Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?

[cyperghost]

It was also a time you gave a bit of honor to every cartridge. I bought two consoles in my lifetime a GameBoy and a XBOX360

For the XBOX360 I bought two BRAND NEW Games: Syndicate (a third person shooter) and L.A. Noire. I finished both games in two weekends.... LAMEWARE!

Then later the XCOM series was released but it was the same "spinoff" as done with Syndicate - no interest, thank you! That was the point I took my XBOX360 in the rack - I think less than 100 hours playtime on this.

[mediamogul]

@caver01 said in Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?:

We both agreed that there is something to be said about the hardware constraints back in the day that may have helped produce better games.

I totally agree. I'd go so far as to add that it's the reason some home conversions were superior to their arcade counter-parts even in their day. 'Contra', 'Rygar', 'Bionic Commando' and even 'Punch Out!!' were all vastly improved with a little creative thinking to make up for the lack of visuals.

[Alturis]

Nostalgia.

I LOVE the fact that when I boot up Galaga it goes through the arcade initialization and ram/rom check sequence before going into the game. Knowing that I am playing the original game code and not a remake is what I love about all this.

Even if the emulation and controls may not be 100% the same, the fact that its the original code is awesome. (without having to have a warehouse full of original arcade units or an entertainment center in my living room with dozens of consoles)

[thelostsoul]

@alturis Yeah and its freaking cool that you must actually use (virtual) coins to get continue.

Besides all those nostalgia and personal feelings about emulation, I am still so amazed about the technical background that it let the pc hardware "thinks" it would be a different hardware. And this is done by reverse engineering. Everytime I play a game, it blows up my mind, more or less. I also saw in YouTube people can play Shenmue on Raspberry Pi, with some problems, but this is really impressive for this little device.

[Alturis]

@thelostsoul Oh yeah, and it also blows my mind that hundreds and hundreds of games are just sitting on a little memory chip the size of a dime.
And the tiny sizeof the Pi itself is just amazing as well.

[Clyde]

@thelostsoul I also like the little detail of virtual coins and that you can check how many you already "spent" for a game, e.g. for a complete playthrough.

And I'm also blown away by the engineering of both the originals as well as their reverse engineered emulation. My admiration for the people behind all this knows no bounds.

@Alturis The funny thing with today's storage mediums is that I dreamt of having my complete music collection in my pocket back in the days when it became forseeable. But now that I could do that, I don't. :) As the only variant of it, I have an waterproof in-ear mp3 player I listen to scientific podcasts and discussions with while exercising.

That said, the sci-fi nature of today's technology comes to my mind sometimes, and I'm bragging about the Pi's small size every time I tell "normal" people about this hobby of mine.

[ballboff]

@bobharris said in Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?:

@oldskool There are several reasons for me

• Pixel art: I prefer the 2D art over the hyper realistic games of today. Seeing the smooth animations of Street fighter III gets me more excited than any 3D Street fighter

• Childhood: Many games I play today are from my childhood..so part of the appeal is nostalgia.

• Challenge: Like you said, games used to be harder so there was a feeling of accomplishment when beating that boss or that level. (I am a big fan of From softwares Souls games for this reason.)

• Simplicity: Most games I can pick up and play and don't take 100+ hours to finish. I don't have that much time anymore.

• Pure fun: Retro games for me are exciting to play at every moment in the game. Modern games often have a lot of boring elements. There are always the exceptions like Hotline miami for example, but that's a modern oldschool game. :)

• Originality: A lot of games that are being developed today are based on the same principles as games of the 80s and 90s, but therefore lack the originality that the games did have back then.

What he said... My mates rave about the n64 version of mario kart being the best and for me, that incarnation of 3d didn't excite me. I just saw them as coloured blobs and don't even get me started on the cardboard boxes that used to walk around in goldeneye. After I had a PS1 for a while, I went and invested some money in pc gaming. At that time you could pick up a pretty decent rig for around 300 quid, as all you needed was a 30 quid 3d card, not a 1000 quid one. personally I thought 2d graphics looked better. I look at star fox on the snes now and it hurts my eyes, and I even remember thinking that at the time. I also have fond memories of going to the arcades and playing all the latest games and also the classics, but not just arcades everywhere you went would have an arcade machine somewhere. I remember playing phoenix at my local cafe.

I guess nowadays you can't just have a game that only has 1 screen, such as pacman. It's no longer enough to get a high score on a game, you have to play the whole game and all the DLC, and then fanny about collecting all the pointless stuff. The games take that long to complete, and I can appreciate all the level of detail that goes into them. Assassins creed and fallout/elder scrolls blow my mind in terms of how much detail is in them, but the amount of leg work you have to put in (i'm a father of 2 now, I can't justify losing 6 months of my life on fallout new vegas?!)

[mediamogul]

@ballboff said in Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?:

I guess nowadays you can't just have a game that only has 1 screen, such as pacman. It's no longer enough to get a high score on a game

Actually, there's a pretty big resurgence of interest in this type of game play going on at the moment. It's just not happening on dedicated hardware, or personal computers. However, many of the current phone/tablet games parallel the arcade single screen, point-driven paradigm and have proven to be extremely popular with the modern masses, especially the younger crowd. Some are even cross-pollinating older genres in ways that were never thought of back in the day. Still, they'll never possess the group social component that made going to a local arcade so much fun. I don't care what anyone says, a group of people sitting on a couch playing with their phones isn't a great social experience. I mean, you can't even bowl or roller skate.

