/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8135856
I appreciated awesome, artistic cartridges as a kid. I knew what a fucking video game was and would look like.
I absolutely hated the DVD era, where both games and movies replaced artistic covers with mugshots of the lead actor/character.

I was too young for the Atari generation, my first console was the NES, so the graphics were fully realized things. Can't say I ever felt anything like OP's comic.

Unless you were an absolute retard, you knew the state of technology at the time and what a gaming console was capable of.
Cool cover art was just an extra nice thing to look at and just a way to grab your attention in a store.

I suppose that refers mostly to Atari era games?
I only played NES and Genesis as a kid and didn't think about it at all. Covers are covers, you look to screenshots and gameplay to rank for yourself if the game's good, before you buy.

>>8135859
>I knew what a fucking video game was and would look like.
This

No, they usually had screenshots on the back.
I think I only remember once or twice something like that happening and it was with rentals in the NES era.

The Gameboy is especially guilty of this sort of artwork. Based on the US artwork you'd figure the game would be about a detective who was left for dead seeking revenge, but in actuality it's a game about a cutesy ghost possessing other cutesy characters. The European artwork is much more accurate. This happens a LOT with Gameboy games in particular.

>>8135859
Yeah, I really miss that time when cover artists had to put their creativity to work and do their best to draw the game contents only by vague description. Even if it was super bad and cringey like with Mega Man 1 cover, it's still better than just 3D render of character which is basically 99% of box arts nowadays.

>>8135856
Graphical fidelity is whatever, but I got heated when the cover art or literature lied.

>>8135889
The PS1 is the worst offender of this shit. I really hate the word soulless, but those shitty CGI renders might as well be

>>8135859
Yeah that's pretty lame when it's just a face or whatever.
>>8135863
Well, I would still say the NES era had some shit that was a far stretch from the actual game.

Interesting bit of trivia, this phenomenon is exactly why the first batch of NES games had the pixel box art. Nintendo of America didn't want to repeat Atari's mistakes and decided to be 100% transparent about the game you were getting.

>>8135901
>PAL region Breath of Fire 3
Poor devils.

>>8135886
>what it's supposed to be: Avenging Spirit
>what it actually is: Dead Connection

>>8135856
When I was a kid the mere fact I even got a new game to play. Didn't give a shit about the box art.

>>8135856
When I was a kid the mere fact I even got a new game to play made me happy beyond belief. Didn't give a shit about the box art.

>>8135901
Late PSX era is DVD era, so absolutely.
I feel like early releases had some killer case art, and it helped that they came in really large cases. I distinctly remember seeing this awesome cover as a kid at a rental place and being jealous I couldn't play it, even though I knew I didn't like 3, and could have played the same game on my SNES.

>>8135886
Yeah now that you mention it, Gameboy did that alot.
>>8135904
Interesting, didn't know that, but if so, then it means a lot of people actually did care that the box art was very different to the game?

>>8135889
The background in the Mega Man 1 box art is painted-over concept art of Wily's fortress. I think the artist was told "draw some kind of a mega man, he has blue armor and shoots the bad guys"

>>8135912
Holy shit. Avenging Spirit is by Jaleco and Dead Connection is by Taito, but I wonder if they got their art mixed up. Perhaps there was a canceled console port of DC that got lost, and GB got the artwork of that hypothetical port?

>>8135951
The problem is that it looks like a kid drew it. This is awesome.

>>8135967
>This'll appeal to Western sensibilities!

>>8135974
If it is airbrushed and has chrome, absolutely yes.

>>8135951
I remember reading that the artwork was produced at the eleventh hour, just before the game had to be shipped. They didn't have the time to go over any wrong details so they probably just said 'fuck it, good enough'. I still wonder who the artist was.

>>8135979
Based.
>>8135984
Considering the success of Mario, Kirby, Pokemon, etc... Do you guys think the game would have been hurt if it was just released with the Japanese cover?

