How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?

[empsolo]

Would you please

 

1) lighten up,

No.

 

 

 

2) read what I wrote, not what you infer from what I wrote,

 

I read exactly what you wrote.

 

 

 

3) understand where this conversation is coming from.

 

Lighten up. Nobody (especially me) has anything against having fun. Your definition of "looks nice to play" is your own, not some sort of universal standard.

 

 

Considering that colorful and visually stunning games generally merit all sorts of praise within the gaming community, I would argue it's damn near universal.

 

 

 

 

 

I think vector games look beautiful, especially Star Trek: SOS and Tempest. I think raster games like Xevious and Wizard Of Wor and Defender and Rally-X look great. And they're fun. Do you understand? Get someone to help you if you don't. Most arcade games look nice to play. Can't really say that about most 2600 games but the 5200 games looked great, too.

 

I'm not saying they aren't fun. What I am saying is that you should take a step back and think before you spout BS like that.

 

 

 

What's obviously "kiddy" is taking comments presented in a forum conversation personally and reacting defensively about them.

 

Even though they are nothing more than put downs aimed at deriding fans of consoles that were universally adored back in the late 1980's. Both here and in Japan. Especially since they introduced newer genres of games that you don't like.

 

 

 

 

The original question was why newer people getting into retro games skip the Atari. Nobody can say for sure but they can guess or have ideas about why. Simply comparing NES/SNES games to Atari 2600 games, both graphically and also via gameplay, can give you some good hints. I (and others) are trying to decipher those hints.

 

I don't see any deciphering. What I do see on the otherhand is a circle jerk where some of the actors here are still salty that their company couldn't get out of the 8-bit era and was forever playing catch up after that. So instead of actually discussing why retro gamers give the the old Atari consoles a pass, which by the way I haven't seen any sort of evidence to back up this assertion, instead you just mock and ridicule and justify that behavior through the thin veneer of "discussion."

 

 

 

You don't like it, find another conversation where everyone agrees and talks about how cute games are.

 

Or better you yet, you could not act like a dick. You don't see me retorting that the reason why the nobody cares about the VCS is because the VCS claimed it could do 200+ screen colors but all you got were a few hundred games that had varying shades for the color of shit. But I have the sense to respect what came before the NES and what came after. Instead, all you do is dismiss the opinions of those that came after Atari instead of you know, asking.

 

 

 

 

There is no way to claim that most Atari games were cute.

 

[snark] I don't think you can call 4 bit pixels cute. [/snark]

 

 

 

Most were arcade ports or rip-offs of arcade game play and those games are mostly not cute,

 

Yet the popular games of the early 1980's were Pac-man, Ms-Pacman, and Donkey Kong. Games that pretty much were beginnings of cartoon styled video games and influenced an entire generation of video game designers going forward.

 

 

 

 

they are kill everything and they look primitive.

 

Not all were kill everything. And while they look primitive, you can see how these game designers were looking to bring something new to the plate that wasn't Atari space-doom game #400.

 

 

 

 

NES side-scroller based games are cute,

 

Not every game was Super Mario Bros. You had games like Splatterhouse, Castlevania, Metroid, Ninja gaiden, Double Dragon, etc. There were side scrollers that appealed to all sorts of demographics.

 

 

 

they are exploratory,

 

Exploring the world, seeing new sites and sounds, going on adventures out of your wildest imaginations. I don't see anything that is inherently cute or kiddy as Dr. Lewis pointed out in his "On Children's Stories."

 

 

 

and they have the worst controller ever designed.

 

Haha...no.

 

 

 

 

They are far away from the typical 2600-type game.

 

Which goes to show that Atari didn't start branching out and really trying new things until the very end. You can only go so far with the arcade style format of games. You need new ideas and IPs that can bring diversity to your library. Otherwise, your library is going to get stale.

 

 

 

The few 2600 games that delved into that type of gameplay looked inferior and played inferior due to the poorer graphics and less memory.

 

Mostly because late Atari was pretty stingy on how much memory could be used in a game. So it really stifled the ability of 2600 programmers who wanted to do something different.

 

 

 

Two different console types.

 

They are different no doubt about. That isn't to say that VCS couldn't do something more, albeit primitively. It's just the VCS is just the embodiment of the old mentality, the stubborn refusal to try newer things.

 

 

 

Whiners who treat 'adult' as a personal attack on themselves because they don't want to acknowledge that they like/prefer cutesy video games,

 

Except cute is inherently neither adult or childish. If you read "On Children's stories," you would know this. CS Lewis wrote his essay attacking the idea that so called adult- fantasy needed more so-called "adult things" like more emphasis on violence, vulgarity, and sexual innuendo. Lewis argued that none of of these things are the hall mark of maturity because they

miss the overall point of fairy tales. That fairy tales are stories that capture that sense of wonder, that yearning for a world that is different from the drudgery of this one, of lessons in ethics and morality, and that spark of human imagination found in all people across all ages.

 

 

 

cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about what others say about favorite video game types, to hide behind quoted passages from famous people in order to appear morally superior or right by association with some social majority; these things are the marks of being intolerant of differing opinions. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being too tightly connected to cutesy games is a mark of playing the victim. When I was ten I played the Atari 2600 because that's all there was, when I was a little older I went to arcades to play better video games. Now that I'm almost 50 I still play those types of games while others who grew up with more powerful consoles got into different games with more background story and bigger worlds to explore and cuter characters to identify with and worse controllers to play them with. When I became a man I put away childish things, including concerning myself with overly-sensitive forum members who cannot stay on topic but instead twist every comment that goes against their way of gaming life as some sort of indictment of what they hold dear.

 

Riiiight.

Edited December 7, 2015 by empsolo

[Jinks]

Ok mommy's tits are getting full kids. Time for another suck.

Like I said early atari's block was a man. If you don't get that today then nuff said move on to another system. No one is going to build a time machine to take you to the early video game years to understand. You will have no comprehension.

Some day our grandchildren will play games so far advanced they will think 4k sony is lame as hell and not get wtf you were doing pressing x all day long.

[wolfy62]

Ok mommy's tits are getting full kids. Time for another suck.

Like I said early atari's block was a man. If you don't get that today then nuff said move on to another system. No one is going to build a time machine to take you to the early video game years to understand. You will have no comprehension.

Some day our grandchildren will play games so far advanced they will think 4k sony is lame as hell and not get wtf you were doing pressing x all day long.

Someday you will be defending whatever you play today and a lot of young people will wonder why.

 

I see a couple guys in here saying you should be playing games of death and destruction EXACTLY what is wrong with our world today......death, killing and destruction.

 

I let my son play some of them, I choose not to or judge whoever does.

 

Please all don't pick on the harmless non-violent folks who may actually want to play basic and harmless games. Thanks, Happy Holidays! Wolfy

[sega_SHARK]

Video game forums:

 

 

I think Frogger is cute BTW.

 

[ledzep]

I agree with most of what you are saying except

Um, just about every retro title is considered kiddy in some way, I don't understand what you're saying.

Considered kiddy by whom? Yes, I'm sure many people look at all/most retro games as quaint and simple. But, within that group of games the arcade games were for the most part not considered kiddy or cute. Didn't look cute. If they played cute, ok, you have games like Marble Madness or Rally-X that seemed cuter while still not having individual characters to identify with. Nobody considered Star Castle cute, or Space Invaders or Tempest or Missile Command or Robotron: 2048 (even with the family to save) or Berzerk or Scramble or most of them. Kiddy now, compared to all the cinematic FPS games and the racing sims? Probably.

But when you're discussing how someone would go as far back as the NES/SNES and collect the actual components and games, but stop there and not go back further (Atari), the different style of games and graphics and controllers must play some part, if even that varies among newer collectors. It can't be because they're unwilling to deal with the physical pieces or they wouldn't collect retro games at all. It must be the specifics of the Atari versions of basic games.

Call of Duty is what you should be playing for your realistic graphics, killing everything and military manly type themes, but it doesn't appear you do.

Agreed, those games are more or less full CG movies now. And, no, I don't play those kinds of games. Partly because I suck at them, partly because I don't have days to spend exploring those worlds and figuring out all the mysteries and secrets, partly because I don't have the computer to drive the great games, partly because I was never that big a fan of games where I am maneuvering a person around.

The games are too realistic. By that I mean they really look like the outdoors or the inside of a ship or building, the people really look like people (dogs look like dogs, cars look like cars, etc.) and when that happens I expect the control scheme to be realistic, too. In real life when you walk, when you fight, when you shoot, you're not hitting buttons, you're actually moving limbs. For those realistic games I would want some sort of control scheme that used my limbs to move and fight, same way that when playing realistic looking racing games I expect a steering wheel and gear shift and pedals (and when I play flight sims I expect all the controls a plane has).

