What makes you feel old about the gaming industry?

[Leo656]

Sumac: That's all very interesting. Nintendo "deputizing" Dendy sounds rather similar to what Sega did with the Master System in Brazil with TecToy (I think that's the name). "Yeah, we're kinda done over here with this thing, you guys have fun with it." I think TecToy was still selling Master System variants and clones until like, just a few years ago. Which is nuts.

I actually was never a huge joystick guy. My favorite way to play Atari games was with the ColecoVision "number pad" controller, since that's what I learned on. The little knob/pad thing was a lot more sturdy than any of the joysticks I had. I had several kinds of Atari joysticks - including some really sexy big black ones with a red button and a trigger on the handle that looked like some kinda airplane control stick or something, way cooler than the puny little 2600 sticks - but most of them broke while the ColecoVision controllers never did. I guess because the knob was so "stubby" there was less stress on it when you moved it around. Like it extended barely an inch off the controller itself; it was odd-looking but the durability of the design speaks for itself. Many of those ColecoVision pads still work to this day. People are drowning in busted Atari sticks but you don't really hear about broken ColecoVision pads very much.

I didn't have any games at all that actually made use of the number pad itself, so I always thought that controller was kinda weird . But every time I had a busted joystick, I was super grateful to have them anyway.
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Which reminds me of a console I didn't have, but had a similar controller, the Intellivision. Never had one. But I did pick up the Intellivision Lives! compilation, and... yeah, without the number pad controller, the overlays for said controller, AND the instruction manual, most of those games are simply not even playable. And that's a real shame. They simply don't work well at all on an Xbox controller or whatever. Without the overlays telling you what button does what those games are damn near impossible to figure out. That's a real bummer, because I'm a sucker for retro compilations and I never played any of those games... and most of them, I still haven't.

Great idea to do a retro comp for that system, but they definitely needed to put more work into adapting the controls to modern game pads. Or at LEAST put more than the absolute bare-bones into the instruction manual. The whole manual is just what games are in there, with almost no instructions on how any of them work. A ton of the games don't even work unless you have a second controller plugged in, and you don't know that until you try and start the game and it won't start.

Good idea, needed more thought put into it though. Easily the "worst" retro compilation I own, through no specific fault of the games themselves. It's just the only retro comp I own where you need a NASA blueprint just to PLAY the damn games on it. And they definitely could've done something about that, they just didn't think to.

Originally Posted by neatoman

Bioshock, a game I don't think of as being that old, already seems like relic even in it's remastered form. At the time it was released, Rapture really felt like this large city but now the levels feel really small and few, it comes across more like a small village than a city. The pre-rendered cutscenes are a method that just isn't used anymore because in-game visuals usually look more than good enough, nowdays a pre-rendered cutscene just looks like compressed mess. Hearing the same exact voices coming out of the mouths of the same few character models is grating. Even though Atlas, Tenenbaum, Langford and Steinman are plot important character, they still aren't given unique models.

Y'know, I still gotta play the first one. I forget How or Why but I jumped in with BioShock: Infinite in like 2017 and I loved the hell out of that game. So I bought one of the collections but never got around to the earlier games. I will, though.

I mean... gotta see Elizabeth again, and everything. That girl is a stone cold fox.

Y'wanna talk about things being dated like a limited number of voice actors. Gotta love Knights of the Old Republic where there's only like a handful of "alien" voices and the same clips get recycled for dozens of different quotes because "Hey, it's all gibberish!" But still, you notice how much of that "gibberish" gets re-used. Often.

Can't lie, none of that bothers me at all, not even a little bit. I guess I'm just "retro" through and through. I mean I DO obviously notice and comment on how far we've come, when I play older games and then think about newer games. But more often than not, I look at an older game's shortcomings and just think, "That's so quaint." But I can't say it ever puts me off very much at all, with anything.

I do often gain an even greater appreciation for "quality of life" improvements, though, when I play an older game and compare it to a newer game, especially in the same series. Grand Theft Auto, lookin' at you buddy. Took 'em like 15 years to figure out that Mission Checkpoints weren't "pussy sh*t". God bless 'em, they finally figured it out.

[Sumac]

Playing on NES-pad after Atari joysticks was like a revelation. So much better and comfortable and fun.

I've tried to play BioShock series, even bought the whole trilogy in Steam, but couldn't get through the beginning of the first game - gameplay was just boring and gungame felt like crap, compared to Half Life 2 and Wolfensteins. Tried to BioShock Infinite and it felt the same, so I abandoned the series.

[Leo656]

Infinite was the exact opposite for me. First first-person shooter I ever got more than five minutes into. I've just never really been into those games, and some of the older ones legit gave me motion sickness. But I took to that game like a duck to water, somehow.

Back in the day I gave one'a them Duke Nukems a shot, and I just couldn't. And I tried one'a them Star Wars ones - Jedi Academy, I think? - and it immediately made me sick.

I never had anything against the genre or anything, I'm just not good at certain things. And again, the nausea didn't help. But I had zero problems with that game at all and it ended up being one of the most fun times I ever had with a game. Which I certainly did not expect.

Stuff like that is why I'm never, ever gonna be into that whole VR stuff. If most FPS games give me a migraine I know for a fact that any kinda VR stuff would be even worse. That's like the number one thing that's always held that genre back, the overwhelming amount of people who physically can't play anything in VR without getting violently ill. That's what killed Sega's VR project back in the 90s right before it was set to launch. It's a real problem that simply can't be resolved on a widespread level and probably never will be.

[neatoman]

I wasn't too happy about the changes Infinite made to the gameplay from the previous two games. While I did call Bioshock 1 dated, this is mostly for technical reasons, not so much the design. In the first two games you get Plasmids (alternative attacks to the normal weapons in the form of superpowers) and Gene Tonics (kinda like perks in Fallout or Skyrim) by spending ADAM (EXP) you get from the Little Sisters after defeating the Big Daddies. You get eight total weapons and you keep all of them with you, to spice it up you can upgrade them and use alternative types of ammo. This gives you a lot of variety to play around with on new playthroughs.

In Infinite you find the Vigors (that game's version of Plasmids) in a fixed order with no penalty involved and you can only carry two weapons out of... Let's check the Wiki... 14. While you can upgrade the weapons and Vigors, the fact that you can't pick Vigors in any order means you are stuck with the same ones until you just come across another one and in case you spend money on a weapons upgrade it will be useless until you find another one of that particular weapon. I honestly wish there was a mod that would fix this and make the gameplay more similar to the first two games.

Burial at Sea episode 1 does fix the weapons system and episode 2 does make for a decent homage to Thief the Dark Project, too bad both are too short.

[Papenbrook]

To think that Angry Birds was released over a decade ago ...

Time flies.