Controversial Retro Opinions

[ScouserInExile]

2 hours ago, Colonel Panic said:

I dunno how people couldn’t notice the awful dot crawl you get from composite. 

That's not a thing. You're just typing random words now.

 

2 hours ago, Dudley said:

Gran Turismo certainly suffered from completely losing sight it was supposed to be a game at some point, GT1 is actually pretty tight in its structure.

 

Like, remake GT1 but give it 24 car fields and GT Sport's car line up and no other changes and you've probably got the best GT by country mile.

 

You're completely right about GT. I used to be a huge fan, but it became a full vanity project after the third or fourth iteration. GT5 and GT6 were hugely dull, 6 especially, and I haven't bothered since. The fact they started to use rolling starts to hide the poor AI  - giving the CPU cars a half lap head start - really underlined that they weren't about racing anymore.

 

 

2 hours ago, ulala said:

grinding to unlock newer faster cars is very very boring

Controversially, this is my favourite parts of racing games. I'd rather by running a Toyota Yaris around a track than an F1 car.

[Dudley]

I do think the worst thing PGR3 did was remove the slow cars certainly.

 

I've done this a few times on here but on a game that supports it, like all GTs and Forzas, one of the cool ways to play a game is to start everyone in the slowest class of car in the game.

 

Whoever finishes last moves up a class for the next race.

 

Very quickly you have the very best drivers fighting to survive in something very slow, the people who don't play racing games in something that allows them to compete and everyone else in a big cloud alternating between going for a win and fighting to avoid last.

 

It means great mutliplayer races for everyone regardless of how good everyone actually is and every race is a new challenge as people getting promoted has you, whoever you are, sliding further back.

 

We spent fucking ages doing this in PGR2 when I used to work for GAME.  PGR3 made it essentially impossible by removing all cars under 170mph.

[Protocol Penguin]

I would’ve put down the opinion that Turrican and Turrican 2 belong in the same category as Shadow of the Beast, being glorified Amiga tech demos that are utterly lousy games to play, but I’ll row that back a bit. Turrican 1 and 2 are still among the best looking and sounding OCS Amiga games, and they do get a fair bit right (the control scheme, given the lack of multi-button controller), and it’s an interesting  fusion of its influences; Metroid, Contra, Psychonics Oscar, etc. However... the level design, enemy layouts and lots of miscellaneous irritating things in the gameplay design really drag the Turricans down to “mediocre Europlatform shooters with hardware-pushing presentation” status. They aren’t classic games, rather iconic games, and I couldn’t recommend playing them now other than to get a sense of how capable the vanilla Amiga was at the hands of technically competent programmers.

[Wiper]

33 minutes ago, Protocol Penguin said:

I would’ve put down the opinion that Turrican and Turrican 2 belong in the same category as Shadow of the Beast, being glorified Amiga tech demos that are utterly lousy games to play, but I’ll row that back a bit. Turrican 1 and 2 are still among the best looking and sounding OCS Amiga games, and they do get a fair bit right (the control scheme, given the lack of multi-button controller), and it’s an interesting  fusion of its influences; Metroid, Contra, Psychonics Oscar, etc. However... the level design, enemy layouts and lots of miscellaneous irritating things in the gameplay design really drag the Turricans down to “mediocre Europlatform shooters with hardware-pushing presentation” status. They aren’t classic games, rather iconic games, and I couldn’t recommend playing them now other than to get a sense of how capable the vanilla Amiga was at the hands of technically competent programmers.

 

On 14/02/2020 at 22:58, watusi said:

Super Turrican is the best game on the SNES. 

 

[watusi]

Haha! I agree that the turricans on the Amiga play poorly now. Most Amiga games that aren’t mouse controlled do. 
 

Super Turrican on the SNES is a different beast altogether. It benefits massively from a better controller. I just love the music too. 
 

Super Turrican 2 can get to fuck though. 

[Protocol Penguin]

I’m not going to pass comment on Super Turrican, because unfortunately I’ve never played it. Looks like a bit of remix and reimagining of Turricans 1 and 2, having some YouTube footage. But it’s not an Amiga game, so I wouldn’t judge it as such even if I had played enough of it to decide.

[Clipper]

2 hours ago, Dudley said:

 

Grinding is boring.

 

There you go solved

 

Completely 100% true I absolutely hate grind.

 

EDIT - and to be clear on this - I regard grind as being parts of the game I am forced to repeat to unlock stuff. I am sure there are edge cases but if I am playing a racing game (for instance) and I have to do a race more than once to unlock a new track because I dont have enough "madeup currency" then that is grind.

 

I'd actually prefer it was all unlocked and I get to choose how I play the game not how the designer chose to stop me at certain gateposts

 

[Dudley]

I'd call grind in a racing game having 5000 near identical tournaments to pretend you're not grinding.

 

GT always had all the tracks unlocked and an arcade mode with most of the stock cars.

