/vr/ - Retro Games

We all do

>>4636930
I don't. it's a predecessor of "free to play, pay to win".

>>4636930
The haunted forest from MKII before it discovered metal and meth.

>>4637007
>paying for games/episodic content is bad

>>4637007
>pay to win
Being this dense.

>>4637013
Stolen from King's Quest 4.

>>4637021
Pic?

>>4637007
it's not though

Ok they're evil trees and not dopey ones, but you clearly see where they got the idea from.

>>4637036
That looks more like the Wizard of Oz.

>>4636930
i miss it a lot

>>4637007
you wot m8

>>4636930
I never got why they insisted on using EGA mode for these games. VGA would have been miles easier to code for, looked much nicer, and all new PCs by the early 90s had it.

>>4637041
not everybody had vga cards.

>didn't have the money for all those shareware games to register as kid
>download them later in the age of the internet
>most of the registered episodes turn out to be nothing more than half-assed level packs with occasionally horrendous spritework and level design

>>4637041
EGA monitors were still pretty common in that era. Many of these games even supported CGA too.

>>4637047
>not everybody had VGA cards in 1991
VGA had been out almost five years in 1991 and was de-facto standard on all new PCs for at least 2-1/2 years at that point. That's a long time in terms of computer technology.

>>4637058

>>4637060
Lots of games actually did still support EGA for poorfags with old machines although CGA support was pretty rare by 1991.

>>4637060
You miss the point tho, back then we didn't have the rat-race of games pushing the limits of hardware because dedicated gaming hardware didn't exist. It was more important to support the widest range of PC's, so backwards compatibility was the defacto standard, and this trend was only ended when Doom came out and people where willing to upgrade.

>>4636930
>if you're over 25 nd own a computer, you must try this game!

>>4637015
I'll be honest, it is. It worked for shareware, but now it just feels like a scam when devs and publishers do that, getting you to pay more for each piece of what could of very easily have been a full game had they actually finished it, but decided that getting the first part of the game "Done enough" and selling it, and then selling the next part when it's done is cheaper and makes more money. And then there's the case of Sonic 4 where it takes a long as fuck time between episodes, Sonic 4 isn't even a good game, and it really doesn't help that they literally just release one episode that's just barely a finished product, and then the next episode about two years later when no one cares, compared to Genesis Sonic where you had one full game, and in about a year you had another full game, or Sonic Mania where it blew expectations and was packed with content.
>But sonic 3 & Knuckles
Sonic 3 was practically a full game on it's own without Sonic & Knuckles, not to mention Sonic & Knuckles was also a pretty full game, combine the 2 and you got one pretty great adventure.

>>4637007

>>4637007
>paying for the actual single player game is paying to win
>brainletwojak.jpg

>>4637060
It is but most PCs at that time were 386 shitboxes with ISA VGA cards that were akin to breathing through a straw. EGA mode often ran better on the things because it was lower calorie (32k of graphics data versus 64k for VGA).

Trying to do animation in EGA mode is a nightmare. There's four graphics planes and you have to constantly be toggling registers to access them. The linear VGA Mode 13 was a massive step up in terms of ease of programming.

>>4638671
Thexder on the Apple II and the PC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtwKgmH2Uw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaJaVJvQy5Q

Contemplate how the Apple version running on a little 1Mhz CPU manages to have a better framerate and smoother animation.

>>4638729
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6n7AErrIDE

The Amiga port is so fucking lazy. They just copypasted the EGA PC graphics and Tandy sound with no actual attempt to properly utilize the hardware.

>Commander Keen
Superfrog tier.

>>4638732
It's pretty rare for a commercial EGA game to use Mode E, but I think it was because they copied the graphics from the PC-8801.

>>4636930
>ayyyy lmao trees that look like cocks
ffs man

>>4637080
jesus christ

>>4638772
There can be no greater compliment.

>>4637080
You don't remember what shareware was like then

>>4637018
How is it not? It literally gives you an incomplete game and places a toll gate before the rest of the game content.

All the "LE 90S KID" cucks gob this shit up 24/7 purely because of nostalgia.

>>4638918
I'm going to assume you're a millennial who wasn't around in the shareware era. It's not your fault kiddo, so let me explain what shareware is..

Shareware is a business model that gives free episodic content to entice players, often giving several levels of content before asking those who enjoyed it to pay for the full game. Before the internet (before your time) this was a great way of distributing content, and offered more than a 'demo version'; encouraging people to share the game with friends to spread the word.

'Pay to win' as you call it, is where players buy upgrades or some advantage in order to make a game easier to win.

If you're struggling to understand the difference, perhaps because you're getting bullied in school, then I suggest you spend some time in /v/, where you will find a more age-appropriate audience for your stupidity.

>>4636943

DUDE

Back when OnLive was still around, you could play the first 30 minutes of almost any game in its library for free. That to me was the closest modern equivalent to shareware, and nothing has cropped up to replace it.

