Made a new Gamasutra article: The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history

[Ninjerk]

I actually think this is a good reason why we shouldn’t have a list of must play classics.

Most people you run into who hold up Shakespeare as brilliant or one of the greatest writers of all time don't show any interest in Elizabethan drama beyond him. Most would probably be hard pressed to name any of his contemporaries; the few who could would probably be limited to 1-2 of the most famous ones, struggling even then to name more than 1 or 2 works for each (and good luck finding someone that's actually read them). This isn't just the equivalent of proclaiming you're a massive fan of the Elder Scrolls and only playing the newer titles. It's more akin to claiming that Skyrim is brilliant and the best game of all time, and then admitting that it's the only RPG you played and you've only played a few video games at all.

This is important to note. Many people's experience with silent movies starts and ends with Metropolis, The General and Something Something Chaplin. Even if they enjoy them (which most people do), they often assume they are the odd exceptions among many more unwatchable films. A reading list is valuable in orienting people, but when it becomes a closed catalogue of The Official Must See List of Must See Classics, they end up as limits, not jumping-off points.

To bring up another film example, there's The Birth of a Nation; a film which is by most modern standards unwatchable: It's long, extremely boring most of the time, is a silent movie, and based upon an unapologetically racist premise.

That's interesting. I watched it last year in its latest restoration, and if you aren't triggered by the frankly hilarious racism, or the melodramatic acting style, it actually comes off as a classic Hollywood superproduction. You have eye candy, majestic battle scenes, tension-building, tragedy, romance, cute little animals, and a message of peace and brotherly love

Spoiler

(also, Gus the Renegade Negro, who tries to rape the heroine after a hilarious chase sequence).

Since it pioneered the modern Hollywoodian film language, it is immediately understandable to a modern moviegoer 100 years after it was made.

...although this also begs the question: what is the Birth of a Nation of video games?

Bioshock: Infilastofus obviously

 

[pippin]

The Birth of a Nation served as THE blueprint for modern cinema. Even Eisenstein was inspired by this film. Most history books regard it as a major breakthrough in technical and narrative terms, in spite of all the racism shown. I'm a leftard, but it's still nice to see all those sjw filmmakers going like "well... yeah" when they are forced to understand this fact.
DW Griffith was saddened to see this, however, as he didn't wanted to come across as a KKK member. That's why he made Intolerance, but that's another story. It should be noted that many people are willing to acknowledge The Birth of a Nation's status as a generall improvement in cinema, despite its theme. This could suggest cinema is an industry which has self respect. Try to do this with Mass Effect fans by showing them the Star Control games, and see the results.

 

[Karellen]

felipepepeI am cautiously optimistic that this market change will inspire people to go back and play older games. I do think some will be effectively lost forever: however good it may be, I don't think System Shock, for example, is playable today by any except a very rare breed. But I also think some, those with better interfaces and more intuitive systems, will survive and be recognized. I hope, anyway.

So I'm a bit late here, but when I read that I realized that, not too long ago, I wrote something similar about System Shock myself. So rather than answer immediately, I had to go and take the original System Shock out for a spin first. Having done that, I want to take a moment not just to gush about how much the original System Shock rocks, but also to point out that, in truth, it's surprisingly accessible. I want to compare it to System Shock 2 (which, admittedly, many people probably already consider too old to play). Still, this is important - SS2 starts with an intro, two tutorials and interactive character creation montage, after which, even once the game actually starts, you have what is, essentially, a long interactive cutscene and yet another pseudo-tutorial where you learn to use the character upgrade system. I have a saved game at the actual start of the game, when the first fight happens, with 50 minutes in the clock. It takes almost an hour before you even start playing the game! In System Shock, when you start the game, you start the game, after which you'll be bashing robots in mere minutes, because the game lacks many of SS2's slightly arbitrary subsystems and therefore needs no explanation.

