/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.3250142]

Did limits and restrictions make old games better?

[Anonymous No.3250149]

Not in every aspect, but often limitations meant perfecting your skills, doing your best even if there were limits, molding yourself to it.

That was the philosophy of many legendary game designers like Tokuro Fujiwara.

[Anonymous No.3250171]

Some limits are better. For example, when fighting games made the transition to 3D graphics, they largely became much less animated and fun to look at. We'll never get another game with the variety of Darkstalkers or MvC2, even.

[Anonymous No.3250172]

I got my cock stuck in a nintendo 64 cartridge what do i do ? Blow it ?

[Barry micociner No.3250179]

Hey its me again i think im just going to saw my cock off i have plenty more games to play :)

[Anonymous No.3250325]

Limits in terms of not detailed graphics were fine because it let you use your imagination. Now that everything is fully voiced in 1080p HD there's no room for interpretation.

Limits in terms of not being able to implement features they wanted can be great too. Great games have been made because the creators had technology limits they couldn't avoid and so they came up with real creative solutions to get around that that resulted in really fun and unique games or characters.

[Anonymous No.3250329]

>>3250171
BlazBlue says hi.

[Anonymous No.3250370]

>>3250171
I'm not good at fighting games, but it's fun to see fluid 2d fighting animations

[Anonymous No.3250378]

>>3250171
>they largely became much less animated
wot? I advise you to navigate to the nearest sprite repository to count the number of sprites used per fighter in darkstalkers and compare it to the number of animations you'll find in games like VF5. Here's a tip Akira has more punch variations than a character has moves in darkastalkers. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean no love and attention to detail is put into it.

[Anonymous No.3250424]

>>3250329

BlazBlue is shite tho

[Anonymous No.3250483]

>>3250149
Along with the fact that if you released a new game that is unfinished to the public you would be
fucking over not just the fans but the company as well.
Unlike now where that is a common practice because they can just fix it all later with hundreds of patches.

[Anonymous No.3250849]

Genius is a product of creativity under restriction.

[Anonymous No.3250931]

>>3250142
It definitely made them interesting, and it's what I find most charming about older games. Ocarina of Time for example, I'm still blown away by how much is in that game considering it fit onto a 32mb cartridge.

[Anonymous No.3250952]

>>3250483
Pretty much this. Even if by some magic you were able to recall the flawed run you still took a HUGE financial and public relations loss. Not like today where you can just patch it right away and move on.

Personally I wish the gaming market would crash again, but that will never happen with today's moronic youth.

[Anonymous No.3250958]

>>3250329
>BlazBlue

[Anonymous No.3251076]

>>3250424
Fuck off Sayaka.

[Anonymous No.3251097]

>>3250952
Nah we don't need a crash anymore, games are starting to get good again and FPSes are dying off finally.

[Anonymous No.3251125]

>>3250142
I like how they set a (sometimes loose) standard for how given console games would look / play / sound. For example, I know that your pic is a Gameboy game just by looking at it. It makes the consoles have an unique iconic feel.

[Anonymous No.3251139]

>>3250142
Limits and restrictions definitely made old movies better. If you wanted a 12 foot tall alien you needed to make damn sure your models and animatronics looked great on film; now you just pay 5 nerds $10M to draw it in digitally and try to pretend nobody can tell it's CGI immediately.

Limits breed creativity, or at least focus. Now every game dev can do almost anything they want but the only actually creative games are the ones that intentionally limit themselves to that faux-retro aesthetic (and even they are mostly all just platformers) or god forbid, the few games that hire competent designers and/or writers. And yet we have these consoles that are more powerful than ever and all they do is run games that could have been programmed for less than 1000 lines of code. What's the new hype train about now, No Man's Sky or whatever? Obviously we can't have it look interesting, it's got INFINITE REPLAYABILITY. I bet each planet just gets randomly generated from a list in a database with about 100 finite attributes and they just call it a day. How long will people play that game before they see the same thing twice?

The sad part is sometimes you actually DO get games with both nowadays and they get swept under the rug. Like Sony is fucking stupefied that Until Dawn did well despite them not advertising it and The Order goes down in flames despite them ramming it down everyone's throat. No shit, guys, one of those games was creative and engrossing and the other was The Order.

At least old games tried to push great looks AND great gameplay - now nobody here is going to agree on exactly which retro games they think accomplished that, but I'm willing to bet everyone here can think of way more titles that they think qualify between 1985-1999 than 2000-2016.

[Anonymous No.3251206]

I feel 3D really effected games. With 2D a lot couldn't be displayed and you had to use your imagination, you would see scenes/actions happen and typically imagine them in better detail and adding details you envision. With 3D there was little to interpret as actions were clear. Just my thoughts.

[Anonymous No.3251505]

>>3251139
>I bet each planet just gets randomly generated from a list in a database with about 100 finite attributes and they just call it a day. How long will people play that game before they see the same thing twice?

This. When i think about this, i see how Pokemon was eable to make every creatre trully unique without using algorithms to generate each one, and nowdays games that generate content cannot create a single unique thing. No Man's Sky will have a poor replayability, because it is not about how many worlds it can generate, but how many of them feels unique.

From my perspective, games that auto impose some kind of limits are easier to get, make sure the rules can be enjoyable without resorting to accesory elements for when the player gets bored quickly.

[NESfag No.3251518]

Working with restrictions can boost creativity in a way, because you're going to try to exploit those restrictions to the max.

For example, the PC version of Exhumed/Powerslave uses an older version of the Build engine, and even as far effects (like moving sectors, explosions etc) are concerned, which doesn't come with the engine and which is something each Build dev programmed themselves for their respective game, the devs of Exhumed worked with a lot less effects than DN3D.

And yet, I think the level design is amazing. Instead of trying to showcase a huge variety of cool effects that they barely use in the end, like Shadow Warrior, level design is 100% pure Doom-era layouts and exploits the little they have in very creative ways.

[Anonymous No.3252025]

Modern hardware and budgets aren't inherently bad things. The problem is that they encourage a top-down design style, when bottom-up tends to produce better results. I'm not saying that planning your game out well in advance is a bad thing, but the greatest games of all time are more than just features you can list on the back of the box. For example, it's well known that the Mario 64 team spent ages tweaking Mario's movement in a featureless map, making sure that he was fun to control even with minimal obstacles. Of course, player character movement is one of the first things implemented in any game, but designers get ahead of themselves and as a result the game lacks cohesion. When you want to make a platformer, but you ALSO have to design the whole thing around a F2P model, and shoehorn in parkour moves because that's the new trend in 2017, and your team wants Halo-style vehicles, and all this other crap, that's how you get a bad modern AAA game. Look at Bioshock Infinite, the game has a "complex" dimension hopping plotline, an AI companion that was hyped up to be groundbreaking, and really nice setpieces -- but the gunplay felt like shit.

So I guess my point is that too much freedom paradoxically becomes more limiting than having manageable limits imposed by hardware, because of corporate culture and overambitious designers.