But just saying: "yeah, those games did a lot for gaming today, I have great memories of them and you know, some of them are still pretty fun, but gaming has gotten better overall" isn't very sexy.  It isn't very snobby.  It isn't righteously indignant nor does it hearken to the golden days of yore.  It makes me an unwashed heathen.  Yes, it's boring and pragmatic.  But I think it's also true. 

I can look at a list of just the most recent games I've purchased:

Gears of War
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Elebits
Final Fantasy XII
Viva Pinata
Guitar Hero 2
Bully
God of War

And I know that, as great as the NES or SNES was at the time, that I still have far better overall gaming available to me with whatever recent releases are available now.  Except for God of War, all those games I mentioned are releases in the past few months and they are all fantastic games doing stuff that we could only dream of on the SNES.  Not just technically but gameplaywise.

Some of those are good examples of new forms of gameplay (much like Katamari which I mentioned earlier). I wouldn't argue with them. Others I'm not so sure of.

Still though, and here's the main point: They are original for underlying concepts. Gameplay in the abstract sense --- And the abstract is the same reason why someone can appreciate an older game, without getting distracted by the lack of present day technical features or modern sensibilities. It's the same reason why people still play Chess, Checkers, Poker, Tetris, Battleship, or Simon. The fundamental ideas behind those games aren't outshined by the mere passage of time. Games do not work that way.

No, that isn't what happened at all. Revisionist historize much?

You said the FF games had childish plots. When people pointed out you were wrong you said you didn't remember. LOL. That's why I call you a know-nothing. If you didn't remember why did you make your claim in the first place? Just throw some shit at a wall and see what sticks. You cited Oblivian as some new awesome game when it is clearly the same basic game Bethesda has been making for years and years. You said that scoring in movies and cinematic techniques have come a long way because your friends told you so, and the only example you've been able to come up with is totally inconsequential rock-skipping. As far as I can tell your cinema-scoring argument comes down to "rock music FTW!" You claim that "old" fantasy (which you refuse to qualify with any time period) is all Dwarves and Elves and that "old" sci-fi (again without any qualification) is all about aliens and robots (99.5% - very scientific there!) - then cite BSG as an awesome new direction. You know, because it doesn't have any robots. Whereas Ubik is all about robots. Good call. The TV version of The Canterbury Tales is apparently new to you. I call you a know-nothing because you don't seem to know much about anything.


LOL. That's all I can say. You are right, characterization was just invented two years ago.

---

Aren't your "specific examples" just my "cherry-picking"? You've yet to explain why all my examples are the latter and yours are all the former. I think the unspoken rule here is that Gabe gives examples, Margalis picks cherries - by definition. You give a list of games you like and that is valid evidence but my list is cherry-picking. Very convenient.

So what have we learned in this thread?  Well besides that Gabe and Schild don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

Nintendo is awesome.  Old stuff is awesome.

Buying Nintendo systems but not buying Nintendo games to play on it is fucking stupid.

Old stuff has more heart and soul to it.

And the newest bit of info:

I'm so addicted to Ultima games I just bought a 200 dollar Palm PDA just to play Ultima remakes on it.  (And maybe use its actual PDA functions to enhance my tabletop RPG and miniatures stuff.)

But, its all nostalgia right?  Gears of War is just SOOOO much better than anything made before it only nostalgia freaks could dare play an older game..   :roll:

What?

Wow.  Very amusing rewriting of what I said.

I wasn't talking about BSG in the context of blowing up robots/aliens.  That was a different conversation.  Yes, BSG has that.  Hmm, wonder why.  Maybe because it is a revisit of a 30 year old TV series?  And actually, while I applaud its characterization I don't like the tired rehash of blowing up robots.

The statement about elves and dwarves was intentional hyperbole but of course you are really only interested in how many nits you can pick so you wouldn't get that.  That most old fantasy (which I did quanlify as 30+ years old) has flat characters is a statement that I stand by.  That Steven Erikson and George RR Martin are doing things with the genre that have not been done before by anyone is another thing I stand by.

I never said anything at all about rock music and music scoring.  Other people talked about that.  I said that generally I find the average quality of scoring to be much higher these days than in the past and that a few exceptions to that overall rule do not disprove that generally this is true.


