/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10372378
That they look unintentionally old. Indie shit looks intentionally old

Indie imitations are usually done by devs who aren’t willing to put in the effort or are not interested in perfect accuracy. Little things like models and sprites having more detail than they should, color palettes with too many shades, music that is so long and conplex it could never fit on a cart/disc, etc.

A lack convenience. Buying potions? Be ready to buy them 1 at a time. Selling potions? Better be ready to reopen the dialog window between each one.

you almost always can tell

>>10372410
There's one thing. Indie fakes get to choose their color palette. Real old game devs had to pick from the ones the system supports, so even key elements like link's hair would sometimes have to be the wrong color.

>>10372470
Yeah gameplay is always a tell. Too many modern conveniences, UI is too well designed and makes too much sense.

>>10372378
Holy shit the PS1 is older than Harry Potter. For some reason I always think the books started earlier than they did.

>>10372521
Yes, but can you describe it?

>>10372378
Running at some 20FPS. Making a retro graphics game running at that framerate on modern machines doesn't just take incompetence, it takes sabotage.
Slowdown. Modern games would skip frames instead of slowing down.

>>10372378
Old games had hardware limitations that the devs tried to overcome. Many modern retro-looking games are made with modern tools for modern systems, so the devs have to actively try to limit the graphics themselves (and usually it's only the graphics, not the rest of the game), which shows.

>>10372378
Difficulty.

Complete lack of modern politics.
Large focus on things just being cool for the sake of cool.
Everything wasn't so "genre-ised". Developers generally weren't thinking "I'm going to make a JRPG with anime graphics". They were thinking "how do I make a fun game, people are going to want to play?".
Controls often obtuse in ways a modern game would not be.
Almost a complete lack of irony (look at the difference between DMC1 and DMC5)
RPG elements were for RPGs, not for every genre.
Story games were generally adventure games, not third person shooters.

>>10373376
>Complete lack of modern politics.
>Story games were generally adventure games, not third person shooters.
Metal Gear

>>10372378
Minimal animation. No particle effects. Pixel art that looks good rather than deliberately bad. High production values generally. 4x3 or 8x5 aspect ratio. Resolution that doesn't neatly divide 1920x1080. No popups or overlays. Only one or two short logos before the title screen. No handholding waypoints/quest markers or the like. You're playing it off a physical cartridge or disk/disc, on a TV or a CRT monitor or early, blur-prone laptop LCD; or at least under an emulator for an older system that had those things. You read the manual before you started. Probably many more and more obvious things, but they're often individual to the game you're playing, or at least the system you're playing it on.

>>10373496
>Only one or two short logos before the title screen.
Addendum: Unless it's a 5th generation or later game that has a full-motion (but severely compressed) pre-menu cutscene, of course.

>damn modern games sure blow
>you're right, let's try makin some in an older style
>no actually those blow too
i think you just want an excuse to whine desu

>>10372378
Not wide enough it doesn't fill up my 32:9 monitor

There is definitely a look and I can always tell. One of the most obvious of course is overly fluid movement, but even if they manage to avoid that, the pixel art itself always looks slightly off, like someone misremembering how old games actually looked, or an alternate universe where they were slightly different. I think I see it in the eyes of the characters a lot.

>>10372378
Very basic (or static) camera movements and sparsely used screen effects.

adherence to "objectively good" game design is the biggest tell. Games are possibly the most homogeneous art form i've ever seen because what works and what doesnt for wide audiences has both been largely figured out and beaten to death. Old games didn't have that base of knowledge (or the horde of customers that came with it), and would have to be designed more subjectively as a result.

