/vr/ - Retro Games

soul

>turn on
>press start
>play game

>>5675931
/thread

Fun

>>5675932
All of my, this. Tried playing ffxi recently and it was a fucking nightmare just to get the game to open thanks to PlayOnline.

>>5675925
Sprite-based engines. Modern hardware is physically incapable of it, instead having to map pictures onto polygons and moving them on a plane to simulate true 2d graphics.
Thankfully, sprite-based graphics were a travesty. Not a single artist worth his salt would've touched them with a ten foot pole if they had a choice. They were talented enough to design good-looking games despite the limitations, but of course it takes a very special kind of ignorant imbecile to believe that said limitations were somehow actually useful or in any other way welcome.

>>5675946
>Sprite-based engines. Modern hardware is physically incapable of it, instead having to map pictures onto polygons and moving them on a plane to simulate true 2d graphics.
Aside from being completely wrong, what does that change?

>>5675925
based horror pc98 game
wish it's translated

>>5675925
SOUL

Nostalgia

>>5675925
optimization

>>5675968
Zoomers have nostalgoa for 6th and 7th gen.

Things that are shoehorned in simply because it was a neat new effect they wanted to show off they could do.

>>5675925
People who wanted to make games because it was a new and exciting field made them. People who are not PC made them. People who had original ideas made them. People had to work with actual constraints. People had to make games fun without the ability to interact with other players online. Teams of primarily programmers and not numale producers made them. They made games to be fun, they would have made games even if there was no money in it. The games are better.

>>5675958
>Aside from being completely wrong
Huh? What modern console, phone of PC GPU can do 2d in hardware? Holy shit, dear fucking ignoramus.
>what does that change?
It's THE difference.

>>5675979
I'm literally a 30yo boomer and I have nostalgia for 6th gen. That shit was like 20 years ago, you retard.

>>5676008
What the fuck is up with calling my generation (late 20s / early 30s) "boomers"? Boomers are our fucking grandparents--not even parents. 40s and 50s people are boomers, whereas you were born in the fucking 90s.

>>5675979
6th gen began ~18 years ago and ended 13 years ago. Few people on here are old enough to not be nostalgic for that. I'm 33 (I bet you're actually younger, dear /v/irgin) and I'm nostalgic for the goddamn Dark Souls

>>5676003
>What modern console, phone of PC GPU can do 2d in hardware?
>what piece of electronics can process and copy 2D data in various assortments to be displayed on a 2D framebuffer
faggot

>>5676014
It's a meme, you retard.
And people like you are why it persists.

>>5676021
You have no idea what you're talking about. Retro consoles had processors geared to calculate 2d graphics specifically. Modern GPUs simply can't do that. In software anything is possible, but somehting like the SNES could do that in HARDWARE. Saturn also could, whereas PSOne already couldn't. Nothing past that could. "2d" games are 3d games designed to look flat; "sprites" are actually textures on polygons that never rotate. Consult a programmer friend or something.

>>5676023
Why don't you stop spouting memes then, considering you aren't even a child, so not even that excuse is available anymore, you dumb shit?

>>5676024
>DUDE LIKE, I CAN ADDRESS AND MOVE CHUNKS OF 8X8 PIXELS INSTEAD OF JUST ONE, THAT LITERALLY CHANGES EVERYTHING
>ALSO I HAVE SEPARATE TILE ARRAYS THAT I CAN MIX TOGETHER TO MAKE PARALLAX AND SHIT, THIS KIND OF THING COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE DONE ANYMORE, THE HORROR

>>5675925
limitations

>>5676034
It changes absolutely everything to the point where it's easier to emulate true 2d games on modern hardware than port them, because nothing is compatible in terms of code.

>>5675925
They’re generally untampered time capsules we have nostalgia for. I know I love a certain old game because I can fire it up and have a enjoyable experience and if that’s not the case, I can still remember the good times I had.

What I get with modern gaming: distilled marketing ploys wrapped with a gaming facade plagued with MTX designed to drain my bank account by drip feeding content that should have been included in the full 60$ asking price in the first place. Obviously they’re not all like that, but I’ll be damned if all companies and corporations don’t want to do this model.

As the industry had matured from what it was to what it is now is pretty horrific as a gamer imo

>>5676034
Who are you quoting?

