Generation gap... what ARE they teaching our yougster gamers these days?
polycounter lvl 13
Had this conversation yesterday with a 15-year-old Halo / COD:MW / MOH:BO "pro" gamer I'm acquainted with. He's legitimately pretty good at those games, and too smart for his own good, but very much the stereotypical console kiddie FPS fanboi... so I've been trying to broaden his horizons a little and teach him a little of our history.
I submit it to you all for reminiscence, chortling, and shaking of heads.
Hunter: Know any good retro games?
Me: MechWarrior 2.
Hunter: What console did it run on.
Me: Please tell me you're joking.
Hunter: Nah, I don't know retro stuff.
Me: DOS. IT RAN ON DOS.
Hunter: What's DOS?
Me: Give me strength... Before there was Windows 95, there was Windows 3.1. And before there was Windows 3.1, there was... DOS. It was a command line OS with no graphical interface. Back then programmers wrote their own game engines to run from scratch, with direct access to the hardware, instead of using stuff like DirectX nowadays. Back then, programmers were fucking hardcore.
Hunter: So windows?
Me: No... DOS. You've seriously never seen a DOS prompt?
Hunter: Nope Ha
Me: Stop making me feel fucking old. Look, just play the damn game. This is where 3D games came from. Before this there were text adventures and 2D sprite graphics. Mech2 all but singlehandedly launched modern 3D games. This is our history and our heritage as gamers.
Hunter: What type of game is it?
Me: Mostly sim.
Hunter: I don't play lots of those.
Me: You better damn well play it, or you don't have any right to call yourself a real gamer.
Hunter: Okay, I'll download it after this episode of My Little Ponies is done
Me: I hate you so much right now
Kids these days, yaknow?![:\](https://polycount.com/plugins/emojiextender/emoji/twitter/confused.png ":\")
I submit it to you all for reminiscence, chortling, and shaking of heads.
Hunter: Know any good retro games?
Me: MechWarrior 2.
Hunter: What console did it run on.
Me: Please tell me you're joking.
Hunter: Nah, I don't know retro stuff.
Me: DOS. IT RAN ON DOS.
Hunter: What's DOS?
Me: Give me strength... Before there was Windows 95, there was Windows 3.1. And before there was Windows 3.1, there was... DOS. It was a command line OS with no graphical interface. Back then programmers wrote their own game engines to run from scratch, with direct access to the hardware, instead of using stuff like DirectX nowadays. Back then, programmers were fucking hardcore.
Hunter: So windows?
Me: No... DOS. You've seriously never seen a DOS prompt?
Hunter: Nope Ha
Me: Stop making me feel fucking old. Look, just play the damn game. This is where 3D games came from. Before this there were text adventures and 2D sprite graphics. Mech2 all but singlehandedly launched modern 3D games. This is our history and our heritage as gamers.
Hunter: What type of game is it?
Me: Mostly sim.
Hunter: I don't play lots of those.
Me: You better damn well play it, or you don't have any right to call yourself a real gamer.
Hunter: Okay, I'll download it after this episode of My Little Ponies is done
Me: I hate you so much right now
Kids these days, yaknow?
Replies
Hard core gamers are a hoax! Just get your adrenalin to a very high level with a bit of rage and you can dominate in any fps, works for me with halo and CoD your enemies move sooo slow there just begging to be killed. Feels like im dead once my blood stops rushing though, bad trade off.
At this very moment i think i just realized why Retro studios is named retro studios
I still love them, don't get me wrong, but I also recognize it's mostly nostalgia. There are some games that I wish would return. Like Simon the Sorcerer, Full Throttle, and those point and click adventure games. But for the most part, I see no reason why gamers today would like those old DOS games. Stuff today does so much more.
I was watching my little cousin play the last Halo game on my 360. And man, he was SOOO into it. I'm sure those graphics blew his mind, and he was so engrossed in the experience. I couldn't help but think that if it was me back in the day, I would play the living crap out of that game, and would think it's the most awesome thing ever. Halo is simply better than anything we had back then. I was seeing nostalgia being made in my little cousin's mind.
Just my 2cents.
Same here.
There will be no such ignorance in my household! :poly142:
Quiet, you, I'm yelling at a cloud here.
I mean, it can only be good if someone is genuinely interested in learning about old games, but at this point I would not judge anyone for not knowing much or caring about the old games.
