Quality Freak

Hi all!

I'm new here and I just want to air my opinion about some issues I have with gaming.
I'm 36, that's probably an old-timer around here and I've been playing computer games since Video Pong (TV Tennis) and the original Pac Man came out in the arcades. This means I've literally seen generations of computer games come and go (like anyone my age) and I have some strong feelings about modern games.

There used to be a time, when computer games were about fun.
Not about money.
Those times seemed to have changed.
What am I talking about?
I'm talking about game QUALITY. Game Quality to me is simply one single thing: How much fun is the game? How ADDICTED will it make you?
That's what game fun is and that's what game quality is to me.
Not graphics, not digitized speech, not lack of bugs.

Why am I telling you all this?
Because I think computer games used to be a lot better in old times.
Seriously! I think computer games are actually getting WORSE in terms of quality, meaning FUN all the time.
Let me make a few examples:
Let's start right with Pac Man for instance: Today this might be seen by many as a primitive game compared to modern life-like 3D graphics. But Pac Man had real quality! It's a very simple but very nice game idea, it has really awesome sound and like many games of that area it can get you pretty hooked, at least if you don't fall victim to the lure of games with fancier graphics. Same goes for other games of that aera: Tempest, Mr. Do, Asteroids, etc. Guess why the MAME (Multiple Arcade Game Emulator) Project was started? Because those games got people HOOKED!

Let's make another example: The Commodore 64:
O.K., there are about 17'000 Games for the Commodore C64 and admittedly, many games were crap. But there were some REAL jewels in those games as well. Some very primitive and simple, by today's standards very VERY limited graphics (but with C64's unparalelled SID SOUND!), yet those games could get people hooked almost like drugs! For instance Bard's Tale 3: A REAL ROLE PLAYING GAME, turn-based, with a full party, very limited sound, and very simply animated 2D graphic pictures showing what you currently see. This game could actually send shivers down my spine when I just finished a big task, my party was half dead and I was returning to the Guild (the only place in the game where saving was allowed) and I got attacked by some... simple 2-D graphic picture monster...

I want to keep this "post" or rant short so people will read it, so I'll continue to my last example: The PC:
One of the best examples for declining game quality I feel is the Mechwarrior series. There was a game for DOS (and later for Win98) called Mechwarrior 2 - Mercenaries.
GOD! WHAT A GAME! O.K., admittedly, this game had LOTS of bugs. So many, that in the beginning it was actually hard to even play at all. But when the bugfixes were out, this game ruled!
It had relatively simple 3D graphics, but ALL the things which make a game fun were there. You had a real CHOICE what you want to do. You could REALLY customize your mechs any way YOU wanted (such as an Atlas with about 40 small lasers delivering an unparalleled punch in infighting), you could take out other mechs by selectively shooting off their arms / weapons or by taking out their cockpit. The Missions were fantastic, always very very different and with lots of fantasy. The story was awesome and it climaxes to the end to a grand fight with the clans attacking the inner sphere.
This is a game people can truly WORSHIP it's so ... good!

Now let's see what happens when graphics get better as it does every darned year: Microsoft bought all rights to the Mechwarrior games and felt it had to sell that game again with better graphics.
Better graphics = better game. That's the logic of today's ****** game industry.
Mechwarrior 3, 4 and Mercenaries by Microsoft (which I all played through) in comparison is just a LOAD of CRAP! Really!
It's horrible!
O.K., the graphics are much more detailed, but that's the ONLY thing that's improved! ALL other things are worse! And that results in a game that's much LESS fun to play! The missions are horrible boring copies of Mechwarrior 2. There is no story (or not one worth noticing), there is no choice, you can't customize your mechs as freely any more. If you own a certain amount of a special weapon, (such as the all-mighty Arrow Rockets) it's no longer offered in the free marked, because Microsoft thinks you should not own more than a certain amount of that type of weapon. - In the old Mercenairies 2 it was just random. The program didn't peek and look what the player already owned and then gave a list of stuff it felt the player was allowed to buy. It had it's OWN, independen REAL rules for what weapons were currently available, depending not on what the player already haed (=cheating on the game's side), but on what planet you were on. Microsoft cheats and treats its players like they were little kids which need to be governed to be able to have fun…! And Gawd does that make me sick and spoil *ANY* fun which might come up by coincidence!

The Micro$oft version of Mechwarriors is the most patronizing game which degrades the player to an imbecile baby kid I know. It's ALL GRAPHICS and everything else is just a worse copy of Mercenaries 2. Even the story doesn't leave you any choice. In Mercenaries 4 for instance in the end, you have the choice between one mission and nothing else. If you take the mission your advisor says "You made the right decision!"... What a joke! Really I regret having paid Microsoft any money for its Mechwarrior games. Actually I played Mechwarrior 2 – Mercenaries through about 4 times, and I'll do it again, but I'll never ever play one of Microsoft's Mechwarrior games again!