>>10372470
basically this

>>10372378
old games were severely limited by memory. even the code had to be incredibly small in order to fit an nes game on a cartridge along with the a/v assets and text so they did everything in assembly and kept the code as small as possible. modern games are not limited by code size at all and hardly limited by a/v asset size. the result is robust code that creates responsive gameplay and numerous quality of life features that older games likely would have included if they could. overcoming clunky controls is satisfying, even if it wasn't meant to be, and modern games often lack that feeling of progress. there are a few exceptions like m&b warband where downing enemies is made more satisfying by the clunky combat mechanics compared to something like the musou games where hacking apart a thousand enemies per level is the norm. in old games you had to master the range and timing of attacks whereas newer games are more about using the right ability in the right circumstance. it's a different kind of difficulty and one that's arguably less satisfying to overcome.

>>10373624
it's also important to remember that game engines didn't exist in the way they do today. game engines tend to bloat the size of even simple games dramatically and when memory is scarce it becomes overly wasteful. retro games were generally made from scratch which gave each game a unique feel compared to the modern indie games which tend to be built on engines which give them all the same feel.

Color palettes are an extremely obvious tell, and I don't mean having a gorillion colors vs 256 or whatever, I mean the actual use of color. Contemporary retro style games have "softer" palettes and color combinations that were rare during the actual sprite era, classic sprite games often have stronger contrast and "harsher" palettes. There are exceptions for both sides but it's very true for run-of-the-mill titles.

>>10373717
Might be because nowadays everyone has 10 bit screens and gets the same colors every time.
Back then there was Never The Same Color. Really gotta compensate for some random TV desaturating the colors.

>>10372470
>>10373090
>>10373616
This can go either way.
The core difference is that old UIs were built entirely from scratch for a specific game (sometimes re-used within a franchise). Newer games are more likely to assemble a generic UI from stock widgets and a custom skin. This makes it easy to include features so that you aren't cycling in and out of a menu screen 10 times in a row buying potions, but will also encourage settling for "good enough" pre-made components rather than thoughtful custom designs.

>>10373729
It's also that pastel colors have been associated with indie music and films since 00s and indie games somehow continued that tradition. No idea what's that about but it's a thing somehow

>>10372378
retro indieshit:
>mixed pixel sizes outside of specific gimmicks and visible sub"pixel" movements
>colors, enough said
>wasted pixels in graphics
>scared to use similar colors on different things that might make something not stand out or blend with the background
>2d background and even the stage is composed like a painting with a lot of layers and placement without consideration for number of tiles or scrolling layer limits
>title screens are missing or too heavy in irrelevant effects
>doesn't take genre risks
>everything has to be realistic or explainable
>any non-obvious controls are explained
>if there are any creative mechanics then the game focuses on them throughout or explains them in the middle of the game
>widescreen
>smooth polygon model shapes and sharp textures at sizes/distances that nobody would have cared about at lower resolutions, or ridiculous low effort shapes that make katamari damacy look photorealistic by comparison
>lack of care for how diagonal lines of pixels appear
>player character has less detail than the stage
>too many sound effects are obnoxious elaborate mini-chiptunes
>music flaunts the simplistic bleepbloop generation of the instrument sounds
>too many soft gradients, glowing things, particle effects, dynamic lights, shaders
>small text
>doesn't look good on a CRT
>weirdly unresponsive controls
>blurry movement
>inconsistent or excessive levels of blurring in general
>no manual

>>10372378
Remember when all the pause button did was pause the game? I do

>>10373106
You can tell that older games were made within the limitations of the computers/systems/chip sets they were made to run on. They found ways to work around the limitations not by avoiding them, but by coming up with creative ways to make the game even more endearing through creative work-arounds. Remember, the developers back then were putting their entire lives on the line and really loved what they were doing. They weren't trying to break into a saturated market while having fun, though some may have said they were later. The limitations forced them to cut most of what they wanted to put in their games and forced TRUE innovation into them. Something similar to when we went to the moon with the rockets and tech that had to be used back then. Same principal. This resulted in limited but charming artistry (that had a lot more work put into it than it looked, just to get the stuff on the screen) and attempts to put only one or two of their gameplay ideas into the game instead of the many they wanted, making them a little more simplistic than originally planned while also making them novel experiences for the player, "That is the one with the job system, I love that." That kind of thing. Hard to recreate faithfully if you didn't live at that time, in that culture and only had limited resources to try to make a million dollar hit with in a short amount of time as your cash was running out everyday. There is literally a series of aesthetic types that come out of these factors when pressure is applied to them. That's what we saw back then and what people love to go back and play today. The combined result of all of these things. Today's retro attempts are nothing like them because, well no one today wants to buy an indy game that is simplistic and lacks the exact charm that old games from the retro era gives them.

