Seems all old school dev's will all be retired soon. :(

[Skykid]

what skykid has said about ocarina of time and majora's mask is mostly true.

I think this is the second time you've saved me arguing cyclical points with stubborn philistines. I definitely owe you one now.

I'll just leave it there, I couldn't find any worthwhile counter-arguments in any of the responses anyway - just more baseless humdrum comparisons that cement the fact it's totally possible for people to definitively misunderstand a masterwork of gaming. Fancy that.

Your loss folks, I'm happy for you to live with it.

[Ed Oscuro]

It's telling that Edmond seems to have deserted the thread for the greener non-analytical pastures of Digitpress and Skykid has thrown in the towel too.

I wanted to point out that Neathyr has an almost unprecedented number of hard-hitting posts in such a short time. Sinful and new champ Heisenbergman are worth good consideration but in terms of getting bang-on-the-money this works.

By the way, I don't think anybody is saying that people who enjoy the Zelda games are terrible people, because that's a matter of taste. But I think that as most of us learned how to drive cars and do other things we realized that autopilot gaming and entirely hollow fantasies no longer held the same allure. Certainly there is an objective matter of the LoZ series being overrated, in comparison to other franchises, for some of its qualities overall.

I very much like both N64 games but I would never mistake its combat for something challenging. Beyond that I don't see any reason to trash those games.

[BryanM]

just more baseless humdrum comparisons that cement the fact it's totally possible for people to definitively misunderstand a masterwork of gaming.

Jesus christ. 0_o

It's a little game where an elf goes around murdering things with a sword, and he levels up by exploring the world instead of killing things. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Ed Oscuro]

If you think highly of Gothic, make sure you play FFCCh: The Crystal Bearers. It's a very fool-proof console game, but messing with it can be as engrossing as Gothic was for me.

Dangerously high praise!

and I've played a few hours of Demon's Souls when it first came out.

I know what happened here.

[Skykid]

just more baseless humdrum comparisons that cement the fact it's totally possible for people to definitively misunderstand a masterwork of gaming.

Jesus christ. 0_o

It's a little game where an elf goes around murdering things with a sword, and he levels up by exploring the world instead of killing things. Nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks for completely proving my point.

[PedroMD]

What about Xenoblade? Is it really a single-player MMO type of game? Even through I dislike jRPGs, I get the feeling this one may be the exception of the rule, mostly from the vast and somewhat rich environments I keep seeing on pictures. Maybe the exploration is close to Piranha Bytes' standards or is it just illusion?

I don't know the other games mentioned, but I wouldn't say Xenoblade has much in the way of exploration. Some environments are very big and open an detailed, yes, and there are secret areas that give you some XP for discovering them, but all areas connect to one another in a pretty linear fashion and the story has you always moving forward.
I think people describe Xenoblade as a "single player MMO" because of it's sidequests and the cooldown-based combat. There is a very intricate sidequest system that is tied to the reconstruction of a place, so you can talk to more people and unlock more quests as you progress. The objectives themselves are pretty MMO-ish, like "kill X of this" or "bring me Y of that", but they are so streamlined and there are so many useful systems for keeping track of everything and moving around (fast travel from anywhere to wherever you have visited is the best thing ever) that thy generally don't feel like a chore. As Obiwanshinobi said, though, it's a grind-heavy experience. The "kill unique monster" are the highlights, but any discrepancy in levels makes the fights almost unfair.
You should give it a try, even if you don't like JRPGs. When not moving forward with the plot, it almost doesn't seem like one.

I think this is the second time you've saved me arguing cyclical points with stubborn philistines. I definitely owe you one now.

I'll just leave it there, I couldn't find any worthwhile counter-arguments in any of the responses anyway

If you just want to save time, you could probably just link this video to every reply. It would have about same effect.

[Udderdude]

everyone got hit hard by whatever the fuck it was in the early 2000s that caused us to lose all our style, and while those old devs are trying their hardest to hang on to what they have, it may as well be fueled by memories and thus faulty. that loss of style will continue to be spread around until, as usual, we force ourselves to seek out something new... no one will ever realize that what happened within this decade is completely different than any single decade prior. but i only say this because i believe things are getting somewhat better; if they suddenly get worse anytime soon, most of the previous just goes into effect harder.

So here's a non-troll, non-ZELDAAAAAAAAAA reply.

That "Whatever the fuck it was", was the previously new and fertile areas of game design and development being explored in the 80s and 90s. After that explosion of newness, it was really hard to top .. so things started going downhill. Anything after that would really have to struggle to come up with something really new and original, and it didn't happen very often.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but we're never going back to that time when everything was brand-new and even the most tired platformer cliche was still fresh and interesting.

Personally, for my part, I'm trying to take the classics and put a new spin on them .. really, if anyone is going to do it, it's going to be the hardcores who still care and remember.