I didn't pick one game from this year and one game from that year.  I picked the entire list of games that I have purchased in the last 3-4 months (actually I left out Bookworm Adventures but I was thinking of just console titles).  Of those I listed, all but 1 are new releases.  And all of them include gameplay that wasn't available/possible 20 years ago.  All of them are fantastic games.  And all of them are games I'd rather play than well, any SNES game.  Which isn't, of course, to say that there aren't good SNES games.  It is to say that there are better games now -- for me.

I have no idea, whatsoever, how anyone who isn't in denial, can look at a game list like that, of games all released in the same 3-4 month period, and think that we haven't moved forward from SMB3.

I dunno. Platformers havne't moved very much in the fun factor from Mario 3. And trust me when I say nostalgia isn't my strong suit.

In fact, platformers are probably the poorest evolving genre. You're bad at this.

let's do Metroidvanias next.

Uhh, I agree.  I said as much like 3 pages back.

Overall, however, I feel it is very shortsighted (or nostalgic if you will) not to think that we've come quite a ways since the time when SMB3 was the highpoint of gaming.

The whole conversation started in response to you talking about whether we'd gotten anywhere between the SNES and the Wii and my point is that we have.  In such a manner that we often lose sight of all the improvements we've had.  Because our standards are just a lot higher these days.  And we've forgotten the many, many crap games from back then and just remember the few good ones.

Martin is considered "low fantasy". It's an entire subgenre that's existed at least as far back as Conan (the 30's). There are all kinds of people who have been writing character/personal struggle based stories within fantasy settings for years. It's not an innovative thing.


As far as this subject goes, you're woefully wrong. It's not a "few exceptions". It's you not knowing shit, and talking out of your ass. I hate to go all Margalis on you here, since it's not my style, but I just have to. I've wasted a good deal of my life studying the subject of music, and it's history, including film scores. Wasted. What have you done? Buy a Freddy Got Fingered DVD?

You're either deaf, or just some guy who doesn't expose himself enough to film and music history. Or just the history of art in general.

Back to knitting with you!

lolz. Also, RR Martin isn't doing anything new per se; he's just doing his thing very very well. Same as Paolini.

I also call bullshit on your notion that the only reason I can go back and play games that are not new is because of nostalgia. Link to the Past isn't really that good? Tons of RPGs have heavily surpassed the Baldur's Gate saga? Um, Deus Ex?

And you're supposedly a game developer? What have you developed, another Bejeweled clone?

Actually he listed Baldurs Gate as one of the examples of RPGs that are much better than the nostalgic old RPGs...yeah it doesn't make any sense to me either...


But it's so fun!  :evil:

Everyone pile on Gabe! The idea that character driven fiction is new...is just absurd. As far as things like Lost go, it's a phase. Right now TV is in a serial-story phase. Lost, The Nine, Heroes, BSG, Jericho, etc etc. In a couple of years we'll be on some new phase. That's all it is. Now if this phase appeals to you more than others that's fine, but I wouldn't go off and say it represents some awesome new direction in storytelling. More like trying to duplicate the success of 24.

I do think this is a very good time for the TV drama, but IMO a lot of that has to do with cable. Nearly all the dramas people here (on F13) like are on cable. The Wire, The Shield, Rome, The Sopranos, Deadwood, BSG, Rescue Me. I don't think it is a revolution in storytelling and craft as much as the emergence of something other than the big 3 or 4 networks and their play-it-safe, family-friendly approach.

I think Gabe seriously underestimates things like that - environmental issues that have nothing to do with art *or* craft.

But I will agree that this is a great time for TV drama. But by the same token a terrible time for TV sit-coms.

Edit: I'm still waiting for Gabe to articulate how film scoring today is different and better than it was in the past.

Whatever, you nostalgia-driven hacks!  You couldn't pick up a hooker, get full health, then kill the hooker and get your cash back in the SNES days!  Hurrah for innovation!

 :roll:

The princess was a hooker.  What do you think she was doing in the other castle?

Mario was a "plumber".

Whatever.  You see the thing is, I learned a long time ago that I don't need to be right about everything I say on the internet.  Batting .900 is just fine by me.  You can each take pot shots at the one idea I've mentioned that you disagree with.  You still aren't really responding to most of what I'm saying.  Games, generally, have gotten significantly better in the past 20 years.  A random sampling of the new releases currently available demonstrates an amazing breadth of gameplay not available 20 years ago and in fact, quite a bit more fun that which was available 20 years ago.

None of that says that you can't still have fun playing an SNES games these days.  As I pointed out, I admitted in my very first post that yes there are SNES games that I can play for a long time.  It says that overall, the quality has increased tremendously.

