What made you 'go retro'?

[Tanooki]

Outside of my MVS I wouldn't be caught dead with a CRT anymore. I had an opportunity at a thrift earlier ago to have a choice of 4 of them (around 20" or so) for $5/ea, kept walking.

[thadsilverfox]

Outside of my MVS I wouldn't be caught dead with a CRT anymore. I had an opportunity at a thrift earlier ago to have a choice of 4 of them (around 20" or so) for $5/ea, kept walking.

Great!!! Glad you got that off your chest. However, I enjoy all 4 of my CRTs and wouldn't be caught dead with an MVS (never heard of it) or an HDTV, LCD, LED, or whatever the hell they are called now. I tried all of these newer TVs and not a single one lasted past 7 years. All 4 CRTs I purchased in the early 90s when I enlisted in the military and they all are still going strong. I'm done with new technology hence why I am on an Atari forum discussing old games and consoles. Hell the computer I am typing this on is 15 plus years old.

Edited January 28, 2017 by thadsilverfox

[thadsilverfox]

Yeah, that's a pretty predictable trope around here. Want to see another one?

 

FACT:

CRT televisions are big, ugly, heavy, and old. All video games look better on sharp LCD panels so you can see the crispness of the pixels.

ALL OTHER OPINIONS ARE CRAP

I think she is beautiful

 

FACT:

Just my opinion and ALL OTHER OPINIONS ARE CRAP.

 

[Tanooki]

Great!!! Glad you got that off your chest. However, I enjoy all 4 of my CRTs and wouldn't be caught dead with an MVS (never heard of it) or an HDTV, LCD, LED, or whatever the hell they are called now.

Hope that was sarcasm. MVS=NeoGeo arcade cabinet with a 25" CRT monitor in it.

[thadsilverfox]

Hope that was sarcasm. MVS=NeoGeo arcade cabinet with a 25" CRT monitor in it.

Nope, not sarcastic at all. Never heard of it and not interest in owning one anyhow just cause it has a CRT. I'm a recreational gamer and not a gaming aficionado.

Edited January 28, 2017 by thadsilverfox

[Asaki]

Woah, settle down guys, Flojomojo was being facetious =)

 

 

 

 

... you can never replicate some of those arcade games in the home, like the Daytona multi link with force feedback...

 

I wouldn't say "never", but I know what you mean. I got to try a real Daytona 2 recently, and I couldn't believe how much easier the game was with the force feedback.

 

...and then a few quarters later, the feedback broke on me, and I went right back to crashing into walls like I normally do in any racing game that isn't Mario Kart.

Edited January 28, 2017 by Asaki

[juansolo]

On the CRT / Panel debate, the correct answer is of course to have both

[Keatah]

I'm a child of the 70's and a teen of the 80's. So I grew up with this stuff. And "retro" kinda sorta just happened. In a sense I never really left.

 

Starting with dedicated Pong, sports, tank, and shooting consoles. Then came the single board computers like the KIM-1 & RCA COSMAC VIP, Apple II and traditional consoles like the VCS and Intellivision. I stayed with these things and the arcades to the 1990's.

 

Fighting games came on the scene, and I hated those. Arcades went downhill. I got a 486 PC, enjoyed Doom and Raptor and Quake. Segued into complex simulations like Orbiter and X-Plane and fractal explorations. And along the way began curating a great emulator setup - years in the making - so that I may enjoy all the consoles of the 70's and 80's again, today. Hassle free with unprecedented reliability.

 

Despite having to “be tied to a PC” and all the nuances that come with it, I found it very liberating in that I can switch from game to game, system to system, near instantly. I also have great confidence in that I stopped the clock. The way I play games through emulation today is the way I will be able to play them 20 years from now. No degradation.

 

I never took much a liking to modern consoles a lot because of all the DLC, account, updating, and always-on internet connection requirements. Not to mention the servers, when they go so do your games. Don’t get me going on the in-game purchases or the half-assed tricks they use where you have to pay yet more just to get the other half of an incomplete game. And startup times are ridiculous.

 

At the same time I’m not oblivious to modern consoles either. Just highly selective in what I spend time on.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

I'm way late to this topic, but for me there were 3 factors that all played a significant role in my decision to mainly stick to retro consoles:

 

1. Price

 

I'm always on a pretty tight budget these days and realistically I just can't afford to spend $300 for a system and $40 to $60 each for games anymore. Retro gaming was a much more affordable entertainment option, since the retro systems I like playing only set me back $30 to $60 a piece and most of the games I'd want to play are in the $5 to $10 range. Flash carts have made retro gaming even more affordable as well, giving me access to the full library of every game on the Atari 2600, NES, and Sega Genesis at a price that I could handle with some careful budgeting.

