By John Walker on March 25th, 2011 at 1:51 pm.
CVG have an interesting story from EA’s games chief, Frank Gibeau, discussing their history of games and the potential for reviving old IPs. It’s interesting because it’s Gibeau who points out that some of those classic games we all remember loving, well, he says, they might not actually be that good. Dare you admit the same?
Gosh, the sacrilege. This is all in the context of discussing whether older series might be worth bringing back for fresh versions. While series like Burnout and Need For Speed are still huge sellers for the publisher, what about Road Rash or Dungeon Keeper? Gibeau told them,
“We constantly look at ways to grow the recent category of titles like Burnout, Need for Speed, Road Rash are constantly things we think about. It’s the same thing with the old Bullfrog IPs like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Powermonger, Magic Carpet, I can go on. So we do look at that stuff and are very cognisant of our past.”
Yay! Old games from our childhood! They were all brilliant, weren’t they? Possibly not says Gibeau.
“The key thing for us is, if we do bring [any of those] back, the game has got to be good. I don’t know about you but when I look back at GoldenEye, I think of it as this amazing game and the you go and play it and are like, ‘Oh. Really?’. From our perspective we have to manage that element which makes things look nicer in the rear view mirror compared to what you have to do now in the modern day.”
Heavens, he questioned GoldenEye. Which was perhaps a little cheeky, being a Rare/Nintendo game, and thus nothing to do with EA. Clearly he meant to say “Magic Carpet”, which was always rubbish, no matter what Billy off of Neighbours may have thought.
Another interesting aspect of this is the list of Bullfrog games he names. Not mentioned in there is Syndicate – a game that’s often been rumoured, though never confirmed, to be receiving a modern-day update. That may mean nothing at all, but it looks a little conspicuous in its absence.
So, what classic games do you love that you’re too terrified to return to in case they’re horrible? Or have you recently gone back and discovered that when you were young it turns out you also had no discerning skills or taste? Go on, confess. Say those names.
25/03/2011 at 13:56 MrThingy says:
I remember (back in t’day) one of the main UK magazines (PC Zone, possibly?) gave Magic Carpet (or Magic Carpet II) a really bad review – all the others had been 90%+) and there was a huge furor from EA and Bullfrog, to the point of some rep at Bullfrog wanting a user vote vs the magazine.
In retrospect, a lot of Bullfrog’s games were graphics engines with the ‘game’ later plopped in. In a lot of cases… it worked. =)
I always wanted a blend of Powermonger and Black and White 2.
No whiney micromanagement. Conquer and build cannons. And look after sheep. And eat them.
25/03/2011 at 14:46 Mad Hamish says:
Yeah I remember that. PC Zone gave Magic Carpet 2 a score in the 40s I think. I was a big Magic Carpet fan and I think that review stopped me from buying it. Still haven’t played it to this day. It looked pretty much like the first one. I was pretty stupid back then.
Road Rash has deserved a new game for the past ten years. There was some development footage of a new one a few years ago, looked pretty cool. I would definitely go for another Magic Carpet game though.
20/05/2013 at 19:18 Phasma Felis says:
Road Redemption, a third-party remake/homage of Road Rash, was successfully Kickstarted last week, if you haven’t seen it yet.
25/03/2011 at 15:06 Urthman says:
Any studio that can’t take the basic gameplay ideas from Magic Carpet and modern graphics and physics technology and turn them into an amazing and fun game should just close their doors and give up. (And in ten years when computers can do Magic Carpet V with high-res voxels, it’ll be the greatest game ever.)
What? It also has to be playable with a console controller? Oh. Never mind… :P
25/03/2011 at 15:16 deejayem says:
The Magic Carpet 2 review was by none other than the legendary Rev Stuart Campbell in PCG. He’s like some sort of god of the perpetually narked.
25/03/2011 at 15:40 Dominic White says:
“What? It also has to be playable with a console controller? Oh. Never mind… :P”
Magic Carpet got a Playstation port. It worked pretty well, all things considered. So did Diablo. A lot of early PC-to-console ports worked out far better than most PC gamers would ever like to admit.
25/03/2011 at 16:02 Baboonanza says:
True story: When I played Magic Carpet many years ago I got so enraged that I calmly unplugged the mouse, took it down to the garden and beat it to pieces with a hammer.
25/03/2011 at 16:05 Dominic White says:
So.. err.. why/how can anyone hate the Magic Carpet series, anyway? They were really fun games. Making huge forts bristling with guardsmen, or fighting absurdly huge flocks of enemies with massively explosive spells was huge fun.
25/03/2011 at 16:15 Urael says:
I actually can’t believe what I’m reading! Where’s the defence of one of the greatest games ever invented??
Magic Carpet was AWESOME. It played like nothing else out there at the time and still, through the magic of Dosbox, can have me playing for hours. It’s not nostalgia, it’s still a bloody brilliant piece of gaming history that is being criminally left to rot. A modern update of it could be glorious.
25/03/2011 at 20:04 Dominic White says:
Yeah, Magic Carpet (and MC2, which while being a bit more uneven was even more ambitious) was an absolute gem and years ahead of its time. It still looks quite pleasant to this day, too-close fog layer aside.
25/03/2011 at 20:08 Red_Avatar says:
Actually yes, it was PC Gamer UK and Stu “I hate PCs” Campbell reviewed it and actually criticized the game for things he said it lacked that it didn’t. Basically, he got a pre-release version without a manual and it seems Stu is not that good at finding his way WITHOUT a manual so he slammed the game for missing certain stuff like (off the top of my head so may be inaccurate) a key to come to full stop when the game had just that. So a Bullfrog rep wrote a letter explaining how the review was misleading and inaccurate, and how it was selling loads and received great feedback. (note: it wasn’t the only reason for his low score, he just didn’t like the game, but the review was still misleading in parts)
Reminds me of the whole Worms thing, where Stu slammed it as well while everyone else in the PCG office loved it (he even admitted as much). Makes you wonder why on earth he was ever allowed to review it if he was such a minority (maybe because he had been complaining that he never got to review A titles -which mentioned in one of his reviews- no wonder if you trash them like that). I loved the hell out of Worms and the editors meant custom maps leading to some of the best gaming times with my friends ever.
About Magic Carpet: I never played it until several years after its release in 2000. By then, the hype had calmed down and I could appreciate it and I DID enjoy it a great deal. I think it’s one of those games you either love or just feel neutral about – and the game was especially made for good mutliplayer.
25/03/2011 at 20:36 Mman says:
Does DOSBox (or some sort of fan patch?) allow you to play Magic Carpet in “pentium mode” (or whatever it is)? I remember I bought MC ages ago but stopped a little in because I had a computer way stronger than a pentium, yet I couldn’t choose that mode so it looked and ran much worse than it’s supposed to, so I stopped and decided to wait for some sort of fan patch or similar for it and kind of forgot about it. If I can play it at the better settings now I might dig it out again when I get the chance.
25/03/2011 at 13:58 Inigo says:
“And then we sell them to the Chinese.”
25/03/2011 at 15:22 LionsPhil says:
Yeah. Given:
I am very welcome for EA execs to continue to be under the misapprehension that they’re all rubbish.
Go play C&C1. Runs nicely under DOSBox, freely available, and is still on the right side of the UI threshold to be managable. Observe how slow harvesting rate actually makes tank rush a pretty lousy tactic compared to mixing up forces a bit and giving those tanks some infantry support. Compare with later, frenetic C&C games. Weep.
25/03/2011 at 18:43 jeremypeel says:
If I was in the business of picking an example of a franchise EA has upturned, I don’t think I’d choose C&C!
Easier to say before the C&C 4, granted, but EA have done some lovely and varied things for that old timer since Red Alert 2.
25/03/2011 at 19:44 Lord Byte says:
While I loved the First C&C to bits, the best thing they ever did was still C&C Generals (NOT Zero Hour). With the last patch it was perfectly balanced, and incredibly fun to play! Zero Hour went back to RA’s over-the-top-ness and left every idea of balance far behind itself… 3 was okay but it never really re-lit the spark, the main reason being bad balance and the ridiculous alien race… 4 was the first C&C I didn’t buy…
25/03/2011 at 20:29 Barnaby says:
I couldn’t disagree with you more. C&C Generals is exactly when the franchise turned to shit in my opinion. This being a game I played every installment of with Generals being the last one I purchased until RA3. Isn’t this the concensus, that when Westwood stopped being involved it just wasn’t the same?
I played Road Rash on an emulator not long ago and that game is STILL incredible. I would eat like 800 babies to have a $10-20 remake of Road Rash with multiplayer. I played some other PC knock off a while ago but it wasn’t the same.
31/03/2011 at 10:12 wererogue says:
Yeah – having replayed the original Dungeon Keeper within the last six months, I’m confident in saying that the only thing that suffers badly now is the graphics. Some of the controls could be a little smoother – but not a lot.
25/03/2011 at 13:59 dryg says:
While old games can be good, usually when I play old games that I loved I really hate them
28/03/2011 at 15:11 enobayram says:
I can name 2 games which brilliantly stand the test of time:
1.XCom Apocalypse
2.Masters of Magic
I still go back and play those games from time to time for their own sake, not out of nostalgia! There are claimed spiritual successors to both, but neither has captured the essence.
25/03/2011 at 14:00 shoptroll says:
Here’s a thought for EA: how about you put your older games up on Good Old Games and let everyone decide which ones have withstood the test of time?
It’s a crying shame the back catalogs of Maxis, Bullfrog, Origin and EA itself are locked away in some underground bunker vault thingy.
25/03/2011 at 14:00 Jim Rossignol says:
The original System Shock is unpossibly awkward without the mouselook mod. But actually SO good.
25/03/2011 at 14:33 Subject 706 says:
If any game is worthy of a HD-remake (and UI remake), this is it.
25/03/2011 at 15:25 LionsPhil says:
It’s entirely possibly awkward, and I love that. It fixes the longstanding FPS issue where MIT physicists have perfect aim without resorting to random-dice fuzz-cursors.
Every time you move or reload you foul your aim. As a pathetic creature of flesh and bone (hacker, not ninja), you scramble about awkwardly and terrified. As it should be.
(The mouselook mod is still an impressive achievement, mind.)
25/03/2011 at 15:42 Big Murray says:
This reminds me … is there a mouse-look mod for the Ultima Underworld games?
25/03/2011 at 15:56 Muzman says:
And putting a new interface on it is as simple as copying the one from System Shock 2, which is basically the best of that sort of thing there is (or near to it)
25/03/2011 at 16:21 faelnor says:
I love the clunky and encumbered interface of System Shock. Over at TTLG I have been thinking about writing a long post explaining why the experience would have been quite different and inferior for me with a different control scheme, but have yet to find the courage to gather my thoughts.
And no, those are not “rose-tinted glasses” (I hate how people get so dismissive with that stupid argument). I played System Shock for the first time only three or four years ago. It is my favourite game of all time.
25/03/2011 at 16:35 Nick says:
Totally agree, the control system takes a lot of getting used to (but it did allow you to do unheard of things back then like lean and crouch and crawl etc) but the game is still standout brilliant.
25/03/2011 at 17:32 Jebediah Adder says:
One of my fondest gaming memories is co-opping through System Shock with a friend of mine; me in charge of looking and him providing the moves. Had to skip school to get the sucker finished.
20/05/2013 at 21:34 Phasma Felis says:
Holy God. That sounds…bizarrely entertaining.
25/03/2011 at 18:15 Nick says:
Thats System Shock 2, just so you know =)
25/03/2011 at 18:48 jeremypeel says:
I still haven’t made it all the way through System Shock sans mouse look mod, but since discovering that I’m biting at the bit to start again.
Need this damn dissertation finished – I’m biting at so many gaming bits right now my teeth have been worn down to smooth pegs! Handy for carrying the lady’s coat, mind.
25/03/2011 at 14:00 AndrewC says:
All Of Them.
But a lot contain mechanics or, more accurately, bizarre combinations of mechanics, that we don’t get these days due to the increased expense and, for better or worse, sensibleness of the modern industry.
Less sensibleness and more Sensible-ness, amirite! Woo
I reckon all the good shit we got back then is available through indie wierdness today, anyways.
25/03/2011 at 14:01 MrMud says:
What, what, what!!!
How dare you say magic carpet was rubbish? O.o
25/03/2011 at 14:05 Giant, fussy whingebag says:
Because it’s the truth, Billy off of Neighbours. The truth!
25/03/2011 at 14:29 somnolentsurfer says:
I remember actually lusting after Magic Carpet when it came out. I even got my parents to buy me a persian rug so I could sit on it and fantasise about flying round the town singing ‘A Whole New World’. Some short-lived PC gaming magazine I was reading at the time that I now can’t remember the name of opened their review with a double page spread picture of the dragon from the gorgeous intro sequence. I just used to leave it open on that page round the house in the hope that someone would see it and buy me the game.
I think I eventually played about 10 of the 50 odd levels. My computer could barely run it, and I couldn’t cope with the three dimensional movement. As soon as I started coming up against enemy wizards I just got totally stuck.
25/03/2011 at 15:10 fearian says:
Yup, I loved and still love magic carpet. :(
Mr Walker, sir – Fuck you and good day sir!
(<3 you)
25/03/2011 at 14:02 pkt-zer0 says:
Hey, Magic Carpet was pretty good (the second one, anyway, haven’t played the first one). GoldenEye is rubbish, though.
Hmm, can’t really think of old games that are only bad in retrospect, actually. Weird.
25/03/2011 at 20:39 Kaira- says:
GoldenEye? Rubbish? Shall we take this outside? [If you are referring to Rare-GoldenEye, that is]
25/03/2011 at 14:03 boar_amour says:
I suspect what he means is that it’s difficult to turn some older games into 3rd person shooters with a cover mechanic.
James “Horny” Horn, elite special forces commando and his crack team of mercenaries Greg “Imp” Jackson, Paul “Salamander” Bradshaw and Jessica “Mistress” Fredericks blah blah blah infiltrate blah secret terrorist dungeons in Afghanistan blah. Dungeon Keeper, coming to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC Fall 2012. Oo-rah!
25/03/2011 at 14:22 pakoito says:
No it isn’t. Look at X-Com.
25/03/2011 at 15:01 Inigo says:
The good news: There is another Dungeon Keeper title being worked on and it’s not a Third Person Shooter.
This is the bad news.
25/03/2011 at 15:39 FriendlyFire says:
What? NO! This is not the way it should’ve been!
Where’s my DK3 now… *cries*
25/03/2011 at 19:42 Grape Flavor says:
@pakoito
You know, take the silly “u ruined r franchise!!!” butthurt out of it, and XCOM is actually an original and interesting looking FPS. If it were named anything else it would certainly be getting positive feedback around here.
