many say that games of our past where always better than the current games of we play today. sure without Doom, Dune2 and many other games we wouldnt have CoD, Sup com and the other recent big hits gaming might be completely different.

personally i believe gaming is like how man kind evolved from the apes, it is a continuously growing medium and without the history gaming has, it wouldnt be at where it is now days.. Doom was a great game for its day, revolutionized everything about the FPS genre. but if it was released today against something like CoD4, on gameplay and replayability it wouldnt last against CoD4*.

sure many of the current games that are being released are not the best compaired to some of the games of yesteryear (looking at you Speedball2 compaired to Speedball2 Brutal Deluxe**).. due to many games early last decade where garage games where production costs where no where nearly as much as nowdays, the devs where able to do what they wanted and we had many great games, and publishers now days try and not take risks

ill never be able to play the same game 6 hours a day for a year straight no more due to being able to get bored of the same game quickly.. i have many great memories from the games as i was growing up, but i believe games from today have better gameplay overall due to the evolution of where gaming came from, and from here, i believe it can only get better.. sure we may get bored of the same things, but just think of how many hours of playin the same genre of game have you spent? its an addiction

is gaming of yesteryear better than the current games out on the market.. whats your thoughts about this?



* graphics has nothing to do with this comparision
** SB2 Brutal Deluxe was the orig released in the early 90's
(been playin games for 23 years now, since i was 3, so i got some experience in me :P

Old games tended to be really original, whereas games now are just copies of whatever we had then, but better [sometimes] :P

I just like to think that older games were just early drafts of ideas, which have now been polished and improved upon. Originality is great and all that, but i find new games to be far more intense and involving, and the vast majority of the time, the better graphics do make immersion a bigger factor.

I too have gamed since i was very young, gaming on a Commodore plus4 (or minus60 for you 64 lovers ). I'm 27 now, and although new idea's have all but dried up in the gaming industry, imo games generally just keep getting better and better.

I look forward to what the next 10 years brings us (Maybe an LFS beta )

Things were better when games weren't yet catered for ad/hd casual gamers.

adhd? attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? lol :P

And yeah odl games you tend to look back on fondly...but they're generally pretty crap when you play the, (i'm talking most of the late 80's early 90's stuff, C64 mainly)...as thats what i had growing up, and still have lurking around the house somewhere..waiting 5 min for it to load a game doesn't appeal to me...or longer than that if i decide to use the Cassette drive.

Old games are the inspiration. New games are the future. And I'd rather play CoD4 than Pong anyday thanks.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Old games are the inspiration. New games are the future. And I'd rather play CoD4 than Pong anyday thanks.

Imagine Pong with crysis graphics. I think it will be THE game of this century.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Old games are the inspiration. New games are the future. And I'd rather play CoD4 than Pong anyday thanks.

But i would rather play Sonic the Hedghog to COD 5 anytime.

Old games were original, challenging and new. Now we have games that focus on story telling, cinematic techniques and big names....not all for the better either. The face of gaming has changed, and as such gamers have changed also. Gone are the days were the Atari or Amiga was fired up for a quick blast of Pac-Man or Rampage which lasted into the wee small hours of the day, now we have games that cater for everything and almost everyone.

I don't know if I'm alone on this, but i still have the Mega Drive hooked up to allow some old school fun with Sonic (nothing past Sonic 2) or Desert Strike....those were imo the golden age of gaming.

Incidentally anyone else remember Sonic 2esday, never felt such excitement for a game since then. As the Boss would say............Glory Days

Quote from senn :

adhd? attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? lol :P

"ADHD generation", never heard this term? Can be used to describe other entertainment too.

Maybe not old, but some games in 90's were really exceptional. Most of the games today are made strictly for money, not from passion(except LFS ).

Quote from simscube :

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Thats ultimately my comparison of old vs new. Older games had more action and gameplay, new games are too worried about their length that they forget about quality.

Portal.

Totally agree with that one exception. There seems to be far less of a focus on good gameplay.

Quote from Bose321 :

Imagine Pong with crysis graphics. I think it will be THE game of this century.

play wii tenis, it's almost looks like that

Or perhaps we just get more picky and demanding as we get older?

Quote from simscube :

Older games had more action and gameplay, new games are too worried about their length that they forget about quality.

This is true. Probably one of my favorite "modern" games is Ikaruga. You can play through the entire game in a half hour, but its a blast to play. It's also more like an old school top down shooter, just with more modern graphics and some cool gameplay twists added. New games try too hard to go for the wow factor of fancy graphics and try to claim a long play time, and most of the time they miss out on having actual gameplay to back that stuff up.

Just thinking about Ikaruga, I think I'm going to go hook up the GameCube and play.

See also Shadow of the Collossus on PS2.

the main problem is that innovation is mostly dead which is why indie games have become so popular among gamers that started out in the c64/amiga years or earlier... unpolished but new interesting and exciting

portal was great in pairing humour as good as in classic lucas arts adventures with a new and enjoyable gameplay mechanic but i doubt it would have been the best game for at least a decade if the market were the same as it once was

Though I haven't really played any new games since the N64 era, it doesn't get much better than the old school NES and SNES games for me.

NES games were simple, addicting and fun. The SNES of course added better graphics and sound with the best console controller ever created before the world got stupid and complicated everything with analog sticks.

