Decline Felipepepe is unpleasant and points fingers - I wrote yet another rant on Gamasutra

[taxalot]

Oh, god, it's even worse when you find out who said that originally : http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/...-like-ray-charles-in-the-style-of-kanye-west/

 

[HiddenX]

Great article felipepepe - I'm a game collector and historian. I agree 100% with you. And it is not only about old games. Old RPGDot reviews, walktroughs, forum comments are gone for most people for example, many other good old websites are gone, too.
Unfortunately even the wayback machine doesn't help in all cases.

 

[Don Peste]

Remember Sudden Strike? There's something, a feel in that game that I couldn't find anywhere else (Nor in CoH, Men of War, Blitzkrieg, etc.).
It used to have quite a big modding community. But it seems there was some kind of fight between the devs (Fireglow, extinct. I think they were from Cyprus? ) and the publisher, CDV. Fireglow wasn't happy about CDV selling a stand-alone, Hidden Stroke, using Sudden Strike engine/assets without their permission. Well, they parted ways. Fireglow ended up making Sudden Strike 3, then they disappeared not long after. And CDV... They fucking deleted the Sudden Strike message board, and all the files, links and everything in it. The Wayback Machine only adds butthurt: https://web.archive.org/web/2003121...v-board.de/english/forumdisplay.php?forumid=7
Oh, then they went bankrupt in 2010.

Now, searching for all those old mods and maps is an impossible task. Well, maybe it's a little less painful if you speak German or Trotsky language. But most of it, and most of the original documents, are lost.

Anyway, I might be wrong about some of this. I don't remember where I read it (Doesn't matter, I'm sure the place is gone too). MobyGames says CDV published Sudden Strike 3. Who knows, maybe if you're a German WW2 strategy fan, or just Russian, you know something more about what happened. What I know is that everything was intentionally lost!! And Felipe wasn't there to warn us!!!

Take a look at this. It's probably the best SS compilation ever made (And I don't think Fireglow would be very happy about it). I found it at a ehm... Russian... store... It even has a game/mod about the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. I also remember a map with Israeli paratroopers with Uzis dropping in Egypt or something. And I couldn't find this anywhere else. I can't find it even now! It's called SS_Antalogy upload by armatech [sic]. The menu plays this weird Russian song. Shazam says it's Vladimir Vysotsky's We Rotate The Earth. You'll like it.

 

[J_C]

tl;dr

 

[DeepOcean]

Jesus Christ, I mean, servers aren't free and all of that but I can't understand the company mindset that lead to the NWNVault being closed without warning. You need to be a really self serving little bitch to do something like that without a single warning on the main page for people to backup their stuff. Its funny, gamming media and many developers are absolutely useless cunts, if it is to piss on the wind and pretend you are important attacking windmills like "diversity", "social justice", you have an entire cunt brigade but when its to talk about stuff concerning to gamming they prefer to jerk off to the latest popamole and forget anything existed before the Xbone was invented. The RPG Watch attitude is just disgusting, "ignorant and proud!", yeah, and those fucks sometimes get all butthurt when they are called idiots.

Those clows when Rober Ebert talks out of his ass to criticize gamming as an "art form", a legion of those low life scum get all enraged because it was a film critic that said gamming was basicaly a hobby for children and they get all serious seeking the next AAA schlock to claim its the "Citizen Kane of the games" but their attitudes towards the history of gamming betray them. Most gamers are man children without their own opinions, they want someone from a "true art" to validate gamming so gamming history become important like literature, art and movie history until then they just don't care.

I think developers too have this ridiculous view that they only do cheap entertainment, like they were making sausages or something, and their stuff is not worthy of preserving what is ridiculous because if they aren't careful about preserving their legacy, it will be them that are going to be forgotten the same way people already forgotten so many developers. Not a single comment from Obsidian or Bioware to shame IGN?

 

[PocketMine]

Remember Sudden Strike? There's something, a feel in that game that I couldn't find anywhere else (Nor in CoH, Men of War, Blitzkrieg, etc.).