Also - and this is interesting - even though System Shock is often described as a difficult game, the entire first deck actually isn't difficult at all. I would go so far as to say that it's easier by far than the beginning of SS2 (which is perhaps the hardest part of the game), since the early enemies are very slow and you can always go patch up at the surgery machine if you need to. Like many old older games, it's a game that can actually be learned by playing, and like the dungeon crawlers it draws descent from, you can progress very gradually and escape when the going gets tough and try another direction. This might be boring if it weren't for the godly level design and the interesting progression in gear and armament, which makes exploration very rewarding. The actual combat, incidentally, is pretty slow and rewards being careful and using cover. It certainly doesn't call for quick reflexes and needle-sharp aiming.

The only things that could make System Shock inaccessible, really, are the DOS-era graphics which are primitive, but not outright bad, as well as the admittedly cumbersome controls which appear to be designed for a person with three hands. But the latter isn't really a problem anymore, since anyone playing System Shock now would probably get System Shock Portable, which provides the game with mouselook and WSAD key configuration. What's left is, simply, a superb game. So while I could be part of a minority here - System Shock 1, with its exploration focus, is pretty much tuned to everything I like about games - I think this sentiment that old games are inaccessible and we only played them back then because we had way too much time and didn't know any better is a myth that reinforces itself. It's exactly this meme of old games being "outdated" that felipepepe pointed out.

Most of all, it's a line of thought that overlooks many of the things that actually make old games highly accessible, like the way they're often quite short, cohesive, have reasonably discrete mechanics and make sure that most of the time you spend with them actually involves playing the game. Put another way, many things that are considered design gaffes in modern games work perfectly well in the context of older games simply because you get more things faster in old games. Trial-and-error gameplay or backtracking aren't much of a chore if reloading is instantaneous and you can run through a level in 30 seconds. It's only when you look at these things through the assumptions of modern gaming without actually trying older games out for yourself that these things look bad, which is precisely why these assumptions are pernicious and should be treated with caution.

 

[MRY]

well as the admittedly cumbersome controls which appear to be designed for a person with three hands

When I tried to play SS, maybe a decade ago, it was the controls as well as a cumbersome UI that made it hard to approach. I also think that while the lack of a tutorial and so forth is quite nice -- I've always enjoyed the way old NES games dropped you right into the action -- in this case I found that the game offered too much to do too early on. Because the controls were tricky and the UI was not intuitive, the diversity of options seemed overwhelming rather than liberating.

it's a game that can actually be learned by playing

The problem is, at least for me, when the UI is hard to get a handle on, it's hard to tell if you're flailing and failing because you're not grasping the controls or because you're not grasping the rules.

reloading is instantaneous

Hear, hear. It's tragic how post-1990, we came to accept loading delays between zones as an inherent feature of gaming. It's amazing how much stress they add to exploration and experimentation.

we only played them back then because we had way too much time and didn't know any better

This is not my view. My view is, "We didn't know any worse." Being able to interact with command line makes you a better person than being able to do nothing but swipe iOS screens. I just think it may be that we've gotten too soft, and there's no easy way back.

 

[taxalot]

We had a much bigger tolerance for what we now call shity game mechanics in the past, and I think that's for two reasons.

One, we didn't know they were shitty mechanics. Nobody was here telling us that the way we played games, reading a lot of text and without quest compass was the wrong way to play. And of course, because gaming was just about the gameplay back then. However hard to access the gameplay, it was still gameplay (*) . It's even more blatant if you reload games from the days of the 8 bit, not consoles, but computers. Just try : half-of-them are nearly unplayable, even for a crowd that is as hardcore as the codex is. Action games are sluggish, hardly moving at 10 frames per second if you are lucky and the sun shines, mechanics are obscure, the ways the characters move make no sense at all and you are to figure all of that, the basic concept of moving your characters by dying a thousand time and going through hours of reloading on the slow drives of back then. But back then, yes, we actually considered that gameplay. So, in a way, you could argue that there is no such a thing as a bad game, just games with very awkward mechanics to the current player. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ; gameplay is in the muscle/nerve reflex of the gamer.

