The Magnavox Odyssey -- is it still fun today?
kymalabs.com
kymalabs.com
While it's fun to try and put on the nostalgia hat and try and get back into the mindset of the day the game or system was released. I'm trying to balance that against a modern viewpoint.
(I'm also planning on reviewing other entertainment media, like movies and television in a similar way).
A big part of why I'm so into computers today is likely because of those early experiences with the Odyssey (which was then followed by a TRS-80 Color Computer of my own).
I've also asked myself the question whether the old games are still fun. I personally grew up with the Oric-1/Atmos range of 8-bit computers and have had a fantastic time re-building my old library of titles for this platform, for use with the Oricutron emulator. I still find these old games extremely fun to play - but maybe its just nostalgia, rather than game-excitement, I'm experiencing?
Regardless, there is also something very rewarding about introducing these old games to a new player - especially if that player is your 4-year old son, and you don't have to worry about explaining blood and gore and stats to him but can instead say "yes kid, you just have to rescue the princess from the giant ape!" .. ;)
I can enjoy games older than SMB for nostalgic value and had a lot of fun with them at the time I first played them, but in terms of pure gameplay value, none of them really hold up when viewed outside of the rose tinted glasses, IMO.
This makes me get back to my systems in the attic (MSX-2 & Amiga) when I want to play a game; I made plugs on my old NES + PS1 to connect the Arcade joystick. I didn't manage that with the others yet, so I find myself playing on the old machines. No rose tinted glasses; just less of a frustration to play.
FYI There's an MSX reddit that's looking for members and discussion.
I do notice something about how people use joysticks verses pads; people assume you are supposed to hold them in your hand. For joysticks that's a really miserable way of playing. You are at your best with a joystick standing on a flat, strong surface, using your right hand (if you are right handed) to steer and left index finger to fire. All other methods, like people firing with their right hand thumb on the top of the stick, are quite worthless. By that I mean that you are much (!) more flexible and faster using the 2 hands and not using your thumbs; your arms and fingers can keep up pounding the buttons without any strain feeling, while your thumbs give out fast. Just my experience.
Thanks for the Reddit; heading over there right now :)
I'm not saying all the 2600 games were great, nor that it was technically better than the NES, but the core ability was there around the time of the 2600.
I don't disagree that those were great games. But I don't think they are great games (today), which is the difference I was trying to get at.
Super Mario Brothers was a great game, and IMO is still a great game when I play it. All the old 2600 games that I played for hours and hours and had great fun with back in the very late 70s/early 80s were great when I played them then, but they are not actually fun for me to go back and play now... the core game mechanics of that era can be tweaked to be fun but the originals are still just too raw or repetitive to be fun IMO. eg. I really liked the Pac Man Championship Edition game that came out a few years ago though I don't really enjoy playing the original Pac Man much these days.
Obviously there is some subjective bias here and each individual's views on this are probably colored by how much gaming they've done in the intermediate years, etc.
I agree that it's a largely subjective thing, and I would say Super Mario Bros 3 is a great game, SMB 1 is a good (and clearly game changing if you'll pardon the pun) game. Donkey Kong is another example from earlier, but I won't pretend that it was a good port to the 2600 that stands the test of time.
I also see your point about games that were good then versus now, but I have to say that Pong was only good because there wasn't anything else around. Space invaders, Galaxian and co are still playable today. Still, endless examples and counterexamples abound and there'll never be a definitive conclusion for the reasons you mentioned. Still, it's good to take a trip down memory lane now and again.
Out of interest, what was your favourite Mario game of all time, and how did it compare to SMB1?
In fact they match quite closely the current trend for simple, easy to grasp games that you play for 15 minutes once in a while.
Droll, Pac-man, River Raid, Moon Patrol, Choplifter...
To say nothing about solving programming problems with BASIC on an 8-bit computer:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
(sorry for the translation - I wrote that one in Portuguese)
That's exactly one of the questions I'm trying to answer in the article.
That last time I physically played an Odyssey I must have been 5 or 6 years old, so I wrote this looking for reviews by others, as well as other source material.
Turns out that in this case, most modern gamers don't like the system. In the edited reviews they describe it in rather unflattering terms.
But I linked to a behind the scenes video I managed to find from one of the reviews and the players, while going completely off script and not really playing the rules of the various games, had what appears to be an outrageously good time with the system. That combined with the video from the Smithsonian and the legacy of how much the Odyssey just got dead right with respect to defining a gaming console is what made me give the system rather than individual games such a high score.
Individually, I have to agree with you, there are many many old games that I loved as a kid that simply aren't fun today. I'm trying to suss out exactly where that line is and what defines it.