Pre-crash systems are slowly being forgotten.

[Keatah]

When I was a youth of 10 or 11 or so, I had a friend whose dad was a ham radio guy. He would have these meets over at his house, where a bunch of ancient guys would come over and talk for hours about crystal radios and ham operations and like how cool Morse code was and tap things out to each other. I remember thinking, 'My GOD these guys are lame. That stuff is sooooo boring, why are they into it? I'm glad I live in the modern age with cool stuff like atari's and sinclairs!". Inside I swore that I'd never wind up all old and obsessed with ancient tech like these guys were.

 

So. Here I am, all old and obsessed with ancient tech

 

I had the same experience. I had this fat ass girlfriend in high-school who had an even fatter-assed father that would sit around in front of an amber screen on a PC-XT and run PKZIP for what seemed like hours on end. Watching files compress and decompress all damned day long.

 

And here I am! fretting over archive accuracy on FTP asimov and different versions of Apple II DOS and ProTerm. It's that day in 1985 all over again. Except the fat girlfriend got replaced.

[+save2600]

Dont'cha wish they could PKZIP fat asses today? Oh wait, they seem to be all the rage now.

[Keatah]

..and heaven help us if we even went near that mini-Jabba while a packing operation was going on. We'd get yelled at and disciplined and couldn't hang out there, not that we'd want to too much for the place was a pig-sty.

[Keatah]

Simpler times. Not a bad thing.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

I know all of this now but back then I didn't think in terms of publishers. It was a foreign concept. To me a game made for the NES was a Nintendo game, a game made for the Atari 2600 was an Atari game, etc. If you asked me back then,"But who made these games?" I probably would have answered,"Santa's elves because I asked him for them at the mall and then they were under the Christmas tree."

 

That was only you though and obviously that younger you was wrong, period. I think you can admit to that now all grown up and such

 

I remember owning an MSX and be well aware of Konami games, they were the bomb. Never thought of them as "MSX games" per se.

Same applies to the rest. Never thought that the C64 games were Commodore games, I actually cared of who made them and sometimes actually who ported them (some ports were atrocious to no faults of the originals)

Later on, when owning and Amiga it was fun to see what utter junk would come out from the likes of U.S.Gold and other "labels", never really blamed Commodore for that. But I was longing for Psygnosis and Cinemaware releases knowing that something good was cooking all the time (well most of the time anyway).

I can still see the brick wall at the beginning of "Defender of the Crown" with the changing color letters of the title .... amazing

Well developers live and die by the quality of their games. Back when we were kids, Nintendo and Konami were the shizzle. If the boxart had Konami's logo on it, you could bet it would be good. Konami, Capcom, even Hudson to some extent were known throughout the 8- and 16-bit wars, and that is in addition to Nintendo / Sega. Some of the other 3rd party developers were known to release crap games.

 

Even today if I'm thumbing through a stack of NES carts at my local GameXChange, and I see some random licensed cash in that I have no reference for, the first thing I look for is who developed it. Capcom treated most IPs well for instance. Acclaim, Data East, EA, and numerous others were all over the place.

 

Pity Konami acquired all of Hudson's assets shortly before dropping out of the developer market. Now they seem more interested in creating Pachinko and Parlour games for the Japanese market. Castlevania branded Pachinko slots. What a waste...

[Schizophretard]

That was only you though and obviously that younger you was wrong, period. I think you can admit to that now all grown up and such

I can but it is still kind of confusing. Going back to Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong(both the one put out by Coleco and Atari) for an example. If I organize all my carts based on who put them out(Atari, Activision, Coleco, Imagic, etc.) then I feel like I could point to the Atari stack and say,"Those are the first party games while all the other stacks are third party games." But I feel like I could also take out the Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong carts from the Atari stack and the Donkey Kong from the Coleco stack to make a new stack and say,"Those are third party games from Nintendo." Both seem correct to me. Kind of like I could say that Yars' Revenge, E.T., and Raider of the Lost Ark are Atari games, or Howard Scott Warshaw games, or I could take out Yars' Revenge and say that they are Steven Spielberg games. In other words, I feel like I could give credit based on the company that published, or the company that developed, or the developer(s) themselves, or a movie director that owns "IP" in the game, or ignore all of that and just base it on what console it was made for, etc. and not necessarily be incorrect.

