Retro games are crap.

[PeteJ]

I have to say that I am in complete agreement with MD (and Innovator). I've never been a fan of 'retro' gaming and it only serves to remind me how far gaming has come over the years. I do enjoy gamesTM's Retro section, but purely as a reminder of the games I used to play. I don't expect the games they cover to actually be good today.

At an NTSC-UK meet recently we spent seemingly ages playing games like Rampart and Gauntlet. The really old people at the meet, such as Papercut and Mayhem ( ) could have probably played the games all night, however the younger players such as myself got bored of them extremely quickly. They were both amusing for about five minutes, but they both also feature dreadful controls to the point of them being unplayable. If I were to review them both today, I'd struggle to say anything positive.

There are a few old games I wouldn't have problems playing, but as MD quite rightly says; these are classics, not just retro.

Games have moved forward a long way, and while it's nice to look back occasionally, I don't intend on turning around.

Or something.

[Darwock]

How young is that, out of curiosity?

I am 26. I still get a kick out of:

Sabre Wulf, Manic Miner, Atic Atac, Bumpy(yay!), Chaos(double yay!), Lords of Chaos, Treasure Island Dizzy (plus many other Dizzys), Ghosts n Goblins.. I could actually continue this list for a very long time.

And I won't accept that these games are 'classic' rather than 'retro' as that turns this into an argument over semantics, when most of us hear the word retro this is what we think of.

[Madbury]

Pete,

I never knew you felt that way. Putting Guantlet to one side surely you must appreciate the brilliance of Ramparts. Needs the arcade trackball to be played properly, but any version is good. It's such a brilliant mix of missile command and tetris with a tactical element to boot.

It perhaps is one of the games which still deserves praise (just as Tetris does) even today.

[Mayhem]

Never thought I'd be called old now

Still the right side of 30 for now heh... though admitedly whilst I'm old for the people on this site, in retrogaming terms, I'm actually one of the youngest. I was right on the cusp of being old enough to "be there" at the time and experience the wonder of the early 80s for myself. Most people I know into retro are already well into their 30s...

[gordon]

38 here. And I still enjoy I Robot and Armalyte. Robotron is still the greatest shoot 'em up ever made; and there are a ton of classic shooters on all formats that knock most 3D efforts today into a cocked hat in terms of adrenaline-inducing excitement. Shoot 'em ups and race games have tended to date less severely than the rest, IMO.

But.

Most of the retro stuff I own is a bit ****. I can't bear Goldeneye on the N64 now. Even my beloved Zelda OOT is rapidly fading into "it's the best game ever, but I think I'll talk to those fish in Wind Waker instead..." category. I don't use my C64 except for a couple of shoot 'em ups; ditto the NES apart from Zelda, RC ProAm and Ice Climber. The SNES for Mario Kart and Super Mario World. The Megadrive for Thunderforce, Hellfire and Sonic. The Saturn for Nights and Radiant Silvergun. The Dreamcast for... well, still quite a few games, as it hasn't dated yet. But I think the point about 99% of the old stuff being essentially worthless (unless it happened to have some kind of emotional impact for you at the time) is essentially accurate.

That said, there's little on current platforms that has held my attention in the way that the oldies did: nothing seems quite as fresh or as new as it was, and most ideas have been exhausted. Apart from graphical advances and the impact of new things, it's all getting a bit moribund...

[edit] Nice thread, btw, Mayhem.

[randombs]

rats i'm only 21 which makes me sound like a kid smoking a pipe trying to look like grandad...

i got bored of retro stuff mainly because people who saw me playing would get baffled - kung fu on nes instead of halo on xbox? are you nuts? etc etc

recently i've been rearranging my life, and i've less and less time to play them now, so i tend to go for the oldies beacause they're usually quicker to just get into - no silly CGI intros or anything like that (kinda why i love sega games) - so i will choose, say, SF2HF over Halo 9/10 times simply because i can finish the former in under 1/2 hour (don't laugh i'm rusty). besides it's fun to set myself challenges like clocking it without losing a continue, or getting X amount of perfects

i think some games will always be there for me when i need them, while others are better left as fond memories.

i'm off to find my slippers

[Halo]

Simple as this. Some games back in the day were technical masterpieces, and this is what made them notable. Some games were genuinely great. It's only the latter that deserves playing for reasons other than nostalgia.

Oh, and I think I, Robot is a bloody great game. And I'm 16 and thus have no nostalgia for it.

[James Harvey]

No but 99% of all home games released before 1990 are ****. FACT.

Worst thread ever.

The same can be said about games released after 1990. Unless you have really ****ty taste.

[Papercut]

I have to say that I am in complete agreement with MD (and Innovator).

Yeah, I agree too.

It seems that people who play retro games a lot (I include myself in that group) have a healthy cynicism towards revered 'retro' games. As MD said, there are retro games, and there are classic games. I have played retro games a lot.

Far too many of the old C64 games I loved I now know to be inferior clones of good-but-not-great arcade games.

The retro reviews in GamesTM are pretty ropey, MD is dead on the money suggesting they should be evaluated contemporarily. In fact I'll just come out and say that while GamesTM retro is as good as retro coverage gets in print, it is still not very good. Way too much googlism instead of proper journalism.

