"new school" gaming?

[Theo Rob]

I have this friend who blames most of the things he dislikes in upcoming games (like ultimate marvel vs capcom 3) on "new school" people who apparently no nothing of the good games of the past and are ruining games.

I personally think this is somewhat BS with the amount of great games that's been out lately and I know people who stay neck deep in nostalgia and still prefer newer games (street fighter and final fantasy for example)

discuss: are you one of or do you know people so full of nostalgia that some new games are kind of dead to them?

 

[Jay Knowles]

hmm, i grew up with health bars, complex and indecipherable controls/menu's/ui and punishment, glorious punishment. to this day i enjoy games that take a while to get the hang of and are a bit tedious, which a lot of people, or what games companies think a lot of people dont like.
so yeah, the new school games dont often rock my socks, but occasionally one will come along that does (fingers crossed for tes: skyrim)

 

[TehCookie]

There has been so few newer games that I find interesting I've gone back to playing older gems I missed. Is is nostalgic if you never played the game before? People just have different taste, I like colourful fantasy worlds and long games. I hate realistic graphics and most of the shooting genre. I'm not saying there isn't any good games this gen, but I can find a lot more on older ones (not to mention since they are older they had the time to build up their libraries).

 

[CAPTCHA]

Well I strted playing Deus Ex:HR and got halfway through the game before losing interest and installing the original which I guess was what I wanted to play in the first place. But on the other hand I play a lot of Civ V and prefer it over any of it's predecessors.

What does that say?

 

[krazykidd]

There has been so few newer games that I find interesting I've gone back to playing older gems I missed. Is is nostalgic if you never played the game before? People just have different taste, I like colourful fantasy worlds and long games. I hate realistic graphics and most of the shooting genre. I'm not saying there isn't any good games this gen, but I can find a lot more on older ones (not to mention since they are older they had the time to build up their libraries).

This is exacly what i was going to say , ninja'd so soon . But since i'm a jrpg fan , and they are few jrpgs this gen , well i find myself buyong ps2 and ps1 games i never played before and i love them to death . Here's to hoping for a wild arms 6.

 

[Seishisha]

I've been playing games for a good long time now on various platforms and i have to say alot of the modern gaming tropes like regenerating health and coverbased shooting is nothing more than one innovation then blatant copying, this has happened before in the past and will happen again in the future, think back if you can to platforming games, when mario and sonic had extreme popularity, there were loads of rip offs like coolspot, RTS games like command & conquer and warcraft had there own bad copy's too. Im gonna go out on a limb here and say All popular games have atleast one cookie cutter copy.

I guess my point is you can go to almost anytime in game development, point at any sucessfull game that pushed the boundries abit and see others that just copied the success, so blaming specific features of games as being somthing to dislike is while entirly reasonably to state that older games didnt suffer from this is just hypocritical, every generation will have good titles and bad titles, saying that older games were better or more innovative is easy when you consider years later the same mechanics are still being used so ofcourse it seems less unique than it did 20 years ago.

I personaly think that alot of modern games are over simplified for the newer generation when compared to the predecessors, but that doesnt make them worse it just makes less daunting initialt as they take less time to get the hang of, or if you look at it another way more streamlined and easier to play, i guess alot of it comes down to console development aswell, few titles these days are pc exclusive but the ones that are tend to keep all the old complexities, most titles though have to deal with controller restraints and hardware limitations becuase they are developed for console aswell.

A good example would be somthing like duke nukem the originals had explorative levels hidden secrets a huge arrary of guns health and ammo pickups and so on. Compared to the more recent DNF it has almost non of those things, blame it on console development and contraints mostly but i guess you can also blame it on lack of creativity.

 

[Halceon]

I can kind of agree with your friend. Oh, the games coming out now are nice and pretty, but I can't say I've found many of them to be engaging. Certainly not among the high-budget high-hype games. The games that I have had prolonged fun playing this year are Civilization 1 and 4, both older games, then a fair share of Dwarf Fortress, which is still officially in alpha, then some AI War, some Killing Floor and some Artemis.
And that is a fraction of the games I've tried over the year.

 

[Henkie36]

Well, there are of course games that used to be good, and have been franchised into ''worst games evarrrr'', like Silent Hill and Final Fantasy. But I won't say games were always better back then. No one can deny that the graphics have improved, so that's at least one down for today. Gameplay has become less challenging, I find that the missions in, say, Vice City are harder then they are in IV. But you can also argue that that would make it less annoying. Take for instance Yathzee's quip from L.A. Noire: ''Having to analyze every cigarette butt'', which has been made better. So in the end, it's personal preference. Me myself, I like today's games better, because of the mentioned less annoying gamplay.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I like old games AND new games. Sometimes for different reasons, sometimes for the same reasons. I actually think the medium is starting to show signs of maturing, although progress has been slow. I think as the current generation (who were weaned on games) grows up, and the perception that gaming is for kiddies completely fades away, we'll start to see the medium take shape as a legitimate art form that can be appreciated on an intellectual and emotional level and not simply on a mechanical level.

And yes, I'm aware there are already games that give us this, but they're still thin on the ground, which is why we celebrate them so much when we come across them. For every Silent Hill 2 and Planescape and Bastion we have 100 Deer Hunters.

 

[Blondegoth]

You see the problem with nostalgia right (and I speak as a terrible 80's child who loves those crappy cartoons) is that it is based on your memories and the happy feelings you got in days gone by. and well nothing can live up to that, something that is a bit rubbish now when compared to something that you vaguely remeber, is always going to seem worse.

