Extra Punctuation: Keeping Old Games Intact

[Aegis A'Sha'Se]

I agree with Yahtzee.

We need someone to document old games, so that they, and whatever flaws they may have, shall be remembered.

And I think there needs to be a seperate wing devoted to reminding 'modern' game developers that FPS don't need to be limited to curses, military cliches, and the color brown.

 

[Frost27]

I agree with the points regarding augmentation of an old title. Going back and re releasing a 16 bit title with modern cgi cutscenes is a waste of everyone's time not to mention it runs the very real risk of ruining a fan of the original's own feel for the game that they grew up with. It's like re-releasing Moby Dick but now the shark sinks the ship with a torpedo and Ishmael kils it with a lightsaber.

I do not, however, have any problem with an all encompassing remake as long as it is both true to the original and doesn't contain any of the original technology. The remade Final Fantasy 1 comes to mind.

Re-releases of old games in their original form is perfectly fine. Final Fantasy 1, 5, and 6, River City Ransom, and Mega Man X are the only reason I have touched my Wii in the last 2 years.

 

[AndrewOfHell]

Thankfully there is now somewhere that will forever keep these classics safe and preserved.

The United States Library of Congress has long had an organisation designed to preserve certain pieces of human culture that have been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Video Games have been added to the list of mediums this year that can have certain pieces preserved (which is fantastic imo!). So classics like Silent Hill 2 can be preserved on their original platforms for the world to come back to in later years.

It's really nice to know this has happened. Just the very thought of a young child visiting the Library of Video Games and seeing in printed letters 'GOLDENEYE 007 (RELEASED IN 1997 FOR THE NINTENDO 64)' and looking at this big, bulky old console with its spider people controller and enjoying part of the history of this medium. Then the child will move onto a game from 2015, a revolutionising gaming experience that totally changed the industry forever, and we can be assured that games will now forever be remembered, and it will always be preserved for future generations and historians to look back upon.

Kind of nice to see how this medium is truly evolving, do not fear Ben, your games will always be remembered and played EXACTLY the way they were meant to...warts and all!

 

[bushwhacker2k]

I COMPLETELY AGREE.

I get really concerned about games just ceasing to exist (several MMOs pop to mind, Tabula Rasa, Spell-something...) and how people will never play them again and the original value and purpose will be totally lost in time and no one will care because everyone's so damn concerned about 'the next big thing' or how dare I not pre-order everything and that game is so 3 months ago, you retro-gamer.

I find myself very rarely playing new games, I've been captivated by a few of them this year, but I consider them exceptions overall.

I remember when the xbox (not nearly as old the C64, I know) was out and popular and I was thinking "this is the pinnacle of gaming", no other console can compare for quality of games. Now it's like no one remembers it ever existed.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Fuck legality, this is why emulation needs to be legalized. Anything other than the current generation of consoles is going to swiftly disappear to the mists of time, and we've gotten pretty damn good at emulation the really old stuff. Anything from the SNES/Genesis era and earlier is nearly perfect.

I didn't think emulation was illegal? The distribution of roms and bios yes, but not emulation itself.

With the right tools, games can be backed up to a suitable digital format; and the needed bios obtained from the purchased console. How is it illegal then to use something you own?

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

not tracking user's IP addresses because they trust the customers to not lie(and they did this right after Australian retailers forced them to jack up the pre-order price of the DD copy, otherwise they wouldn't stock the game)

It wasn't Australian retailers, it was the local distributor... who, according to my The Witcher 2 box, is Namco Bandai. They're the ones who forced CDP/GOG to put up the price to keep it more in line with the pricing of the retail version.

Letting publishers/distributors set the pricing of digital distro games and them using that to keep those prices artificially inflated so as to keep retail pricing competitive is one of the reasons I don't use Steam for game purchases. Here in Oz Steam prices are usually above what I can pay in a store let alone the prices I pay on importing games (which is the cheapest method when I can be arsed dealing with it).

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Heres a question. In 70 years do all the copyrights expire and all these games become free game?

70 years + life of author...

Here's the problem... what happens when the 'author' is a corporation? They can have theoretically infinite lifetimes.

 

[Rigs83]

The library of Congress is starting an archive

http://kotaku.com/313328/the-library-of-congress-loves-video-games

 

[Urh]

As Yahtzee alluded to with his remarks on emulation, the whole thing hinges on developers/publishers playing ball. And some are more inclined to be complete and utter fucksticks about it - ESA members are especially annoying at cracking down on abandonware sites. If anything, the combined antics of the film, music and video game industries (and by extension, the computer software industry as a whole) demonstrate just how out-of-date and just plain broken copyright and intellectual property laws are.

Fuck legality, this is why emulation needs to be legalized. Anything other than the current generation of consoles is going to swiftly disappear to the mists of time, and we've gotten pretty damn good at emulation the really old stuff. Anything from the SNES/Genesis era and earlier is nearly perfect.

I didn't think emulation was illegal? The distribution of roms and bios yes, but not emulation itself.

With the right tools, games can be backed up to a suitable digital format; and the needed bios obtained from the purchased console. How is it illegal then to use something you own?

I have to confess a reasonable degree of ignorance on the subject, but from my POV emulation could be regarded as bit of a grey area - it can be argued that emulation is a form of reverse engineering, which does have rules & restrictions.

 

[octafish]

For very old systems like the NES it's actually possible to recreate the original hardware with modern technology so you can buy a modern NES clone that works with modern TVs but accepts the old carts. For old computers it's possible to hook their drives up to a PC to feed the diskette data into a PC-based emulator, with C64 games that has the added benefit of letting you savestate the game after it's loaded so you never have to sit through those 30+ seconds again.