You guys sometimes dismiss promising games for the most arbitrary and childish of reasons.
25/03/2011 at 20:09 DJ Phantoon says:
My only response to that video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54
27/03/2011 at 03:13 Danorz says:
@grape
no it isn’t, it’s a bad norman rockwell painting, visually derivative of bioshock and the pre-apocalypse world of fallout, and mechanically a rehash of bioshock 2 even down to the camera. the tar effect monsters looked like country-fried arsehole, the animation looked like mocap of michael j fox and the BIG SCARY OTHER alien laser death bastard ship looked like literally 30 seconds and 2 button presses in 3DSMAX. you got the tar monsters off your AI squadmates by shooting them in the face with a shotgun
and all that’s before i get into how utterly tone-deaf it is. you say “we wouldn’t be mad if it wasn’t called x-com” as though that somehow dismisses and invalidates that they called that hot mess xcom and we got mad about it. also, if it wasn’t called x-com it wouldn’t look anything more than big-studio-average, which is all big studios have to do to secure a >85% review nowadays.
25/03/2011 at 14:03 Heliocentric says:
Here’s the thing EA. Dungeon keeper is still better than half of the games you release yearly. And syndicate while hamstrung by technical limitations managed to produce crowds only recently beaten by io in the hitman and kane and lynch games. Here’s a factoid. Realistically behaving crowds make almost any combat more exciting.
25/03/2011 at 14:28 Meneth says:
Only half? I’d say 99% +/- 1%
25/03/2011 at 14:04 Vinraith says:
It all depends on the genre. Old RPG’s and strategy games tend to hold up much better than old action games, FPS’s, or anything whose appeal is significantly dependent on graphics.
It also helps that when it comes to RPG’s, “they don’t make them like they used to.” For many of the old subgenres there’s no modern equivalent to even compare them to.
25/03/2011 at 14:18 One Pigeon says:
Now you say it, come to think of it all the Old games that I have played recently have generally incorporated some form of strategy.
Jagged Alliance 2
UFO EU
Civilization 1/2
DK 1 & 2
In fact the only one that sticks out in my mind as not being a strategy would be SWOS.
If we’re talking consoles now, that’s another matter entirely…
25/03/2011 at 14:22 Risingson says:
Strategy games maybe, but RPGs… try now to play any Ultima 1-6 (or even 7-8 now), any Might & Magic (actually 3-5 hold up quite well), the Bard’s Tale trilogy, Wasteland, the Magic Candle trilogy, Dragon Wars, the gold box games… Or better, try the first Baldur’s Gate. Try it.
25/03/2011 at 14:25 DrGonzo says:
I agree and disagree at the same time. A lot of the old RPGs have great writing, Planescape is still one of my favourite games.
However, RPGs and old strategy games have the most dated interfaces and such which often make them unplayable if you didn’t play them the first time round. Whereas Doom and Quake are still great fun.
25/03/2011 at 14:34 SanguineAngel says:
For the record I played Baldur’s Gate (1) unmodded last year and it beat the socks off of Any neverwinter title as well as, to my mind, Dragon age. I would say Mass Effect and Witcher pipped it to the post though.
And by that I mean it was not only a better game but it also controlled better, held up better graphical in retrospect (compared to looking back now at any of the neverwinter games for example), and the UI was largely far more intuitive.
So there :P
25/03/2011 at 14:36 Subject 706 says:
@Risingson
Actually, the Infinity Engine games have all these nice HD-mods, so they are very playable these days. For the older RPGs you mention though, yeah some aren’t that great to return to.
25/03/2011 at 14:38 Vinraith says:
Which raises another point: 2d games usually age better than 3d games. Early 3d tends to look pretty awful to modern eyes, but I, at least, am almost totally unbothered by the vast bulk of 2d art. Some of the early motion capture stuff is the only exception that springs to mind.
25/03/2011 at 15:06 SanguineAngel says:
Totally with you there Vinraith.. as you probably gathered already from the above. Interesting to note the number of 2d indie games as well. I mean, certainly it’s techinically easier to produce a 2d game I am sure but it’s also easier to produce genuinely pleasing visuals.
I am a little saddened that big developers don’t experiment with 2d anymore outside of the handheld market. It can be very pleasing and will probably still hold up well years down the line when other games look relatively ropey.
25/03/2011 at 15:44 trooperdx3117 says:
Not sure all old 3d games look horrible, last year I played Thief the dark project for the first time and I thought it held up remarkably well and thoroughly enjoyed myself despite all the guards being made of origami
25/03/2011 at 15:58 Vinraith says:
@trooper
The nature of generalizing is that there are always exceptions. I’d say that, in general, stylized old 3d holds up better than attempts at realism. Sacrifice, for example, looks a lot better than its contemporaries to me these days.
25/03/2011 at 21:04 Dervish says:
If you think the appeal of action and FPS games is “significantly dependent on graphics,” that says more about you than it does the games. Nothing wrong with it, but maybe you just don’t like those types of games that much? There’s a reason why people are still playing Quake’s earlier incarnations.
25/03/2011 at 21:10 Vinraith says:
@Dervish
I would argue that any game that relies more on twitch reflex than on slow, careful thought is inevitably going to be more graphics dependent. The reason is simple: you need to be able to quickly understand what you’re looking at and be able to react to it. Things that (to a modern gamer’s eye) look like a blur of pixels are very difficult to react to. Try going back and playing the original Ghost Recon, which was brilliant in my opinion. I can’t distinguish anything from anything, personally, which makes me genuinely sad.
Maybe other people don’t have that problem, and if not then good for them.
25/03/2011 at 22:54 Mman says:
Beyond the default terrible image quality of most older games (which can generally be fixed easily today) I don’t really see much visual clarity difference in the gameplay sense; if anything, a lot of newer games are worse due to being so visually cluttered. Something like Doom with a sourceport is visually cleaner (in a pure gameplay sense) than most newer FPS games. Ghost Recon seems a bit of an odd example as, from what I recall, enemies being tricky to pick out as times was intentional as it’s a slower-paced game and frequently takes place in areas where enemies are camouflaged and similar.
26/03/2011 at 00:35 Vinraith says:
@Mman
The default terrible image quality is exactly what I’m talking about, though. Obviously if you port the game to a better graphics engine the issue goes away. I’m not complaining about design here (which, you’re entirely right, was often much clearer than that of modern games).
26/03/2011 at 00:59 Mman says:
I definitely agree about the default image quality; like I said elsewhere here image quality is the main thing that makes unedited shots/footage of old games look completely horrendous to me, and the thing I go out of my way to fix when I’m playing one (which I’ve found can thankfully be done the vast majority of the time).
26/03/2011 at 02:06 Archonsod says:
“For the record I played Baldur’s Gate (1) unmodded last year and it beat the socks off of Any neverwinter title as well as, to my mind, Dragon age. I would say Mass Effect and Witcher pipped it to the post though.”
Really? I remember thinking BG1 was crap when I went back to it after BG II, let alone something further down the line. BG II still holds it’s own, particularly in the writing and general construction. A couple of elements are starting to show their age and it lacks one or two useability niceties but still playable.
“It also helps that when it comes to RPG’s, “they don’t make them like they used to.” For many of the old subgenres there’s no modern equivalent to even compare them to.”
In the same vein, I still find Might & Magic 7 & 8 to be as fun as I remembered. Daggerfall suffers, but I think that’s because the TES games tend to be more iterative than most. Wizards & Warriors is still wonderful, but I think that’s due in part to the failures of it’s successor (Dungeon Lords).
I don’t think it’s the case that there’s a lack of modern alternatives, in fact I’d argue there’s plenty of games which suffer precisely because they try and mimic the older RPG’s, but have this weird tendency of the devs not seeming to understand what made those games good in the first place.
I don’t think it’s the graphics. The thing with RPG’s is they tend to rely on writing first and foremost, and good writing tends to be good writing no matter how old it is (cf Chaucer, Shakespeare). Really, the only mistake such a game could make is if the gameplay somehow impeded enjoyment of the story, but then I’d suggest games in which this is the case that were considered good on release are few and far between.
Although saying that I’m not sure about the aRPG. Most of the Diablo clones have been surpassed by later Diablo clones. Saying that the only one I really fell in love with was Sacred, and the sequel was pretty much more of the same.
25/03/2011 at 14:05 Freud says:
I didn’t play Magic Carpet but I did love the sequel.
But I pretty much never return to older games anymore. The graphics, bad AI and horrible UI generally makes it a disappointing experience.
Last old classic I replayed was Fallout 2. It looks crap even with the high res patch. The combat is mind numbingly boring (and those that argue it has depth are wrong) and pretty much the only thing that made me going was the writing. The one possible exception to this is X-Com, because of how well designed the combat is in that game.
Where I disagree with EA Guy(tm) is that there has to be some correlation between my experience of these games now and the point of making new games in the series. That’s obviously stupid. Basically you take the ideas that worked back then and use them in a way that works now. Of course you could make a great Ultima Underworld 3 today if you took the best parts of it and modernize it. Even if UU2 is horribly short and cumbersome by todays standards.
25/03/2011 at 14:05 Rinox says:
I recently replayed DK and it was every bit as good as it was 15 (+-) years ago. The only thing holding it back was the resolution. So I call BS on that one. Maybe for games that are really linear and part of a series that’s constantly being upgraded (NFS series etc) it applies, but not for quirky and unique games like DK.
If I think about it, there’s really barely any games I used to play back in the days that I’m afraid to go back to…maybe Quake and Quake 2, for their grey-ish settings, but other games from the same era like Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior (or Redneck Rampage) are still more than fun enough to enjoy. Again, probably because of their uniqueness.
25/03/2011 at 14:07 Rinox says:
As an addendum…I just remembered the original Hitman (Codename 47). Way too hard for me to get into again now, with that insane savepoint system.
25/03/2011 at 14:13 Dworgi says:
What what. Quake 1 & 2 are still incredibly fun. The controls are a bit awkward and some of the level design is a bit boring, but both work incredibly well in multiplayer.
Obviously, QuakeWorld is head and shoulders above Quake 2, but they both have their selling points.
25/03/2011 at 14:17 misterk says:
The original hitman put me off hitman for good. i’m told the sequels are amazing, but I just remember the original being extremely frustrating.
25/03/2011 at 14:38 MikoSquiz says:
It’s hard to believe now that Quake 1′s single-player campaign was actually a game people were expected to pay money for, back in the day. It feels like a substandard hobbyist project now.
Doom holds up much better, weirdly.
25/03/2011 at 16:05 Muzman says:
Quake1′s single player campaign has its fans though. I’ve seen people argue that it’s more coherent and imaginative that Quake 2. Which, even if you hate Quake 2, is completely bonkers. Q2 was id’s first genuine crack at a proper narrative driven fps. Still there’s probably Q1 fanfic around somewhere
25/03/2011 at 16:37 faelnor says:
Is it that bonkers to think that, by allowing the player – instead of a briefing – to fill in the gaps between the thematically coherent levels, the first game gave more freedom for immersion?
Suspending disbelief is easier when you’re thrown into an universe over which you have no control and no precise description, especially when the actions you’re required to lead are as far from your real world experience as they can be. Narration through outlandish levels set in highly iconic places is just as much narration as basing level design around a storyline.
Personally, I know I prefer the former, hence my loving S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Quake and Half-Life more than Metro 2033, Quake 2, 4 and Half-Life 2. Still today, I can remember very specific levels of Q1 while I can’t even remember the general story of Q2.
25/03/2011 at 17:05 Mman says:
I’d agree with Faelnor (the general point at least, as I don’t fully agree with the examples) in that I played Quake 1 many years after Quake 2 yet found it a lot more evocative despite it having “no story” (though it was the SP mods that really got me into it).
25/03/2011 at 19:11 Urthman says:
Have my eyes gone insane?
People are trying to decide if single-player Quake and Quake 2 are still fun by talking about the backstory? Are you people also campaigning to add FMV cutscenes to Robotron?!
I like a game that’s beautiful to look at and has depth and a decent story and I wouldn’t want a diet of nothing but brown murky Quake, but Quake SP is still fast fun action gameplay and the level designs are still great today. You can jump in and start running and shooting instantly, without any lame story or cutscenes or conversation trees holding you up.
25/03/2011 at 21:21 Dervish says:
That is why EA and modern gamers don’t see the value in older franchises–they don’t even know what they’re supposed to be looking for. I played Quake for the first time a few months ago and had a blast. The movement is blazingly fast, with great encounter design that deviously drops tough combinations of monsters on you at the right time. That was back when FPS designers knew the meaning of “challenge” and “balance.” Some of the level architecture is also pretty damn creative for being an early 3D game–E3M5 (The Wind Tunnels) and E4M2 (Tower of Despair) come to mind.
25/03/2011 at 21:58 Muzman says:
In a word, yes. Although perhaps not so harsh. This argument is barely removed from saying switching TV stations quickly and piecing together a story out of the bits in your head reveals the great art inherent in all TV. The fact that you can find these things in something that amuses you says nothing about the work itself. Good eliptical and evocative stories and scenarios might trade on this effect, but there is more there if you look and the details support your imagination (Half Life is one of the more crafted games around in this respect). What immerses people about Quake isn’t the plot. One kind of immersion just sometimes begats another. It’s still a gonzo grab bag of almost random nonsense from the margins of Romero’s high school notebooks and they were lucky to have Sandy Petersen’s atmospheric levels to help it along.
I don’t think you could be more wrong in both these points. The first one is the precise opposite of the way suspension of disbelief works.
Anyway, as mentioned, not much point going on about the fiction of either game. I do think Quake 1 is pretty atmospheric (particularly towards the end) and evocative at times. I kinda like Quake2 though, still. Better than people remember it (or forgot it, as the case may be). As a big sci-fi adventure it does kinda get badly left in the shade by the likes of Unreal soon after.
25/03/2011 at 14:06 CMaster says:
The thing is, some of these old games just haven’t been done better since.
Yeah, some things you go back to and think “huh, pretty meh” – Goldeneye is in some ways one of them. Of course, one of the things about goldeneye was it was so damn easy to play – the same can’t be said for modern twin-stick FPSes given to new players.
25/03/2011 at 14:09 Rinox says:
Having never played Goldeneye and not being aware if it was ever available on the PC, what was its appeal specifically? I always thought that Goldeneye was sort of the proto-holy grail of console shooters, much like Wolfenstein or Doom are on the PC, and that it got its name mostly from that.
Fully prepared to stand corrected obviously!