Old arcade type shooter games, on the other hand, were more from the perspective of watching the action through some sort of radar screen or global display. A few had first-person perspective like Star Wars or Battlezone but then they had cool control panels. But the rest, like Galaga or Tempest or Xevious or Asteroids or whatever looked more like sensor readouts of what was going on, the ship was a little shape, so were the targets. Nothing realistic looking, nothing representing me as a person. That's what I'm used to, that's what most old Atari games are. It's a mindset thing.

You still play the same arcade titles, all of which looked cartoony in that era.

Maybe you haven't seen many cartoons but those games don't look cartoony, they look basic, they look simple. Would you watch a cartoon that looked like Defender or Battlezone or Vanguard or Omega Race or Star Castle or Satan's Hollow or Solar Fox? I wouldn't, and I love cartoons (well, old theatrical cartoons, not this modern Spongebob shit). A spaceship is one triangular shape, an alien target is 20 pixels of 3 different colors arranged in a vaguely insectile form, a city looks more like a hard candy. Not cute, just whatever an 8-bit computer could pull off.

No one plays cute games anymore, that's why you have to buy a Wii U if you don't want to exclusively play FPS games. and obviously retro gamers don't want to just play FPS or the scene would be as big as it is.

Ya, I know, hence the discussion (although you ignore the wave of smartphone app games that are overly cute, including their commercials). So are you saying that people decide to collect NES/SNES and Saturn and Genesis universally avoid the cute games and side-scrollers? Because that's much/most of the game libraries of all those consoles. So retro gamers, by even going that far back in gaming time, accept and enjoy playing some/most of those cute games, otherwise why bother? Why commit to the expense and time to track down NES/SNES consoles and games only to decide afterward that they don't want to play any of those games? They're not stupid, they know what they're in for before they start. They know what the main games, the important and popular games, are for the different systems before they go down that scour the internet for rare retro shit road. Only an idiot would decide to start buying up Saturn and Genesis and SNES consoles and games and then realize that those games are too kiddy to deal with.

That's why games like Hotline Miami and Retro City Rampage were popular; retro style graphics and violent. It just didn't exist back then. So you have to make due with what you got. And I certainly don't consider 2600 games to have edgy design... half the things you can barely make out to begin with.

Who in the fuck said that 2600 games had edgy design? Unless you mean aliased graphics nobody is saying anything about "edgy" other than most 2600 games weren't capable of being cute like many NES/SNES games were because their graphics and sound could not possibly match those later consoles. Not enough resolution or detail. The homebrew Zippy and Halo games are proof of that.

Ya, I'd say more than half of what was presented on-screen in 2600 games you had to take the game's word for it that what you were looking at was a person or ship or building or football or insect or cactus or balloon or whatever, really they were just LEGOs moving around.

People aren't skipping Atari because it wasn't cute enough, they skipped it because you didn't know what the fuck was a tree and what was a football half the time. There are plenty, plenty of cute games for the 2600 people would find if they wanted to play them. It's not like there's some catastrophic curse sweeping Atari off the retro map, people don't give a damn about most everything non-NES/SNES. When you go from a vast, diverse library such as the NES and find yoursellf in Atariville, it's quite the shock. Because if you don't want to play primitive score based games (many of which you can find elsewhere ported to HD on newer consoles, to boot), you don't need the 2600. And if you do, you can play these games on most any console, the need to go back to the 2600 to play them is making things more difficult. People moderately interested are gonna buy Namco Museum or Taito Legends and get all this type of shit in one swoop with better features. I can't say they're all doing that, but I'm willing to bet you have a handful of those collections in every retro gamer's collection. We're also assuming that NES fans don't go back to the 2600 when we have no idea if they have Atari Anthology/Activision Anthology and thus have like 100 2600 games for like $15. I know Intellivision Lives! isn't perfect, but for $15 10 years ago, I bought it, enjoyed it and I consider it my Intellivision collection. Half the library was on it, why go through the expense and effort to get one? A lot of 2600 games in which they are ports are also on NES. So we can't just up and ignore the fact that while they may not have an Atari, it or at least with arcade collections, those "times" are likely still represented in their collections. This is the digital age - that counts.

Agreed. Atari was more appropriate for high-score based games, it couldn't do big worlds or cute recognizable characters or FPS or depth or anything like that. Arcade ports, that was its bread and butter. Puzzle games.

 

But people "moderately interested" don't go down the retro game collection road, they stop at retro anthologies like you mention, the Namco and Atari stuff. That's as far as they want to go. But those who want to go for real, have actual console and carts and controllers, they're more than "moderately" interested. And if they're seriously interested in actual Atari games then they aren't expecting cute platformers or giant worlds to explore, you're right, they want twitch-shooter games where the goal is the high score or beating their friends.

 

Nobody was talking about "times" being represented in video game collections via anthology discs. Those people aren't actual retro game collectors. That's like saying vinyl fans will be satisfied with CD copies of old albums. Fuck no. They want the actual vinyl, the album sleeves with the full-size album art, they want to deal with the annoyance of a turntable. The two groups are not the same, if a CD recording of an old album via a USB turntable is good enough then you're not a vinyl collector. There is no arguing around that.

 

Ya, the digital age counts, it makes things way more convenient, lots of emulators out there, have all your retro games on one SD card, done. But that's not retro game collecting, that's not what this discussion is about. And I think that's what seems to be confusing some people here, they go back and forth between what it takes to have an anthology collection or two and play them on their PCs or XBoxes compared to what it takes to track down an actual NES or Saturn or Atari 2600 along with the carts and the controllers and the possible weird accessories (and hopefully a CRT). Night and day.

[bretthorror]

I agree with most of what you are saying except

 

Considered kiddy by whom? Yes, I'm sure many people look at all/most retro games as quaint and simple. But, within that group of games the arcade games were for the most part not considered kiddy or cute. Didn't look cute. If they played cute, ok, you have games like Marble Madness or Rally-X that seemed cuter while still not having individual characters to identify with. Nobody considered Star Castle cute, or Space Invaders or Tempest or Missile Command or Robotron: 2048 (even with the family to save) or Berzerk or Scramble or most of them. Kiddy now, compared to all the cinematic FPS games and the racing sims? Probably.

 

But when you're discussing how someone would go as far back as the NES/SNES and collect the actual components and games, but stop there and not go back further (Atari), the different style of games and graphics and controllers must play some part, if even that varies among newer collectors. It can't be because they're unwilling to deal with the physical pieces or they wouldn't collect retro games at all. It must be the specifics of the Atari versions of basic games.

 

Agreed, those games are more or less full CG movies now. And, no, I don't play those kinds of games. Partly because I suck at them, partly because I don't have days to spend exploring those worlds and figuring out all the mysteries and secrets, partly because I don't have the computer to drive the great games, partly because I was never that big a fan of games where I am maneuvering a person around.

 

The games are too realistic. By that I mean they really look like the outdoors or the inside of a ship or building, the people really look like people (dogs look like dogs, cars look like cars, etc.) and when that happens I expect the control scheme to be realistic, too. In real life when you walk, when you fight, when you shoot, you're not hitting buttons, you're actually moving limbs. For those realistic games I would want some sort of control scheme that used my limbs to move and fight, same way that when playing realistic looking racing games I expect a steering wheel and gear shift and pedals (and when I play flight sims I expect all the controls a plane has).

 

Old arcade type shooter games, on the other hand, were more from the perspective of watching the action through some sort of radar screen or global display. A few had first-person perspective like Star Wars or Battlezone but then they had cool control panels. But the rest, like Galaga or Tempest or Xevious or Asteroids or whatever looked more like sensor readouts of what was going on, the ship was a little shape, so were the targets. Nothing realistic looking, nothing representing me as a person. That's what I'm used to, that's what most old Atari games are. It's a mindset thing.

 

Maybe you haven't seen many cartoons but those games don't look cartoony, they look basic, they look simple. Would you watch a cartoon that looked like Defender or Battlezone or Vanguard or Omega Race or Star Castle or Satan's Hollow or Solar Fox? I wouldn't, and I love cartoons (well, old theatrical cartoons, not this modern Spongebob shit). A spaceship is one triangular shape, an alien target is 20 pixels of 3 different colors arranged in a vaguely insectile form, a city looks more like a hard candy. Not cute, just whatever an 8-bit computer could pull off.

