Rant on the current state of the gaming industry and a thank you to RetroPie team
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Hello all,
Thank you for listening to this rant that has been bubbling up in me the last couple days. I really want to hear if you share my same thoughts or think I'm crazy. Just as a background, my video game days began in the late 80's and never really ended. I love them as an art form and I think that they can do so much more than a book or a movie.
Lately, I've been thinking that as a consumer base we've lost the medium. Games are still fun and there is still innovation in them, but we no longer have the same control over them we once had. In short, we no longer buy them, we rent them and it friggin sucks.
I turned on my gaming computer for the first time in 3 months and booted up a single player game on steam (portal 2). It wouldn't run in offline mode because it had been more than 2 months since it had pinged steam's server. It suddenly hit me, I don't own any of my modern titles. I can take an old game I have on disk and copy it. I can take it to my next computer. I can run it on multiple machines at the same time in my house. I can't remember a title I've bought recently (minus GOG) that I have any assurance will be there in 5 or 10 years when I want to go back and re-live it. That doesn't require a day one patch or a crappy server to ping back to it. EA, Steam, Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, they have all made their games convenient and at the same time taken away the exact property that makes a game timeless. Our ability to blow the dust off
the disk and run it again when it no longer has support. To bring it to the next medium or trade it with a friend.Even when our old console systems break and we still own our games we are still @#$% out of luck. In this age of technology I can take a $35 dollar computer and run every game I played as a kid but when nintendo (which has an enormous playables library) decides to release a $60 dollar machine, they choose to make it a closed system. They choose to package the bare minimum of games. They choose not to have it read cartridges and they give it a 4 foot controller cord. They also choose on their stronger hardware which could play their entire library, to drip our old games 2 at a time, every month, slowly so that it is out of our control. Even if we want to re-purchase our games we are stuck. Sony's answer has been to create a netflix-like service that means we will be paying to play our favorite PS games until we die. Sony and Xbox charge us for the rights to play our friends over the internet we already pay for.
The point of this rant? How refreshing it has been the last couple of years to have retropie. I cannot describe how I feel to know that I have the library on playstation that I had as a kid and it is still mine to run or not run. That I can run my pi offline and ignore the internet, that I do not have to pay $5 dollars a month for an online connection, that I own the games that I love so well and one day will be able to share them with my children thanks to retropie. That with a $35 piece of hardware and a vision, they were able to give us back our ability to play the games that we own and paid for as children. So thank you retropie team and I apologize for the long rant but you are a shining light in this world. I'll get off my soapbox now...
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That is part of the reason I love old games. No servers, no patches, no fear that a day will come when we can't play these games.
Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade
Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud
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@lilbud unfortunately in the future of 2536 i wont be able to hook my nintendo wii up to my float screen without a laser 7 output. :) (what show is that from?)
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I have no idea what show that is from but now i must compulsively know! Reveal your precious secrets sir : )
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@tyreal90 it is from south park. In season 10 there was a multi episode show where eric cartman couldnt wait 3 weeks for the nintendo wii to come out so he freezes himself in the snow and butters was supposed to wake him up in 3 weeks but he ends up waking up over 500 years later and he is trying to get a wii in the future and when he finally did the tech couldnt hook it up to his float screen because it needed a laser 7 output.
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i have to hand over my nerd card to you now. i've seen that episode 3 times and still couldn't place the quote. Science damn me i should have remembered!
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@tyreal90 yes, science dammit! :)
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Hi,
you are absolutely right. I´m born in the mid-70s and my gaming history is: C64, Sega Master System and PC, with a short Xbox 360 time in between. I never liked Nintendo, i never liked that company.
I never was a fan of this next-gen consoles, especially those Xbox Live stuff.
Soon i realised that all the new games are very well looking, but the old games are more fun.
In my opinion the last real good and innovative games were released before the year 2000.
After that, most of the games were sequels oder new games with the same gaming idea....
Any examples?