25/03/2011 at 14:12 Vinraith says:
4 player split screen FPS with spy gadgets. It did what consoles are best at, provided something incredibly entertaining to play in the same room with other people. I’ve no idea what the point of consoles is anymore, now that so few games even include a split screen option (despite TV’s having gotten so much larger and clearer that they’d be far better able to accommodate it.)
25/03/2011 at 14:15 AndrewC says:
It did stealth, it did open levels in which you could approach objectives in many different orders, its difficulty-slider changed or added objectives to your mission, it did ‘realism’ (relative to when it was released) – all of which were fairly special or innovative back then. It also did FPS on console and Deathmatch on console and a whole bunch of other things that were pretty big for consoles, if not games as a whole.
Also it was a licence that was good.
25/03/2011 at 14:16 CMaster says:
Yes, Goldeneye basically provided an (up to) 4 player FPS on the same console, that anybody who could wrap their heads around the first person perspective could sit down and play straaight away, making it a brilliant party game.
It also had a fantastic approach to difficulty in single player, but never owning an N64 I didn’t really experience much of that.
25/03/2011 at 14:16 karry says:
“I always thought that Goldeneye was sort of the proto-holy grail of console shooters, much like Wolfenstein or Doom are on the PC, and that it got its name mostly from that.”
That is indeed the case. Except that there was Doom on N64 as well. And it was a better game than Golden Eye.
25/03/2011 at 14:27 choconutjoe says:
“I always thought that Goldeneye was sort of the proto-holy grail of console shooters, much like Wolfenstein or Doom are on the PC, and that it got its name mostly from that.”
It could be argued that Goldeneye foreshadowed games like Thief and Deus Ex more than Halo (or any other console shooter), despite being a console game.
25/03/2011 at 14:30 Mr Chug says:
Goldeneye was groundbreaking at the time, but playing it recently it’s kind of slow. It doesn’t help that Perfect Dark (on the same console) and Timesplitters 2 in the next generation did the same thing, but better. Yeah, it’s a vital part of FPS history, but when I’ve been around mates’ houses for a nostalgia gaming session, we always end up frustrated with Goldeneye and crack out the Gamecube.
Still, 4 player split screen multiplayer on consoles is a dying breed, so treasure every game like that before the concept itself becomes nostalgia fodder.
25/03/2011 at 15:31 Tatourmi says:
@ choconutjoe: I know it is kind of fancy to hit on Halo on every occasion, and sometimes it might be right, but in my opinion you are doing it wrong. Why? Because what made Goldeneye unique was its split-screen multiplayer and it’s “gamy” stuff. Namely gadgets, sort of powerups and map-related tricks. Halo was massively inspired by that and is maybe the most “old school” shooter you will find on a console nowadays. It has powerups, it has game customisation, it has split-screen, it has meaningless gamemodes and non-balanced weapons. It does not seek realism but fun. One could argue that it does it badly, but Halo is maybe the only faithfull spiritual successor to Goldeneye we have.
25/03/2011 at 18:50 NunianVonFuch says:
Don’t forget the multiple paths and adding on objectives for the different difficulty levels. Plus having to speedrum the level to unlock special cheat modes. First game to include these features afaik. It had the added “advantage” of being low-res too, which ment you could be extremely accurate with the thumbstick when aiming unlike modern HD console games.
Also Halo:Reach is where it’s at now for splitscreen 4-player on a console. I still have a few mates over for midweek beers and it’s always played.
Reading that back I’m pretty sure they must have been generous with the hitboxes or something as I’ve never felt like I’d get a better score by switching a game to SD. Must be nostalgia at work!
25/03/2011 at 21:14 Dervish says:
Aside from successors like Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters, GoldenEye did things that few FPS games have done since. Some of the aesthetic touches, like the large number of death animations and hit reactions, are still notable.
And then there are all the mechanical things, some of which were already mentioned: stealth, nonlinear missions, level variety, lots of guns and a few neat gadgets, and above all a challenge that came from having to pay attention throughout an entire mission instead of bashing your head against the next checkpoint until you break through.
26/03/2011 at 09:10 DJ Phantoon says:
I was always sad they never brought TimeSplitters: Future Perfect to PC. The infection game mode was the BEST.
25/03/2011 at 14:08 MrMud says:
I replayed Freespace 2 a few months back (with the texture and model packs released through the freespace source code project) and its shocking how great it still is. Granted there hasnt been much development in the genre, being dead and all, but its still one of the best games I have ever played.
25/03/2011 at 19:00 Atomosk says:
Freespace 2 is amazing but any sort of flight simulator is considered a niche market and Volition Games has resorted to 3rd person $hooters. Maybe some day one of these smaller companies making WW2 flight sims will stop it and make something cool like freespace.
25/03/2011 at 14:10 Atic Atac says:
I’m just waiting for EA to come to gog.com. If anyone in charge of getting that through at EA here’s a message to that person. I would personally buy the following games from gog.com if they became available:
- Magic Carpet 1&2
- Syndicate+Syndicate Wars
- Dungeon Keeper 1&2
- System Shock 1&2
- Lands of Lore, Eye of the Beholder series
- Bards Tale series
- Blade Runner
- Wing Commander (all of them!.. I’d pay good money for 3 and 4)
…and more. make it happen!
..and on topic…for the last month or so my xbox, fancy new steam games and others have been waiting for me to finish Might and Magic World of Xeen. Old games are great!
25/03/2011 at 14:22 Vinraith says:
I’d skip the Magic Carpets and Wing Commanders, personally, but I’d pay good money for the rest of that list.
25/03/2011 at 14:35 shoptroll says:
They would make fistfuls of money just on Simcity 2000 and The Sims Complete alone.
Although if GOG were to port the Windows 95 build of SC2K they’ll need to update the source files. The save as… dialog breaks the game on anything newer than Windows XP.
25/03/2011 at 14:37 somnolentsurfer says:
Also Hidden Worlds, the expansion to Magic Carpet 1, that I never owned at the time.
Actually, what I’d really like to see is a retrospective of Creation, the game which, IIRC, the Magic Carpet engine was actually created for. I remember reading many previews and developer diaries and the like back in the day, and massively anticipating the game, before it was eventually cancelled.
25/03/2011 at 14:12 Lewie Procter says:
Alpha Centauri.
25/03/2011 at 14:16 Fwiffo says:
Preach. I’d love to see that on GoG or Steam since I accidentally chucked out my box copy. Just to see how badly it’s aged.
25/03/2011 at 14:17 Rinox says:
@ Lewie
Really? I go back to it at least once every year and it’s still solid as ever. If you can get over the fact that the diplomacy screens are static rather than nicely animated, it’s a much better game still than the newer Civs on almost every level (I’ll agree that combat is clunky though).
25/03/2011 at 14:38 Simon Hawthorne says:
I have to agree with Rinox. AC is still fantastic (and Alien Crossfire which I found in a charity shop for £1! Go Big Society!) and I enjoy it more than the Civs.
There’s something about lifting terrain or building weird units that can terraform but can gravdrop or having in hiding a few sea colony pods in a rag tag fleet a la Battlestar Galactica JUST IN CASE.
I like the fact as well that the factions are so extreme. For all that Civilisation has been called racist because of its depictions of various races, it can’t be seriously extreme because it’s dealing with real life. In AC, there are some real wackos.
A new Alpha Centurai is one of the few games that I would pay full price for – which is ironic because you, Lewie, have meant that I very rarely do that. (PS-Thanks)
25/03/2011 at 14:47 Lewie Procter says:
Obviously it is still fantastic, but I’d very much like to see what a faithful sequel would look like.
25/03/2011 at 14:48 Rinox says:
@ Simon Hawthorne:
I have fond memories of sending in a fleet of choppers with nerve gas pods to commit unspeakable atrocities to my opponents during a brief window where I ‘convinced’ (ie bribed) the council to dismiss the UN charter for 20 years. I like to imagine they were playing ride of the Valkyries as they attacked.
I have less fond memories of Brother Lal (in a different game) thumping his UN charter Bible and constantly telling me off for having planet busting weapons, only to use a planet buster himself on my capital the next turn. That goddamned two-faced snake. :P
But I guess karma’s a bitch huh?
25/03/2011 at 14:57 J-snukk says:
Having not played alpha centauri (or indeed civ2) at its release, I found it impossible to get into. This was mainly due to the interface, which I found less helpful than a blind guide dog with narcolepsy.
25/03/2011 at 15:22 drewski says:
I picked it AC in a re-release sale box, finished it once, and haven’t touched it since. Think it felt too much like a wonkier Civ II for me.
25/03/2011 at 15:33 LionsPhil says:
AC suffers a bit from sci-fi naming. If you haven’t played before or for a while, it can be hard to determine which technologies do what and lead to what others; what it really needed there was some better indication you could right-click to go to the datalinks and look all this up.
I can only assume that Firaxis hate money, since they’ve yet to pick all the excellent parts of AC (that terrain engine!) for a Civ, what with its more immediately-understandable setting.
25/03/2011 at 15:39 drewski says:
The datalinks are a complete rabbit hole, though – you wonder what tech to research, jump into them, and emerge half an hour later planning your city development in 40 turns time, and have completely forgotten when tech you were wondering about in the first place.
Or perhaps that’s just me.
25/03/2011 at 15:48 Tei says:
Obligatory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY57ErBkFFE
25/03/2011 at 16:38 Simon Hawthorne says:
That’s part of what I love though. With Civ I’m generally frustrated by my simpleton archers who traipse through the wilderness, stopping to glance at each beauty the forest gives them. I want the highly elite assault rifle wielding troops of now.
With AC I’m already in the future. My troops are already firing lasers or laser like weapons almost from the get-go. I’m stumbling blindly through knowledge rather than picking specific technologies which lead to the stealth bomber. I think this works particularly well with the build-your-own-units; you have no idea what ‘Ecological Consciousness’ does, but maybe it means your troops have a higher Psi so can resist the mindworms. It’s less counter-factual history and more boldly going where no Turn Based Strategist has gone before!
25/03/2011 at 16:48 Rinox says:
@ Tei:
You can also find all the quotes of the game techs online.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hou-Iwv1GvM&feature=related
My personal favourite was this one:
Man’s unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov “For I have tasted the fruit”
25/03/2011 at 21:05 Tei says:
Hummm…. a lot of it seems inspired in a movie called “BARAKA”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO1nSVy8q8I&feature=related
26/03/2011 at 00:59 daphne says:
That game is strangely transporting. The technological progression, the clearly distinguishable factions and personalities (but less so in its expansion, admittedly), and the philosophical undertones have consistently compelled me like no strategy game has so far managed. Not to mention the sense of a truly alien world which the game conveys so incredibly well.
I guess I feel it is very much a designer’s, an auteur‘s game (in this case Brian Reynolds) so to say. It’s just one coherent, competent offering. I can’t say that about most games.
26/03/2011 at 05:31 marach says:
it’s still for sale “sold out” still publish alot of the EA back catalogue and ship internationally from the UK
25/03/2011 at 14:13 Schadenfreude says:
It wasn’t from EA but I’d kill for another Darklands game. Love me some Darklands.
The knockers in the mines always made a mess of me though.
25/03/2011 at 16:34 Bullwinkle says:
Oh, God, if there was ever a game in desperate need of a resolution upgrade, it’s Darklands.
25/03/2011 at 19:53 sinister agent says:
Darklands is one of those rare gems that really is screaming out to be imitated. And I only played it via abandonware, in the mid 2000s. Brilliant game, and it’s aged relatively well in a lot of ways.
25/03/2011 at 20:47 Kaira- says:
Actually, there’s a Darklands remake going on by a pal of mine.
25/03/2011 at 20:58 Bullwinkle says:
@Kaira
I love your friend’s vision, but it looks like we won’t be seeing that game for years.
26/03/2011 at 05:30 TillEulenspiegel says:
Developing a spiritual successor to Darklands is my ultimate ambition. There have been a lot of attempts by various people, but I’m quite serious about it, and have been for several years now. I’ve got the programming chops, I’ve got a goddamn library of medieval history books. And I’m going to release my first serious game fairly soon, to get some experience and hopefully make a bit of money.
I’m also a firm believer in the “release early, release often” model of game development, as pioneered by the likes of Mount&Blade and Minecraft. So who knows, in a year or so you might hear about an alpha version of an RPG set in 15th century Germany.
25/03/2011 at 14:14 Justin Keverne says:
I’ve come to the conclusion that Gibeau’s entire career consists of him making statements designed to illicit news posts.
25/03/2011 at 19:55 DJ Phantoon says:
I don’t think his posts are designed just to elicit responses. I think they’re also designed for HEY REMEMBER THIS NAME, FRANK GIBEAU. YEAH THAT IS ME.
Subtly.
25/03/2011 at 14:16 misterk says:
Deus Ex? No I’m not going to get away with that one, am I? Sacrifice is a game that rps bigged up but when I tried to play it I found the control scheme goddamn awful, and the camera being attached to me incredibly frustrating.
One discovery I did make a while back was that while I am fairly forthright in my defence of “graphics don’t matter”, sometimes they really do. I played an emulated version of populous 2 recently, and the graphics are so shitty its actually hard to tell what the bloody hell is going on. Battle Chess is a game I adored, but when I picked it up on GoG I discovered that it runs so slooooooowly, as the AI has to think for approximately a decade before the incredibly slow moving animation occurs.
25/03/2011 at 14:20 CMaster says:
Graphical fidelity doesn’t matter. (well, good graphics add to a game, but they don’t make the game.
Graphical clarity does. Dwarf Fortress is better with a tileset than with the default “ASCII” display, because with a tileset you simply see whatever is there, rather than having to look up just was a # or a ` is. With animation, it would improve still, as you’d be able to see what your Dorfs were doing just by looking at them. But provided that the information is conveyed clearly enough, then the game can be great regardless of how crude the graphics are.
That’s my take on it anyway.
25/03/2011 at 14:30 Mman says:
“Graphical fidelity doesn’t matter. (well, good graphics add to a game, but they don’t make the game.
Graphical clarity does.”
This. I’ve realised the main problem I have with the graphics of a lot of older games by default is image quality (with stuff like massively pixellated or/and blurry textures combined with terrible resolution and tons of aliasing). Thankfully, I’ve found the majority of games where this is an issue have some way to fix it nowadays.
25/03/2011 at 15:26 drewski says:
Sacrifice is a game where I can see *why* it’s lauded – but I couldn’t get into it.
