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[hanut]

First up Im sorry for being away for soooooooo long from my fav site. Okay now to business.
I see a lot of games today htat are really cool. Great graphics, good gameplay and excellent plots but somehow I get the feeling that the general tendency of the developers is to stuff good graphics into a moderate story and sell it. Do you feel the same? Post up! I wanna know.

:Titan:

[Kon-Tiki]

*votes no*
First of all, if you've played one game nowadays, you've played a quarter of them. Play Half Life 2 and you've played Halo 2, Super Metroid Prime 2 and all that crap, for example. Story's always the same: "They bad, we good. We got guns, so we shoot bad." That or it's yet another RPG spoofed off of the Baldur's Gate engine. There's nothing innovative in today's games (except Syberia and a few others, but they're kept out of the spotlight, for some reason). When I got to a store, I don't want to see the shelves packed with The Sims addons and rip-offs, but with alot of wonderful, original games. If that's the case, who gives a muck 'bout graphics? Sure, having cool graphics's sweet, but if story, gameplay and over-all originality is kicked in the rear due to it, it's just an insult to the gamer.

'bout the controls... who can beat a game which only uses the cursors and one button as controls? Or a joystick and one button? I've seen games that require two keyboards, a gamepad, three joysticks and a pair of mouses, so to speak. It's good to have lots of options in a game, but they have to learn to try and incorporate it into a minimal amount of keys and menus. Otherwise, it's just a pain to find which key's for what all the time and kills the fun of a game. That or you just don't use three fourth of the functions the game supplies. In that case, they could just as well haven't bothered 'bout it.

[wendymaree]

Great topic and I also think the old games were way better. I've just brought three relatively new ones: Longest Journey - so many recommended it; Atlantis 2 - was knocked out by the first) Gabriel Knight 3 - so boring and the character gets annoying. I haven't finished any of them and am playing (and having much more fun) with Simon the Sorceror and Indiana Jones - the Atlantis one. The older games had so much going on and were so innovative and imaginative and magical. Where's the magic gone? Where's the inspiration?

[DeathDude]

I think the older games are much more fun than the newer style games, even when I think back, I still remember playing my snes and genesis games, that was a classic time in the video game industry imo, games like the final fantasy series, the many new rpg's, some of the classic original fighting games, and so the list goes on. Even the older titles for the pc like the classic adventure games from Sierra and Lucasarts are still fun to play to this day, and hold a certain classic charm. Also developers were much more willing to try a new idea and take the chance.

Today it seems that graphics has won out, the next gen systems want to focus a lot on graphics it seems, when in fact story should be a key, the games that I play nowadays, you see very few that will have a lasting appeal like we used to be able to see alot of. With so much focusing on profit in the industry and essentially one wrong move can make or break a company, the freedom of developers is decreasing which is sad to see...

[Evad]

older games were simple, and simpicity can be a good thing, but theres no way you can compare good gameplay "back then" to good gameplay "today".
that being said good game play "back then" beats great graphics/bad gampley "today".

[The Niles]

Moved to the proper part of the forum. Please use only the games part of the forum for game related topics do not use open forum for that.

As to the question I would say that todays games are in many ways better just not always. I enjoyed Doom more then I did Doom3 but I cannot agrue that in many ways Doom3 was the better game. Gaphics need not be explained but as far as gameplay goes the controls where better in Doom3 then Doom and being able to use the extra dimension (Doom was essentially 2D) is great. Monsters are smarter and there are more options (moving the barels with a crane was especially fun). I also got hooked on a strategy game recently, Hearts of Iron 2. Something like that the gameing world has never seen before. The level of debth and realism is amazing.

Of todays game genre´s only pure adventures have gone downhill. They are no longer being made in large numbers and the few who are still being released are not as good as the great ones from years gone by. The genre that has bennefitted the most in terms of quality, I think, are the strategy games. Strategy used to be an area of little or no graphics and large collums of numbers (think early SSI). Now we have games like Rome Total War, which still has its flaws but is still one of the best games released in the strategy genre ever and, dare I say it, Hearts of Iron 2 (not a looker but fun through and through).

