Gaming Your Favourite Game Was Rubbish

I'm sure I wrote a letter about this very topic to the gaming podcast not a couple of weeks ago

This is considerably better articulated though.

I stick by what I said in that letter, those old games are my "benchmarks" (as it was so quaintly put) and I set the standard of all of my new games by them, I don't think they were particularly bad or good, I just know and love them.

 

I can't see how anyone can even try to compare Doom 3 with HL? maybe the graphics, but anything else...
In any case, i don't see games as new or old, i put them in one of 2 categories:

1. the ones with a great story
2. the "tech demo" types

And i prefer the 1st group... most Doom games along with Quake games were simple tech demos in the time they were released... so was wolfenstein... they didn't have a story that would interest a child, let alone someone a bit older... and those exact games started sucking really badly when their graphics got obsolete.

The thing with older gamer with a good story or gameplay is that you can play them again, and again no matter the graphics, which can't be said for crap like Doom 3 or the mentioned Bioshock.... even Crysis for all its hype only lasted a few days on my computer... when the initial "wow" factor wears off, its just a tech demo with a pathetic story.

But, i still find the time to occasionally throw a game of HOMM3, Starcraft or UT(1999) with friends... and i enjoy it much, much more then playing the latest COD or any newer title...

I totally disagree with the article, because the point is "give up on old stuff, because its old and accept new things". As much as the author "hates" how some journalists hype up older games, he brings up the same things with trying to convince us that's wrong, that newer is better, and that if we played those games now they would suck.
If i loved Deus Ex when i 1st played it, its that impression that matters... i don't care if they released DEx 25 or BioShock 15, if i didn't get that same feeling when i played it i'd still rate the much older game higher...

I was always of the opinion that when you don't have the option of fancy graphics (such as it was about 10 years ago) you work on other things, such as story and gameplay... but most game developers these days think that nice pictures are enough... then again i'm old today (in gamer terms) so most developers design stuff for the mainstream, which i suppose is 12 - 18 year olds who simply like different stuff. Also the console-like feel of every new game doesn't really help that much.

 

I did like doom 3, but that was up to a point, when the gameplay became repetitive and no new weapons seemed to be introduced after the disapointing BFG9000 or whatsitsname. Never finished it

My old computer have been "saved" from formatting, for 2-3 years now, only because I have a copy of Deus Ex 2 wich I haven't finished yet. I still play it every other month and loves it I do see similarities between DX2 and the stalker games though. They have the "loner survival" gameplay I do tend to prefer.

 

ahhh.... so after a whole game that set up the gman story and a long-waited-for sequel that decided to only show him atr the beginning and very end you still find the gman interesting. Joe has an #excellent# point: hl2 went off on a tangent. They clumsily shoehorned the gman into hl2 to maintain some continuity with the first game, while pushing a new story i personally didnt find half as much interesting. Props to the earlier poster who said hl2 was stoopid linear. It felt more linear than hl1, which was set underground, in tunnels.... Plus as a #shooter# hl2 is w@nk.

Doom 3 is a good game, if you see it is tongue in cheek, then its good like how van-helsing is good. The audio logs were very atmospheric to listen to, too.

 

@ VaLkyR-Assassin ---- dude your missing out on the hell levels. Really well realised and at the time utterly dazzling graphics. Was a much more clever graphics engine there then the perma-dark gameplay allowed you to see.

 

Like I said (in an earlier comment) I really enjoyed Doom 3 and just completed it (finally) this week!! I loved it from a sci-fi perspective even if the story and hell AI was pretty rubbish... I plan to start the "Resurrection of Evil" soon... Looking forward to the (allegedly more story driven) Doom 4...

 

I like to compare old school CS with CS:S. I'm sure everyone has some amazing memories from 1.6 (or older) but what does it have over CS:S? A riot shield for CTs? Other than that there's really nothing superior about CS other than nostalgia. Just between the two of them 1.6 seems, well... bad.

And both them compared to games like MW2 seem rudimentary with their lacking features and gameplay options. I, personally, enjoy the bare bones feel of CS which seems to rely on skill more than NPC controlled helicopters and what not, but from an objective standpoint MW is far superior. Old games generally lack the number of features and dynamic gameplay that we cherish today.

 

"Doom 3 is better than Half Life 2"

That made me die inside.
:L

 

The nostalgia exists because old games was created with passion. In the past developers make games. Now, game companies just make money.
A great game is a game that make u "woooooow" at it. In contrast to older games, few nowday's titles manage to do that.
Instead of improving games, in their hungry for money, companies just change few things but leave behind alot of wat a game was. Gamers want that a new release have all what an older game had plus something more. It's simple.
For exaple there are old games that had great physics compared to alot of new games that have almost no physics. Don't mention about consoles, that actualy stopped games innovation.

