The Nostalgia Thread

[H4run]

I miss having lower standards for video games. Every once in a while some game I loved 15-20 years ago comes on sale on Steam for like 79¢ or I'll track down a Genesis cartridge, or load up one of the retro games on the Switch online service thinking I can enjoy a revisit. Sometimes I am happy but more often than not the graphics are hard to look at or the controls are too clunky and I'm disappointed. Simple things used to keep me enthralled, now I feel kinda snobby.

Now we are harder to please and to impress, the last game that blow my mind was oblivion, now everything have its lack somehow. Nothing so surprising any longer

 

[civvver]

uh I think standards for games as a whole are lower, much lower. For the gameplay and story elements. They try to make up for it with fancy graphics, but even then that's only on triple a titles. Still tons of craptastic bad graphics games on steam that are new. And don't even get me started on mobile games.

 

[H4run]

uh I think standards for games as a whole are lower, much lower. For the gameplay and story elements. They try to make up for it with fancy graphics, but even then that's only on triple a titles. Still tons of craptastic bad graphics games on steam that are new. And don't even get me started on mobile games.

Come on man I even feel like I was in a dream when I play Top-Gear the first time during snes era. Never-winter Night was feel so awesome back-then but the last time I revisit, it feels so empty and compare NWN with our current crpg game which is mind-blowing, but now it even not attracts me enough. We are indeed are harder to please.

Ok forget about all those rpg. Even a space shooter back-then made us happy. Or Pacman, lode runner, and Civ 1??! Compare Civ 1 to our current Civ 6, but I even don't want to touch Civ 6, because it doesn't impresses me enough, actually what @Socrates99 said is quite true for certain scenario.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's not calling people in the 1980s stupid to note that climate science was nowhere near as advanced as it is now.

It's the implied view that prior to the ending of the Cold War (late '80s, so hardly in the Dark Ages) people had not only less information, but didn't really care that much. This is absolutely not true. And I've noticed that the same people who didn't care 30 years ago, still don't care. They think they can remediate the hellhole in northern Alberta in a matter of a few years, when it would take decades at least to get the toxins out of the soil and water. It took lawsuits to persuade them to do something about the tailings ponds that were killing so many migratory birds. The birds thought it was a lake of wholesome, fresh water to land on and rest; they had no idea it was a lake of pure poison.

Our understanding of the science has gradually increased. No switch flipped.

Then kindly inform the pre/post Cold War 'splainers.

I'm not going to go out and compare generations. When I think about the current climate I think about all those who lived through the great depression and how there was a lot more scarcity. I think each generation has their own challenges and to measure my pain is bigger than yours seems kind of pointless.

But regarding gaming, I never understood why world of warcraft designed the game to be such a gigantic time sink. I remember having to grind battlegrounds for 20 hours a week for 3-4 weeks just to get enough honor points for stupid pvp bracers. The reason I thought this was incredibly stupid was because the game is monthly subscription based. Whether someone plays 12 hours a day or 1 a week the price is the same. Mobile games I get it cus they make money off ads or packs you buy to speed up your progress, in warcraft there was no such thing. I guess they just wanted everyone hopelessly addicted but you can do that without grindy daily quests and such.

It isn't only gaming sites that can addict people. Right now, there are hundreds, if not thousands (but not millions as the company running this scam site claims) who are clicking on articles, posting comments, and passionately posting hateful things to one another on a website called "Care2." (wanna see some truly vile things said by vegans to omnivores, or anti-vaxxers to non-anti-vaxxers? That's the place to go, as the "moderator" will do absolutely nothing to the flamers but will suspend the accounts of people who report them)

The members are awarded points-per-post or per-click, up to a daily maximum in several categories. What they do with these points is browse a "shopping list" where they assign points to some sort of charity that purports to convert the points to actual $$ amounts that these charities will receive, for things like tree planting, providing food donations to animal shelters, etc.

Personally, I began to doubt that most of the organizations listed were actually getting anything significant from this, and the cow pies hit the air cooling device when C2 announced a "points giveaway" of 100,000 points each to 25 randomly chosen members so they could give them to the charities of their choice.

Sounds great, right? Except that some of us noticed that most of the names on the list of winners included accounts that had never posted anything, or that had been inactive for years. Nice racket, where C2 could make everyone think they were being super-generous, but few if any of those 250,000 points would ever be converted to real money and donated.

Those who started asking questions about this were censored, then suspended, and effectively banned (perpetual account suspension).

What this has to do with addiction is that the people active would spend hours each day on that site, accumulating points in the mistaken belief that they're helping charitable organizations by posting, clicking, signing petitions, etc. I haven't been there for about 7 years now. But I'd be willing to bet that some of the people who wished a horrible death on me because I drink milk and eat cheeseburgers are still doing their "daily points".

