/vr/ - Retro Games

1988

1993

94 but i forgot why

>>6317739
1997

golden age of psx + tomb raider, age of empires, MDK, Grand theft auto....

98 is a strong contender.

OoT, Starcraft, Thief, MGS, Baldur’s Gate, Grim Fandango, Marvel Vs Capcom 1, Banjo Kazooie, Fallout 2, Halflife, others I’m not thinking of. Even if you consider those games overrated they’re considerable leaps forward in terms of user interface and polish and are inarguably influential on their genres or in some cases even the whole medium. Those are the most notable games but there’s others from that year you’ll see recommended or discussed pretty frequently.

Was a strong year for gaming for sure.

>>6317850
true that.
Though I always had a soft spot for the 93-94, which gave us doom, warcraft, tie fighter, and others.

1996 is when Lufia 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Donkey Kong Country 3 got released so I'd say that's my personal favorite.
1994, 1998 and 1991 were what I'd call milestones in gaming with games like Doom 2, DKC1, Super Metroid, Thief, Street Fighter 2 and Wolfenstein 3D just to name a few examples.

>>6317739
1994 if you were an SNES person. It was the pivotal year for the system when games that really pushed the console's abilities started to come out. You had Super Metriod, DKC, MK2, Demon's Crest, Earthworm Jim, FF6, Shaq-Fu, and even EarthBound (in japan).

I'm more of a 60s guy.

It seems like the 4th year of every decade since the 80s has been the best.

94, 97, and 98 were the best for me for the reasons stated earlier. 97-98 was an exciting time for 3D games. Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye, Tekken 3, Final Fantasy VII, and too many others to list. 98 also had the English release of Pokemon, starting the whole craze.

Thinking about it though, it's harder to pick a bad year for games in the 90s. The whole late 80s through early 2000s seems like it was a golden age of great games and innovation. The years I was most disappointed with were probably the late 2000s (06-08 in particular).

>>6317739

I'd say 93-94, there was just so much cool stuff going on, Sonic, Donkey Kong Country, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Mana, Chrono, Streets of Rage, Ecco, etc.
I was buying game magazines and renting games in the weekend and talking about games with my friends during lunch break in High School.

I enjoyed the 80s for sure, MSX and C64 and all. but nothing compares to the Snes/MD era of 93-94.

>>6317974
I would agree with that. I almost mentioned 01 as a great year for vidya earlier but that goes outside the board’s territory. Still though, smash bros melee, halo 1, silent hill 2, mgs 2, ico, and others.

I think the issue with the late 2000s is that the sense of forward movement really disappeared.

Nintendo had the wii which should have been revolutionary, but surprise surprise the motion controls were kinda dogshit and barely utilized in anything besides minigame collections. We all thought games would be like functional versions of red steel, instead we got the actual red steel and twilight princess’s ‘motion controls’. At the end of the gen they release motion plus which was what they false advertised wii as being 5 years earlier, but you have to recalibrate it every ten minutes and it’s still not that great and the console is fucking done anyway. The forward movement wasn’t here, it was a scam.

360 popularized online play for consoles but also ruined it. Paid online and rrod being super common without warranty (was it like 10% of systems crashing?) shouldve been inexcusable. Cinematic games existed before this point but I feel like this console/audience is where the modern AAA machine really took root. The ‘forward movement’ that should’ve been here were just practices that fucked industry standards.

Old memes aside ps3 eventually built up an okay library, but is all in all pretty unremarkable. I have no real complaints though.

There also just wasn’t near as much of a leap as there was between 5th/6th gens. All my personal greivances aside, the diminishing returns pretty undeniably started around here. Didnt mean to go on a rant but yeah, late 2000s felt like a period of major disillusionment.

To offset my sounding like a cranky geezer, I think things have improved immeasurably in the decade since then, mainly due to indie publishing being much more feasible.

>>6318117
>only talking about consoles
Meanwhile PC was making huge bounds during the late 00s.

>>6318186
Yeah I fully admit my knowledge in that department is lacking. For whatever reason I seem to only play either very old pc games or very recent ones.

>>6317964
What is your favorite 1960s video game?

I've actually crunched the numbers using my own game collection.

As you can see with these boxplots of user ratings across IMDB and Metacritic over the past 30 years, over 50% games released in the following years scored at least 8/10 or higher:

a) 2003
b) 2002
c) 2000
d) 1997

Because the distribution of user ratings for games released 1997 is approx. symmetrical, we can say that on average users scored games just over 8/10.

