Historical perspective on videogame appreciation

[Kurenai]

A certain trait found on classic game reviews has been bothering me for a time now. I've seen it in some Action Button reviews, rampant in lots of game forums (mostly by young posters) and just yesterday while looking for information in Wikipedia about the Saturn version of Resident Evil. There I found a choice paragraph that led me to question a few things about how we treat vintage games. Here it is:

[jiji]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. The ephemeral nature of games, and the way it affects people's perspectives, is one of the things that annoys me most about the medium right now.

Games should never be dismissed out of hand for dated technical aspects, and perspective (i.e. knowledge of context) is absolutely required when somebody is playing an older game, whether for enjoyment or for historical interest. This situation will probably persist until game technology evens out somewhat (if this ever happens). We probably can't expect the average user to keep an educated point of view when playing older games, especially with new users being introduced to the medium all the time.

But I don't think it's too much to ask for reviewers and other game writers to learn a little history and have some perspective. It would go a long way toward showing younger players how to look at and understand older games.

The Virtual Console is a good instrument for this, too, I think.

[adonis]

Yeah, I've already pointed out the tragichilarity of the Golden Axe review on actionbutton. If you weren't there, you must really try hard to see what it was that made those old games so great at the time. Just randomly shitting on them just because they don't play like Gears of War or whatever will simply not do.
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[sethsez]

[professor_scissors]

This is why I tend to replace "(Old game) is terrible, what did we ever see in it" with "(Old game) didn't age well."

Because a lot of old games are still fun, but some of them are not! That is how evolution works.
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[adonis]

If I played a game at the time and had fun with it I will always be able to have fun with it. Working from there, I can have fun with other games of the era which I didn't play at the time. Seeing as my first game was Pong (not Spacewar) I can enjoy practically any game as if I had travelled back in time. Obviously, I mean the good ones, not the bad ones.

It's all in the mind, really.
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[professor_scissors]

[adonis]

I have met even teenagers though who can enjoy games that even old-timers now find "unplayable". So this is something that's not limited to old guys like myself.

Obviously there's not many people like that, and there never will be. You just have to want it enough, I guess, and reading the words of someone who understands how these games worked and why must help.

Which is why revisionist reviews are doing so much harm. Wish those people would just stick to the new stuff if they are not prepared to face the past on its own terms.
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[thatbox]

Well, as you yourself said, the audience they're writing for shares their lack of context and missing sense of history. A modern, revisionist perspective is how most of them would be approaching old games themselves, so.

[Salamande]

Context, context, context. It's something to keep in mind in general, but especially when talking about games. That said, there are timeless classics. We'll still be playing Tetris 200 years from now, and it'll likely play almost exactly the same as it does now.

Here's a related question:

Which system or mechanic that is popular today do you think will be looked at negatively in the future?

I'll put forth the Gears of War-style cover mechanic. It works well enough, but I've always had the nagging suspicion that it could be done better somehow. Sometimes it just feels restrictive and imprecise, and I don't always feel in control.

[Scratchmonkey]

[aderack]

[Mr. Apol]

I don't think I could really enjoy the hell out of Golden Axe nowadays, but I really enjoyed playing it in my local grocery store when I was eleven.

[aderack]

The music is awesome. As is kicking imps. And the choice of characters. At the time it was a real sensory experience. In terms of player input, though, it really is clumsily designed. And shallow. Which... maybe is okay in that this is kind of what the game was going for: spectacle rather than depth. You get to ride a chicken stinger! Look, magic spells!

But I guess that's the thing. Years later, a lot of that pizazz kind of falls away and we're left with the game's demands of the player, and its response to player input. And in that regard, Double Dragon is not only more varied and sophisticated but more responsive -- and it's the original template!

Basically I don't see much point to playing a game like Golden Axe except for the nostalgia thing. You can have fun with old exploitation movies or trashy novels because they don't demand anything of the audience other than attention. I'm not sure what to do with dated exploitation games.

[Kurenai]

[NFG]

Fact is Golden Axe was always complete shit, and so was Ridge Racer. I played the former just to see what was coming and to enjoy the exciting newness of it with my friends. A long term game it was not - Sega doesn't make games with longterm joy, and most arcade games similarly were designed only for short-term kicks and quartergobbling.

Time doesn't create flaws in our old faves, it reveals them. We get older, smarter, and we have more experience with which to create context for the games of old, and we can - with more authority now - judge them more accurately.

Lots of old games didn't age well, but lots of them did, and we can either choose to share teh love with others of like mind, or we can become the crusty old men shouting at the new kids about how they don't know jack about quality, and how our crusty old favourites are better than their shiny new flavour du jour.

Every time someone tells me an original song or movie was better, or how old black and white movies were more entertaining than modern ones, I want to shake them until their eyes bleed.

I don't want to be the guy people want to shake.
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[Kurenai]

First: nobody is saying that old games are better than new ones. The way the Ridge Racer question was phrased is a clear example: "What ever people saw in Ridge Racer 1?". Well, I'd gladly tell you why it was so popular and special. Now, a statement like "Ridge Racer didn't age well", well, that's an entiiiirely different thing altogether. I'd say: "you are right", and that's it. I wouldn't say "WHAT?? RR is a bastion of quality you moron!" or something like that.