>>5676023
>garbage forced memes exist because of the people who don't force them excessively
Hottest of takes

>>5676024
>>5676036
>GPU = API

>>5675925
>What do retro games have that modern games don't?

>>5676024
I'm going to have to agree with the other anon that sprites are just bitmaps superimposed on or composed with other bitmaps.

We had scanline-based sprite hardware back in the day because doing it on the general purpose CPU was not possible or for some other reason not desired. It's easy to do it in the CPU now so we just do it in the CPU.

I don't know how old you are, but remember modems? Modems used to be all hardware with custom ICs for performance reasons, but as soon as the DSP could be moved to the CPU, it was. It's not like the new softmodems weren't modems, they were just modems in software. 2D is still 2D, it's just ... softsprites.

>>5675925
gameplay

>>5676036
What are your thoughts on all the modern games that are natively 2D like Stardew Valley and Shovel Knight? It's not like Terraria is secretly emulating a PPU in the background.

>>5676052
We could do it in software but we DON'T. We do it in hardware, and it's all 3d made to look like 2d (often mixed in with obvious 3d in most cases).

>>5675931

>>5676059
Shovel Knight does keep to numerous limitations out of principle, whereas Terraria is not natively 2d at all is it.

>>5676063
Terraria was built in XNA which literally has sprite classes:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/xna/bb194908%28v%3dxnagamestudio.10%29

>>5675983
based
X and Sigma's floating heads is the coolest shit ever

>>5675946
>hi there, i have no idea how programming works at all, but ive played a gazzillion games so im an expert

Actually i just read the rest of that comment chain and I'm in tears of joy
literally none of you have any idea what the fuck you are talking about at all holy shit
keep being retards guys

>>5676037
>They’re generally untampered time capsules we have nostalgia for. I know I love a certain old game because I can fire it up and have a enjoyable experience and if that’s not the case, I can still remember the good times I had.

This

I still fire up PSX from time to time and play the first Air Combat which was the first game I've got for that console. Then I feel like a kid I was back in the day, kicking everyone's ass in dogfights.

I hope that I'll be able to show that game to my kid one day...

>>5675983
>>5676085
They have that now but instead of cool floating heads we get Mocap LA NOIRE EEMMOOOOSSSHUUUUNNNNSSSS

>>5676119
educate us

>>5676126
>dude, just impart 20+ years of knowledge on me to prove yourself to a bunch of basement dwellers who throw around words like "framebuffer" to sound like they know what they are talking about.

nope, not today.
but reast assured, yes, modern hardware can very much do """"true 2d"""" whatever you think that means lmao
devs are pretty lazy, programming as a whole is very lazy these days. anyone writing from the ground up can achieve literally anything they want, but most will jsut crack open unity and do that instead because its easy.
there is no black magic at work in your old hardware that is somehow lost to time.
its not special.

>>5676140
Unsubstantiated contradiction is rhetorically empty. You are saying "I disagree" and nothing else. It has no value to anyone but you, so why post? On an anonymous board, disagreement doesn't even carry the weight of reputation. I question your motivation for posting today other than a need for perceived superiority.

>>5676157
>trying this hard

mate, just stop
Came to this thread to talk about what makes old games special, not to give programming lectures to retards.

The combination of good design and budget/talent. Now you're either get shitty to mediocre looking indie games that are fun to play, or homogenized mass market appeal garbage that's technically impressive. This was mostly due to smaller size of the industry, hardware limitations and now outdated formats like the arcades giving developers the right set of incentives and holding them back from the faggotry they devolved into now.

>>5676164
> Came to this thread to talk about what makes old games special

Obviously you did not.

>>5676008
>>5676020
zoomers still have nostalgia for it, many kids were still playing 6th gen by late 00s and early 10s.
Anyway, that's besides the point. The point is that every generation has nostalgia, it's not something exclusive to pre-2000 stuff.

>>5676179
i did, but upsetting you is way more fun
i love that you type the way you wish you spoke.
"Unsubstantiated contradiction is rhetorically empty" is something that Fraiser would say, the joke being that its a nonsense sentence designed to sound intelligent.
But you went ahead and said it unironically.
you made my day dude, best tea break all week so far.

>>5676190
> tea
> mate
This board is for places with a rich videogame history, not the UK.

