Old School vs. New Wave

[Don't Poke My Bobcat]

I personally believe that the true Golden Age of games is yet to come, and it will come in the form of "projected reality".

Whenever I hear the debate of the future of videogames my thoughts always wander back to the PS2 ad "PS9" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTG3-Mkx-CM], and I can't help but feel the only unrealistic part of it is the date of release.

The Nintendo Wii is treading the fertile ground of this technology already, with Microsoft Natal and Sony Arc/Gem/Move/Glowey Ball "refining the defined" and taking up their own patches. Especially in the case of Natal, entering a truly "frightening" realm in being that no manual input into the system is required, being almost a fully organic entity.

With this in mind the next generational leap will most likely see a step down in our graphics to harness full 3D pseudo environments. This technology will then be refined by the generation following and the chain shall repeat - this has been evidenced in gaming's past and history does have a habit of repeating itself. Which means we're going to have a Virtual Boy and Dreamcast somewhere as well unfortunately.

The mention of the chase of more intelligent narrative and premise I feel is misplaced slightly in this medium. People (I use people in the sense of the collective majority) play games for the simple freedom that they supply within an environment. Clearly we need some control/guidelines as that is what we define our existence on, but I feel games will soon have the story "Save the world" and from beginning to end no one will experience the same adventure. So the evolution of script is required, not the storyboard.

The ability to tell a story in a linear fashion to its best ability will always belong to books and film. Pacing is integral; games give this control to the consumer and the creator cannot possibly cater for each consumer's method of play.

Additionally, the increasing number of individuals within the industry chasing "real life gaming", not least this issue's Jane McGonigal, only helps to back up this prediction - as well as many popular games not treading too far from reality's threshold anyway; the first coming to mind Cooking Mama, Nintendogs.

Don't misinterpret me on this however, this isn't an either/or situation. I still believe the controller will have a place in the future, but it will be this generation's light gun: reserved for a few, and for the games where "jacking in" would really be overkill. Namely Bejewelled.

In conclusion, the best is yet to come, and when it does the entertainment industry will stop dead. This will be the golden era, and this will herald the all encompassing awe.

 

[Section Crow]

i think old school was better since all the games seemed new and fresh, while new games are the same thing with a different story and fancy effects

 

[Necromancer1991]

I believe the Gaming landscape is both a more predictable, albeit slightly more interesting, place. Way back when they made pong the thought that the medium they had created would come this far was unlikely if not impossible, but eventually games caught on and if you look at the landscape as it is now it is a more stable and predictable place, sure the franchise milk-pumps are running full throttle but when you look at the early (I mean Atari jaguars and arcades) landscape it was barren and prone to massive shifts in focus, you had so many games using so much crappy technology and just plain sucking that, while most games nowadays are a lot more reliable quality-wise, the previous generations had yet to find a true focus as far as plots and game-play were concerned which led to a lot more experimentation, I'm not saying we should pour money into risky business maneuvers but some amount of experimentation should be had.

 

[FinalHeart95]

I think new-wave is better. You will see that people years from now will be talking about games from this era with the same fondness as, say, Super Mario Bros. 3. It's all nostalgia. Games from our childhood will always be the things we are so fond of, because they would be the games that would introduce us to the medium. This makes them the "freshest" games we have played.

i think old school was better since all the games seemed new and fresh, while new games are the same thing with a different story and fancy effects

Not necessarily. The old-wave had tons of shovelware, it's just that the really good stuff (i.e. Sonic, Super Mario Bros., Metroid) is the only stuff that stays in the public conscious. While you see a lot of shovelware around now, mainly great games will be remembered long-term. Also, there are a lot of very original games that were just low key. Okami and MadWorld are good examples of this.

 

[Zombie Nixon]

I think gaming peaked from 1998-2001.

 

[Credge]

I'd argue PS3 did so poorly wasn't because of its capability for graphics or the graphics themselves, but because technology-savvy gamers are smart consumers and didn't want to pay $500 or $600 for the exact same experience as an Xbox 360.

I don't follow. In fact, I come to the exact opposite conclusion that you do.

The 360 sold well because it was cheaper while being marketed towards college aged people.

The PS3 was marketed as the complete, all in one box, next gen solution.

The tech savy gamer would gravitate towards the PS3 as the tech savy gamer would most likely have a large, HD T.V., and would have a need for a Bluray player. He might have even used it for the now defunkt linux.

The problem is that there aren't that many tech savy gamers out there. The majority of them are as thick as bricks.

 

[real life potato]

I feel that the games of old had better quality than today's generation of gaming. In the golden days, there was no xbox live, no ps network, nothing of the sort. They were the days where you invited your friend over to play Duckhunt, or maybe Mario Kart if you were a baller. The games back then were designed mainly for single player, and because of that, game developers focused a LOT more on plot and gameplay. We see this today in games like Dragon Age and Half-Life 2. These games were designed for a single player purpose, and it is the single-player games that most of the time end up on top, plot and gameplay wise. Sure, nowadays we have the fantastic internet which allows us to play against people from the UK to New Zealand. Because of this, developers have more of a focus on the multiplayer industry, where they can make some extra pocket change by adding on multiplayer content and forcing people to buy the content in order to get the "full gaming experience" out of the game. By focusing more on the multiplayer, it doesn't give games the edge they used to have.

