This generation may just be just a footnote in gaming history.

[tahrey]

Yeah, but those batteries are super easy to replace. You need a special screwdriver that costs, like $3, plus a button cell battery that you can buy pretty much anywhere batteries are sold. It takes a little effort, but there's a big difference between a dead save battery and dead servers for a game with always online DRM and/or important DLC that you won't be able to get by then.

(...)

Edit: There's also a pretty fundamental difference between the batteries and the servers. One is a hardware failure, which is just going to happen over time with aging electronics. I had to retire my old 32" SDTV this week because it finally crapped out. I would have probably kept it around indefinitely, for retrogaming if nothing else, but you can't get around entropy.

I'm entirely with you on the artificiality of planned server shutdown and the like - it would cost so little, and decreasingly so, to keep a virtual server alive for the few people who would continue to play the old game, it can't be anything more than penny-pinching and an attempt to drive as many as possible to buy the new thing regardless of whether they actually like the look of it - but... you lecture first on the ease of replacing the battery in a cartridge, but then chuck away a "broken" high-compatibility TV because "you can't get around entropy"? Those things can be repaired, just as batteries can be replaced. We'll now never know what killed your set, but it might well have been a part that was as simple, and as cheap and easy to replace as the battery (or it might have been some fundamental and damn near impossible to source or replace piece, like an electron gun, but that's pretty unlikely).

There are, at least for now, still people who can service and repair old CRT TVs and monitors, and their main concern is what will be an ever-dwindling supply of replacement picture tubes and their (forever sealed-in-place) internal components, as the phosphors gradually burn away with every hour of active service life, literally no-one makes them anymore, and it's a part that would require considerable investment to restart production of. But basically all of the other internal parts other than bespoke ICs (which again, tend not to break) can be switched out, as they're all pretty standard and fundamental electronic components. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, transformers, fuses, wires, plugs, switches, relays and sockets. Particularly the connectors suffer dry joints, capacitors corrode or leak, fuses blow and switches/relays stop switching. A car has plenty of these in as well, and when they break, you replace them, as the part is far cheaper than the car, and if it's a classic it doesn't even matter if the labour costs more than it's supposedly "worth", because it is basically irreplaceable.

I do hope you at least gave it to some recycler who will have the presence of mind to save the tube and reserve it for the day when a specialist repairman comes knocking and can be charged a small fortune for it, rather than just leaving it on the kerb for the trashmen to pick up and crush in the back of their truck.

I've got four different small-screen CRTs scattered around in storage at home, and the most precious are the ones with leads that can hook them up to my old Atari ST, because it's proven rather incompatible with my LCD (just gives a weird grey picture even over RGB) and gives a fuzzy off-centre picture on the old tube TV in the kitchen, but works just fine with a dedicated composite/RGB monitor. When I can get any of the discs to load, of course. Two of the monitors aren't directly compatible with it, but their tubes should swap right in place of those if needed... Part of the problem is its gonzo 13-pin-DIN monitor plug, which, like CRTs, simply isn't made by anybody any more. I might have to resort to pushing bare pins through a piece of kiddie modelling clay, firing it in the oven and then soldering it up myself...

(BTW, an appeal: does anyone, anywhere, have a data cable and UK power supply for the external disk drive for these things? The internal one isn't going to last forever, and our original PSU and cable have vanished )

 

[tahrey]

snip

Yeah, but those batteries are super easy to replace. You need a special screwdriver that costs, like $3, plus a button cell battery that you can buy pretty much anywhere batteries are sold.

Considering the inflated prices of batteries in retail stores today, I think it would be much cheaper to get such cartridge batteries off of E-Bay. I was originally going to make the same comment you did, but with a different angle.

I've been doing quite a bit of old game cartridge buying recently, and during my E-Bay searches, I every once in awhile come across people selling lots of the exact type/model of battery used in cartridges from the NES to the N64.

I just did a search a second ago to compare prices, and from searching Super Nintendo Battery, I found one seller that is selling them in quantities of ten for $10.21 with free shipping, so basically $1.02 per battery. I know I've never seen a single specialized battery like that go for less then 2 bucks at a retail store, so that's why I think it might be cheaper. Heck, the seller even gave full instructions on how to install the batteries.