Your Favourite Game was and is a great game.

And about this article. Is not even worth talking about it.
You should be impartial as possible when writing an article. Not desperately trying to make others share your opinion.
Is a disgrace to bit-tech.

 

I only have a few minutes to comment on the article, so I haven't read the reader comments on it.

This is nothing short of a troll article designed to solicit comments.

I might have agreed with the premise of the article, and even willing to defend it, over DE/IW. I thought IW was good, I enjoyed it and thought it got a bum-rap for its flaws. I also agree that DE isn't a perfect game, although it is one of my favourites.

But you lost me completely with the Doom 3/HL2 comparison. Were you drunk/high/suffering from concussion/brain damaged when you wrote this? Doom 3 ranks near the bottom of the games I've played, and I was so looking forward to it.

I'm sorry Joe, it didn't have a story. Your fleshed out paragraph doesn't prove a story. I could write a paragraph on the narrative of Portal, doesn't mean it has a story. It merely means it has a premise that leads to a conclusion. In fact, I'm so good at BSing that I could probably write a paragraph describing the story of Pac Man.
It had great atmosphere, that had me shaking in my boots, but it didn't take me long to tire of the never ending identical corridors and identical set battle pieces. Never bothered to finish it.

Haven't played System Shock, so can't comment on superiority over Bioshock, but I thought Bioshock was crap and never went very far into it. My opinion of Bioshock is just how much I thought it was like Doom 3. I even thought it while I was playing it. Liked the atmosphere a lot, a great period environment, but just so same-y. I just couldn't get into it and invest in the narrative. Quite frankly, I had better games waiting for my time. Perhaps I'll give it another go when I have the time.

The article would have better without the trolling. And decent examples with which to prove your argument. DE/IW = good. D3/HL2 = woeful. SS2/BS = gah!

 

A comparison between SS2 and Bioshock is about as relevant as it gets to this topic, and I fail to see validity in your complaint when you say you haven't even played System Shock?

 

The comment on the first page explains a large truth about the industries of the world and the way humans tend to work.

Humans have natural reactions stored in them, memories that trigger episodes of happiness or pain or other emotion. When we experience something close to these memories, our emotional stimulus kicks in and gives us a feeling from the closest related memory. This means if we liked something before, we are generally going to like more of it. This is typical across the populance, rather than across the individual.

 

The last sentence to this article should be:
This is what happens when you grow up and don't accept it.

To recapture that feeling of the first time you played Atari games, Nintendo's Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Knock Out, Contra is have a son and buy him a good game console research and by good games and watch his eyes light up just like yours did back then.

The excitement, adrenaline rush, the fear you have when you first started playing games is just like a drug. At first it's a rush! Then as time passes you spend the rest of your days chasing the dragon.

Games are still fun for me, but I know I'll never look at them again like I did when I was young and games in general where new. Any game was good and I was not yet a critic.

 

Of course! That's why this forum exists - provoked people view more pages and *cough*ideally*cough* see more adverts! (plus Joe probably didn't want to limit it to the back page of Custom PC).

Now that we've established that the Bit-Tech staff are seasoned "baiters", should this article qualify Joe as a Master?

I'd agree absolutely here - both games were epic but the controls in NWN2 are pretty awful (requiring keyboard and mouse together to access a key menu is a real no-no). Sadly, the lawsuit between Hasbro and Atari has likely put an end to any further NWN patches - and possibly any future NWN games.

Both seemed to rush at the end though - it seems to be sadly prevalent with recent RPGs that stories get brought to a hasty conclusion.

 

I dunno, given enough fustration I'd say the modding society could come up with a solution.

I do agree that modern RPG's are rather rushed at the end, often with a large sequel cliffhanger. I'd like to see a remake of the Baldur's Gate series with the Mass Effect engine.

 

I've heard there's a project underway to remake NWN2 using the DA:O editor. Could be epic.

 

Which is why I didn't comment on it, beyond the "Gah!". I have played the others, so I did. Even though I haven't played SS, I have been around the block a few times and seen and read enough to form an opinion that other than both being FPS, SS and Bioshock are different enough to not be directly comparable. However, I will bow to your and Joe's superior knowledge and if the use of a single descriptive word invalidates the rest, then....alright then.

