Bad experiences trying old or nostalgic games?

[Silentstorm]

A lot of developers put more effort into the shareware versions to be fair, they were basically large demos, and if the demos sucked then no one would buy the full version and we couldn't have that, so people would usually do everything they could to make the shareware versions more awesome.

Speaking of Id, has anyone tried the Commander Keen games recently?

Haven't played them in many years, but i remember liking them when i was younger and now i am wondering if they still hold up.

BTW, Bethesda, when are we going to get the full blown gritty reboot of Commander Keen set in the future of the recent Wolfeinstein games where Billy is the son of B.J's daughters and he has to face alien nazis, come on, i can't be the only one who thought of such a thing!

 

[ZeniBot]

Wait you actually want Bethesda to make a Commander Keen game. Are you insane?

 

[Silentstorm]

I mean, i didn't mind Doom(2016) even if it was more of an arena shooter, but now that i think about it, i wasn't that big of a fan of the new Wolfeinstein games, particularly the latest one, and Bethesda isn't one to make games with the look and feel of Commander Keen so probably not.

I just have fond memories of Commander Keen even if i bet playing those games now wouldn't be so great and would love to see the character come back.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Then why not play the new Keen games?

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

i wasn't that big of a fan of the new Wolfeinstein games, particularly the latest one, and Bethesda isn't one to make games with the look and feel of Commander Keen so probably not.

For me Wolfenstein was on its best when it was this mish mash of Indiana Jones/Hellboy pulp WW2 secret war. That is why I enjoy RTCW and even Wolfenstein 2009 the most even if that title suffers a lot from console game design issues.
Also the reason why I am looking forwards to Blade of Agony.

I don't think I could go back to the ZX-Spectrum, as much as I loved it.

Understandable as a lot of the games have aged to much. There are some decent homebrew games for it that have been developed in the last fifteen years, a couple of them ports or sort of reimagings from NES games such as Castlevania Spectral Interlude, Mighty Final Fight, and Aliens Neoplasma.

But Prince Of Persia 3D is so good...okay, no, but i don't mind the Sands Of Time games.

I liked the Sands of Times games as well, controls were pretty smooth and it was easier to get into.

 

[Beastro]

I've played a few old console games lately revisiting some and trying out others I missed.

One that I enjoyed, but could see why it was hated for its difficulty was Master Blaster. I couldn't imagine playing that game without save states to fill in for the lack of a save function given how merciless it can be at times, especially near the end when the later upgrades actually make the controls more difficult to use (For instance, requiring you to prematurely jump before edges to order to not stick to them due to the wall climb ability when you don't want to, then fall into pits trying to release yourself).

It's one of those games that feels like it was too advanced for its time and badly needed a SNES controller to spread the abilities around in that the NES controller struggled to contain.

Good call on Total War, too. I remember being wowed by the tech at the time - you can zoom ALL THE WAY IN AND SEE THE SOLDIER'S FACES - but now even the greats like Rome and Medieval 2 just make you wish you were playing some kind of Paradox game instead. Total War is a game where you click on the towns until your army flag looks better than other people's, then you right click on those people and either command a boring battle that drags on forever while your advisor yells "OUR MORALE IS FLAGGING" and "OUR MORALE IS SUPREME" within a second of each other, or you get bored and click the auto-resolve feature which results in a lone peasant obliterating your army of over 1500 knights. Bullshit either way.

I remember being stuck by how shallow Medieval 2 was after enjoying Rome, which was a nice introduction to the series. Sadly I assumed the series was building up complexity, not reducing it as Rome started.

I recall a buddy unhappy with it too as he was psyched for its release after MTW1 and it's detail.

 

[Silentstorm]

Yeah, i mostly only really tried ZX Spectrum just because it's an important part of european gaming industry and some developers had their start on it like Rare, but even looking at videos i could see not that many games being that good, or some ports, like, R-Type is apparently a very good port for the ZX Spectrum, yet looking at the game in motion i can't help but think "Hey, there are better ports out there, hell, Steam has a compilation of the first two R-Type games and 3D remakes of those two games, with those remakes actually being liked by the shump community" and just go play something else instead.

There are some fun games, but a lot of them are ones i wouldn't mind seeing remakes out of or i just don't get them like the Miner Willy games, there are some homebrew games doing some nice stuff, but even games like Aliens: Neoplasma make me think there are games of comparable quality if not better on digital stores thanks to indie developers.

Granted, a lot of indie games are crap(just like everything) but still, it's not necessarily a bad system, just one that i don't enjoy as much as i wanted to, and i am not knocking it down, i know how important and beloved it was, i can still find some british gamers saying that the ZX Spectrum is their favorite game system of all time if not the one they consider to be the best, there is something to the system and it's games, but i don't think starting to play it at the 2010's at a time where i already had a backlog of PC games across GOG and Steam helped.

 

[Chippy]

No such thing OP.

 

[Silentstorm]

Not really something i went back to playing, but looking at a Youtube video, i heard Pong consoles being mentioned, and man, talk about a game that just doesn't excite anymore, like, it's hard to believe it was so popular at a time.