I miss having lower standards for video games

Most of my computer gaming has been pretty tame by the standards of folks here, anyway. The sorts of games that keep me entertained would probably bore most people here.

I still wish someone would convert my old favorites to some version playable on a Windows 10 computer. I don't ask for different music or fancy modern graphics. Actually, that would ruin the experience, as I was rather fond of that silly jumping hamburger in Zany Golf. I just want to play these games again.

There are some game developers who post on the Pond Friends forum, interacting directly with the customers. It's nice to be able to give them feedback and suggestions (the representative for Suricate had a "facepalm" moment when I mentioned the ambient sounds for Jewel Match Atlantis (a game that takes place entirely in an underwater environment) includes softly hooting owls. Whoever was responsible for that just copied the sounds over from Jewel Match Twilight and didn't notice.

The representative was embarrassed, but I said it hadn't impacted my enjoyment of the game. I just imagined the owls were wearing scuba gear and went on with building my underwater castles (since it's a fantasy game, why not?).

But they're asking for customer feedback and suggestions for the next game they're developing, so I will be happy to give them some. The castles and scenes that get built in these games can be used as desktop wallpaper, and a couple of them have given me story ideas for my ongoing epic (based on a game by a completely different gaming company, but I'll take ideas wherever they come from).

 

[H4run]

I still wish someone would convert my old favorites to some version playable on a Windows 10 computer. I don't ask for different music or fancy modern graphics. Actually, that would ruin the experience, as I was rather fond of that silly jumping hamburger in Zany Golf. I just want to play these games again.

Valka you can use this. I already check your Zany Golf and it's there, either the 1988 version or the 1990 version, I don't know those game myself, but surely now you can enjoy your nostalgia, and don't forget to have fun

 

[civvver]

Come on man I even feel like I was in a dream when I play Top-Gear the first time during snes era. Never-winter Night was feel so awesome back-then but the last time I revisit, it feels so empty and compare NWN with our current crpg game which is mind-blowing, but now it even not attracts me enough. We are indeed are harder to please.

Ok forget about all those rpg. Even a space shooter back-then made us happy. Or Pacman, lode runner, and Civ 1??! Compare Civ 1 to our current Civ 6, but I even don't want to touch Civ 6, because it doesn't impresses me enough, actually what @Socrates99 said is quite true for certain scenario.

A lot of that is just aging. When you are young many things seem wondrous.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Do you think people were that stupid? Are you seriously trying to tell me that prior to the ending of the Cold War, people did not understand that climate change was a real and dangerous thing (we didn't call it that, but we understood what was going on)?
.

you misunderstoof me. I actually agreed with you and commented that people were already afraid and aware of climate change in the 80s. awareness of climate change in fact goes back almost 80 years iirc.

you ignored my point, which was the following: in the 80s, climate change was simply one possible outcome of the future, depending on how economy/ecology developed. you still had opportunities, alternate outcomes, possibilities. in the year 2020 a climate catastrophe is guaranteed unless severe measures are taken. it's a certainty, an empiric fact. we now know numerically how many megatons of CO2 are left, how many years are left, until the catastrophe hits. the two situations are completely and utterly different.

You think I don't know that modern technology is addictive? I don't own a cell phone, and one of the reasons (besides cost; mobile phone service in Canada is insanely expensive) is because I've seen how addicted people can get. I don't want to join them.

This isn't all holier-than-thou, btw. Most of my waking hours are spent online, and I've noticed my own attention span being much shorter than it used to be. Sometimes I don't even finish drafting a post here before a stray thought about my current games will send me back there for one or two more levels. Or maybe someone will post a video, I'll watch or listen to it, and then get sidetracked by the recommendations that come up for me (shouldn't complain too much about that, though; I did find a new musical group I really like).

But at least I'm not so involved with gadgets that I'm walking into a tree or out into traffic. And thank goodness for the distracted driver laws that mean the taxi drivers are paying a bit more attention to the road than they are to their phones.

What would you call it when they (not all, but many) don't know how to have a basic spoken conversation anymore?

I've had to tell taxi drivers to put their phones down, because I don't feel safe with a driver whose attention is not wholly on the road. I've seen kids as young as 3 with their faces practically glued to their mother's phone because she's using it as an electronic babysitter. And yes, my mother didn't mind that she could park me in front of the TV on Saturday mornings and I'd be quietly absorbed in cartoons that make me cringe nowadays because of the content and how some types of characters were portrayed. But back in the mid-late 1960s, that wasn't considered questionable at all. And I was equally adept at entertaining myself with books or toys or persuading my grandmother to play ball with me or get out the crokinole board (I still have that, btw, though the playing pieces are long-gone).

