Features - QOTW: Are computer games better now than they were 20 years ago?

[benegerton1985]

Quite frankly, No. I could go through some of my favourite games of all time and compare them to modern equivalents and anybody who played the older games would choose them over modern day versions. For example, football games these days are nothing compared to SWOS 96/97 and football management games will never be better than Championship Manager 01/02 (although FM2013 classic mode comes close).

Another example is the 'new' Simcity. The original and Sim City 2000/3000 were the best because they were simple and had no hassle. Zone your areas, make sure they had the required utilities,watch them grow and if you have an evil streak unleash some disasters! nice simple fun. Simcity 4 introduced regions which just annoyed me (I would have rather had the whole region as one giant map and an option to choose a map size when starting the game?) and the new one has the online element and a stupidly small map which is just not Simcity in my opinion. Simcity Societies...no comment!

Give me updated versions of the following and by that I mean graphics/known bugs/new storylines but no changes to the gameplay and I would be happy: Frontier Elite 2, Red Alert, Cannon Fodder, SWOS, Simcity 2000, Civilization 2, Half Life (Have tried Black Mesa but it just does not feel right), Total Annihilation, Theme Hospital, Theme Park, Transport Tycoon, Wing Commander, Speedball 2, Syndicate, Desert Strike, Flashback, Populous, Another World, Wipeout 2097... Can't think of anymore off the top of my head!

[benegerton1985]

Nostalgia gets in the way for too many middle agers. There is no competition. Modern games are superior in every single way. They couldn't do any more to the games.

This statement perfectly describes what is what's wrong with people these days.

It depends as what you class as superior, Simcity (1989) v Simcity (2013), newer version has better graphics but I would have a million times more fun playing the original. Give me fun over pretty graphics anyday.

[abaxas]

Nostalgia does play a part for people who are replaying games. But this works both ways, some games stand the test of time, while others should disappear into obscurity. A good example of this is Transport Tycoon (deluxe) which is as fresh as it was in 94/95 and can still suck you in for hours/days/weeks! Another one is heroes of might and magic 2, newer versions looks better and have a small feature set upgrade, but the game is infact the same. Warcraft II doesnt stack up as well and carmageddon only has nostalgia left.

I often think of older games like I do old films. Does it really matter if they didnt have cgi in the 50s and used stop motion or puppets for special effects? My imagination can fill in the blanks and I enjoy it just as much as I would a current blockbuster.

If I think back to the early 90's when 3d started penetrating the arcades, people loved the tech, but still wanted to play bubble bobble. Today is no different.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nostalgia does play a part for people who are replaying games. But this works both ways, some games stand the test of time, while others should disappear into obscurity. A good example of this is Transport Tycoon (deluxe) which is as fresh as it was in 94/95 and can still suck you in for hours/days/weeks! Another one is heroes of might and magic 2, newer versions looks better and have a small feature set upgrade, but the game is infact the same. Warcraft II doesnt stack up as well and carmageddon only has nostalgia left.

I often think of older games like I do old films. Does it really matter if they didnt have cgi in the 50s and used stop motion or puppets for special effects? My imagination can fill in the blanks and I enjoy it just as much as I would a current blockbuster.

If I think back to the early 90's when 3d started penetrating the arcades, people loved the tech, but still wanted to play bubble bobble. Today is no different.

Its not even that. Its the BLANKET attitude of how modern games are ALWAYS worse than old ones.

Its nothing but people using rose tinted glasses and it is rather insulting to people involved in making modern games,indicating they have NO talent. That means EVERY MODERN title from a one person Indie title to a massive effort involving 100s of people.

It smacks of a lack of objectivity and almost religious like hatred of modern gaming.

Moreover,the statements seem to come from people having decent rigs,which means it just a load of hot air. They do obviously play and enjoy modern games,otherwise they would not be having modern rigs,but then go onto state how they hate them.

But OH! NO! They just happen to have a fast modern rig with expensive graphics cards,to not play the games they HATE! Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!!

It smacks of hypocracy TBH,and double standards.

Edit!!

Some of the people making blanket statements should watch this film:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

Then they would realise the passion and effort behind some of the Indie Titles.

[Percy1983]

I do remember getting my 360 at release and playing call of duty 2, the graphics where amazing compared to the PS2/xbox I had been playing, but then I came to a part where there was so much going on that I knew we had took a leap not just in graphics.

Are games getting better, I would say so, does this mean we should forget where it came from? certainly not.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Are games getting better, I would say so, does this mean we should forget where it came from? certainly not.

Nobody is forgetting anything. Its more the flipping blanket statements about modern games,by people with very decent gaming computers.

Its like someone saying there is no decent films made in the last 10 years and ALL films made 30 years ago are better.

That means ALL films.

If old games were instantly better,then how come this happened:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_A..._crash_of_1983

I mentioned this before in the thread.

There were crap games 30 years ago. There were crap games 20 years ago. There were crap games 10 years ago. There are crap games today.

Its one criticising certain practices in the modern gaming industry,but its another thing indicating that all modern games are crap and anyone involved in the gaming industry by association is talentless.

