[HN Gopher] It's all just an old videogame
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It's all just an old videogame
Author : vitabenes
Score : 27 points
Date : 2022-07-14 10:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ioann.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ioann.xyz)
| raldi wrote:
| Since it's kind of buried, if you're wondering what the title
| refers to, it's the feeling you get when replaying an old video
| game and finding it doesn't seem as amazing as it did when you
| first played it.
|
| Weirdly, I've replayed most of the video games from my youth (and
| beyond) and I'm hard-pressed to come up with any memories of ever
| experiencing that feeling.
|
| Now, TV shows and movies, and especially processed food, on the
| other hand...
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| The phrase "doesn't seem as amazing as it did" is distracting
| in the context of videogames.
|
| Almost every response is talking about how games graphics have
| gotten better, or whether gameplay has improved or gotten
| worse. _That 's not the subject._
|
| The subject is the loss of innocence and wonder, and how the
| author misses being the person who could play a mediocre game
| like Gothic III and be entranced by it.
|
| You can put practically any videogame in front of a kid and
| they'll play it for hours and add to the story.
|
| I wandered around the world of Ultima VIII for months. This was
| a _terrible game_ if you play it straight.
|
| But if you used the hackmover cheat you could move any item in
| the world anywhere you wanted, like an early 2-D version of the
| Sims or Minecraft. You could take parts of other people's
| houses and build yourself a castle. It was a game construction
| set. You could put poisons in an NPC's inventory and they might
| drink it.
|
| I was in love with the weird mushrooms and the eerie music and
| the plot that didn't make a bit of sense. I was cheating so
| hard that every NPC was just a strange person I was visiting
| for a bit, with scattered bits of scripting firing off events I
| didn't understand. It seemed like an unlimited open-world
| playground.
|
| I'm not that person anymore. I can't enjoy a bad game that way.
| I have nostalgia for the version of me who could love that
| terrible, terrible game, and for the lost half-imagined better
| version of that game that I'd filled into the gaps.
|
| I feel like there's a world where Ultima 8 had better
| management and everybody remembers it fondly, and that I don't
| live in that world.
| m463 wrote:
| > Since it's kind of buried
|
| (somehow you teased out what I could not)
|
| > Weirdly, I've replayed most of the video games from my youth
| (and beyond) and I'm hard-pressed to come up with any memories
| of ever experiencing that feeling.
|
| As to old movies, they have bad hair, yes, but they also have
| horrendous pacing which sometimes makes them unwatchable.
|
| But some old games get a better go of things since you ditch
| old hardware.
|
| Modern hardware eliminates the significant delays from booting,
| level loading, graphics rendering and the rest.
|
| Even some of the largely text-based adventure games could use
| synthesizers like the Roland MT-32 to make nice music available
| that wasn't there in the (my) past.
|
| The only thing that seems to reliably clobber old games is
| sketchy game mechanics. That is a hard one to overcome.
| Sin2x wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ygjD04vyU
| Legogris wrote:
| Seems inspired by Si iChu haYi Qian Mo
|
| https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=Dz4giR9Ru10
| jfoutz wrote:
| castlvania. I could consistently get to Frankenstein, but
| always struggled with Igor. 25ish years later, I still feel the
| same frustration.
|
| But, uh, yeah. I can't really think of a "fun" example.
| Legogris wrote:
| FPS title on first-gen 3D consoles.
|
| Had lots of fun with Turok 2 back in the days. Replayed it
| recently. Felt like rewatching Transformers.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| The disappointment of old games for me is usually the controls.
| Newer games have polished controls so well that movement almost
| feels like a direct extension of thought. But when I go back
| and play my old favorites from decades ago, movement feels so
| clunky! I spend so much time fighting the controls rather than
| getting into the groove of playing. I didn't see it the first
| time around, because there was nothing better to compare
| against.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Yeah, controls.
|
| RTS: No build queues, no multiple commands.
|
| FPS: Really old ones before the WASD+mouse standard.
|
| But I'm not oblivious to any of this before I replay the
| game, and might choose not to replay because of it. It's not
| the game that's gone bad, it's me.
|
| I'll never replay a game not giving a shit about time
| passing, not bothering to save, or even _choosing to start
| from the beginning_ the next time I play even if I 'd saved
| the last time. I used to play for the sake of playing. Now I
| play to win.
|
| That's a hugely different way of playing and you spend much
| less time in the game that way.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I hear you on the 3-D stuff. But for 2-D games, I'm not sure
| if there's been any measurable progress in them for 25 years.
| Have you played Donkey Kong Country recently? It still holds
| up. The hockey games on Sega Genesis do as well.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah, DKC was super smooth. Also the Mario games in
| general, but I'm especially partial to Yoshi's Island. I
| replay that one almost every year. Also Zelda games,
| especially SNES/GB.
| mehphp wrote:
| To me, it happens when the game was graphically mind-blowing at
| the time. If, I remember it for that and not the gameplay,
| yeah, I get that feeling.
| ip26 wrote:
| Partly puzzle-based games like Zelda have lost a lot of the
| magic for me, as they became more obvious and started to feel
| more like turning the crank instead of creativity & discovery.
| ge96 wrote:
| I spent so much time in Fo3 and remember the graphics vividly.
| But then replaying it years later, yeah not as good. Bioshock
| still holds a feeling of awe though the initial descent.
| watwut wrote:
| I definitely can relate to it. The games I fondly remembered
| from old times were mostly meh later on.
| greenbit wrote:
| Well, they keep remastering the old shows, and the makers of
| the processed foods are perpetually tweaking their recipes. So
| there's that.
| tresqotheq wrote:
| I have replayed Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. And these felt as
| amazing as they were back then.
|
| If you fall in love with a fad, then you are going to look back
| and wonder why you loved it. But not everyone falls in love with
| fads all the time. Sad that this dude generalises so.
| jessaustin wrote:
| When you replay them now the FPS is amazing!
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| I think his point is precisely that sometimes you have
| beautiful memories of a bad thing.
|
| Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament are irrelevant because they're
| masterpieces. The movie "The Shining" holds up too, right? So
| what?
|
| He does all this explanatory work with a film about a Russian
| with cherished memories of a shitty cabin and a music video of
| a couple with warm memories of a cheap and tawdry wedding.
|
| That's not generalizing. It's extremely specific. It sounds
| like you're just not interested in the feeling he's describing.
|
| He does not mean that everything you used to like is guaranteed
| to be bad when revisited.
| mordae wrote:
| Actually, I've just watched Vox Machina series and found out
| there were (and still are) playing DnD on an online stream.
|
| I think I want to start playing a bit again. :-)
| antiverse wrote:
| I needed this today, and I'm sure I'm not the only one on HN. A
| sort of a lament for innocence and nostalgia. Thank you for
| sharing.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Was a great read. Was surprised by the sudden mention of Tame
| Impala. I was hooked on "Lost in yesterday" a year ago, and its
| music video, which I naturally then thought about a lot too. So
| nice seeing someone else's thoughts on it. However
|
| > as the pregnant bride from the first scene returns, destroys
| the cake
|
| The cake never gets destroyed, seems he revised his memories
| over time :-)
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