The I,Robot review was just wrong. I bet no one here played it on it's original arcade release, the numbers were just too low and the machines too unreliable. Not to mention it was a bit crap.

At an NTSC-UK meet recently we spent seemingly ages playing games like Rampart and Gauntlet. The really old people at the meet, such as Papercut and Mayhem ( ) could have probably played the games all night, however the younger players such as myself got bored of them extremely quickly. They were both amusing for about five minutes, but they both also feature dreadful controls to the point of them being unplayable.

Really old?!

If I remember right, you played Ramparts, which does have clunky controls - but it's not the game's fault, the arcade version had a trak ball and the Midway Treasures version tries to simulate that (rather than just using the later arcade version that supported joysticks...).

I hadn't played Rampart much at all until that meet... I didn't say anything, because I reigned supreme at that game, and didn't want to rub it in. I enjoyed Rampart a lot more than I thought I would, it is a great game.

Gauntlet was a bit naff, it loses it's appeal without the credit feeding. We played Super Sprint too, and that was great fun three player. That is a game I played a lot back in the day. Again, the controls simulated a wheel, so were a bit clunky.

I like Armalyte more than MD, but it is an overrated game. Delta is much better...

[Leon Retro]

Whos Cacky?

Ah Bombjack an excellent game, even with it's version of a Beetles Track.

Yeah nice to see you back, ignore what so called idiots like me say.

MD, Bombjack cements the fact that retro games can be excellent. I think this proves that all this bull**** about whether old games are good or bad is a load of misguided drivel.

Classic games rare **** games are plentiful



Classic and still enjoyable, no doubt!

[PeteJ]

Sorry, I was joking at you two being really old

I am 23, which is half way to being nearly fifty, and so I'm basically nearly dead also. I have a very positive outlook on life.

Rampart was...amusing for a few minutes, but it was virtually impossible to control (fair enough that the arcade version had a trackball, I've never tried this) and really limited. I completely agree it is Tetris mixed in with Missile Command, which is why I couldn't get into it. I can't stand either (though I hate tetris because I can't play it).

I like the idea of "retro" because we need to be reminded of our history, and I like that people really enjoy old games because we need to keep our feet on the ground and not become another Hollywood.

[Super Stu]

Bit hard to interject in a thread like this, but I'll offer my tuppence.

I think the protagonists of "retro is ****" (or words to that general effect) are being overly harsh. I'll give you what, imho, should be the actual phrase that requires chanting: "an awful lot of games are ****". It is largely irrelevant when they were published, as they are rated there and then, and not with reference to some other time (ie, if you were to review Gauntlet now and compare it so, erm, Baldurs Gate DA2 or something).

I'm afraid I haven't read the various GamesTM retro pieces, so cannot comment on them.

I think this classic/retro nomenclature should be dropped immediately; one man's classic is another man's turkey. Better to just label a system which has been officially put to rest as retro. That the old farts here might not consider N64 as retro is largely irrelevant, the era that we spent without a care in the world playing game after game will be entirely different per person.

I really like retro gaming and enjoy playing the same games I enjoyed back then. I won't attempt to convince it was a golden age of gaming, where everything was sound. Likewise, I'm not going to accept that everything back then was ****. It's all relative; I wonder if we'll have a similar debate in 20 years time of current "classics" like Ico, Rez, Zelda etc. Will they then be ****? No, but it'll be interesting to recover the ground, as this time round you'll presumably have a lot more memories of the period.

[djjimbob]

Of 1000 games released back in the 'retro' period, let's say there were 950 **** games and 50 classics, if you are playing some of the **** ones you will mostly be evaluating it for it's gamplay + mechanics rather than the gloss of wonderous graphics, FMV, audio etc.

Of 1000 games released in the modern day period, people's views can be skewed by the distractions of the gloss, and yes the gloss is sometimes quite nice and lets you be a bit more forgiving of the game as a whole.

"Grabbed by the Ghoulies, oooh that looks nice when really it's ****!"

Jimbob

[randombs]

once you've seen enough gloss, you just get used to the shinyness i guess...
i think the argument proves fruitless because you can't be convinced that retro is a waste of time, and likewise if someone isn't interested in retro then to each his own.

i think after a while it becomes a case of 'why play old games when there are so many new cool ones?' which is true, although in my case i'm into the sort of half-hour stints i can achieve playing older arcadey games. even just loading up something like pgr2 takes a while, and about 90% of my time on that game is spent taking the funky show room cars round the test track
now something like sega rally on my saturn takes about a minute to get into the actual race from bootup, and i'd happily spend a half hour going round the desert course - i've been doing it for 8 years now

and damnit i need to get bombjack too! forgot about that. don't kill me - i was really young when we had it

[Darwock]

Well in my case, the prime example is once again Bumpy, I still play this because I've never got close to completing it, it's fun, brain-taxing and there is nothing like it around today (as it is not fancy enough to charge any money for!). That's why I play it. You could say something similar like.. why play chess when you've got cluedo/trivial pursuit/hungry hippos!