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/vr/ - Retro Games

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9717389 No.9717389 [Reply] [Original]

What was different back then that japan was able to produce so many unique and creative games?
Nowadays every new title feels like the same shit only slighty changed.
Is it cuz there are no small studios left and all work for the big ones?

I'm currently exploring the PS1 catalog and there is so much cool shit, I get the feeling any crazy idea was given a chance and turned into a game.
Not only that but designs and mechanics were more unique too.

Do they just play it too save now?
What caused the decline?

>> No.9717401

Sir this is a retro game board, to discuss modern stuff there is /v/

>> No.9717415

I have yet to find an actual hidden gem for the ps1, most of these games are kusoge.

>> No.9717426

>>9717389
man jap devs are insanely overrated, i'll never understand weebs, especially faggots who won't just say "shit game" like >>9717415 this dicklick

>> No.9717434

It's just a time and money issue, not a cultural shift. Budgets, devtime and number of devs ballooned to the point were taking risk was not "allowed" anymore.

>> No.9717443

>>9717426
The worst japanese dev is still a god compared to the many bad westie ones.

>> No.9717461

>>9717443
yeah whatever dude

>> No.9717530

Most powerful game devs are objectively Brazilian, Indian and venezulan videogame creators

>> No.9717539

>>9717530
...so what are the best Brazilian etc games? Never heard of any.

>> No.9717546

>>9717389
Young industry full of young and hungry people.

Now those same people are still running it but they are dreary old men.

>> No.9717559

Because there is nothing new to invent. Every genre has a standard now, you gotta have the same controls, same gameplay etc. There has been zero gameplay innovation for a long time. PS1 was still "early" 3D without any of that shit so there was room for innovation and new ideas. The only thing that improves now is the graphics and even that's barely noticable. There are no huge leaps anymore. Just stagnation and hopefully an eventual crash, but of course that's not gonna happen because the core gaming audience is perfectly fine with playing the same games with different stories over and over again.

>> No.9717589

>>9717539
Sorry anon I can’t spoon feed you these hidden gems

>> No.9717590

>>9717389
depraved internet hentai porn was extremely rare back in the 80s was a more innocent pure time full of ambition. People grew lazy and stupid with the advent of internet and smartphones.

>> No.9717674
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9717674

>>9717389
Its called SOUL

>> No.9717692

>>9717389
Read up on the 1980s economy. Japan was in a boom and Americans were afraid they'd take over the world. It's not just video games. It's also why they could blow millions on overproduced theatrical anime like Akira. Video games were just one branch of an overall technology heavy era.

>> No.9717714

>>9717389
>What was different back then that japan was able to produce so many unique and creative games?
Small devs. Simple as that. Teams in Konami used to be 6 people:
3 programmers
2 designers(they did the art for the game)
1 musician
No game designer or some stupid shit like that. These 6 people would get together and discuss what kind of game they are doing. It worked for Arcade and MSX games. Capcom also had a small team too.

>> No.9717716

>>9717714
some people have made the argument the smaller the dev team the more unified the vision can be.

>> No.9717772

It was the bubble economy. You could create anything you wanted. Japan was a hub of uncharted territory. I don't think people really understand that it was a land of promising dreams for a few years. Everything was flying off the shelves. Read the "Untold Story of Japanese Game Developers" for more context. The bubble wore off in the early 90's but it was the same gifted devs who had been fortunate enough to: create or grow during the bubble, with enough technological leeway/advancement that projects could be their own. No ideas boiled down through huge bloated teams. The art was their own. The music was made by friends. People still don't really get what these people were doing. They were passionate folk who felt like they were literally creating history. And they were. The best games were made by small groups. PS1 coincided with their sweet pot in budget, creativity and enough technological grit. Takashi Tokita says in the book that the PS1 was absolutely the golden age of the Japanese game industry. It would cool off heavily after that, and a lot of old devs either went out of business, consolidated or retired outright.

All of the information is out there, and it's really quite fascinating. Soul is just the passion they put into the games. Games are just products now to pad a corporate mandate. Do you really care as an individual developer on a thousand person team? Where the rest of the staff aren't even in the same building as you, where assets are farmed out, music is just another sound library, and all of the engines are pliable? It's just another job now.

>> No.9717787

>>9717772
Imagine writing all that only to be wrong.

>> No.9717802

>What was different back then that japan was able to produce so many unique and creative games?
Super autistic skills with business and math
>>9717434
Also this
>>9717443
Not this, there are lots of absolutely shitty Japanese games (many with cult status for being absolute ass) that make LJN games look okay.

>> No.9717907

>>9717389
Nips are always good at working alone due to autism but when they need to form a big team, now we have a problem, they bully and harass each other while their bosses take all the credit and make retarded decisions just to power trip. As dev teams grew, Nip relevance declined.

>> No.9717913

>>9717389
Japanese game companies acted like real companies trying to make a good product for consumers.

In the USA a lot of game companies were rather carny and considered gamers to be stupid losers they were taking advantage of.

European companies were more like the Japanese but a little more laid back.

>> No.9717968

>>9717389
Games were simpler and took less time to make. That's literally all it is. There are still good games being released today but they take much longer to make so there are less good games. Much of the older games were made in just a few months so we got more games from each team, and because teams were much smaller back then the games themselves tended to be more intimate and include touches that are not as ofen flund today. For an example of what I'm talking about, Mega Man 2 was made in just 2 months. Games didn't take a whole lot of time back then. Now it's completely normal to spend 5 or 6 years working on a single game.

