Seal Team - PC - (1993) (Look at how badass games were 30 years ago.)

[anvi]

 

[Mise]

Sorry mate 1993 wasn't almost 30 years ago.

 

[anvi]

Crazy isn't it.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

Looks pretty cool. Yeah, they don't do simulation like that anymore.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Yeah I played the shit out of this back in the day! The game is indeed amazing, though some parts (like shooting) are clunky as fuck, as one would expect from a title this old. It has it all, team selection, lots of weapons to choose from, variable insertion and extraction options (heli or boat), if you invested enough effort you could capture some gooks alive (though keeping them under control was pretty hard if you got into combat afterwards). The missions were also pretty realistic and cool, I remember stuff like looking for an unexploded US bomb and blowing it up so the gooks couldnt take it appart, kidnapping VC tax collector from his house, taking out fortified VC hideouts etc, failure was always an option as the campaign was dynamic.

My only real problem with the game was shooting, since my character could almost never hit anything - I usually threw nades instead and left the shooting to the rest of the team.

Really great stuff, would love a modern remake of this...

 

[anvi]

Yeah that transition to the 3d era was a rough road. This was so clunky and slow, I hated it at first. But I think I went back a year or so later with a better CPU and enjoyed it. Amazing to see them pulling off a military simulation in a time when most people were playing platformers and adventure games.

 

[Endemic]

Amazing to see them pulling off a military simulation in a time when most people were playing platformers and adventure games.

F-14 Fleet Defender was fun. Even had the Falcon-style planning map:

 

[Curratum]

Guys, guys, guys, 30 years ago, games were an incomprehensible mess of interfaces, mish-mashed styles of gameplay and endlessly obtuse menus.

I understand you loved this as kids, because it sure as fuck would look incredibly badass and awesome and "rich" to my kid-self as well, but 30 years later, you should have also seen enough other games to know why this isn't exactly great.

 

[anvi]

It was such a janky time, but they could pull off so much with such low tech. So much improved over the rest of the 90s. So to do so much before all that evolution was amazing, it shows just how much can be done with the brute force of good programmers. They were like alchemists, making games out of nothing but machine code and a database. Nowadays kids can shape 3d models in fancy software and pre-bought engines let you throw everything together much easier, best methods are so established now. But back then they were winging it with stuff like this, yet still managed to make things more advanced than it should probably even be for the time.

They could wring so much game out of such little hardware and software. If that kind of ability had continued to today, I think games would be so much bigger and better, Star Citizen would seem small.

 

[Curratum]

It was such a janky time, but they could pull off so much with such low tech. So much improved over the rest of the 90s. So to do so much before all that evolution was amazing, it shows just how much can be done with the brute force of good programmers. They were like alchemists, making games out of nothing but machine code and a database. Nowadays kids can shape 3d models in fancy software and pre-bought engines let you throw everything together much easier, best methods are so established now. But back then they were winging it with stuff like this, yet still managed to make things more advanced than it should probably even be for the time.

They could wring so much game out of such little hardware and software. If that kind of ability had continued to today, I think games would be so much bigger and better, Star Citizen would seem small.

I agree with almost all of that. I too remember those days. Seeing just how they could pull off cool ideas and make cool things come to life in games. I remember that fascination too, don't get me wrong.

I just wish they stopped halfway between dumbing down the gameplay and raw cool ideas to the point we're at now, and refining those idea mish-mashes and menu clunk to something more palatable and enjoyable and easy to use and jive with.

 

[anvi]

Yeah it is madness, they started stripping depth out of games like scavengers strip a car. I never understood it because even as a little kid I appreciated the variety. I loved blowing shit up in action games like Doom, and I loved getting stressed over some tactical evacuation back in 'Nam. But the whole world went straight down the McGame route.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Yeah it is madness, they started stripping depth out of games like scavengers strip a car. I never understood it because even as a little kid I appreciated the variety. I loved blowing shit up in action games like Doom, and I loved getting stressed over some tactical evacuation back in 'Nam. But the whole world went straight down the McGame route.

They did it for the simplest of reasons: To fit the third dimension into games.