>>10373845
TLDR: It is nearly impossible to recreate games that featured limited innovations (remember, only the lucky ones were successful, it was a crap shoot) and art based on a bygone era and culture and were made through extreme pressure that forced incredible creativity but only within a very limited scope.

>>10373779
Great example.

>>10372410
>>10372539
you guys hit the nail on the head. this is how you distinguish actual old games from 'indie wanna-be 8 bit'

>>10373717
contrast has died in media, not limited to only video games.

>>10373758
>>player character has less detail than the stage

>>10373779
Shit, sometimes it didn't even do that.

>>10373454
Even Metal Gear isn't a third person shooter, and it pretty much is an adventure game, when you get down to it.
Kojima was an adventure game developer. That's where he came from.

>>10373376
>RPG elements were for RPGs, not for every genre
I've seen to many mid-80s Famicom games to know this is simply not true

Completing the game or achieving notable feats on it gives you access to extra content already built into the game without having to pay extra, instead of a shitty notification for attention starved individuals with troubled childhoods that does absolutely nothing while the actual extra content requires you to pay more money, despite already being in your game data most of the time.

>>10373376
>RPG elements were for RPGs, not for every genre.
Not true, even Double Dragon II had a rudimentary growth system based on "Exp". You could have just said they were less common or less explicit.

>>10374212
I remember the first time a friend of mine who got the 360 early on was telling me about achievements and gamerscore. I thought he was just making shit up as a joke, especially when i asked him what that stuff unlocks and he said "nothing".

Well, for one, they don't run on the original fucking hardware

>>10374331
homebrew games that don't run on the console they were designed for belong in the garbage, especially romhacks

>>10372378
1) artstyle doesn't match the period
2) gameplay lifted from established genres that weren't established during the period they're trying to replicate
3) characters/dialogue/politics

>>10372407
/thread

>>10373616
>Games are possibly the most homogeneous art form i've ever seen because what works and what doesnt for wide audiences has both been largely figured out and beaten to death.
Hard disagree, gaming has converged towards skinner boxing not good design or interesting artistic qualities

>>10375143
I think the other anon was basically saying the same thing as you but in a nicer/more euphemistic way

>>10375197
Yeah that makes sense, the reward mechanisms in games make them ripe for this sort of stuff. Comprehension is just a bit dull today

>>10372378
SFX taking up sound channels from music

>>10374098
this image is exactly why i hoard crt
it just looks like pure shit to me otherwise

>>10373616
>Games are possibly the most homogeneous art form i've ever seen because what works and what doesnt for wide audiences has both been largely figured out and beaten to death.
People thought that, then Minecraft came out and won an entire generation.

>>10372378
Indie games almost always do that thing where the sprites move around in steps that are smaller than the pixels they're made of. Making the movement far smoother than would have been possible on the old systems.
This actually seriously triggers me.

>>10373073
Old games also very often had dithering like this, while zoomer spriters think it's something you're not allowed to do.

>>10377040
>Old games also very often had dithering like this, while zoomer spriters think it's something you're not allowed to do.
Not allowed to is a strong word, but it has a basis on reality. Old devs didn't use dithering because they liked it, they used it because of color limits. See earthworm jim for the snes vs genesis.