>>8135967
>The problem is that it looks like a kid drew it.
The pal art for Mega Man 1 is good too. They redrew the characters in a realistic style and it has the same building from the concept art shown from a different angle.
>American box
Somebody who doesn't normally do art, or an "artist" who was friends with somebody at Capcom USA did this. Color directly over the concept art for the building and change a few things so you can say it's an original drawing, draw mega man as an old man with a gun squatting to take a shit.

if the game was good you can generally imagine what the blocks and shit are. like the dragons in adventure look more like ducks but you still felt that they were fearsome monsters
and if the game sucks you had bigger problems than the graphics

>>8135967
>>8136010
Mega Man 3 kept japanese Mega Man's head and body shape, but has the knee joints from Mega Man 1 EU and silver Mega Man's muscular chestplate.

>>8136045
Dr. Wily and Heihachi are the same person, apparently.

>>8135856
>Or did you imagine those pixels were actually what was on the cover?
Yes. The pixel graphics were just a crude representation of what was really going on. In some ways, the simpler the graphics were the more you had to use your imagination and the more lifelike the game world became. Like a reverse uncanny valley.

>>8135856
Didn't play Atari garbage. NES games tended to look MUCH, MUCH better.

>>8135950
One suspected reason for the crash was people stopped buying games after getting burned one too many times from deceptive box art that made the game look a lot fancier than it actually was.

>>8135856
>did you just not think about it at all?
Did not think about it. I mean, books (still) have the same deal with visual dissonance between the cover art and the contents; I read books back then and I still do. I don't remember even caring about video games graphics at all until I first saw either an Amiga or a Genesis (can't remember which I saw first).

>>8135974
It looks like the cover of an Isaac Asimov novel so they probably wanted people to have that familiarity.

>>8135995
It probably would have been fine but remember that video games were not really their own thing yet. They were still largely thought of as electronic toys and as such the goal was to treat them the way you would action figures or board games: connect them to something familiar. Which meant aping whatever was popular in "real" entertainment like movies, TV shows, novels, or even comic books.

>>8135965
>draw art for Dead Connection port
>it's cancelled
>get assigned Avenging Spirit cover
>it has one gangster enemy in it
>here's your cover bro

>>8135863
Pretty much me. I played some 5200, but that was alongside the NES as best I recall, not to mention my earliest NES game was SMB/DH, so it matched the game fairly well. Maybe at the back of my mind I thought "wow, wouldn't it be great if one day games looked like this art," but I never dwelled on it. Probably a good analogy would be like seeing the food photographs on a menu at a fast food restaurant and then getting the sad reality of your meal - it might alarm you once, but you quickly accept it as just the way it is and not dwell on it.

>>8136010
That art is really cool.
>>8136073
Good point, like they say how black and white pictures make you use your imagination more than color, and how Nomura pushed for more text-only dialogue in his games because he thought it was a better experience than constant voice acting.
>>8136107
Interesting.
>>8136127
Good insight, so how did people react to games that used the Japanese art like Nintendo franchises? Was there an initial hesitation towards them?

>>8135856
When I was a kid and went to the video store I passed by all the boxes with "realistic" cover art because in my mind, real life is boring and cartoons were cool, so I picked up stuff with cartoony or sprite based covers. Never was disappointed that way.

>>8135859
Yeah, fucking photoshop has ruined so much. One of my favourite things is old science fiction paperbacks.

nintendo doesn't have this problem

>>8136369
Soulless.

>>8136079
>NES games tended to look MUCH, MUCH better.
Nah they tended to be shovelware that played like trash. 2600 games were minimalistic but they had tight gameplay and impressive sound design. Contra guns sfx sound extremely weak next to Berzerk and Wizard of Wor.

>>8135856
zoomer drew that comic

>>8135867
No, don't excuse them. The world is literally a better place when people are honest and frank instead of this conman behavior. Just because you do something doesn't mean you deserve money for it and doing things to trick people into purchasing your shit, even if it's like putting out one good song while the rest of your album is trash, is wrong. If you set expectations regardless if you're aware of it or not and fail to meet them, you are in the wrong and deserve whatever misfortune happens to your product. It's like a comedy having all the funny parts in its advertisements and then when you go to the theatres you saw all the funny parts already. It's wrong and conman esque behavior. If you honestly believe they're okay to do such things you're the reason why games will advertise being a mmo when they aren't and a plethtora of other lies people just brush aside and continue supporting which turns the gaming industry into shit since there's no accountability when someone lies or tries to trick people into wasting money on their product.

>people who don't understand the concept of abstraction and letting your imagination fill the gap
Don't ever try to read a book. You won't get it.

