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Bad experiences trying old or nostalgic games?

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Oh hell yeah, the videos are more for looking at the different ports and listen to the audio than his opinions, sadly, there isn't any other series like it that covered as many games or ports, at least, not that i can find.

The closest I've found is ChinnyVision who claims to use original hardware to review his games. He also reviews old hardware from time to time so it's not all games.
 

The Dutch Ghost

Arbiter
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May 26, 2016
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681
Based on what you just told me you should give Dead Zone a try.
A simple concept but I found it very fun and addictive.

 

cosmicray

Savant
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I've heard of people giving up on Ultima 7 because it was just too damn big. That's a different argument entirely. ;)
It is, but I think I somewhat was overwhelmed by the whole system of constantly writing in notebook, combat and big world with lots of interactivity.

Don't forget the perspective. That complaint is the most baffling to me.
Yep, I played it and never thought of it, but my friend after seeing the perspective was surprised by it. Seem alright to me.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
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At least i am sure it aged better than the first few Ultimas, or even Ultima Underworld.

Actually, while it's not enough to make me outright dislike them, there are quite a few blobbers or CRPG's that were too much in love with the mouse and used it way too often to do anything, even real time combat.

Again, not enough to make me hate some classics, but man, having controls and UI that focus on using both the keyboard and mouse feels a lot better and more comfortable to me.
 

majorsoccer

Prospernaut
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Mar 10, 2019
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By the way i tried Thief 2 other day,that game fucking sucks ! how i supposed to know where to go when there's no automap ? levels are unnecessary big too ! is this a stealth game or a open world game ? the controls are clunky as hell !

Thief 1 & 2 are unplayable by today's standards
 
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Tigranes

Arcane
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Jan 8, 2009
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Occasionally, yes, I really struggle to get into an old game - Betrayal at Krondor, for example.

But the general experience is that many older classics are fantastic games whenever you play them in whatever order, as long as you give yourself some time.

As someone who never really played blobbers or had fond memories of Ultima, etc, there was nothing really enticing about Ultima Underworld - but it was amazing once I gave it a proper try. I needed to rely a little bit on emulator save state to save frustration, but Wizardry I was fabulous.
 

DalekFlay

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There's the occasional older game I liked back then but have a hard time dealing with now. Betrayal at Krondor was mentioned just above and I think that's a good example. Early adventure games with arrow key and type interfaces are another one for me, like King's Quest and the rest.

There are also genres I use to like but don't really play now, mostly because I enjoy them less and have less free time. RTS is the biggest example, I much prefer turn-based and always have, and so RTS games don't really get into my playlist like they did back when classics were coming out like Red Alert. I still love point and click adventures but they often get put on the back-burner for RPGs and FPSes, which often means I never get to them.
 

Tweed

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I've never been able to get into M&M1 for some reason. I also had a really horrible experience with Tegel's Mercenaries and I wanted to play it since I owned Strike Squad as a kid, of course I never finished that either so it should have been a clue.
 

Mustawd

Guest
There's certainly some annoyances involved though, usually related to UI.

The biggest annoyances for me are:

1. RTFM instead of help tips or tutorials. Even if they put the manual in-game that’d be an improvement.
2. Annoying anti-piracy that relies on the manual to proceed.
3. No mouse functionality/unintuitive UI.
4. Unresolved bugs.
 

Jack Of Owls

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Trying to map dungeons in Bard's Tale 3 with the poor automap then on graph paper many years ago when I attempted to play it on my Commodore 64 was a disorienting experience, to put it mildly. Also, random monster encounters on almost literally every single square you advanced to didn't help. However, the recent remasters of this series by Krome Studios are almost a joy to play (Bard's Tale 1 Remastered being the best) due to extensive bug fixes and many QoL enhancements.
 

Silentstorm

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You can't underestimate how great remasters can be regarding old games, improving the UI can help a lot even if you let some bad element designs like constant random encounters that just won't stop.

Seriously, a good UI can help a lot.
 

Silentstorm

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Hexen, confusing maps and the puzzles are mostly switches that you activate and then look around to see what they opened or look for more switches, it's just not that fun or great, i don't mind big maps and levels, but damn me if they weren't too big and samey after a while.
 

octavius

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I've played most of the pre-Windows era CRPGs worth playing, and the only ones I really found unplayable due to the UI was Ultima 6 and 7. Althought I'm sure that if they had a half decent combat system I would have tried harder...
So I really appreciate total remakes like the Ultima 6 Project.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
By the way i tried Thief 2 other day,that game fucking sucks ! how i supposed to know where to go when there's no automap ? levels are unnecessary big too ! is this a stealth game or a open world game ? the controls are clunky as hell !