 

Ya, I know, hence the discussion (although you ignore the wave of smartphone app games that are overly cute, including their commercials). So are you saying that people decide to collect NES/SNES and Saturn and Genesis universally avoid the cute games and side-scrollers? Because that's much/most of the game libraries of all those consoles. So retro gamers, by even going that far back in gaming time, accept and enjoy playing some/most of those cute games, otherwise why bother? Why commit to the expense and time to track down NES/SNES consoles and games only to decide afterward that they don't want to play any of those games? They're not stupid, they know what they're in for before they start. They know what the main games, the important and popular games, are for the different systems before they go down that scour the internet for rare retro shit road. Only an idiot would decide to start buying up Saturn and Genesis and SNES consoles and games and then realize that those games are too kiddy to deal with.

 

Who in the fuck said that 2600 games had edgy design? Unless you mean aliased graphics nobody is saying anything about "edgy" other than most 2600 games weren't capable of being cute like many NES/SNES games were because their graphics and sound could not possibly match those later consoles. Not enough resolution or detail. The homebrew Zippy and Halo games are proof of that.

 

Ya, I'd say more than half of what was presented on-screen in 2600 games you had to take the game's word for it that what you were looking at was a person or ship or building or football or insect or cactus or balloon or whatever, really they were just LEGOs moving around.

 

Agreed. Atari was more appropriate for high-score based games, it couldn't do big worlds or cute recognizable characters or FPS or depth or anything like that. Arcade ports, that was its bread and butter. Puzzle games.

 

But people "moderately interested" don't go down the retro game collection road, they stop at retro anthologies like you mention, the Namco and Atari stuff. That's as far as they want to go. But those who want to go for real, have actual console and carts and controllers, they're more than "moderately" interested. And if they're seriously interested in actual Atari games then they aren't expecting cute platformers or giant worlds to explore, you're right, they want twitch-shooter games where the goal is the high score or beating their friends.

 

Nobody was talking about "times" being represented in video game collections via anthology discs. Those people aren't actual retro game collectors. That's like saying vinyl fans will be satisfied with CD copies of old albums. Fuck no. They want the actual vinyl, the album sleeves with the full-size album art, they want to deal with the annoyance of a turntable. The two groups are not the same, if a CD recording of an old album via a USB turntable is good enough then you're not a vinyl collector. There is no arguing around that.

 

Ya, the digital age counts, it makes things way more convenient, lots of emulators out there, have all your retro games on one SD card, done. But that's not retro game collecting, that's not what this discussion is about. And I think that's what seems to be confusing some people here, they go back and forth between what it takes to have an anthology collection or two and play them on their PCs or XBoxes compared to what it takes to track down an actual NES or Saturn or Atari 2600 along with the carts and the controllers and the possible weird accessories (and hopefully a CRT). Night and day.

 

(Is there any easy way of doing the breakdown of posts like you guys have been doing? If not I'm too lazy, if so, that's sweet, how?)

 

I just wanna make broad statements about your post, we obviously agree in certain aspects, but I still don't think we agree in the same way, not that we ever could.

 

1) I don't look at an Atari or early arcade game and see realistic images. To me, the images in the arcade were all cartoon-ish. They're basically drawn with pixels, I don't know how they couldn't be. The most upsetting thing, is the shit brown with black dots or brown caves we often got in the NES era that was meant to emulate a realistic view looked boring. Trying to make a city look as realistic as possible showed limitations to me, designing a game from imagination makes all the sense in the world. Even to use Contra on NES as an example, not that it looks bad, but the style doesn't exactly pop because it's not being colorful... "cute" maybe. Making something look boring instead of exciting isn't a bad thing. Put it this way, when these games came out, men wearing neon was in. I rest my case.

 

2) Yes, I'm talking about the old arcade games being kiddy by today's standards. Why wouldn't I? I live in the now, man! I'm not stuck in 1982. In 2015, I feel a bit weird playing, say, Mario in front of someone. It's a simpler game I enjoy more. I also like modern FPS games. But those FPS games look like movies, Mario looks like a cartoon.

 

3) Stop with the control schemes. You realize I've got ridiculous controllers all over the place, right? You're talking to the guy who plays NES Rad Racer with his Zoomer. I love all that shit you love, but it's just not feasible that every game ship with its own $100-$150 controller. You're being insane there, dude. Just as insane as your hatred for the d-pad. The average person will not ever, ever do that. I've been to the arcades, I play Lucky & Wild every time I go, we're talking steering wheel and light gun at the same time. But in my mind, I know... at home, I just can't do that. If you want to do that, you need to stay in the arcade and not worry about what everyone else plays at home. It's not economically feasible to do this for 99+% of games. Hence the D-pad or joystick. Don't like it? Well keep waiting for games to come out with their own elaborate control sets, I guess.

 

4) We are talking about retro gaming as far as I know from the OP, not collecting, but even if you wanna bring collecting into it, sorry, but also, not necessarily should any interested party run out with $1000 to get an insane Atari collection. Am I interested in the Channel F, Intellivision, Colecovision? Yes, but I'm not interested in going through hell to find working systems and hard to find games. Just because I'm a collector doesn't mean I can collect everything. You have to draw a line somewhere. You seem to think people should just bow down before games made over a 5 year span. These collectors/gamers are likely into games made over a 40 year span. There is a need to prioritize. A lot. Unlike you who never moved forward, these people are devouring knowledge backwards. That costs a lot more money and span your interests over a wider range of topics. River Raid has to compete with Xevious, Raiden, Ikaruga, and lord, like, everything on the TG-16 and beyond to modern day Steam stuff. Being a vinyl fan is totally different. You buy a good record player, buy some good records. If you're into gaming history, you gotta buy like 40 systems at least. It'd be like saying you can only really experience a movie in the theatre.

 

5) The night and day emulation not being able to perform against original hardware is obsolete and irrelevant. Sure, special snowflakes want us all to believe it, but face it, digital is here and emulation is now. At best, the 2600's most famous titles were ported down to it. So it's not even the original game, it's the Atari version of said game. This is why I mentioned the collections. Sometimes those collections make the most sense when playing old ass games. If emulation is so bad, why does everyone do it? If MP3s are so bad, why does everyone listen to them? In these situations, it's not because the people are dumb, it's because the upside outweighs the downside. Everything is give and take. And if I already have the Space Invaders, Centipedes, Millipedes, Donkey Kongs and Qberts of the world in a compilation or on the ever popular NES, who in God's name is gonna rush out to buy these games they already have again with lesser quality?! Atari fans only, I guess, since they just regurgitated this stuff onto the 5200 and 7800 and people didn't want it in 1987, either.

 

6) How Satan's Hollow (or any arcade game, really) has qualities more in common with real life than a cartoon to you, I have no idea, I can't fathom it, nor will I ever understand it. It looks like rudimentary animation. Oh, wait, it is! You're basically saying to me every flight simulator needs a true, real to life cockpit to enjoy with old ass, out of date, non-realistic pixelated animation only. How are the little dragons in Satan's Hollow breathing fire not cute? People regard animation as cute and stylistic more so than realistic, at least from my limited knowledge, because I don't watch cartoons or read comics or anything. It's like you're saying "Yeah, Atari had weak tech, so no no one else should have colors and cool shit and ideas in there games because like, I like Atari more". You're actually knocking creative and stimulating imagery... in a video game. That is insanity. Your opinions seem to imply that anything that doesn't look like a block is cute just for cuteness sake, so you also had to be the first person to say something negative about the word cute, but Satan's Hollow is somehow... realistic? But Satan's Hollow looks better than NES games... so, in certain situations where you say so, it's ok to have great art design and not be a block? Or just on the home side of things, where NES happened to kick Atari's ass, then and only then must everything look like a block? And then you're likely to reply and say that "to experience the 2600, you have to play arcade ports with poorer graphics", well no, there has to be a reasonable reason for these gamers to turn back the clock. If they have Centipede on PS2 in the Atari Collection, they don't have any real reason to turn back the clock. People are interested in games, not hardware, and they don't need to buy Centipede on 2600, 5200, 7800, an arcade port and whatever else it was released on to do it. There's just not enough time.

 

7) Nobody cares about collections. No one cares about mine, no one cares about yours, no one gives a fuck. We can all sit and fiddle with this shit until the cows come home, it doesn't make any difference. "I'm a vinyl collector" "I am a game collector". How about people stop collecting and stop attributing ridiculous superficial items to be their personalities and go out there and just be awesome. Nothing is more annoying than when people label themselves as a true collector, because nobody cares. And even if they did, we would never come to agreements on what Atari is to you, what Atari is to me, where retro gaming ends, whether boxes and carts and all this shit really matter or not. On the most rudimentary of levels, we could all either emulate or play the games on real hardware, enjoy the games and talk about the games. But we can't even do that together as a whole. Because everything needs to have some sort of ridiculous label. Bill can't play River Raid on the 2600 and Bob can't play River Raid on the PS2 without Ron saying neither of them have played the game because neither used a CRT. This shit is so superfluous, it needs to end.