>>5676191
haha righto chap
can you hit me up with those norf-fc style memes about shitty old speccy games please

Originality. They are a template for everything that's come ever since. There's been some innovation because of new tech, but most new games are fundamentally the same as their forebears.

>>5676190
oi you really wound him up, a right tosser he was! cheers!

>>5675925
imagination

/actual end of thread.

>>5675925
Simplicity

>>5676025
Why don't you fuck off.

>>5676246
I won't. From this moment on, you are forbidden from spouting memes.

>>5675931
The amount of soulless crap from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, isn't even funny, don't kid yourself.

>>5676336
This. Newbies play the time-tested masterpieces and, lacking all perspective, come to believe that all games were like that. When in reality most games were terrible and--especially in early eighties--quite a few were borderline unplayable.

Tits

Imagine this art but in a good game.

>>5676025
Where do you think we are?

>>5676352
You gotta be legit retarded to think that modern games have less nudity than retro games.

>>5676025
(you)

>>5675931
Soul is a /v/ buzzword. It just means 'i like thing'

If you need to ask you don't belong here in the first place. There isn't a clean answer to your question, there are hundreds of things that can be listed, but, more importantly, there is an unspoken understanding amongst us who just know exactly what we're looking for when we sit down to play a video game. It's a silly question to ask here, it's like asking why people like music.

>>5675925
soul
imagination
good learning and teaching curves of mechanics
good trials in each game akin to their own context as the game slowly ramps up and expects you to use your knowledge more on how the game works to advance to your next goal
good music
inventive atmospheres that were unique to each game aka soul once again
following the video game crash in the 80's there was an unpronounced jump in an effort to make great products as things were not going well so companies started really putting their life into the way games were made. games started having engaging mechanics that felt unique to each. it wasn't about getting preorders or getting your name on a billboard. game developers of new and old were making stride in following visions that they had and ideas they wanted to test out. it reminds me of the tale of john carmack and john romero creating doom. its beautiful that retro is still played and celebrated today as it is and forever will be the standing foundation and structure of games that are here today, but 90% of the games made today are soulless crap, even the indie games. its also in part due to having actual limitations and restrictions back then so you had to literally make the best of what you envisioned on a limited hardware and software space. new game devs can't understand this. its how you get soulless bullshit like shovel knight, iconoclasts, and all those other weird "16 bit" indie games that have zero restrictions to them running with 1080p resolution with a landscape bigger then a painting. the sprites and backgrounds aren't made using traditional methods for pixel art, rather its people drawing on massive Intuos drawing tablets at massive resolutions and then scaling or really doing whatever they want with their sprites.
>>5676846
go back to /v/ please, just because you weren't born early enough to play these games doesn't mean you have to take your unrequited rage on people that still do. we've had too many of you lately.

>>5675925
They're proper games with proper art and skill. Not all of them of course.
They still feel like toys or genuine entertainment rather than overblown bullshit with shit-tier art direction.

/opinion

>>5675925
High budgeted productions not using the same Cal Arts design mold for every single game they make.

>>5675925
Fun factor, innocence and imagination. Just get a Dreamcast and you will know what I mean.

>>5675925
I'm going to use OP's pic for the background on my computer that is plugged into my 4K 55" flat screen.

>>5675925
They dont have bloat

FF VII is a good example of what we can't have in games anymore.

>big tits for sake of big tits
>jokes about gays and crossdressers
>gritty imagery and dark themes in overall joyfull games
>developers trolling the player with dumb stuff
>games trusting the player to not be retarded
>games coming out actually finished and with tons of optional content
>bonus characters are part of the game and require you to find them instead of paying for them

Overall though, the thing I miss most is the fact that big games didn't take themselves too seriously and were often very self aware.

>>5676906
It literally originated from /v/ tho. If anyone should go there its apologists like you

>>5677072
>The concept of originality and creative context independent to each product originated from an anonymous image board in the US!
You have brain damage.

>>5676906
You're demented if you think that every game made back in the 80's and 90's all equally exhibited all those good qualities.
Some games lacked one or two of those, and some even lacked most of them.