 

I remember owning an MSX and be well aware of Konami games, they were the bomb. Never thought of them as "MSX games" per se.

Same applies to the rest. Never thought that the C64 games were Commodore games, I actually cared of who made them and sometimes actually who ported them (some ports were atrocious to no faults of the originals)

Later on, when owning and Amiga it was fun to see what utter junk would come out from the likes of U.S.Gold and other "labels", never really blamed Commodore for that. But I was longing for Psygnosis and Cinemaware releases knowing that something good was cooking all the time (well most of the time anyway).

I can still see the brick wall at the beginning of "Defender of the Crown" with the changing color letters of the title .... amazing

I suspect that maybe the cause of us having different memories at the time you were well aware of Konami games was that I was still in the process of just learning how to read.

[atarilovesyou]

 

I know all of this now but back then I didn't think in terms of publishers. It was a foreign concept. To me a game made for the NES was a Nintendo game, a game made for the Atari 2600 was an Atari game, etc. If you asked me back then,"But who made these games?" I probably would have answered,"Santa's elves because I asked him for them at the mall and then they were under the Christmas tree."

 

There was a time back in the late 80s when the NES was king and the only video game books out there were based on reviews, tips, the like. Outside of the magazines, that's all you had to go on. So of course, I'd 'acquire' these books and when I say I read them, I studied those like the TOMES of ANCIENT KNOWLEDGE And that's where I learned about the various game companies and how they ranked. Nintendo did not fall into the one company that was a 'go-to' for gaming satisfaction, though. It had some great games, sure, but at the time we were all about Capcom, Konami...maybe some others, but those were the heavy hitters. I didn't understand at the time how Enix or Square fit into the Nintendo picture, but I learned later on.

 

I would read and read and read to the point where I could name the company behind any 8-bit game. I couldn't give a shit to learn, say, mathematics, but I could tell you Taxan was responsible for Low G Man (ok, that was a later title, but...by then the mags were what I was going by). I'd grab one of my hint books (The Unofficial Guide to Nintendo Games seems to ring a bell) and get them to chose any random game and I'd blurt out the company. I could also do this with VHS cover art and the corresponding 79 original Star Trek episodes. But I digress

 

Part of this was purely functional: renting cost money we didn't have, and to BUY a game?...well, you'd better do your homework or you may just end up with Wizards and Warriors!...which, while not bad, certainly was no Castlevania 3 or even Mega Man 2. And worse, you may be able to return it in exchange for (and this sadly actually happened) ...gasp...KARATE CHAMP Now, Wizards and Warriors wasn't great, but Karate Champ was...just so bad, you wanted to cry. Pretty sure we did.

 

And we learned to be wary of both Data East and Acclaim. This was how we could recognize good games from bad...and the formula back then really did work in our favour. You'd get a few lunkers for good measure, but since the magazines weren't much help (they weren't always like that, but in the beginning, they'd call a spade a spade. Then they became glorified advertisers...I'm looking at you, Gamepro).

 

Anyways..flash from the past. I'm pretty sure I could still name the majority of NES games to their game company ...but to be honest, I get all f'd up with the distinction between developer, distributor, programmer...I just think "company" and be done with it.

 

I gotta go track down those books now...lol.

[Keatah]

I just used "Atari" as a blanket term for all game stuff. Let's go play Atari meant we could break out the VCS or Intellivision or Odyssey², or anything else videogame related. Even the C64.

 

But the Apple II remained stubbornly separate, and it was known as the Apple II. It was either play "Atari" or Apple II.