[Jay]

I felt games lost something after the SNES . Mega Drive era. I'm not sure what is was, maybe it was more about me growing up but its never managed to capture those days again.

[Ferral]

I have been scarred by Bubble Bobble for life!!!!

My mother bought it for the C64 on day of release, for a year later she played it non stop and me or my brother had to play it with her, lost count how many times we beaten it, to this day someone mentions it and the tune instantly pops in my head. I still have that copy of the game sitting here.

There was really early 3D stuff, you had the Vector graphics on Star Wars in the Arcades, there was also Elite on the home computers, one of the greatest games ever created, once again Vector graphics. Then you had games like Rescue on Fractalus which used Fractals to create the landscape, thing is it run rather slow. You can get WinVice with SuperCPU support and a modified version of Fractalus & Test Drive is available, these games run smooth as silk and fast using the modified emulator and are excellent games.

Towards the end of the 80's you did get a proper bit of immersive 3D on the C64, it was the Freescape series of games, Driller was the very first followed by Dark Side, Total Eclipse and Castle Master. They did run REALLY slow though understandably given the technology (Once again try them with Vice SCPU). The Amiga managed much better with these games and we started to see more 3D stuff coming in the shape of things like Starglider 2 which had an external view of your ship and the 3D was smooth, there was also a game called Interphase where you had to manipulate 3D objects which where things like cameras, keys to unlock doors etc.....it was really good for the time.

Don't get me wrong, I do love the new games, I have lost hours to Borderlands 2 (104 and counting), Farcry 3, Dishonored etc. Thing is though I do love the old games also, running on proper hardware not through the emulator where possible.

I have fired up a few games on my C64 I used to love but now playing them again it has been a case of Meh, not as good as I remember. On the flip side there are games I have played that have stood the test of time, The System 3 and Thalamus games for example are still great. I have found most of the poor games were the Arcade conversions, things like Outrun, MagMax, Strider, Street Fighter Euro Version are absolutely terrible on the C64 (Strider missed all the bosses on the 64, mind you the 16 bit versions were decent). Bionic Commando, Ghosts n Goblins and its sequel Ghouls were decent though.

[Scribe]

No. Quite simply.

I haven't enjoyed a final fantasy as much since 9 on the PSX, 10 was ok but not worth the trade-off. There hasn't been a half decent RPG since. I'm not a big fan of Fable or Elder Scrolls series, I find them incredibly boring, slow-paced and unimaginative. I still prefer older strategies (AoE2, older C&C), though I find with my dumbing down from playing modern games I suck at them so much more. I prefer good old counter-strike and day-of-defeat over Call of Duty, the gameplay is still better and there's no stupid levelling system that forces a handicap on a skill-based fps which is utterly ridiculous; the only thing I really enjoyed was the co-op black ops, which were discarded as soon as they were introduced. Half-life 2 was a good balance of FPS and story.

More recently, I was really impressed by Crysis 2, loved the story driven scenario that kept the game focused, however in 3 this was diluted back down and you didn't get the best of either an open world or a focused story.

The only other game I've played in the past few years that really impressed me was Metal Gear Solid 4
(and 5 is looking to be rather impressive!).

And YES, games are too easy to be fun or too unbalanced in difficult mode to be challenging as much as good luck and repetitive gameplay.

[EasterEEL]

Star Raiders, Eastern Front 1941 (Atari 400), Dune II (Amiga), Warcraft II, Half Life, Asheron's Call PC) gave hours of entertainment. Graphically they don't stand up to newer games bu the game play was excellent.

Dungeon Siege 1 & II and Oblivion, Skyrim are great games.

[TooNice]

Give me fun over pretty graphics anyday.

Fun and graphics are not mutually exclusive.

And dated graphics does not guarantee fun.

[aidanjt]

Fun and graphics are not mutually exclusive.

And dated graphics does not guarantee fun.

True, but there is a correlation there.

[DavidM]

[rus off to google if there really was a trailer in lunar jetman...!]

There wasn't

[Gitch28]

I've just about given up on gaming now and will have completely I reckon by the time I get married in August. Games just aren't what they used to be, it's hard to get any real enjoyment out of them anymore so have become little more than a time waster.

Just Cause 2. Name a game that provides more fun than that.

[kalniel]

True, but there is a correlation there.

In what sense? I can't find any correlation between graphics and fun, either positive or negative. There are bad games with bad graphics and good graphics, and vice versa.

Now age of game is different - but that's simply because when you look back you are more likely to remember the good games and forget the masses of bad games.

So I think it's impossible to generalise to 'games' as the question asks. Are there individual games that are better now than there were 20 years ago? That's a more easily answerable question.

[Willzzz]

I think one of the big things that has made games different is the level of precision. That actually people quite enjoyed the constraints in older games that meant games were essentially divided up into grids. You knew that if you stood on *that* particular square that you safe, it made the game feel predictable, reliable. Nowadays the difference can be 1 pixel out of several million on a screen, you can easily feel that 'it isn't fair' when you are defeated for the sake of a pixel or two, it feels like luck rather than skill.