For Nostalgias sake we tend to romantisize games we knew in our childhood and remember them more fondly then we knew them back then. Games today are not worse on the whole now then they where back then. The best of yesteryear are better then the mediocraty of games today but the best games today by and large beat their older cousins in every gategory.

[BeefontheBone]

Originally posted by Kon-Tiki@Apr 13 2005, 04:34 AM
Play Half Life 2 and you've played Halo 2, Super Metroid Prime 2 and all that crap, for example. Story's always the same: "They bad, we good. We got guns, so we shoot bad." That or it's yet another RPG spoofed off of the Baldur's Gate engine. There's nothing innovative in today's games (except Syberia and a few others, but they're kept out of the spotlight, for some reason).

That's not something I agree with - in fact the 3 you list there (plus maybe TimeSplitters: Future Perfect which has a great story, although is hardly innovative) are good examples of recent FPS games with deep, rich and immersive storylines which, coupled with the graphics and so on, make for an amazing game experience which is hard to beat. As for innovation, what about Darwinia, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Half-Life 2's physics? there are some innovative and exciting titles out there, which tend to be overlooked by the buying masses in today's console-driven market, which is WHY they're so few and far between - they don't make enough money for the big publishers, it's just the way the market goes.

I'd agree with Evad that it's hard to compare the two, since the technology has moved on so far, but also that good gameplay wins every time (why do you think everyone's favourite Final Fantasy is VII?)

The Picard also makes a good point - we do forget the crappy games we've played in the past and romanticse the better ones (replaying Diggers recently was a HUGE disappointment for me, after I remembered how good it was at the time). We also forget that there were plenty of crappy games made "back then" too, but that they've been forgotten in the decade between.

[Omuletzu]

The thing is the question is kind of retorical.Because the "old" games laid the foundation for the new games.So the *now* games borrowed the elements that made old games go gold.So it's absolutely normal that 80% of the now games seem dull to us.And that's why they're so exciting to kids just starting to play games.
Now if i am to compare the old games to the new games, it's only reasonable to say that the new games are better in gameplay(they borrowed the concepts that made old games good, and improved on those).There is one thing that new games will NEVER be able to capture.And that is the graphics.I have yet to see nicer graphics then the ones featured in games like QfG1(VGA), or the Kyrandia series.Like wendy said, that is just magic, the geniune feeling of a DOS game.Of course 3D is still(!) in it's youth, and i think that in a few years it will start to please even the most demanding gamer.

[The Fifth Horseman]

*Voted no*

I think that altough the graphics, sound and all the eyecandy is in bucketloads nowadays, the game plots and the actual gameplay just don't do the justice. Also the game developers screw up their games often. Have Bloodrayne for example. BR1 was already a good game with good graphics (maybe the engine object collision detection would need some tweaking, tho), nicely surprising elements in the plot and rather good gameplay. BR 2 is supposed to have a better engine - in fact it only works slower, and its combat system went from too simple to overtly ubercomplicated. And don't get me started on combos and their names...


Many games today seem to miss this "magic" of the titles of the olde... plus they just don't give the same challenge as those before them.

For example, newest Warhammer game, dawn of War. Come on, I've beaten it in two days. And the last time I've played an RTS before it was over a year back. Will see how long will it take on the hardest setting...
While the 13 year old Space Hulk taken me a week to beat. Week of nearly constant playing, tearing my hair out in despair, banging the head against the wall (@$%^ ! 23rd attempt at this goddamn mission!) and general feeling of satisfaction after beating each challenge ( :evil: Yes! :Titan: Just twenty seven attempts!).

Also, the music... I cannot really say that 128 kbps 44 khz music today is much better then the old Mod or Midi music back in the days.

[Tulac]

I think that great games came in the same amount back then and today, it's just a question of time when some of tdays games will become legends, I think some of you people forgot how many crappy games were made in those times too(millions of clones of different games)...