Becoming a retrogamer

[Lucas]

;tldr version: "whatever floats your boat man, it's all fine" 
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As I'm starting to spend more time with board games compared to videogames, I'm also realizing that I would rather play (for example) Might&Magic 2 or R-Type again rather than any of the new titles, current and forthcoming (with VERY few exceptions).

In my videogaming life, I owned an Atari 800XL, a C64, the Atari ST and the Amiga before moving to the PC (never owned a console), and if I think about all the titles I played and not finished (because, thankfully and regretfully, I'm definitely NOT a completionist gamer) and that I still would like to revisit and maybe beat, I feel it would take me another 43 years of my life (all genres, but especially CRPGs) 

And I mean, I've come to terms with it: I still look forward to see where the industry is going and what new gameplay mechanics the various game developers will come up with, supported by new technology and hardware in general. But, let's say, just from an "academic" point of view.

While, of course, many titles of the above mentioned platforms are remembered with the infamous "rose-tinted glasses" (or, they were just crap even back then, full stop :D), it's just where, to me, the "magic" of videogaming still resides.
Just my childhood telling me to get back there? Yeah, that might be one reason, but I honestly think that the complexity and ingenuity of many of those games, paired with the "fill in the blanks" you had to do with your imagination, are better than nowadays products (once you can get past the lack of quality of life adjustments you're used to with nowadays VGs: manuals instead of tooltips, lack of balance between some of the mechanics, half implemented ideas etc.).

In the end, I guess that, if I would rather try to beat all the Magnetic Scrolls (still have to finish one) text-based adventures instead of trying out Elden Ring (not that they exclude each other, just a matter of preference in how to spend my videogaming time), it's just like I wrote at the beginning: it's all fine, whatever floats my boat.

But yeah, just wanted to share my feelings :)

[schild]

I Just got a Sega Astro City Mini.

I feel you.

Also, yes board games.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I love the trend to better and better graphics with the games.  Crude pixel art can really be hard on the eyes on today's high rez monitors. But I hate that it has resulted in less and less work/creativity put into the game parts and has introduced huge issues that didn't exist with sprite graphics like pathfinding, clipping & etc.  And it's frustrating as hell that even "simple" things like the next version of HOMM or Tropico or a remake of Baldur's Gate ALWAYS results in some of the fun of the original game being lost, not due to the graphics themselves but because the idiot devs just can't leave well enough alone and deliberately "fix" or "improve" stuff that wasn't broke in the first place.

[Khaldun]

Yes on that point. The other thing is that it's becoming plain that the AAA games most of us really do love are such fantastically complicated and expensive beasts to make that there's almost no developer that really wants to invest the effort to do it anymore--make another Skyrim? Make another RDR2? Make another Mass Effect? where the goal is to have people love the game and play it for a long time and buy DLC enthusiastically and buy it again for the next-gen platform etc.? Instead what we're getting are attempts to cut corners and half-ass that kind of product in some way and it's usually just not very satisfying. Or if they really do go for it, they fall short almost because it's impossible to really satisfy people even if you shoot for the moon and kind of hit it.

So charming little retrogames at least still seem open to developer creativity and some distinctive vision or idea.

[Sky]

I'm not a huge nostalgia type, but I did play through Ultima 8 on gog last year. It was a fucking blast and looked great on a big tv.

I've got a pile of good and great board games but no damned time to play them, by the time I get everything set up, I have enough time to put it all away again. The only time I got in a serious session with KDM was when I broke my toe and had a couple months at home to actually dig deep into stuff.

[Lucas]

Heh, I'm currently playing Phantasie I (SSI, 1985) on the Steem SSE emulator (Atari ST); never played the first chapter, only the subsequent two back when they were released. Loving it so far, hasn't lost an ounce of charm, at least for me. My plan is to play all the pre-Gold box CRPGs by SSI (phantasie series, questron, Shard of Spring which I own on GOG, Demon's Winter, Wizard's Crown).


