/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2082828]

Hey /vr/, I assume at least a few of you are a good bit older than I am and grew up during the 2600 days, and I'm just wondering something.

How was it back then? Owning consoles and buying games for them, I mean. Every thing I've seen of games back in those days makes it look like for every Pitfall there were like 50 Pac-Mans. I know shovelware is still very much a thing and all that, but it just seems like there was way less (if any) quality control back then.

[Anonymons No.2082912]

theres a few movies and articles about this topic. they might be able to splain it better. check out video games on netflix.

[Anonymous No.2082949]

As if steam has any quality control

[Anonymous No.2082961]

Yeah, there was some kind of "crash" or something due to too many games and very bad quality control.

Of course I was too young to know about this at the time. And anyway I didn't own a console. I was strictly an 8-bit home computer user, and of course there wasn't much quality control to speak of there either. More pac-man and space invaders clones that you can shake a stick at! Heck, it was like a time-honored tradition to write your own version of popular arcade games in BASIC anyway... Plus the various magazines had program listings for their own adaptations (some of them not too shabby). Anyway I never bought any commercial games back then. Didn't have the money! Could barely afford floppy disks and magazines!

[Anonymous No.2082962]

>>2082949

That's a horse of a different color though. For that it's like the old west. But, this was something that was under development.

Steam may not change much, but the video games industry had to undergo a revolution because of how bad it got.

[Anonymous No.2082972]

>>2082962
Oversaturated market of shit directly resembles mobile/steam market. There's no quality control whatsoever and less than 5% are even worth touching. Second crash just didn't happen yet. Only a matter of time

[Anonymous No.2082983]

It's hard to explain it to anyone raised on computers and games, the reason there was 50 shit games for every good one (and that's being generous) was largely because it was simply cool that we could CONTROL ANYTHING on our TV screens.

I figure the first Virtual Reality games will be pure horsecock as well.

[Anonymous No.2083054]

Back in the day the games at the arcade were better with much better graphics, but it was expensive.

[Anonymous No.2083163]

Parents wouldn't buy me vidya, but whenever we went to Sears or JC Penny or K-Mart or whatever, I would stand at the Atari kiosk and play Astroids for like a half hour... then they changed the game from Astroids to PacMan, and it sucked. There were also kiosks for Intellivision with like a poker game or something, and then later for Colecovision which had a bitchin' Donkey Kong port. I knew a lot more people who had "home computers" and "TV computers" than game consoles. Arcades were real the real vidya action was at.

[Anonymous No.2083423]

>>2082961
The thing with the old home computers is that the games were much cheaper, so while there was still a lot of shit afloat, gambling on an interesting cover wasn't a huge investment.

[Anonymous No.2083428]

Its hard to explain. First when you bought games, the only way to know if there good or bad was asking to some friends or trying the game in other house. I had the luck to get an Atari XE so most games came in bundles (cassetes with 6-8 games, cartridges with 20-30 games). But for telling you the truth when i pick up one of those games i dont play more than 5mins and i get bored. I guess i played too much new vidya or im just old.

[Anonymous No.2083429]

>>2082983
thank you for the mental picture of equipping an oculus rift to experience being beaten to death by a zombie with a horsecock, anon.

[Anonymous No.2083515]

>>2082828
>Owning consoles and buying games for them, I mean.

No reviews unless it was through word of mouth or you bought relevant magazines. Mags were more likely to be honest back then, at least.

Also game manuals were a must for most games. It's hard to do anything complex yet intuitive with such limited resources. A lot of games get a bad rap simply because you download and fire up a rom you know nothing about.

>it just seems like there was way less (if any) quality control back then.

There was absolutely none. Do you recall the whole "Nintendo Seal of Quality" thing? There's a reason they did that, and even then they had to tread carefully because it was a 1st party release (Pac-Man) that pretty much destroyed consumer confidence before then.

On the plus side the whole venture of creating video games was complicated enough and relevant skills rare enough that it kept a lot of riff-raff out, at least at first.

[Anonymous No.2083525]

>>2083515

There's one important lesson everyone needs to remember about the history of the video game industry:

A crash is not a bad thing.

The overly fat and stagnant are allowed to die off. The industry just gets rebuilt with fresh ideas and comes back stronger than ever.

It has happened twice before and this whole freemium/DLC ecosystem today demonstrates that the industry is due for another culling.

[Anonymous No.2083851]

>>2083525
Twice? I know that '83 is the famous one but what was the other?

[Anonymous No.2083890]

>>2083851

77 when pong clones were fucking everywhere.

[Anonymous No.2083892]

>>2083525
>It has happened twice before and this whole freemium/DLC ecosystem today demonstrates that the industry is due for another culling.
No it's not. Stop playing triple A games.

[Anonymous No.2083902]

>>2083892
>>2083525

The problem wouldn't be the freemium/dlc model, but the fact that consoles are stagnating compared to pc and mobile platforms. The PS4 and XBOX One were already outdated the moment they launched. If technology isn't advancing, the public will lose interest. Nintendo manages to stay in the game somehow with their gimmicky hardware, but now everyone is moving to mobile and pc games. Consoles are going to be left in the dust by next gen if they can't figure out a way to compete by offering something you can't get anywhere else. That's the only reason Nintendo is probably still managing to stay afloat.

