I just listened to a couple of old game music (midi and mods) and I have these vivid images of the game associated with the music and all the fun I had playing it. Even I have this bunch of ideas to make these games better, imagining playing the game with a far superior graphics. But, when I play the games I bought now...somehow they are not that memorable. I had no fun experience playing C&C:RA nor Unreal Tournament, well, not as much as the fun I had with the much older games. Except Starcraft, but that''s probably because I played that game along with my friends in a computer lab for 6 hours non-stop everyday, so I tend to remember the part we yelled "shit shit shit shit f*** you!!" & "bwahahaha...sucker!!" to each other. I am playing War3 and Asheron''s Call 2 right now...War3 is still ok, I still have fun, but not that much. AC2, the reason I am playing it is because I am trying to reach lvl50. Anyway. somehow, these old games are different....or is it just me getting older? is the game quality is downgrading?

---

500

Go back and play those old games again. You''ll find one of two things happens:

1) You suddenly realise that they were all complete and utter garbage, and that the reason you''re not as thrilled by todays games is that you''re so much more mature that even games that would have had you going without sleep for a week endlessly replaying them when you were younger now have a certain "ho, hum" to them. Extrapolating further, you realise that in a few years you''ll lose interest in games entirely and go out and get a job as an accountant.

2) You suddenly realise that the old games were even better than you remembered, and resolve never to touch anything released more than 5 years ago ever again. Extrapolating further, you realise that the further back you go, the better the game. You bacome addicted to Pong, then the Colossal Caves Text Adventure... Finally, after a marathon session of Space Wars, you abandon electronic media entirely, and after a brief flirtation with board and card games, take up big game hunting.

Or, of course, you could realise that the fondly remembered games of yesteryear were generally top quality (though graphics and sound were limited, and completion times much shorter) but that there were only a handful of great games and hundreds of more or less interchangeable non-entities and clones that in many cases were entertaining for a little while (ranging from a few days down to until you got the thing installed...) but not really worth remembering. In other words, much the same sort of situation as with today''s games, and, for that matter with just about everything since the dawn of time...

In fact, I recently got hold of copies of the shareware episodes of Commander Keen, Duke Nukem (1 and 2) and a handful of less known Apogee titles. Commander Keen took me a couple of hours to play through, and did Duke Nukem 1. Of the others, I haven''t bothered to complete most of them, but those two lived up to my recollections. I''ve also been looking for several other games that I have good memories of, and expect some of them to fall short, most of them to be as good as I remember, and most of their contemporaries to not be worth the effort of finding copies of...

"Sturgeon''s Law: 90% of everything is crud"

Gut reaction says to me that games are degrading, but then I look at it a bit more.
Things are exactly the same as they''ve always been, crap-to-quality wise. The reason it seems like things are suck is because only the really good ones from yesteryear have lasted long enough to be remembered these days. And a few are still engrossing enough to be played avidly. X-Com and Star Control 2(Ur-Quan Masters port, for me) being my two notables. But for every great, there was tons of crap you probably don''t remember, or simply weren''t avidly buying games at the time enough to even know about.
There will always be only a few truly awesome games out there, and loads of shovelware crap. The problem is figuring out which is which.
The best games, for me, in terms of overall time spent playing crossed with number of replays, are:
Deus Ex(I''m currently playing through my fifth game)
Aliens vs Predator 2(Played it three or four times completely now with all species)
Half-Life(Played through twice, but if you consider the mod factor, this should probably be number one)
Civilization 3/Alpha Centauri(Too many games to count)
Fallout 2(Played through at least three times, with many more half-completed or test-idea games)

-This is where the world drops off
-ryan@lecherousjester.com

I got Unreal Tournament 2003 and other (semi-)recent games installed. What do I play? Minesweeper. The last game I bought full-price was UT2003. All other games since then were "see, try and forget".

I hope I find those replacement parts for my 386 and 486 so I can give Wing Commander 1 and 2 another try.

Generally, mainstream games nowadays are so obviously suffering from publisher-enforced release dates that they have to suck. Developers don''t even have enough time to get the very basics down, so even before the release, Patch-O-Mania starts. That gets rid of the most obvious bugs, but still leaves the content shorthanded.

I guess (I''m too young/started too late to remember the "good old days") that in the beginning, developers had much less functionality to play with and much less crud to support so they could concentrate on very basic, to-the-point code and after a short time start producing content.

Today... hell, I would really like to start a little game, but there''s so much to learn. I wanted to write a little Xenon Megablast clone, but right now I''m knee-deep into learning APIs that would''ve been unthinkable earlier because the frickin'' binaries wouldn''t have fit onto any medium availabe then.

There are more recent games which would''ve had the stuff to become classics, but suffered from really screwy marketing. I found Anachronox some time ago as a budget version and let me tell you something: that game absolutely positively ROCKS. Through more than 50 hours of gameplay, I encountered two serious bugs and the storyline had me immersed all the time. The maximum review size I saw in a printed magazine was a quarter page, meaning that no Fat Manager Pig saw it necessary to actually spend money on marketing that game. I guess it tanked royally because of all my friends which from experience seem to form an average demographic group, I am the only one who seems to ever have heard of it.

So, what might be the problem? A decrease of "average quality", however you might want to measure that other than in long, painful self-experiments - might be explained by the truckloads of <expletive deleted> the market is being bombarded with and a general beating with the whole stupidity tree that seems to be mandatory for aspiring managers.

It''s also a function of the ''been there, done that'' syndrome. There have been many many games, that at the time, were really engrossing to me, but don''t really hold up as well on replay. Take EQ for example. EQ was the first, really serious/tedious level treadmill that many people had been on. It''s one of the reasons that EQ got away with so much downtime, and so many unbelievably boring time sinks. Once players go thru that once, it''s much much harder to put up with again in another game. Even though the world looks different, the skill sets are different etc, you still have a core of gameplay that you''ve been thru before.

It''s just like special effects in movies...stuff that seemed magical 20 years ago, looks laughable now for the most part. It''s one of the real challenges to designing games in a market where the player base is becoming more and more sophisticated.

I also agree that games, music, art, movies, television, etc are all the same. Out of 100 entries, you''re damn lucky to get 3 good ones.
For every great old game you could name, I could easily name you 10 that were released around the same time that absolutely sucked lol.

I DO think there is a bit of creedence to this though in one respect....games really started out being programmed/run by people that were gamers. In the beginning, there was no where near the market/money there is today. As time goes on, and gaming becomes more and more popular, more people that are only in it for the cash try to produce games. This cycle is the same as it is in movies and music. "Hey, such and such is a big hit, let''s make a game/movie/song like that"... Any creative medium that becomes successful suffers from this. Popularity breeds mediocrity.

My favourite atm is Mafia. It featured great gameplay. Nice story, and a fantastic ending with a lot of truth.

cya,
Phil

Movies and TV haven''t kept my interest much nowadays either.

I feel like they should have the "game formula" down pat by now and give us more along those lines, yet somehow not giving us the same thing over and over.

Is this so much to ask? Or is it actually becoming more difficult? Or are the game companies trying too hard to show us something new, and losing the game in the process?

What is this elusive "fun game formula"? I thought I understood it, but I''m not enjoying games like I used to either...

Game quality degrading? Yah, most people think that or a while in their gaming career... I did so too until I put it to the test...

I used to go around fondly remembering the 2 first RTS games I played... Warcraft and Dune 2... Of course, I had loads of fun playing them back in the old days, and a couple of years ago, I decided that I just had to play those amazing games again. So I manage to get hold of one of them (can''t remember which one I got first), but particularly Warcraft was a big surprise.

Never mind the graphics, they were ok, actually, as was the sound, but the interface? It was completely unplayable! The gameplay was boring, with absolutely no interesting features. Of course, I still liked the plot and the simple cut-scenes, so I completed it for that reason, but really, the game wasn''t half as good as a new RTS game. Sure, back in it''s days, it was far more innovative than, say, C&C Generals, but if you just look at the gameplay, it just can''t compare to modern RTS games.

Of course, some old games are still as amazing as ever, but often it''s just because the game in question was something new and maybe even unique when it came out, and of course things tend to be remembered as even more fun than they were after a couple of years...

The quality of games is probably the same as it''s always been. At least we''re not flooded with tetris and pacman clones anymore...

Obviously some awesome games were made back in the distant past (5-15 years ago), but other games that were considered really good back then are not a patch on a good new game.

But when reading your original post, it occurs to me that you only talk about remembering old games. Try playing a few of them, and you''ll see what I mean. You''ll find a few old jewels, but you''ll also be disappointed in some of your old classics...

Game quality, imho, is not degrading at all. The industry goes into certain periods of slowness, and this seems to be one of them. I expect this slowness to change soon, Deus Ex 2 and Doom III will be out in less than a year and I expect both of those games to kick ass. There is of course the issue of too many sequels and remakes, but this isn''t necessarily a bad thing. Game sequels often improve on the originals and many of them, especially remakes of and sequels to older games, are basically different games with a similar premise and characters.

I''ve been playing a lot of classic games recently (Doom II, Quake I, Day of the Tentacle, etc.) and while these games are great, I wouldn''t say they are way better than more recent titles. For example, both Halo (recent) and Doom II (classic) single player are about equally fun imo. One of the games that I''ve enjoyed the most in a long time is Morrowind, which is less than a year old. A lot of Run_the_Shadows favorite games are games that I would call recent, then again, the older you get the longer your definition of recent becomes (not that I''m old...)

There is also the issue of games that create, or define, a genre vs. games that merely emulate it or expand on it. If a game is something you''ve truly never seen before, or something that adds a new level of quality to an existing game type, of course you will look at it more favorably than others.

And to Waverider''s comment about the "game formula", it is possible to completely copy another game''s gameplay. There''s no reason why you couldn''t make a game that played exactly like an older game with some changes in graphics and design to avoid lawsuits. The problem with that is at this point you''re just creating clones, and why pay for a clone when you can replay the original? Most games in well defined genres follow the same basic formula with a few additional tweaks and new conventions to either improve old flaws or to give the game a different feel then older titles and competitors. The big difference is in content, and content isn''t an easily copyable formula, this is the fundamental thing that makes games different from other types of software. Usually the only acception to this is puzzle games, which are generally abstract and don''t rely as much on content as other games. Anyone can copy tetris and it won''t be any less fun than the original tetris for example.

Multiple factors.

1. You are older; you don`t quite have the same tastes.

2. Theres a reason why you stopped playing X-wing, and thats because you had put 40+ hours a week onto it. You wore the game/genre out.Trust me on this one.

3. I would say that there is a hair too much emphasis on graphics over gameplay.

4. Bugs were less prevalent, if I am not mistaken.

5. I don`t think people had quite the mass-production attitude then with games as you do now.

6. You didn`t quite have the political sector whining about violence in games like you do now and trying to regulate things. I remember there was a flap over Mortal Kombat though...

On the plus side-
1. Soundtracks/sound fx are better than ever- I bet they could release Warcraft III''s soundtrack as a CD.

2. Graphics can be easily made well. Tools are much better nowadays; good engines can be found for free. See OGRE or Crystal Space.

3. Internet connections enable bugs to be easily fixed when found- a feature that has been subject to much abuse; also, they open up new avenues of gameplay.

4. Beta tests can reach thousands of people.

5. Installation is a breeze compared with having to make boot disks for every game and confguring drivers.*shudder*

I''d say that things wern''t what they used to be, and never have been.

~V''lion


Bugle4d