[dumpster]

Controversial opinion:  The Last Of Us or Tomb Raider are simple shooting gallery games that are dressed up with cinematics that you walk through. Although you still have control of the character through these cinematics, you cannot go off anywhere and do things. You have to walk from A to B and you meet character C and talk to them while they lead you to location D where you will talk to character E, and so on.

 

What this means is that , whilst you have to move the stick to make your character follow the script , the actual interactivity is no better than Dragon's Lair or Space Ace. You may as well be watching a movie. You're moving a stick and controlling a character, as long as you make that character go where they tell you to go.

 

The outcome is that critically acclaimed games like Tomb Raider and TLOU are average shooting games dressed up with amazing cinematics to distract you about how repetitive the shooty bits are. If you stripped out those cinematics you would be left with a slow clunky shooter, and we would realise what weak games they are and go back to Contra on Snes instead, which is faster, more exciting, is 100% gameplay and beats most modern games hands down.

[dumpster]

Further to the above, if you want an example of a game that has the cut scenes, explosions, pre scripted action balanced with interactivity, smooth gameplay and lots of fun, the pinnacle of this kind of thing is Resident Evil 6. People didn't like it and it strays too far from the Resident Evil style, but if you like what Resi6 is trying to do then it is one of the best of its type and it is way more fun than many highly rated titles.

[ulala]

52 minutes ago, dumpster said:

Controversial opinion:  The Last Of Us or Tomb Raider are simple shooting gallery games that are dressed up with cinematics that you walk through. Although you still have control of the character through these cinematics, you cannot go off anywhere and do things. You have to walk from A to B and you meet character C and talk to them while they lead you to location D where you will talk to character E, and so on.

 

What this means is that , whilst you have to move the stick to make your character follow the script , the actual interactivity is no better than Dragon's Lair or Space Ace. You may as well be watching a movie. You're moving a stick and controlling a character, as long as you make that character go where they tell you to go.

 

The outcome is that critically acclaimed games like Tomb Raider and TLOU are average shooting games dressed up with amazing cinematics to distract you about how repetitive the shooty bits are. If you stripped out those cinematics you would be left with a slow clunky shooter, and we would realise what weak games they are and go back to Contra on Snes instead, which is faster, more exciting, is 100% gameplay and beats most modern games hands down.

 

 

this applies to just about every single game ever made

[Kevvy Metal]

Here is a totally controversial retro opinion of mine, that I feel totally holds true. 
 

The very UK centric microcomputer line from its 8-bit generation of the ZX Spectrum/Comodore 64/Amstrad/BBC Micro, to the 16-bit days of the Amiga & ST have a collective library of games that are 90% absolutely awful. 
My nostalgic childhood memories do lie here as I owned a Spectrum then an ST and had many Amiga playing pals. 
It’s mainly memories of playing absolute dross. The classics are few and far between. 
 

We missed out by the NES / Famicom not being so popular over here, as the fruit of cutting edge game development at that time was on that platform, and others Japanese systems like the PC Engine. 

[Dudley]

You were doing very well until you tried to claim the NES wasn't 90% awful games too.  Or literally every machine before commercial dev got too expensive.

[ulala]

11 minutes ago, Kevvy Metal said:

Here is a totally controversial retro opinion of mine, that I feel totally holds true. 
 

The very UK centric microcomputer line from its 8-bit generation of the ZX Spectrum/Comodore 64/Amstrad/BBC Micro, to the 16-bit days of the Amiga & ST have a collective library of games that are 90% absolutely awful. 
My nostalgic childhood memories do lie here as I owned a Spectrum then an ST and had many Amiga playing pals. 
It’s mainly memories of playing absolute dross. The classics are few and far between. 
 

We missed out by the NES / Famicom not being so popular over here, as the fruit of cutting edge game development at that time was on that platform, and others Japanese systems like the PC Engine. 

 

I agree it was mostly awful, but thats because it was easy and cheap for people to make games for them. You could literally code a game in your bedroom and become rich and famous almost overnight (or rather famous in the schoolyard).

 

How many spectrum games are there? Tens of thousands. From basic type-ins to classics. Of course there was bound to be a lot of dross.

 

Is it fair to compare these games, that a large proportion copied for free, to a closed system like the NES where Nintendo had an iron grip on what got published, and a big cut of the profits too?

 

The NES wasn't popular in the UK because of...

 

It's release day - it was far too late

Nobody could have afforded the price of the games

No piracy

 

By the time it was released, we were very happy with the Amiga, and console players with their master systems - and looking forward to the 89 release of the Megadrive which really did for the UK microcomputer industry.

 

And despite the "nintendo" seal of quality, lets face it, most of the NES games are difficult, derivative and poor too

 

[partious]

1 hour ago, dumpster said:

Controversial opinion:  The Last Of Us or Tomb Raider are simple shooting gallery games that are dressed up with cinematics that you walk through. Although you still have control of the character through these cinematics, you cannot go off anywhere and do things. You have to walk from A to B and you meet character C and talk to them while they lead you to location D where you will talk to character E, and so on.