* googles "Super nintendo cartridge battery" *

Dude... it's just a CR2032. Like you get on computer motherboards, IR thermometers and all kinds of other kit. Quite possibly the most commonly used button cell in the entire world. I've got a twinpack of them in my desk drawer right now that I bought for work purposes and probably won't even bother trying to claim the expenses back on. It's not "specialised", I just walked into a supermarket and plucked the blister card off a shelf display, paid and walked back out.

Is there a suggestion here that the "inflated" price of these things (which, in their intended use, often last 10 years or more) might stop you repairing your carts? For serious? As in, the extra 97 cents or so difference between the bulk-order ones and the store-shelf ones?

For real?

BTW I'm sure I picked up a multipack of button cells from a similar supermarket a couple years ago which had four of each of several different sizes on and only cost me the equivalent of about $5, maybe less... including 2032s and 2025s (the latter of which fit certain credit-card remote controls) and some others I figured I'd have a use for - wristwatches, kitchen timers, etc. I daresay if you're serious about laying in a supply of them, and cost is a serious constraint, you can do better than a buck per cell.

And as the thing puts out a very low current at 3.0 volts, you could even grab some wire, duct tape, and a couple of plain old AAs and jerry rig it if you really had to.

 

[tahrey]

Why would compatibility be an issue? As you said, loads of games work fine on current OSes. Maybe some require a patch or something but it's, like 1 minute on Google, if that. At most you'd just have to run an older version of Windows in a virtual machine. If you use services like GOG, the issue is already solved for you. Heck, just the other day I played some SimCity 2000 on my 64bit Windows 7. I also managed to play it on Linux, too. No issues, except that the game doesn't have sound, then again, I don't really count that as an issue.

Define for me the difference between "emulation" and "a virtual machine", particularly in this case one that virtualises (or some may say, emulates) an older CPU, chipset and operating system, which may no longer be fully forward compatible with the one you're using without a software layer in the way, and which - certainly for the OS - you may not actually have a valid license?

Both the Z80 line and the x86 line of processors branch off of the 8008, and the Z80 didn't really advance THAT much on it compared to what the 8086, 286, 386, etc did. There's about as much difference in the processing DNA when you make your x64 (or athlon64 or whatever) computer think it's actually a 386, as there was making a 486 think it was a Z80 (or nintendo's clone of it) back in the day, playing the early Spectrum, Gameboy and SMS emulators...

And before Apple went all Intel, it was even more pronounced if you used any of the grey-area programs that allowed you to run (paid-for) PC software on your Mac. That was virtualising the HAL and API AND code for something of an entirely different architecture, a bit like the Atari/Amiga/SNES/Genesis emulators of the Pentium days.

 

[tahrey]

My generation has seen us go from Atari to about - currently - four major systems (which includes PC gaming in that) in which to play games. I live in the great evolution of gaming and its history. People will look upon the era in which I lived as the time in which it all began.

Hmm...

If you're talking about the VCS, that was certainly the most popular, but it wasn't the ONLY system of its day... not even the first.

In the 80s there was a massive glut of competing systems, even after the crash. Pretty certain Atari, Commodore (both with multiple platforms of their own), Coleco, Acorn, Sinclair, Apple, Tandy, TI, IBM, Nintendo and plenty others I can't even be bothered raiding the memory banks for survived it. Bruised, maybe, and ultimately most of them doomed, but still operating.

By the time I properly got on board at the turn of the 90s, there was still Atari and Commodore (both mostly selling 16-bit computers, but occasionally dabbling in consoles and keeping some tiny flame of their 8-bit line alive), Nintendo, Sega, Amstrad/Sinclair, Apple and IBM for the more hardcore types, and few other also-rans.

Sony entered the fray, and Sega plus Atari, Commodore and the smaller contenders in ascending order of size all gradually left the picture, leaving a gap for Microsoft to unexpectedly fill (look, XBox might not be PC, but it's made by the same company who also sells the majority of home computer operating systems, I count them under much the same banner). For a while, until Apple got its act together, and a few more hopefuls turned up, we were operating at just three serious choices of who you wanted your gaming system to be aligned with, which was about the lowest point since the inception of it all in the mid 70s. It contracted, if anything.