25/03/2011 at 15:38 LionsPhil says:
I find that a problem with newer games. Unless they’re designed specifically with graphical readability in mind (e.g. TF2), everything becomes such a grey-brown mess that they then need to add a mess of object highlights on top and suddenly you’re playing something as abstract and ugly as an Atari 2600 game but using many more shaders.
The 2D art era, conversely, is crisp and clear and beautiful. Early 3D varied, but those with good texturework, combined with the need for simple lighting, can end up quite well. Compare a screenshot of a battle in C&C1 with C&C:Generals (not that that’s particularly early) and C&C4. The more particles and “subtle” lighting and stuff, the harder it is to pick out the actual tanks. SupComm2 is a appalling offender in this regard; compare with Total Annihilation.
25/03/2011 at 19:23 Nick says:
Very true, as long as you know what everything is, graphics don’t matter hugely. Even ASCII is fine if you are familiar with it in a roguelike.
25/03/2011 at 20:58 Dozer says:
I always look at it encoded. Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode Dwarf Fortress. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code. All I see is axedwarf, kitten, elephant. Hey, you uh… want a drink?
25/03/2011 at 14:17 dr.castle says:
I always thought GoldenEye was a bit dull. But then I’ve never been able to play FPS with a controller. It’s like trying to drive a car with a joystick.
But realistically: some old games are still interesting, some aren’t. The ones that aren’t are those with gameplay mechanics that have been repeated and refined over the years–I’d bet there’s a lot more people going back to play Elite or X-Com than there are to play Quake or Need for Speed.
Although to be fair, I would say “not interesting anymore” instead of “not good anymore” to refer to such games.
25/03/2011 at 14:17 Tei says:
Magic Carpet is one of my 5 favorite games ever, and I think can’t be compared to anything modern, because there is nothing like that. Magic Carpet is like Minecraft, If Minecraft where arcadey and RTS-y, and where a real game, and not a sandbox.
Then you have games like Beyong Good and Evil, that is full of charm.
25/03/2011 at 14:18 noobnob says:
Why not re-release old games on their own digital store, or 3rd party ones such as GOG.com? Lots of people will buy it for the nostalgia factor, but others will buy based on recommendations/deals and by community feedback you can make a good assessment on whether the game has aged well or not.
In other words, I want my System Shock 2 on GOG already god damn it (game that hasn’t aged well in terms of UI, sadly).
25/03/2011 at 15:40 LionsPhil says:
Having to manually unload the broken shotguns mutants drop to desperately and vulnerably scavenge for ammo before loading it into your own barely-working one was one of the best bits of survival horror I’ve played and far better for the tone than the walk-over-and-magically-scoop-up ammo gathering of the action end of the FPS spectrum.
25/03/2011 at 14:20 Gundato says:
I actually fully agree.
As a non-gaming example: Burton’s Batman. Everyone called that Dark and amazing. Then, after Batman Begins came out, people suddenly remembered that Burton had Prince signing at random and Vicki Vale get escorted into the Batcave by Alfred. Does it make it a bad movie? Not at all. But it also makes it not something that you do a 1:1 remake of.
Same with games. A lot of the ones we love just wouldn’t map all that well to the modern day. Maybe they would do great as niche games, but, unfortunately, it isn’t indie developers that own them.
And someone mentioned Freespace: that is a perfect example. I LOVE Freespace 1 and 2 (replay them every few months). And they age great. Why? Because the genre is basically dead, so nobody has done better yet.
But, when I was a whee lad, I loved a game called Star Crusader (yay, Roman Alexander!). Replaying that, after experiencing Freespace, it is a bit lacking. Still a fun game, but definitely aged.
So, if there is ever a resurgence in space-based combat flight-sims (and there damned well better be…), we’ll probably get to the point that Freespace 2 stops aging so well.
And my friends, THAT is a good thing.
25/03/2011 at 14:34 Rinox says:
I’m not entirely sure I agree. Simply because games are different from (to take your example) film in that they do not only rely on aestheticism or graphics, but also on gameplay systems. I believe it perfectly possible to have a 15-year old gameplay system that is as good or better than anything modern, as creating those is almost entirely independent of technological advancements.
Honestly, most of the AAA titles these days, do you really see that much difference between them and the games they sprung from a long time ago, gameplay-wise? If you take (for example) Oblivion and compare it to Daggerfall, you’ll see that Oblivion’s improvements over its predecessor lie exclusively in graphics and conversations. All the rest was more intricate or more expansive in the older game. Skill systems, character modification, world size, world contents, lore. It’s quite sad in some ways really.
25/03/2011 at 14:45 JKjoker says:
the fps genre is certainly not dead, yet i can name a dozen old games that kick the crap out of new ones in everything but graphics
no one lives forever 2 (1 too but that one has awkward controls)
tron 2.0 (this one aged so well it can even compete in graphics quality if you get it running and it kicks the crap out of the second movie too)
deus ex
jedi knight 1 & 2 (1 has the biggest goddamn levels ive ever seen, they are full of secret areas, you could get LOST in every single one and since you can super jump you can go up and down as well as to the sides, you wont see that in any modern fps)
thief 1 & 2
descent 1 & 2 (awkward controls, great challenge tho, mindblowing level designs)
system shock 2 (not a great shooter, but the best fps ive played that tried to become something else, along with the thief series in this)
and im sure there are more (i just usually liked rpgs more than shooters), all these games have unique things to offer that you will not see from any modern fps
25/03/2011 at 18:26 arccos says:
And they age great. Why? Because the genre is basically dead, so nobody has done better yet.
I think you’re spot-on with this. The interface for them doesn’t feel out-of-date because no one has refined it past that point.
Think of Diablo-like action RPGs before they started using the number keys as quick-use inventory. Diablo 2 felt natural at the time, but it seems silly now you have to change spells with the function keys, and then cast them with a right click. Why can’t I just do a 1-2-3 combo? Same with Dungeon Siege 2, which I just tried to go back to. The interface just feels like a joke compared to more modern games. If Diablo 2 was the last of its kind, it would still feel pretty good as an interface.
25/03/2011 at 19:37 Gundato says:
Arccos: Exactly.
Rinox: No doubt there, but wouldn’t you rather the gameplay get BETTER? I loved System Shock and CyClones. Both of them viewed mouselook as “optional” at best. Does that mean that all future games should not use mouselook, since those didn’t? I mean, they were great, and clearly those designs aged well, right :p
As for Oblivion VS Daggerfall: You play Daggerfall any time recently? I like it, but it is downright clunky compared to Oblivion in terms of combat. Not to mention constantly having broken dungeons, a largely lifeless overworld (okay, THAT didn’t change :p), and a skill-system for swimming that just drowns everybody who ever plays it :p
Maybe you don’t like everything about Oblivion (I don’t either). But there is no denying it has made progress.
Hell, let’s look at System Shock 2. If you haven’t played it, skip ahead past this paragraph. Skipped yet? Good. During one of the best scenes in the game, you stumble upon the corpse of Polito. And then Shodan magically appears on the wall and talks to you for a few minutes. That was an AWESOME scene at the time. Now? it would be mocked for reeking of “exposition fairies” and leaving the player to do nothing but twiddle his thumbs. And not letting the player talk back? For shame! That is another bit of internet griping!
JKJoker: I agree, a lot of those games are great (I hate NOLF. There, I said it :p. Jedi Knight is amazing though). But you notice how most of them are rather “niche” by today’s standards? Almost as if there haven’t really been many games in those genres for a while.
Maybe that is what I meant by “And they age great. Why? Because the genre is basically dead, so nobody has done better yet.”. If nobody ever does anything better, a game will forever age perfectly. But the moment a better system has popped up, it starts to show. But if the genre HAS been advanced, the old game stops aging well. And any attempt at a remake just won’t end well. Either it will be faithful, and it will be a niche game (so not something EA should be making, from a money viewpoint), or it will be the XCOM remake and the entire internet will instinctively scream their hatred.
And also, a lot of what you described has nothing to do with the game itself. JK’s massive levels? How is that any different from the “open world” games? Or even what Crysis and Far Cry kept claiming to do? You don’t need to do a remake of Jedi Knight to have a big level.
Take Wolf3D vs DOOM. Wolf3D was great. Then we suddenly got guns that were DIFFERENT. And now, if someone tried to remake Wolf3D, they would need to add rocket launchers and shotguns and the like. Sort of like they did :p
25/03/2011 at 21:19 JKjoker says:
@Gundato: Crysis 1 and Far Cry 1 had big open areas, closed areas were just as small as always (and they are like 5~7 years old, they are not part of the “modern” fps wave, i havent seen any good fps open world games that could compete with JK, and i dont think there is anything stopping anyone from making better games, the fact is they just dont make better games.
as for XCOM, the problem with a remake is that when you put your dick in the game mechanics even if you made a proper fun game it is no longer the old game which gets ppl mad, i liked the XCOM “remakes” i just wished they did not try to compare them to xcom, just like i wish Fallout 3 had a proper franchise instead of stealing it from games that were completely different or the new xcom game just pull a men in black name out of their ass instead of using XCOM because they had the franchise as a coaster under the designer’s latte at the time
26/03/2011 at 02:23 Archonsod says:
“All the rest was more intricate or more expansive in the older game.”
I think you mean “bloated and unnecessary”. I couldn’t go back to Daggerfall after Morrowind, can’t go back to Morrowind after Oblivion. Although it’s often the small improvements like being able to cast without having to switch from weapon to hand, actually using physics rather than a die roll system to determine attacks, much better fast travel system and so on. Although the Morrowind to Daggerfall gap was a lot more major; largely the hand crafted dungeons which didn’t involve you randomly plummeting through the floor every fifteen feet.
25/03/2011 at 14:24 Ertard says:
I agree.
I don’t really care much for pre-2000s games when I play them today. Since I was too young back then I’ve been trying to get in to a few classics such as Fallout 1, 2 and Baldurs Gate 2, but they’re just too damn old. Since I don’t have a nostalgic link to them I just can’t do it.
I do believe I could withstand a few hours of Half-Life still though, but that’s because that game was quite ahead of it’s time as well.
25/03/2011 at 15:43 LionsPhil says:
Nostalgia is not a requirement. I managed to miss the System Shocks and Fallouts the first time around and have only played them for the first time within the last decade, after Deus Ex and Bioshock and Oblivion.
25/03/2011 at 16:36 Urael says:
Right, for once – just once – let’s have a discussion about old games without some…person….bringing up the word “Nostalgia” or the phrase “Rose-tinted glasses”. I absolutely hate how these have become some kind of shorthand for how we’re all misguided, mis-remembering sentiment-monkeys. We KNOW which games were good and which were shit. We KNOW which games we still enjoy playing and we KNOW why, and it’s nothing to do with us going all doe-eyed and pink-minded about things!
Some of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in recent years have been through trying games I overlooked however many years ago. Obviously age doesn’t naturally make a game great but some were masterpieces – I still play The Sentinel on the ZX Spectrum (emulated, naturally) despite there being modern remakes on better, whizzier 3D engines. They all miss the point; the claustrophobia of not being able to move freely was half the damned game! I can make the same kind of argument about a hundred other titles, and that’s just the ones off the top of my head.
26/03/2011 at 09:14 DJ Phantoon says:
Nostalgia makes Super Metroid my favorite game of all time.
It’d still be one of my favorites if I didn’t have rose tinted glasses for it, though, as it’s a terrific game. In that vein, I’d probably not love Populus or Command and Conquer as much without them, but they’re still stand up games, even after all this time.
25/03/2011 at 14:24 Jake says:
I won’t lie, I’ve bought quite a few games from gog.com and while I love their idea, some of those games well…stink. Red Baron 1 & 2 are ehh, Age of Wonders blech, and Jagged Alliance is just marginal.
On the other side, Cannon Fodder is still a great game as are both MOO 1 & 2. I think the only way to learn whether old games aren’t as good as we remember is to play them again. I’m all in favor of old games but I concur with the EA man (eek, I can’t believe I said that), that many of those “great old games” are not what we remember.
25/03/2011 at 15:28 drewski says:
JA2 holds up a lot better than 1, but even so, it’s clunky by modern standards.
Still awesome, mind.
25/03/2011 at 14:25 JKjoker says:
they are full of crap
if you go faaaar back then you might have control issues, no mouse, no mouselook, no wasd scheme, etc, nothing you cant get used to (but i imagine that without nostalgia to keep you trying, gamers that have never tried them might get put off before crossing the awkwardness wall and start having fun, ive found myself with this problem when i tried to play system shock 1 and descent), in any case there is a lot of variety to have here, every game was almost unique in those days
if you dont go THAT far, (1998~2005, that the current gen of consoles was released in the cutoff date is pure coincidence) youll find games that work just like new ones but are better in EVERYTHING except graphics, better sound, better stories, longer campaigns, better gameplay, etc, fps were so much fun until they became “realistic” all-gray manshooters that hold you hand all the way through
going retro also has something you will not find in modern games : variety, there were hundreds of genres, even in the same genre games were very different and every now and then a new game would come out and pull a new awesome genre out of thin air like dune 2 or magic carpet
ive spent most of the last few years retro gaming (since modern games are so short and boring, i often find myself wanting to play something but with no modern game i want to play/havent finished, that never happened to me until the current generation of games) so its not just nostalgia (it helps tho)
25/03/2011 at 14:25 Wahngrok says:
I liked Magic Carpet at the time it came out. But it was Magic Carpet 2 that I really loved (and would spend money on a remake with better graphics). Besides combat It had puzzles, destructible landscape, base-buidling, underground and hidden levels. OK, the final boss was way too easy to destroy, but otherwise a really great game.
25/03/2011 at 14:27 Alaric says:
Most games, old or new, are crap. In that sense they are very much like film, literature, music, and all other forms of art. Surely nobody would argue that most things ever written are a tragic waste of paper. The percentage of good books is miniscule, and there is nothing wrong with that. Games may appear to be different because they are brand new. Most people who ever played or created games are alive today, and the very amount of games is negligible when compared to older art-forms. This is why the general perception is skewed, there is still nostalgia at play, while nobody is now nostalgic for the bad music of 571 BC.
25/03/2011 at 14:31 Qris says:
Another World had an Anniversary Edition as it was as awesome as 15 years ago. Two miracles of gaming that immediately come to mind are System Shock 2 and Dungeon Keeper 2.
25/03/2011 at 14:51 BooleanBob says:
Here’s one sacred cow I’m actually more than happy to blaspheme against (like so: ‘up yours, sacred cow!’). Another World is pointlessly, hatefully hard – it’s difficult to care for the breathtaking cinematic direction that effortlessly shames what most releases today can muster, or the cold brilliant beauty of those austere vector graphics, when every level combined the very worst aspects of Tomb Raider death, obtuse point and click puzzling and a brutal regimen of checkpoint placement.