I agree with the assumptions made in the article, just not the "evidence" Joe provided. I agree that all too often we nostalgically view our past through the proverbial rose-tinted glasses. I agree with Joe on his DE/DE2 comparison; despite some painful dumbing down IW was pretty good. IMO, it was an 7/10. If I hadn't played DE and given it a 9/10, I may have given it a higher score on my personal scale.

The D3/HL2 comparison was so far off base that I thought Joe had had a whack to the head, and judging from the comments (which I've now skimmed) I'm not alone. If it was a discussion-provoking journalistic device, then it failed because it merely came across as a hit-provoking troll that invalidated his whole argument.

 

While the general premise of the article probably has some merit. The more I read, the less I agreed with you. After the first paragraph I was pretty sure you were right, but almost every example you gave undermined your central premise.

I'm only a little into bioshock, so I can't comment on if it's better than System Shock 2, but I think you're missing the point about nostalgia. If a game makes enough of an impression on you that it stays with you for that long, then it'd doing something right.

Clearly as games advance, they're going to get technically and maybe empirically "better". But games are mostly emotional events, and as such their quality can't be measured that way.
Doom3 has much more to it than Doom2. But I still remember the feeling of playing Doom2. All I remember about Doom3 is that i was annoyed I upgraded my PC for it, and that I enjoyed Farcry a lot more.
Invisible war wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. But I still remember a lot of the missions, characters and events from Deus Ex. I have no memory of these supposed "other students" that i was supposed to have an emotional attachment to.
I never found the monkeys and overall story of SS2 that scary or interesting, but I still remember a lot of the events and scenes.
There are probably dozens of better platformers than Psychonauts, maybe even ones that I enjoyed more at the time I was playing them... but I can still remember almost every element of psychonauts, and most other platformers were forgotten as soon as they were finished with.

If you didn't play the games at the time, and you are comparing them both "right now" then things might be different. (I know I'm having real trouble finding anything interesting in Fallout1 right now). But I don't think you can say Bioshock is better than System Shock 2 until about 10 years from now. If you still remember Bioshock more fondly then you may have a point, but otherwise nostalgia is what it's all about.

 

Wow. I just got back from holiday and am still pooling through all these comments (the article was posted while I was away), but I will say thanks for some of the long and very insightful posts I've read so far. Simply fabulous stuff.

From what I've read so far, anything I say at this point would be a rehash, but I will say that this article isn't honestly alleging that Doom 3 is better than Half-Life 2. It simply isn't. What I was actually trying to do was take a deliberately confrontational stand and play devil's advocate from that point by narrowing my view. The point of the article was that, for example, Half-Life 2 is a great game that is often held up as one of the best games ever - yet if you actually examine it in terms of the story it's so acclaimed for then a lot of people don't even know what's going on. It's not as simple as "HL2 has a sense of mystery"; it's more that the mystery gets in the way. It's the game equivalent of Lost, where answers are getting ignored and questions are piling up and the wait is just annoying.

Again though; devil's advocate. Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, System Shock - these are brilliant games. Way better than the ones they were compared too, IMHO. Yet they aren't as perfect as most remember and, as a journalist and gamer, that's something I wanted to reflect on a little.

And I didn't bring up Monkey Island because, to be honest, I'm kind of done with that for the moment. I feel I blew my wad a bit with the "This Isn't About Monkey Island, Honest" column a while back. I won't bring it up again until I have something new to say.

And, to clear it up very clearly, I'm not saying that HL2 has a worse plot than D3. The reliance on such shallow and short list of characters was enough to spoil D3s plot for me personally; but if you look at the game from this very specific point of view then it can reveal a weakness in HL2 that most people seem all too eager to ignore.

I remember a conversation I had with a veteran tech journo in my first few years in the industry...

He: So, you play a lot of games. I really like HL2.
I: Yeah, it's a great game.
He: I love the story. It's so deep and interesting.
I: Really?
He: Yeah.
I: Ok, then what happens? Why are the aliens on your side? Who are the combine and where did they come from? Why doesn't Eli question Gordon about some basic stuff? What the hell is going on and what's happened to the world?
He: Um...

You can answer most of those questions of course, but it strikes me as blind that most people claim brilliance without actually being able to prove it.

 

My favourite all time game was Joint Operations : Typhoon Rising. There was nothing better than a 150 player server.

Remembering a couple of times we had matches where we would put a few British squads together to play against Europe. It was awesome as the maps were endless but fortunately the spawn point were not that far apart where you could not complete the matches.

Its the first game where I have seen so many players in one server. Then loan behold people who designed it as in Nova destroy it.

Don't you find they bring some awesome games out only for the designers to totally destroy what they had started.