Thief 1 & 2 are unplayable by today's standards

Better trolls than you (and bigger idiots than you as well) have tried to troll the Codex using the Thief games.

It's not gonna work anymore.

Go away.
 

Silentstorm

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Rick Dangerous seems a bit trial and error looking at it now, like you need to know the full game in order to suceed.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
It is. Rick Dangerous is nothing more but a memory game, where you need to memorize the locations and triggers of all the death traps.

The first two levels of the first game are alright (note how the screens of level two form a pyramid when joined together) but then the third level kicks in and ruins everything. It has wrap-around elements, meaning you're never walking along a straight path, but constantly being teleported back and forth all over the place, making it extra difficult to find the right path through it all while rescuing all the prisoners.

The levels in Rick Dangerous 2 are slightly easier than in the first, but the theme of memorization remains strong.

The only reason people liked those games back in the day was due to their charm and, strange as it may sound, the gameplay they offered was fresh, and not that brutally difficult compared to the average difficulty level of games at the time.

Rick Dangerous is the grandfather to cheesefest-games such as I Wanna Be The Guy and Cat Mario, where everything can and will kill you, like superfast platforms, invisible blocks and off-screen surprises.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
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Don't really mind that too much, but never was a big fan of IWBTG and games like that, i don't like games where i genuinely have to restart and end up feeling like there was no way i could have beaten a challenge on my first or second try without knowing about it ahead of time.

Bosses are the big exception, and i don't really mind a game having one or two sections like that, but when the entire game revolves around dying, dying, dying and then passing through because i know what's coming, that's not really being hard or challenging, that's being a memory test.

A game can make me die tons of times and still be really enjoyable, it's just that those games usually make me feel like i always had a shot and just missed something or played badly, not that i was put in a situation where i only had a split second to react or i was dead.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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I found Ultima VII unplayable. By the time I got to it, my brain was totally wired for the other style of "isometric" (I really don't have time/interest in debating whether any of this is actually isometric) projection, so everything looked absurdly tilted. Added to that is the worst inventory in any game I've ever played, followers who can't feed themselves, requiring me to find food for them in that worst inventory of all time, and combat being terrible. I gather than with proper DOSBox settings, the timing on things could be improved, but when I played it, I either didn't get them right or they didn't work, and the result was that some things still happened absurdly fast. Combat is one example, but there were also times when followers started going berserk for food and then abandoned the party before I could find food for them. Finally, the font is horrible, probably the worst font in any game I've played, and the combination of RenFaire Olde Englishe and a gothic font made simply reading the text intolerable, however good the plot may have been.

It's a shame because I could've grown up playing Ultima IV, V (my best friend in fourth grade was obsessed with it, and we talked about it all the time and I played it a few times at his house), VI, and VII, and I'm sure played contemporaneously I would've adored them. For whatever reason, though, I didn't really play computer games much at that age, and missed the boat.
 

Silentstorm

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Dragon Age:Origins is old now?

I wouldn't even consider that retro even, but wow, that must be the youngest game so far.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Ow. My ears.

I recently found a small cache of songs (~300) recorded from video games... all on the Sinclair Spectrum.

As mentioned earlier the Spectrum didn't have a dedicated sound chip (at least in the early models, no clue about the later models released by Amstrad) so it was always going to be a challenge to make it play decent music.

After having listened to about half of those tracks, I conclude that the Spectrum's music capabilities are just a couple of steps above that of a feminist modem. There are very few good tunes in there, and the ones I do find I can find in better quality on other systems such as the Amstrad CPC, and that's saying something.

That actually got me thinking whether there's a piece of music out there that sounds best on the Spectrum. That could only be the case if it was from a Spectrum exclusive title... but with the Spectrum having 27.000+ titles in its library I'm not going to spend further time trying to find an answer to that question.
 

Silentstorm

Learned
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Dunno, but yeah, many Spectrum games had bad to no music, a sharp contrast to it's rival Commodore 64, which, while having a darker palette and generally not being able to make as many great sprites and the like, had much better sound capabilities and a bunch of great musicians working on it, seriously, the C64 music still kicks ass.

Just saying, i think Spectrum is only used for music in that they are put in homebrew games nowadays, the Commodore 64's SID chip is still used nowadays by some people, the band Machinae Supremacy, for example, uses the SID chip in their songs.
 

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