 

[mchoueiri]

I feel that the golden age of gaming is different for each person I know I started with the sega genesis moved to the n64 to the ps2 so on and so forth. I feel that video games is a evolving thing and will continue to grow and expand into new exciting things. So my point is that while most people have that golden age of gaming sometimes if you go back and play those games they are not as good as we thought they once were for example golden eye for the n46 was a great shooter for its time but now it can not go up against games like Halo or COD. so games is a thing that is always evolving.

 

[Lamppenkeyboard]

My early gaming days were spent playing a few games on my brother's SNES and a used N64.

I don't care what ANYONE says, Link to the past was THE BEST Zelda game, and Super Mario World was THE BEST mario game. imo XD

 

[rddj623]

An intriguing debate. One I feel will not ever have a great resolution. I agree with Tito, giant cage match, with rabid badgers on chains inside the cage.

 

[Korten12]

in my opinion I like games now way way better then back then.

 

[nipsen]

..uh. Yeah. You go and have fun playing Final Fantasy 4. And I'll catch some context-aware animation, fast node-calculations, collision detection worth anything at all, and graphics that don't look like dog sick.

Because I like games, and you just like Nostalgia.

I mean, it's not like there's no way to actually point out as good writing in new games as we had in, say, Fallout and Planescape Torment. Even though games nowadays tend to be shorter. But it's still there, even in the most corporate owned cesspool - exactly like before.

So where does this infatuation with old games as a phenomenon come from? Makes no sense. There were bad games made in droves earlier. Sequels that were nothing but skins on the first version. We also had failed sequels that promised to be better because of better hardware - but nevertheless failed, in their glorious 16 bit graphics.

No, games are not getting worse. They're getting better.

 

[yamitami]

..uh. Yeah. You go and have fun playing Final Fantasy 4. And I'll catch some context-aware animation, fast node-calculations, collision detection worth anything at all, and graphics that don't look like dog sick.

The problem with a lot of new games is that all they are is pretty graphics. When the shiny is all that holds a game together then you don't exactly have a very good game. It's like all this nonsense with Avatar. Was it a good movie? Yes. It was even powerfully delivered. But it's not the best movie of all time like everyone is shrieking. The plotline was wildly generic and the only thing separating it from Disney's Pocahontas was a few billion dollars.

So the potential for games is going up, but it's not going to be fully realized until people stop mistaking shiny for good. It doesn't matter how finely rendered a turd is, it's still a turd. So some of the return to older games isn't just the draw of nostalgia, but the fact that (in SOME) the designers actually compensated for the lousy graphics by making the story itself interesting.

 

[nipsen]

No... no, obviously I agree with that. I'm just saying that.. if I take one of my all time favourites.. Jagged Alliance 2.. that game isn't competing with WipeoutHD or Resonance of Fate for my game-time right now. I played through Fallout 2 a while back because of the writing and the role-playing - that's as good as ever. But I don't have the patience to go through and train my mercenaries for weeks and weeks in Jagged Alliance 2. Loads of the mechanics in that game also were... succeeded, basically, when Silent Storm turned up. That was a better game in every way (minus the panzerklein, perhaps) - not because it had better graphics, but because that game used a 3d engine to do things Sir-tech could only vaguely conceptualise with Jagged Alliance.

..In the same way.. there have been made so many bad games with both horrible graphics, gameplay and writing. Old and new. As if it's something new that a game-maker will create a gimmick, market it well, and do this over and over again. As if. Or that the original game, made with loving care, bombed like a rock, and then was bought up by a larger company that raped the soul out of the source-material. This isn't something that turned up last year.

 

[Fordo]

I thought this was a great read, the Audio was ok too.

A couple points I thought were important was discussing how things like game communities, like this one, or something like gamefaqs has changed how we play games. It's very easy to go immediately to a resource like that whenever you get mildly stuck in a game and immediately find your answer.

I'm a firm believer that gamers become more immersed in a game as a result of conquering difficulty in a game (perilous zombies from Resident Evil II, timing your jumps just right in Mega Man games, stealthing through MGS, getting your hammer-on just right in Guitar Hero). So to a degree, I think one could argue that some level of difficulty is lost in a lot of games today because it's so easy to solve a puzzle from the new tomb raider, or uncharted which before may have stumped someone for weeks or YEARS! (Absurd as it sounds, I got stuck on Zelda II as a kid and could never beat it till I learned about gamefaqs). Because I feel difficulty goes hand-in-hand with immersion, (may just be me) I do feel some games today are not nearly as fun as they used to be.

On the other side of that, certainly, a learning curve can help muddle that idea of difficulty = immersion = fun. I used to put games into the Nintendo, Genesis, or SNES that I just did not GET. Partly because they were just bad, but partly because I got bored so fast. As a 13 year old, why in the fuck would I want to read all that text in Final Fantasy II? *pops in turtles in time* So, I'm sure a learning curve has a lot to do with why a lot of people now think games aren't as fun...because they know how the system works. It's the few games that still come out today that challenge and appeal to EVERYONE that we (the older gamers) deem good...which is just hard to do

The gaming industry is little different from TV.. You've got adult shows, kid shows, but the most popular ones appeal to everyone or can appeal to many different generations (Spongebob? Simpsons?)

Just some thoughts. TLDR? Be challenging games! the rest will work itself out.