Two is more easy to do understand. Not only games were more costly, but we were younger kids who could kill time at home watching the stupid crap on TV, rereading a book you had already read most of the time, go out and play (we're codexers, remember), or just replay that game one more time, however awful it is, to try to go further. There was no internet to compete, no Facebook, no twitter, no youtube. You had no bills to pay. You weren't physically exhausted after a day of work. Didn't have to walk the dog out, do the dishes, tell a story to the kid. There was less competition. A game with clunky mechanics was therefore more fun. All is relative.




* But I do remember that there were high-brow and low-brow games back then, even on the PC. People looked at me strangely when I told them about Ultima 7 ; why would anyone care, when you can get the action of Doom ? And that's the beautiful thing, really. The times are changing, but the same overall issue actually remain. The same incomprehension remains between people who love old-school and games and AAA lovers.

 

[MRY]

In the truth is stranger than fiction category, I was introduced to Ultima VII at camp based on descriptions of the game from a group of older football (American) players. All I can remember is that the heart of their love was a sound effect that played when you critically hit a fleeing enemy and it squelched or something. But they seemed really into the game in general. Strange days.

 

[Archibald]

While I agree that early games aren't very easy to play these days I don't think that thats the main problem here. Problemo, imo, is that after couple of years games like Morrowind are likely to labeled as "unplayable" too.

 

[Karellen]

we only played them back then because we had way too much time and didn't know any better

This is not my view. My view is, "We didn't know any worse." Being able to interact with command line makes you a better person than being able to do nothing but swipe iOS screens. I just think it may be that we've gotten too soft, and there's no easy way back.

Purely as a historical side note, I should say to say that while the deficiencies of System Shock's controls weren't maybe quite as obvious back in the day, they weren't great even for their time - for instance, Dark Forces was very similar in that it was a highly vertical (and excellent) 3D shooter without mouselook in which you needed to use a separate set of keys for looking up and down - but since it had configurable keys, you could quite reasonably set it up in such a way that you'd play using just the keyboard with two hands, omitting the mouse altogether. It's still reasonably playable that way, at any rate much more so than System Shock.

That said, while the way the mouse is used is quite bizarre in System Shock in this day and age, strangely enough the joystick controls are pretty reasonable, which would make a joystick-and-keyboard combo the best way to play vanilla System Shock. So the lack of decent mouse controls is in some ways indicative of how the joystick was the essential gaming peripheral for 3D games in the early 90s that has since fallen to disuse. It actually makes me feel quite a bit better about playing System Shock with SS Portable's mouselook mod - you could say "it wasn't meant to be played that way!", but it's actually a reasonably close analogue of the experience that a monocled 90s joystick owner would have had with System Shock, lording it over the rustic mouse-and-keyboard peasants of the day.

 

[MRY]

For about a month, I played Quake in my school's computer lab using the keyboard vertical-looking controls, yelling epithets at the one guy in our group who used a mouse.

 

[Machocruz]

Most of the claims of older games being too hard to get into, cumbersome, nostalgia goggles, I find to be exaggerated and without merit. I didn't own my own computer until after 2000, ok. This was after years of arcades, consoles, and maybe a few C64 games. The first PC games I bought were Max Payne, Ghost Recon, and Return to Wolfenstein. I didn't really start attacking the classics until a few years after that. I didn't play X-Com until about 4 or 5 years ago. Same with Daggerfall, Jagged Alliance 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Civilization 4; System Shock 1 I just played last year. Only SS1 presented any legitimate barriers. I had no problem controlling X-Com; how can you? It's all point and click. You can learn the icons in minutes. Daggerfall was hardly any rougher. The less than fluid animation, which still plagues ES to this day, and the crappy dungeon mapping were the biggest barriers to ease of use. Everything else is simple. What is the problem here? Ego. These aren't games they are able to face roll right away. You can get owned in the first DF dungeon, lose half your squad in the first X-Com battle, lose your best merc in JA2, etc. But one must defend the times they live in, I suppose.

