Rose Tinted Glasses.... or were those days better?

Sleepery · 14 Feb 2007 at 11:10

the-void said:
Depends on how old you are now.

go back about 6-7 years and you have Playstation 1 type graphics. Go back 17 years and you have Amiga type graphics. Go back 20 years and you have Commodore 64 type graphics, go back further than that and your playing pong.

So in 25 years you have gone from black and white blocks to Crysis. Can you not imagine what games will be like in 10 years if the follow the same trend? Especially with multiple core GPU's and CPU's and massive parallel computing here and present. It's only the software that needs to catch up. Pulp fiction with graphics like the film in 10 years. You bet.

Thank you for reminding me just how old I am

geeza · 14 Feb 2007 at 11:28

stuff graphics, i think the future will be in some form of virtual reality. We already have a basic version of this with the WII so in 5 or 10 years we should be able to move all body parts inside a game and feel as if we are in it.

edit -but yes the days of games like blood, shadow warrior and quarentine were better.

I long for build engine games to be released on XP some how

eekfek · 14 Feb 2007 at 11:34

i kinda go with what a few others have said, that many years ago there seemed to be a more mature community in online gaming,
probably because it was a new experience for many and if you were an idiot and got a ban, you didnt have as many options to find a new playground/server
Tribes 2 was my first foray into online gaming, and to me, was and still is the greatest game ive ever played,
and funnily enough just got invited to a t2 cluster tourny this sunday !, cant wait
the same players from the small community back then have all returned and it feels like 'the next day' , not 5+ years ago

to me it will always be about the people you play online with and the community of the game that make or break it

bfar · 14 Feb 2007 at 14:05

Kojak said:
I've been gaming since the late 1970's and seeing your post has just pointed something out to me. I'm using my imagination less and less. Those stick/block graphics that I had to imagine where people have been replaced by computer graphics that require little imagination. I have fonder memories of Championship Manager and Championship Manager 2 for instance than Football Manager 2007 (even though FM2007 is the better game) because I had to imagine the game being played out rather than watching blobs move around the screen. Nothing can compete with your imagination and games aren't half so involving when you don't need to use your imagination.

I'm so with you there - its why books are cool. Its nothing but black symbols on white, but whole worlds live in those pages.
Video games used be be like that. The world was created within your mind, based on the limited abstract information on the screen.

Nowadays graphics are much more real than representative, so we see the world as it is presented on screen. The world we perceive is the one given straight up on the screen, not the perfect world we imagine inside our heads.

Its a very subjective notion, and difficult to explain, but it is a huge factor in why people sometimes like the oldies better....

FrenchTart · 14 Feb 2007 at 14:15

It's all about what you experienced *first* really. My first true FPS was AvP 1 because all otehr ones I played gave me intense motion sickness. That was by no means the first/best FPS but it'll always have very very fond memories for me. Likewise with Quake3, Unreal Tournament '99..Dune2..Mario Bros..Double Dragon...etc.

Once you've really enjoyed an FPS or whatever once, it's pretty hard to top that experience with a newer game.

When you strip out the nostalgia factor, it's hard to really say how any of these older games are any better than some newer ones. Originality is a bit of a pointless argument when you take into account that everything is original until you've played a lot of computer games...and then everything's derivative.

MrWhippy · 14 Feb 2007 at 18:30

bfar said:
... I was stunned by Wolfenstein 3D. How was it possible?

i was stunned by Wolfenstein 3D - running it, as i was at the time, on a 286 with the screen size set to the absolute minimum - about two inch by one and a half in the centre of the monitor.

How was it possible? I don't know, but it was. Must have been the novelty. You rarely get that anymore with games. Most of what comes out has been done before to some extent. It's more, variations on a theme than radical departure.

I can't even think what it would take to give that level of wow from a new game these days.

Selekt0r · 14 Feb 2007 at 20:16

geeza said:
...so in 5 or 10 years we should be able to move all body parts inside a game and feel as if we are in it....

the-void · 14 Feb 2007 at 23:04

Selekt0r said:

lol.

HangTime · 15 Feb 2007 at 21:36

bfar said:
I'm so with you there - its why books are cool. Its nothing but black symbols on white, but whole worlds live in those pages.
Video games used be be like that. The world was created within your mind, based on the limited abstract information on the screen.

Nowadays graphics are much more real than representative, so we see the world as it is presented on screen. The world we perceive is the one given straight up on the screen, not the perfect world we imagine inside our heads.

Its a very subjective notion, and difficult to explain, but it is a huge factor in why people sometimes like the oldies better....

An interesting philosophy put forward by you chaps, not one I'd really considered before but it does make sense.