Same goes for Space Invaders, the original of course, not the rest of the series that has lasted up until this decade, the original is pratically the prototype for many arcade games and shumps, but until you kill the last invader, it's a pretty slow and lacking game when there are so many more exciting games made since then.

Two really big and influential games that helped video games become popular, but man, they are games i only think about when they are mentioned somewhere else.

 

[cosmicray]

It's actually quite easy to believe how Pong was popular. It's just a tennis. It's simple and pure gameplay, what else do you need? Same goes for arkanoid and tetris. Gameplay mechanic is all there is.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

I love Castlevania, but jesus christ on a gram cracker it's tough. Hard to go back to a game that requires the dex skills of a 10 yr old.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Same goes for Space Invaders, the original of course, not the rest of the series that has lasted up until this decade, the original is pratically the prototype for many arcade games and shumps, but until you kill the last invader, it's a pretty slow and lacking game when there are so many more exciting games made since then.

Space Invaders makes for a great little time-waster, especially when you're waiting for those cassette-based games to load up. Which is why some C-64 games put the game into the loading process, so you can play a game while you're waiting for a game to load.

 

[Silentstorm]

Oh yeah, that was a cool thing, but then Namco came around with the idea of having mini games during loading screens during the PS1 Era starting with Ridge Racer and patented that shit making it so that every developer couldn't do anything else with loading screens except put some words(hopefully some tips or something related to the story) on them and it took years for that patent to go away.

As for Space Invaders, yeah, it's pretty much just a time waster, it doesn't help that, again, the series kept going on adding more and more mechanics and stuff making it hard to even go back to just playing the original, i mean, i haven't played it in quite a while, but i remember Space Invaders Extreme actually being pretty fun and having a kickass soundtrack, and Arkanoid VS Space Invaders was pretty fun too...and yes, that game is a thing, instead of shooting at the invaders, you are a ship(paddle) going to every shot and deflecting them back at the invaders or trying to go around blocks and the mix of those two very different games, again, ends up being more fun than one would expect.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Returning to a post from a few years ago to address something.

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.

Update on this: I accidentally stumbled across a case where the Spectrum was playing better music than other contemporary platforms - and made a very interesting discovery.

This is the top-down racer L.E.D. Storm, released in the arcades in 1987. Note that there's a soundtrack.



I owned this game on the Amstrad CPC and distinctly remembered that it had no music, only SFX.

Then I came across this:



WTF, why does the Spectrum version have a soundtrack and the Amstrad one doesn't? (Please ignore the fact that the Spectrum-tune is different from the arcade one, the composer just threw out the OST and made his own.)

So I started digging, and learned that just before Amstrad bought out Spectrum a 'Spectrum 128'-model had been released in Spain, which featured a whopping 128kb of RAM. It also came with something no other Spectrum-computer had: Its very own soundchip! The same one that the Amstrad CPC used, to be precise. After the acquisition Amstrad released the Spectrum +2, which was heavily based on the Spectrum 128, but this meant that the Spectrum and the Amstrad were now identical in many ways.

One notable difference regarded backwards compatibility. Predecessors to the Spectrum 128 only had 48kb of memory, while the Amstrad had the 464-model with 64kb of memory, and the 6128-model had 128kb. To ensure backwards compatibility and allow the Spectrum to use its new banks of RAM, Spectrum-coders would often have the games check the hardware; if they found 128kb of memory they'd run the game as intended, but if only 48kb was found then the music would be skipped. Meanwhile, Amstrad-coders... didn't do any such thing. 64kb was enough to run both the game and the music, so no one saw a reason to 'reward' 6128-users with extra frills... especially since a large portion of Amstrad-releases were just lazy Spectrum ports, post-acquisition.

An excellent example of this is the platformer Auf Wiedersehen Monty. This is what the game sounds like on a Spectrum with only 48kb of RAM (and the infamous Internal Beeper):



But with 128kb RAM and the sound chip, it played this instead:



This sounds pretty close to the C-64 version. Note the extended intro, and the drums at 0:38.

Now let's take a look at the CPC-version:



Hang on, where's the intro and the drums? What's going on here?

What's going on is that even though the Spectrum and the Amstrad have the same soundchip, and therefore should be playing the tune identically, that's not happening. The AY-soundchip only has three channels, and in the case of the Amstrad version they hard-dedicated one of those to SFX, leaving only two for the music. Meanwhile the Spectrum uses all three channels and the extra memory, meaning a better musical performance.

What this means, is that the odds of finding a Spectrum-game playing good music with the Internal Beeper is quite low, but finding a Spectrum-game playing good music with 128kb of memory and the AY-soundchip is quite high, as it automatically has an advantage over Amstrad's entire CPC-line! If an Amstrad game released after 1986 plays a tune well, odds are good that the Spectrum can do it better. I've already found several examples of this, like Chase H.Q.. It's considered one of the best Amstrad-conversions around, but the Spectrum version sounds better.

This is making me rethink many things about the ZX Spectrum. Maybe you can find a good tune in there as well.

 

[Nutmeg]

Mr.Do

I think this one still plays alright. Jumpbug also holds up.

BTW have you tried spacemouse?