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Editorial Entertainment Games

New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics 66

Posted by Zonk from the we-had-paddles-and-we-liked-it dept.
RealDSmooth writes "Codemonkey over at 2old2play.com just posted an article on the evolution of gaming, and how new technology like the XBox 360 and the PS3 stack up against the classics that got us where we are today. It's a nice look at what has changed over the years, and what has (thankfully) stayed the same." From the article: "It is expected with any new game that hits the market that a patch may exist for that game before you ever put it into your PC or console. Why? Has the market degraded to such buggy software that we have to download a few megabytes of game fixes before it's even usable? How many patches did we have to get with Super Mario Brothers or Zelda? How many crashes did these games have besides your typical game lock up due to dust on your cartridge? Were games more solid 'back in the day'?"
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New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics More

New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics

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  • To play devil's advocate... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13, 2006 @08:57PM (#14468770)

    It's reasonable to say that new games take more resources to develop than older games. Unless we want to see higher and higher prices, cost savings must be made. Given that downloading a multi-megabyte patch is much more reasonable now than it was, it seems like an efficient trade-off. Not that I agree the trade-off should be made, but it's an obvious choice if you are going to cut corners.

    • Mod parent up. To further show by example, let's look at games developed for the Atari 2600, that took 1-2 developers and less than 3 months, in some cases just a few weeks. Nowadays, it takes 3 to 24 months, sometimes even longer, with the number of people involved starting at 5 to 50 people. There are more pieces in the games, more lines of code, more things you can do. Overall, it's all more. One shouldn't be surprised that we have to deal with patches. But I will say one thing, they should have either s
      • ET was one guy doing everything with a solid five month deadline (H. Warshaw was contracted in august to get the game out before Christmas). It did sell a million, but with four million left in stock and a slew of unhappy gamers, it was not a big success. I don't think bug fixing would have saved the game at all. Primarily, it needed a functional design, a team of coders, graphic artists and musicians, and a year's deadline. Given the amount of money at stake, this was certainly doable.
      • Exactly. The point is, games are just more complicated now. There are so many more variables and places that can cause problems, that problems are way more likely to occur.

        On another note, I'm not really against the whole patch thing. I mean, even if I buy a game that wasn't built solid the first time around, it'll work eventually, right? So, either you can wait for the patch, or you could've waited for the pushed back release date. What's the big deal.

        Anyways, patches provide a fix for stuff that never

    • Yeah, but the only time you're saving money is when you abandon a game unpatched, otherwise eventually you'll spend the money patching the game, plus the money supporting the patch (directing users to it and bandwidth).

      If anything, publishers release games early to guage whether it's worth working on anymore than they already have. In the early days of 3D I bought several games I was promised Directx hardware patches for that never materialized.

  • Loss of monopoly to blame? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MagicDude ( 727944 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @09:00PM (#14468784)
    Could this be a result of Nintendo's loss of monopoly on the gaming market? Back when Big N was the only dominant force in the video game market, they could probably take their time in developing solid and uncrashable games. As the summary points out, how many times did Zelda or Super Mario crash or Punch Out crash? These days though, there's always the push to release games faster and faster at an unprecidented level of graphical and technical sophistication to beat out not only competing systems, but other 3rd party providers. Just recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!" but I'm guessing that it'll have impecable programming and few if any technical errors. It seems like the creedo these days is that it's better to release more games at 90% rather than fewer games at 100%.

    • Re:Loss of monopoly to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @09:42PM (#14468973) Homepage
      I believe it was Miyamoto that said a slipped release date is temporary, but a bad release is permanent.

      Nintendo seems to understand this.

      As a side note, the article seems to be comparing modern PC games to old console games. My memory of old PC games was that statistical likelyhood of any game you bought actually working was slim, and it would take almost days to find this out. Wrong sound card manufacturer? Game dies. Wrong video card manufacturer? Game dies. 486 Sx instead of Dx? Game dies.

      Compared to PC games of yester year, modern PC games are a bastion of compatibility.