I think we actually agree on everything here, the only difference is that you put individuals to a greater degree of blame than I do, which is totally legitimate. I think people are at fault for losing their social skills, but not entirely so.

what would I call this phenomenon? I think it's pathological addiction to novelty, and information which supersedes meaningful contact. the quantified self. a war for our attention spans. human metadata as the driving force behind much of (digital) economic development. the extinction of the social in favor of hardcore individualism and atomisation. there are some of the issues underlying the phenomenon we both observe.

I think each generation has their own challenges and to measure my pain is bigger than yours seems kind of pointless.

I wasn't trying to say that we've got it worse, but that our situation is meaningfully different from the one 30 or 40 years ago. that's a fact, what you mentioned is a value judgement, which I really don't want to get into. as you say, comparing a generations challenges is a fruitless exercise.

I never understood why world of warcraft designed the game to be such a gigantic time sink.

it is another psychological mechanism: the sunk-cost fallacy. (as well as manufacturing para-social relationships and making the good ole hedonic treadmill go slower, so people would have to work harder for endorphine rewards). people are less likely to abandon a game (even for a month or two) that they're put incredibly amounts of hours in, compared to "closed" games, like playing a match of age of empires, or a game of chess. no consequences after you're done playing, little attachment. you are 100% right that how many hours, if any, a subscriber pays is totally irrelevant to the companies profits. the entire reason for making the game more grindy with every update was to manipulate people into staying.

Now we are harder to please and to impress, the last game that blow my mind was oblivion, now everything have its lack somehow. Nothing so surprising any longer

all the recent FromSoft games were pretty good in almost every regard imagineable. some indie games still have that sense of wonder and surprise.

uh I think standards for games as a whole are lower, much lower. For the gameplay and story elements. They try to make up for it with fancy graphics, but even then that's only on triple a titles. Still tons of craptastic bad graphics games on steam that are new. And don't even get me started on mobile games.

I agree with this 100%. if you compare the standards that we have for, say, a narrative, in literature, cinema, tv and video games, it's absolutely abysmal for vidya. the companies have their priorities all wrong. it makes sense though, games nowadays aren't made to be good, but to sell. which is why we get deliberate lies about the product combined with pre-orders, DLC after launch and reviews, microtransactions, and so forth.

 

[Socrates99]

uh I think standards for games as a whole are lower, much lower. For the gameplay and story elements. They try to make up for it with fancy graphics, but even then that's only on triple a titles. Still tons of craptastic bad graphics games on steam that are new. And don't even get me started on mobile games.

Sure there's unplayable crap today, mobile games, especially microtransaction stuff is horrible. The buggy release with later hotfixes is an awful model. Cookie cutter cut and pasting like what's been done with assassin's creed, Halo and so on is awful. That doesn't take away from the fine tuning and advances over the years though. I used to spend hours playing excite bike but I can't spend five minutes on it now. Everquest hurts my eyes now. Genghis Khan 2 feels shallow compared to today's grand strategies.

I'm 40, I want to wax poetic and pretend every thing was better in the old days but...rose colored glasses. Some of the clunky designs of today that we complain about would have been cutting edge 20 years ago.

 

[Zardnaar]

Sure there's unplayable crap today, mobile games, especially microtransaction stuff is horrible. The buggy release with later hotfixes is an awful model. Cookie cutter cut and pasting like what's been done with assassin's creed, Halo and so on is awful. That doesn't take away from the fine tuning and advances over the years though. I used to spend hours playing excite bike but I can't spend five minutes on it now. Everquest hurts my eyes now. Genghis Khan 2 feels shallow compared to today's grand strategies.

I'm 40, I want to wax poetic and pretend every thing was better in the old days but...rose colored glasses. Some of the clunky designs of today that we complain about would have been cutting edge 20 years ago.

Some good up well though or the genres are extinct.

 

[Lexicus]

Now we are harder to please and to impress, the last game that blow my mind was oblivion, now everything have its lack somehow. Nothing so surprising any longer

I dunno mang like I feel like this kind of thing is impossible to separate from just getting older. It's easier to impress a wide-eyed 12-year old than a bitter 30-year-old.

 

[Zardnaar]

I dunno mang like I feel like this kind of thing is impossible to separate from just getting older. It's easier to impress a wide-eyed 12-year old than a bitter 30-year-old.

Add another 11 years for me.

Some retro games hold up well. Most don't.

 

[amadeus]

GOIN' TO PAMIDA TO GET SOME STUFF, YOU WANT TO COME WITH?

 

[H4run]

A lot of that is just aging. When you are young many things seem wondrous.