Edit: Post 4444 get :3

[Hagane]

Just got to the bunny part. Well, at least that brought some (unintentional) fun to what's been an otherwise completely unremarkable experience. It definitely has nothing on Alundra so far... hope it picks up fast or I'm not going to bother.

Also... what's the point of giving you the illusion of choice and open-endedness, if you absolutely need to linearly get the correct item in the correct order to progress? Makes for some pointless wandering and adds absolutely no challenge or thought. You just get to a place, find that you don't have the item, go to another place, you don't have the item, finally find the spot you were supposed to visit first and then proceed to backtrack to the places you previously visited... it's rather annoying.

[blackoak]

Hagane's comments about LttP reminded me that a lot (though not all) of the older games I liked really were intended for me at ages 8-15, not me at 32. Certainly not me at age 32 with the prior experience of all those tricks/limitations... ie meta-thinking about the game as a game. When I was young I didn't care that the open-endedness was an "illusion", I just wasn't thinking that way. It was a canvas for my imagination to roam upon.

I'm not making an argument about nostalgia, btw, I simply think that there's a time for a lot of these older classics and it isn't forever.

[Ed Oscuro]

Beyond Oasis has a nearly emergent level of gameplay, although it doesn't do as much with it as it could have. The article Rob mentioned lays this out - using the bomb explosion as the fire component for summoning the fire magic. That's almost System Shock 2's level of emergence.

My post that got wiped said that "what happened in the '00s" was high-resolution textures. But really, the whole trend of having high production values as a necessity. Just making art takes up so much of a game's budget - and of course games with inflated budgets can't afford as much to be controversial or different. Of course, this isn't to say 2D games could put a higher proportion of their budget towards gameplay - but I also think that it was probably somewhat easier to try out new ideas in 2D. In that light, many games of the '80s and '90s really weren't as innovative as one might expect.

I really think it's mostly the recent explosion of the game industry, the indie and homebrew scenes, and the Internet that have brought together many of the ideas that break gaming out of the mainstream. But gaming isn't in a perfect state now, either.

[CMoon]

and somehow relate it to a hardcore action dungeon crawler that's based on grinding the fuck out of things, chock full of weaponry and armour to find and level up... and devoid of puzzles. I'm aching for your points to have meaning here.

Grinding is completely unnecesary in Dark Souls. It's based around learning enemy patterns and responding accordingly with your own skills (by the way, all the basics you need are available right from the start).

Not to just echo this (yes, the souls games are my favorite of this gen), but also to question whether making a comparison to Zelda is even appropriate. Dark Souls feels far more like Castlevania's Symphony of the Night--and if SotN actually had builds and a little less linearity, the comparisons would start getting pretty intense.

Would be nice if Skykid went back and spent some time with those games; seems like he might have missed something.

I'm not making an argument about nostalgia, btw, I simply think that there's a time for a lot of these older classics and it isn't forever.

And this. It is funny how much of an old school mentality I have without actually wanting to play a lot of truly old school games.

[chum]

I only really like Zelda II because it has good combat and is consistently engaging. Ocarina of Time is boring garbage, it was nice when I got my first N64 as a kid, but I don't see how any adult could possibly enjoy it today? Especially not adults on this forum. The world is empty, boring, lifeless and ugly, the dungeons offer no challenges, the game forces its trite storytelling on you, there is no way to skip it. You gain nothing from exploring its world except for sheer disappointment. Could it have hurt to offer some semblance of challenge? How about some creativity? Ok, the game can be creative, but these moments are few and far between for such a large game.

Beyond Oasis is not as good as LttP in my book, but they play so differently that I don't quite grasp the comparison in the first place.

The first Zelda game is fun too because it feels like a real adventure and you can actually die in it because there's dangerous monsters all over the game, the dungeons are like labyrinths and the overworld is like a big puzzle in itself.

[Udderdude]

Hagane's comments about LttP reminded me that a lot (though not all) of the older games I liked really were intended for me at ages 8-15, not me at 32. Certainly not me at age 32 with the prior experience of all those tricks/limitations... ie meta-thinking about the game as a game. When I was young I didn't care that the open-endedness was an "illusion", I just wasn't thinking that way. It was a canvas for my imagination to roam upon.

I'm not making an argument about nostalgia, btw, I simply think that there's a time for a lot of these older classics and it isn't forever.

I think that's also true and applies to my previous post. When you're young, everything is fresh and new ..

My post that got wiped said that "what happened in the '00s" was high-resolution textures. But really, the whole trend of having high production values as a necessity. Just making art takes up so much of a game's budget - and of course games with inflated budgets can't afford as much to be controversial or different. Of course, this isn't to say 2D games could put a higher proportion of their budget towards gameplay - but I also think that it was probably somewhat easier to try out new ideas in 2D. In that light, many games of the '80s and '90s really weren't as innovative as one might expect.