>> No.9718039

>>9717539
>Never heard of any.
Brazilians are making some MD/Genesis games.

>> No.9718046

>>9717716
Which is true. Let's be honest, anon, do you think a 100 people team will all want to make the same game? Most of them are just there to get paid.

>> No.9718049

>>9717692
>ps1
>1980s

>> No.9718085

>>9718039
None of them are good.

>> No.9718112

>>9717389
>nowdays every new title feels like the same shit only slighty changed.
You are the worst kind of retro gaming neophyte.

>> No.9718123

>>9717787
educate us, by all means

>> No.9718180

>>9718112
It's a valid criticism. These days everyone uses the same tools, same engines, that alone creates uniformity. Nobody's making their own engines now except for the AAAest of the AAA. And it's not just a technical thing, if you're using an engine that's made for open world you'll gravitate towards making open world games.

>> No.9718259

>>9718180
>It's a valid criticism
Only if you are talking about most formulaic of AAA games with ubisoft template design or some other random forced open world slogfest with tacked on crafting, yes indies also fell into a trap of their own called derivative metroidvanias but it's like denying the truth that retro gaming is full of epigonic shovelvere and straight up clones. Shmups, top down jrpgs, basic bitch sidescrollers with some ugly mascot, adaptations of board games like mahjong, dumb fmv games that flood the market in the 90's... and I can go on and on, retro gaming is not all sunshine and rainbows. Honestly if anyone thinks the market back then was more diverse than current one then he's either cherrypicking or is just jaded.

>> No.9718304

>>9717389
>What caused the decline?
Companies could invest a bunch of money and resources to come up with a novel and creative game that no one cares about because they're too busy playing my crappy game I made over several weekends in Unity(for no cost but my time and maybe a texture pack) called Kicked in the Balls Simulator. There's barely any market for niche games and what's left is filled by people or small teams with a lot less overhead.

>> No.9718357

>>9717389
lots of skilled workers fueled by the bubble economy during the 80's. By the time the party was over in the mid 90's, video games were an established industry and popular export. Publishers were less risk-averse than they are today.

>> No.9718364

>>9718180
If it worries you so much, why don't you try making your own game engine? See how that goes.

>> No.9718379

>>9717389
To answer your question more specifically about the PS1, it was really, REALLY easy to develop for, as in someone with no programming background could probably write for the PS1 after a quick crash course. It was so easy that Sony made the PS2 a complete bitch to write for to compensate. Add that Japan was still very wealthy from the aftermath of a huge economic boom and it's not too hard to see why there was an explosion of games. Not even touching net yaroze stuff.

To answer your question more broadly, yes, I think you're right about the last part. Jap houses were very competitive and competent up until the mid-90s or so, which is when they started getting lazy. More subjective but I also feel jap stuff became easier and easier to the point of holding little interest for me.

>> No.9718381

>>9718364
Are you trying to use the, “oh if you think it’s such a bad movie why don’t you make one yourself”, argument on that guy?

>> No.9718385

There's only a handful of exceptionally good Japanese devs. Nintendo, Capcom, Namco. Occasionally Sega, Konami, and Sunsoft. The rest of them are shovelware that aren't worth exaggerating.

>> No.9718414

>>9717389
Global homogenization.
Essentially, each company is trying to cater to every possible consumer base on the planet and so what you're left with is the same copy-and-pasted soulless garbage created with zero passion.
Somewhere along the line it went from "It would be cool if we could do this." to "This would make our game more inclusive." The unfortunate truth is that video games are more profitable than ever before, however the market share is increasingly being monopolized by only a few handful of conglomerates. This is the same reason why TV, Movies, Comics and everything in between has been lifeless for the past while.

>> No.9718696

>>9717434
It's an "AAA" issue mostly. "AA"/mid-tier nowadays would still require a big team, but not "1000s of people across the globe" big. Or they could do indie-ish games too which wouldn't require too too many people. Doesn't Koei-Tecmo and Gust doesn't have hundreds upon hundreds of employees?
The whole thing pisses because a bunch of the huge franchises and trend of today were developed as "AA" titles and with a small team. They don't even attempt to let innovation grows one way or another instead they just go bigger and bigger and copy indie trends

>> No.9718813

>>9718364
That's exactly my point you retard, back in the day any programmer could write an engine for an AAA game in their basement. Now you need an R&D team of 100s of people and dozens of millions of dollars if you're planning to compete with Unreal. So everyone just uses Unreal, and makes the kind of games Unreal is most suited for

>> No.9718864

>>9718813
There is also the case of general engine. Back then they would always make an engine for this series they were doing(Wizardry 1 for NES, during the development of the engine they saw they could also make Wizardry 2 by just structuring it better) instead of "this engine that we can use for any game we want to make". They used to make engines in ASM, after all. It's just that people now think about general ones(Unity, Unreal) instead of for a single genre or something like that. It's obvious that the general engine will take far longer to finish by a small dev.

>> No.9718869

>>9718381
If you realized how difficult it is to make an engine that does 3D and supports all the current shit people expect out of games now, you'd know why people use something like unreal, unity, godot which does all the really difficult shit for them.

>> No.9718892

>>9718259
underage retards are too fucking stupid to realize "retro gaming" is filled with hits because they've been given a fucking list of good games curated over 25 years.