I remember Sudden Strike. Playable demo released about 9 months before release was actualy better then the game itself (atleast for me). Demo didnt have save function implemented so it made the game faster also no base building was a plus for me. Just the units you got at the start and whatever reinforments were scripted for capturing objectives. Soon after demo release people on forums found a way to mod the demo. Change the unit stats, moddify enemy placement on the map, changing objectives even scripted suprise enemy wawes from all sides of map. Modders even found a way to import bigger map from a nonplayable demo released later.

Final game itself was a dissapointment for me. One of campaign mission was endless wawes of enemy units charging at your entrenched positions it took me hours to finish and was no fun compared to 30-90min modded demo missions so i uninstalled the game soon after.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Don Peste your Sudden Strike rant made me remember the old HotU forums.

It was a gathering of people whom liked the good old games, so you had people there of all ages. One of the users was in his 60s, he'd be 80 years old by now if he's still alive. He told us about punchcard computers and such.

There were all kinds of people there, tech wizards which knew way too much about PC hardware for their own good (IMO), code wizards that didn't just say that Creative made bad audio drivers but backed it up with facts, people whom were battling to get old games to run on "modern" computers before DOSBox was ever a thing, people driving to yard sale after yard sale to grab old games being sold cheap, guys doing fan translations (the guy who did the Portugese translation for Planescape: Torment was one notable case) and loads more. Tons of information about old games you wouldn't believe.

All gone in a heartbeat when the server provider decided to be a dick back in early 2006 because of unpaid bills.

It wasn't just lots of data that was lost, a whole community was virtually destroyed overnight.

 

[buzz]

Conclusion: better give DarkUnderlord some money before the Codex is gone

 

[Ninjerk]

Pers will be gone one day, too.

 

[Akratus]

There is no life

in the void

only

death

 

[:Flash:]

Don Peste your Sudden Strike rant made me remember the old HotU forums.

It was a gathering of people whom liked the good old games, so you had people there of all ages. One of the users was in his 60s, he'd be 80 years old by now if he's still alive. He told us about punchcard computers and such.

There were all kinds of people there, tech wizards which knew way too much about PC hardware for their own good (IMO), code wizards that didn't just say that Creative made bad audio drivers but backed it up with facts, people whom were battling to get old games to run on "modern" computers before DOSBox was ever a thing, people driving to yard sale after yard sale to grab old games being sold cheap, guys doing fan translations (the guy who did the Portugese translation for Planescape: Torment was one notable case) and loads more. Tons of information about old games you wouldn't believe.

All gone in a heartbeat when the server provider decided to be a dick back in early 2006 because of unpaid bills.

It wasn't just lots of data that was lost, a whole community was virtually destroyed overnight.

Well, that was possibly our fault for not creating an exit strategy. The writing that this would happen was on the wall for a long time after Sarinee lost interest. We even had a thread "where should we move once this place breaks down".
I still have the files of my part of the never-finished fan translation of Mad TV 2 somewhere on my hard drive.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Yeah, we had made plans to move, but the change was just too sudden, the community splintered.

Sarinee is updating HotU again, BTW. No downloads on the site (at best there'll be links to the proper download sites) and now it feels more like a reference site than a museum.

Forum's still dead, though.

 

[:Flash:]

Yeah, we had made plans to move, but the change was just too sudden, the community splintered.

Sarinee is updating HotU again, BTW. No downloads on the site (at best there'll be links to the proper download sites) and now it feels more like a reference site than a museum.

Forum's still dead, though.

Are you sure that's Sarinee? I had the impression that some had taken over the moniker.
IIRC Sarinee made all the data she had available for download and basically said "Whoever wants to continue doing this, can do so, I don't have time / I don't care anymore". Shortly afterwards two clones appeared, one (hotud.org) with downloads, but without the original design, the other one with the original design, but without the downloads. I didn't have the impression she had anything to do with those websites.

 

[Andnjord]

Reading the rpg watch comments brought to me the horrifying image of people going "Caesar's De Bello Gallico? Marc Aurelius Meditations? Nah, who cares about that old stuff, why should we preserve it? It's just a burden for the future generations."

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Are you sure that's Sarinee? I had the impression that some had taken over the moniker.

Good point. I hadn't taken that deep a look at it, but the text suggested that it was her - or at least someone pretending to be her, instead of merely being the next person to carry the torch and hold the reins.

