Some time you just cant go back :(

[Adropac2]

Originally Posted by TCD

It most certainly has to do with what games we enjoy. The Atari 2600 has some great pure arcade like games, but except for Tempest I was never really into them. If anything that has only gotten 'worse' over time so today I can fire up a game for the 2600 and play for a couple of minutes before I loose interest.

.

I mean I am the same for most 2600 games myself but the ones I did enjoy back then I mostly still do. I guess the games I did like back then on it, I really enjoyed to such an extent that the gameplay still measures up for me. But yeah the 2600 wasn't for the most something to spend more than 5 minutes on

I'm rather hoping all this extra power we have nowadays may one day go into more than just the visuals and we have games that better approach aspects of realism we don't see as yet such as more realistic and unscripted interaction stuff. Stuff that could in fact actually make games worse if done done bad of course but there doesn't really appear to be much in this direction currently and there hasn't been for probably 20 years. Not even smoke and mirrors

[TCD]

Aye. When I read 'articles' like this one https://dasha.ai/en-us/blog/generati...npcs-heres-how I'm pretty sure that the 'believe NPCs in video games' meter is going down, not up when this is implemented in games. We'll see how games evolve from here and maybe we'll get to a point where 'side content' becomes more than a glorified checklist.

[Cimmerian]

Utopia for me

[ Show youtube player ]

[CCCP alert]

There's still plenty to love about the 2600. Just as many VCS games I would still play for an hour as Amiga ones, ditto PS1/Saturn. Space Invaders is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz outside the VCS port for me and Phoenix is a classy conversion etc. Obv nostalgia helps

[Tigerskunk]

ELITE for me.

That game felt like I never needed to ever play any other game in my life back then.
I cannot even spent five minutes in it now and not get bored.

I bought Elite Dangerous a few years ago, and it's also not for me...
I have just completely grown out of this.

[gimbal]

The thing with the 2600 is that it to me it is more generally that certain simple games are timeless and others are just too repetitive now to be fun. I can still play Ms. Pacman on the 2600. Crystal Castles is also moderately doable for a while. Qbert for sure. Space invaders though... I'll pass. Pretty much anything "space shooty" I'd rather play a modern version of.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by amigang

So made a long blog post about this...

https://amigang.com/cantgoback/


But basically to sum it up, have you guys had a game you loved growing up with and thought it was the coolest thing ever, and really want to go back and play it, but basically the magic was no longer there, it just was not as fun to play. I had this, the two stand out are Theme Park and Wing Commander both classic games, but i just cant find that magic I had as a kid playing them.


Any other games you feel the same?

There are probably some yes, but since I have come back to Amiga I have been better at some games than I was in the past (Monkey Island, SwitchBlade, First Samurai, No Second Prize) and therefore gotten more enjoyment from them like 30 odd years later.

I know when the mood takes me again I will come back and enjoy some of these games that I did worship, but something like Deluxe PACMAN since have returned has not yet grabbed me enough to want to put in some serious effort with it like I used to.

James Pond II is another, just have not got the hook that it once had in me (pun unintended) but I'm sure I will come back to this also.

For me so many games I never had are now accessible and if I am honest these have distracted me away from some of those I loved to bits when I was a kid. So having so many more games to play, you can kind of set some of those beloved childhood games aside.

Another few are:

Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters
Dynablaster
Naughtey Ones
Lotus 1 and 2
Jaguar XJ220
Death Mask
Shadow of the Beast I and 2
Skid Marks 1 and 2
Silkworm
Stardust (basically my taste for these kind of shoot 'em ups has completely died)

[fxgogo]

Originally Posted by Predseda

I do NOT play any modern games. And modern for me is post 2000. Except Amiga games.

So for me anything Amiga, Megadrive or SNES works. Thats all.

That means you miss out on the sublime joy that is:

The Last of Us Part One
The Last of Us Part Two
Bioshock
Dishonoured
Hitman

The list goes on….and that is just the PlayStation.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by gimbal

The thing with the 2600 is that it to me it is more generally that certain simple games are timeless and others are just too repetitive now to be fun. I can still play Ms. Pacman on the 2600. Crystal Castles is also moderately doable for a while. Qbert for sure. Space invaders though... I'll pass. Pretty much anything "space shooty" I'd rather play a modern version of.