The average rating of all games from 2003, 2002 and even 2000 would be irrelevant because the distribution is negatively skewed.

Therefore, 1997 was the year that saw the best games released on average using my game collection as the sample.

>>6317739
Console milennials thread.
>>6319887
Three of those years arn't retro.

>>6319895
Who fucking knows and who fucking cares?

>>6317745
90% of the games I rented or bought for snes back in the day seemed like they came out in 1993. I mained snes on into the early 2000s but it seemed like most games I encountered for the system were from 93 for whatever reason.

>>6319873
Tennis for Two

>>6317970
as someone born in 1984, I approve of this comment.

That said - in the first half of the 90s I was 6-10 years old, and all I had was an Atari 800 XE (with a floppy drive), and I missed a lot of the classics, only reading about them in magazines. I got a pc in 1996.

1985-1994 was the best, i can't contain the best 10 years to an actual decade

>>6320269
well, there is a distinct shift from the lata-DOS powerhouses (and Win95 was basically DOS+GUI), to the windows games of the second half of the 1990s.

On one hand, the hardware pre-1995 was still severely limited, and developers really had to try to make the most of it.
On the other hand, we had SVGA graphics, and games like Eye of the Beholder 2, Doom, etc. were pretty to look at (and aged surprisingly well).

Then in the Windows 95 era, games really started pushing the envelope, but innovation was still the name of the game - largely owing to the great video game crash a decade before, when devs realised putting out mediocre titles and just ticking off coupons wouldn't do.

It's hard to say exactly without seeing a release date chart but the stretch from 97-99 was absolutely nuts in terms of games that would stand as classics across every platform and genre, with RTS in particular standing as still unsurpassed with games like Starcraft and Age Of Empires 2 still being updated and played consistently for over 20 years now. I don't have the picture but this was the era Squares holiday ad for one year had FFT, Parasite Eve, and Brave Fencer Musashi among others, which was only for one company. From headliners to more niche type stuff it was a bottomless goldmine as far as the eye could see. Some games are popular now and make a ton of money, but it was a really different sort of deal back then when you had FF7, MGS, and OoT all coming out within almost a year of each other, to say nothing of the Pokemon virus. Also the Dreamcast dropping right at the end of that stretch and getting Soul Calibur at home, among a million others that I'm leaving out. By just about any metric there is I don't think that age of the industry overall is going to be surpassed in any regard outside of profitability, it's basically been a lot of downhill with some momentary reprieves in the time since. You could lump in a lot of the earlier years going back to Doom but it seems like those late 90's years were where everything really came to a head.

>>6320342

well, the introduction of the CD-ROM, as trivial as it may sound now, had something to do with that.
And the internet, which was still "magic land" in the late 90s, not the place so many people take for granted nowadays.

Even getting to connect to your buddy and playing a game over LAN was a big thing.

What i'm trying to say here, is that video games in the 90s were on the cutting edge of technology, and it is no longer the case. Things like RTX, as impressive as they are, are mere novelties.
The widespread success of monumental games like RDR, TLOU, Witcher 3, or even "just" another shooter that is Doom Eternal - that's welcome, but not the same kind of awesome...

Gotta go with 1985.
Super Mario Bros, Space Harrier, Gradius, Gauntlet, and many others.

>>6318117
You've summed up my feelings about the Wii perfectly. At the time of release, all my friends were at Eric Cartman levels of Wii obsession, and when one of them finally got a console we just about lost our collective minds. But after playing it for the first time, I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed. Even in 2007. It just felt so jerky and imprecise. But in those early days, you at least had the novelty factor. The system's library has aged horribly.

Interestingly, the Wii is now a pretty good way to get into the Gamecube library. Wii consoles can be bought for less than a GC, and they often include the component cables (which run $200+ for the GC). So in theory you can get a better image than running a GC through composite or S-Video. And if you soft-mod your Wii, it's a really awesome emulation machine when hooked up to a CRT. There are compelling reasons for owning a Wii, but playing Wii games is ironically not one of them.

>>6320342
What I find amusing is that the original Starcraft now seems to be more popular than SC2. Because as popular as SC2 was in the early-mid 2010s, we eventually came to realize that BW was technically the better game. On that note, I have never heard an argument in favour of Starcraft 2 over Brood War that didn't involve some combination of

>The graphics are bad
>I can't control units properly
>I don't want to research or experiment with tactics
>I want all my games to end in 10 minutes or less
>I want constant updates and changes otherwise I get bored
>Brood War fans are so toxic for pointing out my flaws

>>6317739
For me personally the latter half of the 90s was incredible. I have ton of memories and nostalgia for Gen 5 and its games.