Now we have Wii (U) (plus the DS(i)), PS3 (plus the Vita), X360, -technically- PC as well (for now), and Apple have also got on board, though the platform in that case is their mobile system ... with Android riding its coat tails. And there's probably some games for windows phone, too. And then the Ouya, and the slow blossoming of the Raspberry Pi, and a strange number of gradually better-quality things from China, and the Leapster, and...

(tl;dr - saying we've gone "from Atari to 4 platforms" is both a major oversimplification, and a touch inaccurate in any case. It's a very complex flow down the years, and it hasn't been - and there's no reason to believe it will remain - one of continual growth in the market or in the number of players)

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Oh god damnit people, enough with the nostalgia and the doom and gloom. People always say that things used to be better and the future will be shit, about everything. And it's all bollocks.

This gen gave us Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock Infinite, Dishonoured, Skyrim and Minecraft. 99% of everything is shit, you just don't remember the shit SNES games as clearly as you can remember the turd that was Medal of Honour: Warfighter. I'm confident that people will be talking about some of these games in the future.

And also, how much do people sit about and talk about 20 year old games? Do you not think that the majority of the people that are talking about them might just have grown up with them? You know, like kids are growing up with this gen.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

As someone else said, this generation brought us the Portal series, DOTA2, TF2, Dishonored,Bioshock and Bioshock infinite (and Bioshock 2, which was honestly pretty good), XCOM: EU, Fallout 3/New Vegas, God of War, the Tomb Raider Reboot, [Prototype](Fun villain sandbox), inFamous, Shadows of the Damned/No more Heroes/Lollipop Chainsaw (all that good Suda 51 stuff), Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Far Cry 3, Street Fighter 4, Wrath of Asura, A ton of Total War games, Spec Ops: The Line, Demon's/Dark Souls, Skyrim, WH40K: Space Marine (Which was pretty fun, and really brought the 40K universe to life), Limbo, Binding of Isaac, Trine, Fez, Journey, Mirror's Edge and so forth.

I think it's safe to say that there is no way this generation will end up as a mere footnote in any context.

 

[Comocat]

As a historian I'm sure that sooner or later(more likely later when all the people over 40 die.) there will be a field dedicated to studying games. There's a history field for every form of established media already books, newspapers, movies and so on. There already are works about gaming(mine included) but still not enough quantity to form a field. Ultimately, emulation's here as a resource for older games, it's not perfect but it's better than losing them forever.

This generation is not likely just a footnote, not for another 10 years at least, Starcraft basically reinvented esports in the western world and is still going strong. Batman Arkham Asylum was the first great Comic game ever sans maybe Ultimate Spiderman. Classic Adventure games(monkey island, sam&max, etc) saw the first releases in almost 10 years. The first always online DRM was implemented(not sure that's a milestone. =p), The Kickstarter high profile CRPG will be released starting with Shadowrun in June completely funded by it's public's pre-orders with no uber advertising budget or publishers telling them something's not appealing.

All in all there's a bunch of important things for gaming happening, it's not just Call of Duty.

I also think its worth noting that from a historical perspective this is really the first generation of games where video games are actually seen as a legitimate past time. Call of Duty grosses more in a day than most summer blockbusters. If anything, this console generation will be the reason why people care enough about video games to actually study their history.

 

[Something Amyss]

It's been 20 years since the SNES and Genesis came out, and they're still talked about all over the internet. Their games are still selling all over eBay, some for exorbitant amounts of money. They're all still playable, to.

You know, that wasn't always the case. In the 80s, we treated them as fairly disposable. They've become classics, but they weren't initially such.

I'm not saying that the current gen will end up like this, but I think it's naive to judge the end result by the current predicament. After all, the NES/SNES eras only became classics and traded for those exorbitant prices after years and years of languishing in flea markets and garage sales.

Talking about the bolded statement, that's not exactly true. Not all of the games from the SNES era are still playable. See, all of those cartridges have internal batteries, and since those batteries are currently reaching the ends of their lifespans and no longer holding a charge people are getting their saves wiped and it's now impossible to save at all on those cartridges, so any game that takes longer than a day to go through is pretty much unplayable now (or will be in the near future when its battery dies).

