You would color in the squares on graph paper. And then after you coloured those individual squares, you would convert them in to numbers, and then you would key in the numbers in hexadecimal using a ROM writer
I used to do this on the BBC Model B, you could re-program character codes to be any shape and would use that to build up graphics. It was really exciting when the thing you'd drawn on paper finally appeared on screen. Or if you'd made a mistake with the hex, there would be pixels or (often) horizontal lines in the wrong place on a row.
Probably it's related with age - we like what we were used to - but contemporary (3D) games feel terribly boring comparing with the ones when I was a kid. My will to play them is literally zero.
I'd say its a little more involved than simply age. With a few exceptions I find most 90's console games boring or frustrating to play but i'm more likely to find a pc game from that era enjoyable to play. However when it comes to more modern games, I largely prefer portable console titles.
I'm generally like that, but occasionally a game comes along that grips my interest. Thus why I'm likely the oldest expert-level Guitar Hero player that is also active in the community, at the age of 38.
Not OP but I wanted to chip in. I love the "pick up and play" aspect of older games and consoles. I don't have much time to game anymore so I just don't have time to sit in front of Steam waiting for GBs of updates before I can even start playing (there are a few franchises I'll make the effort for - the new DOOM, Wolfenstein and Deus Ex games to name a few).
The console I'm getting the most use out of at the minute is actually my old Dreamcast - I can hit the power button and be tearing around in Crazy Taxi in less than 2 minutes. Always good for a laugh when I have a spare 15-20 minutes to kill.
The Switch is pretty good for this, since there's a ton of games you can take on in short play sessions and the console can pause one active game at a time indefinitely.
I find myself enjoying 80s/90s games that I'd never played before over the typical major release these days. Some new major releases really are excellent, but the quantity is far lower than it was 20-30 years ago, likely mostly due to massive budgets and unmanageable team sizes.
Heh, the "instant on" aspect of old hardware is a big part of the draw for me. Although I agree that there are some excellent modern "old style" games - Cuphead, Undertale, Two Point Hospital, and the recent Wonder Boy remake all spring to mind.
Can you talk a little more about what you find enjoyable about these types of games versus new style games? Is it that they have more depth in their mechanics? Is it their presentation? Something else entirely? I know this might be a rather hard question to answer.
Here's my take. Back in 80s there was no established concept what video game was supposed to play like, so developers experimented much more than today. Some of those experiments didn't belong to any established genre (Seven Cities of Gold, Civilization, Harvest Moon) but managed to get huge following.
Modern remakes aim to bring back same spirit and open-endness of those games, but with UX improvements, more streamlined gameplay, multiplayer and other nice features we came to expect from games.
Another improvement over classics is more open development process with fascinating dev logs, creators requesting feedback and with suggested changes making it into future version.
It sounds more like a case for indie games rather than for old-style games. That is, games that aren't afraid to try new, different, unconventional things.
> Is it that they have more depth in their mechanics?
I think it might be related with it. I like that old games are more a 'game' and not some kind of virtual reality. E.g. Chess is an abstraction of a battle at most, not a copy of it and Physics don't need to be always realistic just because we have more capable hardware.
For me, there are a few different kinds of games that I enjoy for different reasons:
There’s the pick-up-and-play games that don’t try to be anything other than a fun activity. Usually they’re somewhat abstract and have simple gameplay with a lot of replayability. The Tetrises of the world. This sounds largely like what you’re referring to.
Then there’s the games that try to challenge you to hone your skills. This could be multiplayer games that could be seen as digital sports in some ways or it could be single player games that are all about challenging you to master the game (eg Dark Souls if you ignore the pvp like I mostly do). Racing games could also fall into this category.
Then there’s the sandbox style games. They give you a few gameplay systems to play with and let you loose in a large play pen. This are the typical open world games or otherwise open ended games.
Finally, there’s interactive storytelling. Some are more virtaul reality simulation than others and some have deep gameplay while others have very shallow gameplay. These games are more about the storytelling though, so it doesn’t always matter. In recent years, I personally think that (some) games have actually surpassed movies in storytelling ability.
Of course, many games are some combination of these and some pull it off better than others.
You can have deep or shallow versions of all of these too.
