The Ugly Truth About Classic Games. They Are Terrible. | Hacker News Reader

The Ugly Truth About Classic Games. They Are Terrible.

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

23 pointssahillavingia61 comments

Broadly, there are two types of games that are important enough to remember years (or decades) later: those that are ground-breaking, and those that are good. Ones that are only breakthroughs can stay remembered for their historical significance, even though new iterations improve upon their formulas and eventually surpass them. Games that are good for reasons beyond being a technical breakthrough are the ones more likely to describe as "timeless" or "classic." Ultima VI sounds like an example of the first: quite a breakthrough in terms of mechanics, interaction, and storytelling at the time, but surpassed by later innovations. Starcraft (the first) would probably be the iconic example of the second: everything about that game already existed (in fact, it was somewhat obsolete on launch for still being 2D), and there has been tons of innovation in RTSes since then, but it was simply executed so well that it was not only remembered but actively played for over a decade.

In practice, many games are both. For example, the original Half-Life was a breakthrough for FPS games in tightly integrating an engaging story into the experience. Integrating the story in such a way has become standard fare by modern FPS standards, but Half-Life remains playable and enjoyable today. The graphics are dated (and a little painful), but the gameplay is rock-solid, and the story is still significantly better than 95% of what's on the market, both in terms of what the story is and how it's told. Deus Ex also ages well. It's gameplay innovation of putting RPG elements in an FPS game is now quite standard in FPSes, but the plot makes the game fun to play. Its gameplay innovation isn't really obsolete yet because there isn't something significantly better, but it is exceedingly common, and yet Deus Ex remains a better game than most other games that use it. I strongly suspect Portal will fall into this category as well--portals are cool, but when I think of Portal I think of GLaDOS and the Weighted Companion Cube. As a game, it is held up by way more than just a technical gimmick.

Unrelated: My personal favorite timeless classic is X-COM: UFO Defense (known as UFO: Enemy Unknown on the other side of the pond), which is apparently available now on steam, 17 years after its release.

> My personal favorite timeless classic is X-COM: UFO Defense

My, this game is so great. It's actually much better now, because you don't need to wait for 20 minutes at each turn in the later levels (yes, up to 20 minutes back when I played it on a 386SX 16Mhz with 2MB RAM).

It's a great game, but I've noticed that after a while I've been bored with battles - I prefered allocating resources, waiting for new discoveries, battles felt a little too long, especially killing the last few aliens on each map.

I wonder if others feel the same?

In that vein, you might like the game UFO:Alien Invasion. It's a rather playable open source clone of X-COM.

Granted, they have a long way to go before they match up to the original and there are quite a few bugs if you get far enough along to disassemble UFOs, but I've been having fun playing it.

Interesting, I had given it a try a few years ago but it was really too unplayable. I'll have a look, thank you.

It has improved a lot with the most recent version. Like I said, most of the rough edges are a ways into the game. Oh, and I strongly recommend using the alternate HUB in options, so you can keep track of your soldiers' health more easily.

It looks like there's code for a lot of cool stuff, but they have yet to enable most of it in the release version (there are a ton of other alien ships not yet enabled, for example). Some of their problems may be art-related.

But none of that should stop you from having a bit of fun. And I hope that some talented folks from here, especially artists, might become contributors. Because I want to play a polished version of UFO:AI someday.

I'd say the big thing that defines a timeless game is the story and atmosphere. Chrono Trigger, for example: fairly mundane RPG gameplay, 16-bit graphics, but the fantastic story has made me replay it several times over the years. Or one of my personal all-time favorite games, Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. It's a deeply flawed game both in terms of gameplay mechanics and technical details (it's shockingly buggy) but the deep, intricate story and well-realized atmosphere make it, in my opinion, much more fun to play than its newer and much more beautiful sibling, Oblivion. I was thinking of re-playing it just yesterday, in fact. Half-Life is another example.

System Shock 2 has a deep, creepy atmosphere and engaging story despite looking worse than Half-Life, and it's one of my favorites. Mass Effect is a more recent example--while it's still near the top of the heap graphics-wise, I thought the gameplay was pretty flawed. Despite that the amazing story and characters pretty much guarantee that I'll come back to it in 5 year's time.

For me, it's all about the story.

I know it is all a matter of opinion, but as someone who dabbles in game development (I am an admin of the Dark Mists MUD, after all), here is my perspective:

If you look across the spectrum of oldstyle games, there are a few aspects off the top of my head that were responsible for our fun: challenge by control limits, challenge by time limits, and challenge by perfection (restarts, saves, etc).

Joust is a perfect example of challenge by control limits. You may accelerate left and right, you can bounce left and right, you can flap your wings to ascend or not flap to descend. This game is still fun for me because I understand and accept those limitations; they are almost the whole point of Joust. In many ways, Joust AI is predictable, so it is essential that you master the control. In other words, Joust is a game of skill!

