Comment by incomplete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incomplete | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

man, the early/mid 90s was such a revolutionary time for video games, and being in college and having a 486dx-33 gaming rig that i worked my ass off to procure most definitely contributed to my dropping out and never finishing my degree(s). :)

system shock was such a great game. suspenseful, intricate, engrossing and just plain scary to immerse yourself into fully.

in a few years span, we had this, doom, warcraft, xwing/tie fighter, wing commander 3, command and conquer, civilization 1 and 2, myst, alone in the dark (now THAT was a fucking scary game), descent, and so many more that sucked my time away. it was amazing to be present in the golden age of PC gaming, where the confluence of cheap x86 hardware, improving gfx tech, directx and peripheral support all came together so quickly.

i recall fondly the 10base-2 network in my college house, and having friends bring over their computers for LAN parties. descent and warcraft were the best when played to the sounds of your enemies yelling in anguish from downstairs in the living room.

:)

I think you see it most in 'eurojank' games these days but I really love the ambition of older games that include really unusual or deep gameplay mechanics that you'd never see in a typical AAA title.

Games like Gothic, Elex, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Two Worlds, Eye: Divine Cybermancy, basically most Deck13 titles...

The late 90s and early 2000s were such a great time for PC games like that.

AAA titles now have Hollywood budgets, and thus Hollywood's restrictions: no risky moves, play safe, be family-friendly, return the investment and produce a franchise to sell sequels and swag.

It leaves rather little room for art or innovation. This is why I mostly stopped paying attention to such games, and watch for what smaller, bolder studios produce on 5-10% of an AAA budget.

> family-friendly

The most successful AAA title of all time is GTAV. Fun for the whole family ^_^

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/gta-5-now-profitable-ent...

It is played by kids, teens and adults, so yes. Family friendly.

If that's the bar then what isn't family friendly? I played Postal as a kid.

In some ways games of this period are similar to the movies of the 1920s and 30s, before genres had ossified into their more rigid modern forms. In the same way that you'll find the plot of a 30s movie moving strangely between murder mystery, horror, and gangster drama, there are 80s and 90s games that combine two or more oddly disparate genres in fascinating ways.

A good example is the game MEAN STREETS (1989), which is both a point-and-click detective adventure game and a full flight simulator as you move between locations.

This is exactly how I talk about those days with friends. Genre expectations were not so restrictive and it was more about exploration than exploitation, though the latter was increasingly common as the 90s came to a close. I worked as a lowly artist & level designer on one of the later genre hybrids (Battlezone II) amidst the realtime strategy boom of the late 90s and as a young creator it was so much more fun to work in the spaces between genres where things hadn't been tried. I would have loved to have worked in the early/mid 90s when genres were even less well defined.

What are the 'eurojank' games you mentioned? Can you give some examples?

Not GP, but Eurojank is normally referring to games like Metro 2077, S.T.A.L.K.E.R etc.

Made by European studios (usually east Europe), with grand ideas, but missing some of the polish you would expect from a AAA game. I be clear I think these games are fantastic, and personally consider the missing polish an asset rather than a detriment to these games, but it certainly impacts game play.

Interesting you could put forward the argument that Cyberpunk 2077 is a Eurojank game as CD Projekt Red is a polish developer, and well, Cyberpunk has more than its fair share of bugs.

As a European, I cannot help but to find the term extremely offensive if that's indeed the intended meaning. De-normalising a below-AAA level of polish with such language makes me uneasy, at best.

> European studios (usually east Europe), with grand ideas, but missing some of the polish

I bet CD Projekt Red doesn't miss any

> Games like Gothic, Elex

I really think that Piranha Bytes are the most interesting game studio with regards to RPGs right now. I think they have the best blend of weird mechanics + plot driven gameplay out there, despite their relatively limited resources.

My memory is that System Shock had a poor frame rate even on my p60. A 486dx-33 must have been brutal.

It was quite nice on a 486DX4-80. At 320x200, though, even if it natively supported even 800x600.

i dont think there were any games in 1994 that had support for 800x600, let alone FPS games. The SVGA enchanced edition came out many many years later.

The (rushed) original floppy release was 320x200 only. The (much better) CD-ROM version released later in 1994 supported 320x200, 320x400, 640x400, and 640x480. (Although good luck playing at the higher resolutions on typical machines of the time :-)

I played the CD-ROM version on an IBM PS/1000 with a "Blue Lightning" CPU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_386SLC#IBM_486BL_(Blue_Lig...) which was a "486SX3" 25/75 MHz - IIRC it did manage the higher resolutions, but the framerate got very choppy when there was a lot going on...

yes, i just went and fired up my cd rom version and 640x480 was the highest resolution. i am not sure when 800x600 became common in games. warcraft 2 was the other very famous 640x480 IIRC.

I think 800x600 only started to become common around the time 3D accelerators became a thing. Some 2D games may have had 800x600 or 1024x768 a bit earlier but doing higher than 640x480 in a detailed 3D game would really have pushed it without 3D acceleration with the CPU power available at the time.

IIRC Descent II (1997) allowed 800x600 and maybe higher even without a 3D accelerator, but you'd have needed a fairly powerful PC for running that. I'd kind of like to assume Quake would also have supported higher resolutions but I honestly can't remember.

By 1998 or 1999 so, when 3D acceleration was becoming more common, higher resolutions also started gaining more ground in 3D games.

Even after that, many 2D games (including the original StarCraft, I think) were still only 640x480, probably in order to avoid scaling issues with multiple resolutions.

Another problem was the lack of standards at the time. The standard VGA was 640x480 in 16 colors, anything above that you had to program the specific VGA chipset directly.

Then there was VESA, which was standard for high-res, but slow.

Then Windows 95 came and with it came drivers and DirectX, and the driver wars moved on to 3D accelerator territory...

I hadn't thought of the state of standards, but that's also true.

However, mid-90's games that did do 640x480 generally did that in 256 colours, so they already had to deal with going above standard VGA one way or another. Very few games that I can think of used the VGA mode of 640x480 in 16 colours, and they certainly weren't first-person shooters.

The game was hard to play at 320x200, unlike Doom or something where you didn't need to see the details in rooms.

If you liked x-wing/tie-fighter, take a look at Star Wars Squadrons - it captures most of the feel of those games (but sadly without the special extra semi-evil missions for the empire).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com