That other people will have stomached the bad to savour the good I have no doubt, but I haven’t been so keyboard-chewingly annoyed by any game since Abe’s Odyssey (although something funny may be going on with my memory, because Blackthorne was agonising too and they all belong in the same puzzle-platforming subgenre against which I am seemingly prejudiced).
Goldeneye was the shit, though.
25/03/2011 at 18:19 Pantsman says:
I’m afraid I must agree with BooleanBob. I only played Another World for the first time a few years ago, and I managed to force myself all the way through it, but dear lord was the gameplay atrocious. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Same with Abe’s Oddysee.
What the hell were those designers thinking? Was there really a time when reflex-dependent trial and error was considered anything other than an exercise in keyboard-hurling frustration?
25/03/2011 at 20:05 DJ Phantoon says:
Dragon’s Lair did pretty well, guys.
26/03/2011 at 09:04 arghstupid says:
Every time Another World is brought up somebody mentions the difficulty and the random deaths. I finally got around to buying the Anniversary edition from GOG the other day having not played this game for years and I really can’t understand where these criticisms come from. Yes there are arbitrary, unpredictable deaths, but the combination of this randomness and the utter brutality often involved had me laughing out loud several times. It’s just comically harsh. Having died, you’re back in the game a few paces back from your untimely demise within seconds. As in VVVVVV, this means death isn’t that big a deal and pretty much eliminated the frustration element for me. There are a couple of tricky platformy bits, but these are much easier then the equivalent feats you’d be expected to perform in other games of that era (Dizzy anyone?) or even more recent titles such as the Tomb Raider series. The puzzles are challenging, but they’re also logical – I only got completely stuck once and when I eventually resorted to a walkthru I just felt a bit silly rather then cheated – The solution to the problem that had snagged me made perfect sense.
The only critisicm I’d level against the game is that it is short. It only took me a few evenings of play to get through the game in its entirety. If I went back through having solved all the puzzles I’d imagine it’d only take an hour or so.
Having said all that I do agree a lot of old titles are overrated. Monkey Island is the one I always think of – puzzles really are obtuse, and it was never particuarly funny. The sequel is an improvement but it’s still not worthy of the praise almost univesally heaped on it.
25/03/2011 at 14:33 Oozo says:
Hawk The Slayer was rubbish.
25/03/2011 at 14:51 Savage Henry says:
And Babylon 5 is a big pile of shit!
26/03/2011 at 05:39 marach says:
Get ouuuut!
26/03/2011 at 12:17 Savage Henry says:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
29/03/2011 at 16:30 DrunkDog says:
This.
25/03/2011 at 14:34 Ian says:
I still return to Panzer Dragoon Saga and Guardian Heroes every often and I still think they’re both splendid.
25/03/2011 at 14:34 kyrieee says:
I just started replaying Deus Ex (I haven’t really played it since it came out, played TNM though) and graphics, AI and all that crap aside I’ve been surprised again and again by how ahead of its time it feels. So yes, old games were and are good.
25/03/2011 at 14:36 Aero says:
I want a remake of SimCopter/Streets of Sim City.
25/03/2011 at 14:43 Daniel Klein says:
Returning to old games is WEIRD. Memories are seriously fucked. I was sure Monkey Island 1 and 2 were the funniest, most amazing games ever. I bought the Special Editions. Could not finish either. Mind-numbingly boring, jokes falling flat, puzzles totally retarded etc. God, what was 12 year old me thinking when he loved those games?
And Warcraft 2! Really, Blizzard? Completely identical races? How very dull! And the pathing! Oh dear god! How could I tolerate this stuff?
The only game from my childhood I’ve ever returned to and loved was DooM II, but let’s be honest here: that game is just special. And it turns out I can still play the first 7 levels with my eyes closed pretty much. It’s astonishing when you go back to the birthplace of FPSes and wonder what could have been had we not decided that this genre needs more burly men, cover mechanics, and military “realism”. Not even Serious Sam scratches my DooM itch. The way you glide butter-soft through the levels, the way monsters died instantly if you knew what you were doing, the way you could dodge most attacks if you anticipated them. Absolutely brilliant.
So yeah, what I guess I’m saying is, make another DooM, id, and pretend like 2 was the last one you made.
25/03/2011 at 18:27 JP says:
Word.
25/03/2011 at 14:44 Sarlix says:
I think some games can never ‘date’ or become too old to play. The infinity engine games are a good example. Even in 30 years Baldur’s Gate will still look and play good. I’ve been playing Star Control 2 recently and that doesn’t feel dated to me.
I played a game of dune2 through DosBox the other day and that felt Very dated and awkward. No drag and select or unit queuing, unable to hot key units etc….I wouldn’t say it isn’t as good as a remember, just very dated control-wise…Dune2000 however is still fine to play. Same as Red alert2 etc…Early 3D RTS’s like Emperor: Battle for Dune would be more difficult to enjoy.
I think It’s mostly games with early 3D graphics that I find it hard to go back to.
25/03/2011 at 14:58 Corrupt_Tiki says:
Yes, EA (re)making old games; Just look at what they did to C&C, and RA; yeah, EA, I’m going to hate on you for the rest of your miserable life for doing that to my favorite universe(s) Fuck you guys, seriously, Westwood built it up to such a pinnacle, and to see it so brutally raped was just disgusting. Burn in Hell.
/ragequit.
25/03/2011 at 15:19 cjlr says:
Amen, brother.
25/03/2011 at 14:58 Navagon says:
I don’t think that after their two most recent Dragon Age offerings they’re in any position to talk about the inherent superiority of new games.
Yes games like Syndicate suffered from problems like almost non-existent path finding, but they’re still a lot more fun to play today than a ludicrously expensive browser grind-a-thon. While there certainly is a fair bit of a rose tint when it comes to old games (and Goldeneye is definitely the best example there is of that), when the core gameplay remains unmatched today simply because the industry is reliant on the tried and tested.
25/03/2011 at 15:07 Jorum says:
GoldenEye is a strange example for Gibeau to choose.
Of course a 14 year old FPS is going to seem dated now – FPS is a genre very much technology and graphics related that has seen hundreds of title releases and massive technological advancement over the last 15 years.
Not to mention GoldenEye wasn’t spectacular in the first place. I think it’s reputation is based on being the first 3D FPS on consoles so was a big thing to them (PC had already had Duke 3D and Quake by then) .
If you look at DK what’s been comparable since? Evil Genius is only thing that comes to mind really.
There’s been nothing remotely like Syndicate since things like Abomination and they were also back in the old days anyway.
25/03/2011 at 15:13 Gabbo says:
To me, that reads more like he wants to use old IP’s for new games, but to do so would have to change a lot of what people remember/liked about those games. He fears the wraith of rose tinted glasses.
It’s a good thing we just want the old games to work on new hardware, not new games with an old IP slapped on them or he may have some kind of problem on his hands. He must have seen the reaction 2K got with XCOM and started sweating.
Drop the reworked games on various portals (even the terrible EA Store), and we’ll tell you which IP’s you can squander on shit ‘sequels’, with our moneys. Less work for EA, more games for us.
25/03/2011 at 15:30 Dominic White says:
Nostalgia is a bitch, no question about it, but the old games that I replay are the ones that HAVE endured the ravages of time. Doom is still as good (if not outright better) than most FPS’s released these days, and has gotten even better over time due to engine upgrades and a billion new levels.
Some games are very awkard to play nowadays. The Battle Isle pack on Good Old Games presents us with BI1 (barely-playable due to a single-button joystick-based control scheme) and Battle Isle 2 (a little more mouse-oriented, but not hugely better), which clearly haven’t held up too well. In the same pack is Battle Isle 3 with a modular multi-window based UI which works remarkably well, and Incubation, which is basically Space Hulk + XCom, and aside from looking a bit low-res, it performs fine.
Not many games hold up after 15+ years. The ones that do should be held as examples of brilliance for all to follow.
25/03/2011 at 15:30 liquidsoap89 says:
GoldenEye… You can’t play that game now without wanting to slap somebody.
25/03/2011 at 15:38 Dominic White says:
Goldeneye had a very awkward proto-FPS control system, but the port of Perfect Dark (basically Goldeneye IN THE FUTURE) on the 360 offers modern-style controls, and it works pretty well.
25/03/2011 at 19:05 NunianVonFuch says:
@Dominic White: Goldeneye and Perfect Dark had the exact same controls on the N64 :-S Did you not change the style from 1.1 Honey to 1.2 Solitaire? Thumbstick was look and the yellow pad was strafe.
The controls hold up so well because pads haven’t changed, just added a thumbstick in place of the digital yellow pad.
http://goldeneye.wikia.com/wiki/Control_style
25/03/2011 at 20:58 Dervish says:
1.2 Solitaire (aka “Turok controls” as we called it) is the closest I have ever felt to WASD+mouse on a console.
25/03/2011 at 15:32 Bugste81 says:
Replayed X-Wing Alliance with the old trusty Microsoft Force Feedback 2 Joystick. Much better than most of the new games I’ve Played recently, Even Bulletstorm.
25/03/2011 at 15:33 satsui says:
I would have to disagree in some cases. The only reason re-makes fail is because they’re always trying to add or remove features that ruins the balance.
For example, I still play SC2000. It’s still fun and easy. SC4, while still kind of fun, isn’t better than SC2000 outside of graphics. Another good example is FF7. I still love that game. I doubt there will be a remake, but if there is, just improve the graphics. DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE.
25/03/2011 at 15:34 cjlr says:
Starflight
What more needs to be said? Not that it would ever happen. Not that we even need it to happen, since we have Star Control II. But still.
Let’s hold off on Syndicate for a few years, though. I really, really don’t want that one to turn into a stupid six hour series of chest high walls. It deserves better.
25/03/2011 at 15:51 Megagun says:
I could never really get into starflight, despite loving Star Control 2. I think it had to do with the graphics, clunky UI, and way less hand-holding. Perhaps if there was a modern remake with neat graphics, I could end up playing it.
25/03/2011 at 16:19 Hendo says:
A new StarControl 2 would be awesome. A new Starflight would be awesomer.
Space exploration, exploitation, combat, puzzles. They had it all.
25/03/2011 at 17:52 darjeeling says:
I’ve been getting my Star Control II fix from Space Rangers 2: Reboot. Steam! The planetary exploration is there, and so is a surprisingly thriving economy, where you can freely trade between planets, or jack cargo from ships, while staving off the encroaching forces of three variants of self-replicating killer robots. Some of the missions are also really interesting text adventures, too (purely optional, btw, in case that’s not your thing).
25/03/2011 at 15:37 drewski says:
Most of the old games I play are on console, and I could give some examples there, but I’ll save my criticisms for PC games.
GTA2 is needlessly messy and the gang mechanic is nothing more than an arbitrary bar on game progress. It’s awful design. Warcraft 2 has one of the worst interfaces imaginable, whilst C&C’s building mechanics are laughable. When I saw a screenshot of the original Baldur’s Gate a week or so ago, I actually laughed at how bad it was. MoO2 is just obscure and impenetrable. And Railroad Tycoon is a completely infuriating little cheat.
I loved all of those games when they game out, apart from MoO2, which I came too a little later. Yet now…eugh.
It’s mostly interface stuff though so I’m going to grit my teeth and get through at least Baldur’s Gate again. Don’t think I can face C&C or WC2 after modern RTS games, though.
25/03/2011 at 15:39 Acosta says:
Master of Orion II, impenetrable? holly molly…
And Baldur’s Gate II is really beautiful.
25/03/2011 at 15:44 choconutjoe says:
“And Baldur’s Gate II is really beautiful.”
Especially with the high-res patch. It’s like walking around on a beautiful painting.
25/03/2011 at 15:49 LionsPhil says:
C&C’s lack of order or build queueing hurts a lot less than you’d think because it’s a much slower game. Otherwise the UI hasn’t really changed that much since.
Now, Dune 2 on the other hand, is like trying to control your units with chopsticks.
25/03/2011 at 16:27 Mman says:
“And Baldur’s Gate II is really beautiful.”
I could see someone finding Baldur’s Gate 1 pretty ugly with its original settings as it ran at 640×480 and couldn’t go higher, which is going to look pretty bad on most newer systems, and, while BG2 has better resolution options it doesn’t support widescreen by default. But yeah, with resolution mods if anything the graphics of Baldur’s Gate series (and Infinity Engine games in general) get better over time, as the hardware at the time couldn’t really bring out the full beauty of the 2D artwork.
25/03/2011 at 16:27 drewski says:
@ Acosta – yes, MoO2 is impenetrable. If you’ve never played it before, it’s about as easy to pick up as juggling on a unicycle. Baldur’s Gate 2 indeed does still look lovely, but the original is ugly, and the interface is absolutely terrible. Even the BG2 interface isn’t exactly streamlined. I’ll put up with things with those two games because they’re good enough, but let’s not pretend they are what they’re not.
@LionsPhil – it obviously bugs me a lot more than it bugs you. Then again, I never particularly liked the C&C games, the bombast of Red Alert was always more my style. I can still play RA2 to this day.
25/03/2011 at 17:05 Bhazor says:
I’m currently replaying BG2 (thanks GOG sale, kiss kiss) and looks wise it’s a mixed bag. Some of the backgrounds are gorgeous yes and on a big enough monitor it can look truly “epic”. A word I use sparingly.
What is less good is just about everything else. Character sprites, some effects and all the animations all look like complete guff now and even at the time the animations looked stilted and unconnected with what was happening. Some of the strict adherences to dice rolls are also annoying, Yoshimoto wasting his uber powerful special traps because he failed a skill being especially grating*.
All that said it is still one of the best games of all time and probably still the best non turnbased tactical rpg.
*I know a lot of people hate the memorising spells mechanic but I really like the planning and imagining all the upcoming scenarios. Makes plunging into a dungeon much more tense when theres always a chance I’ll run into vampires and not have any Restoration spells on hand.
25/03/2011 at 17:24 TillEulenspiegel says:
“yes, MoO2 is impenetrable. If you’ve never played it before, it’s about as easy to pick up as juggling on a unicycle.”
Wh…what? If you compare it to, say, GalCiv II, MOO2 is much much MUCH much easier to learn. It’s just about the friendliest 4X game around.
Unless you hate the genre and don’t enjoy poking around and learning things yourself, I can’t imagine how it could be described as “impenetrable”.
25/03/2011 at 18:25 Jimbo says:
BG1 looks alright with that mod (BGT?), but I still don’t think it’s a great game. I’ve owned it since it came out and in truth it’s always been something I feel like I should like rather than something I actually do like. The early level combat is ridiculous – it’s about 90% luck.