[Keatah]

Emulation is just a different method of playing the games. I still catch flak for it.

[ledzep]

(Is there any easy way of doing the breakdown of posts like you guys have been doing? If not I'm too lazy, if so, that's sweet, how?)

Use "BBCode Mode", the little button in the upper left of the quote/reply window, next to the "Remove Format" button. Then copy/paste extra slash/quote and quote name= separators.

 

I just wanna make broad statements about your post, we obviously agree in certain aspects, but I still don't think we agree in the same way, not that we ever could.

 

1) I don't look at an Atari or early arcade game and see realistic images. To me, the images in the arcade were all cartoon-ish. They're basically drawn with pixels, I don't know how they couldn't be. The most upsetting thing, is the shit brown with black dots or brown caves we often got in the NES era that was meant to emulate a realistic view looked boring. Trying to make a city look as realistic as possible showed limitations to me, designing a game from imagination makes all the sense in the world. Even to use Contra on NES as an example, not that it looks bad, but the style doesn't exactly pop because it's not being colorful... "cute" maybe. Making something look boring instead of exciting isn't a bad thing. Put it this way, when these games came out, men wearing neon was in. I rest my case.

I don't look an Atari or early arcade game and see realistic images, either. I don't know where you get that I ever said that. I said they're not cute. I said they look like some kind of radar representation of what is "really" going on for most of those games (Galaga, Sinistar, Joust, side or top views of something that would look far more detailed if they were real). There are more choices than simply cute and realistic. There's also basic and simplistic and many other versions of too primitive to look real.

 

You're right, when the consoles immediately after the old Atari consoles showed up, some with 16-bit graphics (and arcade games that progressed that far), they had much more graphics horsepower to try for more realistic representations of objects and people. But they were still far away from current games like Assassin's Creed and Call Of Duty. The issue is the Uncanny Valley you hear about with animation of humans. The closer you get to realistic imagery but fall short, the more obvious it becomes. When you're dealing with crude 8-bit games, nothing looks anywhere near real except for actual numbers and straight lines. Everything else is pathetically basic and representative. But the best 8-bit consoles and then the 16 and 32-bit consoles, they had texture maps and complex sprites and way more colors and resolution. You could have a Mortal Combat with shapes that were easily recognizable as supposing to be people. But they weren't realistic and their movements didn't look natural. Way more natural than Pitfall, of course, but not like current games.

 

I prefer the "imagination" games (you're a square pixel in Adventure) over trying and really failing at "realistic" with something like even Karate Champ.

 

2) Yes, I'm talking about the old arcade games being kiddy by today's standards. Why wouldn't I? I live in the now, man! I'm not stuck in 1982. In 2015, I feel a bit weird playing, say, Mario in front of someone. It's a simpler game I enjoy more. I also like modern FPS games. But those FPS games look like movies, Mario looks like a cartoon.

You said

 

"Um, just about every retro title is considered kiddy in some way,"

 

and that's to you and many people, sure. But I disagree that it's universal, that everyone sees things the same way simply because you live in the now, man. Good for you. I don't see things that way. Wasn't "kiddy" then, isn't now. I'm not stuck in 1982, either, I just still appreciate those games. I am really impressed with modern PC and XBox games, to be sure, it won't be long before those games actually look the same as reality. But I don't play those sorts of games. Not because they suck or they're beneath me, but because I prefer shooters, I prefer older arcade-style games. High scores, kill everything, don't care about exploring the universe the games are set in.

 

The arcade games of old are primitive, yes. Embarrassingly simplistic compared to modern games or even games from 20 years ago. So what. Too bad for you that you care what others think if they see you playing Mario Bros. or some other simple game you like. I don't let that bother me, I'll go to the Arcade Expo and play those games all day. I'm not playing them to make strangers like me, I'm playing them because they're my favorites.

 

3) Stop with the control schemes. You realize I've got ridiculous controllers all over the place, right? You're talking to the guy who plays NES Rad Racer with his Zoomer. I love all that shit you love, but it's just not feasible that every game ship with its own $100-$150 controller. You're being insane there, dude.

I'm talking to lots of people, many of whom have stated that they prefer a d-pad or joypad for all games they play. So, it doesn't matter what you prefer in that context, it's a comparison to people who are used to switching from joysticks to paddles to trak-balls to whatever, nothing more.

 

Where did you get the idea that I wanted or expected every game to ship with its own $100-$150 controller? I never suggested that outside of wanting to own Steel Battalion. What I was saying was that if a game was designed for a specific kind of controller (like Tempest or Arkanoid or Marble Madness or Tron or Tail Gunner) then I want to be able to play the home version with the exact same shit. Otherwise don't bother butchering it by porting to a system that is designed for d-pad control. Save it for a system that can do the game justice.

 

That you're fine with playing games with the wrong control schemes demonstrates that you have a fundamentally different viewpoint from those of us who would expect/insist on the right controller for the right game. Now, obviously that doesn't apply to brand new games designed specifically for a d-pad or joypad or some system that never heard of analog controls, those programmers would have the sense to make games that were appropriate to those control schemes. But for ports, they fucking matter and you're being insane there, dude, to assume it's not an issue.

 

Just as insane as your hatred for the d-pad. The average person will not ever, ever do that. I've been to the arcades, I play Lucky & Wild every time I go, we're talking steering wheel and light gun at the same time. But in my mind, I know... at home, I just can't do that. If you want to do that, you need to stay in the arcade and not worry about what everyone else plays at home. It's not economically feasible to do this for 99+% of games. Hence the D-pad or joystick. Don't like it? Well keep waiting for games to come out with their own elaborate control sets, I guess.

Well, there you go. I wouldn't expect that game to be available for my home system if it needed a steering wheel and a light gun (especially now with flatscreen TVs), if I was in the mood for that game I'd track it down at an arcade somewhere. But if Nintendo or Sega or Sony announced that they were porting that game to their home gaming console, I would 100% expect that elaborate controller set-up to come with it, or be an option to purchase. Otherwise I'd be as pissed off at them for lying about being able to play the game at home as I would be with Atari handing me trak-ball games on the 2600 but replacing that controller with a joystick. Where's your sense of pride? Do it right or don't do it at all.

 

4) We are talking about retro gaming as far as I know from the OP, not collecting, but even if you wanna bring collecting into it, sorry, but also, not necessarily should any interested party run out with $1000 to get an insane Atari collection. Am I interested in the Channel F, Intellivision, Colecovision? Yes, but I'm not interested in going through hell to find working systems and hard to find games. Just because I'm a collector doesn't mean I can collect everything. You have to draw a line somewhere. You seem to think people should just bow down before games made over a 5 year span. These collectors/gamers are likely into games made over a 40 year span. There is a need to prioritize. A lot. Unlike you who never moved forward, these people are devouring knowledge backwards. That costs a lot more money and span your interests over a wider range of topics. River Raid has to compete with Xevious, Raiden, Ikaruga, and lord, like, everything on the TG-16 and beyond to modern day Steam stuff. Being a vinyl fan is totally different. You buy a good record player, buy some good records. If you're into gaming history, you gotta buy like 40 systems at least. It'd be like saying you can only really experience a movie in the theatre.

(Off topic, but if you ever get into cinematography you will discover that, yes, you can only really experience a movie in whatever setting it was meant for and if that means a movie theater, then watch it in a movie theater first, or at least once. You want to watch it later on your smartphone or tablet or DVD player on the headrest of your SUV, fine. But to see it correctly? Where it was intended. Aww, doing it right sucks many times compared to half-assing everything.)

 

Yes, if the subject is not about physically collecting then much of the discussion goes out the window, emulators and anthologies are good enough. I'm not insisting that anyone has to spend any amount of money for an insane Atari collection. Or any specific console collection, for that matter. Again, you exaggerate. Many collectors are interested in going through the hell to find working systems and hard to find games. Have you not been paying attention to the many threads on AtariAge about finding rare games "in the wild" and having one of the only X number of carts of Random Rare Game known to exist? Or all-time wish lists of actual rare games that different people wish they could find or had the foresight to have bought years ago? The "thrill of the hunt" for many people is far more interesting and fun than playing the actual game once it's found. I'm surprised you're not aware of this phenomenon. I'm not one of those people, I want my favorites and some must-have cool games and the working console and controllers to go with it, some great homebrews, that's it.