The problem with that, is that they had to regress games considerably to pull that off, and then retread their steps to try to get back where they were. Unfortunately a certain depth of gameplay almost got permanently lost in the process, and only with the rise of the indie game scene around 2009 was it spared utter destruction.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Yeah it is madness, they started stripping depth out of games like scavengers strip a car. I never understood it because even as a little kid I appreciated the variety. I loved blowing shit up in action games like Doom, and I loved getting stressed over some tactical evacuation back in 'Nam. But the whole world went straight down the McGame route.

They did it for the simplest of reasons: To fit the third dimension into games.

The problem with that, is that they had to regress games considerably to pull that off, and then retread their steps to try to get back where they were. Unfortunately a certain depth of gameplay almost got permanently lost in the process, and only with the rise of the indie game scene around 2009 was it spared utter destruction.

What? Early 3D games had plenty of depth, its just that you needed a super computer to run it or it'd be absolute hell to play. Strike Commander is a notable example, but you can find examples all the way back to 1981 if you look hard enough. Part of the reason for Doom and Wolfenstein's success is that they actually ran on most machines without getting a frame rate in seconds per frame.

 

[Alienman]

Looks pretty cool. Yeah, they don't do simulation like that anymore.

Arma?

 

[Nutria]

Back then you couldn't make this game work right because of hardware limitations. Now we finally can create a 3D environment with vegetation, realistic buildings, and people who are more than a jumble of 100 pixels. But you couldn't do a remake of SEAL Team now because the younger generations would be confused at why they're not getting bonus points for headshots and why they have to play as Amerikkkan imperialists.

It's a shame because it had a lot of depth. There a lot of variety to the missions. They were rarely just going out somewhere to kill everyone. The helicopter and boat supporting your squad gave you a lot of interesting choices to make.

My only real problem with the game was shooting, since my character could almost never hit anything

Yeah, besides the environment being more like a desert than a jungle, this is the one problem I remember. My guy would be blasting away with an M16 at someone 20 meters away and never get any hits. The only gun that I ever found useful was the M60. It's to the point where I wonder if they shipped it with a bug and it never got patched.

 

[Nano]

They did it for the simplest of reasons: To fit the third dimension into games.

The problem with that, is that they had to regress games considerably to pull that off, and then retread their steps to try to get back where they were. Unfortunately a certain depth of gameplay almost got permanently lost in the process, and only with the rise of the indie game scene around 2009 was it spared utter destruction.

What? Early 3D games had plenty of depth, its just that you needed a super computer to run it or it'd be absolute hell to play. Strike Commander is a notable example, but you can find examples all the way back to 1981 if you look hard enough. Part of the reason for Doom and Wolfenstein's success is that they actually ran on most machines without getting a frame rate in seconds per frame.

The game in the OP is in 3D...

 

[Alienman]

Nutria Sure if you make it for the Fortnite generation, then no. Everyone keeps forgetting Arma (I mean they recently released a Vietnam module) or other countless modern simulators. There is a huge market for stuff like that, AAA publishers will not touch it of course, but then again, I'm not sure if modern AAA publishers could even be compared to the devs of this game. It seems indie already and from what I can tell (while being a nice and cool looking game) it didn't sell back then. So I'm not sure there was this magical audience for it then that wouldn't exist now. I would rather say it's the other way around. Just look at Euro truck for an example.

 

[Alter Sack]

Guys, guys, guys, 30 years ago, games were an incomprehensible mess of interfaces, mish-mashed styles of gameplay and endlessly obtuse menus.

I understand you loved this as kids, because it sure as fuck would look incredibly badass and awesome and "rich" to my kid-self as well, but 30 years later, you should have also seen enough other games to know why this isn't exactly great.

Well, I have no problem playing most of these games today. The interfaces and menus were pretty usable. But I admit that they often lack some comfort functions which are standard in games today.

And what you call a mish-mashed style of gameplay I call innovative. Games like Myth, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper or Star Control which mix elements of different genres are sadly very rare now.

It's always the same old recipe. Developers (often big corporations) aren't willing to take risks anymore (apart from some few exceptions, mostly indy developers).