The best thing is seeing a gamer who got into recent console gaming, someone who never touched old dos games to get into dos games and really like them, it's a joyful moment.
Seriously. Should try being less condescending. Could have just answered his question with: PC DOS.
Realize 15 years from now these kids will be old school gamers talking about the old Halo/CoD days.
You may think those games are total crap, but these kids are loving it, and that's great. It may be difficult for these kids to enjoy Half-Life as much as we did 13 years ago. (feel old yet
Half life was reborn through deus ex human revolution no one els sees it but me They all think im crazy!
A lot of the sarcasm between the two of us gets lost in the text.
I don't look down on the current crop of FPS / shooters at all - I've got a good chunk of them myself, and they're fun, even if the multiplayer isn't precisely my cup of tea (generally, I suck compared to the hardcore multiplayer population and get killed constantly, therefore fun level drops). My 7-year-old son and I duke it out on our PS3 regularly.
That said, I've never been particularly impressed with the notion of "professional" gaming, but that's probably because the early Cyberathlete Leagues with Counter-Strike and StarCraft got off to such a laughable start. I'm coming around though. Wouldn't mind paying the bills playing TF2...
Wow, I checked it out on youtube and am still surprised. There must be some magic going on for sure :P
And keeping them away from those damned Japanese rape games! DAMN THEM ALL TO OBLIVION!
Seriously? My little pony? *Shakes head in shame....
~ Objection.
I was never allowed a console by my education obsessed parents until a couple years into the PS2 era. Even when I DID get a Ps2 I was only allowed 3hours a day on it.
I never play games now. Ever.
Feels completely unnatural to sit and play anything for more than 45mins even though I'm now free to do whatever I like. It's pretty much hardcoded into me.
We let her play Toy Story 3 since the sand box mode didn't really have forced objectives time limits or even the ability to die. She was dreadful at first but by the time she hit 2 years and 10 months ish she was fully controlling woody and jumping about completing missions, buying buildings, racing bullseye (and even winning a gold medal here and there).
(side note this was awesome as the dexterity learnt from this increased her ability to draw 10 fold).
When we realised she was now completing the story mode we introduced her to older games.
Shes now in love with mega drive sonic games and mario in any iteration. Definatly makes me proud, she just enjoys any game
We already lost Batman the Bold series, Transformers has too much of that Bay vibe going on to be anything decent, and most Eastern stuff must have some kind of tinted hedonism, either racial or gender.
Frankly, watching MLP is the only thing I can do nowadays, that, and old stuff, like District 9 and Fly Castle. Too much of the current stuff is simple brain-dead garbage, smoldering in angst. I mean honestly, enough with the dark reboots already.
Also, not proud of it, but the only time I dabbled in DOS was when me and my friends downloaded a game which was called RobotDolls or something, and I don't need to remind why a teenager would ever download that by the name alone.
So, don't watch cartoons? :poly124: Lots of big people shows have arcs these days...
That's odd, since the Mechwarrior 2 I have is for Windows 95. Was it a different one of the same name?
Maybe it's only re-runs but still a fun show.
As for old games. While moving from Chicago to Green Bay recently I found my original Command and Conquer DOS disks, C&C win95 versions, moto racer gp for my integraph intense 3d voodoo card, tomb raider 2, delta force, return to castle wolfenstein, rogue squadron... oh so many more but can't remember off the top of my head... So many memories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechWarrior_2:_31st_Century_Combat
The game was apparently released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Sega Saturn and PlayStation.
Also, Ponies. I'm surprised to see how many pcers have started watching that since the thread went inactive.
Mech 2 v1.0 / 1.1 ran native in DOS in (if I recall correctly) Protected memory mode, something pretty novel at the time. It's what allowed them to squeeze unaccelerated 3D graphics out of late 486s and the first Pentiums.
It was later released in a DOS / Win95 dual native release, although the Win95 implementation was basically just a 16bit GUI shell on top of the DOS native game engine.
There were a large number of specialized SKUs of MW2 that were bundled with 1st generation PCI GPUs, such as the original Voodoo 3dfx, S3 Virge, Diamond Monster, etc. There were so many it was difficult to track them all. Best count puts the number of GPU-specific ports at more than 25, probably closer to 30 - remember, this was before OpenGL and DirectX, and each of those versions had the renderer (and other chunks of the game code and in some cases chunks of the game art) re-done from scratch specifically for that card.