      • This is a big pet peeve of mine -- everytime anyone talk about games from the olden days they always talk about the dreck that we got from Nintendo, Sega and Atari. Bah, in the old days, we used real computers, like Speccys and Commodores and Amigas (and one dude even had an Acorn, but he never had any games to talk about).
      • >>> I believe it was Miyamoto that said a slipped release date is temporary, but a bad release is permanent.

        "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." [wikiquote.org]
      • I remember it differently.

        Wrong sound card: No sound or use AdLib emulation

        Wrong video card: This was more or less a case of you have a video card that can play games or you don't. 3D acceleration (and feature levels) didn't really exist (for gaming) at that time, and when they did they were added to another slot and linked to the 2D card via a ribbon cable.

        SX instead of DX? I don't remember any games that utilized the FPU that the SX/DX distinction represents. 33MHz SX vs 66MHz DX2? That's a differe

    • Reaction to TP delay (Score:5, Interesting)

      by antizeus ( 47491 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @10:44PM (#14469230)
      ust recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!"
      That's interesting. It seemed to me that the reaction (among fans) was more like "That's unfortunate, but I'd rather wait for a good and complete game than have a bad or incomplete game earlier." Similarly, quite a lot of people would rather have waited a few more months and gotten two more dungeons in Wind Waker.

      This may be a difference in perception, as I may have payed more attention to such an opinion because I share it, and that I would tend to disregard an opposing view. It also may have been a matter of the choice of communities that I monitored.

      Of course, I did see plenty of "Nintendo is teh suck" type opinions, but those seemed to be from people with a prior bias against Nintendo, and didn't really care about a Zelda release other than as an opportunity to engage in a flame war.

    • It isn't the loss of the monopoly that's to blame, it's that the developers don't spend time making there games. Look at Blizzard: every game that they make has been delayed past the initial release date, and yet every one of them has been an incredibly good game that innovates. Warcraft II, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and World of Warcraft have all been critically praised.
    • I crashed SMB 3 several times, though I can't think of any other NES games I had that ever gave me trouble.
  • but larger, yes.

    Games were small and simple then-- they are large and complex now, bugs will be easier to find in a large program.
    • Since small programs do very little, a bug will be more noticable because, chances are, the buggy code will be executed quite often (the program has little else to do). This makes finding, and fixing, bugs before publication a lot easier.

      In large programs, there are a lot of chances for rare conditions . It is nearly impossible to recreate each of these conditions in a reasonable time and therefore it is only logical that not all bugs will be found before publication.
  • The ability to target a single platform reduces bugs. Also, the more complex the platform is, the harder it is to be certain that your program takes into account all the idiosyncracies it may encounter. Furthermore, input devices have gotten more complicated.

    • Re:Causes for stability... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:24PM (#14469391)
      Also, the more complex the platform is, the harder it is to be certain that your program takes into account all the idiosyncracies it may encounter.

      Back in the days of DOS, this was extremely important. Now it's almost irrelevant. Everyone writes their games using DirectX and/or OpenGL, and it's overwhelmingly the responsibility of the libraries and drivers to ensure compatibility, not the game.

      • But drivers are frequently written that fail to cover situation x, and many of the patches released for games these days seems to be to cover situations where driver doesn't cover situation x, or where for some reason, be it poor documentation or just poor understanding of the relevant issues, the game tries to do something that's just to the outside of what the driver/hardware combo wasn't designed to handle. Then you have the situations where the software was designed to run with older drivers, older hard
      • No, it's the reverse now. Back in the days of DOS you had to code everything manually, which was a terrible hassle, but it also meant that the developers were much more in control of what was going on. If you tested that your game worked with an SB16, it was pretty safe to assume it's going to work on your neighbor's SB16 too.

        Now you have to worry about new patches from Microsoft, new drivers from NVidia, Creative and that obscure Taiwanese company you've never heard of that made the onboard sound for tha
  • Guess the guy's never played Devil may cry has he? He acts like all games now must be huge, dialog filled and super complex, yet if he picked up Devil may cry for five minutes he'd see that games today can get by without being "super realistic" and just be a damn good game.