I guess what I’m wondering is: do you have any interest in the other three types of games I mentioned and if not, how come? (I know, again, its not an easy question to answer)
In general I like games that are a good/interesting/fun abstraction of reality. This normally implies interesting mechanics and sugestive graphics. I normally prefer simulations, rpg, strategy and rogues. But never too realistic, unrelevant details should be wiped away, as an extreme example, what's the point of playing an ultra realistic simulator of a restaurant? It would be better to get a job doing that and earn some money.
Note also that I don't consider myself a gamer, I only play occasionally.
Yes, modern indie games are the only modern games I play.
Modern games need to appeal to an increasingly large number of people as their scope and budget increases, their breadth has to increase to appeal to larger numbers of people in order to be more accessible. Smaller games can more easily afford to be less accessible to a wider audience.
Checkers for example is very easy for anyone to play, however Chess is more difficult to understand and master but there's a much greater depth of gameplay.
Some really great games can do both. Tetris for example is very easy for most anyone to pick up and play, but there's a depth of mechanics that can be explored (t spins, Combos, reading the incoming blocks, hard drops).
http://www.tetrisconcept.com/p/start.html
This sort of depth is frustrating when to new players, especially in multiplayer games where it is used against you. It's also wasted development time if few players will ever get to take advantage of it.
Older games tend to be more like an instrument in terms of requiring development of new skills which develop into mastery, while new games are often closer to experiences that do not have the same level of highs or frustrations.
I don’t agree that all old games did this though, some absolutely did, but there were a lot of mediocre games too that didn’t try to push any boundaries and just copied something else that was successful. You see that a lot now with modern AAA games (certainly from many of the big publishers), but not all are like this.
A lot of indie games, modern style or old style, have a lot of this because they need to take risks and try unconventional things in order to differentiate. But even some mainstream games try interesting things sometimes. I personally don’t really play multiplayer games, so won’t comment on that.
> It’s also wasted development time if few players will ever get to take advantage of it.
Maybe. That’s the easy answer, but if you have an otherwise great game, then adding things not everyone will experience helps build a loyal following. For example, the Dark Souls series has entire areas with bosses, which are hidden in often really obscure ways (such that most people would never find them without looking up guides). This is a big draw for some people as it helps with world building, a sense of discovery and longevity. Or how The Witcher 3 has countless hand-crafted and well written side quests (often with stories just as good as the main story, just shorter) — so many that its pretty much guaranteed that very few people will experience them all. The same goes for something like Red Dead Redemption 2. Obviously many developers shy away from doing this, since its seen as wasting money, but not all.
I play a lot of indie games, for the reasons that are discussed here, but there are mainstream games which I personally felt meet the criteria just as well. I’ll mention a few of them here:
The Dark Souls series — they gambled on making challenging games with deep but hidden lore and lots of secrets to discover. Its one of the few game series’ where I really feel a sense of accomplishment both with the combat and with simply exploring the world or discovering snippets of lore.
Bloodborne — same as above.
The Witcher 3 — (the entire series really, but the third one is the biggest, most polished and most mainstream one) the writing, quest design and world are all excellent. I spent months exploring the world and it was a lot of fun. The combat was also quite interesting when you play on hard and are forced to make use of all the different mechanics.
Red Dead Redemption 2 — similar to The Witcher 3, just great all round design and attention to detail, but it has a lot more interaction with your gang members that I found really nice (eg just having a mundane conversation with your buddy)
Detroit: Become Human — they gambled on heavily branching storylines.
Horizon: Zero Dawn — great and interesting world, interesting story, interesting combat mechanics (at least if you play on hard so that you can’t just spam shoot)
The Last Guardian — the entire game was a gamble, based around your interactions with the AI-controlled creature. Maybe a bit less “mainstream”, but still a recent(ish) AAA game that tried something new and in my personal opinion, succeeded.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance — they gambled hard on a realistic world (and everything that includes, such as a lot of dificult mechanics that alienated a ton of people) but in doing this they created an incredibly immersive game.
Basically, my point is that there are mainstream AAA games that really push the boundaries and take risks with new things. Some more than others, sure, but they’re out there. Just steer clear of the big studios like EA, Activision and Ubisoft. Beyond that, there are a lot of amazingly creative and innovative indie games out there.
Old-school games (and they can be recent: Factorio is an "old-school" game despite being made somewhat recently) are about depth of gameplay as opposed to breadth of gameplay.