[Eldrethor]

@ballboff That's the thing with 3D graphics; they look gorgeous for their time, but they generally age poorly when compared to their 2D predecessors. I remember when Final Fantasy VII blew me away, but today it looks awful compared to Final Fantasy VI. But on the other hand, the art style used in Wind Waker on the GC allowed its graphics to age gracefully.

And gaming has evolved in a way that I don't particularly like. Back in the day, arcades were important because consoles were generally inferior to anything that the arcades had to offer, and it was the best way to build a solid community. High scores and competitions became personal, and friendships and rivalries were formed. Strategies, cheat codes, and rumors were shared over pop and pizza.

Today, any arcade game can have a perfect port on a console, and anything on a console can offer so much more content than its arcade counterpart, but it comes with a lot of trade-offs. Online multiplayer doesn't feel as personal, you can Google strategies instead of discussing them with your fellow players. Achievements don't feel nearly as significant as having your initials on the scoreboards, and waiting for someone to overthrow you. We can do so much more now, but it broke the very thing that made the arcades so special: that sense of community.

[Lupin]

Graphics not make the game. Older games need skill not brute force and LARGE wallets.
Also being original in design is so much harder today, without someone pointing out a retro game similar :)

[thelostsoul]

German article: https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/retro-gaming-fast-die-haelfte-aller-europaeischen-spieler-zockt-gerne-aeltere-titel,3324297.html

This is a German study from this year. It says half (41%) of all European Gamer are playing older games. Thy asked through online formulars, phone and directly in four countries. Main reason are nostalgy and curiosity. Only 22% are thinking the old games are better. 38% are thinking that the games aren't good as they was back in those days.

They also asked specially thos who buy retro games. From these, 66% are playing games from their youth. 67% are playing games which they missed. 49% are playing for nostalgy.

[PetroRie]

I enjoy older games because they're much better compared to modern games. I recently bought a couple PS4 games and I really didn't play them that much. I spend more time enjoying older games, the only good thing about the PS4 is that I can use it's controller on the Pi.

An another thing I like a lot is finding great retro games. For an example I have a couple romsets and often I just load up a random game, you'll be surprised how many good games there actually are.

For some reason retro games really grab my attention when playing them, I have ADHD and usually I have a short attention span so I get bored easily. But with retro games I can play the same game for many hours without getting distracted (or make some lame excuse to do something else lol).

I'm a SNES fan and I think anyone would agree with me if I said that the Donkey Kong Country series have aged pretty well. The games still look great and the music is timeless. IMHO one of the BEST games on the SNES. I noticed that older games have a lot of replay value, nowadays with games its meeeeh. It's just graphics, DLC and multiplayer.

[Clyde]

@petrorie said in Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?:

often I just load up a random game, you'll be surprised how many good games there actually are.

Yeah, I often do that, too. :)

[space cadet]

Retro gaming rocks!

[thelostsoul]

Here is a video about scanlines and old crt monitors for retro gamers. Its really interesting to watch:

And if you get bored and want read why accuracy in emulation matters, here is something to read for you. I feel, I had to post these stuff here. We have weekend and I am at home, thanks emulation and such stuff. :D
Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator
Another EDIT: I remember to have read this maybe 6 years before. That time, I didn't understand every aspect. Now, I understand every sentence. :-)

[PetroRie]

@thelostsoul Last week I went to a local gameshop. The guy still sells old games and he had a SNES's, Sega Genesis, PSX and a N64 hooked up on a couple old TV's and you could see a couple games. One thing that occurred to me was that it looks kinda "weird". I don't know what it is but I'm really used to emulation but when I stared at the TV's I did notice the scanlines but for some reason my eyes didn't like it. I used scan line shaders on the Pi but it is really different compared to what I experienced when I stared at the old TV's. Maybe it's because I'm not used to it since we don't get to see these kind of things?

[BobHarris]

@petrorie I think emulated scanlines look more like the Sony bvm/ pvm crt tv's (once very expensive broadcasting tv's, now considered the holy grail in crt retro gaming). These tv's had very well defined scanlines. Regular crt tv's were nothing like it.

[thelostsoul]

@petrorie It is probably because the tech have some other disadvantages than scanlines only, making the image worse, which you may dislike. The emulation together with LCD displays have "perfect" image, clear from any pincushion etc and color corruption duo to ntsc standard and cables (consumer or rgb?). Plus the consumer tvs have worse scanlines than the good scanlines we used to emulate. On NES emulator, I use blargg's NTSC filter to add additional artifacts, even if I didn't have a NTSC console and grown up with superior PAL system (at least superior in image quality). I like it the bad way. ;-)

Btw, funny enough I posted several hours ago something related to your statement. I show there, why I use shaders on my crt monitor. Thats right, I got crt monitor and still use crt shader on it. :D Its just because I can't run them in native resolution, sadly. Here if you want see the comparison (jumps right to my posting): https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4046/crt-pi-shader-users-reduce-scaling-artifacts-with-these-configs-in-lr-mame2003-lr-fbalpha-lr-nestopia-and-more-to-come/280