The challenge of time limits is pretty obvious: You have X seconds to complete the level. In Joust, you have X seconds before eggs turn to soldiers or before the pterodactyl comes out (and he is killable if you have the skill). Time limits create stress; you want to beat the time limits. Some people rise to the challenge of completing things in the shortest time. Often, it is skill that allows you to surmount the challenge of time.

The challenge of perfection is provided by limiting restarts and save points. Some oldstyle games had plenty of restarts and saves, but they kept internal counters of your retries. They would reward you with certain kinds of endings, based on your retries. In Joust, you have X number of lives before you are forced to start all the way over from level 1.

Tetris is another great example of an oldstyle game that incorporates all three of these challenges.

One thing the game industry realized was that they could sell games to more people if the games required less skill, less challenge. Most games now practically walk you through them. What you do for fun is different now. Maybe you play to be an interactive (but aided) participant in a storyline. Maybe you play to be the first to finish the same progression everyone else can finish (WoW). Maybe you play because you want to see the latest pretty lights (aka advances in graphics) or have the stronger system, both of which are less about gaming and more about presentation.

Is it really that classic games are terrible or less fun than today's games? or is it more that the kinds of fun you can have with them are different from the kinds of fun you can have with today's games? As an oldschool gamer myself, I can tell you that I have gotten bored with some of the past approaches, but that does not make them suck. It just means that what I want has changed.

mentioning WoW inevitably leads me to consider the social component. Especially once I reached the endgame, one of the main sources of enjoyment in WoW was my interaction with other players. Sure, there were social aspects to arcade classics (leaderboard w/ initials) and I'm sure those aspects were crucial to some players' enjoyment. But now that I've played MMOs, Facebook games, predominantly multiplayer FPS's (Unreal Tournament, Halo, etc), it's difficult to play an old-school RPG for very long because it almost feels like playing WoW on a server where you're the only account. Too static, too lonely. I've never played any game in the Ultima series (a sad omission in my experience, I'm sure), but I have a feeling that many gamers of my age and (especially) younger perceive a similar hole in a lot of old single-player games.

What about two-player Duck Hunt or Mario? Excite Bike? Bubble Bobble? These and many other games allowed people in the same room to play with and compete against each other. I remember hours of fun doing that with my parents and friends. When it came to RPGs, we would take turns progressing in the same RPG; one of us might grind the levels up while the other slept. Tabletop games had this same feel.

And on many levels -- just my opinion -- it is more fun to play with people I know than to play with a bunch of strangers, especially groups of people selfishly interested primarily in their own advancement in the game. This is one reason WoW bores me. The social arenas in online gaming are usually annoying, something to tolerate rather than enjoy.

Good observation about different challenges.

Different people like different things. I like games that allows mastery of complex control scheme, and exercises reflex. It's great feeling, when you have complete control.

Some games are based on logical thinking, story, strategy, etc - in these games difficult controls is just distraction, and it makes experience worse. Control schemes evolved, so older games had worse than new games (also computers evolved, now it's easier to do good ui than 10 years ago).

For me one of the best games was "Icy Tower" - very simple concept, simple graphic, no story to speak of. It aged very well.

Doom - the same - the feeling of nicely timed double shotgun shot is very rewarding, it doesn't matter you are shooting to rectangles.

I've seen in some game design book the distinction between a game and a toy. Toy is when you are given some cool object to manipulate, and some constraints, and that's it. Game has rules and objectives, you must solve some problem.

You can make a game without a toy - when there is no pleasure apart from solving problems.

You can also make a toy without making a game - it will be boring after a while, because there will be no objective, no problems to solve.

But great game is when you have cool toy and interesting problem to solve with it - these games plays great even after years.

> Doom - the same - the feeling of nicely timed double shotgun shot is very rewarding, it doesn't matter you are shooting to rectangles.

I always like how people bring up Doom as opposed to, say, Wolfenstein or one of the other 3D shooters of the time. What made Doom feel different with the controls was two subtle things: head bob and acceleration.

In the same vein, there were other side-scrollers that featured characters jumping around. The side-scrollers that added acceleration physics (Mario, Metroid) were the really popular ones.

I am trying to consider Castlevania as an exception to my acceleration theory, particularly the limited jumping movement in Castlevania 1 (similar to 8 Eyes, which allowed you to have neat two-player coop action but somehow was not as popular).

Hm. Thats for shallow console games. Some games have deep gameplay, large persistent universe state, opportunities for collaboration, or creativity.

Almost no games even touch on these things, but those that do are often considered classics. When in fact they are just "good games".

Witness checkers or chess. Lasted a long time without any graphics or fancy controllers.