There are items you can purchase to save externally (or so I've seen ads for) and you can replace the batteries with a little work.

I know Valve has plans to remove Steam locks from digital games if and when they ever go under (and it's so easy to do already that it would cost them literally no money).

And that will totally be fine with the companies who made the games. I'm also personally hesitant to take Gabe at his word, but then...How's that episodic content for Half-Life coming?

Activision and EA have plans to make Diablo 3 and SimCity offline if and when they stop supporting it, and EA already programmed Origin to boot in offline mode if it can't connect to the servers, meaning most games can already be played without a connection (sans multiplayer, SWTOR or SimCity).

Not only does EA already shut down servers for most of their games of a certain vitnage, they've locked out SINGLE PLAYER content from games before. They may make SimCity offline only, but it'll be the exception in terms of how they regard DRM titles.

I don't know about Activision, though.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I think Luca72 nailed it with the first reply in the thread. This generation will not be a footnote, because it will always be the generation that made gaming accepted by the general public. Just like the movies made around 1935-1945 will always be remembered as the movies that proved cinema could be a real artform.

Many of the games will likely be forgotten on an individual basis, but the most successful games and those games that pushed the envelope in some way will probably be remembered. The CoD, GoW and Halo series for their high sales, Crysis for its' boundary pushing in terms of graphical fidelity and Braid and Bastion as the forerunners of the indie developers.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Yeah, but those batteries are super easy to replace. You need a special screwdriver that costs, like $3, plus a button cell battery that you can buy pretty much anywhere batteries are sold. It takes a little effort, but there's a big difference between a dead save battery and dead servers for a game with always online DRM and/or important DLC that you won't be able to get by then.

(...)

Edit: There's also a pretty fundamental difference between the batteries and the servers. One is a hardware failure, which is just going to happen over time with aging electronics. I had to retire my old 32" SDTV this week because it finally crapped out. I would have probably kept it around indefinitely, for retrogaming if nothing else, but you can't get around entropy.

I'm entirely with you on the artificiality of planned server shutdown and the like - it would cost so little, and decreasingly so, to keep a virtual server alive for the few people who would continue to play the old game, it can't be anything more than penny-pinching and an attempt to drive as many as possible to buy the new thing regardless of whether they actually like the look of it - but... you lecture first on the ease of replacing the battery in a cartridge, but then chuck away a "broken" high-compatibility TV because "you can't get around entropy"? Those things can be repaired, just as batteries can be replaced. We'll now never know what killed your set, but it might well have been a part that was as simple, and as cheap and easy to replace as the battery (or it might have been some fundamental and damn near impossible to source or replace piece, like an electron gun, but that's pretty unlikely).

There are, at least for now, still people who can service and repair old CRT TVs and monitors, and their main concern is what will be an ever-dwindling supply of replacement picture tubes and their (forever sealed-in-place) internal components, as the phosphors gradually burn away with every hour of active service life, literally no-one makes them anymore, and it's a part that would require considerable investment to restart production of. But basically all of the other internal parts other than bespoke ICs (which again, tend not to break) can be switched out, as they're all pretty standard and fundamental electronic components. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, transformers, fuses, wires, plugs, switches, relays and sockets. Particularly the connectors suffer dry joints, capacitors corrode or leak, fuses blow and switches/relays stop switching. A car has plenty of these in as well, and when they break, you replace them, as the part is far cheaper than the car, and if it's a classic it doesn't even matter if the labour costs more than it's supposedly "worth", because it is basically irreplaceable.

I do hope you at least gave it to some recycler who will have the presence of mind to save the tube and reserve it for the day when a specialist repairman comes knocking and can be charged a small fortune for it, rather than just leaving it on the kerb for the trashmen to pick up and crush in the back of their truck.

I've got four different small-screen CRTs scattered around in storage at home, and the most precious are the ones with leads that can hook them up to my old Atari ST, because it's proven rather incompatible with my LCD (just gives a weird grey picture even over RGB) and gives a fuzzy off-centre picture on the old tube TV in the kitchen, but works just fine with a dedicated composite/RGB monitor. When I can get any of the discs to load, of course. Two of the monitors aren't directly compatible with it, but their tubes should swap right in place of those if needed... Part of the problem is its gonzo 13-pin-DIN monitor plug, which, like CRTs, simply isn't made by anybody any more. I might have to resort to pushing bare pins through a piece of kiddie modelling clay, firing it in the oven and then soldering it up myself...