You have to remember that back then it was a lot harder to get a fully polished game out of the limited hardware that was around at the time .. those were very high production value games for the time.

Also it's definitely been proven you don't need multi-million dollar budgets to have a game that sells.

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't see how it's harder to get a "fully polished game" out when the target is 240p and a flat landscape with a strict limit on onscreen elements, versus having to deal with 3D collision, dozens or hundreds (or more) interacting objects, each with a full spreadsheet of unique properties, and textures on everything. You can spend as much time just looking for places where people can jump over fences in new games as you could troubleshooting an entire 2D game. If anything, today's sensibilities are much higher. Old games rarely get criticized by looks even today, and people buying games back then didn't say "SMB looks so bad." Yet it's now commonplace for people to dislike a game for "cartoony" visuals (Team Fortress 2) or not having anti-aliasing or frame drops or for bloom or fog or for otherwise "looking dated." So no, I don't think your comment is true at all.

Yes, I have remembered that things weren't all roses - Budgets simply were much lower back then, which limited how much polish could go into the games. If you throw the modern game-design flowcart process at 240p and a similar set of specs to the NES, you get a superior product - if you have a somewhat higher budget. In some cases you can see homebrewers with fewer resources (aside from free computing power and modern design tools, which of course isn't insignificant) putting out projects that shame the originals, like the unfinished but still amazing jetpack Metroid-alike DARC homebrew for SMS, or Battle Kid for NES. Budgets doen't need to be millions of dollars.

Many NES games simply have terrible artistic sensibilities, regardless of the hardware. Compare something like SMB or Mega Man to Shadow of the Ninja or Batman - no comparison.

[Skykid]

I only really like Zelda II because it has good combat and is consistently engaging. Ocarina of Time is boring garbage, it was nice when I got my first N64 as a kid, but I don't see how any adult could possibly enjoy it today? Especially not adults on this forum. The world is empty, boring, lifeless and ugly, the dungeons offer no challenges, the game forces its trite storytelling on you, there is no way to skip it. You gain nothing from exploring its world except for sheer disappointment. Could it have hurt to offer some semblance of challenge? How about some creativity? Ok, the game can be creative, but these moments are few and far between for such a large game.

Ha ha, wow. You're real fucking dumb.

Will be sure to earmark your name for instant dismissal of any future input you have on anything.

[Udderdude]

Uhhhhhhh muh gudddddd Skykiddddddddddd :3

[Rob]

Ha ha, wow. You're real fucking dumb.

Will be sure to earmark your name for instant dismissal of any future input you have on anything.

chum is a fine fellow as far as I can tell and a stellar shumper. No need to be a baby. I like Ocarina, too.

[Skykid]

chum is a fine fellow as far as I can tell and a stellar shumper. No need to be a baby. I like Ocarina, too.

Tell me you read that passage of text.

Now you're just being a dumbfuck.

Same bizness.

[BryanM]

Thanks for completely proving my point.

Dude, you've got oneitis. Your girlfriend is not a special snowflake.

Let's check the transcript here:

"The combat is underwhelming."
"But it's not about combat. Don't you see?!?! It's all about -insert stuff a million other games have-"
"Yeah sure. But it has combat in it. Can't it have all that, and have fun combat too?"
".... No! Because it's not about that! I win you lose lolololoplolokloklasoflkfeiojwioqjht892u4912y4789y"

Get over it. Penicillin helps.

Will be sure to earmark your name for instant dismissal of any future input you have on anything.

There's an entire empty hub zone whose sole purpose is to suck 3 minutes out of your life anytime you need to go somewhere. There's mandatory dialogue boxes that crawl along slower than a one limbed puppy. And the box shoving.

There's nothing remotely subjective on these points. "Ocarina of Time is kind of boring" is a legit assessment.

[Ed Oscuro]

brb, photoshopping a green felt hat onto a one-limbed puppy

you know you've done something wrong when Rob tells you not to be a baby. I hope.

[BryanM]

Many NES games simply have terrible artistic sensibilities, regardless of the hardware. Compare something like SMB or Mega Man to Shadow of the Ninja or Batman - no comparison.

STARGAZER



Man look how that thing melts the eyes. It is a thing of utter beauty.



The early games on the system are interesting since a lot of them don't implement a dark color outline for sprites. In the later games, it often feels like the hardware can only display 2 colors for sprites, since everything dedicates a color to black or near-black. How much better games could have looked if the hardware had just one extra universal color that could be shared on all 4 sprite palettes...