A game made by a huge team is certainly an accomplishment. Take Final Fantasy X, XIII, or XV for instance. There's a huge world to "explore" (linear, but its still a huge world) with many characters, well voiced lines and a huge variety of enemies to face. But its very "wide". There's so much to do, but all of it feels shallow.
Now compare it to recent "retro" games like Factorio, or Minecraft... or the truly early games like Missile Command, Centipede, Tetris.
These games have an incredibly small core. In the case of the earliest arcade games, you never stop doing the same loop (Ex: Tetris: its 7-types of falling blocks and nothing more).
Its harder to make these kinds of "deep but simple" games today. See the "Threes and 2048" controversy for example. 2048 became the more popular version, even if the primary game loop was invented by the Threes developer.
Breadth however, can only be replicated by AAA-studios. And don't get me wrong: breadth of gameplay is perfectly fine. I enjoy Final Fantasy XIII and other AAA-titles (Witcher 3, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption...). But major studios focus on breadth instead of depth: breadth is what their audience wants and only AAA-studios can deliver it.
Indies don't usually have huge hopes to hit it big: there are exceptions like Flappy Bird, Minecraft and Factorio. But for the most part, Indies aren't going to make much money. And in the case of Flappy Bird, the "designer" more or less took the concepts of the Flash Helicopter games, ported it to iOS and put a Mario-like pixel art skin on it. Flappy Bird, despite being a commercial success, is arguably everything wrong with the indie market today. Lets be frank: Flappy Bird is just that generic Newgrounds "Helicopter" game that has a billion clones, except Flappy Bird has Mario-look-a-like graphics.
I mean, its a good gameplay loop. But the core design was certainly not made by the Flappy Bird author.
Also: don't get me wrong. There's a lot of depth in AAA games sometimes. Rockstar games has the "deepest" crowd effects and ragdoll physics. The way NPCs in Grand Theft Auto run from gunfire, or grasp at their wounds, or limp after you've hit them... its actually fun to play with the ragdoll effects in GTA5. In my experience, most people play GTA5 as a glorified dollhouse game... trying to launch cars off of ramps into the city or something. There's something fun about what Rockstar Games has done with its crowd-AI and crowd-physics.
Nonetheless, GTA5's marketing primarily focuses on the story mode. The many hours of gameplay and such.
What makes Factorio an old-school game? Is it purely the graphics? Because almost non of its actual gameplay would have been possible in the 90’s or earlier due to the hardware of the time not being up to the task of a deep simulation and the old-school sim games didn’t have the same kind of depth that Factorio does, in my opinion.
As for breadth vs depth, I agree overall, but in my opinion Tetris had neither (doesn’t stop it from being fun though!) and Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have, in my opinion, both breadth and depth. Maybe not to the same degree as Factorio’s open ended factory building has depth, but still they have, in my opinion, a lot of depth. It goes beyond individual mechanics though and to the game as a whole, including how fun it is to simply explore and how intriguing the story is (especially when much of the story is optional and you have to find it for yourself, as in the Dark Souls games).
I’m not sure I understand what the point you’re trying to make re: “indies don’t usually have huge hopes to hit it big”. Can you explain a little more?
Regarding your “don’t get me wrong” comment, I personally don’t include those things as depth. They’re cool effects, sure, but they don’t really impact how deep the gameplay loop is. I do, however, include the overall world building if it makes me want to explore and the story (both of which Rockstar do well, certainly in Red Dead Redemption).
But I guess overall, we are in agreement — we want deep games with interesting/innovative/unconventional gameplay loops that are fun for a long time, over games that have a lot of stuff that ultimately gets boring quickly. In my opinion, some AAA games and many indie games have this. Some are retro in style, others aren’t.
> What makes Factorio an old-school game? Is it purely the graphics? Because almost non of its actual gameplay would have been possible in the 90’s or earlier due to the hardware of the time not being up to the task of a deep simulation and the old-school sim games didn’t have the same kind of depth that Factorio does, in my opinion.
Factorio's roots are in Transport Tycoon (1994). In fact, the OTTD (open-source clone of Transport Tycoon) rail-signaling methodology was blatantly "borrowed" by the Factorio Devs (And the Factorio devs are quite open and honest about this! There's nothing wrong about being inspired by earlier games, especially since Factorio adds so much gameplay on top of the core loop).
Coal -> Power Plant -> Electricity, as well as Iron Ore -> Steel were originally Transport Tycoon concepts as well. Factorio added many more items, but the "core items" of the game are clearly based on Transport Tycoon.