    He some how acts like because a game has a full team of developers it's fine to release a buggy game. It's more important to make stuff "look real" than make a damn good playing exprience. Yet I can think of countless games which are stil
    • Guess the guy's never played Devil may cry has he? He acts like all games now must be huge, dialog filled and super complex, yet if he picked up Devil may cry for five minutes he'd see that games today can get by without being "super realistic" and just be a damn good game.

      Of course, Devil May Cry 2 seems to fit the dossier. Much weaker than the original, too, IMO.
  • A more complex game is going to have more chances to go wrong.

    Modern games have more 3D models, scripted sequences, dynamic rendered doodahs etc etc. Many older games would easily fit on 2MB of space, moderns games you're lucky if it's under 4GB. With so much extra information, so many extra possibilities, bugtesting is far harder - the code itself can't be checked for bugs, but instead playtesting is mainly relied on to find them. Thus, many bugs will be missed, and those that are missed will require more
    • Many older games would easily fit on 2MB of space, moderns games you're lucky if it's under 4GB.
      2MB? You spoiled kids these days! Back when I was a child, games would be up to 4 KB ! (Atari2600, anyone?)
    • If you were expecting X number errors per thousand lines of code, then it seems to make sense that as the games grow exponentially, the number of errors would as well. If there aren't as many opportunities for errors, the ones that are there will be more readily noticed in the testing phase.

  • Is it really that bad? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phantasmo ( 586700 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @10:45PM (#14469239)
    Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy." They're certainly not any more buggy than the original Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda, and they're far more complex.
    I've only seen one Nintendo game crash (Metroid Prime), and it's only happened once to me in hours and hours of play.
    I haven't played a PC game in the last few years that wasn't patched within a week of release, but most console games are definitely very playable out of the box.
    • Your Super Nintendo didn't run Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Norton Antivirus, and several dozen windows services while simultaneously playing those games, either.
    • Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."

      I'd describe the latter as "horridly designed." The sequence for trying a level again was "Die -> Wait for Island level to load -> go back to level -> Wait for Level to load -> play level for a bit -> Die". Bad, bad, BAD design that keeps me from really even looking for my copy of the game.

      Wind waker was much less so, although it could have used more game.
      • I dont know ... generally I think of games having a negative effect for death as being pretty standard. Admittedly, experiencing death over and over again gets very annoying ... but its a Mario game - that really shouldn't happen to you unless you start siezuring during a boss fight or something.
        • The "secret" levels in SMS cause many deaths, especially if the camera decides that it knows a better point of view than your current one or you misjudge the distances of objects freely flying in space without any points of reference.

          Mario should have stayed in 2d.
    • The original SMB had lots of bugs. You could walk through walls, glitch the warp pipe to take you to world " -1", pass through the left side of the screen to the right using a vine, get trapped and not be able to move on a vine, trick the game into thinking that you were shrunk by getting hit and touching the axe at the same time, using the previous glitch to become little fire Mario, beating the castle and dying at the same time, sliding around by firing and jumping at the same time, and locking up the ga
      • One of my favourites is the bug in Bomberman. If you planted a bomb on your square, and held down the button without moving, it would turn your character into a continuously exploding square. Of course, the minute you let go of the button you would die ... but it was still fun to walk around as a blazing inferno.
    • ### Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."

      The problem with WindWaker and SuperMarioSunshine isn't that they are buggy, but simply that they are broken by design, they might not be bad games, but for sure they aren't great either. Comparing them to the really old classics is kind of pointless, since you end up comparing a brilliant game of yesterday to an average one of today. Comparing Sunshine and Windwaker to their predecessors on the N64 is much more in
  • I think one of the reasons that older games are more 'refined' could be due to the fact that the industry was much smaller then and millions of dollars were not riding on whether or not your compile completed that night.

    Back in the days of the Atari 2600, games were often made by one guy in a basement writing assembly code for small, fledgling companies that did not stuff 10 million dollars into the development of Combat.

    I cite the example of The Sims Online. Never played it myself, but I heard horror s
  • i am so bold, i suggest that the quality of gameplay and number of bugs are both inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on hype and advertising.

    or, maybe they should advertise AFTER the game is COMPLETE, and not just for any given value of complete.