>>10373073
this unironically mogs 90% of modern titles

Every genre has a fully standardized set of controls and handling style now. In every first person game for example you have your WASD movement, E to interact, space to jump, and ctrl to crouch. You're not really doing anything different to every other shooter. So it sticks out big time when a game expects more than zero seconds to learn the controls.

>>10375573
Infiniminer + dwarf fortress

>>10374070
I still have no clue what this picture means. There is only one game on each side but they show different things. Wtf is the point?

>>10377061
Dithering creates a textured look, which sometimes is preferable to a straight gradient.

>>10378931
I have no idea what game that is, but the point that anon was making seems pretty obvious.
When you play the left game (presumably the original), the graphics were crisp and detailed, and had effort put into them by humans since the technology to add rich color wasn't really there yet, or was somewhat limited.
The right image (presumably a remaster or sequel of the left game) shows what happens when graphics designers get lazy and can rely on the ability to slap a shit ton of pretty colors on a setting.
The general dissatisfaction that this anon feels is probably vague and not immediately obvious to most people until it's brought into sharp relief with a black and white image. Which half looks prettier with colors? It's debatable. Which half looks better in black and white. It's no contest. It's not even a discussion.

>>10372378
I remember when I first emulated Zelda Four Swords Adventure a few years ago, it looked like gaudy Newgrounds trash that would have been contemporary at the time, and ofcourse I'm old enough to be nostagic for gaudy trash like Newgrounds that would certainly have more soul than alot of what you find these days.

>>10379029
Forgot to post link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khK4xFvumcY
It looks worse in an emulator, because you have perfectly crisp 16 bit spirtes surrounded by lazy modern sparkle effects.

>>10373496
>Minimal animation. No particle effects. Pixel art that looks good rather than deliberately bad.
This is a great description of the difference between Earthbound and Undertale.

>>10374843
>gameplay lifted from established genres that weren't established during the period they're trying to replicate
Example please?

>>10377040
>Indie games almost always do that thing where the sprites move around in steps that are smaller than the pixels they're made of. Making the movement far smoother than would have been possible on the old systems.
>This actually seriously triggers me.
"Megaman Dies at the End" and most of what Dorkly makes, has this issue and it bugs me.

>>10374070
>>10378931
>>10379009
I think that's Diablo 2 vs. Diablo 4. The original Diablo is my favorite game ever. D2 is neat but that's where people started grinding for perfect loot and the franchise became the aggressive skinner box that it is today. Damn shame because D2's art and sound design are phenomenal on the right setup.
>>10374239
That's when video games started dying as far as I'm concerned. Once the PS3 got trophies the homogenization was complete. That's the one thing I like about Nintendo consoles being a little behind on trends.

>>10372378
I would use FAITH chapters I and III as a comparison. As a disclaimer neither one claim to be a perfect 2600 recreation and I find both to be good games. However they're different in how closely they stick to the 2600. There are some things that are accurate throughout, such as the lack of sub-pixel movement (other than cutscenes), janky but responsive controls.

>FAITH I
>Limited soundtrack
>Gameplay and story relate to each other but have clearly defined boundaries
>Single small area

>FAITH III
In general there's no way you're fitting that onto a 2600 cart.
>Many music tracks
>Long plot with branching paths, and dialog options
>Multiple large areas.
With its structure it's closer to a SNES game than an Atari 2600 game, other than the aesthetic.

>>10372378
Limitations. Even these "ps1 style graphics" games use tons of improved features that developers didn't have on the actual hardware. There's very few games that even come close to the oldschool flare because they always, ALWAYS add modern improvments in some way. Even games made for old systems have a certain sterilized feel to them that you can't escape.

Megaman X-style walljumping. That's usually a big tip-off that a game isn't retro, since it was an extremely rare thing back then. But every single indie game is in love with it.

>>10377072
No Zed Spec port though

Electric Underground did a great video on the topic. https://youtu.be/qoVVB3Va5kw

>>10372378
Ok, let's commit some heresy: Is it a bad thing for "retraux" games to have better QoL? I agree with >>10373616 that games have become more standardized as they become more ergonomic, but if you had a time machine (and game designers would listen to you) would you give them some tips on how to make better controls/menus/etc based on hindsight?

