Retro Gaming: your thoughts?

[andy]

As this thread keeps popping up, what grade did EAB get?

[synchro]

Originally Posted by magnetic

At an amiga meeting a few months back this guy brought his 10 yr old son. Well he has an xbox 360 with tons of games and I put him on the Amiga 500 with Turrican and he was in heaven!
.

Thats the thing....Arcade games on whatever platform back then were for everyone....Kids these days dont know turrican or games like that really...They get an xbox with NFS or an up to date game and its all to serious...No fun no brilliant colours or stomping sound tracks or cracking SFX to amuse the mind...Its all to real and just accepted by kids that they have to play them cuz its there...

[andy]

As magnetic's post could suggest, it's not all doom and gloom, synchro. I've seen a fair few photos across a variety of forums over the years in which utterly captivated little 'uns were playing or watching games of the 8 and 16-bit eras.

I don't know the modern scene too well, but I think there's been a fair few re-releases or updates too - and now I remember it, including on-line re-releases on the consoles.

Now and again, I also notice people talking of or moving to older games and hardware that they've either never known or were barely old enough to see. That would appear to be the case at EAB as well if some of the ages shown are genuine and we've certainly had newcomers to the Amiga here over the last couple of years. Perhaps it's an equivalent to lots of music and though a game, generation or piece of hardware couldn't be considered 'mainstream', old or young, there'll be a certain type of person willing to step away from the centre, equipped with an open mind and willingness - or propensity - to explore.

I have more concern at forum posts effectively drawing in the work for projects and 'concepts' that I won't describe here than I do for games and what can be experienced (such requests are a long way from an EAB phenomenon), along with what that suggests of the state of a portion of the modern education system.

Returning to the immediate discussion and the paragraph before the last and back to where the subject pleasingly went from the earliest posts, along with opportunities from emulation, there's the reinvigorated 'Indie' scene, all that's come to a wide range of hardware from 8-bit computers and mobile phones to current consoles and on-line services like Steam, Good Old Games (now GOG) and the 'bundle' companies that have come into being.

Though I keep thinking of further aspects to add, in the same way that not all old games were great, they're not all bad now and equally, in relation to their peers, not all games were simple or 'Arcade' in nature twenty-plus years ago. Take how for all of the hundreds or thousands of platform games that we had early on, there were soon management titles and flight or driving simulators. To offer some examples, some of the most complex, even demanding games that I have ever played came early in the rise of the 8-bit 'home micros' - specifically in Aviator, Revs and Elite. The First-Person-Okay-It-Wasn't-A-Shooter wasn't an unknown, either. Who could forget that most frightening of Survival Horror titles in 3D Monster Maze?! Or Incentive Software's Freescape titles of the late Eighties onwards...?

With a small effort made to discover new games, the fantastic outcome of the time was the breadth of game style available. Every generation and piece of hardware has carried a surfeit of a certain genre's games, each of them has had its detractors - but it's also been possible to remain selective and at the moment, I feel like I'm doing very well in the varieties of game that I am able to play.

None of the above is intended to cancel out your thoughts, by the way. There absolutely is a truth in your words and many will know nothing else; but it's also the case that it's not all like that either on the production side or for the gamer. There's still choice and 'play' and colour still exists in even this generation. Away from the pain of the real world, times are good.