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The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

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Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#81

Post by Narishma »

nasalgoat wrote: post #51

The main difference between games then and now, I feel, is that they didn't have the crutch of excellent graphics to fall back on to wow people, they had to make their games fun and worry about the nonsensical story lines later. Gameplay distilled down into its most pure form. A lot of these games are extremely difficult and require twitch reflexes, which is something a game burdened with pushing a lot of pixels has…

> A lot of these games are extremely difficult and require twitch reflexes, which is something a game burdened with pushing a lot of pixels has trouble replicating.

It's not that they have trouble replicating it, they are intentionally avoiding it. With higher fidelity comes higher development costs, so they have to sell more copies to make a profit. One way to do that is to make games easier. People in general want games that can be completed with the least amount of effort on their part.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#82

Post by Noos »

emodendroket wrote: post #67
eoun23nntheo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. For me, that's when arcades were no longer fun. Every game was a fighting game, and there was no skill involved - only memorizing combinations of buttons to press. (How is that fun?) Furthermore, no levels to explore, no secrets to find. Just non-stop mindless punching and kicking.

I mean, you can not like fighting games if you want, but the skill ceiling in fighting games is actually insanely high -- much higher than the majority of games.

...during the arcade era it wasn't. The skill ceiling actually is pretty low for most arcade fighters. The ones that were high skill ceiling games didn't do all that well in arcades; Street Fighter 3 or Virtua Fighter for example.

The skill ceiling rising was mostly due to consoles, and I'd put it during the dreamcast/psone era when fighters started becoming really intricate.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#83

Post by harel »

adamlovesgin wrote: post #79
harel wrote: post #21

Those of us who lived through those years have a priceless benefit of having witnessed technology history unfold in real time. We saw the evolution of technology beyond just a bigger screen size of slightly faster processor. We had actual leaps and breakthroughs. My kids today will never have that unless some sort of huge technological miracle happens that changes everything.

Thanks for reading. We'll never see anything like the technology leap we had back in the late 70's early 80's ever again. I mean, even the internet wasn't that great a leap. Simply connecting PCs.

The internet was a "bigger screen" of the lets-connect-two-computers-together breakthrough. Still mind blowing though. Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I'm a huge fan of side/top scroller shootemups (R-Type being up there at the top as one of the hardest games ever made).

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#84

Post by raesene6 »

emodendroket wrote: post #2

For my money it was the 90s explosion of fighting games or else the rhythm games of the turn of the century. But hey I'm biased by my actual experiences just like everyone else is.

Yeah my main time with them was early 90's when I spent two summers working in arcades at the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk.

We often got to play after hours for free, and Street fighter and mortal combat were favourites.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#85

Post by emodendroket »

Noos wrote: post #82
emodendroket wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can not like fighting games if you want, but the skill ceiling in fighting games is actually insanely high -- much higher than the majority of games.

...during the arcade era it wasn't. The skill ceiling actually is pretty low for most arcade fighters. The ones that were high skill ceiling games didn't do all that well in arcades; Street Fighter 3 or Virtua Fighter for example. The skill ceiling rising was mostly due to consoles, and I'd put it during the dreamcast/psone era when fighters started becoming really intricate.

Have you watched people talking about option selects and stuff in Super Turbo? There's a reason people still play that stuff. It seems to me you're talking more about game with a high skill floor, if you will.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#86

Post by adamlovesgin »

lolive wrote: post #3
emodendroket wrote: post #2

For my money it was the 90s explosion of fighting games or else the rhythm games of the turn of the century. But hey I'm biased by my actual experiences just like everyone else is.

Double Dragon -> Final Fight -> Street Fighter 2.

Street Fighter 1 had no impact whatsoever, and I could never understand street Fighter 2's popularity.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#87

Post by hanasu »

Noos wrote: post #80
hanasu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think fighting games don't involve skill try beating an experienced Street Fighter 2 player having never played the game. When you lose, and lament that you 'simply haven't memorized the combos' go home and look them up. After you've realized that there's only one or two major combos to learn for each character in that game, come back and I promise you'll still lose. There's much more to it than that. Most imp…

I doubt you played Street Fighter 2 in the arcades when it first came out, then. This was a game where it was possible to redizzy people simply by spamming jab, or one where moves often did insane damage. SF really only became balanced around Super Street Fighter Turbo in the arcades, and a lot of people who play fighting games now don't realize how bad or frustrating a lot of that generation was.

World Warrior is a bad competitive game. No doubt. Champion Edition is only slightly better. But that doesn't really take away from my point - a random person walking up to the game is not going to know how to do the CE Dictator dizzy/redizzies for example, nor know how to play lockdown defense with CE Guile to prevent them.

And it's not as simple as just 'memorizing' the combos if you never play well enough to get yourself in a position to land them. There's still a journey there both outside the game to learn and inside the game to break down the patterns in your opponent's play that will never be present in a single-player game. That's what keeps fighting games interesting and new 20+ years later for me.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#88

Post by hanasu »

emodendroket wrote: post #68
hanasu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think fighting games don't involve skill try beating an experienced Street Fighter 2 player having never played the game. When you lose, and lament that you 'simply haven't memorized the combos' go home and look them up. After you've realized that there's only one or two major combos to learn for each character in that game, come back and I promise you'll still lose. There's much more to it than that. Most imp…

I agree with the thrust of your post, but you're underselling how much time and energy people can devote to discovering absolutely perfect runs of single-player games.

That's fair - although I was mainly referring to the era of arcade games referred to in the original blog post, and not to console speedruns and so forth that came later and cater more towards the 'perfect run' style of play. In the late 1970s/early 1980s there really weren't a lot of games that have 'perfect' runs. You simply can play the majority of them forever once you learn to play well enough since they repeat the same levels over and over. There are some exceptions like Donkey Kong and Pac-man that have killscreens, sure, but personally I don't find that 'beating the system' to play the same levels over and over to be very enjoyable. Since I'm not spending my allowance on the game, I want the game itself to be interesting rather than just long.

I do enjoy some games of this type like Robotron that have enough variation in the random patterns of the enemies to still feel fresh. I also love games like Pole Position or Outrun that have well-defined endings and force you to play 'perfectly' like you describe. However most games of this earlier time period are unfortunately just not designed that way.

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#89

Post by emodendroket »

adamlovesgin wrote: post #86
lolive wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double Dragon -> Final Fight -> Street Fighter 2.

Street Fighter 1 had no impact whatsoever, and I could never understand street Fighter 2's popularity.

Well, it invented the genre of the fighting game, which is basically endlessly complex

Re: The Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade: 1981

#90

Post by emodendroket »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
Noos wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...during the arcade era it wasn't. The skill ceiling actually is pretty low for most arcade fighters. The ones that were high skill ceiling games didn't do all that well in arcades; Street Fighter 3 or Virtua Fighter for example. The skill ceiling rising was mostly due to consoles, and I'd put it during the dreamcast/psone era when fighters started becoming really intricate.

Have you watched people talking about option selects and stuff in Super Turbo? There's a reason people still play that stuff. It seems to me you're talking more about game with a high skill floor, if you will.

I should also say that it seems like a stretch to say Virtua Fighter didn't do well in arcades, but that had more to do with the graphics.
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