By all means, I'd like someone to argue nostalgia goggles when I played System Shock 2 for the first time the year before Bioshock came out and found the latter wanting and a waste of time in comparison. Or how about playing Civ 5 for 100 hours, then Civ 4 and finding the latter more satisfying in the space of 5 hours. One year is enough for nostalgia goggles, yet people are still talking about how legitimately great Skryim and Bioshock are. It's newfags being defensive, is all I see.

It's even more blatant if you reload games from the days of the 8 bit, not consoles, but computers. Just try : half-of-them are nearly unplayable, even for a crowd that is as hardcore as the codex is. Action games are sluggish, hardly moving at 10 frames per second if you are lucky and the sun shines, mechanics are obscure, the ways the characters move make no sense at all and you are to figure all of that, the basic concept of moving your characters by dying a thousand time and going through hours of reloading on the slow drives of back then. But back then, yes, we actually considered that gameplay. So, in a way, you could argue that there is no such a thing as a bad game, just games with very awkward mechanics to the current player. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ; gameplay is in the muscle/nerve reflex of the gamer.

And these are fair game. Except for Ultima 4, I don't go earlier than the 90s computer games. But the people calling games outdated are mostly naming 90s games, late 90s even, and blaming interface instead of admitting or realizing that maybe it's the play challenges that are hard for them. They'd still get hosed in Wizardry 7 no matter how friendly the UI was, no matter how many quest markers and auto maps. They'd still get caught out a million times in Thief. I suck at RTS, no matter what year they were made. Because I haven't put in the time outside of Company of Heroes and a few rounds of AoE2. It's user error. I'd rather do something else than work on my APM or memorize hotkeys. The first skirmish I ever had was very rough, frustrating even. My fault though, my skills weren't developed.

 

[tuluse]

It's even more blatant if you reload games from the days of the 8 bit, not consoles, but computers. Just try : half-of-them are nearly unplayable, even for a crowd that is as hardcore as the codex is. Action games are sluggish, hardly moving at 10 frames per second if you are lucky and the sun shines, mechanics are obscure, the ways the characters move make no sense at all and you are to figure all of that, the basic concept of moving your characters by dying a thousand time and going through hours of reloading on the slow drives of back then. But back then, yes, we actually considered that gameplay. So, in a way, you could argue that there is no such a thing as a bad game, just games with very awkward mechanics to the current player. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ; gameplay is in the muscle/nerve reflex of the gamer.

I've recently been diving into 8 and 16bit console games, and I have no idea what you mean by sluggish action games. Maybe I've been lucky with the ones I've played, but I find them mostly smooth as glass. It's clear most attention has been paid to controls and responsiveness instead of fancy animations.

Spoiler

NES games I've tried
Adventures of Rad Gravity
Arman no Kiseki
Batman - the video game
Batman - return of the joker
Bionic Commando
Castlevania 1 and 3 [small exception to smoothness here, but it's clear the slightly delayed actions are intentional]
Contra
Jackal
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Lode Runner
Metal Storm
Metroid
Rygar

games that actually had poor controls:
Golgo 13 (both of them

 

[taxalot]

Notice how I mention mostly computer action games suffering from that issue. Try replaying good old classic "Shadow of the beast".

 

[tuluse]

Notice how I mention mostly computer action games suffering from that issue. Try replaying good old classic "Shadow of the beast".

I didn't notice that actually

Yeah, you're right. The early days of computer programming were not kind to action games.

 

[MRY]

Since this is really derailing for the sake of nostalgia, I'm putting my NES thoughts behind a spoiler tag.