And all this about Mechwarrior is just typical for today's gaming industry! It's the example, the tip of the iceberg!
Most other companies do similar stuff like Micro$oft.
It's as if gaming and GOOD games were actually killed by modern hardware capabilities!
It's like programming modern games is so ****** expensive, because it's such a monster task with all the graphics, that it's actually TOO expensive to make games that don't only look O.K., but actually are also fun to play.
Take role playing games for example. If you ever played Bard's Tale 1-3 or Realms of Arkania (Das Schwarze Auge) and compare that with modern top-of-the-line Role Playing Games such as Neverwinter Nights (or even Baldur's Gate), hell, those old games beat modern games in terms of ACTUAL playing fun by miles and miles and MILES!!!

There's many more examples of old games with simple graphics which just simply beat all this modern baby-kid-super-graphics-and-nothing-else-games. For instance Jagged Alliance 2. What a great RPG! Real turn-based, real FUN! Compare that with any real-time RPG with superb graphics but no fun and you know what I mean.

I'm not a console guy, so I don't know what's going on in console games, but I assume it might be similar.
I just wonder, when will game developers start noticing, that all these advanced hardware and graphics possibilities are actually not only HURTING but DESTROYING good games, because with all the effort needed to fill out all those detailed graphics, games become too expensive to deliver real fun to the gamer. Instead, all that big companies like Microsoft do, is cheat the gamer community by selling them off old cakes, baked over with more graphics, but with less story, less possibilities, less fun, less quality.
Graphics… Graphics REALLY do have their price!
And it's us gamers that have to pay it!
If you buy a game today, all you get is graphics. Because that's what can be advertised on the back of the game box or with screenshots in the internet. That's what sells!!!
You can't advertise what makes Bard's Tale 3, Jagged Alliance 2 or Mechwarrior 2 – Mercenaries fun! You can't boast with any "hard numbers" of graphic effects... You must actually play the games to *KNOW* why they are so much fun! - This includes the developers (!!). Many modern games seem like nobody who sells or developed the game actually ever would take or took the time to play the game through only ONE SINGLE time, let alone have any fun doing so. Heck, those games are not for fun! They're for little kids and to make top dollars! Money $$$! Not for having fun!!
Many old, simple graphics but everything else good games were just fun! Not as nice to look at. But fun. Fun which can't hardly be found in modern games anymore at all.

Maybe we should all boycott modern games and stop buying them?
But tell that to a 5-year old who sees the nice graphics of a game like Micro$oft's Mechwarrior 3 or 4. Explain to him why this type of fraud should be boycotted. Explain to him that this is just a cop-out of the real thing, the real game.
And then try to explain to him, why, if you enter "Mechwarrior 2" in Google, the first and primary site of the producer, "Activision" actually is a dead link and Activision denies ever having produced such a game on their web page...
The world's just upside down! Activision denies having ever produced Mechwarrior 2, one of the best PC games ever, and Micro$oft is boasting with pride about their crimes "Mechwarrior" 3 and 4...

I think the gaming industry truly is on a very bad course since about 5 – 10 years. And it seems there's no limit how bad it can get...

To end this rant, I'll admit there are very few occasional very rare exceptions.
Such as Serious Sam (Part 1!) by this seemingly little unknown team "CroTeam". Although Serious Sam is just like all other modern games 99% about graphics. They at least considered the fact that a game should be fun too, not only look good graphically for sales and advertiseablity.

Greetings, signing off,
Quality Freak


PS: Note to Admins: Although this is a "rant", admittedly, maybe even an "intelligent" one, I strongly feel this post should be seen by all people, even non-registered users. Hence I posted it here where its visible to non-registered visitors as well an hope this is O.K.

flclisgreat

holy wall of text Batman!

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you will run in fear of my knowledge of **** that will **** you up

glikh

HAHA!

Bitey

Yeah I pretty much don't care. Morrowind is teh greetest.

Apachai

erm i agree to a certain extent. but not all games are like that these days. one brill example. line rider. simple, gets you completly addicted, completely fun. AND NOT ABOUT THE MONEY. some people like me develop games for free. although his is way better than mine at the mo (remember im not even 16 yet). also here is anougther wall of text about one of the games you meantioned

The story of PONG (not to be confused with Tennis, invented by Ralph Baer) started much earlier than 1972. At the end of the 1960's, Steve Russell's "Space War" game had been circulating throughout many campus' and companies' huge and expensive PDP computers. Nolan Bushnell envisioned this game being played by the masses. He set to work to build a simpler and less expensive platform to play his version of Space War... the result was Computer Space. The game was sold by Nutting Associates, Inc. and would bear the marking "Syzygy Engineered" to represent Nolan and fellow partner Ted Dabney's new company: Syzygy, which would later become officially Incorporated on June 27, 1972 as Atari, Inc. (Nolan enjoyed playing japanese chess game "Go", where "Check" translated as "Atari" in Japanese, hence the new company name). Only 1,500 Computer Spaces were sold and did not meet with favorable response from the game players.