It all depends on what you consider a "classic" game. I can't play NES games anymore. But I still have fun with SNES games. I keep my SNES around to play games that I consider classic: Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Castlevania 4, Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6.

Also, if you like talking and reading about classic games, you should visit: http://www.gamespite.net

I still find enjoyable the following:

Star Force (1984, Tehkan, Arcade game)

Black Tiger (Capcom, 1987, Arcade game (2x Z80), 7 megabit ROM set)

Ninja Kid II (UPL, 1987, Arcade game)

Legend of Hero Tonma (Irem, 1989, Arcade Game)

Parodius Da! - Shinwa kara Owarai e (Konami, 1990, Arcade game)

Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990, SNES, 4 megabit ROM cartridge)

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (Konami, 1991, SNES, 8 megabit ROM cartridge)

Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994, SNES, 24 megabit ROM cartridge)

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996, N64, 64 megabit ROM cartridge)

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997, Playstation, CD-ROM)

It is possible to play it in its original form, and also in the PC, using emulators.

My favorite game of all time was made in 1998... 12 years later I still play it maybe once a year. Anyone else a big fan of Grim Fandango? I wish they would resurrect this game, or at least do an update to it like they did with Monkey Island.

Eagles on Pogo-sticks.

Mine too: the original Deus Ex was one of, if not the, greatest games ever built and I still play it today.

I absolutely loved that game, but I lost the disc a long time ago :(

Me too, but I found a torrent for it. I then later found it in a software bin somewhere for like $4.99 a few years ago and bought it a second time.

By this metric "Citizen Kane" is dull, Beethoven's symphonies sound tired, and Phidias statues are so déjà vu. BTW did you read the Odyssey? Ha, they don't even have rail guns, stupid Achaeans!

I still love playing PacMan, etc. Actually I can't stand modern games at all out of the "casual" ones, because they're just too demanding, and I have no time to spend for this. I don't need any special involvement to play PacMan, Activision Enduro, or Intellivision AD&D. They're fun, anyway.

Yes, many classic games are terrible by today's standards. Even those of us who are old enough to have played these games when they came out, and who thoroughly enjoyed them, now consider them unplayable (or close to it), simply because many games have come out since that are better in every possible way (graphics, sound, playability, UI, ...). All in all, it's just a matter of expectations, and how they change over time.

Which makes me wonder, will today's games be considered unplayable 20 years from now? You'll explain to your (grand)child how revolutionary the Wii was when it came out, and they will just look at you funny, and throw away the controller in disgust after five minutes of playing on it?

I think we are on a path to reach an asymptote, so changes won't be as drastic (though that may just be narrow-mindedness).

Think about movies. The earliest movies were terrible; just technology demonstrations, but they wowed audiences at the time. By the 1920s you were starting to get some films which are still worth watching today as films rather than as historical curiosities (Metropolis, The General). By the 1940s, truly great films were being produced (Citizen Kane, Casablanca) and many would argue it's been basically a plateau ever since then... a few truly great films and a large number of quite good ones produced every decade since.

Donkey Kong (arcade version) is still the only game that, in my opinion serves as a true metric of core gaming skills (tenacity, patience, hand-eye, etc)

New games won't ever come close to that era in regards to sheer difficulty

Yeah, that is one of the hardest games ever made. Probably why the high-score is still contested. Side note - Billy Mitchell just lost the title back to his Kind of Kong rival Steve Wiebe.

Excellent film too - for those who missed it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/

I'd place Robotron: 2084 (arcade) in that same category - seriously one of the hardest games ever made, mostly due to the dual control requiring a fair amount of ambidextrous skills.

M.U.L.E.

Seriously, one of EA's first game releases from the early/mid 80's and I still play it on an atari800 emu.

Hell, Star Raiders and even Archon/ArhonII are pretty incredible still from that era.

Even better when you have friends with the same M.U.L.E nostalgia to play with. My favorite was monopolizing the market on food to make all the other players starve and pay me crap tons of money just to eat.

The original Crystal Quest of the mid to late 80's on monochrome Macs and the early color version on the Mac II were great (but not MultiFinder compatible). Very addictive and fast/smooth which was a feat on the 8 and 16 MHz machines of the era. (Not to be confused with later rewrite which just wasn't the same)

Just the other day I was wondering about getting an old version of the OS running under SheepShaver to try it. I'll probably dust off an old machine instead.

There are also recent versions for iOS, Xbox 360 and Windows.

I can't believe nobody mentioned nethack!

It's the most well-designed game I have seen to date.

Yeah, but is it new or old? It's still under development...

Granted, it hasn't changed much in forever. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some scrolls to price-ID and I'm not sure if that creature over there respects the E-word...

This may be a little off topic, but it occured to me that Nethack is probably the most fun a blind person can have with a video game.