 

I'm not expecting any collectors to track down and own all the systems between the '70s and today. That is, again, an exaggeration. But I do assume that collectors of certain systems will actually collect those systems, will get into whichever ones turn out to be their favorites. I read many times from people here asking about how they have stuff for 5 different systems, what should be the next one they collect, or people talking about how they've basically collected all they can for the 2600 or Colecovision or whatever, it's not fun anymore, so they're going to sell the collection and start cold with a new system they don't even own yet. It's not common but it is something that video game collectors do. I didn't really start collecting Vectrex stuff until after I was in college.

 

You misunderstood the vinyl collector comparison. You're right, a vinyl fan needs the good turntable and some good vinyl records. What is totally unacceptable is CD copies of those vinyl records, listening to them on a CD player. Actual "hardware" vs. emulation. Get it? For some people the close approximation will not do, even if you can successfully argue that the modern digital version is technically superior. They don't care. The real deal or nothing. Do it right or don't do it at all.

 

5) The night and day emulation not being able to perform against original hardware is obsolete and irrelevant. Sure, special snowflakes want us all to believe it, but face it, digital is here and emulation is now. At best, the 2600's most famous titles were ported down to it. So it's not even the original game, it's the Atari version of said game. This is why I mentioned the collections. Sometimes those collections make the most sense when playing old ass games. If emulation is so bad, why does everyone do it? If MP3s are so bad, why does everyone listen to them? In these situations, it's not because the people are dumb, it's because the upside outweighs the downside. Everything is give and take. And if I already have the Space Invaders, Centipedes, Millipedes, Donkey Kongs and Qberts of the world in a compilation or on the ever popular NES, who in God's name is gonna rush out to buy these games they already have again with lesser quality?! Atari fans only, I guess, since they just regurgitated this stuff onto the 5200 and 7800 and people didn't want it in 1987, either.

You know what is also "here and now"? The actual consoles and accessories and games. They're available and attainable... unless you're really lazy. Emulation isn't the same as the actual thing. Never is. That's not a knock, merely a truth. If emulation is fine for you, so be it. Enjoy that and smile at the saved thousands of dollars and saved time and energy from not scouring the Earth for rare, brittle shit.

 

Why does everybody do emulation? You can't be that stupid, right? Because it's less hassle. It's more convenient. One device (computer) running dozens of systems. One set of controllers (keyboard/mouse, USB joysticks or gamepads) for all of them. One place (disk drive, SD card) to store all the games for all the systems. There's no beating that ease of access. There's also no need to devote a whole bookshelf or closet or room to stacks of boxes and consoles and games. No argument there. And then knowing how to repair them! But collecting includes having one of the rare originals. That's just how it is. And for some of those, emulation will not do. A Vextrex must have a vector display and an analog stick. You don't agree, so what, nobody cares about your viewpoint. Emulation is much much better than nothing, many people don't have the room or money to get the actual games. Emulation is not as good as the original versions. It's a place-holder, not a replacement.

 

People listen to MP3s because they're convenient, store them all on one device, scroll through playlists. People pay for MP3s because they're stupid, they should buy the CDs or the lossless digital versions and then convert them to MP3 and then store them on their iPods or whatever. But only pay for lossless versions of music. Paying for compressed stepped-on music is retarded.

 

6) How Satan's Hollow (or any arcade game, really) has qualities more in common with real life than a cartoon to you, I have no idea, I can't fathom it, nor will I ever understand it. It looks like rudimentary animation. Oh, wait, it is!

If you refuse to understand basic English, I can't help you. I didn't say that Satan's Hollow or other arcade games I like have qualities more in common with real life than a cartoon, that's your misunderstanding. I said they weren't kiddy or cartoony, merely simplistic. Worthy of ridicule, probably, compared to current games. But they aren't cute like Pac-Man and Q-Bert and other games of that era with characters you can sell plushies of. It's becoming clear that there is a great deal you cannot understand or fathom and that makes this much harder.

 

You're basically saying to me every flight simulator needs a true, real to life cockpit to enjoy with old ass, out of date, non-realistic pixelated animation only.

 

No, I'm not. What I'm saying is that for me to care enough to want to play a first-person flight simulator, I'm going to want and expect actual flight controls (at least stick/throttle/pedals), I'm not going to want to play that with a joystick and fire button or a d-pad. In comparison, Red Baron, one of my favorite vector games, isn't a flight simulator (no take-off/landing, no attempt at realistic terrain or flight physics) but even that has an analog stick to fly with.

 

If other people are fine with playing flight sims with just joysticks and maybe a keyboard or whatever, great. That's not for me, though. No judgement there, merely a preference.

 

How are the little dragons in Satan's Hollow breathing fire not cute?

Because it's not? I'm not sure what you define "cute" to be but to me it's something that will make people go "aawww!" or it's something that can easily be turned into stuffed animals for children. The little dragons breathing fire in Satan's Hollow certainly aren't menacing or scary, but they're not cute. If they had big eyes and smiles and wagged their tails, ok, they're cute. What they were, to me, was crude representations of dragons breathing fire, nothing more.

 

People regard animation as cute and stylistic more so than realistic, at least from my limited knowledge, because I don't watch cartoons or read comics or anything.

Obviously you have limited knowledge. Try this to test your "people regard animation as cute and stylistic more so than realistic" hypothesis. If you have a niece or nephew, or you have a friend with a young kid who watches cartoons, have them watch "Heavy Metal", "Taboo Charming Mother", "Akira", "La Blue Girl", "Coonskin" with you, see if you're ever allowed near those kids again, haahaha. But but but, it's animation! Therefore it's cute!! Come on, that tentacle rape doesn't look realistic! Don't get mad at me, I have limited knowledge!

 

It's like you're saying "Yeah, Atari had weak tech, so no no one else should have colors and cool shit and ideas in there games because like, I like Atari more". You're actually knocking creative and stimulating imagery... in a video game. That is insanity.

Dude, what in thee fuck are you talking about. Nowhere have I implied or stated that no one else should have colors and cool shit and ideas in their games because like, I like Atari more. Everyone is free to enjoy whatever video game systems they like. The more the better. What I've been saying, and what you forcefully refuse to understand, is that Atari games were too primitive to pull off games with more detail and space, therefore they were almost all either simple puzzle games or space shooters with simple graphics. They didn't have the resolution for games with cute characters like Mario Bros. or Sonic, any attempts at those would be blocky failures. High scores, shooters, puzzles. That's all the 2600 could manage. That doesn't mean that that's all I want or want others to play. Only that if you're used to that, if that's your "normal" then side-scrollers and games with big wide-open spaces and cutesy characters won't really be your cup of tea. Most people who played Atari transitioned to the newer consoles, I'm not claiming they didn't. More games, more games. Games that actually almost looked like what the titles said they were. What I'm trying to explain is those people who grew up after primitive Atari-type games not being attracted to those really simple looking games once they backtrack down Retro Lane. I understand that, why don't you?

 

Your opinions seem to imply that anything that doesn't look like a block is cute just for cuteness sake, so you also had to be the first person to say something negative about the word cute, but Satan's Hollow is somehow... realistic? But Satan's Hollow looks better than NES games... so, in certain situations where you say so, it's ok to have great art design and not be a block? Or just on the home side of things, where NES happened to kick Atari's ass, then and only then must everything look like a block?

You seem to be confusing "imply" with "infer". Please look up both of those, see where you're making the mistake. Whatever you infer from what I write has got dick to do with what I'm actually writing.

 

No, anything that doesn't look like a block isn't therefore cute for cuteness sake, I never said that. You inferred that. Satan's Hollow isn't great art design. It's not bad, either. It's certainly not realistic. All it is is not cute. Live with it. Cute games, at least in that era of arcade games, were games that weren't kill everything, that hopefully would attract more girls to play (a known untapped market). Centipede was a hit with girls, so I've read, partly because of the bright colors. But in terms of games that girls played, those were games like Pac-Man, Q-bert, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Pengo, some others. Notice anything in common with those? They weren't about wiping out hordes of enemies. You could still win, get a high score, but it wasn't guns and explosions and fire. It wasn't Robotron or Tempest or Star Castle or Defender or most arcade games that I never saw girls playing. Cute is looks but it's also gameplay.

 

And then you're likely to reply and say that "to experience the 2600, you have to play arcade ports with poorer graphics", well no, there has to be a reasonable reason for these gamers to turn back the clock. If they have Centipede on PS2 in the Atari Collection, they don't have any real reason to turn back the clock. People are interested in games, not hardware, and they don't need to buy Centipede on 2600, 5200, 7800, an arcade port and whatever else it was released on to do it. There's just not enough time.