The point is not that you can't play SNES games anymore.  The point is that, in discussions like these, they are given a lot of extra credit just because of they impression they made at the time.  We tend to discount all the great stuff going on right because our standards have increased in the meanwhile.

...

And about Martin:
The notion that Conan is doing the same stuff as Martin.....it boggles the mind.  Yes, I know what low fantasy is and no that isn't what I was talking about.  Conan, now there was a flat character.  I have no idea how the notion of a general improvement in character-driven sci-fi over idea-driven sci-fi has escaped you.  It is exactly the point that Martin is doing what he is doing incredibly well.  That is exactly what hadn't been done before.  Conan existed, low fantasy existed, stories did have characters of some sort or another but the quality fo character development wasn't there.  Fantasy/Sci-Fi was stuck in a cycle of rehashes and flat characters (with some exceptions, but not exceptions that match today's standards) and it finally got out of that, with authors like Martin and Erikson offering up not only fantastic ideas but real, deep characters go with them.  The overall increase in quality is exactly the point.


I agree.  I mentioned quite a ways back that a lot of the improvement in narratives comes from an improvement in the overall maturity of the audience.  This has helped to create new markets that can support greater creativity.

Perhaps you haven't read enough "older" fantasy/sci-fi.

You're simply wrong.

He went from an insecure teenager, to a skull splitting barbarian, to a wandering thief, to a silk adorned patron of the fine arts. One could say that Howard changed him TOO MUCH over time.


You should stop lying. You haven't read any of it.

Gabe, before you reply to Stray....let me just warn you.


Don't fuck with him when it comes to Conan; it'd be like me messing with someone like Abagadro on an issue of law.


In both cases, it would just be fucking stupid.

Pretty soon he'll argue that the Vagina Monologues is a better play than Hamlet.

I'm ready to argue that vagina is better than Hamlet.

Please just stop... fucking... writing.  If your ultimate goal here is to keep being so fucking wrong that the laws of the universe will bend and somehow make you right, I'll let you know in advance that it doesn't work that way.  The only thing you're batting .900 in right now is bullshit.  Please stop embracing ignorance.

Now Velorath is pissed. That's saying something.  :-P

I'm batting a 0.473 in noticing that one man's toilet reading is another man's bible.

He didn't read anything.

If that's what you're saying you're right about :  You're Not Right.

Just so you know.

I think it's more than that.  We've been headed in this direction for a long, long time now and with the advent of the DVD and the soon to come permanent On Demand back catalog you're going to be seeing this push towards continuity and directors working on a bigger canvas a lot more.

The whole point of self-contained, wrap everything up in a pretty bow at the end of the hour episodic content was due to the fact that you needed people to be able to get into your show even if they hadn't been following it from the beginning.  Releasing every show in creation on DVD has altered that structure.  And when we have set top boxes where you can pull up whatever episode of whatever show you want at will (Just you wait, it's coming.  Either in the form of an ad-free pay service or an impossible to skip the ads, but free service, it'll get here.) you'll definitely see the landscape change completely.

You are probably right to some degree, but I expect an eventual backlash as people find it too difficult to follow the continuous storylines of a half-dozen+ shows. As comics have found out, continuity isn't always a good thing, for the consumer or the producer.


Did anyone actually perform this random sampling? Of course not.

I suspect a random sampling would find a lot more sequels and licensed games than it would have found during the SNES days. Prove us wrong. But don't claim that a random sample proves X or Y when you haven't actually done the sampling.

Also why is now 20 years ago? 1986? I'm not sure how much argument you are going to get there.

Whenever I feel disgusted with nintendo, I bring out the N64 and play Ocarina of time.  Good old days...

anyways, I thought gamecube controllers wrked for the Wii?

Um, they do. But not for all games.

Hmm... I see....

Then I thought the Wii would support some 3rd party controllers?

Cube controllers work for some games but not for games that actually require a pointer. You can't play Wii Sports on a cube controller.

Platformers, 2D... there's lots of room for opinion there.  Pinnacle could very well be Symphony of the Night, if you ask anyone that's played it.  Best thing that has come out since then are games that try really, really hard to be a reskinned SotN.

Platformers in 3D, I think, have come along rather well lately.  I consider God of War a platformer, so there's where my brain is coming from.  God of War is almost as good as the Ratchet & Clank series, and if there's another 3D platformer in the running, I don't know that I played it.