>>8135856
don't have high expectations, only bought bootlegs and multicarts. when cd became the norm I just see the screenshots at the back

>>8135856
This comic would be funnier if it ended at the 3rd panel. I fucking hate webcomic faggots.

>>8136418
Maybe you shouldn't because a cover will carry pretense into the text thus ruining your oh so precious imagination.

>>8136418
why do you defend false advertising?
are you a kike or just a stupid amerishit

>>8136432
It's not false advertising. It's an artistic interpretation of the game.
It's no different to this shit. Does Ico actually look like this? No, it doesn't.

>>8136435
shut the fuck up

>>8136441
not me but I share this sentiment
by the way yes ico looks like this

Only slightly related, but I there's that Jet Moto 2 commercial where the rider got off his bike in the game and started trash-talking the granny playing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzo0n528yhE

And for some reason I was SURE that that was actually in the game. That, as an easter egg, if you idled long enough, the rider would get off their bike and start trash-talking the screen. I don't know, seemed reasonable to me.

>>8136441
No. You are wrong, and need to be told.

>>8136446
Ico looks like a painting, and not a janky early PS2 game?

>>8136435
>cover looks like pretentious hipster artsy shit
>game plays like poorly designed hipster shit

All in all I'd say it checks out.

I would argue this kind of shit is closer to false advertising, because it might actually fool a few hapless people into thinking those are ingame graphics.

>>8136435
The visual isn't exactly the same but yes, you have two characters running around in an environment close to that, and the visuals are good in the game.

>>8136515
And yet this is false advertising, despite also being a depiction of what happens in the game?

>>8136429
That's because you, much like myself, are a super intelligent higher life form who uses their imagination to fill in the rest after the third panel. Mere humanoids need to see a facial expression to have the conclusion register with them as they see an epic reaction image and tell themselves 'OMG HE MAKE FACE LIKE 'HUH!? WHAT THIS!? THIS NOT LIKE PICTURE ON BOX!?'

>>8135856
For me, it was the mechanics of the game. If I'm supposed to be fighting a dragon, I want to feel like I'm fighting a dragon, whether it's 8 pixels tall or bigger than the screen area.

>>8136525
Not whoever you were having a big huff about 'false advertising' with. Dunno about putting that term on it, but there's a much bigger gap between the game visuals and the actual game in the case of Asteroids. You could probably pick some other examples though, Ico art looks much closer to the game than other PS2 and even later games.

>>8136539
I don't perceive a distinction at all. The art presents an impression of how the game is supposed to feel, but the game doesn't actually look like that.

>>8136549
Sure, it's a reasonable point to make that the art is supposed to represent the feel, it's just that the Ico and Asteroids thing is a confusing example. Both can be said to represent the feel, if you point that out first, but just on first glance people are probably just thinking about the visuals and saying okay Ico is way closer to that picture than Asteroids is to its own picture in terms of just the look.

>>8136557
I don't even think it is. At no point does Ico look like a painting. There's no canvas filter. There's no area that looks exactly like the one in the image with that expanse of yellow ground, or the green sky in the background.

>>8136562
Now this is just semantics. People understand that the medium is different and that a painting or drawing as promotional art or a cover does not mean the game needs to look canvas and oil painting. This is way off course now. I get that you're saying art is always somewhat different than the game but we're getting into details just to argue now.

>>8136539
>Ico art looks much closer to the game
To me that's closer to false advertising, like >>8136491 said. No one expected Asteroids in-game graphics to look exactly like the cover art. Just like no one expects a book to be filled with illustrations similar to the one on the cover.

>>8136413
Preach brother, fight the power!

>>8135856
I started gaming with gen 4 in the very early 90s, which is when vidya first had great gameplay and visuals, so I never had that problem.

>>8136349
I actually did this as well, never put into words why I did it, but I still remember all those games with real people or whatever on the cover and how those were the games I never rented.

>>8136589
ROW ROW

>>8136413
Based.

>>8136349
>>8136630
I didn't have a console when I was a kid. But when renting movies I only wanted to watch cartoons for the same reason. I thought of movies with real people as grown-up movies and therefore boring.

>>8135856
Even though I was like 5, I didn't expect the actual game to look like the covers, I was little not retarded.