I keep meaning to look into a good C64 emulator, but my original Commodore is still going strong, mind you my TAC-2 is getting a little worse for wear, I may have to start looking for a replacement on the bay. My concern is how emulators emulate the SID chip. Does an emulator sound like a C64?

I have a Commodore 64, an XP box, and a Win7 box for my gaming needs. XP is pretty good at emulating all the OS that came before it. Plus the XP box doesn't have to be a powerhouse to run legacy games.

 

[itsausernamewhatofit]

Fuck legality, this is why emulation needs to be legalized.

This statement confuses me, you say "fuck legality" and then say that emulators should be legalized so you can use them. If they were legalized wouldn't we no longer need to "fuck legality"?
I agree, though, it would be nice to see emulators easy and legal to use.

 

[Strazdas]

Heres a question. In 70 years do all the copyrights expire and all these games become free game?

differenty in different countries, however americans pushed it up for 95 years now.


On topic: looks at my stack of some 300 dvds. Aye captain!

 

[Thunderhorse31]

I imagine your concerns over a potential update to Silent Hill 2 are completely justifiable, and they are the same concerns I had about Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on Gamecube, which I hate to this very day.

Re-written and re-recorded dialogue ruins some of the most memorable lines and deliveries, including the ending. Tons of Matrix-style cut-scenes are added-on - the movie coming out AFTER the original MGS, and of course we need to throw in its gimmicks to capitalize on its popularity - so we have our Solid Snake... who now dodges bullets and is on-par acrobatically with a cybernetically-enhanced ninja? C'mon now. Oh, and now FPS mechanics are the rage as well, so let's toss in the first-person shooting perspective from MGS2 as well, to make the game easier.

This is not the Metal Gear Solid that I grew to love (one which would have been the best game of '98 hands-down, were it not for Ocarina of Time). The Twin Snakes is a whored-out and cheapened version of the original.

And yet, I'd say about 99% of the people who played Twin Snakes preferred it, if for no other reason than the prettier graphics and extra cutscenes.

Sigh.

 

[Sicram]

Weeeeeeeeeeell I can still play old games. Hell, not too many months ago I got Fallout 2 from GOG.com and I can play it just fine on my new supah dupah system.

You could've at least mentioned the PC a on a little side note. It has pretty decent backwards compitability after all.

 

[TheBaron87]

Yahtzee, I completely agree with you. I can't stand these remakes where the new developers think they know better than the old ones and add new content that's a decade out of sync with the design philosophies of the source material. Square being the worst of all, and I'm saying that as someone who absolutely loved Square's SNES and early PSX work. After FF7 they basically turned into one of those anime studios that runs the same culturally hollow show for 500 episodes that are half filler. The only remake I've ever seen Square make that came out better than the original was FF4DS, and that me completely by surprise seeing how revolting all their other remakes have been. I don't even want to talk about either of the Chrono Trigger ports.

Point is, remakes just need to stop, period, until developers can learn to respect that fact that old games don't need to be improved, they just need to be updated visually and THAT'S ALL. I've learned to appreciate ports, at least people are getting the real experience.

Speaking of the gaming archive, I'd love to do it. I have the time and passion, just not the budget. Sorry, I love gaming and I've been doing it since before the NES, but I can't make a living preserving old games, and I can't afford to maintain the servers and do the digging and ebaying required for such a project without a really good job and lots of free time. If I could break even doing it, count me in. Hell, I'd do it non-profit if I could quit my job. Problem is, there's no real interest. People aren't just unwilling to archive the old games, they're unwilling to support such an archive as well. GOG.com is a great start, but who's going to make a sacrifice so people can play old Atari 2600 games nobody's even heard of? Especially when all these games are available free through emulation anyway.

 

[KDR_11k]

I keep meaning to look into a good C64 emulator, but my original Commodore is still going strong, mind you my TAC-2 is getting a little worse for wear, I may have to start looking for a replacement on the bay. My concern is how emulators emulate the SID chip. Does an emulator sound like a C64?

I have a Commodore 64, an XP box, and a Win7 box for my gaming needs. XP is pretty good at emulating all the OS that came before it. Plus the XP box doesn't have to be a powerhouse to run legacy games.

Honestly I haven't even played the games that much on the emulator, my main concern was to get the disks imaged on the PC before they decay, I don't really trust these old 5.25"ers to last forever. Not sure about the SID emulation but I think that's a pretty solved problem by now, AFAIK there are even stand-alone SID emulators purely for music purposes. Either way there seem to be a ton of competing implementations.

 

[k-ossuburb]

Funny,I seem to remember mentioning the Silent Hill recast a while back. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.299682-Silent-Hill-HD-to-be-re-cast-over-legal-disputes#11913144]

Way to miss the band wagon, guys.

 

[realslimshadowen]

This is one of the few times I have whole-heartedly agreed with you, Yahtzee. You've always had your points, and you're often quite hilarious, but I don't tnk I've ever found myself nodding at every single point you made in either a column or video.

I'm sure that just made your day.

 

[mikespoff]

Could not agree more, and it's a massive objection that I have to "remastering" of old films. The grainy black and white footage is part of their cultural history, and retouching it (or updating stories in games to reflect current sensibilities) would be like updating Shakespeare's language. It may take some work to get into the old stuff, but that's part of the experience - you're gaining appreciation for how the medium was.

The related problem with re-makes is that it generally involves the creative mind behind the project putting in a lot of stuff that got edited out of the original, because the popularity of the game/movie/book has given them the power to ignore editorial advice. This is almost always to the detriment of the final work

 

[mikespoff]

Heres a question. In 70 years do all the copyrights expire and all these games become free game?

differenty in different countries, however americans pushed it up for 95 years now.

Yeah, basically the US copyright laws get extended every time Mickey Mouse is about to become public domain...