 

 

2. Nostalgia

 

I'd be lying if I said that fond memories of the past didn't play an important part in my decision to go retro. All the retro systems that I love to play and collect for are systems that I had either as a kid or a teenager, except for the NES which was a system that I wanted but could never get as a kid. There's a lot of fun to be had going back and playing all those games that I loved growing up and they never fail to bring back good memories from those time periods every time I sit down to play them. But it's also just as fun, if not more so, discovering all the great games that I missed in my younger days. From well known titles that I just never owned before to the obscure hidden gems, the thrill of discovery that comes from really digging in to the game libraries of my favorite systems from days gone by and discovering all they have to offer is immensely enjoyable for me.

 

 

3. My Wife

 

This last reason is probably pretty unique to me, but it's also the most important reason that I decided to go retro. Without sharing too many personal details that she might be uncomfortable with, I can say that my wife loves playing video games but due to a physical disability she is unable to hold a traditional game controller and has to use arcade stick controllers for everything she plays. She's gotten quite skilled with her arcade sticks (she's the only person I know who can easily beat Doom on Ultra Violence difficulty with an arcade stick) but it does limit the number of systems that she can play games on. Anything that requires dual analog stick controls is out of the question, since arcade stick controllers are single stick digital input only devices, so the most recent system that she can play games on is the original PlayStation; as it was the last system to use all digital controls before dual analog stick controls became all the rage.

 

For a long while after we got together I continued playing modern systems, but the more time went on the worse I started to feel about playing and spending money on systems and games that she couldn't enjoy too. As much as I liked my Wii, 3DS, Xbox 360, and PS3 I always felt guilty about playing them, because they were systems that the love of my life couldn't play. She never complained about me playing modern systems or anything like that, she was always really cool about it and never seemed to mind, but in spite of her reassurances that it was fine I never could manage to shake that feeling of guilt every time I played a game that she couldn't.

 

So, a couple years into our marriage and when I just couldn't take the guilt anymore, I decided to sell off all of my modern systems and games that the misses couldn't play. It was a little hard to let go of a few of my favorite modern games but ultimately I know it was the right choice and I've never regretted it for even a second. I'm much happier now knowing that if the misses ever wants to play any of the games in my collection she can, and that alone was worth going retro for.

[Flojomojo]

Jin -- that's a wonderful reason! I never thought of arcade sticks as particularly accessible, and I'm happy to have learned that they can be.

 

My kid and I were watching this brief video about "why we are so attached to our things?" that reminded me of this thread.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Jin -- that's a wonderful reason! I never thought of arcade sticks as particularly accessible, and I'm happy to have learned that they can be.

 

I was a bit surprised when I learned about it too. There are quite a few companies out there making custom arcade stick controllers for people with limited mobility ( http://www.oneswitch.org.uk/1/AGS/AGS-bespoke.htm ), but to say that they're all absurdly expensive and way out of my spouse and I's budget would be an major understatement. We've looked into getting her an arcade stick with accessible dual analog stick controls, but everything we've found so far started at $500. On the upside of things though she does really love her PlayStation and has been able to enjoy it and many other systems with more affordable commerically produced controllers with big easy to press buttons buttons like this Asciiware stick (her current favorite controller):

 

[Yak]

I've been a consumer of games since pretty much the ancient origins, and I still am to this day. I've even created one or two.

 

I find most aspects of gaming interesting, whether it's the history of ancient systems and game designs or how we might go about creating satisfying games on emerging technologies, and everything in between.

 

Emulation is marvellous, because it allows us to study games' design across a broad spectrum of ages and systems, and allows for the near-perfect preservation of artefacts that might otherwise be lost in time. (I'm not saying that emulation is better than owning the "real thing"; only that it is much more convenient and accessible to anyone who is inclined to look at the history of gaming).

 

Looking back at a lot of what was available in ancient times it's evident that a lot of it was pretty bad. The games that were truly great back then, though, are still great to this day, and still just as much fun to play - due largely to the fact that back then poor game design couldn't be covered up by fancy graphics and music because those things weren't possible. So a truly great game stood on the quality of its design, and that quality doesn't fade even in comparison with modern gaming. In fact I think it is a good exercise for anyone interested in learning game design to make their own implementation of one of the great old classics. Doing so will help you learn just what made those games great, and give a good understanding how subtle nuances of an ostensibly simple design can make or break a game.