>>6320745
Yeah wii is a god tier emulation machine. My mod channels and such are like a decade out of date, I should look into all the more convenient launchers and such that it has now so I dont have to launch one game at a time from nintendont.

Also while I dont want to derail the thread, I will say that the reaction to starcraft 1/2 reminds me a lot of melee/new smash bros games. Not really into starcraft myself but some of my friends are and have the same opinions you do. the similarities in terms of how people react to these games is uncanny.

>>6317739
1999

online gaming was good before mmos and games as a service crept in

>>6320342
Maybe not the exact same ad, but it shows what you were saying about Square. Great time for games all around.

'88 here
Gone from C64 to PS1
It was like fly to the moon for me

>>6321259
That was like me when I went from a monochrome Game Boy to a PSP.

The graphics themselves were not unprecedented, but having all those functions stuffed into a tiny little mobile package in 2005 was like alien technology.

>>6321374
PSP graphics were still insane for its time. Even if you bought every handheld before, you'd still get a big jump from GBA graphics to this.
Also you could hack it almost day 1 and play nes games on it. Terrific hardware.

>>6319873
Spacewar

>>6321394
To clarify, I meant the graphics were not unprecedented in that they were equivalent to the Dreamcast, but for mobile, I did think they were nothing short of incredible. Also yeah it was pretty nifty how the PSP was hacked. Someone apparently messed around with a score downloading feature in Wipeout and from there got a dump of the system firmware. It was worth owning the hardware just for the hackability.

I personally didn't soft mod my PSP until I graduated high school in 2007, but I was sure glad that I did. At the time, I did have a SNES (still do), but only owned 6 games for it (DKC, SMW, Yoshi's Island, SMK, Mystical Ninja and LTTP... so all good ones at least). I ended up playing and beating Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Pocky & Rocky, Earthworm Jim, Super Metroid and a ton of other great games on the PSP, hooked up to a CRT using composite. Of course, I now wish that I just BOUGHT carts of all those games since they were a fraction of the cost that they are today, but at the time I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. It would also do PS1 games almost natively. There was a ROM conversion program that took a PS1 ISO and turned it into a PSP ISO. At one point I could "play" 6 different consoles with a single piece of hardware.

>>6317739
Hands down it was 1996
>Super Mario 64
>Duke Nukem 3D
>Resident Evil
>Quake
>Pokemon Red and Blue
>Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
>Crash Bandicoot
>Tomb Raider
>Diablo
>Super Mario RPG
>The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall
>Mario Kart 64

And many more

>>6320906
That's the one. Crazy to think about compared to now.

>>6320745
I think a lot of the interest in SC2 was mainly driven by a "we're not going to let the Koreans get in front of us this time" sort of sense, more than anything specifically about the game itself. They eventually did succeed in that regard judging by the recent tournaments but it was an entirely different animal when it was new and is even moreso now after the expansions and patches, and I don't think there would have been much interest in it had the name and notoriety of Korean professional BW not been attached. Sort of similar to Diablo 3, it being the fastest selling game of all time (or was when it was released) says far more about how much people liked Diablo 2 than anything about 3. Most things now seem like middling attempts to get the lightning back in the bottle.

*sips*

ah, the 90s, now that was a decade! anyone else remember arcades?

>>6322152
Why are kids so passive aggressive about people discussing stuff? I get that it's probably because you weren't alive, but you really are overly romanticizing the time period. No need for this kind of hostile and overt jealousy.

>>6322184
*sips*

remember pogs? anyone want to play pogs? still got my lucky crusher in the attic!

>>6322184
Children don't like being excluded.

>>6322196
>replying to himself

>>6322203
Quiet, adults are talking

>>6322206
you know, in the 90s it was still okay to laugh at people like you with mental disorders

*sips*

the sega genesis, now THAT was a console!

