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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

I must be the only one disappointed with old-school games. I was super excited to set up a retropie, after 20 minutes playing the nostalgia wore off quickly. Anyone else find the same?

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I have a collection of old C64 games flying around on some of my external drives. Never got to play them. But one day I remembered Deuteros. An old Amiga game. I made it through the whole game back then without knowing English at all. I was so proud back then, I had to pick it up. I couldn't believe it but I played it through all the way again. I really can't say what it was exactly but I guess it was the flashback. The sounds, the graphics and understanding!

I continued with Lure of the Temptress. I only had a buggy version where you couldn't save. I played this with 3 other people. Beginning every Friday. Ending on Sunday... It was fantastic to finally finish it and being able to save.

But if I look at all the games I had back then, most of them are not worth it, but if you seriously look at it: they never were ;)

I totally remember Deuteros. It was riveting. I remember adding more and more stations and bases, I thought I had the game down, and then after deploying a certain number of stations, I triggered a reaction from the aliens and little by little, they started destroying all my empire. I was never able to beat that game.

But what a memory.

Oh ~~ people mentioning Deuteros! That's certainly something I don't see often when people talk about retro games. It was indeed an excellent management game.

You should try again ;)

I think some of that has to do with the fact that a lot of those older games aren't really as fun as we remembered them to be.

There's some classic gems, to be sure, but they were also all we had.

The bigger underlying problem is that we associate those games with happy periods of our lives. The once where we could play games, do projects and not worry about anything else.

By playing an old school game, your brain extracts these happy feelings from the memory. However, it's not a sustainable source of "fun" per say. As opposed to the newer games where "fun" is being caused by the game directly.

I strongly disagree. I have zero interest in today's bloated AAA games. Simple games like Tetris, Mario + romhacks, or Civ II have given me collectively more fun that I would ever have playing some insipid shooter or uninspired pay2win fantasy game. I wouldn't trade them for any of today's games, which I consider severely flawed in many ways.

Sturgeon's law applies. We only play the 10% (or less) of old games that are good. There are good new games, too.

I don't doubt it. I only say that the percentage of good older games is at least equivalent, if not greater, than the percentage of good newer games.

i disagree with you. i think the bad games end up being forgotten.

Nope, they are still getting a lot of exposure on retro websites and even GOG (despite calling themselves Good Old Games there's also some not-so-good games in their catalog).

When they speak of "old" games, I do not think they are thinking of Mario or Tetris, which are a decade newer and orders of magnitude better than some "classic" games.

A 31 year old game I feel qualifies as "old". What is old, then, pong on an oscilloscope? :p

Sure, Moon Lander. Original Sprint. The dragster one. 31 years ago was at about the end of the Golden Age of video games.

The golden age ends roughly 16 years after the birth of the observer.

Ha ha, I get your point, but the GAoVG is a specific era, roughly 1979-1985. :)

Wikipedia has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_arcade_video_gam...

Restricting to arcade games is probably justified. I'd say we are in the golden age of video games right now---at least in terms of popularity. And you can still get remakes of all the good old games, or even play the originals.

Well, there was a first golden age, which was followed by nintendo and the street fighter era, and so on. That's fine you want to make up new Golden Ages -- more good attention to video games the better -- but be sure people aren't thinking of the earlymid 80s when you use the term for other purposes.

> There's some classic gems, to be sure, but they were also all we had.

Some stuff has aged, but some of the best games are in the past and have never been "reached" by any newer game. Ultima 7 is an example of such games - there's just nothing that comes close to it even in modern RPGs.

For 2D platforms the best was made in the past again. All the newer Mario games are either too easy or uninspired, or both.

There's a whole bunch of genres that has been completely a abandoned by publishers and devs for years (simulators, adventure games, RTS, even RPGs - sure we get Witcher 3 recently, but there's really nothing much else on the radar, there's too few of them now compared to how many we were getting back in the days).

It's been many years that the main production money goes into making GTA, First Person Shooters, Open World games, Racing games and that's about it. Of course the indie market is very much alive, but you can't compare the level of contents made 20 years ago by large teams versus 1-2 folks making games nowadays.

I'd argue that whilst very different in philosophy, The Witcher 3 is about the closest we've come to Ultima VII since it was released.

You might also find Age Of Decadence interesting - it's a super-indie made over a decade or so by a very, very dedicated team. I've not played it and I understand it's flawed, but it looks to be reaching for the same kind of freedom as Ultima VII.

Taking turns with my son, playing Super Mario World on my RPI2 with Lakka is every bit as much fun as playing that game originally.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. People always remember the truly great games but seldom remember the countless bargain bin cartridges they popped out as a kid after muttering to themselves, "Wow, that sucked."

Well, you know what they say, "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be".

:-D

I dunno. I just set up DreamSNES for my son the other day and he played Metroid until we basically had to threaten to burn all of his toys just so he would put down the controller. But yeah, I guess speaking of myself there's not a lot of lasting interest there.

Metroid or Super Metroid?

IDK the one where you jump out of a crashing spaceship and explore some lonely tunnels.

That's Super Metroid. That's the Metroid I played first---on an emulator as well. It's one of the greatest games for the SNES.

I tried the NES original Metroid (also emulated) later, and I was surprised of how many of the game elements were already in place on the much weaker system.

It depends on the game and your expectations. Super Mario Kart is basically obsolete unless you have very specific acquired tastes. Super Mario Bros 3 is still one of the greatest games ever created, but if you go play it, it will just be better than most other platformers, not bring back the magic of childhood.

Gaming has evolved tremendously and there are a lot of not so great elements to vintage computing. I go back to games I spent days straight playing and find them impossibly awful.

That said there are a lot of absolute gems. To find them search youtube for "best <system name> games".

Also, lots of classic PC games have fan made patches (or even remakes) that often remove bugs and help balance.

Master of Orion and the original XCom are just two examples. More recently, the gamemaker version of Spelunky has people still fixing it.

... Kings Quest, Falcon 4.0

I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the old 8-bit days with my kids - but yeah, the games are pretty boring after 10 minutes.

That said! There are tons of great gems in the old archives.. you've got to find them .. we could play Chucky Egg for days on end in our household .. but we definitely had to search to find it ..

One thing you shouldn't discount is the idea of giving your kids access to the 8-bit machines to learn how to program them. This has been immensely valuable to our 8 and 5 year olds' .. they play crap games, but then right away can get access to the code, understand what it does, and learn from it. My 8-year old spends more time reading code (BASIC) than playing games now .. and that is a delight to see.

> but yeah, the games are pretty boring after 10 minutes.

But most of them were even back in the day. When playing C64 games with friends back in the day, we'd spend almost as much time figuring out what games to play and loading different games as we did playing.

Some games we'd play for ages, but many were 10-minute entertainment at the time.

And others we'd play for ages only to suddenly stop when they got out of the sweet spot in terms of challenge (e.g. Commando and Tapper were two of my favorite C64 games for a long time, but in both cases they had fixed points for bonus lives and once you got to a certain skill level you could basically play "forever", just cycling through the same few levels over and over while accumulating lives, and suddenly they were no fun any more)

I've found that they are great fun to play with groups of people, particularly when it is a group of people that remember playing the games when they were new.

I, like you, have been mostly disappointed when it comes to playing them alone.

I totally not feel that way. I've had more fun playing Fire Emblem games lately than I had with any game released in the past 5 years.

It must be due to the fact it is not the original hardware with the same controllers, etc. That's one thing that goes against the nostalgia feeling (other than bad games).

For example, when I see an original arcade machine (of an excellent game), I cannot not play it.

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