  • New technology is crap if it doesn't ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @05:01AM (#14470229)
    ... run NetHack. I mean, what other game do you need? All this new-fangled stuff, colors, sound. Good grief.
  • Old software wasn't any less buggy than their modern counterparts, but in the good old days we had to accept the bugs and learn to live with them, and even try to work them to our advantage. We had to get up early in the morning to start the tape player if we wanted to play the game during the afternoon, but they were often so difficult we rarely got beyond the first screen. The bugs were also spectuclar, often culminating in bosses not being possible to kill, to sprites getting stuck and tapes that demagne

  • SMB was not bug free (Score:4, Informative)

    by j0nb0y ( 107699 ) <jonboy300NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday January 14, 2006 @07:51AM (#14470515) Homepage
    Super Mario Bros was not a bug free game. I know of three bugs...

    1. Lil Spits. While big and fighting Bowser, land on the hammer and be touched by Bowser at the same time. You will complete the level and go down to small size, but the game will be confused and still think you're big. On the next level, hit a mushroom block. It will put out a fire flower (since the game thinks you're big). Grab the fire flower. Now you're still little, but when you hit b, you throw a fireball.

    2. The Fabled Minus World. At the pipe at the end of level 2 - 2, stand on the edge of the pipe facing left. Duck, jump up, and move back towards the wall. If you do it exactly right, you will go through the wall, and come out the other side in the warp zone. Immediately go through the first pipe (before the numbers appear). You will be warped to world - 1, which is a copy of world 2 - 3, except that it never ends. The end pipe for the level will take you back to the beginning of the level.

    3. Get Stuck. At the end of level 2 - 3, there is a space above the exit pipe. Duck and swim into it. Then let go of the down button. You will get stuck in the wall. There's no way to get out.

    All that being said, these bugs didn't interfere with normal gameplay, as usually the only way they showed up was if you were trying to show them to somebody. And even then, they weren't easy to trigger. The third one is the easiest. The other two are a little tricky to pull off.
    • This still indicates that QA was a lot better back in the day than it is now, as the only bugs that remained were fairly obscure and unlikely ever to be caught by in-house testers (assuming they wanted to release the game before Duke Nukem Forever comes out). Yesterday's games win out on the obvious to not-so-obvious bugs, because the better QA process will catch them and they'll never see the light of day. Take the uninstaller for Ubisoft's Pool of Radiance (please), which would sometimes start deleting
    • <mode="Pedant">

      The "minus world" is actually at the end of level 1-2, not 2-2. You run through the blocks to the first warp zone of the game.

      </mode>
  • Not that it excuses poor QA, but the gaming environment now is much different than the gaming envirionment "back then."

    How many possible configurations can a PC gaming rig have? How much more complicated are the games themselves, and the process of making them?

    And fault... Who's fault is it if a game crashes with certain video cards because of a buggy driver? Is the game maker really responsible for ensuring that every possible system that meets their minimum specs can run the game?

    With consoles, the games
  • It's not from the 16-bit era, but my all-time favorite game is Deus Ex. Modern shooters can't even hold a candle to its story and gameplay.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • There were innumerable ways to get all kinds of wierdness to happen in the old NES and SNES games. I never owned a Genesis, but I can't imagine there aren't tons of them.

    I knew several people who used to glitch hunt back in the day. It was a way to hack the games without really being able to hack them per se. Figuring out all the flaws. A quick search for such gave me http://kontek.net/davidwonn/nes.html [kontek.net] which is a glitch listing site for NES games, and I'm sure there are far more like it.

    The difference
  • All I know is that no-one has even come close to creating a better football (soccer) game than Sensible Soccer.
    • Speaking of this...i was playing Madden '06 on the PS2 last night with my son. Steelers vs. Colts. About 2 minutes into the 3rd quarter he hits "start" to challenge a play and the whole game glitched out. Repeating 1 second sound effect and frozen console. He said he wins. This is about the 4th time Madden '06 has frozen on me (a couple times on the PSP and a couple times on the PS2). What's up with that??

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