Hell how many time have you hear the phrase "in the good old days", I remember the good old days, and they were pretty bad. Riots, Thatcherism, the first gulf war, He-man, Poll Tax, the list goes on and that was just the UK in the 80's.

And yes my old Mega Drive (Genesis for you american types) was a wonerful machine, but i tell you what. I dusted off my old megadrive and snes emulators and you know what? 90% of the games were crap. Pure unadulterated rubbish.

So yeah Old School... Pretty much the same a New School (only in 16bit)

Bleh nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

 

[Caliostro]

i cant remember the last time i played a modern main stream game that i actually needed to read a manual for. anyone remember the days of getting a back injury frombuying a game in store and the manual was the size of an encyclopaedia?

Ok, and here's my question: How is this a bad thing?

There's a difference between making a game deep and complex and making a game complicated and obtuse. I have nothing but love for the former, and nothing but hate for the later. If there's one thing games have massively improved (in general at least) it's their presentation and introduction to the player. Games used to have gigantic manuals because they were needlessly complicated. The interface was a mess, they didn't have any kind of tutorial but "here's your character, go fuck shit up", and people were generally expected to have been playing games since they were kids, and therefore have an inherent grasp on certain principles.

This was the kind of thing that made games a "niche" to begin with. But we've evolved. We have discovered that you CAN teach the player to play the game. That you can make your interface more accessible and, in all fairness, useful. The bad games tell you to go read the instruction manual. The "ok" games have a simple tutorial to show you how to play the game. The good games incorporate said tutorial thinly into the game, usually making it the first mission (think of the original Splinter Cell, for instances). The great games these days blend the teaching of the game's mechanics with the actual gameplay and storytelling. Look at Portal, Bastion, hell, GTA... You're never pulled out of the experience. The game teaches you what to do as you play it. Without interruptions.

How is this a bad thing? The interface should be as seamless as possible shouldn't it? It should be as little in the way between the player and the game as it can. Do you honestly miss clunky and needlessly complicated interfaces? Do you miss having to pause the game and browse through a booklet to know how to perform a specific move, or combination, or whatever?

I sure don't.


(if I misinterpreted you and you weren't reminiscing for the "good'ol days of tome-sized instruction manuals"... sorry, sarcasm, internet, etc.)

 

[Illithidae]

I know I feel a bit disturbed when someone goes around claiming to be a nerd when they don't seem to know games from before 2004/2005. It kind of hurts to know that they know nothing of their own heritage as a gamer.

 

[Theo Rob]

I personally think this is somewhat BS with the amount of great games that's been out lately and I know people who stay neck deep in nostalgia and still prefer newer games (street fighter and final fantasy for example)

Im sorry but I cant agree with that statement. It is not somewhat BS it is 100% BS.

I'm a little tired so I think I'm misunderstanding you. can you explain a bit more what you think is 100% BS?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. I simply don't like gritty realistic shooters so a lot of them are dead to me, new and old. I like a lot of new fighting games and Jrpgs and whatnot and nostalgia has nothing to do with that cause when I was in the good old days I played 3D fighters when I now play 2D ones .

 

[LilithSlave]

I don't hate all new games. But I base all games upon how well they live up to the SNES as a system and experience that changed my life. That means I tend to prefer more "old school" gameplay. Based upon traditional fighters, rpgs, stgs, platformers, and ect.

It's not so much that I don't like new games. There's only so many times you can play the old ones... in a row. But I do come from a gameplay style that many people consider outdated. Also, almost every single one of my favourite games is 2D and there is probably not a single 3D game in my top 10. Maybe my top 20, but not my top 10. So I am a "retro-gamer" of a sort. I just try not to be elitist about it. And believe me, I am definitely aware of the elitism out there. People can take their love of retro games way too far.

Though honestly I think some of the love is deserved and many retro games don't get enough love. For instance, the Lolo series. It's a bit sexist, but not moreso than the Mario game series. Nobody ever talks about Lolo and Lala, it's terrible. Honestly I'm often less comfortable on most gaming sites because I'm more likely to want to post in a topic about an old game, while topics in most gaming sites are about games that have just been released. I said when I was a child I wasn't going to be a slave to nostalgia like oh so many adults that annoyed me. And I am not with many things, but video game old fogeyness seems to be something I have caught. I blame the Super Nintendo and it's unparalleled library for being so amazing.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

^

Yeah, there's this whole mentality that turn based battle systems are somehow outdated and that they only existed cause they couldn't display action like they can now. That may have been the case 25 years ago but since then that reality changed and turn based became a style of it's own and a unique experience that a LOT of players have come to love. That experience simply doesn't exist in action games and a lot of action-game-only fans simply don't get turn based combat and since there's a ton of them turn based seems to be more and more eclipsed. Ah well, at least Jrpgs still exist.

 

[Blondegoth]

Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. I simply don't like gritty realistic shooters so a lot of them are dead to me, new and old. I like a lot of new fighting games and Jrpgs and whatnot and nostalgia has nothing to do with that cause when I was in the good old days I played 3D fighters when I now play 2D ones .

Fair, but there are a lot more games out there than gritty fps's. What I was trying to say was that there has always been a lot of crappy games out there. We just have the ones we like. As for nostalgia, i was trying to say that we tend to only remember the good things. That is to say remember the good games, and forget the bad ones. Just as I choose to remeber the good cartoons and forget the bad ones

 

[Twilight_guy]

Throw a rock in the Escapist and you'll hit one of these guys. They likes the old NES but they hates the haloz.

I can't really say that I'm so into old games that I don't care about modern games and I also don't think that's healthy. Hiding in your nostalgia bunker and pretending the world doesn't exist or worst pretending it sucks isn't healthy.