I have been wondering about that on for ages, mostly when browsing Abandonware websites and downloading oldies I absolutely loved when I played them first. Do you ever get that ? Having wonderful memories of a game, remembering the colours, the interactivity, the incredible immersion ... then you download it, and the 16 colours doesnt look that cool anymore (except Hentai games... those guys can certainly use 16 colours the way it should be ), the interface is awful, and it''s almost unplayable, if the whole thing runs at all (thanks WinXP). Well, the thing is, some of those games ARE brilliant, and with a little lifting, I am convinced they could still be kicking ass. I think about something like Darklands, a superb RPG from 1991 in medieval Germany, or some old puzzle games like Oxyd, ShufflePuck, etc. Is it just me or there is a gold mine there waiting to be dug ? Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

a number of the old lucas arts and sierra games are much the same. the old police quest games were great - even though you had to TYPE IN what you wanted the guy to do:

"open door" yields: <br>&quot;turn doorknob&quot; yields: [why?]<br>&quot;open the f***ing door you moron!&quot; yields: [if you do that, sgt dooley will climb your back!]<br><br>anyways, it was fun when it did what you wanted.<br><br>-geo

you should try games like ''the dig'' ''full throttle'' ''day of the tentacle'' ''sam and max hit the road'' ''indiana jones and the fate of atlantis'' (all lucas arts) the earlier ''police quest'' games, ''kings quest'' ''space quest'' and ''the black cauldron'' (all sierra games)

these were all really fun games to play, and they are all sitting next to me, quite unplayable thanks to XP. or if they do play, the sound doesnt work. Or, black cauldron: it runs at about 3,000 fps, and you cant even see the damn charater anymore because when you tap the right arrow, he is suddenly all the way across the level asking why you ran him into a tree. and that on the ''slowest'' setting...

anyways, i would love to see some of these old games come back to life in 3d 32bpp mode. so many of the older games had more in depth plot and more difficult puzzles. anyways, i hope you put together some great games from this: if you do, please post something here! i would love to play some old-style games remade!

good luck!!

-geo

Ahh, the joys of remaining with Win98...

quote: Original post by Anonymouse Poster
Ahh, the joys of remaining with Win98...

Joy, eh? :D

quote: Original post by ahw

Is it just me or there is a gold mine there waiting to be dug ?

Yes and no.

Yes, there are a lot of older games that are great.

No, because they are protected by copyright for about a century. Given the problems getting them to run after 10 year (or less), I doubt the games will even be remembered by the time they become public domain.

Even if a game isn''t being sold, made, or marketed, few companies will release their intellectual property for someone else to develop.

With the rapid rise and fall of game companies, it''s likely that the sources used to make the games are lost along the way. So even if you wanted to remake them, you''d end up starting over from scratch.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
With the rapid rise and fall of game companies, it''s likely that the sources used to make the games are lost along the way. So even if you wanted to remake them, you''d end up starting over from scratch.

Well, that''s the point. I just think there are brilliant concepts out there that were tried in the past when the UI were crap, the sound were crap, the graphics were crap, and yet they were succesful. What would happen if someone decided to recreate such games (BTW, I dont see any point in doing a remake of an adventure game, why replay an adventure if you can do a new one)
with modern technologies ?

For instance I cant stop thinking of Darklands.
This game by Microprose (from 1991) is a RPG based in XVth century Germany. You start the game with a team of 4 and from there you are on your own. Open ended game.
You can roam the countryside looking for adventure, you can stay in town and take some job to earn some money (yes, you dont have to kill goblins to earn money !!! incredible concept, isn''t it ?)
The magic is simply praying to saint patrons (and of course, you dont know ALL patrons, you have to discover them as you travel in different churches and libraries), and you can also use alchemy and various recipes to create cool potions.
The interface was very cool, because instead of trying to model several dozen medieval towns, they simply decided to use a menu system, why bother modelling a whole town if you are not gonna allow the player to do anything more than access a few shops ?

Now with todays hard drive capacity, sound/gfx/AI, I really wonder what kind of game this would give us (although I am still waiting to play Morrowind which might just be it)


Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

Hey ahw, I''ve encountered the exact same thought this weekend... I found and downloaded Powermonger (a great game from Bullfrog). The thing brought back tones of memories just reading about it and when I downloaded to play it ran much too fast for it to be fun... and I started thinking that it would be fun to re-create (code) the game for modern computers.

There are legal issues to wrangle... I think if you were to re-create one of these games and distibute it as freeware that you should be ok. BUT, I''m no a lawyer... so don''t quote me on this. I do know that there are numerous people working on Ultima rewrites... search Google.

If anyone rewrites Powermonger be sure to send it to me, I loved that game

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Morrowind, yuck.

<opinion>
This sounds like a good idea at first. Hell, it could be great, depending on the game. I think of how I''d love a modern version of X-Com UFO Defense. Realistic lighting, fire and smoke effects. Deformable terrain. Atmospheric effects. Great AI, aliens stalking me in warehouses, jungles, spacecraft.

And then I realize that I''m no longer playing the game that I loved. I''m playing yet another game in which graphics are the big selling point. The nostalgia is gone.

I think that a certain degree of imagination is still required in games. When we play games that look terrific but we still complain of a lack of gameplay, it''s because there''s just not much left to our imaginations.
</opinion>


"If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein