- What improvements would you make to your favourite games of old to bring them up to date? I often get the feeling with games programming that we as programmers/designers are often wrestling with concepts and techniques that are so huge in scope that they are almost to the point of being out of our full control. By this, I am referring to things like the need to patch games to get rid of bugs because we cannot account for all possible eventualities. We can get the techniques/concepts working in the majority of cases, but never with 100% certainty, and the chances of something not working as intended increase in line with the complexity of the technique/concept. That is not to say we should abandon such things, but it brings up a question I find interesting. What if we went back to basics and looked at old styles of games and improved what we could do easily? I'm talking about back in the day when you played Sonic, Mario or whatever on a console/computer and wished it had loads of features such as massive boss enemies, super special attacks, loads of enemies on screen. All the things you wished the game could handle, but it couldn't at the time because of the limited power of the machines. Another thing that prompted this question was some thread in the lounge showing some MMORPG platform game (maybe someone can remind me of the name?). I just thought it was a really cool concept and could certainly be applied to other genres. Hence my topic What improvements would you make to your favourite games of old to bring them up to date? Cheers, Steve

Some recent games def have left out the fun of the older ones... but fun is starting to creep back in again.

Some innovative and deceptively simple games like Monkey Ball, Eye Toy, Sing Star, Burnout 3, plus the addictive sub-games in titles such as Final Fantasy and GTA: SA are bringing things back to fun.

Heck "Mashed" is a great return to racers of old. And some things like Bomberman I'm not sure you can sucessfully update if you try and bolt on tons of crap on the side.

Some games i might update with new features, but i think if i were going to upgrade old games like Warcraft 1, Ultima Underworld, or System Shock 1, then i'd probably just update the software so it doesn't need EMS memory, and work on higher end PC's without the need for crazy slowdown programs.

You could throw on tons of added features, but the fact is i like those old games alot more for what they are than the new ones, even with all the features they have.

I'm kind of on the same page as Gyrthok: Part of what makes old games great is elegant simplicty. If, for example, you took the SNES game 'The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past' and changed the graphics to 3d, you'd lose a lot of the artistic style that made the game look so fun (or you'd write tons of SM3 shaders and make million poly models). If you changed the items system to be like some modern CRPGs where you can only carry a few items at once, it'd kill the fun of seeing a nearly-full inventory (meaning you've nearly found everything).
You must be very careful about changing the style or gameplay of an old game, because making them more complex can often ruin the whole feel of the game.

Besides updating games to work on current systems, the only change I would make would be to add new content.
LoZ:LttP was fun, and I can still replay it, but it'd be great if there were some whole new worlds with different missions/items/creatures/etc. Having some kind of 'world generator' would be an awesome addition if it did better than any current game with the whole dialog/plot/quest creation =-)

I'm currently working on a good old-fashioned vertically scrolling shooter :D

I'm not putting in too much of the new stuff. I will add a powerup inventory kinda system where you can turn shields on and off, have different secondary weapons and superweapons etc. I've got a particle system in, _simple_ lighting, higher resolutions than what was common, but it's still 2d. I'm just taking advantage of the added power of the modern computer a little bit more. This also allows me to put a LOT of enemies on screen and a LOT of action without slowdown. I'm having a lot of fun with this. My next project is probably going to be something similar. A remake of Stunts is pretty tempting with heightmapped terrains and all that :)

Anyone ever play Guardian Legend for NES? I don't know HOW they did it, but that game had a ton of enemies/weapons being shot on the screen at the same time, and I very rarely noticed any slowdown. I think it may have flickered some when several enemies were in a row on the screen, but I don't remember it being as bad as something like Ultima (the first one).

I think the main thing I'd change about early RPG's would be to put in branching plotlines. And of course, making NPC's say different things now & then. Few things annoy me more in an RPG than an NPC's dialogue not changing after you kill off the monster that's been terrorizing his town.

This is more of a wishlist for future games rather than revamping old ones, but it'd also be neat if the towns would change over time depending on your actions. The town being terrorized by dragons could have people move out, buildings destroyed, and graphics changed to look darker/more dilapidated as time goes on, and then get rebuilt slowly after you kill the dragon. A really prosperous town could get bigger/better built and have new people move in. A town where the people hate their king could have protests and riots now and then. (I can SO see this in an Earthbound-type game. Imagine trying to get into a shop through all the protesters running around outside holding big signs with "Save the purple-bellied skrunloth!" written on them...the purple-bellied skrunloth being the monster the king has told you to kill. Environmentalists in a medieval RPG would be hilarious. :P)

More simply, there's a lot of games (Kid Icarus, Metroid, etc.) that used passwords that would be more convenient if you were able to just save your game. (I'd DEFINITELY update the inventory screen on Kid Icarus...the original one is pretty much useless when you've lost your instruction book and have no idea what anything's supposed to be.) Then there's games like Milon's Secret Castle where if you turned the game off, you had to start over from the beginning. I'd also add a way to see descriptions of items in RPG's (and maybe other types), like how on Lufia 2 hitting X on an item/spell told you what it was & what it did.

Well, there's my long rambling post for the day. :P

Ahh, nice to see some replies!

Well the general consensus seems to be that some minor tweaks can help make games nicer, but that we should preserve what made the game fun in the first place. I do hasten to add however, that this was exactly my intention in the first place.

When I refer to updating old games, I am not saying that in the sense that we should make them use the latest technology, i.e. I'm not saying we should make a 3D platformer or something because that would be updating the techniques used (it would no longer be a 2d side scroller). I'm saying that perhaps we should use the power we have available to make what existed even better, because now, making a 2D side scroller is comparitively very very easy compared to your average 3D first person shooter.

Just like the example of the vertical shooter with loads of enemies on screen at once. I'm sure at the time most of these games were made, the designers would have loved to have that freedom. The MMORPG platformer that there was a thread on in the lounge is a perfect example of this as in the days of the Sega Megadrive and SNES, etc, we probably wouldn't even have dreamt of being able to have such massive game worlds (in 2D , let alone 3D!). Now, such a project would be comparitively simple in the scheme of things as 2d is so much simpler to deal with than 3D that we stand more chance of doing it with less mistakes than if we attempted to make an MMORPGTSFPS!

So, yes I agree that we should preserve the simplicity of some games. Obviously this applies more to some games and genres than others, but I still think some old games could have great things done to them given the great power we have easily available to us these days.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks,

Steve

Death Rally with on-line multiplayer!