>>8135856
Why are webcomics like this? You would have to be a complete inbred jackass to not understand technology and it's limitations based on it's time of release.

>>8135856
>Were you like wtf?
No, because there were screenshots on the back of the cover.

>>8136670
Anon...

I really don't get how we can even be having this conversation. Have people's abilities to imagine and immerse really sunk so low? Of course we used our imaginations. Why would we be like WTF. If I was playing fucking Golden Axe or whatever shit on my Genesis, I probably had a pretty good idea of what was normal on the system. There's no WTF. I may certainly expect newer games to look better than old games but graphical improvements were steps not leaps.

>>8135856
I didn't grow up with crude 2600 games, I grew up with NES games and PC games, where things actually looked like things.

>>8135867
This.

>>8135904
They did take a few liberties there anyway, adding speed lines and enhancing some small details here and there on those covers, but otherwise they truthfully conveyed the appearance of the graphics in the game.

>>8135856
Not whatever this shitty comic depicts, that's for sure.

I guess I did actually wonder why Kuros was almost naked on the cartridge art, while in the game he's decked out head to toe in plate armor.

>>8135974
Yeah, look at the cyborg warrior with his chromed steel body and arm cannon, look at the beasts depicted in the foreground, look at the cool as fuck skull fortress at the top of that ominous cliff.

>>8135979
Hell yes, brother.

>>8136010
I always loved the hell out of this art.

>>8136709
Well the only way to know for sure is to ask the resident boomers and find out exactly what they felt. Same as if you see a vet you ask him what war is like instead of assuming yourself because you weren't there. Gamers from before the NES area are our vets on this board.

>>8136723
Not that I minded this, by the way, because a knight decked out in full steel was way cooler to me.

>>8136045
Kinda dig that juxtaposition in styles desu.

>>8136403
>2600 games were minimalistic but they had tight gameplay and impressive sound design
lol no, the library was flooded with rehashed garbage, for every reasonably popular arcade port there were dozens of cutrate clones of it

the NES had its share of shit games, but finding the really good ones was never hard, partially because the library wasn't as stupidly bloated as the 2600's

>>8136747
The nes had a bigger library and more shovelware though.

>>8136767
The numbers I recall is that the NES had like 700 games, while the VCS had closer to 10000

>>8136747
>>8136767
Both have points. NES had tons of shit, so did SNES, PS1, etc... but it was easy to tell what the top-tier games were. As for Atari generation, I have no experience with that.

fortunately whenever i first heard "don't judge a book by its cover" when i was like three or something, i immediately understood that this also applies to other things

>>8136860
VCS as in all Atari consoles????
>>8136881
Are you gloating about blindly thinking as you're told and never questioning it because 'it's a saying' and never changing your views on the world since being a 3-year old? If so, based.

>>8136886
free thought isn't simply the ability to unrelentingly reject and question every single thing you hear. if you fight back against everything you're still ultimately a slave because all they have to do to control you is tell you the opposite of what you want them to do or think. true free thinking involves being able to recognize and accept that someone came to the right answer before you may have even ever thought about it and not letting your ego get in the way of accepting it

Boxes always had pics on the back. The problem was with the home computer arcade ports, that in many cases had pictures of the original arcade and not the actual port, obviously no one expected a pixel perfect, but being not able to judge was suspicious. Luckily there were game magazines, we bought them just to look at the pics, even back then we knew that game journalism was a joke.

>>8136886
free thought isn't simply the ability to unrelentingly reject and question every single thing you hear. if you fight back against everything you're still ultimately a slave because all they have to do to control you is tell you the opposite of what they want you to do or think. true free thinking involves being able to recognize and accept that someone came to the right answer before you may have even ever thought about it and not letting your ego get in the way of accepting it

>>8136906
Good points, but I still think 'don't judge a book by its cover' has its bounds, and maybe 'don't always judge a book by its cover' would be more accurate but that's semantics.

>>8136860
>while the VCS had closer to 10000
It only has 400s or less of registered games.
>it was easy to tell what the top-tier games were
Usually the atari published games were the top tiers. The third party games varied in quality.

Only time I had this reaction was on the Commodore 64.
I saw a casette with multiple games on it and was going through them. One was "tennis" and I was expecting something like the NES Tennis from the cover art. It was fucking Pong.