 

So I play old games sometimes out of a sense of nostalgia, because they remind me of times I lived through. But it is also partly because the beauty I see in the best of those old games is a timeless thing that does not fade and which I still appreciate to this day.

[Flojomojo]

I totally get where you're coming from with the necessary purity of classic game design -- but I feel that despite massive budgets for flashy modern games, we are way less likely to have crap covered up by "fancy graphics" nowadays than in classic gaming days. We have internet reviews and lots of option, a far cry from the late 1970s/early 1980s when we mostly had word of mouth and box art to guide us to the best purchases.

 

Maybe I should start a thread about games with fancy graphics but bleh gameplay. Vectron for Intellivision, and Dragon's Lair on everything, come to my mind as the most offensive "graphics over gameplay" that I can recall.

[Neo 64]

Since I am younger the thing that made me go retro is being tired of playing minecraft

[Keatah]

I think the newness (back then) of the whole art of "electronic gaming on a TV" was compelling. It was an adventure. Heck it didn't even have to be gaming - just anything on the TV. The family room TV or the basement TV.

[Yak]

yeah I wasn't actually saying that I thought modern games were covering up bad design with fancy graphics necessarily; I play and enjoy a lot of modern games too that are fantastic. Only that such subterfuge wasn't technically available to games back then, and looking back at the body of work from back then it's painfully obvious that many of them don't hold up at all well viewed from this perspective.

 

Which only serves to make the brilliance of the genuinely great designs from back then, those that are as fun today as they were back then, even more evident.

[NE146]

I love playing on my CRT's.. but yeah they've been cast aside to off-corners of the house, no longer the main entertainment areas. I got a little tv on my office desk, and a bigger trinitron stuck in a corner of a room. It makes it hard when you can't just plop on the couch and it'd be right in front of you. Now that's an HDTV with an Xbone hooked up.

[The Usotsuki]

Wasn't Robotron 2084's dual stick layout designed because the guy injured his hand or something?

[+wongojack]

I love modern and classic (or retro) gaming, but there definitely has been a few moments that got me more interested in games of the past. I think the first one was in '96 or '97 when I found KMart selling used NES games. Weird right? They were in the game section in a pile behind some glass. I think they were $4 or $5, and I convinced my mom to buy me some. I was in college at the time, so I had no job to just go nuts with my own money. I played NES games alongside my Playstation at the time, and my roommates and I would switch between NCAA Gamebreaker and RBI Baseball.

 

Then in about 2003/2004 when every grocery store had a video rental place, they began to sell off their old PS1 games. I remember buying a bunch of formal rental copies for $1. I got Valkyria Chronicles and Chrono Cross that way (Still never played either). That was fun and around the same time, I really started to go nuts with emulators. Being able to play old arcade games was great because those games had been so inaccessible before. The fact that I could just plug in a $10 USB pad and it worked was amazing.

 

It took a few more years before I did anything else serious in terms of actually collecting. Starting a real career and buying a house helps with that. I fixed my family's light 6er in about 2009 and its been a slippery slope ever since.

 

I still play modern games all the time. Nowadays video games are more like old movies. I probably won't ever watch every critically acclaimed movie, and I'll be dead before I can play all the games in my collection, but I'm sure gonna try. I'll still check out the new stuff that comes out every year. Gaming is great!

[Tanooki]

Nope, not sarcastic at all. Never heard of it and not interest in owning one anyhow just cause it has a CRT. I'm a recreational gamer and not a gaming aficionado.

Fair enough, can't blame you as most things are getting a bit expensive now. I find it sad when I look at that arcade cabinet and the prices on enough of the games on what should be more expensive costs less than a lot of the so called quality and even crap games you can pick up on old consoles scalpers have rammed through the roof. What I have at this rate isn't all that terribly much anymore, not much of an aficionado anymore either as it's more something to enjoy passing the time at times.

 

All this talk of old and now the new too, I've actually cut myself a great ways off from the new as of the last year. PS4 just got boring and I decided 5 days ago to put the 10 games I had for it up for sale and 8 sold thankfully. I'll get a switch but the depths of how much I get for it will depend. I tend to like to do my modern play on my gaming computer and that can be done one handed or two if needed. I find mostly I'd rather mess around with my late 90s/early 00 consoles (DC/Gamecube) and back from there.