25/03/2011 at 19:22 drewski says:
@ TillEulenspiegel – isn’t that a bit like saying staring blankly at a wall is easier than riding a bike up Mt. Everest?
I find the Civ games remarkable easy to get into; even Alpha Centauri can be managed with a basic idea of the concepts. I just couldn’t get access to MoO2. Had no idea what my priorities should be; none of the technology seemed to indicate the order they should be researched; I had no idea what any improvements did or what they meant.
I like 4X games in general, but there was nothing about MoO2 that gave me a frame of reference for *how* to get into it.
30/03/2011 at 00:54 Cirno says:
About half a year ago I’ve decided to play Baldurs Gate again. I spent 2-3 weeks playing and ENJOYING BGT. I spend less than a day (on the weekend) to complete any modern game, sometimes its just a few hours. As for the enjoyment part, well, its rare to see a good game nowadays, hoping for an excellent game like from the golden age of PC gaming is useless.
I can easily name a few excellent old games: BG, Deus Ex, Planescape, Fallout, Half-Life, Mech Warrior etc etc. Naming some modern is harder (Chronicles of Riddick: EfBB, Half-Life 2, Portal, Dawn of War +some moar), it takes time to rember, while names of old games comes to mind without even thinking. Too bad, console is only one of the reasons behind all of that, second being big companies making pile-o-crap AAA games.
Like EA games, personally, I prefer to skip most of them – from my experience nothing worthy can ever be done by company like EA. But thats my personal opinion, through shared by almost all of my friends.
25/03/2011 at 15:37 Acosta says:
Dungeon Keeper is better than everything released by EA in the last years, combined. It´s probably a good thing they don’t touch it (just make a deal with GoG already and let them release it please, I want to have a digital copy.)
25/03/2011 at 15:40 Megagun says:
I think replaying old games can sometimes be annoying for the following few reasons:
-Hardware/Software improvements: some games tend to not work well on modern hardware at all. Think timing issues, incompatible OSes, and that newfangled 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratio that stretches your GUI up to a point where it’s starting to annoy you. DosBOX tends to fix many of these issues for old DOS games. Old games having their source code released tend to not have this issue either (Star Control 2 plays really well, as do the Quakes and Dooms. Freespace plays exceptionally well, and even has an amazing graphical boost because of it). The worst offenders here are early 3D games on the older Windows platforms. If you get them working on your shiny new modern OS, you’ll probably find yoursel getting annoyed at the ugly stretches GUIs…
-Advances in GUI designs (and gameplay changes): old GUIs are annoying. Old games didn’t do the ‘character diary’ thing at all, which means that you’ll have to replicate a modern GUI by using a pen and notepad in games like Star Control 2. Sure, this might be part of the charm if you’ve played these games in their original time period (nostalgia!), but in this day and age of hit tab to review a recent conversation, it feels annoying.
-Graphics resolution: old games were running on low resolutions. New games aren’t. We’re used to having large monitors with high-resolution games playing on them. In the old days, having a 15 inch monitor running fancy 640×480 games was common. Old games play like poop on a large monitor. Related: GUIs being way too large and obnoxious on high-resolution, large monitors.
-Advances in sound: I’m often amazed at how little this gets mentioned. Sound design has improved a lot, up to the point where if you listen carefully you may hear the background sounds (gunfire, ‘city activity’ type sounds, etc.) in a game. Usually, you won’t notice these kind of sounds unless they’re actually missing, and a lot of old games didn’t have the capability of having these sounds together with the ‘important’ sounds actual like enemy gunfire, or that kick-ass game music playing in the background.
-Lack of voice acting: with every game being voice-acted-to-the-core nowadays, reading feels like a chore. If I wanted to read, I’d pick up something from my way too large stack of Sci-fi lit I still have to read; mission briefings should be spoken out loud!
As far as playing old games (for me) goes: almost all games that have their source code released play rather well on modern systems, and compare extremely well with their closed-source counterparts from the same era. DOS games play fairly well on a technical side thanks to DOSBox, but usually suffer from an annoying pixelated look.
Interestingly, I sometimes find older FPSes to play nicer than modern ones. For some reason, modern FPSes like to have a lot of ‘graphics noise’ in them (excessive flora, way too much greeble, excessive use of destroyed scenery to break up scenes, etc). This noise makes it hard for me to notice enemy positions, especially on my older hardware at lower resolutions.
EDIT: added in lack of voice acting. That really annoys me nowadays. :)
EDIT 2: God, I hate this edit system. Seriously, the insanely small size of the edit window is annoying (thank god Chrome allows me to resize the edit box) and the way it kills all my line breaks is bad. Almost makes me feel like editing comments is like playing an old game from the mid 90′s!
25/03/2011 at 16:36 Nick says:
reading is hard
26/03/2011 at 10:53 Klaus says:
Voice acting is tricky because if it isn’t done to your liking, and no voice is palatable to all, you’ll have to mute the game or hope for a voice/subtitle option in the menu.
Reading is fine for me unless everything is written needlessly descriptive.
25/03/2011 at 15:53 LionsPhil says:
Oh, hey, I bet I can win the “oldest Electronic Arts game that’s awesome and hasn’t really been surpassed” race:
M.U.L.E.
And while it’s not EA (unless Rainbird ended up swallowed by them), while talking of early 3D FPS hybrid things, Midwinter needs more love. I guess you could kind of call Boiling Point a spirital successor? Only with way more bugs.
25/03/2011 at 15:53 adonf says:
EA made their own Goldeneye in 2003 or so. Maybe that’s the one he’s talking about, not the one from Rare/Nintendo
25/03/2011 at 22:02 bhlaab says:
That was Activision. See what he did there?
25/03/2011 at 15:53 Alfius says:
I always liked The World is Not Enough better than Goldeneye … clearly the better game but does anyone else think so? Hell no.
25/03/2011 at 19:15 NunianVonFuch says:
It wasn’t a terrible game, just next to no replayability, blocky graphics and levels, awful sound design for the weapons, rubbish stealth mechanics, frustrating difficulty at higher settings rather than challenging, static enemies that pop-up to shoot you from windows, clunky controls, multiplayer maps that favoured massive open spaces (which is daft for a max of 4 players) and slow framerates even when things aren’t exploding.
It was okay with 4 people on the airplane map but other than that I completely agree with you, nobody else thinks The World Is Not Enough is the better game. =D
25/03/2011 at 16:05 Soon says:
“So, what classic games do you love that you’re too terrified to return to in case they’re horrible?”
Every Amiga game. My youth would seem wasted.
25/03/2011 at 18:09 Dominic White says:
About 95% of Amiga games suffered from the same crippling flaw: They looked great, they sounded great, they were just hideously designed and played like scarcely-updated C64 games.
The 5% that had gameplay to live up to the graphics were amazing, though.
25/03/2011 at 16:32 Nick says:
I have returned to all the games I liked as a child that weren’t on my Amstrad CPC at one point or another and most of them stand up well, assuming you have a tolerance for sometimes quirky UIs or control interfaces. Usually it was the NES games, not counting Mario, that were pretty awful compared to what I remembered, while most of the SNES, Mega Drive and PC games still had a lot going for them.
And I like/always liked Magic Carpet =/
25/03/2011 at 16:39 Wulf says:
I return to old games frequently. In fact, I find that it’s necessary to retain my gamerness, considering how narrow the field of interest for games has become, lately. A friend of mine who also likes old games made an interesting point a few days back when randomly talking about old games. I’ll attempt to paraphrase what he said, including context.
“New games from the mainstream today may not seem as passionate or as vividly interesting as games of yore. True, you don’t have Vangers or Oddworld, and there’s a reason for that. Gaming used to have a more confined audience, and developers could get away with being wildly eccentric and strange. Thus you had games which were, to wit, wildly eccentric and strange.
“These games appeared at a time when people were accustomed to games having oddities, and if you go back as early as the earliest of home computers, you’ll find stuff that’s just… what? Examples being Head Over Heels and Snake, Rattle, ‘n Roll. However, as gaming became more mainstream, it suffered what happened to films – the mainstream gaming industry became akin to Hollywood. And just about every mainstream game is like a Hollywood blockbuster.
“Except this invites the problems that Hollywood has, currently. They have massive budgets and cast their nets wide, the problem is however that due to trying to appeal to the most common person, they leave out creativity and ingenuity, and we get the same old stuff rehashed. And they feel they need to do that in order to justify their aforementioned massive budget. If they don’t get a lot of customers then they’ll have trouble even breaking even. So they cast their nets ever wider.”
“This is, of course, why we’re seeing a resurgence of both independent titles and small scale creations, and not just in the gaming industry but in nearly every entertainment industry – comics, animation, film, games, and so on. They have smaller budgets, they can’t afford the special effects or shiny graphics of old, but certain groups are so starved of things that are specifically targeted at them that they’re making huge profits anyway. And they’ll continue to do so.”
“The huge Hollywood monster and gaming equivalents will eventually collapse under its own weight. It’ll get to a point where the budget of their films is bigger than the amount of people willing to watch them, and they’ll realise that they can’t just use one film to rake in billions any more, and that instead they need to make a series of smaller films which appeal to more niche demographics. This is something that both independent and small scale studios have figured out.”
“You can’t expect to be interested in something that’s targeted at the lowest common denominator, or the widest field of interest, because you aren’t in those areas. In fact, a piece of entertainment that’s far too common across all interests can actually mean that no one is interested in it. In trying to create a ‘dumb action film’ or whatever that everyone can enjoy, well, eventually everyone is going to get bored of that, and that’s why this approach can’t succeed.”
“In the past of the games industry, like the film industry, we had smaller scale houses putting out pieces of entertainment that were targeted at more specific demographics, and that’s what we can find in the past. That’s what our future seems to hold for us as well. Things are coming full circle, and we’re almost ready to begin the cycle anew, and when we do, it’ll mean a lot more raw creativity, and people not being afraid to offend some people because they’re targeting a specific demographic.”
This was basically what was said in a conversation with him, most of the points are his, and he’s right. I go back to the days of gaming yore because there are games that appeal to me. Reecently I’ve replayed Fallout Tactics, Quest for Glory III, Uru, and a bunch of other old games. These are the sorts of games that you would never, ever find in the mainstream these days, because each of the games I’ve mentioned has the chance to alienate, freak out, and/or offend the masses.
But then, what do we see independentss doing? They’re just beginning to touch upon games that might seriously alienate the masses. And… well… good! Good! Really good! Very good! Awesome! Let’s do that! Then we can figure out demographics that are more granular than ‘everyone’ again and actually start making entertainment that can work for ‘everyone,’ because each group of people will have those who’re working to create entertainment for their demographic. That’s what the past held, and my friend and I think that this is what the future holds, too.
Look at stuff like Amnesia and Dear Esther, look at VVVVVV and CreaVures, are these really games which have a broad base of interest? Nope! But three of them sold well enough, and I’m sure that the other, which will come out shortly, will sell well enough too! I’m more excited about the future of gaming now than I have been in a while. I’m not too excited about right now, because we’re still coming down off the mainstream high, but I am excited about a potential tomorrow, one that might look very much like my distant yesterdays.
So I disagree with EA. I don’t think it’s necessary to make blockbusters out of old game reboots at all. In fact, if we’re going to reboot those old games then I’d rather see independents or small scale dev houses do it. And that’s all there is I can think to add to that topic.
*falls over.*
25/03/2011 at 16:41 Hammelbamf says:
Well, that doesn’t sound like “We’re unimaginative, too lazy to buy another studio and will now just make some remakes of old shit (with annual sequels, of course).”
Oh, wait…
25/03/2011 at 16:47 Moonracer says:
Yeah I agree with others. Are we saying old games suck now because of the technology or the actual game? What elements are important? This also makes me think of movie sequels where they switch out an actor and how jarring that is (how many people played Batman?).
I guess this is also like the Fallout 3 controversy over switching to 3D. A drastic change in the game’s look and playstyle, but it worked.
Ultimately I agree with those who think releasing old games now and see which ones sell, then think of remakes.
25/03/2011 at 16:57 Wulf says:
GoG has been selling old games for a while, now. They might be a good source to tap for that.
And… to be honest, I thought Fallout 3 was shallow. It was a case of casting the net too wide as I described in my post above, appealing to the lowest common denominator, and losing what I enjoyed about Fallout 2.
Fallout 2 being a crazy game put together by truly passionate people, one which knew when to be serious, when to be silly, and how to mix the two. One which could handle issues, and even deal with the core problems of humanity, and do it without being maudlin and melancholy. And it was incredibly creative with its humour too, and even dealt with issues there. I mean, a great example of this was playing a character with low INT – on one hand it was funny, on another, it was an insight to how people with mental disabilities are treated by the populace.
New Vegas was pretty good, it was a nice try to recapture the glory days of Fallout 2, but it still didn’t match it. It was one of the better RPGs I’d played in years, absolutely, but it had moments of brilliance rather than being brilliant through and through.
Edit #1 – TL;DR: Hm…
Fallout 3 – It’s funny and a pastiche!
New Vegas – It makes you think, but it’s depressing.
Fallout 2 – It’s funny and it makes you think!
25/03/2011 at 17:08 drewski says:
Fallout 3 probably *is* shallow compared to the older ones, but it’s vast, and I personally found that equally compelling.
25/03/2011 at 17:11 Wulf says:
Like I said, Fallout 3 cast its net wide, which can also be read as vast. It is incredibly shallow though, and even Fallout Tactics at least had the soul and personality of a Fallout game, even if it got some of the more clerical details wrong. That’s why I’ve recently gone back to play it, because I personally enjoy how it brazenly tackles various issues whilst being actually funny in the process.
Without either the humour or the bald-faced audacity with which Fallout will question certain things, I tend to find the experience hollow. But that’s just me. Fallout 3 would’ve been a much better game if it hadn’t had the ‘Fallout’ name attached to it, because that name carries with it some weight, merit, worth, meaning, and pedigree that Beth just couldn’t capture.
Edit #1: If you’re curious about what Fallout Tactics dealt with… I remember the topics of fascism, co-dependence, the prime directive philosophy, xenophobia versus acceptance, the mutual co-operation for survival, and so on. It handled these issues incredibly well and often gave me pause for thought. It made me laugh, too. I actually long for games that are brave enough to do this sort of thing again.
25/03/2011 at 19:29 drewski says:
I played Tactics when it came out, and tried to play it again recently. It’s incredibly dull, and I say that as a person who *loves* turn based tactical games.