>>8136927
you don’t have to add a “…but (weird nitpicky aside)” just to save face in these situations, just leave it at “good points” next time, makes you seem weak-minded

>>8136935
Dude, give it a rest, it was clearly banter and you can't see the irony in what you're saying now.

>>8136931
>registered
Nothing stopped you from making your own game, plenty of companies did.

>>8135867
You're missing the whole point of the thread. See >>8135886 for an example of what OP means.

>>8136981
>You're missing the whole point of the thread
The whole point of this thread is shitposting. VCS games had screenshots on the box, as stated already multiple times in this thread.

>>8136970
ah, joke's on me, you were only pretending to be retarded

>>8135856
Comic artist, if you're in this thread, the punchline is in the third panel. You don't need the fourth.

>>8136987
>VCS games had screenshots on the box
Exactly. Americans are impulsive retards who love brainlessly consuming crap and blaming others for their idiocy. This is how the "beautiful video game covers are a scam" meme started and beautiful imaginative artworks were replaced by shit like this.

>>8136138
Or perhaps two separate artworks were drawn by the same artist, and the one originally meant for Avenging Spirit got scrapped with the Dead Connection port.

>>8136073
> implying zoomers don't nitpick this shit to death no matter how realistic it looks.

>>8136987
>The whole point of this thread is shitposting.
Sorry, OP should have just made another thread complaining about inflated prices or a trolly Speccy thread.

>>8137286
The art for Dead Connection would have had a cartoon ghost, but with angry eyes because American.

>>8136987
Take the shitposting to /v/ and see pic-related for why you shouldn't just blindly believe what you read in a thread.

>>8135856
games like combat were top notch, any kid that was disappointed with it was mentally retarded

also >kid playing atari by himself

comic confirmed drawn by millennial

>>8135856
Rule #1 with 8-bit games you feel nostalgic about: never play them, you will destroy your fond memories. 16-bit games still can look pretty good tho.

>>8138009
Shut up zoom zoom

>>8136635

>>8136876
>As for Atari generation, I have no experience with that.
Wasn't much harder, really. I was too young to buy games for myself but everybody seemed to know what the good ones were.
>>8135856
>What was the feeling back in the day when you looked at some badass cover art then played the game and it was like 5 pixels shuffling across the screen
>Were you like wtf?
It depended on the cover. Obviously I wasn't a retard like you, everyone knew more-or-less what the Atari hardware was capable of so we knew the cover art was just cover art.

>>8136635
ROW YOUR BOAT!

>>8138835

>>8137707
Or a mobster with a ghostly aura around him to represent the possession mechanic. You could also make the 'connection' that he's 'dead'.

>>8136073
Pic related.

>>8136490
Your affected cynicism is not the apt substitute for a genuine personality you seem to think it is you joyless cunt.

>>8139324
I've seen this meme image for at least 10 years. What is it from?

>>8139358
The anime for sure is from Gintama.

>>8135856
Sometimes when I was a kid I'd wonder what the pixelated blob I was fighting was supposed to be, so I'd look at the enemy portraits in the manual.

>>8135856
Nobody cared about covers back in the day.

>>8138817
>retard like you
Why are there this many people seething about just being asked what it was like back then? There isn't even an assumption in the OP, it lists different options.

>>8137880
>shitposting

>>8139324
you're not supposed to take anything they say in gintama seriously

>>8137880
I can't help but see that pic as a giant frog opening its mouth

>>8139608
Yes, some games have pictures on the back, some don't.

>>8139484
The question itself is stupid. Only a stupid person would ask it.

>>8135856
Fester's Quest was a poster up at our local Hollywood Video that looked awesome as fuck but after AVGN covered it it was obviously a crap game with great cover.

>>8140143
>after AVGN covered it it was obviously
really...

>>8135856
I'm pretty sure every LJN and Acclaim game from the NES era had a pretty awesome cover of whatever movie tie in they'd do like Dick Tracy, Batman, Darkman, Who Framed Roger Rabbit etc etc but the game itself would play like dogshit and would look designed on some Amiga from the fucking Seventies or something. Honestly how did Acclaim survive from the NES era with their horseshit games is beyond me?

>>8140105
The question is a way to start a thread on 'how it was back then' so younger people can hear about the perception of things that older people had. The question then sparked a thread with over 100 posts and some interesting comments.