Add to that the general dumbing down of games, especially the gameplay mechanics nowadays. Older games were often more sophisticated and complex. I really miss the good old times because of that and certainly not because of nostalgia.

Now we have bombastic graphics which we were unimaginable thirty years ago. But what use is superb graphic if the gameplay is unsophisticated and the game mechanics appear to be developed for retards?


But the most important difference in my opinion is that these older games had a heart and soul. It may sound strange but I really have the feeling, while playing these older games, that people really put their heart into developing these games.

Games today are mostly soulless crap constantly shitted out by soulless corporations for soulless people.

At least that's the feeling I get.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

They did it for the simplest of reasons: To fit the third dimension into games.

The problem with that, is that they had to regress games considerably to pull that off, and then retread their steps to try to get back where they were. Unfortunately a certain depth of gameplay almost got permanently lost in the process, and only with the rise of the indie game scene around 2009 was it spared utter destruction.

What? Early 3D games had plenty of depth, its just that you needed a super computer to run it or it'd be absolute hell to play. Strike Commander is a notable example, but you can find examples all the way back to 1981 if you look hard enough. Part of the reason for Doom and Wolfenstein's success is that they actually ran on most machines without getting a frame rate in seconds per frame.

The game in the OP is in 3D...

Ah, I see that my post is confusing, since I failed to give it the proper attention (was juggling my attention across multiple places). I apologize for that. Allow me to elaborate.

The first issue is that I missed out on adding a second parameter when I said "fit the third dimension into games" to make things clearer, and that parameter is "that acted in real-time".

The second issue is that some posters seem to be confusing 'games with three dimensions' with 'games with first-person perspective'.

A 3D 'perspective' has been around in games since the early 1980s, but it wasn't until 1987 that games came out that had 'true' 3D environments, and even then they utilized basic geometric shapes, and they still couldn't nail down the 'real-time' part. It was more common to see games who convincingly faked it, than ones that actually tried. And yes, there were some very complex games released that dared to use these 'first-gen' 3D environments. The Freescape-games, the Mercenary-games, the Midwinter-games, the Elite-games, and many more. But all of them were faking it in part, even though some of them contributed technological progression towards the goal.

When Wolfenstein 3D came along it gained notice because it offered a fast-running first-person perspective game, with modern-day graphics. But it was a 2D-game, the z-plane was a single, constant value. World interaction was also minimal, though it did break free of being grid-based in movement, even though the gameworld itself is built on a grid. Ultima Underworld made a closer step, but both it (and the Doom-games released shortly after) were 2.5D-games as the z-plane was no longer a constant value, but it was still a single value, meaning you couldn't have one area on top of another, giving the games a 'flat' feeling.

It wasn't until games like Descent and Quake came about that the third dimension was truly and finally crammed in, and that in real time as well. (Compare that to the contemporary Build-engine games, who did a very convincing fakeout of full 3D.) But consider the 'cost', to pardon the term; those two games (and many of the ones that followed them) were simple games with simple gameplay, move about and shoot things. Neither game sports a 'Use'-function for example, instead you either push against or shoot anything that required "using". (Thief: the Dark Project deserves praise because it contains surprising depth for a full 3D game in these early days.)

But then we get to the third and final issue of my post, and that is me failing to define who "They" are, the ones who made the push to add in the third dimension proper. Are "They" the developers? Only in part. They were certainly pushing for it, but they were going about it at their own pace. But once Wing Commander 3 and Doom were released in 1993, the Big Money-people, the corporate suits, began to take notice; because those two games were absolute proof to them that you could put (big) money into video games, and they would make bigger money back. And it was all thanks to this tired cliché known as 'immersion'. Because with a first-person perspective the player feels and thinks like he's actually in the game, a notion that had been proven consistently since the mid-1980s, but only became 'financially viable' in the early 90s. And immersion sells.

So the corporate suits moved into gaming, and they began to bark orders. Old licenses were exhumed and made into '3D' titles, deadlines became extra-strict, so games were cut down in depth and gameplay, rather than in looks and immersion. The technology advanced, but the games stagnated. And one way the suits tried to cover up this simplification process was to make the whole thing feel edgy. One moment we were (happily) mowing down Nazis in a simple first-person shooter game, the next moment we have this game where a guy is looking to make us their bitch. And despite massive leaps and bounds in the technology between those two games, they play eeriely similar... and it's obvious which one of them is more fun to play.