You don't have to play arcade ports with poor graphics, but if you get into the Atari 2600 that's the bulk of the game type that you will encounter. And if you're not in the mood for that then the Atari holds no appeal to you, you will stop short of Atari, the NES/SNES/Saturn/Genesis will be as far back as you dare go.

 

There's only one way to play Centipede, and that's with a trak-ball. And that means the arcade, MAME or the Atari 5200. And any other newer console with that port that has a trak-ball option. Otherwise it isn't Centipede, it's a game with centipedes and fleas and spiders that looks and sounds like Centipede but doesn't play like it. There's not enough time to waste it doing shit wrong.

 

7) Nobody cares about collections.

The very existence of this forum and others like it make that statement insane. Many people care about collections. Not just their own (if they have any), but those of others. Not just video game collections, but collections of Star Wars figures, Disneyland memorabilia, Hot Wheels, LEGO sets, G.I. Joes, vinyl records, classic cars, 1st edition books, etc., etc. Have you heard about the Internet? Have you actually visited it? You should search for collecting and collections, see what you run across.

 

No one cares about mine, no one cares about yours, no one gives a fuck. We can all sit and fiddle with this shit until the cows come home, it doesn't make any difference. "I'm a vinyl collector" "I am a game collector". How about people stop collecting and stop attributing ridiculous superficial items to be their personalities and go out there and just be awesome. Nothing is more annoying than when people label themselves as a true collector, because nobody cares. And even if they did, we would never come to agreements on what Atari is to you, what Atari is to me, where retro gaming ends, whether boxes and carts and all this shit really matter or not. On the most rudimentary of levels, we could all either emulate or play the games on real hardware, enjoy the games and talk about the games. But we can't even do that together as a whole. Because everything needs to have some sort of ridiculous label. Bill can't play River Raid on the 2600 and Bob can't play River Raid on the PS2 without Ron saying neither of them have played the game because neither used a CRT. This shit is so superfluous, it needs to end.

Huh, so you think you're in charge. How cute.

 

Yes, it can reach ridiculous levels. Marriages and friendships end over arguments about such shit. Nothing is more annoying than someone telling others how to act because he can't wrap his mind around what they're doing.

 

The only time people really get into arguments is when someone makes a claim about achieving some sort of level of authenticity or perfection and then it turns out that that person is wrong but won't admit it. Your CRT example. Ya, the true right way to play those old Atari games is on a CRT. It's not required, not at all. But it is required if someone is claiming to be playing his Atari 2600 in the purest, most authentic way possible, like when the Atari was new. Ok, that's something that can be established and confirmed. All original hardware? Yes. That stupid switchbox connection to the TV? Yes. 4:3 CRT? No. What the fuck.

[Schizophretard]

I'm 25 so obviously I didn't grow up with Atari. I remember I was 12 when I started researching old Atari games, old NES games etc. I got my hands on a 2600 when I was 20 and I love it. I can play Atari for hours. However, I've only met one retro gamer my age who likes Atari. For most, they stop at NES. A lot dismiss what came before it.

 

I've heard from other retro gamers

"Atari is bad"

"Atari is boring"

"Gaming didn't get good until Nintendo"

"Only hipsters like Atari"

 

Most retro gamers I know also dismiss Sega and love anything Nintendo released in the past. Why is this? I would say personal preference but I'd say a good 85% of retro gamers my age adore Nintendo and dismiss Sega and especially dismiss Atari.

What you are describing about you 90's kids held true even for us 80's kids. After the shift went from Atari, Mattel, and Coleco being the Big 3 the new Big 3 became Nintendo, SEGA, and Atari. Their popularity was in that order. It was Nintendo is greater than SEGA and SEGA is greater than Atari. So, my theory is that you 90's kids just inherited the same results of the popularity contest from us. We as a collective whole said to our younger 90's brothers and sisters what we said to each other,"Nintendo is greater than SEGA and SEGA is greater than Atari." In other words, the results of the 80's console wars stuck and were passed down. To show what I mean lets shift the same thing back another decade by instead of 90's kids going back to 80's consoles, 80's kids going back to 70's consoles. That is going into the uncountable dedicated Pong consoles. Which would other 80's kids and I choose first? We would start with the ones we perceive to be the most popular. We would likely go for the ones made by Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, etc. name brand models more than we would go after the ones we would perceive as the "generic me too" models. To use other categories as an example, I bet 90's kids into 80's movies and music would be into movies and songs that were also popular to us. Going the other direction, I bet 00's kids(or whatever they are called) would think,"Sony is greater than Nintendo and Nintendo is greater than SEGA." because that was the perception of the 90's Big 3. In other words, the kids of each decade aren't starting with blank slates but are looking back into the past the same way we brought the past to them.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

4:3 CRT? No. What the fuck.

I don't care for 4:3 (as long as the aspect ratio is displayed correctly), but a CRT looks WAY different than any LCD I have seen so far.

[ledzep]

No.

 

That sounds very, what's the word, childish? Your borrowed quote mentioned putting away childish things, I assumed you meant to associate that with yourself. Evidently not.

 

I read exactly what you wrote.

 

And you infer much that I didn't write or mean. Which is the root of your problem in this discussion. Some of us are pointing out facts or differences (between early Atari and later consoles), others are taking those observations personally and attaching motivations or thinking behind them that aren't in evidence and that we aren't even suggesting.

 

Considering that colorful and visually stunning games generally merit all sorts of praise within the gaming community, I would argue it's damn near universal.

Considering that colorful and visually stunning games does not equal cute side-scrollers, and your version of "looks nice to play" covers games that aren't actually visually stunning, merely better than whatever something like the 2600 could hope to achieve, I would argue is missing the point of your flailing argument. Further, nobody who is in the mood to play typical 2600 video games is going to care about whether the game "looks nice to play" or merits any sort of praise within the gaming community because it's a given that the game's appeal is centered around how it plays, not what it looks like. Which, again, is the root of probable reason why newer people into retro games would stop short of the Atari (the other would be the differences in controllers). Finally, whatever the "gaming community" has to say about colorful and visually stunning games, that has nothing to do with what you personally consider games that "look nice to play" and is in no way a definition that can be evaluated in terms of its universality.

 

I'm not saying they aren't fun. What I am saying is that you should take a step back and think before you spout BS like that.

 

You're not saying anything coherent, you're finding ways to take offense at every comment that doesn't agree with your point of view. I was trying to respond to your contradictory defensive statement -

 

Because god forbid that some games actually look nice to play and dont take themselves super seriously. But then having fun and having fun looking games are obviously "kiddy."

 

I said that the arcade shooter games I'm used to and prefer (and are typical of the ports that ended up on the 2600) looked nice to play and were fun, negating your accusation about what types of games I (and others like me) prefer. No BS there.

 

Even though they are nothing more than put downs aimed at deriding fans of consoles that were universally adored back in the late 1980's. Both here and in Japan. Especially since they introduced newer genres of games that you don't like.

They are not put downs, they are comparisons of different game types along with comparisons of what the different gaming consoles were better/best at. And a comparison of what was considered normal and typical with newer generations of games and those who played them. They were, by way of better graphics and sound, many times cuter and more of a side-scrolling style or an exploratory style. Which were very popular, yes. And because that was what was 'in' for those later gaming consoles and the people who played them, they would be missed when looking at possibly collecting older Atari games that did not fit that same mold and couldn't possibly pull off the same look and play of those expected games. Get it?

 

And get off your easily-offended soapbox. Those consoles were very popular but that doesn't mean they were "universally adored". Many people I knew didn't care for those gaming experiences. A lot of them stuck with their older consoles or switched to PC games or collected arcade games or in other ways avoided dealing with the rise of the cuter games. They would veer towards the NES/SNES games that were more typically violent, like you mentioned. But they weren't fans of the d-pad, either. No such thing as "universally adored" in gaming.

 

I don't see any deciphering. What I do see on the otherhand is a circle jerk where some of the actors here are still salty that their company couldn't get out of the 8-bit era and was forever playing catch up after that. So instead of actually discussing why retro gamers give the the old Atari consoles a pass, which by the way I haven't seen any sort of evidence to back up this assertion, instead you just mock and ridicule and justify that behavior through the thin veneer of "discussion."

 

What you "don't see" in this discussion would fill volumes. No one is "salty" that their company (where do you get the idea that any of us mentally take possession of video game companies?) couldn't get out of the 8-bit era. I'm fine with the Atari style of games (though I'm no real fan of the 2600 graphics, much prefer the 5200), I love the Vectrex and its 8-bit era games, too. I wasn't interested in Atari adapting to cute games or games that took days to explore, either. Not my thing. For those who love those things, good for you, knock yourselves out playing those game styles.