Also, while I read (great things) about it on magazines when I was a kid, I never played Captive on the ST (a sci-fi Dungeon Master clone), so that's another one I'm looking at.

[Kail]

Yeah, I grabbed one of those retro emulator consoles with 3,000 games preloaded on it and have been having fun with that.  Also been trying to get in to board games (well, Warhammer, mainly, don't know what that counts as) but haven't been having any luck convincing people to sit down and play with me (partly due to the whole pandemic thing).

I do find the state of modern gaming to be awfully depressing, it's so wound up in DLC and NFTs and "games as a service" and behavioral psychology that the actual GAMES are getting increasingly irrelevant.  Mobile games especially drive me nuts, I remember not so long ago there were games like Sword and Sworcery which were playing around with expanding the medium and all kinds of ports of popular games like Shadowrun, Street Fighter, Chrono Trigger... it seemed like it was going to be the next big thing.  Nowadays, the whole market is just the same three games (Match 3 game with ten seconds of story between levels, OR build your base and level up your buildings, OR collect a whole bunch of characters from a random draw and have them fight other groups of characters) with different paint, and the ads are just fucking NUTS.  When they're not outright lying about what's in the game, they've got anime girls with huge boobs simpering at the camera about how much they want to be owned by you, or they're just fucking weird nonsense which is only there to maybe catch a flicker of attention due to the WTF factor.

Regarding the graphics thing, I dunno.  I'm more interested in seeing weird, fantastic, creative settings, and those tend to do fine with lower fidelity.  I've seen a lot of remasters and remakes where textures or models were updated and I've never really thought it made much difference to the game.  I guess I'm in the minority there, because I know a lot of people love that kind of thing, but in a vacuum, a game that four people can put together in a month sounds more potentially interesting to me than a next gen game that a hundred people on teams spread across the continent have to coordinate on for a year.  In a perfect world, I'd argue that AAA game companies would have two development tracks: one for small scale innovative titles that probably won't make back their small budget, and one for taking those ideas that DO make it and polishing them up in to smoother, high budget, mass market sequels.  But, I guess why bother with step one at all when you can just count on someone else to do it for you and rip them off.

[MediumHigh]

I don't consider myself a retrogamer despite having zero interest in most modern games outside of "oh i'll play that eventually." I like games that are fun but also don't waste my time in the 1 hour I take to play video games and there is only a handful of modern, retro, mobile games that fit that criteria while at the same time scratching an itch for customization and different playstyles.

I like Vermintide 2, for example,  but there is like 2 ways to play the game with very very minute differences most of the time between the 6-7 non dlc characters. I would sink more hours in it if the RPG aspects where more fleshed out but that would make it a great game for guys like me who like feeling clever for coming up with builds and they settled for "alright". Its still a better L4D experience than most of the L4D clones, but that is my dilemma. I like builds and stacking advantages, but I hate crafting and gathering resources. I like difficulty but I absolutely hate systems that feature experience loss or restarting content from level 0 if you died on level 5 (sorry Hades).

I no longer play video games to test my twitch muscles, I'd much rather beat something because I feel like I exploited a weakness or have a tactical advantage. Its a funny place being my kind of gamer and I see myself not even playing video games when I get older if current trends remain the same. Because while a game like New World is visually and technically more advanced, its also really shallow compared to Guild Wars 1 and I have to engage in systems I mostly ignored in Guild Wars, to ewk out half the enjoyment.

[Kail]

Hijacking this thread for some trailer spam, there's three games on the horizon that I'm kinda pumped about

TMNT Shredder's Revenge comes out this summer, allegedly, a sort of "new but retro" TMNT arcade style game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qJvTq7_KA

On a further TMNT bender, the Cowabunga Collection also is coming out this year apparently, which contains 13 of the old titles, from the old crappy NES game to the arcade games to the 16-bit tournament fighters games

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-78FD9xvc0

And for some non-turtles media, Sonic Origins finally got a release date of June 23. Contains the big 4 console games (Sonic 1, 2, 3+K, and CD) with tweaks like widescreen support and more character options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzHXjAJ86Zw