Transport Tycoon was first published in 1994. One can very easily call Factorio a high-performance, modern "Transport Tycoon" game, with aliens and guns added. The core element of collecting resources, loading them into packages to be delivered across the map, and growing a transportation empire is... well... Factorio in a nutshell. The vast, vast majority of player thought goes into moving items around in Factorio, just like the game it was based on.
Granted, Factorio has a LOT of additional details. But its gameplay roots are very, very clear. The devs really took the old formula and crafted something new out of it. In any case, its old-school because its roots are clearly inspired from games in the 90s.
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If you like Factorio, I highly suggest you play Chris Sawyer's simulation games: Rollercoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon (or at least, OTTD, open source clone of Transport Tycoon).
I feel like Factorio is a continuation upon Chris Sawyer's obsession over detail, even if its done by a different dev. The original games have aged quite well IMO.
> but in my opinion Tetris had neither (doesn’t stop it from being fun though!)
There's a large community of players who strongly disagree with you. When you see what players have learned to do to take advantage of the RNG to score the most points in a 150-line Marathon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F90TIwPLPyw
Well... the game is deep. Not a lot of players can do the BT-Cannon Triple-TSpin Double-TSpin perfect clear loop. Then you've got players who focus on 4w center wells, then some players focus entirely on 9:1 sprints, while others focus on 7:3 splits instead.
Most players aren't trying to break the high-score lists against experts. But if you're an expert-player trying to prove yourself in the Tetris community, you'll have to pull out crazy tricks to keep up with everyone else's gameplans.
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> I’m not sure I understand what the point you’re trying to make re: “indies don’t usually have huge hopes to hit it big”. Can you explain a little more?
Today, there's just so much competition in the game development space. Something like 10,000+ games are released to Apple or Android app stores each MONTH.
The games which happen to "strike it big" and become huge successes aren't usually the games that invented a new style of gameplay either. Flappy Bird and Threes vs 2048 are the examples I give of this.
Flappy Bird is a shallow clone of the Newgrounds Helicopter game. While 2048 became the huge success on iOS despite being a blatant rip-off of Threes.
For every game like Factorio (which is certainly an excellent game), there are 10x examples of relatively poor gameplay games which become big instead.
Ok, I see your point regarding Factorio, but most games have predecessor and ancestor that were similar in spirit but maybe not as advanced. Transport Tycoon certainly had many of the features, but they weren’t nearly as simulation heavy as Factorio (not that it needs to be, mind). I’m quite familiar with OpenTTD, its a great game, but the advanced signalling stuff you mentioned wasn’t in the original and was added much later (TTD was 94 as you say and OpenTTD started in 04, many of the advanced features added even later). But I take your point!
> There’s a large community of players who strongly disagree with you.
A game doesn’t have to be large or have much gameplay depth for people to sink a lot of time into them or to play them at a very highly skilled level. There are people who sink hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of hours into all sorts of games, including modern shooters which I’m sure you agree are often quite lacking in depth. The videos you showed didn’t show depth in the game, they showed very skilled players who clearly played a lot. I’ll give you an example: does flipping a coin have depth to it? Because given enough practice, I bet I could flip a coin in a way that it will always come up heads.
> Today, there’s just so much competition
The examples you’re giving are on mobile, which is a cesspool of remakes, clones and garbage copies. Of course, so is Steam. The “strike it big” examples you’ve given are also on mobile, where games that can idly occupy someones time while they commute or whatever do well. Outside of mobile, there exist successful indie games that are more sophisticated games that made it big. But you’re right, for every great innovative game, there are 10x trash games that made it, but most of them are on mobile. I don’t know of any examples on PC or console (aside from big budget AAA games) that are like Flappy Bird or whatever and did really well. Instead you see games like Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Spacechem, World of Goo, Spelunky, Terreria, Bastion, FTL, Super Meat Boy, Rim World, Prison Architect and Braid.
The encoding used to represent the data while keying it in or burning it would have made no difference in terms of ROM space, so there's a fair point to be made somewhere underneath the "Wat". Whether your write an hexadecimal or binary number to key in a byte, in the end it's still just a byte in the ROM.
I assume the message you’re replying to was a joke...
But, while the original comment got flagged, there is a legitimate question behind the “wat” because its not at all unclear what they were referring to here, for the reasons you state.
https://pixelartpark.com