 

[Servo]

felipepepe amazing article as usual. Fighting the good fight

Hope I can find some way to contribute.

 

[AN4RCHID]

good stuff.

I noticed this slimy douche at Ars Technica just posted a cheap knock-off of this article: https://archive.is/0nlWa

 

[Xu Fugui]

Especially since the issue with online-only content there is even worst.

Most people don't live that much

This triggers me, pls correct, felipepepe. Very nice article content wise, you should have gotten it posted on the codex too.

Just the other week or so I considered making a thread and some sort of repository for very rare games and other things worth preserving and sharing, seeing as how we have such prestigious collectors such as Luzur around, it would be interesting to see just how obscure things we could unearth and bring into the daylight. Personally I grabbed a ton of stuff from UndergroundGamer back when that was up and running and have all sorts of neat odd things stored on a portable HDD that I'd like to share. Mods seem really anal about enforcing the rules these days though and DU wants a clean codex so I decided not to.

It's really annoying that the preservation of video games falls completely to the shadier parts of the net for no good reason. Came across this article on hardcoregaming101 when I was looking for information on another rare game and there was this section dealing with the accessibility of a game which I found rather interesting:

Even though Tong-Nou wasn't necessarily a commercial breakthrough, Sato decided he didn't want to stop there. One year later, in 1995, his new game was already completed and again released exclusively on Japanese Macintosh machines at first. Unsurprisingly, it never left its native country this time. Yet, when the game's existence was discovered by Western players more than fifteen years later, it gained quite a reputation. Not for its content mind you, but actually for the fact that it was considered to be completely impossible to find. Similarly to how some films didn't survive the test of time or war, Chu-Teng was thought to have disappeared - it had become a "lost game".

Well, that's what fans thought before some guys from 4ch's /vr/ board - who can do great stuff when they don't spend their time insulting each other - decided they would put their hand on this game, whatever the costs. After having turned the Internet upside down, experiencing a frustrating refusal to rip the game from the only Japanese collector known to own it and getting the word from Sato himself that the game was so damn rare that even he didn't have a copy, it seemed like a lost cause. And it would have been, if not for a sudden and unbelievable stroke of luck. As the gang of anons was scrutinizing every corner of the Internet, some guy came out of nowhere claiming a copy of the game was lying around somewhere in his attic. Very few people were convinced of that assertion's authenticity, and rightly so. Yet, what seemed indeed like a tease proved itself to be perfectly true. So, that is the story of how Chu-Teng was brought back to civilization - technically, by a random guy who happened to be browsing the Internet's backdoor portal at the right time. So, now this game is finally available to mankind, what is there to say of it?

Makes you think.

 

[mindx2]

felipepepe Doing my part to at least preserve and archive the physical portion of our shared love of cRPGs.*


*

Spoiler

Last part of that sentence doesn't quite sound like how I wanted it to...

 

[felipepepe]

Just the other week or so I considered making a thread and some sort of repository for very rare games and other things worth preserving and sharing, seeing as how we have such prestigious collectors such as Luzur around, it would be interesting to see just how obscure things we could unearth and bring into the daylight.

It's a tricky subject... there's a lot of really rare games floating around, but they are so hard to pin-point. Like, how many people archived things like that Generation Xth fan-translation, or the extremely obscure translation of Chinese Paladin?

I spent like 3 days hunting that last one, and had to PM a forum member to send me a download link. But it's not something I can just go and share. :/

 

[Siveon]

It made me sad to see how the Vault disappeared like that. One day it was ok and literally the next day it was all gone. I tried to look for some backups or info on the Bioware Social Network, and I came across a very lenghty list of modules which were all gone. Conversions of old games, new fanmade adventures, adaptations of settings and campaigns, and crazy experiments like post-apoc DnD, all gone. NWN's "vanilla" quality aside, it was truly a community effort, and even Bioware themselves kept releasing official patches for years. Fortunately, sites like Sorcerers.net or Gibberlings 3 are still up and working, but we still lost a huge chunk of work made by fans for fans. Not a good thing for gaming historians at all.

Try to tweet your article to Dorito Pope, since it mentions him directly and it could provide a Colbert bump effect.

WTF is a gaming historian?