Spoiler

NES games tend to be pretty good about responsiveness (if I thought hard enough, I could come up with some bad examples, I'm sure). That said, many of the early NES games do have some control-related issues. In particular, there was a degree of QWOP-style griefing going on -- sometimes perhaps unintentional, but sometimes by design. Coming back to them after having played later NES and other console games is depressing. For example, in SMB1, the movement is much worse than in later games: you can't control your mid-air momentum as much (you can only somewhat reverse your jump). In Castlevania you can't jump on stairs, and a large amount of the challenge consists of putting you on stairs, where you can't jump, and then having things fly at you where you'd want to be able to jump. In Ghosts and Goblins you can't control your mid-air momentum at all, and many of the challenges consist of having you helplessly flinging forward into any enemy who spawned after your jump. In Metroid, your gun has a very limited range (initially). Each of those is a good game, but significantly inferior to the later games when the controls got better. I recall Kid Icarus as having poor controls, too, but I can't remember my exact beef with them. Most of the games on your list are golden, though. You should definitely add Ninja Gaiden.

I am especially fond on Contra, which I played so much in law school that I could beat the first level with my eyes closed. I remember thinking the game was impossible without the 30-lives code when I was a kid, but as an adult, I could whip through it without dying over and over again.[/quote]

 

[:Flash:]

That said, while the way the mouse is used is quite bizarre in System Shock in this day and age, strangely enough the joystick controls are pretty reasonable, which would make a joystick-and-keyboard combo the best way to play vanilla System Shock. So the lack of decent mouse controls is in some ways indicative of how the joystick was the essential gaming peripheral for 3D games in the early 90s that has since fallen to disuse. It actually makes me feel quite a bit better about playing System Shock with SS Portable's mouselook mod - you could say "it wasn't meant to be played that way!", but it's actually a reasonably close analogue of the experience that a monocled 90s joystick owner would have had with System Shock, lording it over the rustic mouse-and-keyboard peasants of the day.

It's funny I had completely forgotten how for some time Joysticks were considered a legitimate (or even the best) option to play FPS games.
I even had a Logitech Wingman Warrior for a certain amount of time (it broke during guarantee and I received the money back as it was no longer in production), which was a Joystick that was promoted by John Romero and was specifically designed for FPS games. It had a third axis for the left hand that could be turned endlessly and didn't reset, which was meant for turning, whereas the normal x axis was used for strafing.

Terra Nova was another one of those games, which existed in the timeslot where mouselook was not the norm. You could aim anywhere on the screen with the mouse, but looking around was independently mapped onto a lot of keys.

 

[Machocruz]

I've recently been diving into 8 and 16bit console games, and I have no idea what you mean by sluggish action games. Maybe I've been lucky with the ones I've played, but I find them mostly smooth as glass. It's clear most attention has been paid to controls and responsiveness instead of fancy animations.

Spoiler

NES games I've tried
Adventures of Rad Gravity
Arman no Kiseki
Batman - the video game
Batman - return of the joker
Bionic Commando
Castlevania 1 and 3 [small exception to smoothness here, but it's clear the slightly delayed actions are intentional]
Contra
Jackal
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Lode Runner
Metal Storm
Metroid
Rygar

games that actually had poor controls:
Golgo 13 (both of them

He meant 8 bit computer games. I thought the same "what is he smoking?" because I missed that detail. Jap and western arcade game, the bulk of console games, were mostly polished.

 

[Gerrard]

I've recently been diving into 8 and 16bit console games, and I have no idea what you mean by sluggish action games. Maybe I've been lucky with the ones I've played, but I find them mostly smooth as glass. It's clear most attention has been paid to controls and responsiveness instead of fancy animations.

Spoiler

NES games I've tried
Adventures of Rad Gravity
Arman no Kiseki
Batman - the video game
Batman - return of the joker
Bionic Commando
Castlevania 1 and 3 [small exception to smoothness here, but it's clear the slightly delayed actions are intentional]
Contra
Jackal
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Lode Runner
Metal Storm
Metroid
Rygar

games that actually had poor controls:
Golgo 13 (both of them

He meant 8 bit computer games. I thought the same "what is he smoking?" because I missed that detail. Jap and western arcade game, the bulk of console games, were mostly polished.

I think james Rolfe would disagree with you, strongly.

And this "we didn't know better" is a retarded argument. Do you need to have a better example to know something is shit? Are you unable of thinking of a way it could be made less shit yourself?