I happen to think Bethesda’s take on the Fallout universe far more compelling than Fallout 2s which frequently strikes me as unnecessarily silly.
25/03/2011 at 16:48 Grape says:
Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!
25/03/2011 at 17:10 Phinor says:
Old games/franchises are of no use to EA because.. most of them don’t turn easily into console games.
25/03/2011 at 17:14 Wulf says:
Old console games wouldn’t easily be transformed into modern console games, either. :p
That’s really a point worth making. In fact, there are some fringe aspects of the console market which are hanging in there, and creating games which don’t fit the vast majority of the console audience at all. Koei and Disgaea et al.
25/03/2011 at 18:12 Dominic White says:
See, Wulf, when you limit yourself to maybe a single paragraph, you can boil down the problem quite well.
Yes, in some respects, mainstream PS3/360 games are a step back from Xbox/PS2 titles. Far fewer RPGs, and generally less ambition. As I’ve pointed out in the many Operation Flashpoint 2/Red River threads, anyone going ‘hurrr, consoles r dumm’ clearly never played the fantastic port of the original OFP for the Xbox, which was even better than the PC build in some respects.
Nowadays you’ve got huge, high-budget developers for the 360 saying how it’s just not possible to do a serious sim on consoles.
25/03/2011 at 19:31 drewski says:
Are they really saying that, though? Or are they saying “we don’t think a serious sim will sell enough copies to buy us all new Ferraris, so we’re going to make it more accessible to lure in the CoD crowd”?
25/03/2011 at 19:33 Dominic White says:
Well, they say A, but they probably mean B.
25/03/2011 at 17:11 R10T says:
This is Blasphemy! This is Madness !
25/03/2011 at 17:22 Inigo says:
THIS! IS! BUSINESS!
25/03/2011 at 17:23 Oneironaut says:
Some games definitely held up better than others. I think Doom is great, but Wolf3D hasn’t aged as well. The controls don’t feel anywhere near as smooth and the sounds/graphics also feel so much worse. I do however love the iPhone port of Wolf3D, as that control scheme works great.
My second favorite game (surpassed only by Mass Effect) is Diablo 2. I played that for hundreds of hours when it came out, and still regularly play it. Everything about the game is great, and I hope Diablo 3 manages to be as good.
25/03/2011 at 18:20 Phydaux says:
A lot of the problems with old games is that most of the interface was unique for that game, there was no definitive way of laying things out or navigating through menus, or controlling characters. A lot of old games were using window-like systems (all in very different ways) before GUI style OS’s were even made. And many of the interfaces and control mechanisms were completely unintuitive, because you had never used something like that before.
All the different games had wildly different control mechanisms, even in a single genre like FPSs there was no standard. (The N64 has the 3 prong controller, and “camera buttons” because they just didn’t know the best way control things in a 3D environment. The original PS1 controllers didn’t even have thumbsticks, but they soon saw the errors of their ways when 3D games became increasingly popular — and increasingly difficult to control with a D-pad.) This is one of the major drawbacks of old games, they’re just so hard to get into because better control methods have been refined, and we’ve learnt how to play certain games in a specific way.
I’ve been playing games since the early 80′s. And there have been a few major games that I never played. One of theose games is XCOM (UFO: Enemy Unknown). It’s excellent. I started playing it for the first time about a month ago. I don’t understand how a game like this passed me by. The amount of stories you could tell would have filled many a school day. How none of my friends raved about this I’ll never know. The biggest shock that I’d missed XCOM, was that my friends and I were massive Chaos fans. I suppose it’s easy to miss this stuff back then with no internet.
25/03/2011 at 18:22 BobsLawnService says:
Except that I played Magic Carpet about two years ago and absolutely loved every single second of it. Technologically it was far ahead of today’s games. These days you’re lucky if you can deform a wall, in Magic Carpet you rent entire worlds asunder.
So yeah. Boo fucking Hiss.
25/03/2011 at 20:39 DJ Phantoon says:
And in ten years, we’ll have it all again!
25/03/2011 at 18:26 Pantsman says:
Some hold up, some don’t. Duke Nukem 3D is still great fun today, but Doom II feels kinda weird and a bit dull to me, and Wolf 3D is mind-numbingly boring. The original Super Mario Bros. is as addictive as ever; the original Legend of Zelda ain’t. System Shock 2 is still marvelous, System Shock 1 is just strange.
It’s actually really surprising to me how much variance there is in games that were once equally popular, and even ones spawned from the same developer. It really makes one wonder which of today’s games will still be enjoyed ten years from now, and which will seem unplayable.
25/03/2011 at 18:27 godkingemperor says:
THQ did much better with the Road Rash license than EA ever did, they should just give it back to them.
25/03/2011 at 18:47 Ginger Yellow says:
Yes, Goldeneye plays terribly now, and in fact wasn’t all that great at the time if you were familiar with PC shooters. A revelation for console only folks, I’ll grant. But I’m playing Dungeon Keeper for the millionth time at the moment and it’s still just as brilliant as it ever ones, even though it looks butt ugly. It has never, ever been surpassed in gameplay, and I say that as a big fan of Evil Genius.
26/03/2011 at 06:36 Dervish says:
You are simply incorrect about GoldenEye. What “PC shooters” were out in 1997? Hexen 2, Quake 2, the Build engine games? GoldenEye was doing things with AI and scripting that none of them even came close to, not to mention the overall level design and objective-based missions. “For console only folks” my ass.
25/03/2011 at 18:49 JP says:
There is a presumption in what Gibeau says that I don’t much like.
If you say “well, some of those old games weren’t all that great”, but then the mega-budget products you release every year aren’t all that great either, that’s a double standard. The latter were apparently worth spending millions on, compared to the tiny amount it would take to do a faithful remake or up-res, or hell even just a release on GoG.com.
And by using that as justification for not releasing or reviving anything from their enormous dragon-hoard of wonderful old IPs, they’re ensuring that those IPs will continue to be dusty and mostly-forgotten. “Ah, those old games weren’t that good anyway. Trust us, you don’t want ‘em.”
Here’s a theory: deep down there’s also a sting they’re trying to avoid, which is that releasing their stuff from the golden era of PC gaming would show just how low the bar has become for innovation, breadth and depth. Look at EA’s earliest output: amazing stuff that really expanded what games could be. Remember, they used to be called “Electronic Arts”.
Also, yes, GoldenEye is an extremely poor random example to beat up on. In a certain sense, GoldenEye is the first fish that scrambled onto land, of course it’s going to be awkward.
25/03/2011 at 18:59 Ragnar says:
I can’t stand playing old FPS games, or any kind of 1st person 3D game. I absolutely loved Half Life when I played it in 2002. I tried going back to it in Half Life Source, and just couldn’t do it. And just watching Doom now makes me nauseous and gives me a headache.
Early 3D looks the worst, while 2D and sprite based games hold up well. Compare Final Fantasy 1 to 7. FF1 looks basic, but perfectly fine. FF7, aside from the 2D drawn backgrounds, looks like crap.
25/03/2011 at 19:46 Xanadu says:
Definitely agree about early 3D. Played the remake Tomb Raider Anniversary recently, and it recaptured the magic I remembered from the original. But I shudder just looking at screenshots of the first Tomb Raider. Which is a shame, as I’m pretty sure the gameplay would still be there, if I could look past the visuals.
25/03/2011 at 20:54 gganate says:
I love replaying old shooters, mostly because I like sci-fi settings and military stuff not so much. Half-Life is still really good and better than Half-Life 2.
25/03/2011 at 21:27 Urthman says:
But I shudder just looking at screenshots of the first Tomb Raider. Which is a shame, as I’m pretty sure the gameplay would still be there
Actually, no. Talk about a game that doesn’t hold up. The original Tomb Raider games are horrible. Moving Lara around feels like you’re driving a tank.
25/03/2011 at 22:16 kyrieee says:
Yeeeees HL definitely holds up.
The fights against the soldiers is still some of my absolute favourite shooter gameplay.
25/03/2011 at 19:01 Xanadu says:
Valhalla. In the early 80s an eleven year old thought it a complex, intricate world of wonder. Twenty years later I eagerly loaded it into a spectrum emulator to find it completely random and unplayable.
25/03/2011 at 19:01 MOKKA says:
I’m still desperately hoping that someone will make a Bioforge 2.
I replayed the original Bioforge a few years ago via Dosbox and although it’s flawed (if you don’t want to read a lot, don’t play it) the overall experience and the story were just great.
26/03/2011 at 11:41 Urael says:
oh, man, I’m right there with you on this one! I only played Bioforge for the first time a couple of years back and despite the most ludicrous, barely responsive keyboard control system imaginable made it a decent way through the game before my attention was turned elsewhere. I loved every second of it, though, which is what made me battle on through.
27/03/2011 at 17:04 BobsLawnService says:
Another vote for Bioforge. I loved the direction Origin was going in when EA destroyed them. They really pushed genre boundries and came up with some awesome concepts.
25/03/2011 at 19:04 Aero says:
I’m tempted to reinstall “Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold”, but afraid it wont live up to the endless hours of entertainment it provided me as a child.
I remember liking that game much more than Wolfenstein or Doom, but maybe because it was much brighter and didn’t scare me as much.
25/03/2011 at 19:09 bluebottle says:
Does anyone else get an ever increasing sense that a lot of the big wigs in the industry don’t actually like games?
25/03/2011 at 19:34 drewski says:
I think they just like money more.
25/03/2011 at 19:36 Zogtee says:
“The key thing for us is, if we do bring [any of those] back, the game has got to be good. I don’t know about you but when I look back at GoldenEye, I think of it as this amazing game and the you go and play it and are like, ‘Oh. Really?’…”
It gets more interesting when you turn this critical gaze on EA’s current output, though. How many of their current titles will be remembered fondly twenty years from now?
25/03/2011 at 19:42 SirKicksalot says:
Where is the Undying sequel? You’d think that in this post-Bioshock era someone at EA would notice they have one hell of a concept there – a period horror shooter involving time travel and alternate dimensions in which you dual-wield awesome weapons and spells.
25/03/2011 at 19:59 ts061282 says:
It’s the allegory of the cave…
Good games are good, but compared to what?
25/03/2011 at 20:32 bluebomberman says:
I wonder if EA came to this conclusion in part from the atrocious release of Wing Commander Arena for XBox Live in 2007.
25/03/2011 at 20:47 jalf says:
Anyone who’s tried replaying the first Warcraft knows perfectly well how not all old games have aged well.
But of course, there are others that are still excellent.
And then there are all those in between, which are still playable ‘to fans*, but would never be able to attract *new* fans today.
Btw, I have to say it’s amusing reading the comments, and just counting how many hardcore fans of game X think that because *they* are still able to play and enjoy X, it proves that “old games are awesome”:
I know a few logic professors who’d be turning over in their graves if they were dead.
26/03/2011 at 02:45 Nick says:
similarly, not all recent games are worth playing.
25/03/2011 at 20:51 gganate says:
I started replaying Star Wars Dark Forces and while it’s certainly not horrible, some of the levels have questionable design. The switch puzzle in the sewers, for example, not to mention the illogical idea of it as a decent hideout. You’re telling me that Moff Rebus plays with all those switches and performs all those platforming jumps every time he need to get out of the stink? Also, I’ve pretty much given up on the game now, having reached the imperial city level. There’s a ridiculous hexagon and you have to manipulate all these damn switches. One door closes, another opens and it’s just too damn confusing. I want to shoot things in a shooter, damnit, not play with switches until my head explodes. I’ll take the more logical puzzles of Portal or Guardian of Light any day.
But for the most part, most of my favorites hold up. Deus Ex and Thief seem to get better every time I return to them. The amount of thought that went into developing those worlds is amazing.
25/03/2011 at 20:56 Dranthaar says:
A couple games that came to mind for me, some EA, some not are:
* Mail Order Monsters by EA – One of the first “pet” games I remember playing and playing for hours upon hours.
* Elite (the original one) – The area’s of space where huge, with thousands of planets that actually varied from world to world, good, okay fair, flight control, and an actual story. Granted, you had to get at least some of the story by reading the novella that came with it, but still.
One that only has a part of the game I’d love to see a new release for is:
* San Francisco Rush: 2049 – While the game, overall, is just a fast racing game, I LOVE the 4 player vehicular combat arena that you could play split-screen. Even people who didn’t like racing games and/or arena combat games could get into that one, so it must have done something right.
And a bit newer game that I still think is great and would absolutely LOVE to see a sequel to:
* Omikron: The Nomad Soul – This game was part 3rd person action game, part FPS and part fighting game, all rolled up in an RPG. Heck it even had a soundtrack done by David Bowie, who also played a couple characters in the game. One such character was the lead singer of a musical group that, if you looked for them, gave actual concerts. Only one song each, but still…
26/03/2011 at 05:53 marach says:
Elite 4 is in a constant on again off again development state check out David Brabens company (all 3 previous elites are available) maybe it’ll be released one day when they stop making games for the wii or kinect..
26/03/2011 at 09:31 arghstupid says:
Actually I think Elite is a prime example of a game that’s no longer particularly special. Don’t get me wrong, the original was mind-blowingly awesome when it came out, but whenever I go back to it I’m always left feeling a little like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe9kKf7SHco
It’s just been out-done in every way since, multiple times.
26/03/2011 at 11:51 Urael says:
Elite 4 isn’t happening. Gaming’s longest prick-tease. Accept that Braben has no will to do another one, and let’s all move on with our lives.
Elite itself has aged rather badly. A stunning technical achievement for its day, the gameplay and mechanics of it are relics that should be best left forgotten. Oolite proved this – by not even changing the control scheme they’ve guaranteed that only the most hardcore will ever get into it, and the falseness of the universe is still noticeable; that shiny planetary globe that you can’t visit or land on (much like the X-series).
Pioneer, however, is taking the right approach. Taking Frontier: Elite 2 as it’s inspiration, it is reworking and reinterpreting just about every aspect of what made the original game so great. New controls, bigger, better planets, reworked combat, new autopilot AI options…this is exactly the approach EA and others should be taking with their legacy titles. Keep the core, then modernise it. We don’t need any more X-Com debacles – just give us the thing that grabbed us in the first place, with the same old magic, only polished up for modern eyes to behold. Is that really so much to ask?
25/03/2011 at 22:06 mashakos says:
I wanna see how well The Bard’s Tale holds up today. It must still have killer graphics, right?
25/03/2011 at 22:14 Mman says:
In this context whether a game has “aged well” doesn’t even really matter; if a games designer (although I’m not sure whether a designer gave the quote in question) can instantly dismiss a game/series because they consider it to have aged without taking some look at what people loved about it and thinking of ways they could attempt to modernise those things (even if that seems to translate into “make it a shooter” these days), then they aren’t very good designers.