[doctorclu]

But you're forgetting that 20 years from now people will start saying "Hey remember that crappy Atari/Intellivision/Colecovision Flashback system our Dad forced us to play, I miss that." and the cycle will repeat itself

 

Things I picked up from my Dad:

*50's and 60's horror movies

*Star Trek

*Get Smart

*James Bond / Our Man Flint

*Fireball XL5

 

All good stuff that I continue to enjoy.

[HoshiChiri]

Part of this was purely functional: renting cost money we didn't have, and to BUY a game?...well, you'd better do your homework or you may just end up with Wizards and Warriors!...which, while not bad, certainly was no Castlevania 3 or even Mega Man 2. And worse, you may be able to return it in exchange for (and this sadly actually happened) ...gasp...KARATE CHAMP Now, Wizards and Warriors wasn't great, but Karate Champ was...just so bad, you wanted to cry. Pretty sure we did.

*mumbles* We liked Wizards and Warriors... */mumble*

 

I will say, it is interesting to see what preconceptions we formed during whatever generation we began playing in don't apply to other eras of gaming. For example, teaching myself to actively seek out odd-shaped third party Atari carts, because the quality is often better. Or that these days, being a licensed game doesn't automatically mean it's crap (that's a hard one to get around for me.)

 

At least sports games haven't changed- once it's over a year old, it's worthless!

[Skippy B. Coyote]

At least sports games haven't changed- once it's over a year old, it's worthless!

Unless it has "Mario" in the title.

[Flojomojo]

Unless it has "Mario" in the title.

Heh, could you imagine annualized versions of Mario Golf or Mario Tennis, with roster changes and no major differences?

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Heh, could you imagine annualized versions of Mario Golf or Mario Tennis, with roster changes and no major differences?

That could actually be kinda cool, if they went the Smash Bros. route and started adding in new characters from popular Nintendo and third party franchises every year. The new characters would need to have some kind of special moves or abilities that made them play differently from the rest though, otherwise the whole thing would be about as pointless as it initially sounds. I would kinda like to see who would win in a game of golf though, Samus Aran or Sonic the Hedgehog?

[Flojomojo]

Would you really want to re-buy the same game for $60 every year for that? This is why unlockable characters and downloadable patches were invented.

[gamecat80]

I'm doing my part in keeping pre-crash systems alive. I usually 'rotate' my classic systems every once in a while; focusing on one at a time playing it. Played ColecoVision for a couple months, now on Atari 7800 (yeah, yeah, ...technically post-crash) playing 7800 & 2600 games.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Unless it has "Mario" in the title.

What I love about the "Mario" titles, even the sports games, is the crazy powerups that wreak havok on the field. Like how Super Strikers on Game Cube, Bowser would just drop in randomly during a match and the field would get littered with bananas and shells.

 

Somehow it made playing Soccer that much more fun...

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Would you really want to re-buy the same game for $60 every year for that? This is why unlockable characters and downloadable patches were invented.

 

Heck no. I'd wait until 5 or 10 years after the games were released and the majority of gamers had moved on to the next generation of systems, then pick them up for pennies on the dollar. I don't think I've paid full new retail price for a game since 2006. lol I guess it's kind of irrelevant though, since these days additional content for most games gets released as digital downloads rather than revised physical releases. It'll be a darn shame for collectors in a decade or two when they go to add a copy of Super Smash Bros. to their 3DS or Wii U library and can't play with any of the extra characters not built into the game from the start, or get the patches for all of today's games that are shipped loaded with bugs.

[high voltage]

Would you really want to re-buy the same game for $60 every year...

But Nintendo still sells you the same game every year.... Mario Party 10 already (really?), another 1000 SMB games.....

Edited July 8, 2016 by high voltage

[CatPix]

I suspect that maybe the cause of us having different memories at the time you were well aware of Konami games was that I was still in the process of just learning how to read.

There is also probably the fact that he's talking about computers, and you about consoles.