 

Of course you haven't seen any sort of evidence to back up any assertion about why the retro gamers give the old Atari consoles a pass because there is no evidence. It's all guesswork and supposition, "could be" this, "might be" that. It's a discussion, not a proof. You continue with the childish demand for absolute or definitive answers. Boo hoo if I mock and ridicule people who think like that.

 

Or better you yet, you could not act like a dick. You don't see me retorting that the reason why the nobody cares about the VCS is because the VCS claimed it could do 200+ screen colors but all you got were a few hundred games that had varying shades for the color of shit. But I have the sense to respect what came before the NES and what came after. Instead, all you do is dismiss the opinions of those that came after Atari instead of you know, asking.

I don't see you doing much beyond being defensive about observations of different eras of video game players. But you're right (at least I think it's a reasonable guess) that the VCS couldn't do lots of screen colors. Or pixels, for that matter. Blocks firing blocks at other blocks, blocks moving around blocks avoiding blocks. You respect what came before the NES, others don't, right? And therefore those others aren't interested in collecting what came before the NES. Which is the point I and some others have been making.

 

I'm not dismissing the opinions of those that came after Atari. I'm saying that I think those who came after that system aren't into that type of arcade shooter/puzzle game/high score mindset that was the norm for Atari games. And therefore would probably not be interested in collecting those games. Some are into the older Atari/arcade gameplay style and they're the ones who end up collecting 2600 games, even coding homebrews for it.

 

[snark] I don't think you can call 4 bit pixels cute. [/snark]

 

There you go, that's what I've been saying. The old Atari was graphically incapable of pulling off the type of game that found an audience with NES/SNES/Saturn/Genesis players. Now, I'm not saying that's all they had to play, I'm saying that type of cuter game was more common and more achievable and therefore more accepted. And if it's desired then the Atari is going to be a big disappointment.

 

Yet the popular games of the early 1980's were Pac-man, Ms-Pacman, and Donkey Kong. Games that pretty much were beginnings of cartoon styled video games and influenced an entire generation of video game designers going forward.

No, some of the popular games of the early 1980s were Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. When I'd go to arcades the big draws were Defender, Robotron: 2084, Tempest, Tron, Star Wars, Centipede, lots of games. Some cute, most not. Paperboy and Food Fight were on the cuter end, just remembered those two.

 

Not all were kill everything. And while they look primitive, you can see how these game designers were looking to bring something new to the plate that wasn't Atari space-doom game #400.

Very true. And no amount of advancement in arcade games was going to get the 2600 to retroactively be capable of playing those games. Reality was moving on, the Atari could not follow. And for those people who welcomed the new, non-"space doom" games, there were newer game consoles like the NES/SNES/Sega/Genesis that could pull off those newer ideas.

 

Not every game was Super Mario Bros. You had games like Splatterhouse, Castlevania, Metroid, Ninja gaiden, Double Dragon, etc. There were side scrollers that appealed to all sorts of demographics.

 

They were also side-scrollers that could possibly be ported to the NES/SNES but no way for the Atari 2600. Exploration games unsuited for a system that could barely handle arcade shooters.

 

Exploring the world, seeing new sites and sounds, going on adventures out of your wildest imaginations. I don't see anything that is inherently cute or kiddy as Dr. Lewis pointed out in his "On Children's Stories."

 

What you describe has got dick to do with NES/SNES side-scrolling games. Exploring the world, seeing new sites and sounds, going on adventures out of your wildest imaginations is a great way to live and something more people should do. No one was equating that with cute or kiddy, you were inferring that for who knows what reason so you can stop moving the goalposts. My wildest imagination can far outstrip whatever a cute side-scroller game can dish out. If your imagination can't outdo that, too bad.

 

Haha...no.

Haha...yes. A d-pad is 4/8 direction digital movement and a few buttons. That's is woefully inadequate for most games. Even most joypads include an analog thumbstick because speed of movement is as important as direction. To be fair, the old Atari one-button joystick is even more inadequate for most potential games. The only advantage is being able to grip the stick vs. push down on directional buttons but that's probably more preference than need.

 

Which goes to show that Atari didn't start branching out and really trying new things until the very end. You can only go so far with the arcade style format of games. You need new ideas and IPs that can bring diversity to your library. Otherwise, your library is going to get stale.

 

Ya, I know. That's what I (and others) have been saying about Atari's glut of arcade shooter/high score/puzzle games (in addressing the original subject which you seem to have veered away from in order to defend side-scrollers and cutetivity). That's all it was good at. And why I'm proposing that someone who is used to the diversity of a game library from newer consoles might not be open to old Atari games that were more often than not one screen and just shooting things that looked like a collection of blocks and going for the high score vs. being able to explore. Thanks for agreeing with my opinion.

 

Mostly because late Atari was pretty stingy on how much memory could be used in a game. So it really stifled the ability of 2600 programmers who wanted to do something different.

 

Certainly. I think when Atari first saw what Activision was accomplishing with its 3rd party games they must have been dumbfounded. And probably felt threatened. It was also probably the best thing that could have happened, forced Atari to try more new things, push the 2600 harder and further. But, ya, profits meant not splurging on more memory and other fixes. What for? Atari rules the Universe! Sure, for now, but watch out for those new consoles coming soon.

 

They are different no doubt about. That isn't to say that VCS couldn't do something more, albeit primitively. It's just the VCS is just the embodiment of the old mentality, the stubborn refusal to try newer things.

 

More like it was simple, inescapable inability to pull off newer things. You may love jet planes and speed but no amount of money is going to get a biplane to break the sound barrier like a jet fighter can.

 

What the VCS could do, even primitively, is unfortunately too inadequate. Even today, with all we've learned, modern homebrew programmers with better cart boards and more memory can't get the VCS to do things that are no big deal on newer consoles. Most retro gamers will accept some simplicity and crudeness with older, weaker gaming consoles but most will have their limits of what they're willing to play and collect. I don't blame them. You have to want to play that style of 2600 game to bother collecting it.

 

Except cute is inherently neither adult or childish.

When did I say it was either? I think I said I preferred games that were less cute, more serious or "realistic" (certainly that is taken with a grain of salt when involving 2600 graphics). That's all. Not a fan of side-scroller games, especially the cute ones. I prefer the arcade shooters. It's just what I'm used to. And practically all of those are non-cute.

 

If you read "On Children's stories," you would know this. CS Lewis wrote his essay attacking the idea that so called adult- fantasy needed more so-called "adult things" like more emphasis on violence, vulgarity, and sexual innuendo. Lewis argued that none of of these things are the hall mark of maturity because they

miss the overall point of fairy tales. That fairy tales are stories that capture that sense of wonder, that yearning for a world that is different from the drudgery of this one, of lessons in ethics and morality, and that spark of human imagination found in all people across all ages.

 

I couldn't give less of a shit about what Lewis thinks about anything, his Chronicles of Narnia were a bit too Christian-centered and young reader oriented for my liking but from what I can tell he's a great writer. If I'd read them when I was a kid that would be one thing but I don't think I could deal with them now. Except for Tolkien I don't really read fantasy, I'm much more a hard sci-fi fan. Those sci-fi stories still capture that sense of wonder but with a more realistic bent. And I don't consider this world to be one of drudgery. What kind of defeatist bullshit is that?

 

Riiiight.

Glad you agree.

[high voltage]

Judging by this topic, they don't skip Atari whatsoever, otherwise they wouldn't be talking about it. Another compliment for the 2600.

[The Usotsuki]

The "putting away childish things" was already a borrowed quote in CS Lewis' use of it (it's from 1 Corinthians 13.11).

[Jinks]

Emulation is just a different method of playing the games. I still catch flak for it.

Ya know you can go blind doing that!

[Andromeda Stardust]

Not all controllers are well made. Looking at this 3-button Genesis tear down image, it is clear they use the conductive glue. Over an extended time, it will wear away.

https://electrothoughts.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/sega-genesis-controller-pcb.jpg

Fun fact: the expansion port on the Genesis is coated with the same black carbon stuff.

 

Um he said moon patrol.

Kinda controls like Master Blaster, don't it? Say that 5 times fast! Don't you feel dirrty now...

 

I think that's the key. Surely nobody would care or even notice if space-themed games were scrolling around. It was the change to being "on the ground" and scrolling side-to-side with a side view that mattered. And only because those games also added the character element. That made the game cute. Defender isn't cute, it scrolls side-to-side. Neither is Scramble. But the Mario Brothers games scroll and are cute, same goes for Sonic and others like them. It's the cute aspect that drove me away from that console and its descendants.

And maybe the "uncuteness" of Atari graphics drove more people away? Every coin has two sides.