>>6317739
1993, the year of Doom and the birth of the deathmatch and made FPS what it became today

the late 2000s really was a departure from video games being about fun and progression into the test marketed bland media that movies also became in the era, blame the recession and publishers doing retarded shit with developers
calling a game linear used to mean that it took out shit like side quests or other bonuses that video games used to have in favor of a single track singleplayer game, nowadays it means a literal turret section of an fps game where you aren't allowed to go backwards or wander off or the game will auto kill you because the devs don't want to fuck with the AI having to come and look for you to kill you
it used to be in video games that if you wanted to add a feature like a helicopter kill streak you'd have to add shit like vehicles having their own physics and identity in the game both as a npc element and game engine feature so it would physically exist in the world with ai, bounding boxes, physics, ect
now its all like call of duty where you just throw a 3d model up into the air unaffected by gravity just following a simple loop while it auto fires at you and exists as something no simpler than a bounding box for the hit registration

Microsoft Windows is my favorite MS-DOS app

>>6322371
>app

found the millennial, nobody said "app" in the 90s

>>6322586
You post this in every thread you can. It's weird.

>>6322863
I have no idea what you're talking about but it sounds like you use the word "app" inappropriately a lot and have been corrected repeatedly by many people but still fail to learn

>>6322093
>Diablo
>released Dec 30th 1996

you are walking a fine line there my friend :)

>>6322586
not to be nitpicky about it, but millenials were born in the 80s. I was born in 1984, so I'm technically a millenial, and I basically grew up in the 90s.

I'll agree, that nobody said "app" back then - we just called them programs, like normal people...

how'd it all go so wrong

>>6323042

>>6323042
I don't know. Maybe it's just the industry becoming so big, with games being so expensive to make, that the big budget games tend to be "test marketed bland media" like >>6322369 said. Along with a bunch of crap to milk money out of you. It's not all bad though, in a lot of ways I'm happier with recent years over the late 2000s. There's still a variety of great games coming out.

>>6323042
When a medium reaches critical mass and becomes about mass appeal, it can only go downhill

>>6323042
>>6323045
>>6323054
>>6323060


Internet.

When games were distributed physically, and there was no DLC, you had to put everything in the game, and get it right from the get go - even getting patches was dificult, when people were limited to video game magazines and the CDs they came with for their dlc and patches.

Then internet became commonplace, and downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of data became easy, and digital distribution kicked in, and greedy bastards like EA came up with this "service instead of a product" approach, which has nothing to do with providing a service, but everything to do with charging for it.

Like I said in the beginning - in the 90s, technology was making big breakthroughs - we went from EGA/CGA, to VGA/SVGA, and then 3dfx and beyond.
4x1.44MB was no longer the limit for what you could put in the game, and some games didn't even fit in 650MB, and needed multiple CDs.
But at the same time, it was still primitive enough, that people needed to use every trick they had, to make something wonderful.

Now we have what? Call of Yearly Franchise? GTAwhatnumberareweon?

There's hardly any innovation going on. Even the highly anticipated games, like CP2077, are not really innovative - it may come out great, but at the core, it's no more innovative in design, than Daggerfall (technology aside).

>>6323096
>and there was no DLC

Sure there was, it was just called an "expansion pack" instead

>>6323096
>When games were distributed physically, and there was no DLC, you had to put everything in the game, and get it right from the get go
Let’s be real, while game devs now have much less incentive to get a bug free complete release, let’s not pretend the ranks retro games aren’t also filled with broken and buggy games

>>6323103
yeah, but you had to go out and buy it, and there had to be enough content to justify making a boxed release, even with a reduced price compared to the base game.

No horse armor horseshit.
DLC was in the form of user-made maps, and models for games like Quake2, and it was free.

>>6322969
As you can clearly see I like to live life on the edge. It still counts though but to be honest I think it's aged worse than any of the other games I listed so I probably shouldn't have included it anyway.

>>6323112
>and there had to be enough content to justify making a boxed release

I don't know, a lot of expansions for games had very little content... Honestly, the real problem is people paying $200 dollars for an in-game mount

>>6322586
the term killer app has been thrown around for decades

>>6323118
Personally I think the problem isn’t really with DLC itself but rather the companies that exploit the concept to its extreme and the mindless consumers who reward such practices. It’s telling that the worst examples of this lie in mobile gachas where you have the widest demographic of nongamers who have place no value in actual content

I think the real question is why does the indie scene attempt to mimic AAA so hard? A lot of C64 games were written by 1 or 2 guys, and even though most of them were shit, nearly all of them at least tried something original

No wonder vidya is stagnant if there's literally nobody left trying to keep the dream alive

>>6323127
>>6323136

because as long as it was a subculture, and not taken 100% seriously, a lot of the developers were passionate about the games they made, and trying to push the envelope as far as they could.

