Your confusion is confusing me. Maybe it’s my own confusion confusing the both of us. Either way, I still don’t get the allure of playing old video games when newer, better ones are currently out there.
Ah, alright. It all hangs together then. I no longer see any potential inconsistency in your argument. Carry on…
Because a lot of those old games (and Pikmin, which started this hijack, can hardly be called old) are still damn fun. Mega Man 9 is practically a clinic in how to create a 2D side scroller.
Pikmin was released in 2001. That’s 7 years ago. That’s old.
For the record, I liked having to complete the game in under 30 days. That made it hard.
I don’t hate on Mega Man 9, though. I appreciate trying to revive a 2D scroller. I just personally have no use for it.
I would actually disagree with this (as long as we’re talking about the original NG2, not the one that came out for the 360). Often game mechanics develop so much over the years that attempting to go back and play an old game is frustrating and annoying, and games that made me break controllers back when I was a kid put me in a right ol’ mood these days (which I then carry to work, not good). Some games are simply unplayable by today’s standards.
That said, I do love old games. Not all, obviously, but I still go back and play games like Zelda: Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, the Genesis ver of Shadow Run, etc, periodically because they were fan-fuckin-tastic back in there day and, quite simply, they hold up to today’s standards. This really only applies to some fo the best games that decades of releases have put out (personal opinion on which games, obviously) whereas I have a buddy that goes back and plays pretty much any old game he can get his hands on, such as Crash and the Boys and other games I didn’t like back in the day and think are terrible now (yes, he kicked the crap out of me at Crash and the Boys, I still hate that fuckin roof top race bs)
The flip side of this is that some things which used to seem hellishly difficult, when replayed now, simply cause me to think “What was the big deal?”. (e.g., the sun level in World 2 of Mario 3 (I can no longer at all appreciate what made this terrifying as a kid), the “Special” levels in Mario World; hell, pretty much all of the levels in those two games just elicit a “Wow, these are actually really, really short” reaction now). But this is probably just growing up and gaining experience rather than gaming as a whole developing in any particular way.
The whole concept of ignoring old games just because there are new, shiny games out is anathema to me.
Someone on another forum put forth the idea of Gaming Literacy as a sort of acquired knowledge one builds up from experiencing or seeing the most significant games of each generation and, ideally, appreciating them for the leaps and bounds they made. Obvious examples being Super Mario 3, Chrono Trigger, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy VII, Half-Life, Psychonauts, Deus Ex, Star Wars: KOTOR, ICO, Phoenix Wright, Bioshock, and probably hundreds of others.
Anyone can pick up the special ‘logic’ that games use to tell their stories (hi invisible walls, huge inventories, robotic NPCs) in just a few months, but actually going back to the Must Play Games and seeing how these games broke the molds and started the trends that end up with Halo 3, Saints Row 2, Call of Duty 5, Guitar Hero Metallica is critical. Not all appreciation for 32-bit and before is nostalgia: many, many of the games released then were just fun in addictive ways that modern games rarely change, only iterate upon.
How would we all feel if someone in 10 years flatly refused to play through Bioshock or Katamari Damacy because they just had no use for a game that didn’t have Pixel Shader 10 and 512-player multiplayer?
There are moments in gaming history that have to be experienced to understand why we are where we are today.
I still haven’t played BioShock. I wanted to. There are just too many good games eating up my time now.
Also: meh.
BioShock was a great game, but was essentially System Shock 2 except Steam Punk instead of Cyber Punk. Great storytelling on the whole, and worth playing, but not terribly original (I still love the game, mind you).
I agree with you, Robin, that some things were just absolute classics and have to be played. Perfect example, imo, is playing a Sonic game on the genesis to understand why people actually freakin like that blue hedgehog and why people still buy the games even though they’ve sucked for the majority of the damn franchise. Or playing a game like Final Fantasy (6 and 4 being my favorites, but VII was also good, they tended to heap on the suck after that and FFXIII is being directed by Toriyama Motomu, who did FFX-2, so I’m reasonably sure that’ll be a big pile of suck too) to understand just how influential the series was on JRPGs and gaming in general, the earlier games’ influence on gameplay, and FFVII particularly influenced the presentation of all games that followed it
Ignoring the bickering, anyone play “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed”? Getting a Wii for the kids for Christmas and this game looks pretty sweet.
Some games, yeah. Examples of this would be the original Zelda and Metroid. Zelda lacks any but the most rudimentary story (or any idea of what you’re really supposed to do) and Metroid is even worse.
So yeah, there are definitely cases where a later iteration of a game makes the former unplayable.
Now, Ninja Gaiden 2 (and really, I just sort of randomly picked that one, but it works) isn’t really one of those, I would say. It’s one of those games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Castlevania 3, Mega Man 2, Kirby’s Adventure, and Sonic the Hedgehog that has aged excellently because what it does, it does perfectly. The controls are crisp and the gameplay is solid. Mega Man 9, for instance, changes little from Mega Man 2 because it doesn’t have to.
Frustrating difficulty alone isn’t a sign that a game is aging poorly - those games are designed to be hard because they’re so short.
Anyhoo, I liked Force Unleashed on Wii a lot.
I played the 360 version and found it to be pretty standard fare. That said, it was STAR WARS standard fare, so I definitely enjoyed it, but I didn’t find it to be anything special. Gameplay was good, but the story was pretty cut-and-dry. Also, StarKiller looks like an abercrombie and fitch poster child, he’s about as generic a character as they come.
I played it on the Xbox 360, but it was fantastic. One of my favorite Star Wars games in a long time.
You have a lot of ‘meh’ for non-modern-online games, don’t you? 
Yeah - my favorite game, bar none, is FFVI, but the seventh installment deserves pretty much all the credit for bringing together 3D, FMV, epic setting, and minigames (and lots of marketing) to form the mold for the modern JRPG.
These are games worth playing just to be able to see the technical feats and story parallels between them, to be able to catch the injokes and know the characters most gamers consider important parts of their experiences growing up.
BioShock is modern. I’m just full of meh. I just never got around to it.
But it’s not online, which I think is what Robin Goodfellow was referring to as you have a (very obvious) preference for online multiplayer games.
I do, and I planned on getting it, there were other releases that happened around the time that prevented me from getting it, though.
The demo was nice.
To drag this thread kicking and screaming back on topic. Here’s a list of every Wii (and DS) game being released in the next three months.
Thanks. NASCAR Kart Racing. A kind of bizarre concept but the game looks pretty fun actually (the trailer reminded me of Kart Rider which I LOVED.)
Any other games on that list (besides the ones already mentioned) have buzz? I’m googling them one at a time but some have very little info.
Sonic and the Black Knight? GOOD GOD Team Sonic, why the $%#@ can’t you understand that we want a SONIC game, not a crap action game that happens to feature Sonic as the main character. You had a good start with Sonic Unleashed (ruined by making 1/3 of the game a hub world and 1/3 of it an absolutely attrocious and slow beat-em-up. But that 1/3 that was actually, you know, a SONIC game was cool) but now you’re going to give us Sonic with a freakin SWORD? :smack::mad:
I. HATE. YOU.