Video Games: Nostalgia Vs Extinct Genres

[MarkB]

Oh I really liked that game and its setting two, I always wondered if Blades in the Dark was inspired by The City with its steampunk medieval setting. Great game

I think it was more inspired by Dishonored, but since Dishonored is something of a spiritual successor to Thief, it's still the same basic DNA.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

My college is in the middle of building a new building for game design. It is supposed to have a learning room with 1 of each gaming system ever.

My favorite from childhood. "Fighter needs food badly." Elf is about to die."

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Gauntlet is a classic, I will always gravitate right to it if it's in an arcade, ever since I was a kid.

As for retro games I find myself playing these days, I've been playing a lot of Atari games of late - Missile Command, Centipede, Asteroids, Tempest.

I am terrible at Pong and Breakout, but I'm trying to get better at them.

 

[Mad_Jack]

I've got one of those generic Atari-shaped things with the 300 games on them, and I occasionally bust it out and screw around with some of the classics.

Gauntlet - any incarnation of it - is one of my all-time favorites, and I refuse to have a copy of it on my home computer for the same reasons alcoholics don't keep booze around, lol.
(On the Reaper forum, one of my catchphrases is, "Green Skull needs food badly...", when I stop posting to go eat...)

A few months back I found out you can play Tetris online, and that game was always one of my biggest time sinks - back in the day when it first got big in American arcades I was pretty much competition-level good at it. I could have paid for grad school and financed my retirement with all the quarters I dropped into that machine.

Thief is another favorite as well.

I used to play Diablo (the original), Planescape, Neverwinter Nights and some of the other old D&D games on Steam, stuff with smaller screen dimensions than modern monitors, but then they started changing the size of my desktop on me when I closed them out, and that got really annoying so I stopped.

 

[Deset Gled]

A few months back I found out you can play Tetris online, and that game was always one of my biggest time sinks - back in the day when it first got big in American arcades I was pretty much competition-level good at it. I could have paid for grad school and financed my retirement with all the quarters I dropped into that machine.

HATETRIS @ Things Of Interest

qntm.org

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. Arguably the best Civilization type game ever and a great 4X game. There's been no direct sequel and the spiritual successors don't hold up.

Yeah this is a truly shocking one to me.

SMAC remains unbeaten essentially for two reasons:

1) Gameplay - It simply plays better and is designed better than almost all CIV-type games. It has a higher learning curve than most CIV games, but once you get past that, you find that, not only are there a bunch of genuinely very diverse factions, who have stuff about that matters deep into the game, rather than just at the start or specific periods of the game, but a much wider variety of strategies, and more nuanced strategies work than in other CIV-type games.

2) Setting - SMAC was relatively original, certainly inspired by a lot of writers, but with a real grasp on sci-fi, and an eye for less trope-y, less obvious, more thoughtful, and more philosophical SF. There's bits of Kim Stanley Robinson, of Frank Herbert, of Stanislaw Lem, of Vernor Vinge, of Greg Bear and all sorts of others. And rather than being sort of cheaply centrist (as the mainline CIV games increasingly became), it allows for any kind of different or bizarre society to potentially flourish, from the hellish to the utopian to the simply strange. The whole thing is extremely imaginative, and strong and consistent visual design (which could be initially off-putting, but knew how it wanted to look) really helped.

A number of games have attempted it, and they've all failed miserably - probably the absolute worst being Firaxis own CIV: Beyond Earth, which was very much marketed by by Firaxis as a "spiritual successor" to SMAC, but had a number of key flaws, primary among them being:

A) Neither of the lead designers had played SMAC significantly (one hadn't played it at all). This was beyond astonishing, but came out in a couple of interviews. I believe much later, after the game wasn't very successful, they tried to retcon this and say actually they had, but given that they'd rather proudly denied it earlier, and even said it "wasn't necessary" to play it (i.e. implying they had zero to learn from it), that just seemed weird.

B) Said lead designers clearly had poor imaginations, and when they listed their inspirations, it was basically "Super-mainstream sci-fi movies from the 1980s and 1990s" (and most it not space or planetary SF, rather stuff like Terminator!) and a few more mainstream and less imaginative/visionary SF novels, but IIRC, not a single one of them from after 1980, so excluding people like KSR, Vinge, Bear, and so on.

C) Gameplay-wise, instead of being an original game with truly unique mechanics, it was just CIV mechanics transported to another planet, essentially.

Other older games I sometimes still play:

Streets of Rage 2 - I've actually stopped with this, because SoR4 is a "true" SoR game and basically has everything I liked about SoR2 but better (you can even play Shiva, as we always dreamed of back in the 1990s).

Dragon's Dogma - 2012 so I think 11+ years counts as it hasn't been updated, unlike say Skyrim or Mass Effect. A truly amazing game no-one has really equalled in a variety of ways.

Super Mario Bros - the original SNES version.

F-Zero - Original SNES again. Nothing quite like it.

WipEout - The first one and 2097 only - the later ones maybe technically have better gameplay, but none of them have remotely as good and consistent visual design, nor as banger soundtracks (indeed some of the later soundtracks contain some actual sound-crimes). Together with F-Zero it represents an essentially dead genre (modern attempts have been fairly pathetic).

Crazy Taxi/Crazy Taxi 2 - Amazing. Pity they ruined the music because it might have cost slightly more to not ruin it. I should find a mod/hack to put the real music back.

Doom/Doom 2 - Still great.

Mid 90s games felt archaic and outdated even 10 years later, but late 90s games still hold up as things you can recommend to people who only got into videogames over two decades later.