Then the marketing people got hold of it, and this is what we have.
Seriously - they teach you this in basic economics - to identify your dogs, stars, and milk cows.
Dogs are the products that don't earn money. Milk Cows are the products that are not spectacular, but pull in a lot of money, and stars are the products that have the potential to be big hits.

And you are supposed to plan your strategy from there. Then there's things like price discrimination - in other words who gets what discounts, and why. And that "turning players into payers" thing Jim Sterling makes fun of is a real concept they teach you in school.

>>6323045
I'm sorry, but I have to know if you made this or found it.

Because the fact that King of Queens, Kim Possible, and Billy/Mandy ended should have been celebrated across the world.

Everything else is objectively correct.

>>6323136
They're not made for you, they're made for vaporwave hipsters who like the aesthetic.
And that's smart because you wouldn't buy a new arcade style game anyway. Because you're OLD and dying of CORONA.

>>6317739
Golden Age of gaming, truly, was 1989-2006
Literally all of the best games of all time came out within that time frame. It's a big chunk of time yes and 7 years of it aren't /vr/ but still

>>6323638
i'm genuinely curious, what made you extend the date to 2006?

>>6323824
I lost my virginity at 2006.

>>6323828
that's hardly a significant event in the world of video games, even if it happened to be in virtual reality.

>>6323824
I assume last period of time before the rise of mobile, DLC, and full online integration into everything

>>6323842
maybe, buy to me, it's more about the fact that beyond 2000 (man that was such a great show), video games weren't cutting edge anymore.
The difference between diablo (december 96), and Unreal (may 98) was a little over a year, and while Diablo would run on a potato, Unreal required what was (at the time) a monster rig.

>>6317739
This is a hard one for me. As a PC gamer, it would be between:

1997: Shadow Warrior, Blood, NFSII, POSTAL, Diablo.
1998: Quake II, Half-Life, POSTAL, SiN, NFSIII.

And don't forget, that the 21st century only had one good year for gaming, and that was 2004. SWAT 4, FEAR, HL2, DOOM 3. Now everything just sucks balls.

>>6323042
When we let greedy, faggot devs and progressive beliefs take over the game industry. Everything just seems forced nowadays. No real improvements in graphics at all. Crysis from 2007 still looks a lot better than most AAA games made today. I believe the collapse of the game industry will come soon.

>>6323638
>Golden Age of gaming, truly, was 1989-2006
I'd say 1988-2006 or maybe even 1987-2006.
From 1987 to '88 there were a lot of classics like After Burner, Rastan, Chase H.Q., Mega Man 1 & 2, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Contra, Super Contra, R-Type, Maniac Mansion, Double Dragon, Operation Wolf, Phantasy Star, Tetris, Altered Beats, Galaxy Force, Bad Dudes, Super Mario Bros. 3, etc. Just too many classics to not include those years into the Golden Age.

>5th gen
>golden era
lol no

>>6323125
>killer app
I swear to the gods that I can remember what I'm almost sure was a commercial for Comcast high speed internet with an annoying cunt blathering the entire time and ending the commercial by referring to the internet service as "the killer app." I really hope I just dreamed that up. I remember it pissing me off to no end every time I'd see it.

>>6323136
Most indie developers are basically cover bands, and they're not trying to do Space Invaders. Within the first minute you're struck by "Oh these guys must have really liked X" in 95% of them, until the ramshackle nature of it makes it so you'd rather just go play X again. The rest get mired in the "whoa, mental illness, that's deep" sludge. You see some interesting gimmicks sometimes but often they're not enough to hold an entire game up, and would have been side activities in older games in many cases. AA is almost always where the real gold is imo.

>>6323582
I found it. Never watched the others, but Billy and Mandy was good. The period after it ended was relatively weak for Cartoon Network as I recall.

2000 just seemed like cool shit was everywhere and accessible. toy stores were just floor to ceiling with videogames, everyone had consoles. pawn shops had older consoles cheap as dirt. places would trade games straight up. bartering with friends for games, finding nes systems in every attic and basement and yardsale.

>>6317850
Yep. '98. Gotta be. '99 comes damn close though.

>>6322926
>I have no idea what you're talking about
Sure you do. A quick look at the archives shows you being triggered every time someone says "app" in a thread. I mean, you're not wrong about its usage, but it's still weird to see you go off about it repeatedly.