Man, gotta love the old games.

What about Jones in the Fast lane? It was like an earlier version of the sims except competetive. You have your one sim and you have to get a job and make lots of money and decorate your house, and you can play it with a bunch of other players.

Or Stronghold? (The old one) An old 3D realtime strategy game with a bunch of npcs with their own DnD stats to order around, and tons of different buildings you can build to expand your empire?

Or settlers: here''s another example of an "oldgame" that should have stayed an "oldgame". The 3rd and 4th incarnations were travesties.

Out of this world: One of the most cinematic games ever, this one had you on the edge of your seat. And the graphics are still pretty good.

quote: Original post by core

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.

If the game is fun, the game is fun. Graphics won''t have anything to do with it, unless you really are playing it just for nostalgia reasons. In that case, the game''s probably not as good as you remember anyhow.

In some cases, I can see how making the graphics better could negatively affect the game. Leisure Suit Larry, for instance, would probably be less fun in 3d, because graphics were actually a big part of that game. But properly done, a 2d remake would be great.

If you want imagination, read a book.

At the very least, I''d like to see an identical copy of the game made, just rewritten so that modern computers could run it. You could cram a shitload of games onto one CD that way, since the filesizes wouldn''t change too much. And games like Police Quest should be given a damn Thesaurus. I''d have loved that game, if not for the fact that the parser was so stupid.

CM

speaking of old games not working in XP...
Did you try compatability mode? That usually works for me. If you dont know how, right click the exe, click on properties, then click on the compatability tab and select the flavor of windows you want to try, apply and try.

quote:
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.

Point taken, but if you think about it, most games we love so much to remember had tremendous graphics for their time (I still remember the review for Darklands :"Wow! you can see the chain of the flail moving while you walk!"),
but it wasnt, just like for any good game, the main reason.
XCom had quite cool graphics but mostly it was a brilliant turn based tactical game, something that was and still is much better than all this Diablo crap, since I dont think there is any game that is vaguely as interesting and complex than XCom nowadays.

My point is, if we brought back some of the oldies, we could possibly reinject some life in a more or less *boring* industry.
Oh, yeah, there are still some great games around, some are even original, with concepts that we havent seen before (well, that one is maybe a bit pushing it ), but mostly we are in a low period IMHO.

If you have got a better idea to get the flame of creativity back in this dwindling industry, I''d like to hear it



Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

oh, i''d like to see remakes of the FF series...up to FF7, think how great it would be to play them with the doom3 graphic engine

the ''fps-problem'' on modern pcs:
there''s a tool somewhere on the net called ''slowdown'' which can slow your pc down(it''s really great and easy to use)

i searched for it and there are a lot of programms for slowing your pc down in the inet!
i didn''t find the one i wantet, but this one does not sound bad to me

AngelForce

--
If you find any mistakes, you''re allowed to keep ''em!

''When I look back I am lost.''

Well, re-hashing old concepts is not exactly the flame of creativity , is it?

After all, this is exactly the formula that the game industry is following these days. The only problem with the formula is that it is a very narrow group of concepts that are being rehashed again and again.

What I think would be great is not that developers/designers rehash old bestseller, but instead take a long, hard look at design concepts in older games.

No one seems to bother looking at those games that didn't quite make it (as bestsellers) but which contain lots of interesting concepts and ideas. E.g., the 4X space empire genre churns out one Master of Orion clone after another, and yet none of them bother to consider a diamond in the rough such as "Emperor of the Fading Suns". The list of interesting concepts in old games are huge; all it takes is that someone bother to look back and consider them.

When it occasionally does happen, we tend to see new "stunning" bestseller games (e.g., Shogun:Total War and others).

As Albert Einstein once said: "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources".

A good example would be my own Imperium. No doubt there are some who would call it highly original when it comes out. I know that it is just a lot of interesting ideas from a lot of interesting games, and then tweaked a little bit.

Imperium - Rise of Rome

[edited by - strategy on August 19, 2002 6:36:01 AM]

quote: Original post by Strategy
Well, re-hashing old concepts is not exactly the flame of creativity , is it?

LOL, you got me on that one

quote:
After all, this is exactly the formula that the game industry is following these days. The only problem with the formula is that it is a very narrow group of concepts that are being rehashed again and again.

Precisely. So if the guys out there arent capable of original thought, they might as well try to widen their scope and dig out the dead.

quote:
What I think would be great is not that developers/designers rehash old bestseller, but instead take a long, hard look at design concepts in older games.

Right, that''s more what I was trying to say, so I guess we agree then


Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

I went to a ROM site before to check out all the old games I remember from back in the day, and they all rated a 4 or 5 out of 5. I think that the driving force of the "nostalgia factor" is the "fun factor", which is what makes a game good to begin with. I don''t want a hardware demo, I want a game. It''s not that 2D is inherently more fun than flashy 3D, it''s that the simplicity added to the challenge, which made it more fun. With newer action games, you have to worry about spacial orientation and camera angles. In an older action game, you only had to worry about dodging stuff and hitting stuff.

http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/

This gizmo runs just about anything you''ve played on your MS DOS 28-, 38- or 48sixes.

Even Star Legions!

That''s a game I''d like to see come back to life with nitty-witty graphics. That''s why I dedicated it a SourceForge project. It''s still in heavy planning though...

What? The game has already been made, so what''s the planning, you ask?
Silly little penguin! There are lot''s of different things to consider these days. Like a realtime version, multiplayer over the internet,programming language...
So there.

Don''t expect any results anytime soon.

to five foot freak...

thank you! i really wanted to be able to play all these old dos-based games again... theyre really pretty fun to play, and to lucin: NO! Compatability Wizard did not work! I already tried. It fixes newer games (like R6- Rogue Spear) but not the really old ones. Or if it helps, you still don''t get sound.

Anyways, thank you!

-geo-