A lot of late 1980s and early 1990s games hold up about as well as late 1990s ones. It's more like there's a whole bunch of games from about 1995 to 2005 that were utterly forgettable for various reasons (even more so than earlier or later periods).

 

[James Gasik]

I'm sort of a retro gamer keeping 16bitganes from the 90s and adding to the collection over the years.

However there's a handful of games I'm still actively playing now and it's because they were arguably the apex of their genres and nothing better has replaced them. By actively play I mean probably play them semi regularly.

Those games are.

Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. Arguably the best Civilization type game ever and a great 4X game. There's been no direct sequel and the spiritual successors don't hold up.

Civilization 3. My personal favorite of the series. I didn't really get into Civilization IV and V+ have changed to much. Not played to often but probably break it out for stints at least once a year.

Star Wars Empire At War. Not to many SW RTS games were made and this was the best one. Still actively supported by the modding community. Thrawns Revenge mod is buckets of fun for me.

Honorable Mentions.

Knights of the Old Republic. Gets broken out for occasional playthroughs. Recently done because my wife bought it on the switch so we played it together.

Sid Meiers Pirates. Similar to KoToR. Another unique game doing its own thing.



Anyway what games (if any) do you semi regularly play that are old. Remakes do not count eg Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Halo Master Chief Edition.

Master of Orion 2. Still the best 4X game ever made, IMO.

 

[Deset Gled]

Super Mario Bros - the original SNES version.

Could you be a little more specific, please?

( )

 

[Zardnaar]

Master of Orion 2. Still the best 4X game ever made, IMO.

Haven't played that one

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah this is a truly shocking one to me.

SMAC remains unbeaten essentially for two reasons:

1) Gameplay - It simply plays better and is designed better than almost all CIV-type games. It has a higher learning curve than most CIV games, but once you get past that, you find that, not only are there a bunch of genuinely very diverse factions, who have stuff about that matters deep into the game, rather than just at the start or specific periods of the game, but a much wider variety of strategies, and more nuanced strategies work than in other CIV-type games.

2) Setting - SMAC was relatively original, certainly inspired by a lot of writers, but with a real grasp on sci-fi, and an eye for less trope-y, less obvious, more thoughtful, and more philosophical SF. There's bits of Kim Stanley Robinson, of Frank Herbert, of Stanislaw Lem, of Vernor Vinge, of Greg Bear and all sorts of others. And rather than being sort of cheaply centrist (as the mainline CIV games increasingly became), it allows for any kind of different or bizarre society to potentially flourish, from the hellish to the utopian to the simply strange. The whole thing is extremely imaginative, and strong and consistent visual design (which could be initially off-putting, but knew how it wanted to look) really helped.

A number of games have attempted it, and they've all failed miserably - probably the absolute worst being Firaxis own CIV: Beyond Earth, which was very much marketed by by Firaxis as a "spiritual successor" to SMAC, but had a number of key flaws, primary among them being:

A) Neither of the lead designers had played SMAC significantly (one hadn't played it at all). This was beyond astonishing, but came out in a couple of interviews. I believe much later, after the game wasn't very successful, they tried to retcon this and say actually they had, but given that they'd rather proudly denied it earlier, and even said it "wasn't necessary" to play it (i.e. implying they had zero to learn from it), that just seemed weird.

B) Said lead designers clearly had poor imaginations, and when they listed their inspirations, it was basically "Super-mainstream sci-fi movies from the 1980s and 1990s" (and most it not space or planetary SF, rather stuff like Terminator!) and a few more mainstream and less imaginative/visionary SF novels, but IIRC, not a single one of them from after 1980, so excluding people like KSR, Vinge, Bear, and so on.

C) Gameplay-wise, instead of being an original game with truly unique mechanics, it was just CIV mechanics transported to another planet, essentially.

Other older games I sometimes still play:

Streets of Rage 2 - I've actually stopped with this, because SoR4 is a "true" SoR game and basically has everything I liked about SoR2 but better (you can even play Shiva, as we always dreamed of back in the 1990s).

Dragon's Dogma - 2012 so I think 11+ years counts as it hasn't been updated, unlike say Skyrim or Mass Effect. A truly amazing game no-one has really equalled in a variety of ways.

Super Mario Bros - the original SNES version.

F-Zero - Original SNES again. Nothing quite like it.

WipEout - The first one and 2097 only - the later ones maybe technically have better gameplay, but none of them have remotely as good and consistent visual design, nor as banger soundtracks (indeed some of the later soundtracks contain some actual sound-crimes). Together with F-Zero it represents an essentially dead genre (modern attempts have been fairly pathetic).

Crazy Taxi/Crazy Taxi 2 - Amazing. Pity they ruined the music because it might have cost slightly more to not ruin it. I should find a mod/hack to put the real music back.

Doom/Doom 2 - Still great.



A lot of late 1980s and early 1990s games hold up about as well as late 1990s ones. It's more like there's a whole bunch of games from about 1995 to 2005 that were utterly forgettable for various reasons (even more so than earlier or later periods).

Currently playing as Morganires. Favourites are probably the Gaias or that mindworm prophet.

Gaians probably netter but early game worm rush.

Should probably grab SoR4.

 

[James Gasik]

Haven't played that one

I mean, it's not perfect; there's ways to break the game's balance in half even with the balance patch, and diplomacy is borked, but I've yet to play a 4X game that does what it does as well. Warlock is ok, Warlock 2 would have been darned close if not for the incredibly buggy state it was released in.

It wasn't nearly as much fun for me, but Ascendancy was decent as well.

Oh that reminds me of another old game I played a lot of recently: the Wizardry series! Most of those games were super hard, but I kept playing them anyways, lol. I guess it was the original Dark Souls.