I can play those old NES games over and over.... Mario, Contra, Gradius, Excite bike, dr mario, punch out. If you ever get bored, grab some beers, get 10 of your friends and have an old school NES tournament It can get pretty intense. I hold the record for the most ownage in contra staying alive to the last level on one life (though I didn't get a chance to finish... I would have beat it on one life grr!).

SNES has some of the best games ever created, Mario World, Mario Kart (10000x better than the N64 one), etc. Top Gear anyone? And of course the best game of all time, Chrono Trigger.

Quote from Shotglass :

the main problem is that innovation is mostly dead which is why indie games have become so popular among gamers that started out in the c64/amiga years or earlier... unpolished but new interesting and exciting

portal was great in pairing humour as good as in classic lucas arts adventures with a new and enjoyable gameplay mechanic but i doubt it would have been the best game for at least a decade if the market were the same as it once was

Portal isn't really original when you consider it's pretty much a more polished version of the more inaccessible Narbacular Drop. And long before that, the early developmental phase of the game Prey featured a portal mechanic which for all intents and purposes was identical to those later games, although you could say that doesn't count because nobody ever got to play the early game. (If you could see those old videos though- sorry, couldn't find a link, it was very impressive for the time).

(Since Portal's always bought up as an example of rare originality in modern gaming, it probably needs to be said that in actuality it's another example of an earlier gameplay concept being overlaid with modern production values).

I think the real reason people were so surprised by Portal is that it was an actual puzzle game, being marketed alongside the likes of HL2. Of course HL2 had its puzzle elements, which I thought were well done- but to me one of the main differences between 'old' and 'new' games is that you normally don't have to do much thinking about what you need to do and where you need to go in newer games. But I think that's partly to do with the fact that modern GUI's are easier to deal with, and there's less emphasis on forcing players to do the 'right' thing within the game- because there are multiple ways to attack the same problem, and multiple routes as well. In this way modern games are easier, but many times more complex than older games.

As for what is actually better, older vs newer games- there's probably no real answer. People who are really into in film history, or really interested in literature, usually don't say that newer = better, or older = better. There are classics in every period. I usually think of games in the same way. I definitely think that any claims of the golden age of gaming being already behind us is pretty close minded.

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Portal isn't really original when you consider it's pretty much a more polished version of the more inaccessible Narbacular Drop.

which was a college project of the same people that made portal ie a proof of concept a portfolio to get the job at valve
it was never intended to be a polished product and it doesnt even have a final level as such... although the ideas of the narbacular boss fight were carried over to portal almost unaltered

I agree. There REALLY isn't man games these days that will "pull me" into the storyline.

Metal gear solid 4
Dead rising.
Gears of war



Thats seriously the only few games i can think of in the past few years that i've played non stop constantly from start to finish more than once.

Heh, well I knew Portal was by the same people, but I never thought that they were looking for a job at Valve - from what I understood, Valve approached them to redo N Drop in the Source engine. But it doesn't really matter. It's no big deal that Portal's a continuation of an earlier game. I was just highlighting that Portal did indeed come from someplace else (perhaps the creators themselves were inspired by the early Prey?).

Quote from Mackie The Staggie :

But i would rather play Sonic the Hedghog to COD 5 anytime.

Old games were original, challenging and new. Now we have games that focus on story telling, cinematic techniques and big names....not all for the better either. The face of gaming has changed, and as such gamers have changed also. Gone are the days were the Atari or Amiga was fired up for a quick blast of Pac-Man or Rampage which lasted into the wee small hours of the day, now we have games that cater for everything and almost everyone.

I don't know if I'm alone on this, but i still have the Mega Drive hooked up to allow some old school fun with Sonic (nothing past Sonic 2) or Desert Strike....those were imo the golden age of gaming.

Incidentally anyone else remember Sonic 2esday, never felt such excitement for a game since then. As the Boss would say............Glory Days

It's just that well, I find simple, linear gameplay such as that in Sonic very boring. I remember Sonic 2 on the Dreamcast.. Now that game was fantastic. It was in the same vain as the original, but in quality 3d, with some new challenges and somewhat of a storyline. It was the best of both worlds.

But I guess it's just down to advances in technology and in the quality of programming, and people "pushing the boat out" to see what new can be done.

I'm definitely a 'new game' person. I used to love my NES and played the games to death, and so a year or so ago bought one from Ebay. All those old games I used to love?

Dull. Very, very dull.


One thing I definitely believe is that games are a *lot* easier these days.

There's no hard and fast rule. Some older games were amazing and still hold up by today's standards, some new games suck ass.

Syndicate, for example. 15 years old, still really good. Sandbox, really deep customisation, long campaign. The Dizzy collection, still some of the best puzzle action money can't buy any more.

There's a reason a lot of the games coming out are updated versions of older ones. We got some crap back in the day, we get some crap now. The solution is not to buy the crap ones, then the developers will realise nobody wants them. Problem is these days, so many people buy new franchise games irrelevant of how good or bad they are, meaning there's no lesson for the devs to learn.

So basically old games where new, fresh and innovative when they where relased, now its only repetitiveness but everyone know that new ideas its usually remake of old ones.
New games have better graphics more complex game play and overall they are better, not all of course.
But somehow I still enjoy old games don't know why, sentiment, maybe climate of games. maybe its maybylline.
<Offtop>
If you looking for innovative, simple and usually fun games then online flash games could be it.
Something about 50% of them sux but there is still enough fun and interesting games.</offtop>