Do you have any idea how much completely forgettable crap was made because someone looked at something successful and thought "We should do that too!"?
So many braindead arcade clones of dubious value, so many slapdash sidescrolling platformers with some license pasted on the side, so many crude first person shooters which couldn't achieve even one of the basic standards of the day set by games like Doom, so much shovelware software (and even hardware).
There's no soul in just making a shit imitation of some popular arcade game, there's no imagination in buying the license to Wolfenstein 3D's engine and making a really shitty imitation of the movie Die Hard, there's no auteurism in making the bare minimum of a shootemup around a movie license, there's no advanced thought or grand vision with putting out yet another Pong machine on a market absolutely saturated with them.

History has lots of good games worth remembering and playing, there's lots of good games you missed which you should absolutely check out, hell, there's lots of just decent or 'kinda good' games which may or may not be worth playing, but people like you don't understand just how much valueless garbage coexisted with the treasures.

>>5675946
Limitations force artists to do their best work. Compare the future scenes in Terminator 1 to Salvation, or the production quality on any old album to compressed modern music. Video games in particular thrive on limitations, because when you can do whatever you want you end up trying to do everything and failing at all of it.

>>5677078
Are you sure you dont? Noone said the concept of originality came from /v/, the phrase soul used as a slang buzzword to vaguely describe things literally mirrors the way its used in /v/. Slang from /v/ should stay in /v/ and so should in/v/aders such as yourself.

>>5677219
Also this anon is on the ball

>>5677219
No where did I cite that every game had the same qualities, we're obviously speaking of mean majority of popularized and widely accepted titles. Don't misquote you look stupid. I'm not reading anything past your first line now since you can't even read properly.
>>5677241
weak bait, try again

>>5675925
any semblance of challenge.

the only exception would be indie games (such as my summer car, which is infuriatingly difficult on the first playthrough)

>>5675931
This is legitimately the shittiest meme word /v/ has come up with. It's just a retarded buzzword that can project anything on a game.

>>5677268
>/v/ things should stay in /v/
>bait

>>5677292
>t. souless

>>5675925
Fuzzy sense of nostalgia, ability to make you feel special for not liking new things.

>>5675965
>Halo 4 poster
>soul

>>5677527
Why do you justify /v/ shit? You wouldn't happen to be from there are you?

>>5677538
>/v/
>shit

>>5675965
>faceberg filename
Proof that the only people who spout this "meme" are underageb&. gb2 /v/

>>5677539
so are you saying /v/ isnt shit?

>>5677549
>assuming assumptions

>>5677321
>"look i did it!! i replied to his post mommy!!"

>>5675932
this

>>5675925
Creative projects thrive under limitations. Hardware limitations and smaller dev teams with more focused visions led to innovation and truly unique and interesting concepts.

>>5677539

>>5677665
yeah but you replied too

>>5677717
>Creative projects thrive under limitations
Only to a point.
You're gonna fucking struggle to write a good game with an allowance of one single byte of data.

>>5677767
Yes, but you know what he meant. This is why a modern game like the Messenger outshines triple-A titles. The team had less money and equipment to work with and had to word extra hard and put their SOUL into the game to make it stand out. The skill and effort put into something shines out as "soul". Game engines have been a disaster for commercial game development, for example.

It's not just a baseless meme. If it was it wouldn't be so damn obvious.

If you enjoy platformers and shoot em ups, new releases are slim pickings and often look and play worse than 25 year old games. They literally don't make them like they used to, gotta play old ones you never got around to.

>>5677786
I'll give you that, some genres have really shrunk down over the years.
I also really miss games in isometric perspectives, 3D graphics pretty much killed that.

>>5677717
Hardware constraints are way less lenient than arbitrary creative constraints though, which isn't good for games. Look at the Atari 2600's library compared to anything NES and beyond. Having a few kb of RAM disallows whole genres from even existing, and what can exist is barebones as hell.

>>5675925
>What do retro games have that modern games don't?
working emulators

>>5675925
Memorability. People will ham on about Final Fantasy VII or Ocarina of Time and how great they are on every image board known to man. I seriously doubt ges Like God of War 2018 will have that same impact, nor will any other modern game.

>>5677838
Well... Mostly.

>>5677740

>>5676014
>40s is boomer
wrong!

>>5675979
last week my zoomer cousin called Minecraft retro.