[Anonymous No.2083952]

>>2083902
Pc is the most stagnant platform. No support for win64 so all games are limited to win32 4gb which at least 2gb pretty much goes to the os. So theres Nobody buys desktops so you have to cater to lower spec computers either way. Microsoft doesn't feel the need to push win64 because most of its users are casuals and win10 will be all cloud so they can control every aspect through their stores

[Anonymous No.2084229]

>>2083952
>pc is the most stagnant platform
Compared to what? You keep saying it is leering towards cloud everything and casual control, but what are consoles doing? Compared to both consoles and mobile platforms, PC is thriving. You say that PC is being limited to 32 bit architecture, this is true for the most part, but think of all the limitations of every other competing medium and it seems really generous.

[Anonymous No.2084254]

>>2082828

When I was a kid we couldn't afford an atari until later on. The good thing was we waited so long to buy it that the games were selling for $1.50-$5.00 at our local department store.

By this time colecovision had been released and that was the latest/greatest.

[Anonymous No.2084590]

>>2083902
I disagree. It's not the consoles themselves, but the content. All these companies are promoting triple A games like Destiny or Watch Dogs. Promising revolutionary gameplay or a 10 out of 10 game and then falling short of those expectations. And then there's the crowd that buys the same sports game every year. At least with Nintendo, you know what you're getting, most of time. Hopefully the gaming community will grow tired of all of this.

[Anonymous No.2084752]

>>2083892

Like it or not, those AAA titles ARE the industry. Independent developers would actually benefit from an industry crash.

[Anonymous No.2084762]

>>2083428
Pardon my youth, but, after seeing Yar's Revenge talked about as the greatest Atari game by multiple people on this board, I tried it out, and it just seemed rather average.

Two levels and the difficulty didn't seem to grow any as it repeated, and the game just felt like I could keep playing it indefinitely and never die. Was there something I missed or is it just that the Atari, while good for its time, didn't have any truly great games (though I do love me some Pitfall) so the best is just average in a modern scope?

I hope I didn't come off as rude, I'm sincerely wondering if there was a subtlety I didn't pick up on.

[Anonymous No.2084764]

wow

[Anonymous No.2084779]

There have been seas of shit for practically every console. It was just harder to wade through back then, without the Internet or even console gaming magazines.

Happily most places had demonstration units, which were mainly to push the big games. Finding a good, obscure game was hard that's why good examples of them are so valuable.

[Anonymous No.2084789]

>>2084762
>Yar's Revenge talked about as the greatest Atari game

I prefer Spider Fighter, but w/e.

>Two levels and the difficulty didn't seem to grow any as it repeated

Difficulty is score-based, not level-based. If you're scoring like shit the game will take pity on you and keep you in easy mode.

The missile and Qotile get faster the higher your score gets. This becomes especially evident once the missile starts getting in the way of the Zorlon cannon all the time because it's following you so closely. The Qotile in particular becomes guided and increasingly less predicable. Eventually the neutral zone will randomly disappear from some levels too, giving you nowhere to hide from the missile chasing you.

You get more points for being ballsy. Using the Yar to eat the shield nets more points than shooting it, and if you hit the Qotile with the Zorlon cannon while it's charging at you, you get 3x the points and a bonus life.

[Anonymous No.2084798]

>>2084789
Oh wow, really? I never would've known since I wasn't aiming for score; that makes me appreciate it a lot more, I'll have to try it again aiming for score.

[Anonymous No.2084805]

>>2084789
>>2084798

Shoot a block = 69 pts
Eat a block = 169 pts
Hit the qotile while it's idle = 1000 pts
Hit the qotile while it's spinning = 2000 pts
Hit the qotile while it's flying at you = 6000 pts + extra life

Max difficulty is reached at 230,000 pts. Don't expect to survive for long past that point.

[Anonymous No.2087781]

>>2084805
>69 points
wonder why they chose that number

[Anonymous No.2088061]

>>2082828
To be brief, I honestly didn't care. I think it was a matter of being too young and living in a time when video games on home consoles didn't really have expectations. At least not like today. Actually, nothing even remotely like today.

I just wanted to play video games. Yeah, I'm capable now, at 36, to be able to look back and see how a good number of games were shit. I also still play a good number of those shit titles to this day. Nostalgia does funny stuff to people.

[Anonymous No.2089369]

As someone that bought an Atari when it first came out, you knew that you'd get a good game if it were made by activision. Imagic was kind of hit or miss, and first party Atari games were normally ok. The rest, 99 times out of 100 they were total crap. You'd get a random game from an aunt or uncle and it would be horrid beyond anything LJN did on the Nintendo.

The only other console from that era I had was the Odyssee 2. I don't remember any 3rd party games for that system, and all the games I ever played for it were pretty good. That being said, for every game that came out for the 2, 50 to 100 came out for the Atari.

But damn, if KC munchkin wasn't lightyears ahead of Crap Man.

[Anonymous No.2092429]

>>2082828
Not much has changed. More people being into gaming is probably the main thing. The ratio of good games to shit seems about the same.

>>2082983
>first Virtual Reality games will be
I get the feeling VR is older than you