>>4637040
I'm guessing he grew up after shareware, saw that some shareware games "deny" the most powerful weapons, and assumed that buying Doom made the BFG9000 appear in KDitD

Keen is a comfy game. I wish more people knew about it.

>>4636943

>>4637060

Plenty of people still had CGA and EGA cards in the early 90's. My family had a shitbox Epson computer which had CGA graphics until the win 95 era. Computers were expensive as fuck, and most people weren't replacing them year to year.

>>4638927
This. Shareware was a bunch of free games you got, and if you wanted another level pack, you bought the game. That's it. A lot of people didn't bother, since the shareware was practically a full game anyways and they were happy with that. Hell, how many people even got to the end of Ep 4 of Commander Keen?

>>4639109
Yes people often did have outdated machines but even if you bought a new 386 box in 1991, it probably had a shitty ISA VGA card so running games in EGA often netted you better performance than the actual VGA modes.

>>4637007
le 64% brain

>>4639130
Tyrian shareware was sooo good!
Sure, it did not take long to get through the first episode, but it looped around to the beginning with all your points and equipment so you could play again and power up your weapons even more.
Also branching paths with different equipment.
Also several secret levels with even more equipment and weapons.
Then you had the different special moves for every ship type you could buy. And hidden difficulty levels and mini games.

More content in a demo than some full games.

>>4638910
Shareware:
>Get entire 3rd or 4th of a game free, and pay 50bux for the rest that is already finished, first part was usually a pretty full experience
Modern episodic games:
>Pay 20 dollars for one part of the game, pay 20bux for the next part, and then another for the part after that and so on, or pay a good 60bux for the whole season, where the game still feels like awkward bits and pieces and never like a full game
>In examples like Half Life 2 episodes and a couple others, they stop releasing episodes after a while
Episodic content should have stayed dead after the mid 90s, but of course devs and publishers want to make their games "Feel just like a TV show!" with seasons and shit

>>4637053
This. Keen 4 was clearly the best Keen game, Keen Dreams as the second best. The rest are... not very good. Such a disappointment.

>>4640527
And every time you beat the shareware episode you were treated to a code that unlocked a new super arcade mode allowing you to replay with a new ship with new weapons each time. It was pretty great. In some ways more rewarding than the full game because of how quick you could experience all those super arcade modes until you exhaust them all and discover the Destruct minigame.

Hey does anybody remember a shareware game i played back in the day:

It was top-down perspective and there were two characters you could choose from. They either looked like mafia gangsters or something similar, maybe even soldiers (all black suit if not mistaken). You'd run around on the map and had some mission/ kill enemies (?) and between each stage there was a shop where you upgraded weapons and life and such. Was about the same time when 2d duke nukem, wrath of gods thunder, etc... was out (they were on the same cd)

>pic is 'wogt'
>also interesting game but never got far

>>4642638
Chaos Engine?

>>4642658
looks interesting but no, it looked shitter :^)

You only played with one on the screen, and it was inside a building with boxes (some with items in them like ammo). Just remembered pretty sure the characters had mafia hats on, can'T remember seing their hair

>>4639046
Plenty of people do. They never made another because only person at Id who wanted to was Tom Hall and they sacked his ass. The rest were just a bunch of edgy tryhards

Shareware was amazing. Not only did they provide many hours of gameplay for a DEMO, but in an age where compatibility could be an issue you had a surefire way to know whether or not the game would run on your PC. Also, a cartridge game cost $50-$60 usually, while I can download tons of free games. I always had something new to play, while my console brethren grinded away at their tiny libraries. Then the age of CDs happened, and you'd get hundreds of shareware titles for like $5-$10. Gaming value at it's best.

>>4642638
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUMb5_ByRo
?

>>4641051
To be fair, a lot of games back in the day had relatively small dev teams, mostly just made of programmers. They weren't artists and full on composers, they just kinda dabbled in it enough to cobble together a game. When computer games started becoming commercially viable is when other trained disciplines came into the fold.

>>4638729
the older personal computers had more dedicated hardware solutions for game and graphics optimization to save very expensive memory resources

the IBM PC graphics cards have sizeable framebuffers available but that's about it, you're on your own to fill the data pixel by pixel yourself

>>4643032
Id started off having Adrian Carmack at the helm of the art creation and Bobby Prince was there relatively early as well so in this case I don't think it applies with Keen. But good point regardless.

>>4643020
Awww yeah OMF 2097. The best PC-exclusive fighting game.

>>4643184
Heck ya. I had Mortal Kombat II for PC, and I still preferred OMF. It's a shame the sequel couldn't recapture that feel and was pretty mediocre.

>>4643023
hmm, it wasn't excactly this game, but it looks like it runs on the same engine or something, instead of the doom-esque features it had more realistic elements, and it wasn't so colorful.

But actually this is almost the game, just with a different skin

>>4636930
>get Galaxy of Games
>discover the Exile series
Good times