Anno Series, Civ, EA-Titles (Fifa anyone?), GTA, thousands of first-person shooters in different settings, racing games, the 30+ Star Wars titles....
The industry uses the same ideas over and over again, instead of trying something new and innovative.I like playing the original stuff: Anno 1602, Need for Speed 1, Doom or Quake and if i want to play an really fast shooter,
i like to take the original Unreal Tournament, which runs on my Pi 3 via Exagear.
On my RPi there are about 150 DOS Games i own, and some old C64 Titles and my Sega games.Recently i thought about my favourite games of all time....
I´m playing some old Microprose stuff for over 25 (!) years now: Civ1, Railroad Tycoon. Pirates Gold and Silent Service 2.
All these games are visually outdated, but the game itself is stunning and it´s fun and easy to play.
My girlfriend said recently: Why are this old games so small in size (MB)?
Civ 1 was about 2,3 MB installed, and it is more fun, than most of the 2,3 GB stuff from these days.When it comes to my life, the gaming industry lost me as a customer about 15 years ago.
I don´t even own a pc where new games can be run, i use chromebooks for surfing..... -
@edmaul69 I remember that show. Given my age, I probably should not.
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I've heard that Anno is amazing! I never got into exagear but I hear good things. How much does the thing cost and how do you like its usability? Right now edmaul69 and I are trying to get win 95 to work but are having a bear of a time reproducing my success with a random win95 cd image I have that works.
When it comes to memory, I remember getting a 200 megabyte hard drive and thinking how large that was at the time. We have truly come a long way from there!
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@edmaul69 South park about 10 years ago. That show always cracks me up, though I wish they didn't start doing season long story arcs.
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@tyreal90 I agree 100%, though unfortunately this is today's reality. I miss the days where you didn't have to download a ton of updates before a play session. I find more often than not that when I have to download a bunch of updates to play a game I haven't played in a while, by the time it is done I don't even want to play anymore. I don't like the idea that a switch can be flipped on some server somewhere, and I can't play the game I dropped $80 on anymore. Nintendo killed the Wii version of Mario Kart before people were done with it, and I personally believe this was done so people would flock to the Wii U and buy Mario Kart 8, money lust if I've ever heard it. Trouble is the Wii U sucked. The system had great potential which was never realized until the release of Breath of the Wild. I bought Breath of the Wild digitally and when I discovered I loved the game (I initially thought I would hate it, but bought it because of the rave reviews), I bought it a second time in physical form just as a guarantee I could still play it if I had it physically should something ever happen to the digital copy I bought. Breath of the Wild is an amazing game, but not enough motivation for me to buy a Switch as I'm extremely soured on Nintendo's hardware department lately. I will likely never buy one. With digitally downloaded media, you are putting your trust in the content provider to remember your purchases and allow you to re-download indefinitely. If the authentication server is ever taken offline, no more game. If you lose your digital copy, or it gets corrupted, and its no-longer available online, no more game. Unfortunately, today's reality sucks and (at least for new content) for the most part we just have to live with it.
Oh and regarding that NES mini thing, RetroPie immediately renders it obsolete, expect for say using the exterior casing for a Pi project. I looked at the specs and if I remember correctly it has a quad-core ARM v7 or v8. In other words, not only could they have added more games, but you could emulate SNES games on the exact same hardware. Yeah they were stingy with the games, that's for sure.
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@drake999 said in Rant on the current state of the gaming industry and a thank you to RetroPie team:
Oh and regarding that NES mini thing, RetroPie immediately renders it obsolete, expect for say using the exterior casing for a Pi project. I looked at the specs and if I remember correctly it has a quad-core ARM v7 or v8. In other words, not only could they have added more games, but you could emulate SNES games on the exact same hardware. Yeah they were stingy with the games, that's for sure.