Understandable, but I can definitely think of successful Amiga games that are so simple as to make Space Invaders look like Civilization. The VCS is well before my time, a lot of my knowledge of its games came from clones on other systems (mostly either very early Spectrum games or Amiga PD / coverdisk games), but I have one now and its got some definite charm, despite being a mass market behemoth in its day.

As for Gerry, First Samurai is one I never really got into and should probably try again. Anything like Death Mask that was an attempt at replicating a game from a newer system that the A500 just wasn't powerful enough to really do justice to (certainly not with the coding techniques of the day) is unlikely to appeal now. With Dynablaster or Skidmarks you'd need to be playing against the right people.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Understandable, but I can definitely think of successful Amiga games that are so simple as to make Space Invaders look like Civilization

You'll have to help me there with an example.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by gimbal

The thing with the 2600 is that it to me it is more generally that certain simple games are timeless and others are just too repetitive now to be fun. I can still play Ms. Pacman on the 2600. Crystal Castles is also moderately doable for a while. Qbert for sure. Space invaders though... I'll pass. Pretty much anything "space shooty" I'd rather play a modern version of.

The tiny RAM and line buffer did limit the complexity, the video screen RAM AND 64kb min spec of the C64 in Jan 82 really pushed us to a new level, and with the ST& Amigas 512k and faster CPUs another phase just a few years later. Still, I can still find time for a co-op 2 player game of Space Invaders with moving bases etc on the VCS but never play it on MAME. The really simplistic hardware still can be fun despite being at the dawn of home gaming technologically; Ditto for later machines all the way up to PS2 GTA San Andreas IMO.

[copse]

Sure, for a lot of things from games to books to TV I now find that they seem fundamentally bad or flawed. But on the other hand, there's a magic to some retro things for me.

- Dungeon Master. Even today it looks fantastic. It has a great colour scheme and is fun.
- Gold box games. These are a fantastic abstraction of the D&D experience that are look great and play as well as they used to. The use of comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, the 3D view, the pixel art. Beautiful!

Flat-shaded graphics. I love it. From Elite to Federation of Free Traders to Virus to Conquerer to Carrier Command and so on. Some of the games might be terrible, but the look fascinates me. Some of the later 3D that tried to adopt the possibilities of graphics cards look awful, but a good flat-shaded game is timeless in look IMO. It's nice to see modern games that adopt this look. Oh, Hunter, Midwinter, ...

I am sure there are more. But these are the things where I can go back and find some joy.

I don't know about the flawed games really. I just don't find myself playing them. Maybe I go back, try them and forget aboout them flushing that memory!

- Darkmere was beautiful, but on a recent revisit I just found it tiresome and slow. I think it could be fixed paraj-style but who has the time.
- Treasure Island Dizzy I loved playing and looking at. Still the latter, but modern me finds the friction of the playing it too much.
- Captive. I really want to get back and play this again. But I look at the UI and controls and it's too much for adult me.

I've become less tolerant for the acceptable slowness of the day, interfaces that feel like work rather than blending in and controls that I find myself no longer able to make myself use. Some of it might me personally (not speaking for others) being a baby though :-)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by copse

- Captive. I really want to get back and play this again. But I look at the UI and controls and it's too much for adult me.

Same here. Well, I should admit that I never got into the game. Loved dungeon crawlers back in the day, but I never got into Captive for some reason. Tried it again about 13 years ago and last year. Still nothing.

[copse]

Originally Posted by TCD

Same here. Well, I should admit that I never got into the game. Loved dungeon crawlers back in the day, but I never got into Captive for some reason. Tried it again about 13 years ago and last year. Still nothing.

For me when I returned to it, there was a large difficulty ramp. I had to learn how to get down on the planet correctly, after several bad attempts landing on water. I got pointlessly lost in the land maze. Then when I did get down I had no idea how to play. Part of this might be reconciled by manning up and reading the manual. But maybe the new player experience could be streamlined to make picking it up much easier, given hindsight for what that is worth.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Amiga1992

I don't think is something to agree or disagree with, more like you have an entirely different perspective, and that's great. If you enjoy them that's perfect.