You say that bad games then are bad games now, the same with good games, and I'm not saying otherwise. What's popping up more and more is that games that we enjoyed, that we sincerely loved playing and still remain just as good, are being judged by current standards. You'd think that's fair, but given the rapidly aging medium, it will kill genuinely fun experiences just because they don't measure up to what you look in a game nowadays.

And saying that Ridge Racer always sucked, well, that's just in hindsight. Compared to what, really? At the time there was just a so-so poor of Daytona on the Saturn. I don't think anyone on Christmas Day held the controller in disgust saying the demo controlled like shit: most of us were just trying to get our breath back.

I'd say this, though: as long as reviews keep being written as purchase guides, vintage gaming will suffer, as no one would recommend Illusion of Gaia over Lost Odyssey, ever. Luckily I know most of us know that a review can be more than this, and offer enough context and commentary to properly appreciate and educate about old games.

By the way, a lot of these sentiments were first expressed in comments to James' ABDN review of Link to the Past.

--Kurenai

[NFG]

Actually I hated Ridge Racer when it was new. All my friends were into it, but other than the technical accomplishments (nice frame-rate!) I thought it was crap. And the music, wow, that's gotta be some acquired taste right there.

I gotta wonder what reviews and articles you're reading where anyone compares old games against modern accomplishments? "Having to push up to jump 'cause there's only one button on the stick? WTF?" Who would say things like that? What sites are you reading?

I can't think of any games I loved and played the crap out of years ago that I can't enjoy now. I'm more likely to fall out of love with a modern release. Kororinpa was glorious when I first got it, but with a few months of atrophying skills I can't play it at all anymore. The challenging galaxy levels are now simply impossible.

Perhaps that's part of the problem: I've got reflexes that fire up on the old games, that modern players won't have.
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[adonis]

[slipstream]

[adonis]

I've always felt the exact opposite.
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[slipstream]

[adonis]

It might work out that way for some people. However, I always end up looking at individual games regardless of how much I may like or dislike a particular company.

In the case of TC/HotD I like both games equally. Each has its own charms (TC the duck mechanic, HotD the more interesting setting and better graphics).
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[Tyler]

At the beginning of the cinematic era, the movie was the medium of the guys like Charlie Chaplin. Little guys dressed up laughably, making grimfaces, like a stupid clown, and falling down from ladders, and stuffs like that. What do you think when you looking at it - nowadays?

'Who the f*ck sponsored this kind of sh*t anyway?!'

Yeah, and you may right, but don't forget this: that was the basis of all kind of films, and the importance of it is incontestable. In fact, Chaplin was as meaningful in the movies, like the Space Invaders in the videogames. The popularity of them is almost the same, I guess.

Later...

[Gironika]

The thing is, people sometimes seem to overlook the fact that old games have a different approach to them than newer games do.

Take Chulip or Disaster Report and compare them to SotC or MGS2. Where Disaster Report or Chulip feels like some guys were trying to do something with an idea, finding out how far they can push the hardware, the latter ones feel more like films and/or streamlined experiences.
And this different experience can make a game fun just because it's not streamlined, it feels different and "new" if you weren't there/around when the game was big. And it's this feeling, the game being "different", that makes for some of the fun I have with older games I pick up now.

Of course, knowing about the hardware helps you to appreciate/wonder about some of the game's choices you would't know otherwise.

Like, someone playing Axelay today might not get how awesome the use of Mode-7 was, back then when it was new to us folks. The more refined use of techniques made for prettier games later on and games like Seiken Densetsu 3 (that make full use of the power the SNES had back then) are a more impressive experience if you know about that.



But then there are people who don't care about this, though ...
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[aderack]

[sethsez]

[aderack]

I guess I'm a visionary, then????

The thing is, it's one of the first things I ever saw in a videogame that jumped out at me and shattered the illusion of a coherent gameworld. Whereas everything else was pretty consistent in its look and feel -- here's a 2D bitmap world; it works like this -- Mode-7 sticks out as a glaring, obvious technical gimmick. It's distracting and flat and weird. It blows up and distorts pixels. It looks flat and fake, and doesn't correspond to anything either in our own reality [or] the 2D reality of a contemporary gameworld. It's nothing but an abstraction. And in shattering a game's overall sense of reality, it just brings down everything around it, making it all look flat and fake and gimmicky.

Again, though, through the filter of time it doesn't stick out as much as it once did.

EDIT: typos

[adonis]

[adonis]

[aderack]

Well. I've certainly played my share of brawlers. And in Double Dragon or Streets of Rage or Final Fight, you have enough of a variety of moves, with a balanced enough range of application, that unless you're being really cautious as hell, the most efficient way of playing is to throw yourself into the middle of things. In particular, the grabbing that came in with Final Fight and carried over to SoR really encourages the player to get his hands dirty. Any breaking free tends to be more about repositioning than about sniping.

All of this leads to more forward momentum and more focus on applying the appropriate move rather than spamming a single effective move over and over.

