DraQ
Arcane
I have NC set up to autostart in my DOSBox (frontends? what's that?).
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What's an old game to you?
- Thread starter Sigourn
- Start date
Corvinus
Arcane
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- Oct 12, 2011
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- 1,969
My view is summed up well by what was said by octavius, Unkillable Cat and now Luzur.
Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to put those old commands to use at work! MS-DOS isn't dead yet!
Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to put those old commands to use at work! MS-DOS isn't dead yet!
DraQ
Arcane
Code:
LOAD"*",8,1
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
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- 2,334
An interesting approach would be to figure out the difference between the release year of a high end PC game and the year when a low end PC can play it at high settings (where that is configurable) and take the trimmed mean of those years (to avoid outliers like Crysis) to find an approximation for after how many years a game is considered "old" (based on the idea that a game is old when there has been enough years since its release so that even low end PCs can play games from its release year).
Though in practice you'd need a lot of hardware since you'll need to cover extensively the 90s (when hardware was advancing fast), 2000s (when hardware was still advancing but not as fast) and 2010s (when 10 year old hardware can still play newer titles at very low/adjusted settings). Perhaps you could calculate some sort of curve for applying a bias at each sample depending on the hardware release year to avoid the early years shortening the span and the late years lengthening it, though it might not be necessary as they may cancel each other out. I'm not much into statistics after all.
Other than that, personally i think anything older than 15 years is old.
Though in practice you'd need a lot of hardware since you'll need to cover extensively the 90s (when hardware was advancing fast), 2000s (when hardware was still advancing but not as fast) and 2010s (when 10 year old hardware can still play newer titles at very low/adjusted settings). Perhaps you could calculate some sort of curve for applying a bias at each sample depending on the hardware release year to avoid the early years shortening the span and the late years lengthening it, though it might not be necessary as they may cancel each other out. I'm not much into statistics after all.
Other than that, personally i think anything older than 15 years is old.
Ah, the joys of "Syntax Error".
DraQ
Arcane
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- May 13, 2009
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- 28,526
Morpheus Kitami
Liturgist
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Anything before the VGA era is old and anything before the C64/NES is ancient. There's not really a huge difference between anything made today and anything made in 2002 beyond general decline to me.
Although for reference, I don't really consider a film old unless it was made before Star Wars, or a film ancient unless it was made before the '50s. I view things as old based on what they generally share characteristics with rather than age outright.
Although for reference, I don't really consider a film old unless it was made before Star Wars, or a film ancient unless it was made before the '50s. I view things as old based on what they generally share characteristics with rather than age outright.
For me the main dividing lines for movies are before and after the end of the Production Code in 1968, and before and after "talkies".
It's funny. It took me a while to appreciate 3D because when I was a kid, the best 3D we got was Wolfenstein 3D (which wasn't actually 3D) and some blocky car racing games with flat-shaded graphics which had pretty bad performance on early 90s DOS machines, meanwhile 2D games had gorgeous 256 color pixel art and played smoothly.
Then in the mid 00s my favorite genres at the time - adventure games, RTS, and Arcanum-style RPGs - switched from beautiful high res 2D graphics to blocky low poly 3D which often looked ugly as fuck and didn't contribute anything to the gameplay whatsoever.
It took Morrowind and the FPS genre (to which I came late) to make me appreciate 3D because in those, the third dimension actually mattered gameplay-wise (verticality!).
Here's what some game series that looked utterly gorgeous turned into around the turn of the century:
Simon the Sorcerer 2 with its colorful pixel art:
Simon the Sorcerer 3D with its prosperous 3D:
The evolution of graphics in the Monkey Island series:
Baldur's Gate 2:
Neverwinter Nights:
Age of Empires 2, from the time when RTS were in 2D and often had beautiful graphics:
Warcraft 3, which was one of the games that started the shift to 3D in the RTS genre:
All of my favorite genres switched from beautiful hand-drawn 2D graphics to blocky, cartoonish 3D and in most cases it didn't even add anything to the gameplay.
I didn't like 3D very much as a kid.
Zboj Lamignat
Arcane
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- Feb 15, 2012
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- 5,767
HoMM would probably be the most shocking example, but yeah, agreed. It's particularly "funny" how tactical and strategy games in the second half of the nineties often actually used 3D to make gameplay better and more varied (Myth, TA, Incubation and so on), but now it's just pretty much always shitty 3d for the sake of shitty 3d. Consider what Myth TFL did with its engine in goddamned 1997. 1997! And compare to what we have now.