25/03/2011 at 22:24 drcancerman says:
This reminds me of the Jane’s F/A-18, which is a really, really, really good simulator from EA. I miss Jane’s simulators. The community has done wonders to it, even without the source code(by hex editing the EXE)…
Maybe someone from RPS could, perhaps…lobby EA to…ermm release the source code? :D
This is one where I’m sure it is good :P, not dubious stuff like magic carpet.
25/03/2011 at 23:19 malkav11 says:
Old games are a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, in terms of graphics (and other technology) and usability (user interface as well as other issues like saves – we bitch about save points now, but quite a few older games have no ability to save at all), old games can be pretty painful to deal with. And I certainly won’t miss code wheels, paragraph books, manually mapping and note taking, high scores driving the entire game (not gone, but far less prominent), etc. On the other hand, entire genres have been all but discarded (some varieties of RPG, adventure games, space sims, turn based strategy), and plenty of promising mechanics and designs have never been successfully replicated in modern gaming (System Shock, X-Com, etc). Not to mention that, once one gets to the era where story becomes a component of gaming, there are plenty of stories never revisited. (Even if a franchise is successful and ongoing, you won’t get the same thing out of the current games you would out of the originals.) I tend not to play them nearly as much as I’d theoretically like to, being distracted by the new shinies. But there’s value there and I appreciate efforts to make these games available to the modern gaming audience like DOSBox and Good Old Games. (And, for that matter, abandonware sites.) Much as I despise antipiracy efforts that, while completely ineffectual in their intended goal, will unnecessarily complicate making today’s games available to the gaming audience of 2020, or 2030.
26/03/2011 at 00:07 DOLBYdigital says:
Yeah the amazing games in the past were made for ‘gamers’. So EA says they ‘suck’ which actually means “we wouldn’t maximize profits from that game, therefore it sucks”. They only care about games that sell to casuals since they are becoming larger than the hardcore gamers. It sucks but its obvious looking at most of EAs lineup…. Now feels like a good time for me to reaffirm my hatred for EA and all it represents… I hate that gaming has become an industry and not just a purely passion driven hobby/side project…. :(
26/03/2011 at 01:12 sidhellfire says:
I wish you weren’t right. But sadly it’s all true. Games that come frome EA just lack depth similar thing happened to Codemasters. It’s just like magically, when company gets big, it looses all the ambitons and instead of making dream come true, they just focus on merchandising, rather than developing.
In fact, I wish they look into dictionary and find out what really “develop” means.
26/03/2011 at 01:03 sidhellfire says:
EA Games recently focuses on releasing games that have nothing innovative. Bringing absolutely NOTHING than remodelling and retexturing old schemas won’t get their games praised in contrary to old games which were gameplay pioneers.
26/03/2011 at 01:47 edit says:
It’s not that games we thought were good are actually bad.. Everything is relative and everything is changing. Games now have the history of gaming to learn from and also to be measured against. Holding old games to modern standards makes little sense. It’s a good game if you have a good experience with it. I often replay ~20 year old games and while occasionally you’ll find one with some kind of game mechanic that is infuriating and has been outgrown by gaming at large since that time, usually they can be enjoyed in exactly the same way as ever, and when that is not true it usually shows a change in the gamer and his\her values rather than some intrinsic problem in the game that was previously overlooked.
26/03/2011 at 02:08 MrEvilGuy says:
but but but I just started playing Ultima Underworld last night!
maybe he’s opened my eyes and now I realize it’s not worth playing.
((complete utter bullshit, I’m having a better experience with this rpg than fucking dragon age bullshit or oblivion or fallout 3))
26/03/2011 at 02:34 Archonsod says:
What I find ironic is this coming from a publisher which made it’s name releasing the same game every year with some mild graphical updates. And still does to this day.
26/03/2011 at 05:56 marach says:
One game I’d love to see get an update is Realms of the Haunting played at night with the lights off it’s still a good thriller/adventure/puzzle/FPS hell if they just released the original uncompressed video footage to us so we could replace the default stuff i’d be cheering!
26/03/2011 at 09:51 Chaz says:
Yep Realms of the Haunting was quite good, never managed to finish it though as my install kept crashing at a certain point. I still have the discs but getting the game to work on modern systems is apparently a right bitch.
26/03/2011 at 11:58 Urael says:
Having bought the game off ebay not long ago I’m reasonably certain Dosbox is your friend here.
26/03/2011 at 17:30 marach says:
yeah it’s really hard the steps are…
1. install dosbox
2. load dosbox and mount a folder as c
3. mount your cdrom with -t cdrom
4.switch to cd rom
5. type ‘install’
6. accept all the defaults
7.type ‘ROTH’
8.enjoy
26/03/2011 at 10:06 Chaz says:
“So, what classic games do you love that you’re too terrified to return to in case they’re horrible?”
Well the ones that pop into my head straight away are the original Tomb Raider games. The platforming action would just seem so slow and clumsy now, in fact even then at the time it seemed to hark back years to the days of the original Prince of Persia. Having to line yourself up perfectly at the edge of blocks and then take a little jump or two back so that you would have the correct distance to make a running jump. Add to that the auto lock-on combat where in third person your guns would flit about from one enemy to the other as they moved in and out of range, and a punishing checkpoint system that had you playing large chunks of difficult sections over and over again. Tomb Raider 2 is one of my all time favourite games, but I bet I’d be frothing at the mouth in frustrated rage if I played it again now.
26/03/2011 at 12:52 gganate says:
i don’t know though, the first three tomb raider games have really ambitious level design, I’m think of the first and third ones in particular, which might help overlook certain issues.
26/03/2011 at 13:33 Mman says:
“i don’t know though, the first three tomb raider games have really ambitious level design”
Correct, but you have to get past to initial (immense) learning curve of the controls (which themselves have advantages over many newer games when learned) to appreciate the other aspects, but I already wrote an essay about that here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08/02/eg-retrospective-tomb-raider-iv/comment-page-1/#comment-483360
27/03/2011 at 02:15 Chaz says:
Oh don’t get me wrong I thought the level design was fantastic, specticles like the sphinx in the massive underground cavern or the sunken ship in TR2 were all major draws of the series and indeed all the lost temples etc are still in my mind what continues to be the main draw of the Tomb Raider series. What doesn’t stand the test of time is the rather antiquated control scheme, that newer interations of the series like Legend and Underworld have much improved on.
26/03/2011 at 11:14 bill says:
None of the old games that are considered classics WERE horrible or terrible. Though some of them might appear to be now.
I think some genres have advanced a lot more than others, so some games stand the test of time more than others. Goldeneye was awesome, but the FPS genre has probably improved on everything it did at the time. (though i played it a few years back on an emulator and still enjoyed it. )
Dungeon Keeper (2) hasn’t really been improved on, and and could be released now in the same form (with updated graphics and maybe controls) and would be awesome.
System shock is a weird one. In many ways it’s been improved on, but i think the core game is good enough that it’d work with a very close modern remake.
Some games however haven’t dated well. Things like magic carpet and duke nukem probably wouldn’t work well for modern gamers as they’re a product of their time and niche audience.
But I think, generally, they should have more confidence in their old IPs. Some of them had amazing elements and could be remade almost exactly for modern audiences who haven’t experienced them. Others could form the basis of more evolved games.
I guess the thing is that games back then were made for gamers – these days they’re made for the mainstream public. And mainstream audiences are much less willing to invest in something, and have much narrower tastes in general.
The games haven’t changed, the audience has.
26/03/2011 at 13:29 Mman says:
Wrong reply
26/03/2011 at 13:45 Buttless Boy says:
I have yet to find a classic game that I loved as a kid that isn’t still amazing. Duke Nukem 64, Link’s Awakening, pretty much any NES platformer, LEGO Island, Operation: Inner Space… These are games which were and are brilliant. I still play these games. Just because some fools can’t appreciate something without high resolution 3D bullshit doesn’t mean it’s not fun. When I rule the world every gamer will be issued a ZX Spectrum and an Atari 2800 and forced to play kickass old games until they can damn well appreciate them.
That said, I have a strong suspicion the dinosaur movie platformer I played as a kid sucked. But considering all the other games I’ve revisited and loved, maybe I should track it down.
26/03/2011 at 13:57 Berzee says:
The dinosaur movie platformer!!! The one from the “brain grain, brain drain” movie?
27/03/2011 at 06:09 Buttless Boy says:
Hmm, maybe. That sounds vaguely familiar. All I remember about the movie was that it starred a T-Rex and/or a little boy, and that it was animated. Also the platformer had a lot of trampolines and dudes that threw bones out of windows for some damn reason; I think you could switch between the different dinosaurs and use their various abilities to solve puzzles or something. There was the T-Rex, a pterosaur of some kind, and some kind of quadruped. My memory at this point is hazy as hell.
26/03/2011 at 14:49 Kefren says:
I can only speak for myself, and I am sure I am not part of EA’s market. However I play old games all the time, and am never disappointed. Recently I have played a few recent-ish games (Blacksite Area 51 at present) and find them to be incredibly disappointing. Then I go back to HOMM 2 and 3, the original Trackmania, UFO, Rune War, System Shock, even C64 games like Ghosts and Goblins or Clean Up Service, and realise they are games that never disappoint. The graphics don’t detract in any way, they are just fantastic games. Thank god that old games didn’t have the DRM shit that EA and others add to modern games. Increasingly the only modern games I pay for are small indie ones like Osmos, Auralux, The Path, World of Goo, Gish etc. Otherwise I just play my old games, emulators, and stuff off GOG or DRM-free games from GamersGate. There aren’t enough hours in the day just for those!
26/03/2011 at 19:09 danimalkingdom says:
Weirdly, when I first played Minecraft it made me think of Magic Carpet. And I saw a mod for Minecraft yesterday that let’s you spawn skeleton armies which is totally Magic Carpet.
RE: GoldenEye, my housemate bought an N64, we played it yesterday. Still good.
26/03/2011 at 21:48 Hmm-Hmm. says:
I wholeheartedly disagree. Older games aren’t necessarily worse because they are older. He may have a point if you have a case of nostalgia covering up flaws in games. But even so, if I liked a game a lot way back when, that fun I experienced didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
And he seems to argue that a lot of games people like aren’t that great. Which is just not true. Or simply subjective.
27/03/2011 at 11:00 Tetragrammaton says:
To add my ten pence – ive recently been on a nostalgia free (Never played before) Ye Olde RPG binge: Darklands, Ultima IV, Dungeon Hack, Throne of Chaos, Lurking Horror & Journey (Ok, so the last 2 are really adventure games) & frankly Ive found It collectively a far more refreshing and interesting experience than that of any RPG released in the past 5 years or so.
Also as a side note: I can attest that Goldeneye multiplayer played with 100% nostagia goggles is still an enormous amount of fun. And fun is what its all about, no?
27/03/2011 at 12:37 tentacle says:
We loved the old games for many different reasons. Some of these reasons hold up today, some don’t.
But dismissing them because they aren’t fun today (for a modern mainstream gamer), is moronic. The technology is dated and although many, many games continue to be fun to this day despite it (MULE, Wasteland, Nethack, most Ultimas, most of the great adventure games, etc), I do think in some cases it’s difficult to get over that barrier.
But to go from that to saying the games aren’t worth revisiting is MORONIC. Nobody wants anyone to just REMAKE powermonger with nicer graphics, but take the ideas that made it special at the time and translate that into a modern game.
I can’t enjoy Populous 1 at all anymore, but would I like a modernized god sim/strategy game that balanced warfare, resource management, and the subjugation of peoples by whatever means necessary, laced with humorous stabs at religion, sheeple, and politics? Hell friggin yeah!
Likewise I can’t enjoy Mercenary, Elite or Lords of Midnight anymore, but imagine what the core concepts of these games would be like translated into a modern game and you realize there are tons of great ideas in these old classics.
Old games were in many ways more creative and willing to try crazy things. Now we’re stuck playing the same old games again and again, everything game is just iteratively better (or worse) and minutely different from it’s earlier incarnation.
(This isn’t to say we don’t have plenty of absolutely incredible games today – we certainly do – it’s just they tend to be of a handful of very specific genres).
There’s a wealth of ideas in old games that should be explored. If bigwigs like EA aren’t going to explore them because they’re too afraid to try something new, fine, just auction off the IP to others who will.
Didn’t trademark law have some kind of “use it or lose it” clause? Isn’t that how brian fargo got himself the Wasteland trademark? I know it’s not like getting the full IP, but it’s something…
28/03/2011 at 13:35 Delphiki says:
Dungeon keeper IS asweome, that is all.
28/03/2011 at 19:05 knyte says:
Give me a modern remake of “Lords Of Conquest”, EA!
Don’t change a single thing about the gameplay or strategy. Just give me prettier graphics and online multiplayer, and I will buy stock in your company.
20/04/2011 at 10:41 RegisteredUser says:
Someone PLEASE remake Hi-Octane (Miniguns and rockets pre-built in, not that stupid racing crap with “powerups” for 1-3 shots we have now) and I sure would not mind another Carmageddon.
Also we need moar Dungeon Keepering.
19/10/2011 at 02:23 Styles says:
“they might not actually be that good”
NOT THE POINT!
Sure if you go back and play them now they may not be as much fun, but that does NOT mean that everything produced now should be first person god damn shooter.
The point is that they were graphically fantastic at the time, had a great story AND had a different type of game play to many of their competitors ….what we want is for these games to be brought forward into this newer age, improving graphics etc, but LEAVING the original game play style intact. Sure, modifications and updates would have to be done, but isometric tactical shooters are still loads of fun. The only people making them seem to be indy developers because they’re not terrified of taking “risks” as shareholders might put it.
The way these big publishers act, it’s as though no other genre exists but FPS …”inevitable” what a load of bullshit.
14/05/2013 at 00:19 Apocalypse says:
If I replay Wing Commander 1 today, it is rubbish compared to Wing Commander V and Wing Commander V is rubbish compared to Starlancer. So what?
It still basicly the same game series (I know, I know different universe with Starlancer) and key elements of game play are the same. You absolutely have to iterate on your games in a meaningful way, you have to make each new game fun, and can not just give us year after year the same g… oh, wait, that was a dude from EA speaking right?
Yeah, keep doing more Need for Speed and FIFA, just sell Wing Commander, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper IP to someone else!
19/05/2013 at 09:12 Gazz says:
Magic Carpet 2 is still installed on my PC and I play it once in a while.
It’s not that it was a good game – it is a good game.