Psychonauts is another great (and recent) 3D platformer.

It is, I just wish I had read to find it was a platformer before I bought it.  That aside, it is not quite as good as a R&C or God of War.

I would agree. It's not better.

Though I wouldn't call GoW a platformer really. Just "Action Adventure" or somesuch. Would you call Ninja Gaiden, Prince of Persia, or Tomb Raider platformers? If so, then I guess GoW is one too.

It is a grey area, I admit.  What dooms GoW to being a platformer is the Hades area; without that I would be less sure about it and might not consider it so.  Might be more fair to say it has platformer elements.

I have never played a Tomb Raider game, but it looks platformy from a distance.  Prince of Persia, I would consider it a platformer.  Not Ninja Gaiden, however, due mostly to some sort of unidentified personal bias.

So, here's a nice academic question.  What would be the differences between Ratchet & Clank and Ninja Gaiden that would cause the first to be a platformer and the second to be merely action-adventure?

Umm.....R&C has actual platform levels maybe?  :-D

I can't recall any of those traditional elements in Ninja Gaiden. It's mostly beating ass on the way to a boss, unlocking traps and such, with a few "ninja" like physical challenges (like wall crawling) tossed about in between (but nothing really platform-y).

Tomb Raider could definitely be a Platformer/Adventure game.

Wow, go away for the holidays, get my copy of Twilight Princess for the GC, come back and this thing is on page 7.

I really like the game.  The controls are very nice.  It is rare that I can come up with a move in my head and actually accomplish it over 90% of the time.  This game does that.  Even long shots with the bow are easy enough.  Yeah, you don't have a cross hairs, but you have the tip of the arrow to use.  Line that up with your target and you hit it.  They didn't put anything in for physics, so your shot doesn't drop over a distance.  It loses some realism, but it is fun never-the-less.

I'm taking a break from it for now as I was getting into that dangerous obessed mode of my younger years.  Solid game and worth the cost. (Even though it was a present.)

That was one of mine, actually.  Level design.  Generally speaking, NG did not involve environmental puzzles of the sort you see in a more traditional platformer.  It's more of a hallway-style beat-em-up.  You generally did not die when you fell from things in NG, either.  My other one was rather lame: R&C is more cartoony.  The similarities are interesting, though, since Ratchet is probably as acrobatic as Ryu, he just prefers to blow shit up instead of carve shit up.  I have not come up with anything else yet.

Getting back to the subject of boycotts for a second, why not boycott a company like Square that really deserves it?  I mean how big a douche do you have to be to give three completely unrelated games the Final Fantasy XIII title simply because they'll sell more as part of the numbered series?  I can't wait until this inspires EA to figure out a way to push out three different Madden games every year.

I boycott games that suck.  I don't boycott games that rox, because the company that made then previously made games that sux.  Geez guys, its not like this is about politics or religion or eliminating poverty or anything. Play what you enjoy. 

Well, yes and no.  Starforce and other 'company wide' decisions can sometimes drive one to miss out on good titles because you simply cannot agree with the company stance of FUCKING YOUR MACHINE.

Also, after Pools Of Radiance eats your hard drive, your unlikely to install anything from them again, no matter how good the game is....

I would go as far to say Starforce IS about politics. They affect other things that have nothing to do with that particular game.

That stuff (and others like that) cripples computers, and keeps people from enjoying games. Not wanting that to happen isn't about politics.

Politics might be a bad word for it, but it fits better than religion or eliminating poverty. Which are the only three reasons Triforcer would see to boycott a company.

Its the right to do with your computer as you see fit, install the legal programs that you like and not have your hardware damaged.

There are better reasons to dislike Squenix than a good marketing plan.

I hate EA, but they actively damage the art of gaming.

Plus they in fact raped my childhood when they killed Origin.

And ruined pro sports games for everyone by starting a giant exclusivity war.

Have to agree with Zar. Still going to buy Spore. They could use an aborted fetus for packaging and I'd buy Spore.

Gah!  I completely ignored this thread because I thought it was Schild whining about something I don't understand.... 

I even typed out a five paragraph explanation about how Martin and Erikson were derivative of Cook, Wolfe, and Brust's writings in the '70's and '80's.....  (Dread Empire books + anthropology + Brust = Malazan books) until I realized this thread has been dead for days.

Can I get a page next time?

If it makes you feel better, pretty much everyone disagreed with StGabe anyway.