>>8140157
This is a retro board and he's the watermark of Retro gaming reviews bruh

>>8135901
It's kinda laughable when you realize one of the best selling PS1 games FFVII literally just has a bad fuzzy render of Cloud with the picture taking the shot from his behind because if they showed his front profile either they'd have to show the real terrible then rendering or make a mock up anime version that would be a bit misleading

>>8135904
I didn't know of Gunshoe and Urban Champion, are they any good?

>>8135974
Everything in media from the late 70's thru the 80's to the early mid 90's had to be EXTREME METAL which today looks kinda cringe

>>8136064
Obviously he needs the Tekken force power to run his robots.

>>8136107
Hmm didn't they have two E.T. covers, one depicting close to the movie and one where you could see the shitty ET sprite?

>>8136413
This is advertising, media, entertainment and art in a nutshell and when you realize they lie to you 95 percent of the time they should be held more accountable for that and fuck white knights defending them because "muh Nintendo" or "muh Sony" etc.

>>8140167
But as always, OP has to be a faggot and frame the question in a really fucking stupid way that leads to stupid responses.

>>8140250
Agree for the most part but let's be real, it's mostly the fault of the people who get tricked again and again, and they aren't complaining, they're recommending the shit to you and hyping up the next big release. Most sane people realize they got duped and grow out of it or are more careful, but there is still a large group who will defend the people ripping them off and attack you for criticizing it. We can see in our lives how there are people who spent their whole lives with this bullshit and still happily consume it and parrot the words that come from the screen.

>>8135856
>>8135859
>>8135867
>>8135871
There were (almost) always screenshots at the back, but this was to an extent a bigger issue from the mid-late 90s, when you started having 3D graphics and cool renderings that COULD be possible on the cover, but there were still cheap 2D games around. This is of course true for shovelware mostly.

I remember renting Paper Mario thinking it was going to be a platformer like 64 and being extremely confused when the battle menu appeared
I ended up loving the game, I just had never seen an RPG before

>>8135950
A lot of people bought the Atari 2600 Pac-Man game assuming it would look like the arcade game, and were pissed when they saw what they actually paid for.

>>8136114
considering Mega Man's premise that's not even a terrible stretch for them to make
the first law is even mentioned outright in X1's opening

>>8135859
"Floating Head Syndrome". Fatal Frame and ICO were hit pretty hard by it, as was the DVD release of The Fifth Element.

>>8135856
I remember seeing Fester's Quest as a poster in our local Hollywood Video and thinking as a kid it looked pretty awesome but thankfully AVGN reviewed it and I didn't waste my money. AND FUCK YOU WHOEVER REPORTED MY POST AND THE JANNY TRANNY WHO DELETED AND BANNED ME FUCKING NECK YOURSELVES

>>8140431
Lol

>>8140390
too dumb to look at the back of the box. Glad amerimutts were pissed

>>8140450
I'll admit a lot of people aren't very bright, yeah.

>>8140450
So there are anecdotes popping up of people actually being pissed off with different games, and also Nintendo possibly reacting to this. So there may be some truth to people being disappointed, and can either be chalked up to them being dumb, or thinking the pic on the back was just one part of the game and thinking there would be more, or some games not having pics on the back, or possibly ordering out of a catalogue or something.

There was this one Atari fantasy game my parents bought that had a full color instruction manual with a comic book. When you reached certain parts of the game you read that section of the comic book. I never played it because it was for the wrong Atari. Parents must have bought it for cheap after the crash or something..

I suppose that was one way of getting around the boxart/graphics mismatch.

>>8140591
Never tried to emulate it to finally get to play it?

>>8140390
>A lot of people bought the Atari 2600 Pac-Man game assuming it would look like the arcade game
>>8140450
>too dumb to look at the back of the box.
In this case, the front cover is clearly closer to the console version than the arcade version. If consumers were confused and it wasn't just some made-up journalism narrative, they probably didn't even look at the box at all.
>>8140493
>So there are anecdotes popping up of people actually being pissed off with different games
>>8140250
There are far more productive ways to combat false advertising than bitching about cover art. Bitching about cover art being misleaing is for LARPing faggots.

