Enjoy retro video games?

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After the Wii and DS were released, I felt that the gaming industry died a little. Inside. It had been coming for a while, but now it's all just money grabbing schemes and clone games. Shoot em ups, war games and "Imagine DS" That's all we see now. Give me Chrono Trigger, give me the Legend of Zelda. Super Mario World. FFIV. Sonic the Hedgehog. The gaming industry in its prime.

Not to say that the industry is dead, but just look at the DS. Stuffed with shovelare kiddie games and in its forth revision of highly outdated hardware. Money money money money money. There's still some gems around, but sometimes I just gotta pull out the GBA or SNES for a while. Anyone feel the same?

Edit: There some brilliant games out there for the modern systems. Don't get me wrong.

I feel DS/Wii's greatest flaw is milking the same old franchises and producing highly simplistic gameplay with cartoonish visuals... treating all their audience as if they're little children incapable of handling any semblance of depth or grittiness.

The only decent games on the DS were the Mechwarrior one and GTA: Chinatown Wars. They didnt sell well, probably because, indeed, the company really makes consoles for kids.

Don't get me wrong, I hate games that slap "mature" on the label where maturity is equated with boobies and gore... but at least they try, you know. They come up with new heroes and gameplay innovations, incremental as they may be... but they're there.

Making yet another Mario game... that's not trying. Frak Mario, he should've been dead and buried for 10 years now. I'm 32 years old, not 12, and jumping on turtles or riding go-karts simply doesn't do it for me anymore.

Oh and I never "got"" Zelda. Maybe it was great for the consoles during its time, but we also had the likes of Ultima series during that era - games that were actually trying to be an RPG and not a linear-progression slashathon puzzle solver cartoon with stats.

I also disagree about what constitutes the "gaming industry in its prime". To me, it's Fallout (the first, 1997), and Battlezone (the first, 1998). Innovative and brilliant games, never fully reproduced since. Oh, and Doom (1993), but that goes without saying.

I used to think that the gaming industry is dying, but every now and then I see something amazing, and realize that, simply, the great games are always rare, but they never cease to exist. Left 4 Dead series, for instance, is the most recent innovative take on cooperative play and creating movie-like atmosphere... its really a big step forward.

Would I rather play a modern, well-polished game, or an old platformer with unforgiving mechanics and frustrating jump puzzles ? Nostalgia isn't all that pretty up close.

Games theory is my thing and this is something I have thought about. I could write an essay but I will try to hold back!

At the beginning there was only PCs. Back then they were complicated to use, system requirements shifted all the time and all that. So you had the upgrade treadmill. There was some early consoles (atari, playstation, etc) but computers started becoming more powerful and console games quickly felt "old" to the new PC games.

Now when 3D graphics first came out most games looked crap, you had to use imagination to really get a good view . Compare Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights. BG2 looks way better, even if it is sprite based. However eventually 3D graphics caught up and some nice looking games started coming out. Good graphics is a selling point to ret*ds that like shiny lights and pretty graphics. Beyond the upgrade treadmill games were still a bit more complicated to play.

Then distributors started realising simpler games sold more. Probably influenced a LOT by World of Warcraft. So we had the golden age of PC games, titles nearly every month, new shiny, huge and pretty games every couple of months. However PCs were still complicated to use. However consoles started to finally catch up. Consoles were easy because you bough the console and then it run games. Probably the biggest advent for consoles was finally getting them to access the net, giving multiplayer to console.

So console sales start going up and PC game sales start going down. Marketers rejoice cause total sales are up. Now there is every type of console imaginable, soon we will probably get the virtual reality (VR) goggles since they can be made small and cheap enough to be practical now. At this time console sales are way up on PC sales. So most games are now for the console. Most people that use consoles like them because they are easy to use and they like the easy games.

Games now are made with a formula, almost nothing that comes out is original. Even Dragon Age is just an incredibly polished rehash of the fantasy scene. My biggest complaint with the surge of consoles is that most big games are made multi-platform and this means games are usually dumbed down for the console crowd. I miss the games that mentally engage the player, rather than the current games that visually engage the player. I really don't care that much for graphics, as long as its reasonable but I need the mental engagement for a game to be fun.

