Why Do You Love Retro Gaming?

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