>>5675925
Creativity to make something good with hardware and software limitations...you could only do so much back then and had to really think about how to make shit work. The design philosophy of today is to just keep throwing money at it until it's done or just throw it out if it's working and then get money and maybe fix it later if people still buy it. You can make your game look as good as you have money to spend and can do literally anything gameplay-wise now, so no one has to come up with anything new to get around limitations and they just churn out the same gameplay formula over and over again because it sells.

>>5675925
age
>>5675931
>>5676336
"soul" is not really a thing. At least not in the sense /v/ puts into it (and you parrot)
Any kind of game can be made with passion, great ideas and desire to make a good game. Sometimes result is trash though.

Retro games are games that passed the trial by time. If a game is enjoyable now, just as it was back then - it's a good game. Some games can only be enjoyed in their respective timeframe because their content is only good in comparison to what other contemporary games have (CoD and Halo ride on that).
Look back at Amiga (or better yet Spectrum) library. People played this back in the day, and praised them. But now you'd recognise that 99% of it is shit with no redeeming qualities.
Piles of unimaginative, derivativeshowelvare shit is forgotten, for all the right reasons, and only the best, tried and tested games are remembered.
People cry and whine here about "lost media" and "undumped hidden gems". Well, guess what - there's fuckton of that shit on Amiga that nobody bothered to dump or remember because it was utter garbage not worth being remembered.

The amount of good games you get each year didn't really change. You are just either too lazy to look away from AAAY industry, brainswashed by /v/ into hating non-aaa just because they told you "indies are trash" and you swallowed that, or simply because you are a retard hipster that hates anything new.

>>5676061
false
while we don't have 2D-specific chips on our GPUs since the tasks GPU needs to perform are much more varied now, you can totally use genuine 2D acceleration if you bother to learn and use respective APIs.
Thing is, it's simply not worth the effort most of the time.
Sure, there are retards that slap 2D assets into 3D engine in the easiest way possible, optimisation be damned, and call it a day. Even good games are not safe from that approach (Hollow Knight comes to mind). but that does not mean you CAN'T do things porper way.

>>5678206
T. Shiteater

>>5678261
>t. braindead retard who can't even shitpost right

Isometric plus retro graphics is the comfiest

>>5675925
lol the palm looks like a dick and balls

>>5676024
Ever heard of fragment shaders?

>>5675931
nice bait anon

>>5675925
Passion. Modern games are too large, too expensive. They become products first, passion projects second. Older game had a ratio that was more tilted towards passion project than corporate product (compared to today), and that can be felt in the games.

>>5676024
You could just, you know, disregard calculating things of the GPU and program just for the CPU (as in: don't use 3d-api's). Then you have "2d on the hardware". Makes literally zero difference though.

>>5676024
Programmer here that have made indie game projects, both 2d and 3d. Things turn 3d when you add mathematics that render things 3d. Things start to use the GPU to calculate these things when you start to use 3d-api's and involve shaders. Unless I have a severe knowledge gap I'd say you are a bit off base. Whether things are "programmed on the hardware" or in the software would make literally zero difference on the games though, as would rendering every sprite with openGL instead of say, SDL (or just with your own ways to render pictures and show different tricks).

>>5676024
>what are shaders

>>5675925
soul and heart

>>5675925
Small video game companies were bought up by soulless corporations. Soulless corporations began marketing their games towards the Tyrones and Billy Bobs of the world. Tyrone and Billy Bob aren't passionate gamers and they're not very smart; they buy games based on graphics and marketing hype.

Twenty years later... nothing but shitty interactive movies and simulators passing themselves off as "video games" are on the store shelves. True gamers are forced to play "classic" video games to get their fix while they wait for the inevitable collapse of the video game industry.

>>5679897
lol, people believe this

>>5675925
>What do retro games have that modern games don't?
More technical limitations and simplicity, which sometimes is good but often sucks
>Megaman
too many objects? Slowdown to the max.
don't like the controls, like double tap forcing a dash? Can't disable that.

>>5675968
Not really, modern games are very different

>>5680181
They are, in a lot of ways people here are actually right about, but also in ways they aren't.

>>5675965
>retro games on LCD TV

>>5680317

>>5680345
>he thinks PC monitors are the same as CRT TVs
Unless you have VGA on your system (like Dreamcast), nope.
And still most devs intended the games to be shown on regular CRT TVs through composite.