MW2: Ghost Bear's Legacy used the Mech 2 engine, almost without alteration. Much of the content in GBL was actually included in MW2 but was never enabled. NARC Becons, AMS, Inferno SRMs, torpedoes, and pretty much all of the gear that didn't show up until GBL / Mercs actually exists in the original MW2 files.
MW2: Mercenaries brought true DirectX 2 functionality to the table, although my hunch is that most or possibly all of those changes were front-end GUI. The engine was still DOS native at heart, since there was a 100% software DOS version shipped on the same CD as the Win95 version.
Later, just after the GPU-specific bundled versions of MW2 were coming out, MW2: Mercs was released in a special "3dfx Accelerated" version that brought basic texture maps and other features to the engine. There was also a "Pentium edition" of both MW2 and MW2: Mercs, which I'm not as familiar with, that preceded the 3dfx Mercs - I believe it was a conversion of the engine from integer to floating-point math.
The final iteration of the game was the 3-pack Titanium Trilogy of MW2, MW2:GBL, and MW2:Mercs. For all three there was a dual-version CD that had both a late revision of the original 8-bit game, as well as a remastered 16-bit version that ran natively under Windows with DirectX.
So there you go.
Yes I typed that all from memory DON'T JUDGE ME
...
[ame="
Guess who had to read it to her, me and it wasn't all that bad.
I also get to watch Sesame Street with her nearly every day.
There will always be Generation gaps between the old and younger crowd.
Don't you see that's how it starts? First they lose their respect for DOS prompts, then they start talking down to our 8-bit sprite art. Before we know it they'll be lording their cordless, 4E Eye-phoners over us and we'll be stuck trying to dial out so we can e-mail our disdain to them at a blistering 7KBs a second speed. Is that what you want?!
God, my dad used to try and get me to not bother using a calculator, and use an abacus, and after 30 years I still don't see the point of learning how to use an abacus when we have calculators.
And sorry, but 99.99999% of games back then sucked. They sucked hardcore donkey balls. You all have beer vision goggles, if you think those Sierra adventure games hold up today. Most of the old school NES games were stupid, and had immature game design. SURE they were wonderful at that time, but for the most part, they were designed around 25cent arcades, and were made to suck your quarters. NOT be any kind of enlightening experience.
I'm certainly not going to force my children to watch old black and white silent nickelodeon films before they get to watch Toy Story. I'm not going to require they play Dice based D&D before I let them play Dragon Age, and I sure as hell won't force them to use an old rotary dial phone before they're allowed to use a mobile.
I dunno. I hope the future generation are better than we are. I think it's really lame to think they should be subjected to the exact same media and upbringing as we were.
I agree for the most part, but a lot of the classics are classics, and they still hold up. And after they get remade on the 3ds or the 3d apple product we can happily thrust them upon the next generation. :poly136:
He thought Contra was repetitive as hell and stupidly hard and boring. HE WAS RIGHT. I don't like it because the AI was retarded, I didn't like the stupid slowdown, and I certainly didn't enjoy the plot. I enjoyed Contra because it made me think of the times I was a kid playing that with my brother, dying all 30 times, and stealing his lives.
Nostalgia doesn't make something good.
Also, most games where good for THEIR time. Things have moved on by then. Again, example for me would be Morrowind, people praise it like it's the seconding coming of Cthulhu or something, but alot of it was pretty much atrocious.
-Spears where useless, and I like spears (before 300 made it mainstream).
-Hit and Miss ratios where something which made the earlier FF games look charitable.
-Alot of the spells where 'fun', but overall, didn't contribute anything to the gameplay.
-Earlier versions of the game had quick-travel, this one didn't.
-Alot of the story was based upon you reading books for motivation.
-Weird environment design where sometimes, you could meet one-hit monsters early on.
So basically, yes, alot of the retro things we have needs to be polished and kept for future generations, at least in example form if possible, but everything is tinted when we remember them with nostalgia and what games we enjoyed, only for us, today, to quit it within the hour because we have better things to do...such as finish the breasts on the model we've been procrastinating for the last week or so.
We don't blame Mozart for not using e-guitars, or blame Chaplin to only have made black and white movies. We appreciate those works for the art behind the technology, and this is something you can still do with some of the old classics.
One more thing I dont like Chaplin, I think he's movies is fucking boring.