>>8140712
screenshot for comparison

>>8140201
>gumshoe
is a light gun game but the character on-screen moves through the world like a platformer. interesting novelty
>urban champion
it's shit. imagine yie ar kung fu but with like 3 attacks

>>8135856
Except that we knew what video games looked like. We just accepted box art as part of the fantasy we were buying into. We also had (and used) our imaginations, which were a really big part of the experience. That comic reads like something written by a young person who doesn't have the perspective required to understand the era, mostly due to not being alive for it. We accepted the media as it came. We didn't say, "Man, this game sucks right now because in, like, thirty years games are probably going to be so much cooler." And I think this is where the disconnect between us and the so-called "zoomers" comes from. They've never known a time when the internet didn't exist. They grew up with games that make ours look absolutely primitive. They grew up in the future we weren't even daydreaming about yet, so they find it borderline impossible to understand how we could have enjoyed anything back then when "now" is allegedly so much better.

I wonder how he would have fared with an RPG that came with a large booklet containing most of the story, meant to be read when the game prompted you to do so. Or a game like "Close Assault" which actually came with a physical gameboard and counters. Or even something like an Infocom game -- really cool boxart but a completely text-based game.

At the risk of sounding like more of an asshole than I already do, I can't imagine having grown up in a time where video game tech was advanced enough to completely removing both your agency and imagination, but here we are. There really is a lot of awesome modern stuff, but it requires absolutely nothing of you but to be present at your controller/keyboard.

>>8140838
This is actually why I really liked a few retro-inspired games such as Organ Trail, which adds more depth to the old Oregon Trail formula, but still calls for you to use your imagination a lot, due to the intentionally simplistic graphics intended to be similar to the old Apple II release. It certainly put a lot of images in my head which were never in depicted visually in the game.

I find that I still do use my imagination with newer games, but certainly not as much, in some aspects I think that's ok, because that can mean that someone paid attention to the little details and did a thorough job on something. On the other hand, AAA industry games have grown increasingly predictable and stagnant in the past decade, so I either I end up fantasizing about how this or that game could be better, or I restrain my imagination, this has led to a few positive surprises, but very rarely. I'm seldom excited or even just a little interested by modern AAA releases these days, and few indie titles draw me in either, what gets me excited in gaming these days is finding a cool old game I missed, or playing around with modding a classic game I like, which in some cases can provide infinite mileage, as opposed to, lets say the Ubisoft sandbox formula.

If there's anything misleading about the 1st party Atari covers it is that they claim shit like 66 VIDEO GAMES when it's just 66 variations of the same game.

I had an atari as a kid but no boxes, just hand-me-down carts, this bad motherfucker right here really fires the imagination.

>>8136010
If MegaMan got a tokusatsu series in the 80's, it'd be like this.

>>8140717
Where are the ghosts?

>>8142482
I think you can see one of the ghost's eyes near the center thing. Iirc, Atari Pac Man only has one ghost in the first stage and they introduce more as it goes.

>>8135951
here's an explanation about mega man 2
https://www.rockman-corner.com/2013/06/meet-man-who-drew-mega-man-2s-box-art.html
couldn't find the original interview, sorry.

>>8135901
Yeah, Parasite Eve has some of the ugliest box art I've ever seen despite being one of my favorite games. I think US MGS1 and JP FF7/8/9 (plus whichever other non-PS1 FFs) were excellent though, with just the logo on a white background. MGS1 especially for that shiny foil effect it had

>>8135856
You can tell a zoomer drew this comic.

>>8135856
IT'S CALLED IMAGINATION, JESUS CHRIST

>>8135904
>Slalom
First case of Rare showing Nintendo what's what on their own system?

>Slalom was developed by British video game company Rare by Tim and Chris Stamper. Rare had been looking to develop games for consoles in the wake of rampant computer game piracy in the United Kingdom. They chose the NES for its nascent popularity, though the console had no Western developers, and asked Nintendo for a license. When Nintendo declined, they reverse engineered the console and made a demo, Slalom to show the company. Nintendo was astonished at their effort, and made Rare its first Western developer, beginning a long and close collaboration between Rare and Nintendo of America founder and president Minoru Arakawa.

>>8143054
>Gaijin asked to make games for Nintendo
>They said no
Based as hell and they should have kept it that way except for very, very special exceptions.