A historian that studies video game history, duh.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It's a gaming journalist that knows Halo didn't invent FPS and turn-based combat wasn't created as a result of hardware limitations. Also, they don't suck cock professionally, maybe for sport.

 

[TheGreatOne]

WTF is a gaming historian?

A youtube channel, obviously: https://www.youtube.com/user/mcfrosticles/videos

 

[Infinitron]

http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=8921

Why “Bad Old Games” Matter
Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 3, 2015

Filipe Pepe has an outstanding rant at Gamasutra about the disappearance of games from history. There is a similar article to be found on the subject to be found from Ars Technica. Shamus Young takes an interesting approach towards more recent games – how Windows-era games may soon become impossible to play.

As a person who both lived through that era and is fond of retro-gaming today, this is a serious consideration. While on a business and legal standpoint I understand the other side… but I’m still not happy about it.

​

But in these kinds of arguments, we inevitably bring up the classics of the industry. The critical successes that were at least cult classics, if now somewhat forgotten. Those have the traction, at least among old-school gamers. You can invoke Mario and get the cheers of millions. Or Kate Archer and get a few hundred or a few thousand. And while not many people know or care about dnd as Filipe mentions, it’s still got a few rabid fans out there who will rise to its defense.

But what about the “bad old games?” The ones that sucked and maybe only not forgotten because they were truly and completely bad. Last week I talked about some pretty dang obscure little games that almost no one remembers (and a couple that would have a tough time finding defenders). These titles are currently spiralling down the memory hole, and it won’t be too many years before they could be forgotten forever. Do they matter at all? Do ancient games that never really moved the needle like Dungeons of Magdarr matter in the grand scheme of things? Do colossal foul-ups like Trespasser deserve to be remembered and archived? Or just moderately lousy ones like Tegel’s Mercenaries? What about those relatively pedestrian arcade games that really only cloned (or “ripped off”) better designs like Meteors, or Sega’s Space Attack? Does anybody REALLYneed to play these games again?

Not that I’d wish Trespasser on anyone, but… you know where I’m coming on this issue, right? Of course they matter. Here are four good reasons:

#1 – One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: Okay, so maybe Meteors doesn’t matter to almost anybody today. Almost. But for someone out there, yes, it matters a great deal. Are we really equipped and prepared to make a permanent judgment on the worthiness of a game? I mean, most of the contemporary literary critics didn’t think much of Shakespeare’s plays at the time. It’s a good thing we didn’t rely upon their discretion for what survived to be experienced by later generations. Save ’em all (if possible) and let future generations sort them out.

#2 – You can learn more from a bad game than a good game: I worry that the modern crop of game designers have limited experiences on two fronts: They lack historical depth, and they lack experience in playing lesser-quality games. Without the contrast, it’s hard to know what a good game really did right. A designer may love Super Mario Brothers, but if they’ve never played any of the contemporary and preceding platformers of the era, they’ll will have a tough time understanding what it was that Super Mario Brothers did so right. Consequently, a designer may not realize what it is that they are personally doing wrong as they reinvent the wheel and go back along previously discovered dead-ends.

#3 – They may have nuggets of awesome: I don’t know of any game that is 100% terrible. Even the worst games may have sparks of creativity or brilliant ideas that were never adequately implemented. What might have been a throwaway, poorly-fitting feature in an old, lame title could be the seed of a whole new genre. Or at least inspirations for future titles. Which brings us to the next one:

#4 – These games may have inspired / informed the classics: Every game was built on ideas taken from elsewhere, especially other games. We all stand on the shoulders of giants… or really, really short, flawed giants. And the game developers you love may have been influenced by these same, crappy games. If nothing else, maybe they provided motivation in the form of the developer saying, “I can make something better than that!” That’s how Jeff Minter got his start, and I doubt the story is that unusual. Maybe they may not be the games that inspire a new generation of game dev heroes, but they have their place in the family tree.

If anything, I think it’s the crappy old games that need the protection and archiving the most. Mario, Pac Man, and Lara Croft are big enough to take care of themselves (for now). But the little games by little companies that might not even exist anymore – or worse, those by people who passed on and are no longer even available to comment on their creations – need to be preserved and playable. Maybe not for everybody. But for anybody.

 

[buzz]

*snort* Filipe