This overemphasis on pushing the "3D" part forward, at the cost of all else, just so that the suits could make more money, slowed down any real innovation in gaming to a crawl. One could argue that the late 90s were the last gasps of an era where innovative gaming was the leading light of a game's development, followed by a decade where even that light seemed to have been snuffed out. Only around 2009, where small studios releasing small games proved to be commercially viable (again), did this dark era come to an end... and even then most of the people daring to low-ball their way through a game's development were just trying to recreate a past game held dear to them. But a few devs were thinking bigger. Ironically, one of the key steps in the rise of the indie scene was a developer realizing, that in order for his vision of a game to come true, he'd have to scale back on the 3D engine he was using. But once Markus Persson did, he could make Minecraft a reality. Terraria pulled a similar thing by scaling itself back until it looks like a side-scrolling title on the Super Nintendo, but once you realize it's simultaneously micro-managing a few million blocks of terrain, while being a full-fledged platformer that doesn't break a sweat, then you realize that actual depth is starting to come back to gaming. And Terraria is ten years old now.

But yeah, gaming took a hit because of the third dimension.

 

[Nutria]

I'd add to this that we've got all these buzzwords now like "roguelike" and "roguelite" and such, but there was a hell of a lot of jumping on bandwagons in the '90s too. There was the brief FMV game fad. Then there was couple years where everyone and their mother was making an RTS. Finally 3D became the hot new thing. Investors didn't know anything about games but they know that 3D is the hot new thing, so you have to check that box if you want their money.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Early 3d games:

1988


1991


1992


1994

 

[Nano]

The way that I see it, the reason creativity in gaming was killed is because development costs got too high for companies to want to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. You could say that 3D graphics put this into motion, but that's not 3D's fault. It just exposed the limitations of capitalism.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The way that I see it, the reason creativity in gaming was killed is because development costs got too high for companies to want to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. You could say that 3D graphics put this into motion, but that's not 3D's fault. It just exposed the limitations of capitalism.

The era of "AAA" gaming has been dead for years. The only recent examples of high budget AAA games are the Avengers game(lol) and Cyberpunk. And if you want to go back a couple years, throw in Anthem(lol again) and debatably Mass Effect Andromeda(lol)
Mid-budget AA titles being pumped out by publishers who own a handful/dozens of medium-sized studios has become the norm.

How many recent games do you see on this list? It's not early 2010s anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

 

[Nano]

The way that I see it, the reason creativity in gaming was killed is because development costs got too high for companies to want to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. You could say that 3D graphics put this into motion, but that's not 3D's fault. It just exposed the limitations of capitalism.

The era of "AAA" gaming has been dead for years. The only recent examples of high budget AAA games are the Avengers game(lol) and Cyberpunk. And if you want to go back a couple years, throw in Anthem(lol again) and debatably Mass Effect Andromeda(lol)
Mid-budget AA titles being pumped out by publishers who own a handful/dozens of medium-sized studios has become the norm.

How many recent games do you see on this list? It's not early 2010s anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

That doesn't matter. Publishers have been making big bucks catering to the lowest common denominator since 9/11. They have no incentive to change course now.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The way that I see it, the reason creativity in gaming was killed is because development costs got too high for companies to want to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. You could say that 3D graphics put this into motion, but that's not 3D's fault. It just exposed the limitations of capitalism.

The era of "AAA" gaming has been dead for years. The only recent examples of high budget AAA games are the Avengers game(lol) and Cyberpunk. And if you want to go back a couple years, throw in Anthem(lol again) and debatably Mass Effect Andromeda(lol)
Mid-budget AA titles being pumped out by publishers who own a handful/dozens of medium-sized studios has become the norm.

How many recent games do you see on this list? It's not early 2010s anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

That doesn't matter. Publishers have been making big bucks catering to the lowest common denominator since 9/11. They have no incentive to change course now.

star citizen is one of the most successful recent games and it caters to one of the most niche markets possible -- old, retired whales