 

And the reason cute worked was the better graphics. A few people here have mentioned the Zippy homebrew. I commend the programmer who made that and managed to get Zippy to look like more than just a stack of colored LEGOs, but the 2600 has such poor graphics that Zippy looks stunned or drugged and the playing area is boring looking. Not the programmer's fault, it's better looking than most 2600 scrolling games. But how much easier/better would it have been to make Zippy on one of the newer consoles with more graphics punch? The music doesn't compare, either. The 2600 simply wasn't ready for that sort of game, it was made more for space shooters. I love it for that but people like me who were with the 2600 at the beginning were used to those games, not cute side-scrollers or games that were more about characters than about killing everything that moved (most arcade games).

Thou shalt not diss Zippy. Ever.

 

I mean, look at gaming now. Specifically those mindless, irritating smartphone app games like Candy Crush and all the derivatives. They're puzzle games yet somehow people want to play them. I suppose because a touch screen isn't a joystick or a paddle so the games have to adapt to the available control scheme. But, just like old 2600 game box art, the commercials for these miserable games are far far far more imaginative and fleshed out than the actual stupid puzzle games. Yet they seem to be popular, probably much moreso than playing Atari's Greatest Hits on the same smartphones. Not for me, of course, I paid $10 to get all those Atari games. Screw those cute puzzle games,

Screw smartphone games, yes. Screw all puzzle games, hell no. Big boys play real puzzle games like Tetris.

 

I am not six years old.

Speak for yourself. I like "cutsey" games (among others) and I'm in my 30s. See also the "arrested development" bit about denying you enjoy youthful things.

 

Um, just about every retro title is considered kiddy in some way, I don't understand what you're saying. Call of Duty is what you should be playing for your realistic graphics, killing everything and military manly type themes, but it doesn't appear you do. You still play the same arcade titles, all of which looked cartoony in that era. No one plays cute games anymore, that's why you have to buy a Wii U if you don't want to exclusively play FPS games. and obviously retro gamers don't want to just play FPS or the scene would be as big as it is. That's why games like Hotline Miami and Retro City Rampage were popular; retro style graphics and violent. It just didn't exist back then. So you have to make due with what you got. And I certainly don't consider 2600 games to have edgy design... half the things you can barely make out to begin with.

Well said. The same argument, why LedZep won't touch later systems because they're "too cute" is exactly why modern gamers won't touch Nintendo anything, including Wii-U. I love my Wii-U, Nintendo, and anything "cute" or "colorful", while generally loathing hyper violent FPS and their drab gray and brown color pallets. Why do they limit themselves when they've got 32 million colors to chose from? On the indie side there's also tones of retro inspired games including platformers, SHMUPs, and giant HD pixel games in vibrant, exiting colors and shapes, ranging the gamut from lucidly easy to ludicrously hard, If anything, the indie scene is celebrating it's roots in a very big way and it shows...

[Andromeda Stardust]

I don't see any deciphering. What I do see on the otherhand is a circle jerk where some of the actors here are still salty that their company couldn't get out of the 8-bit era and was forever playing catch up after that. So instead of actually discussing why retro gamers give the the old Atari consoles a pass, which by the way I haven't seen any sort of evidence to back up this assertion, instead you just mock and ridicule and justify that behavior through the thin veneer of "discussion."

Technically every tightly knit group of irrational fanboys could be considered a "circle jerk". Atari fanboys can be a circle jerk because they can't accept their company failed. Ditto for Sega. Nintendo Fanboys can be "circle jerks" by refusing to accept that other systems exist. Neogeo fanboys can be a "circle jerk" by hoarding their high priced games and not allowing outsiders to get in. Sony/MS fanboys circle jerk each other by dissing Nintendo and anything that's not an FPS. How do you break the "circle jerk" cycle? Join other groups. Experience systems and games of varying time periods or genres. I was a Nintendo Loyalist for ten years. I broke free of the NES "circle jerk" by getting into Genesis, and Atari, and Turbografx. Sooner you admit that every console you don't game on doesn't have to "suck" and accept that other gamers have diffeing viewpoints, you break away from the groupthink of like-minded collectors stoking each others egos, and become part of a larger ecosystem.

 

Ok mommy's tits are getting full kids. Time for another suck.

[high voltage]

2600 can do 'cute':

Frogger, Strawberry Shortcake, Ms Pac-Man, Pigs in Space, Oscars Trash Race, Snoopy and the Red Baron, Smurf, Jr Pac-Man, X-Man (cute blonde)

[Thomas Jentzsch]

2600 can do 'cute':

Frogger, Strawberry Shortcake, Ms Pac-Man, Pigs in Space, Oscars Trash Race, Snoopy and the Red Baron, Smurf, Jr Pac-Man, X-Man (cute blonde)

...Big Bird's Egg Catch, Alice Return, Bobby Is Going Home, Bugs Bunny, Peek-A-Boo...

[high voltage]

....Oink, Cosmic Creeps, Q Bert, Mr Do, Eggomania, Popeye, Mario Bros, Peter Penguin, Halloween....

[Lynxpro]

Um he said moon patrol.

 

And so he did! Oops.

[Lynxpro]

There's also no real difference between the glory of High Scores from the truly classic gaming era and today's Trophy mania, except trophies are earned for all sorts of things as opposed to raw skills. Arguably, there were various tricks and glitches that could be used in some games of the classic era… Either way, both are about bragging rights.

 

The classic games weren't easier. If they were easier, modern gamers who do exceptionally well with modern games would also be masters of the classic games if they chose to pursue them.

[Cynicaster]

There's also no real difference between the glory of High Scores from the truly classic gaming era and today's Trophy mania, except trophies are earned for all sorts of things as opposed to raw skills. Arguably, there were various tricks and glitches that could be used in some games of the classic era… Either way, both are about bragging rights.

 

The classic games weren't easier. If they were easier, modern gamers who do exceptionally well with modern games would also be masters of the classic games if they chose to pursue them.

 

The death (or, at least, marginalization) of the high score is a big part of the reason why I don't like modern gaming. The trophy nonsense is no substitute--that always struck me as more of a "participation ribbon" system than a system that objectively measures ability at a video game.

 

Another thing with modern games is that a lot of them have absolutely nothing to do with skill--just invest the 100+ hours and you'll "finish" the game just like everybody else. That same 100 hours will give the higher Missile Command score to the better player.

[maiki]

I can honestly say modern games do not bother me at all. I stopped buying new games in 2006 after discovering that Xcrap 360 was nothing but a hidden online pseudo PC with RRoD flavour. These games won't work in 5 to 10 years because they require online service. No sence to invest in PS4 or Xbox One either. The last video games generation was PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube. Better spend my money on gold plated Atari controllers or new Cartridge from Atari Age for sure.

[+save2600]

On the subject of Zippy not being cute or detailed enough, lets not forget the game is written in Batari BASIC. Blocky by default and a limitation of the language, not so much the hardware. Besides, plenty of cute games exist on the 2600, some already mentioned above, but others include the bear graphic denoting children's levels, to all the Disney and Sesame Street characters, Kangaroo, Coconuts, Smurf, Dig Dug, E.T., Popeye, Road Runner and Strawberry Shortcake.

[ledzep]

And maybe the "uncuteness" of Atari graphics drove more people away? Every coin has two sides.

Probably. But to say that old Atari graphics are "uncute" is to agree that Atari couldn't pull off what later, more powerful consoles could (cute games, cute characters in those games). Which is my point about newer retro gamers stopping at NES/SNES game styles.

 

Thou shalt not diss Zippy. Ever.

Oh no, I wasn't dissing Zippy, I'm impressed he got as much out of the Atari to fake a Sonic game as he did. But the result is barely recognizable as a Sonic clone because the Atari is too crude to render the imagery effectively.

 

Screw smartphone games, yes. Screw all puzzle games, hell no. Big boys play real puzzle games like Tetris.

Sure, and how cute is Tetris? It's a bunch of rotating blocks. I only brought up smartphone games to explain an attraction to cute games vs. playing Atari Greatest Hits using the same miserable control scheme (touch). Smartphone games like Candy Crush are designed for that crappy control scheme, the old Atari arcade games are not. So, too, are most NES/SNES games designed for the d-pad. Whatever ports came across to the NES/SNES that weren't originally button or digital joystick games suffered as much as trying to play Tempest on a smartphone.

 

Speak for yourself. I like "cutsey" games (among others) and I'm in my 30s. See also the "arrested development" bit about denying you enjoy youthful things.

I am speaking for myself and others like me who saw no reason to get into cute side-scroller games once they started taking over. Liking/not liking cutesy video games is no litmus test for determining your ability to enjoy youthful things. I enjoy many youthful things, cute side-scroller video games is not one of them.