 

[felipepepe]

Columbus' egg bro, anyone can say "WASD is a great control system" today, but we spent more than a decade using cardinal directions or awkward things like F = Forward, L = Left, R = Right.

Even simple things like a "Loot all" button or displaying item stats in-game required someone to implement them first - or even the technology advance to allow it - before it became obvious.

 

[Ninjerk]

SS2's UI should be all the evidence you need to know that much experimentation was necessary to get us where we are.

 

[TheGreatOne]

I didn't really start attacking the classics until a few years after that. I didn't play X-Com until about 4 or 5 years ago. Same with Daggerfall, Jagged Alliance 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Civilization 4; System Shock 1 I just played last year. Only SS1 presented any legitimate barriers. I had no problem controlling X-Com; how can you? It's all point and click. You can learn the icons in minutes.

Quite many PC games (espescially on Amiga) were mouse only. In fact paradoxically enough mouse pointers were a reason for dumbing down PC/Amiga games (or atleast making some games like certain dungeon crawlers unnessecarily cumbersome to control) back then, as pointed out by CRPG addict.

By all means, I'd like someone to argue nostalgia goggles when I played System Shock 2 for the first time the year before Bioshock came out and found the latter wanting and a waste of time in comparison

I played SS2 after Bioshock if I recall. In fact I played most of codex/PC game classics that I like for the first time during the last 4 years. Haven't touched a single multiplatform WRPG since I started getting into CRPGs. Though I do think it's a gradual process, you can't throw some one in the deep end and expect them to like it immedieatly if they've only been exposed to new games. I probably wouldn't have been able to get into many of the older PC games I like if I hadn't worked my way backwards through silver age CRPGs and late 90s/early 2000s PC games, which are a hybrid of and popamole design. So playing Temple of Elemental Evil/Baldur's Gate before Pool of Radiance is advised imo. 8 bit graphics, codewheel, having to read manual, no loading, no tooltips (which is a big barrier of entry) or in game info/tutorials, no info on in game maps/having to map things... that's a lot for some one who has only played Skyrim and Mass Effect.

I think james Rolfe would disagree with you, strongly.

There's plenty of horrible games on the system, but the main point he makes is that there are (numerous) action games on the NES/SMS/PC-E (&MD/SNES) that have stood the test of time and are still as playable today as they were back then, where as majority of C64/Amiga action games are shit or mediocre at best (Turrican being the most notable exception to this rule). Which is why you often see people online using the term "euro platformer" and "euro shmup" to describe those games; visuals that were as good/better than contemporary console games but sluggish controls, horrible design, unfair gameplay due to programming/design (hitbox, jump arc, physics, slowdown) etc. I suppose that Japanese developers (that were often supported by hardware manufacturers or were themselves hardware manufacturers) had bigger budgets and actual QA staff, which led to more polish.

I've recently been diving into 8 and 16bit console games, and I have no idea what you mean by sluggish action games. Maybe I've been lucky with the ones I've played, but I find them mostly smooth as glass. It's clear most attention has been paid to controls and responsiveness instead of fancy animations.

Spoiler

NES games I've tried
Adventures of Rad Gravity
Arman no Kiseki
Batman - the video game
Batman - return of the joker
Bionic Commando
Castlevania 1 and 3 [small exception to smoothness here, but it's clear the slightly delayed actions are intentional]
Contra
Jackal
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Lode Runner
Metal Storm
Metroid
Rygar

games that actually had poor controls:
Golgo 13 (both of them

You've yet to play the best NES games (Mega Man 2, Gimmick, Metal Storm) And wait 'till you get to playing 16 bit games: Rocketknight adventures, Mega Man X, Castlevania IV, Rondo of Blood, Pulseman, Ristar, Super Mario World 1&2, Sonic games, Super Metroid... and many other titles.

 

[Gozma]

For about a month, I played Quake in my school's computer lab using the keyboard vertical-looking controls, yelling epithets at the one guy in our group who used a mouse.