The Brazilian Slaughter
Arcane
Personally I think Warcraft 3 looks good, even for today. Its still on the "clunky 3D" era but some stuff at the time looked absolutely dope, like the effects and the light-day transitions. I think it has good art direction but its done with clunky early 2000s 3D. Its definitively not a game I would call ugly. I suspect that had it been made a few years later it would look absolutely gorgeous even today.
But I gotta agree with Jarlfrank: The switch from late 2D to early 3D was a mistake. 3D looked like absolute crap until Half-Life 2 or so.
But I gotta agree with Jarlfrank: The switch from late 2D to early 3D was a mistake. 3D looked like absolute crap until Half-Life 2 or so.
The Brazilian Slaughter
Arcane
On age: Once again I got to agree with JarlFrank here. There's definitively a cut-off here and its not just age but certain standardizations and things. A game like Fallout, Diablo, Jagged Alliance, Master of Iron 2 or Age of Empires is very modern, whereas games earlier than those feel ancient.
Would UFO Defense class as old in that regard?
Would UFO Defense class as old in that regard?
Glop_dweller
Prophet
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- Sep 29, 2007
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- 1,223
Any game that assumes a printer/teletype or a card punch as the output device; any game that doesn't assume a monitor.
Of those that display on monitors... Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure, and perhaps Dungeons of Daggorath would qualify as old.
Bigg Boss
Arcane
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- Sep 23, 2012
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So are you guys saying that a car that is twenty years old is not old? So games that are from the 90's are not old? Do you guys realize you are also 30 plus year old men that are getting old?
I don't want to die
Corvinus
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2011
- Messages
- 1,969
I'd say it is more that there was such a creativity before. I recall a time when each new game had something new and fresh. Today, developers are making FPSs, RTSs and RPGs and looking back to what has already been done rather than to ask themselves
"What hasn't been done before?" and do it! The last two decades is just reiterations of old games, but worse, with few exceptions. And now the POZ mind rot is seeping in, corrupting all that it touches...
If you've played a tabletop RPG with a few friends at some point, do you recall the time when it was about the game and adventure itself? The tabletop RPG of the 2020s is aimed at sexual deviants and other insane people - as is the digital counterpart. That should say quite a bit about where we are currently...
Yes, the 90s is not yesterday, but to me, and I gather quite a few Codexers, it is as if it happened recently. Not much of value in between.
Bigg Boss
Arcane
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- 7,528
I still don't think that answered the question. A game does not stop being old because you like the type of game it is. The 90's is not yesterday but it is old ENOUGH to drink. I think this kind of pedantry makes me ill. No offense towards anyone invested.
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I prefer
The Brazilian Slaughter
Arcane
The individual car is old, but would a car from 2000 be considered jurassic?
Important detail that a game doesn't age like a car does. The code works just as well (or badly lol) today as it did then, althrough there might be compatibility problems, its the enviroment around it that changed, not the code itself.
DraQ
Arcane
Most series that switched from 2D to early 3D became utterly prosperous in the process, but that doesn't mean that even early 3D was inherently bad.
Only that it was completely unsuitable for emulating any established 2D aesthetics so any attempts at doing so became a horrible dumpster fire.
Frontier: Elite II (1993, about as early 3D as it gets apart from some really rudimentary shit):
Interstate '76:
Homeworld:
Note that, as a way to generate 2D images that are then displayed on your 2D screen 3D graphics advantages are only really visible in motion as it allows stuff to move, rotate and scale smoothly and in arbitrary manner. And that strength is only really harnessed if the game mechanics and movement itself is 3D, so it's not surprising that the games that look the best in 3D are those that play in 3D as well.
Only that it was completely unsuitable for emulating any established 2D aesthetics so any attempts at doing so became a horrible dumpster fire.
Frontier: Elite II (1993, about as early 3D as it gets apart from some really rudimentary shit):
Interstate '76:
Chasm:
Unreal:
Homeworld:
Note that, as a way to generate 2D images that are then displayed on your 2D screen 3D graphics advantages are only really visible in motion as it allows stuff to move, rotate and scale smoothly and in arbitrary manner. And that strength is only really harnessed if the game mechanics and movement itself is 3D, so it's not surprising that the games that look the best in 3D are those that play in 3D as well.
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