>>10379978
>Is it a bad thing for "retraux" games to have better QoL
Not inherently, but all too often it's a sign of thoughtless conformity. One trait many great classic games have in common is that they were laser-focused on the most critical, inspired aspects of the game. Features that weren't important to the vision were cut or left out. Although it's much easier to "cover the bases" in terms of QoL features today, GOOD games should still focus hard on the main inspiration for the game and fuss less about features.

Plus the line between "QoL" and game design has become too blurred. Zoomers will start arrogantly blathering about "artificial difficulty" and "bad controls" and other buzzwords after the most superficial half-assed takes imaginable.

>>10373779
Remember when the pause button was on the console and not the controller? For the first few months or so I genuinely didn't know that sms games had pause menus, because I never paused the games. Imagine my surprise playing Alex Kidd or Monsterland.

>>10377862
I fucking wish

>>10380223
Artificial difficulty always seemed like such an arbitrary term to me. There's no objective cutoff for what constitutes things like HP padding or jank so it's just an imprecise word that gets thrown around when someone can't describe why they're frustrated. All difficulty is artificial because games are by nature arbitrary challenges created by the developer.

>>10380894
>All difficulty is artificial because games are by nature arbitrary challenges created by the developer.
That got me thinking, not all challenge is created by the developer. (don't get me started on calling it arbitrary). Think of a PvP game. The challenge is mostly decided by the skill of the opponent, players are just given the tools to fight each other. Artificial difficulty would be if one of the players was given better weapons or stats, not asymmetric but genuinely better. Looking at it that way, artificial difficulty is where the AI enemies don't play fair in some way, such as if they're not subject to the same jank the player is.
The other part of artificial difficulty is that it doesn't relate to the actual skill the game tests. HP padding is a good example of that. You don't need better aim, or reflexes, or strategy, you just waste ammo. If all difficulty is artificial, some is more artificial than others.

>>10381147
>That got me thinking, not all challenge is created by the developer. (don't get me started on calling it arbitrary). Think of a PvP game. The challenge is mostly decided by the skill of the opponent, players are just given the tools to fight each other.
The breadth of possible difficulties in fighting a multiplayer opponent are determined by the decision to make a multiplayer game. But generally speaking people who whine about artificial difficulty aren't talking about emergent gameplay
>Looking at it that way, artificial difficulty is where the AI enemies don't play fair in some way
This is the type of statement I have problems with. The devs could make the AI completely floor you every time if they wanted, the fact that it DOESN'T is what's based on arbitrarily imposed handicaps. And that level of challenge or whether it's fun are going to be different for every person. There's no real defining line between asymmetry and unfairness amd all singleplayer games have asymmetry
>HP padding is a good example of that. You don't need better aim, or reflexes, or strategy, you just waste ammo.
So your premise is that aim and reflexes and strategy are valid forms of skill, but not resource management or patience? Seems pulled out of your ass chief. If you find it tedious just say its tedious, "artificial difficulty" says nothing

>>10372410
>music that wont fit on a disc
I pissed myself laughing at this retarded shit.

>>10373852
What about people that develop games for retro consoles?

>>10379341
ive argued with /vg/agdg about walljump, double jump, (air) dash, transformationsn with different mechanics multiple times when i was still active there.

i'm essentially against giving them to the player right as they are starting to play unless you have a compelling reason to do so (eg youre making celeste or super meat boy). i believe that the dev should strive to make the game fun without those moves and only give them to the player when things get boring.

i remember playing SOTN and going back to every room i had already been just to check where else i could go after i got double jump, bat/mist form etc. it's like the universe expands when you get them.

>>10377061
>Old devs didn't use dithering because they liked it, they used it because of color limits.
The entirety of pixel art as a medium arose from technical limitations.