That is true and my wording wasn't the best in that post. I did not really mean I disagree with your individual take, because that would be silly - it's subjective and up to an individual how they feel about the retro gaming thingy.

I guess I was thinking more about a generalized opinion in which some people (again, not you or anybody here in particular) claim that whenever somebody enjoys the old stuff it must be because of the accursed "nostalgia", "rose tinted glasses" and other such tropes. And also that the modern games automatically trump the old ones, so eg teh fact that there is Doom Eternal should stop anybody from enjoying the original.

However, while I do agree that nostalgia can play part to a degree - and again, its influence may vary from person to person - I do believe I am capable of removing it from the equation and judging games on their merits themselsves.

And these can be plenty. Most importantly, the timeless gameplay Adropac2 mentioned already. I can seriously enjoy even some super simple games on TRS-80, despite the fact that I have never owned it and have zero "nostalgia" for it. Of ocurse, I won't do it for 3 hours straight, like in Fallout 4 for example, but still. Then there are games which can easily match - or top - anything modern games offer, what with titles such as Pirates! or Monkey Island. And as for the bad un's, well, with perspective we can see that has often stemmed from inexperience and naivety rather than cynical exploitation.

When it comes to gfx (and sfx too), sure, it can be acquired taste, but again I believe that this can be separated from the alleged rose-tintedness and judged on its own strength. It's like nobody will say that caveman paintings or silent era movies are bad art by default, because of their simplicity.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by copse

But maybe the new player experience could be streamlined to make picking it up much easier, given hindsight for what that is worth.

I think that it is a game for people who love to sink their teeth into it. I did have a higher tolerance for games that required a steep learning curve when I was younger, but even then I just couldn't get into it (might have to do with the fact that I didn't have a manual too...). You could argue that it was a very effective copy protection

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by TCD

Same here. Well, I should admit that I never got into the game. Loved dungeon crawlers back in the day, but I never got into Captive for some reason. Tried it again about 13 years ago and last year. Still nothing.

Captive was cool back in the day because it was "not Dungeon Master", it was different - a sci-fi dungeon crawler with many systems. But I must say that the modern onslaught of games with generated content, the many roguelikes and lites and the... likes, has made me numb to the game. I now crave content that hurts me with clever design that came from a fiendish mind. Not pain caused by a cleverly designed generation algorithm.

Like Chaos Strikes Back. Up yours to whoever designed that game - and also thank you sir, may I have another.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by TCD

I think that it is a game for people who love to sink their teeth into it. I did have a higher tolerance for games that required a steep learning curve when I was younger, but even then I just couldn't get into it (might have to do with the fact that I didn't have a manual too...). You could argue that it was a very effective copy protection

Same here. The combination of a language barrier and absence of manual made great many games (especially with quests and text) virtually unplayable.

It's only now, that I watch it on YT, that I realize what those games were supposed to play like.

And there's no nostalgia in those, because I didn't get to play them in the first place because of the entry barriers.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

As for Gerry, First Samurai is one I never really got into and should probably try again. Anything like Death Mask that was an attempt at replicating a game from a newer system that the A500 just wasn't powerful enough to really do justice to (certainly not with the coding techniques of the day) is unlikely to appeal now. With Dynablaster or Skidmarks you'd need to be playing against the right people.

DeathMask I think I completed the game and to me it ran fine on my A500 (what I had at the time but now have A1200's).

Dynablaster I just don't like these kind of games really now and SkidMarks is great but too easy in my opinion. Some other games are just too easy and kill the fun for me (Double Dragon for example although I still play through it once in a while). Some of the super hard games have me come back just to see if I can better my original attempts.

[gimbal]

The battle mode of Dynablaster remains cool but the single player campaign... too many levels of exactly the same slow gameplay. I would prefer Bug Bomber but it has a design flaw where you can easily clear levels before the dangerous enemies even hatch from their egg.