Computers games, especially in Europe, were plagued by cheap games made in mere days, put on a tape and published by some publisher that wanted the ca$h.

Akin to Nes' Action 52, in Europe there is the "Cassette 50"

50 games, on multiple platforms (ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, Acorn, etc...

50 games... Written in BASIC, by random people; one of them being a 14 years old that saw an ad offering money for any game sent to them. He wrote the game in the afternoon, and send it to them. He didn't even know that his game was chosen and put on a tape until much later.

 

So yeah in context, especially in Europe, you simply couldn't ignore a game publisher and developers, because this was the key to know if you game was going to be good or crap.

Seeing Konami, Psygnosis, Delphine? Hell yeah, go for it.

Seeing Ocean, Ubisoft, Infogrames? Should be good, but look out a bit for what you gonna get.

See Tiertex, Mastertronics? Meeh, might as well walk away and save your money.

 

I mean surely it worked the same for NES and Atari, but usually, there was enough word of mouth around a NES or Atari game to know what you were going into.

But for computers, it was all dependant on your platform.

 

A quick example : Only once, Konami trusted an English developer to port Green Beret on the MSX.

The result?

A Konami cart, expensive for the time... Running a ZX Spectrum port of Green Beret.

A decent ZX Spectrum game, but it's NOT what you expect when you got a MSX and an expensive cart, when the price of the computer alone was almost three times the price of the ZX Spectrum and the Green Beret tape version.

A game could have an excellent port on ZX Spectrum, a decent port on the CPC (usually based on the Spectrum one, sometime receving new graphics and music, sometime just music, sometime nothing), but sucks balls on the C64. Or being developed by three different developers for each platform, and so be totally different in quality despite being published under the same name and by the same publisher.

 

So yeah, when you were into computer gaming BITD, you HAD to learn about the publishers and even about the developers if you had the infos, if you wanted to have the good games, and not trust your friend about the game quality because he doesn't have the same platform than you.

Edited July 8, 2016 by CatPix

[Andromeda Stardust]

Cassette 50, man that's crass. Assuming a crapload of different games were on it for different platforms, how to you advance the tape to the correct spot? I take it you needed a recorder with the little numeric wheels?

[Flojomojo]

That Cassette 50 must be one of the earliest forms of shovelware.

 

It reminds me of the "6 feet of games" junk, or CD-ROM collections like those listed here. At least those have some kind of index.

[BassGuitari]

At least sports games haven't changed- once it's over a year old, it's worthless!

 

There is one notable exception to this rule: Tecmo Super Bowl. GOAT. The problem isn't that we need new rosters every year, it's that it isn't 1991 every year.

 

....another 1000 SMB games.....

I kind of dropped out after Mario 64. Super Mario Sunshine was pretty good, but weird (for a Mario game...better than just more of the same, I guess). I was initially very excited for New Super Mario Bros. Wii but quickly lost interest.

 

[Flojomojo]

It's hard to tell whether the games are less compelling or we are just getting older and more jaded.

 

I booted up Mario 64 on the Wii U virtual console a while back and my daughter screamed, "Minecraft!" I never thought M64 looked all nasty and pixelated like DOOM on DOS as Minecraft does, but yeah, it's definitely old now. 20 years of distance didn't help me see that, but someone with fresh eyes recognized it in an instant.

[Keatah]

It's hard to tell whether the games are less compelling or we are just getting older and more jaded.

 

I booted up Mario 64 on the Wii U virtual console a while back and my daughter screamed, "Minecraft!" I never thought M64 looked all nasty and pixelated like DOOM on DOS as Minecraft does, but yeah, it's definitely old now. 20 years of distance didn't help me see that, but someone with fresh eyes recognized it in an instant.

 

A little bit of both.

 

Doom's pixelation was state of the art back then. Just like today's great games will look nasty in some way 20 years from now.

[Flojomojo]

Doom's pixelation was state of the art back then. Just like today's great games will look nasty in some way 20 years from now.

 

 

Ya think?