In an interview, Nolan explained the main problem he had with Computer Space: "You had to read the instructions before you could play, people didn't want to read instructions. To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play; something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play."

Nolan and Ted would go it alone and hire Allan Alcorn to design the first game under the Atari name: PONG. "PONG" was choosen for its meaning: a hollow, ringing sound, which was exactly what Nolan wanted in the game.

However, PONG was not really designed by Allan. As a matter of fact, Magnavox was putting their new Odyssey home video game console in demonstration. On May 24, Nolan went to one of these demos at Burlingame, California where he signed the guest book and played the Tennis game, a simpler version of PONG.

By 1972, Nolan Bushnell would leave Ampex and go into business with Ted Dabney and Larry Byron. Larry would soon drop out leaving just Nolan and Ted. The idea was to create the game technology and license it to other companies to build such as they did with Computer Space to Nutting Associates. However, by the time PONG had finished its testing phase at a local bar called Andy Capps, Nolan realized that there was more to be made if he and his partner sold the game themselves. November 1972 saw the first production PONG games rolling off the assembly line. This assembly line run out of a converted Roller Rink off of Winchester Blvd. (According to Nolan Bushnell: 38,000 Pong's were built and sold).

Mounted on pinball bars, the PONG prototype machine had an amazing story while being put in demo at Andy Capp's Cavern. The following true story is taken from "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari" by Cohen.

"One of the regulars approached the Pong game inquisitively and studied the ball bouncing silently around the screen as if in a vacuum. A friend joined him. The instructions said: 'Avoid missing ball for high score.' One of [them] inserted a quarter. There was a beep. The game had begun. They watched dumbfoundedly as the ball appeared alternately on one side of the screen and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end of the screen. The score was 5-4, his favor, when his paddle made contact with the ball. There was a beautifully resonant "pong" sound, and the ball bounced back to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to use his paddle. They had their first brief volley just before the score was 11-5 and the game was over."

"Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the constant pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing, everybody in the bar had played the game. The next day people were lined up outside Andy Capp's at 10 A.M. to play Pong. Around ten o'clock that night, the game suddenly died." (pg.29)

The reason of this failure was the Laundry-Mat coin-op mechanism which was filled to the top with quarters and shorted out until emptied. Once emptied, the game worked again.

Two weeks later, Magnavox discovered the existence of PONG and its public demonstration without any royalty being paid to Magnavox for its Ball and Paddle game patent. This resulted in a $700,000 fine, which gave Atari the required license for manufactring PONG machines coin-ops. By the end of March 1973, 8000 to 10000 PONG machines were sold. The same year, Atari sold an improved version of PONG with two additional players: PONG DOUBLES. Other variants were released later: QUADRA PONG, PIN PONG, DOCTOR PONG, etc. However, Atari did not forecast an obvious problem: bootlegers. Several other companies copied Atari's idea and released their own version of PONG. Some even proposed special kits

i could continue but i couldnt be bothered

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glikh

Argh! so long to read!

Fusic

HOLY ****!!!

Morrowwind is great!

Another good game is Fear!

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Quality Freak

Hi all,

O.K., maybe I wasn't born yet when PONG first came out.
But I rember seing it once or twice as a kid as a home console game...
:-)

O.K... I *MISSED* Morrowind.
Partly because I don't much care for RPGs where you can't controll a full party. But since I've heard so much good about this game I'll play it NEXT!
:-))
Thanks for the tip!
(And after that I might try FEAR.)
:-)


I just finished the last mission of Micro$oft's Mechwarrior 4 Mercenairies yesterday... I guess that left me in a really bad mood (and not because the game was over, but for even having bothered to start playing it) and it showed...
It's just that I get this feeling with a lot of modern games with great graphics.

I guess every game-generation generates its own few jewels and a lot of crap. And theses days graphic quality and the size of the company making the game simply don't have anything to do with the quality of the game.
It's just frustrating to find out you wasted your time and money with a crappy game that looks good only on screenshots and the back of a box...
;-)


Greetings,
Quality Freak

Random Turnip

OMG that is one BIG rant, but totally true, im with you all the way, give me the N64 any day, back when people knew how to make decent games.

when i say give me the N64, i generally mean it, mine died not long ago, it simply wont do anything, it is a sad time for me, so many hours of pure enjoyment gone, now only memories, thank god for the Virtual Console!

also, why do i see no mension of games like doom, goldeneye, mario 64, FF7?
you cant hardly say they revolved around graphics, fe for their time the graphics werent bad, but they was obviously ALOT of thought put into the rest of the game!

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L O P L <- Happy Birthday from Jorgi =]

Vince

FFS man.... Shhhh LOL! im trying to think. but i cant hear myself think over seing all that typing. :P

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Made by Mike

Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people I had to kill because they pissed me off!

* "Nonsense is nonsense, * * but the history of nonsense * * is a very important science." *
*Help the Turtles take over the world*