Feeling like an old fart gamer

[RabidWeezle]

Alright, so I started on an atari 2600 when everyone else had nintendo entertainment systems, I always liked classic games. Now I'm wondering when my 2 year old turns 13 and I'm still playing super nintendo games, is he gonna be like... WTF is a snes? I want the new Xbox 720 or Playstation 4 with triad core atomic fusion cores and 64 terrabytes of ram (so it can handle the next generation of extremely sloppy code and memory leaks, I mean games). Where was I going with this, oh yeah, nevermind...

[JNABK]

Now I'm wondering when my 2 year old turns 13 and I'm still playing super nintendo games, is he gonna be like... WTF is a snes?

Probably more like, "WTF is a hand controller?" or "You mean you used to play games by pressing a bunch of buttons........ and a TV?" "I want the new Virtual Dome 5.0 , with the gloves, helmet and built-in Wifi".

[walidahmadi]

yeah like lolz,

probably like "wtf you guys kept playing games while awake"

[Dastan]

WTF, a game used to be 2MB? Not even a picture ain't that small...

[RabidWeezle]

I think it is possible to stick every gameboy game ever made on 1 cd... I stuck 1 on my memory card and it was 512k uncompressed... My world of warcraft install was like 8 gb (and one big waste of space lol), and that was before the liche king or whatever. My friend in new york said he installed a game that used up like 25 gigs!?! WTF?! I would like to see why in the hell a game would be 25 gigs when a game as vast as Oblivion doesn't take half that. It must have like 90 hours of fmv in HD or somethin lol.

[ReddHeretic]

I'm twenty-six now, having gotten my start on ColecoVision and the NES soon afterwards. A sense of age had never really creeped up on me until I viewed the recent Zero Punctuation skewering of Tomb Raider: Underworld. When Yahtzee pointed out that there have been "NINE of these ****ing games already", I had to pause the video for a moment & reflect.

My nephew does me proud, fortunately. At nine years old, he has a very well-developed interest in retro games and old consoles. He has full sets of NES and Sega Genesis favorites which he knows from front to back. I expose him to newer offerings as well, but no matter how much he enjoys current games and games one generation back, he will often sit down for some Mega Man even though it makes him angry (of course).

He'll criticize the level design in some old games, or their lives/continues systems, the HUD, unreasonably overpowered bosses, impossible-to-reach power-ups, and sometimes he'll go out of his way to tell me "No, I messed up that part. The game is still okay." He also frequently complains about the camera in modern 3D games, which makes me laugh.

It might seem that I have a budding game designer on my hands?

[yoshi314]

being raised on old gaming systems makes you appreciate the programmers efforts done at that times. incredibly little ram, low processing power and they still made an amazing game.

after a while you could tell, that some of them used lots of crazy hacking to get around hardware limitations of a particular gaming system.

that is what appeals to me the most when i take a game - if it appears to do the impossible on that particular gaming system (be it 8bit atari/c64, snes, psx, ps2, gameboy, whatever) - i already like it. it's a sign that there was a lot of effort put into the game. that's what i like the most about such games.

this is rarely done nowadays. most games are developed basing on existing solutions. it's hard to find a game that you look at and say "how did they do that?"

from that point of view more interesting games to me appear at the end of life cycle of a particular console system. but the older the system, the more amazing it seems.

when you start your gaming experience with older gaming systems, graphics are not a top-priority to you. instead, you look for something called "good gameplay mechanics", and a well-implemented idea backing the game, other things like that. the overall design comes first.

btw if you are a retro gamer - you might be interested in this : http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53

[RabidWeezle]

btw if you are a retro gamer - you might be interested in this : http://www.pagetable.com/?p=53

Omg I thought the C64 was at least like 4 mhz or so, here it says it was less that 1 o_O 0.985 mhz! Haha, the system with the best audio system known to man had a cpu with a speed lower than most calculators. Rock on!

[yoshi314]

i meant the video link at the beginning of the post.

it's so much more informative (especially "cheating" around sprite number limitation was incredible)

[nyquil]

It seems like nothing can measure up to the classic games. I still play Super Cobra, Galaxian and Centipede weekly on my Atari 5200. The Trak-Ball controller I use is bigger and heavier than my laptop. The next door neighbors daughter took a look at it and thought the controller was a gaming console.