Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why old games never die, but new ones do

pleromanonx86.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 335 posts

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#291

Post by const_cast »

platevoltage wrote: post #78
bitwize wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games…

Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?

Clearly y'all never played Clover 3D, which gave Mario 64 for run for it's money. I mean, Clover has at least one extra finger!

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#292

Post by const_cast »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #218
AlienRobot wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to take seriously the argument that copyright is broken because people can't play 1 famous game for free. At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game...

> At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game... They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy cult…

While this is true and a big part of it, we can't deny there's a lot of people right now who would like to play currently active Mario and Zelda games for free. Because they're cheap, or they hate Nintendo, but not enough to not play their games.

Nintendo, believe it or not, needs to make money. No money = no mario. And I like mario. And the seven seas likes mario, too. So that's not good for anyone.

There's a middle ground here, but in terms of messaging such middle ground is severely lacking.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#293

Post by abenga »

Barrin92 wrote: post #226
abenga wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just sounds like everyone remembering music/movies/other art that came out when we were coming of age extremely fondly. Young people starting to game now will remember a different set of games from you.

It's intellectually lazy to attribute any judgement of media to nostalgia, and inappropriate in this case. Young people are the best example of this. If you look at what past games the current teenagers are interested in, it actually is games from the early console era. Even in game art it's evident. Great indie titles, see for example Animal Well or Celeste harken back to the pixelart era, nobody emulates ca 2009 3d…

> There is such a thing as objectively productive and unproductive periods in any genre or medium.

A few great movies are made in any period of history, along with a lot of commercial stuff along with B-D grade crap. Not all movies made in the last couple of movies are Marvel movies. It sounds like you picked great movies that were made in the past to watch when you were growing up, and those are the formative movies for you. It doesn't in any way negate what I said. It is still "what you remember".

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#294

Post by const_cast »

candiddevmike wrote: post #28
jokoon wrote: post #27

I still wonder if the lowpoly/ps1graphic trend is real. I believe making games "the old way" is so cheap because of today's tools, that it might be viable to make such games.

IMO, low poly was great because it engaged your imagination more. Especially horror games, your brain filled in the blanks better than most modern unreal engine horror romps.

It also opened the door to more stylistic choices. There's only one way to do realism - realistically. There's infinite ways to do low graphics. Maybe you do a Wind Waker type look, maybe you do a Binding of Isaac type look, maybe you do a Don't Starve type look. All wildly different aesthetics, but all pretty low-graphics.

This is part of the reason, I think, Nintendo games seem to have more soul. The consoles are limited and, in turn, Nintendo dedicates more effort to make their games look stylistically good. Mario Odyssey doesn't have great graphics, but it looks fantastic. Ditto for Breath of the Wild. Meanwhile, Concord, Battlefield, COD... they all kind of blend together.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#295

Post by southernplaces7 »

safety1st wrote: post #185
mattnewton wrote: post #2

The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation. Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuf…

What's different is that new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy. The game won't function unless it can phone home, stream assets etc. from their server, and they can and do plan to shut that server off at some point, forcing you to move on and buy new games. Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think N…

>The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel

A barrel entirely of your own creation. Just don't buy their games and done. I've never subscribed to a game in my life and never gave a shit about the difference. Anyone at all can do this. You describe these games as if they were some vital service like email or cloud storage (and even those have solutions against companies that become abusive).

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#296

Post by batshit_beaver »

383toast wrote: post #265
fullshark wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK so many strategy games now involve figuring out what stats to min-max and then even if you figure it out there's gonna be an update that rebalances things anyway so what's the point. Maybe I'm just older, but none of this seems fun.

What strategy games don't involve min-maxing to play competitively?

Min-maxing is fine, but the endless balance patches force you to relearn the game every few months. So now you have to commit to a live service game full time, just to keep up.

Or you can choose to play StarCraft or chess or something where the rules are basically frozen at this point. Much better ROI on learning these kinds of games than something like Dota.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#297

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

const_cast wrote: post #292
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least say you want to pay Nintendo to play the game... They possibly did this 30 years ago but now they can’t play the game - despite the license they purchased - because they are missing the original hardware. For the same reason I would never pay Nintendo (again) to get permission (again) to play Pokemon Red: it doesn’t matter to me (and it never will) that I’m somehow “infringing” because I want to enjoy cult…

While this is true and a big part of it, we can't deny there's a lot of people right now who would like to play currently active Mario and Zelda games for free. Because they're cheap, or they hate Nintendo, but not enough to not play their games. Nintendo, believe it or not, needs to make money. No money = no mario. And I like mario. And the seven seas likes mario, too. So that's not good for anyone. There's a middle…

Yes, I agree and appreciate the added nuance which I clearly was not in the mood for with my initial comment. I would not say the same thing about Pokemon Scarlet today, though I probably will be in 30 years. ;)

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#298

Post by AEVL »

zeroq wrote: post #61

The biggest problem today is ownership . There are dozen of games that made headlines 5 years ago that you can't play today because servers are down. Some of those games are single player only. You can't host these games like you could Quake or CS back in the day, because you never owned them in the first place. I own couple hundred games on Steam and similar ammount on Epic but when I die no one will find an obscure…

> "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis"

where can I read more about this?

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#299

Post by okwhateverdude »

johnisgood wrote: post #252
azalemeth wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...

Nexuiz is still alive? There is OpenArena too, and lots of ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous, Urban Terror, etc.

Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#300

Post by nagaiaida »

> Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore.

https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2024/04/06/chasing-the-d...

yeah i think i'm good not returning to this guy's conception of peak gaming

Post reply on HN