Then there's the ability to pick stuff up, which, well, I guess wouldn't fit too well in Golden Axe. It certainly does liven up the other games I mentioned, though -- especially when you take an opponent's weapon away and use it on him.

[adonis]

Yes, of course individual games varied in the exact techniques they required. To give an extreme example, the only way to beat the third Rastan game was to keep jumping around like a madman and use the jump-cancelling move.

In any case, I beat the MD version of Golden Axe within a couple days of getting it, and I never had to use much sniping. There is a slight issue with hit detection, but it didn't even bother me back then because there was no Final Fight or Streets of Rage yet to raise my expectations. I mean, just play Double Dragon and then tell me that Golden Axe does not play smoother. Not that it's a better game -- DD had more variety, etc., but I am just trying to say that -- for its time -- Golden Axe was a very good brawler, excepting how easy and short-lived it was, and how the stages all looked a bit similar. Those were its faults, as far as I am concerned. Its play mechanics, for 1989, were pretty darn solid.
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[extrabastardformula]

Actually, aderack you didn't so much have to get in their faces. It's true that enemies had longer attacks but you had wider attacks which were hella easy to exploit by positioning your dude directly beneath an enemy and slashing as they walked onto your plane. I remember that one fact making the game pretty much trivial back in my youth.

[adonis]

And you say you are a girl?

What's your phone number?
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[BotageL]

insert credit
And you say you are a girl? What's your phone number?
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[tacotaskforce]

[Kurenai]

[slipstream]

Mode 7 was more than adequate in F-Zero: Maximum Velocity. In fact, the graphics were clean and fast. The game never felt hampered by not actually being 3d and using a digital control scheme. Perhaps because the game was made at a time when mode 7 wasn't a gimmick?

[kitroebuck]

Mode 7 is alright. All it is is sprites transforming at a set resolution without any smoothing or interpolation or nonsense. Makes perfect sense to me. Actually, I remember it not so much as a graphical advance- remember, the televisions we were playing these things on at the time were so blurry that individual pixels were not discernible; so Mode 7 stuff, by blowing things up, made us aware of the digital components of the images for perhaps the first time- but as a game design advance. Who didn't, in that era, look eagerly forward to the boss that either grew or shrunk when you hit them?

Well, I did, anyway.

[Swimmy]

I had mixed feelings on Mode 7. We got a Super Nintendo a bit late in the game, so the first games I saw it in were FF3 and Secret of Mana, which both used a simple filter on the sprite layer to add a horizon effect. I was impressed as hell by SoM, but I did always think riding a chocobo right next to a flat castle in FF3 looked silly. Now I see Mode 7 as gimmicky in some games--Axelay, F-Zero--and a really warm experiment in others. Overused, yes, much like cel shading is now, and with about equal success.

[special blend]

[Tyler]

tacotascforce:

"Wow. Um... go take a city college film history class. It doesn't matter which one, clearly anything would be useful to you at this point."

I guess you didn't catch the irony of my post. I was talking about the notability of Chaplin, and I didn't say anything that would rating him ridiculous. I'm just connected in quantity his notabilty to the Space Invaders.

To the Space Invaders, yes, and it was a really great and important stage of the videogames - just as Charlie guy in the films. The parallel is still standing in the meaning of style; if you looking at those old stuffs, maybe you think they're simple - I wouldn't say primitive, because it would be ambiguous -, but judging them by the eye of the era, they were the TOP of all, no doubt about it.

No matter how many times better the Ikaruga as compared to the Space Invaders, that was the first, and that was the cornerstone. And that could be the point of departure too, if we're talking about the worth of the videogames - the measure of influence.

The real worth doesn't wear out with the time - the Ridge Racer was one of the greatest racing games in it's time (but I would set before the Need for Speed on the 3DO because of it was much more exciting, or the Sega Rally in the arcades, and I'm not talking about the Daytona USA, just because it was mentioned earlier), but nothing else. The real revolutionary was the Gran Turismo, because the difference between the Ridge Racer and any other arcade racing games that time wasn't as huge as between the GT and any others, and that's what makes it so famous - and the difference that is came from the approximation (it was the one and only real driving simulator).

[Kurenai]

It's still kind of a weird example because, if anything, Chaplin movies are like the Tetris of films: no matter how sophisticated we get, they remain entertaining.

Or maybe you meant that's how the movies are perceived by uneducated people. I'd like to think that's it because to be frank that description of Chaplin baffled me too. :/

But we agree on principle. Perhaps a better example would be the Lumiere reels of the train arriving at a station. Nowadays we wouldn't think twice about such a thing, but back then they started riots.

--Kurenai

[analogosagnos]

[Cycle]

Goldene Axe is a bit rubbish, yeah, but it was fun multiplayer! I remember staying over night at this party and in the morning we pulled out the mega drive from the chicks closet and played some Golden Axe (the sober ones did, anyway). Good times, I miss those guys and gals... note: this was only like a year ago.

I recently wrote a retrospective on Maniac Mansion, and after reading through it I noticed I kept talking about it in the past tense. I went back through the whole thing and changed everything to present tense. After all, I was trying to say how it's still one of the most mechanically wonderful adventure games designed!