Well, that and a better palette. I get really sick of the red and orange "cause we don't have light brown" palette combo sometimes

brb, photoshopping a green felt hat onto a one-limbed puppy

that... that's perfect. for the inevitible "lul skykid got suspended again" image macro~

[Ed Oscuro]

That's just...not...you can't do that. Hmm, I also just remembered that really really early knight fightin' monsters game, forget what it's called. Yeah I know there's a thousand of them on the NES (with probably no exaggeration). You know the one.


"I might not win any more races, but I'm happy with life since I got my wheels." - Zelda the Dog (isn't it strange that Zelda looks like Lassie in dog form?)

I guess this means I won't be doing any GIMP magic (ha, how perfect!) though, somebody else will have to step up to the plate :\
Truth be told, fightin' over dem Zeldas doesn't have the same appeal that it did in 1998.

[Skykid]

Let's check the transcript here:

"The combat is underwhelming."
"But it's not about combat. Don't you see?!?! It's all about -insert stuff a million other games have-"
"Yeah sure. But it has combat in it. Can't it have all that, and have fun combat too?"
".... No! Because it's not about that! I win you lose lolololoplolokloklasoflkfeiojwioqjht892u4912y4789y"

Don't be a baby.

[BIL]

Hmm, I also just remembered that really really early knight fightin' monsters game, forget what it's called. Yeah I know there's a thousand of them on the NES (with probably no exaggeration). You know the one.

"WHOA ITS BEAUTIFUL"



"WHAT THIS IS NOTHING LIKE THE AWESOME COVER"

Story of my life in the rental place. :[

[Skykid]

Hagane's comments about LttP reminded me that a lot (though not all) of the older games I liked really were intended for me at ages 8-15, not me at 32. Certainly not me at age 32 with the prior experience of all those tricks/limitations... ie meta-thinking about the game as a game. When I was young I didn't care that the open-endedness was an "illusion", I just wasn't thinking that way. It was a canvas for my imagination to roam upon.

I'm not making an argument about nostalgia, btw, I simply think that there's a time for a lot of these older classics and it isn't forever.

Why?

What is it that's fundamentally changed in terms of a playable experience? I don't see why it's at all necessary for an illusion of open-endedness, versus say the open worlds of Rockstar's GTA games today, to relegate a game simply because it isn't as technologically advanced.

I don't get how age and retrospective knowledge of classic games somehow diminishes what they offer... at all. If they were good then, they'll probably be good now. Okay, there are some exceptions: there were always those ones your folks bought you and you tried damn hard to like it because you were stuck with it for three months, but even then you knew when you had a turkey.

Just find it an odd way of looking at things, especially when we're on a forum that celebrates one of gaming's most archaic genres.

[Ganelon]

The FC port of Hydlide 3 often looks like the cart is glitching. Here are 2 images I uploaded a few years back to show that:

[BryanM]

Oh I meant to bring up color identity with all the art talk. Mario is blue and red, and his enemy is a green and white dude. And since Mario is blue and red, Link had to be green.

... been doing too much sprite work these days.

Story of my life in the rental place. :[

Hey at least you can clearly see all the units on the screen. It's functional - and at the end of the day isn't that all we really want?

Hagane's comments about LttP reminded me that a lot (though not all) of the older games I liked really were intended for me at ages 8-15, not me at 32.

Yeah that's what we're really getting at here. Zelda is a baseline, absolute barebones game series. It's meant for people just getting into games; that's why the difficultly level is a zero, and things are so simple. For us, we can only see what it could have been, but never can be.

Expecting that new-girlfriend feel after the N64 era (the last major shift in the series) is crazy town. Ex: Pokemon 9 is going to be boring chit if you're not a porpoise and already played Pokomons 1 and 2. You're literally playing the exact same game with minor remixed art. What did you expect to happen, Yandare-chan?!

Truth be told, fightin' over dem Zeldas doesn't have the same appeal that it did in 1998.

Oh god. Do you remember those crazed fanboys with their timeline theories? Like, how they thought every game in the series happened in the same universe? Instead of how its simply another retelling of the same legend over and over?

I've had dozens of Breath of Fire fanboys breathe acid in my face (btw, Breath of Fire is objectively terrible. like, possibly the only game I've learned nothing design-wise from.), but Zeldaism... who boy.

[BulletMagnet]

Oh god. Do you remember those crazed fanboys with their timeline theories? Like, how they thought every game in the series happened in the same universe? Instead of how its simply another retelling of the same legend over and over?

Not sure if this comment was sarcastic, but in case it wasn't...

[Ed Oscuro]

The funny thing is that those dweebs got their version of things to become "official."

Castlevania has been just as bad about this, and I think that's a verifiable case of the nutters taking over the nuthouse. There's no question Super Castlevania IV is just a remake of the original game.

[Hagane]

I have to compliment Hyrulean pottery: their vases are much stronger than swords. Throwing one can instantly kill even armored knights!