 

 

Jin have you considered for you and your wife a Sega Dreamcast?? The games on the higher quality output ones fall into like a year one PS2 level of visuals and audio. Gameplay mechanics more fall into the PS1/SNES era of style. The system has no dual analogs. It's a single joystick (thumbstick or dpad) setup with just 4 face buttons and 2 on top likes SNES. You can get a cheap enough third party joystick for around $40, or double that into the official one from Sega/Agetek(sold it in the US.) There are hundreds of games, heaps of variety, and it's a very comfortable system to dive into and outside of the Capcom published and developed fighting and bullethell shooters it's hard to find a game over the $50 mark, most are notably more like $5-30 range complete in their jewel case so it's affordable too.

[Asaki]

I think the first one was in '96 or '97 when I found KMart selling used NES games. Weird right?

Not weird at all, we had that at our K-Mart, too. I remember we got Shadowgate, NARC, and Metroid...I can't remember what else, but those were pretty awesome scores in my eyes...they were shrinkwrapped with one of those crappy one-page instruction cards =)

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Jin have you considered for you and your wife a Sega Dreamcast??

The Dreamcast was actually one of the systems we looked at together and thought about when we were planning and putting together our retro game center. We both read all the RacketBoy articles on the games that defined the system, the hidden gems, best cheap games, and so on. It ended up being the mutual consensus that there wasn't much either of us would want to play on the Dreamcast that couldn't already be played on our PlayStation or GameCube (excepting Shenmue), and space in our gaming center is at a premium so we decided to pass on the Dreamcast. The Saturn was a bit more tempting but the price of the games on the system shot that idea down right quick.

 

Right now we've got an Atari 2600, NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, and GameCube and I think we're both pretty happy with the selection. The misses usually sticks to the PlayStation since it's her favorite system but she does play the Atari, NES, and Genesis a bit now and then too. For the GameCube she has an arcade stick with a toggle switch that lets her select whether the stick acts as the GameCube controller's analog stick, D-Pad, or C-Stick and that works pretty well for most games, though she mainly uses the Cube to play Game Boy / Color / Advance games via the Game Boy Player.

 

So at this point our gaming center is pretty well stocked, but thanks anyway for the suggestion though! Right now it's looking like we probably won't be adding any more systems to the collection until we can eventually save up for a dual analog stick equipped arcade stick for the misses, at which point I know she'd want to get a PS2 and PS4, but that could take a good long while.

[Tanooki]

That makes sense I suppose depending on which specific games you did/do care about. Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, Skies of Arcadia all made it to the GC as well, and throw in the import of Ikaruga which was localized. If you're not much on the rest of the library or there's something comparable enough on cube or PS1 you're set.

 

I'm offloading systems/games at the moment so all I have plugged in is a PS4 for movies with a retron5 on top (NES top loader and SNES are put up), Dreamcast, and a Gamecube -- that's it aside from the NES Classic Edition. I'll be adding a Switch at this point too. I'm just going to stick to one system for now on, anything I miss that isn't console maker exclusive hits PC anyway these days and always in better looking and playing fashion as well anyway (and cheaper if you're a hold out for online sales.)

[ryoder]

I had emulators on my PC in 1999 before it was really considered mainstream and then had a modded Xbox with emulators. My brother went retro before I did though. I was talking one day with him about the Amiga and how I always wanted one. He brought one over to our moms house on somebody's birthday and we played some games. At that point I realized I missed my old Tandy 1000 HX and reminisced on how I used to program it for hours as a kid. I'm a professional developer now and wanted to try my hand at it again so I downloaded dosbox and did some programming in C and assembly. Next time I saw my brother he had a mint condition Tandy 1000 HX waiting for me. That was where it began. I started looking into mods immediately and realized my retro passion was in modding and buying modded retro systems with modern hard drives and other peripherals.

 

Then I started watching YouTube and it all went downhill from there. I moved from Tandy to another Tandy to Amiga to another Amiga to an Atari st before getting into consoles. Now I'm collecting portables like the game gear and Lynx that I always wanted. I owned a game gear but never liked the display so I'm buying a McWill modded one now.

[D.Daniels]

isnt retro gaming also due to the fact that there are more games of higher quality to play overall, I dont think there could have been a retro scene around the Snes era, as things were too evolving, and with the current state of GTA 6, GT 6 and Mario Kart 8, I think the staleness is showing up the lack of imagination in modern games

Edited February 10, 2017 by D.Daniels