I think a lot of the classic games are classics because they're universal and appeal to human natures desire to solve puzzles and best challenges. Games like Tetris will never get old because they're simple, easy to pick up, but you can always outdo yourself. Most games now cost $50-$60, last 5-10 hrs, and then you're done (generalizing here). I think that's way worse than classic games that I'm still playing 15 years later.

All creative endeavors must be judged inside a historical context. The movie "Citizen Kane" is terrible in terms of production value when compared to today, but in the historical context it was an amazing work of art that set the framework for many other movies to follow.

Timeless classic games:

- Super Mario 3

- Super Mario World

- Mega Man X

- Baldur's Gate

Still 100% fun. Dunno how they manage it.

Master of Orion II

Fallout 1+2 (and 3 when it gets old enough to be considered "classic")

I still replay 1 & 2 every now and then, and I enjoyed Fallout 3 reasonably well, but I'm pretty confident it won't reach the same echelon of classic games as the first two. It's mediocre as a shooter and otherwise it's just a solid iteration of the now-standard sandbox RPG a la GTA, Oblivion, etc with the advantage that it takes place in a rich and beloved gameworld.

* System Shock 2 * Tie Fighter

Dungeon Keeper 1 is still one of my favorites. I complete it a couple of times every year.

I got my apple 2 out of storage, and my 11 year old son got addicted to Apple Galaxian. Was one of my favorite games, I thought it was interesting that even though he played modern xbox and wii games he could get so wrapped up in a game that old. Comes down to solid game mechanics and playability I guess.

I got my 9 yo hooked on Lemonade Stand through a Apple 2 emulator.

Zelda: Link to the Past

Oh, hell yes. I loved Zelda on the SNES. As immersive as was possible given the period's technology. It really took me to another place.

The question is: do you still love it? Does your son love it?

I (thankfully) don't have kids. But I played it start to finish a couple of years ago and still enjoyed it, as much or more than some modern console games.

Yes, and I don't have any children. I still play it sometimes. For me, the SNES era represents the period of "getting it" for 2D games.

I'm not him, but yes, I still love and play Zelda on the SNES. Even the NES one is still fun! Just try it swordless (except, of course, on Gannon).

Most of the SNES-era games are still great, IMHO. It really depends on the game as to whether or not it ages well. Even classics like PacMan is still just as fun as ever. Some early RPGs? Not so much. Yeah, I still love the original Final Fantasy, but the original Dragon Warrior has a horrific grind, but so do later games like 7th Saga (a SNES game). The only thing that fixes the grind in FF1 are those two tiles where you can meet giants early and if I didn't know about them, I'd have probably given up on the game by now, because of the steep grind when you hit Elfland.

That makes me believe that our tolerance for clunky UIs changes over time. For example, if I can't automatically keep my items sorted and organized without flipping things around one-by-one, I get frustrated. It's one of the few bad parts of EarthBound (a game I really loved for the creative writing... seriously, even the back of a billboard is likely to contain a joke).

In that respect, Ultima has one of the worst UIs because it was so complex and people hadn't figured out how to simplify it yet. In that respect, later Ultimas seem worse to me, because each one is more complex than the last. I can still have a bit of fun with Ultima 1 on the NES. More than I have with the later ones, anyhow. I wonder if the guy who invented automatic note taking in games was playing Ultima at the time... it would make a lot of sense.

i play all mario games on and off through the years. mario bros, mario world, mario 64. the mechanics and "feel" are impeccable, like how tactile the control is

Toe Jam & Earl

I played Panic on Funkotron first, after which the original was painful and disappointing. Panic on Funkotron is fantastic though!

Tecmo Super Bowl, too.

Most of the Lucasarts adventure games are still good games.

one thing to recognize is that modern games generally have a lot of high-cost content. this is stuff that teams of 100+ people have to work on for 2+ years to make. so in that sense it would be really surprising if modern games didn't appear substantially better to us than in the past, when teams were tiny by comparison

Excellent point. I remember it was a huge deal that Wing Commander 4 cost $14 million to make (mostly because it included a great deal of live-action video, the fad of the day). Now that's peanuts for a AAA title.

I'm not tired of 2D side scrollers. I was so happy with the New Super Mario Brothers Wii. A trend I've noticed is that games who want to be modern but also 2D, simply render sprites in 3D but keep the game play 2D. (kirby 64 crystal shards, super smash brothers). It's great to see 2D gameplay is not dead.

I tried to play Wolfenstein 3D the other day... No strafe. :(

It would still be a great game if it only had strafe.

I still have a lot of fun with Thrust, Repton and Blockout, all of which have crappy graphics.

The Infocom games are just as good as ever. And the graphics are still top-notch.

My friends on steam started to comment about how many times they see the popup that I'm playing X-COM: UFO defense, so I had to stop.

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