I dunno mang like I feel like this kind of thing is impossible to separate from just getting older. It's easier to impress a wide-eyed 12-year old than a bitter 30-year-old.

That's one factor perhaps, but I'm not sure, we got lots of old people who still pretty much still in a good mood playing game.

Do you guys ever live in a time where you stay near the radio to wait the song that you like? And when it finally come you feel so happy and recorded it to a cassette? I think this feeling of happiness is foreign for someone who never experienced such struggle, because when everything is under your finger tip and you just have to click it, the convenient don't increase your happiness but it decreases it instead.

Game also the same, now it requires very little effort to buy a game, to see the review (no more game magazine), in the convenient of your finger tip you can window-shop millions of game and you can make a transaction even in the toilet. Is this also a factor? Like the convenient that we have makes us less happy and harder to be please? Like a spoil kid?

 

[AdamCrock]

Let me get this straight. You leave your home every day?

It is just a road to work and back + the shop occasionally , not much of a sight seeing , nothing adventurous.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I dunno mang like I feel like this kind of thing is impossible to separate from just getting older. It's easier to impress a wide-eyed 12-year old than a bitter 30-year-old.

Sure there's unplayable crap today, mobile games, especially microtransaction stuff is horrible. The buggy release with later hotfixes is an awful model. Cookie cutter cut and pasting like what's been done with assassin's creed, Halo and so on is awful. That doesn't take away from the fine tuning and advances over the years though. I used to spend hours playing excite bike but I can't spend five minutes on it now. Everquest hurts my eyes now. Genghis Khan 2 feels shallow compared to today's grand strategies.

I'm 40, I want to wax poetic and pretend every thing was better in the old days but...rose colored glasses. Some of the clunky designs of today that we complain about would have been cutting edge 20 years ago.

interestingly enough I personally still get the sense of wonder and discovery from Morrowind, despite knowing every location, I still play Genghis Khan 2 and am not turned off by the interface at all, I like it in a way. I've never played EQ, but I did play WoW Classic for some time and I loved the graphics, even though they barely changed (at some point I turned the GFX down a little, not for performance, but because I preferred that look). It seems that your experiences aren't really universal in that regard. Sure, for some games we might've had rose-tinted glasses, but I personally cannot even come up with an example for myself. I still play Street Fighter on a goddamn Sega Genesis emulator and that **** has smoother controls than any game released in the last 20 years. We also have many, many people still playing Civ III / Civ IV, even though those are hella outdated, simply because they were superior games.

 

[Socrates99]

interestingly enough I personally still get the sense of wonder and discovery from Morrowind, despite knowing every location, I still play Genghis Khan 2 and am not turned off by the interface at all, I like it in a way. I've never played EQ, but I did play WoW Classic for some time and I loved the graphics, even though they barely changed (at some point I turned the GFX down a little, not for performance, but because I preferred that look). It seems that your experiences aren't really universal in that regard. Sure, for some games we might've had rose-tinted glasses, but I personally cannot even come up with an example for myself. I still play Street Fighter on a goddamn Sega Genesis emulator and that **** has smoother controls than any game released in the last 20 years. We also have many, many people still playing Civ III / Civ IV, even though those are hella outdated, simply because they were superior games.

It's not the interface. It's the simplicity of the decisions. In GK2 there's a mess of info but you can win while disregarding a lot of it and making similar across the board decisions. It felt deep and cutting edge when I dumped hours into it at 13 but now I have the Paradox grand strategies, Endless Legend, AoWIII, etc. It can't hold my attention anymore. Especially once I start rolling the map with Keshiks or Knights.

Loved them then but probably wouldn't give them a second look if they were made today. The nostalgia factor here is that I remember how much time I spent exploring every aspect of certain games in the 90s but when I go back to them today...I just can't find the magic.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

I don't really look on childhood with much fondness.

 

[H4run]

I don't really look on childhood with much fondness.

Yapma ya, don't be!

 

[cardgame]

I think I was still salty about what Runescape 2 turned into in 2009 all the way through 2013-2014. Kind of glad in retrospect though because I would have wasted another 4 years of my life before they would have burned my account with Runescape 3 anyway.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It is just a road to work and back + the shop occasionally , not much of a sight seeing , nothing adventurous.

The point is that you're leaving your home and going outside at all.

When I leave my home (apartment) it's to get the mail or take the garbage to the garbage chute. I don't physically go outside. Today marks two months since I was last outside.

It's been annoying, but on the other hand, a couple of restaurants don't have a problem delivering here when I tell them I haven't been anywhere - it means it's safer to deliver to me than it would be to someone who's out and about every day.

We also have many, many people still playing Civ III / Civ IV, even though those are hella outdated, simply because they were superior games.

I have yet to make it through a game of III, let alone IV (I have tried).