I'm done! Nintendo has fucked me on^h^h^h 3 times too many!

[Strazos]

Yeah, that's what he was thinking of.

Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis was better though.

[Cheddar]

Smash TV?

Oh God that was the greatest game ever. 

BIG MONEY.  BIG PRIZES.  I LOVE IT!

[Yegolev]

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.

[KapcomS]

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.".

[HaemishM]

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

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.

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

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.

[Yegolev]

$460

[voodoolily]

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.

[Strazos]

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

[geldonyetich]

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, although it isn't quite as slick of an implementation as it could have been.  (Yes, I'm aware of Crimsonlands and Shadowgrounds.)

[murdoc]

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

[Nonentity]

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.

[StGabe]

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)

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.

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.

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.

[Sairon]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[stray]

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.

[Joey]

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.

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*

[stray]

Umm...Has anyone linked this before?

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

Funny 

[StGabe]

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.

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Sairon]

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.

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.

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

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.

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Velorath]

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.

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 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.

[StGabe]

Which is why Starship Troopers was better than Alien and why King Kong was better than King Kong...

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. 

If you compare Chrono Trigger to most of todays JRPGs it's not so far behind in character development systems.

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.

[StGabe]

It's less an issue of StGabe saying that newer=better so much as he seems to be saying more complex=better.

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.

[Jain Zar]

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.

[stray]

Which is why Starship Troopers was better than Alien and why King Kong was better than King Kong...

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.

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....).

[StGabe]

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).

[StGabe]

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.

[stray]

Things like scoring for movies, which is a very important aspect of setting mode, has completely changed.

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).

[Margalis]

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.

[schild]

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.