I remember trying to find any minor excuse that could possibly rationalize using arrow key controls vs. mouselook + WASD while trying to play Doom 2 on DWANGO

 

[Machocruz]

I played SS2 after Bioshock if I recall. In fact I played most of codex/PC game classics that I like for the first time during the last 4 years. Haven't touched a single multiplatform WRPG since I started getting into CRPGs. Though I do think it's a gradual process, you can't throw some one in the deep end and expect them to like it immedieatly if they've only been exposed to new games. I probably wouldn't have been able to get into many of the older PC games I like if I hadn't worked my way backwards through silver age CRPGs and late 90s/early 2000s PC games, which are a hybrid of and popamole design. So playing Temple of Elemental Evil/Baldur's Gate before Pool of Radiance is advised imo. 8 bit graphics, codewheel, having to read manual, no loading, no tooltips (which is a big barrier of entry) or in game info/tutorials, no info on in game maps/having to map things... that's a lot for some one who has only played Skyrim and Mass Effect.

Growing up with 80s and 90s consoles does give you a little prep for PC games. There were PC and PC style adventure and strategy games on NES, MD, SNES, and they were fairly simple at the time. You got introduced to the concept of there being something more cerebral than action games, of detailed interfaces and command lists. In a way, Shadowrun on Genesis prepared you for Fallout, Dune 2 prepared you for later RTS, Shadowgate prepared you for solving problems a certain way, etc.

So yeah I never had to start in the deep end after playing modern popamole.

I'll add that I found System Shock 2 easier to get into than Bioshock. The shooting mechanics and feedback in the latter game are ungainly. SS2 was smoother.

 

[Gerrard]

There's plenty of horrible games on the system, but the main point he makes is that there are (numerous) action games on the NES/SMS/PC-E (&MD/SNES) that have stood the test of time

Nigga please, the NES was an ocean of shit with a few good games here and there.

where as majority of C64/Amiga action games are shit or mediocre at best

Yeah, no.

sluggish controls, horrible design, unfair gameplay due to programming/design (hitbox, jump arc, physics, slowdown) etc.

Funny, because this sounds exactly like NES games.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Feel free to try list more excellent C64 action games than we can list shit ones.

NES and SNES had a very high ratio of good games, Nintendo was notorious for having extremely high quality control, it's why those weird ass knock-off carts were a thing. Nintendo didn't let shit like this:



get published on their console. That's the only unofficial SNES game that got made back in the day, and it needed a game-genie extension thing to work on the system. NES had a lot more companies trying to do the workaround shit, but by and large, most games were in the standard grey cartridge, and you only got your game on one of those if nintendo approved it. There's a reason consoles had a reputation for never having glitches or requiring patches, and it was nintendo in the 80's and 90's.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Most of the claims of older games being too hard to get into, cumbersome, nostalgia goggles, I find to be exaggerated and without merit. I didn't own my own computer until after 2000, ok. This was after years of arcades, consoles, and maybe a few C64 games. The first PC games I bought were Max Payne, Ghost Recon, and Return to Wolfenstein. I didn't really start attacking the classics until a few years after that. I didn't play X-Com until about 4 or 5 years ago. Same with Daggerfall, Jagged Alliance 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Civilization 4; System Shock 1 I just played last year. Only SS1 presented any legitimate barriers.

I'm also a relative newfag to most of these games (the only pre-1997 games I ever played near their release date were Civilization, Descent, and Panzer General), but I didn't really have any issues with SS1 at all. I say that as someone who has shamefully had a lot of issues getting into some of the older classics. But I played SS1 for the first time just a few years ago, using the default control scheme, and it all seemed fairly easy to grasp after not much time. Definitely less time than it takes most games to get through their tutorial sections. In fact, it was one of the very few games that legitimately made me lose track of time - that first day of playing SS1 when I finally checked the clock and realized it was 10 hours since I had started playing.

Maybe that's just a completely subjective experience, of course certain games are easier for certain people to grasp. But I never understood all the griping about SS1's interface. Crusader: No Remorse on the other hand...