(BTW, an appeal: does anyone, anywhere, have a data cable and UK power supply for the external disk drive for these things? The internal one isn't going to last forever, and our original PSU and cable have vanished )

Oh, believe me, I looked into repairing the thing. Chances are that all it needs is a capacitor replaced. The thing is, game cartridges can't kill you if you don't know what you're doing. TVs can. Like high powered guitar amplifiers, they can carry a lethal charge even after they've been unplugged for a while. Considering I got a much nicer replacement for it for $27 at a local thrift shop, I didn't see a need to either risk my life or pay someone else the cost of a new HD set to do it for me. I'm gonna try to find a new home for it, but chances are I'm making a hazardous materials run to the dump in the near future. You can't /give/ these things away these days, it weighs close to 200 pounds and nobody wants to bother with something that heavy.

Edit: By the way, what kind of leads do the TVs you've got have that let you hook up an ST? If it's those old fashioned antenna connections like the one on the Atari 2600, you can buy, like, a $0.99 part that screws on to them and turns them into a standard coax connection. That's basically what they are, just with an earlier version of the connector. You get that, it should work fine with any SDTV. Would probably work with an HD set too, although I guess it depends on just how many weird quirks of CRT the system takes advantage of. There's 2600 games that are darn near impossible to emulate because they used the quirks of the scanlines to crank out more colors than the system was supposed to be capable of.

 

[Reyold]

But the other thing is who really cares if these games disappear?

Well, here's at least one guy who does. There are a handful of games I'd like to be able play years from now.

But hey, that's where emulation comes in.

 

[Yopaz]

I've talked to a lot of people who have never heard about the SNES or even SEGA, considering SEGA is still making things that shouldn't be the case, but that's how it goes. The reason you keep hearing discussion about the SNES isn't that the generation was so good, those days were my favourite, but that's no good measure to evaluate the generation, it's because of nostalgia. I grew up in those days, I wasn't tainted by the cynicism of life. It will be the best generation because of my innocence

Will this generation be part of history? Probably not. Neither is the SNES.

 

[daveman247]

I think the better question really is what will publishers, developers, and even Microsoft and Sony do with all the content that requires some online connection. I know there's some DLC and downloadable games that require a connection to Live. Are they going to let the old console on to the servers for the new ones, are they going to send updates deleting that DRM, or are they just going to tell everyone to fuck off?

I think they're just gonna say "go away, play these new games!" Why would they want you to be playng old games which they can't shake money from anymore rather than buying the new ones? Its already happened with microsofts and sony's half-assed backwards compatability or making you buy the games again from the online store.

Probably going to be getting "bioshock H-HD collection" next gen and the like.

 

[FalloutJack]

Poit

Yes, it was a generalization, mostly because I couldn't be buggered to look up the precise details. I'm sure you understand.

 

[Mrkillhappy]

With this generation of games their have certainly been historic moments such as all the protests of companies and the rise of the indie scene. Not only that but we have games such as portal, Spec ops. the line, Metal Gear Rising, L.A. Noire, and the Walking Dead which were all unique or at least considered amazing. Yeah all the COD clones will be forgotten same as all the MK & SF clones of the 90's have been forgotten but just because many popular games are shit doesn't mean that the entire generation is shit.

 

[Retardinator]

I don't really know what you're so worried about, since the solution to the always-on DRM already exists. It's called piracy, and preserving game history from shortsighted moneygrubbers might be a good thing to come out of it, for a change.

Sure, that might not help with backwards compatibility on consoles, but I think emulators have most of that covered. You might not have an emulator for a PS3 or X360, but how many *significant* games have come out on those two that didn't also get released for PC? I'd say about a handful, so it's a small sacrifice. Sure, you might not get your Journey, but you don't really need your Halo 3,4,5,6 and 7.

It isn't all as dark and bleak when you, quite ironically, turn to the dark side.

EDIT: I do not actually condone piracy, I'm just saying it's a valid solution for this particular problem.