I do not think mature is boobies and gore, that is childish really. I believe a "mature" game should be the same as a mature book or movie. It is thoughtful and provocative or mentally engages the viewer/player. Psychonauts is en example of a recent game like this, which they didn't even stock the PC version in Australia, afaik. Other older games like Planescape: Torment, System Shock, Baldur's Gate series, Fallout series (excluding Fallout 3). Even Diablo 2, though it had simple gameplay there was enough interesting story and lore to hold it together. This is why I think Diablo 3 will fail, they will drop the dark atmosphere and complex ability for choice, I loved my melee sorc!, for overly easy gameplay dumbed down enough that you can only make a cookie cutter class, no matter how random you try to make it.

I wish games would mature but while most PC games are console ports it is highly unlikely they will be anything but superficially mature. Also while Australia does not allow an R18+ rating (hope you feel the hate Michael Atkinson) most developers wont bother because they wont be able to sell any copies here at all and we are a rather large market to ignore.

Anyway I would kill (not literally!) to be able to play Planescape: Torment again. The story was just incredible. Of course by todays standards the resolution is tiny, graphics are poor and it is buggy but that is my target for nostalgia.

GBA: I remember the original Game Boy where it was monochrome, limited battery life, took 4x AA batteries and I always wanted one. Pretty chunky. Looking back at it now, I realise how primitive it was, but the games it had looked fun enough to justify buying one. Last time I remember was they cost £60~ I tried to save for one too

Hey, if I could get my old UNIX-version of Rogue to run on anything, I'd be thrilled.

Hey, I was just dropping by to start a nostalgic thread on Apple II games! I really can't call myself a gamer for some 20 years or so, but I still look back fondly on the old skool 80's stuff.

Below The Root, anyone?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrVt3-iW170[/youtube]

Stickybear Bop? Not to suggest it belongs in the same class as Below The Root, it just happened to pop into my head first. There was just something about sittin' at the computer and boppin' dem bears.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNZc3CqWXFE[/youtube]

Super Mario 64 is the greatest game of all time, in my opinion. Kept the cartridge after many years of not having the console anymore, and I recently went out and bought a used console in great shape. And got Donkey Kong 64 on Ebay a bit later, too.

Also bought an SNES console and Super Mario World. Playing that for the first time in even longer almost brought a tear to my eye. Clayfighter was neat, too, in its own cheesy way. Never had it, but I played it on my teacher's old console a couple times in the classroom during middle school.

Another all-time favorite is Donkey Kong. That was fun, it was was very creative for an arcade game from '81. My stepdad had that original DK game featuring Jumpman (Mario's debut form) on a Game Boy cartridge. So much fun we had playing it on the Super Game Boy adapter cartridge.

You don't need dark ambience and tone for making a mature game. Final fantasy IX may have vivid and colorful environment, but it deal with the difficulty to found a sense to life and accepting death. I never get far in Diablo because it's too dark and depressive.

I love both modern and retro games I like playing my SNES

I really enjoyed the older systems better. More effort was put into making the games good when the graphics were, well, not so high tech. A few of the modern games are good, in my opinion these would be FPS or flying games. But for retro games, with two dimensional graphics, I loved 1943, Contra, Ghostbusters, the Mario 1,2,3 series, etc. I also liked the Game Gear, with Chessmaster, a Sonic game, and Aliens 3. For Genesis, I loved F22 Interceptor. For N64, I loved OO7 Goldeneye. Dreamcast had an awesome game called Starlancer, which is graphically as good as Roughnecks Starship Troopers. So, yes, I do enjoy retro games.

one game i really miss is abes odyssey for playstation 1.

Yeah i like the N64 and the Gamecube exept i havent played the gamcube in an awful long time and i'd like to get twilight princess. BUT IT COSTS TOO MUCH MONIES!! !! !!

if you have a 360 there are plently of retro downloadable titles, i would reccomend you try johhny platform or castle crashers.