Hackers have already installed retroarch and found a way to launch other system games (sega, snes, TG16) to retroarch from the NES classics main menu. The only limitation now with the NES classic VS retropie is storage. Im pretty sure the NES classic could play psx, but not enough room to even hold one game. Heck, they even use Lr-Snes9x2005 because Lr-Snes9x2010 save states take up too much room. Not a problem on retropie with our 128GB USB sticks or sd cards.
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I bought a Wii U, and i hardly ever play it. Like once in a blue moon...
I play my retropie for at least 30 minutes a night.I would argue i blow the dust off the Wii U way more than i do my NES carts, haha!
Vector Artist, Designer and Maker of Stuff: Laser Cut Atari / Pixel Theme Bartop
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@Capeman Pretty much the only time I play my Wii U is for Breath of the Wild, and only because I don't have the money for a Switch. But until BOTW, it collected dust.
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We always seems to have crap computers and consoles when I was a kid (we had a TI-99/4A and an Atari XE, for example), but plenty of friends and family had good stuff (Atari 2600, NES, SMS), and eventually we did get a C64, and I bought a Genesis when I moved out. I played so many 8 bit and 16-bit games back in the day it was insane. Even on the junk consoles, I always owned at least a dozen games.
Years later, I decided to dip my toe into what gaming was becoming. I bought a PSX right after the PS2 came out for cheap. But I only bought 3 or 4 games for it. The games invariably tried to make use of all 8 buttons plus endless combinations of such that it required you to use the manual as a constant reference for at least the first week of game-play. And they just had to use all 650 MB of the disc too, with endless cutscenes, animations, exposition (most books I read don't have plotting this unnecessarily dense), etc... In short, I never played anything much past a month. The PSX was a total waste of money for me.
My next purchase (years later) was a PS3. I bought it strictly as a blu-ray player at the time. I bought one or two games but again realized little had changed since the PSX (if anything, it was all much worse). But then I discovered that the Guitar Hero/Rock Band series, with its intuitive controller(s), was a real blast! And there was a nice retro selection in the online store. Unlike the PSX, the PS3 still sees regular service as a home theater device in my system. It's my best DVD player (love the scaling) and it's my fastest blu-ray player, and has an app for every online service as well (in the years before every TV and disc player was "smart", this was a big deal). But it's still not much of a game system compared to the 8 and 16 bit stuff, in terms of pure enjoyment, for me.
When I got Retropie up and running last spring, I had no idea that gaming would or could become a regular thing for me again. But the games from that era... so many are just such pure joy! Just pick up a controller, learn what the two or three buttons do, then get lost in fun for three hours or so. Isn't that how it should be?
So, what's the point of all of this? Well, it's a question. Do I love the 8 and 16 bit era games because they are arguably better designed, or is this strictly a case of thinking they're better because they were the games (or style of games) from my childhood? Is it a case of "they really don't make 'em like they used to" or just an old man grumbling "get off my lawn"? As the old man in the equation, I can't really tell.
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I think that the simplicity of games back in the 80's and 90's make them a better distilled essence than the games of today. They are easier to pick up and easier to put down and they do not take as much advantage of our "addictive pathways" as newer games do. Case and point - Doom - you survive each level and beat the game. Call of Duty - you survive the game but then work on a series of collectables that will keep you engaged for a long time. Final Fantasy - you survive the game and beat it once then done - Skyrim - you have collectable and never ending quests that continue for eternity because there are soo many.....
@lostless I didn't know about the hacking. That's funny! I have been so disappointed with Nintendo as of late. They could have been another "steam" on consoles offering a large library for any system that could play it and yet they decide to play the pre-reformed MR Scrooge from a Christmas Carol.
On the PCmasterrace forum on reddit, some people have been posting pictures of BOTW being played in 1080p and 4k off of a supposed emulator. I was curious as to whether you'd heard of this or whether you'd switch to using a PC for it if you could? I kinda want to pick up the game but I don't want to buy a @#$%ing system for one game.
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@tyreal90 AMD-A6-5200 apu, 12 gb of ram. Integrated graphics. it is a laptop
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