 

What this means is that , whilst you have to move the stick to make your character follow the script , the actual interactivity is no better than Dragon's Lair or Space Ace. You may as well be watching a movie. You're moving a stick and controlling a character, as long as you make that character go where they tell you to go.

 

The outcome is that critically acclaimed games like Tomb Raider and TLOU are average shooting games dressed up with amazing cinematics to distract you about how repetitive the shooty bits are. If you stripped out those cinematics you would be left with a slow clunky shoter, and we would realise what weak games they are and go back to Contra on Snes instead, which is faster, more exciting, is 100% gameplay and beats most modern games hands down.

 

Surely badmouthing Naughty Dog cinematic games (or the modern Tomb Raider games inspired by them) and concluding that Contra on snes is more fun is about as uncontroversial as it gets in the retro and arcade folder?

 

[Clipper]

20 minutes ago, Kevvy Metal said:

Here is a totally controversial retro opinion of mine, that I feel totally holds true. 
 

The very UK centric microcomputer line from its 8-bit generation of the ZX Spectrum/Comodore 64/Amstrad/BBC Micro, to the 16-bit days of the Amiga & ST have a collective library of games that are 90% absolutely awful. 
My nostalgic childhood memories do lie here as I owned a Spectrum then an ST and had many Amiga playing pals. 
It’s mainly memories of playing absolute dross. The classics are few and far between. 
 

We missed out by the NES / Famicom not being so popular over here, as the fruit of cutting edge game development at that time was on that platform, and others Japanese systems like the PC Engine. 

90% of games on any platform are awful.

 

We missed out on the NES not being popular here? It didn't come out til 1987! By then the home micros had been around for over 5 years! even if you take the 1985 US release we'd had 5 years of micros including 3 years of speccy and c64.

 

So whilst these controversial retro opinions are usually subjective this one is factually wrong.

[Lorfarius]

I think it was more to do with Nintendo didn't have a clue as to how to handle things on actually getting stuff out to the wider world. They were trying to get suppliers on board but struggled with it being a Japanese company and had to rely on some ropey third party dealers.

[ScouserInExile]

16 hours ago, Clipper said:

 

I'd actually prefer it was all unlocked and I get to choose how I play the game not how the designer chose to stop me at certain gateposts

Is this not down to adding an element of progression? Like Doom drip feeding in the weapons as you go through the levels? The MSR / PGR series gradually gave you access to better and better cars, which made you feel like you were actually progressing through the game, rather than just aimless unfettered access to everything from the start.

 

11 hours ago, Dudley said:

 

GT always had all the tracks unlocked and an arcade mode with most of the stock cars.

I remember there being a bit of fuss when GT4 came out and the Endurance mode was locked until you'd completed 25% of the game. It seemed to me to be a response to the fact that people worked out in GT3 that you could take a starter car and almost immediately run it in an endurance race that would bet you thousands of credits and a 1/4 chance of winning an essentially game breaking Formula 1 car.

 

I think 5 and 6 went for full xp levels, with events locked away until you got to a certain driver level. The Forza Motorsport series did this from the first iteration.

[Kevvy Metal]

Let me rephrase the 90% is awful thing, to get away from percentages. There's thousands of games on all these platforms and yes. Loads are rubbish. 

 

From my perspective, there's only a very slight few old UK microcomputer games that were even worth playing then not even considering in the modern day. The Minter stuff holds up, and some of the isometric platformers and a very small number of odd and experimental games. I love Mercenary for example. 

 

The NES has tonnes of games that are still fun today and even feel really relevant and pure to play. The action platformer was in an evergreen state even then back in the 80's. 

[Clipper]

Just now, ScouserInExile said:

Is this not down to adding an element of progression? Like Doom drip feeding in the weapons as you go through the levels? The MSR / PGR series gradually gave you access to better and better cars, which made you feel like you were actually progressing through the game, rather than just aimless unfettered access to everything from the start.

 

 

It is not aimless if the structure of the game is still there as a choice. So the career is there and you can go from race to race etc and progress through cars if you want.

 

If you don't you have a "free play" mode where you can pick and choose the cars and races you want to do however you want to do them.

 

This counts doubly for a long running franchise, if I have played Forza1 thru 7 why on earth do I have to be locked into the same progression system on every release? I know it , I know the system I've played it 7 times in a row!

 

Just treat me like an adult and gfive me the option to play the races how I want OR follow a career mode.

[ulala]

 

Anything that's permanently locked behind a grind tier, or stupid difficulty is annoying.

 

There are games i've paid for with cars i cannot drive, and levels that i cannot see.

 

every game should come with a way of bypassing such things

[Clipper]

15 minutes ago, Kevvy Metal said:

Let me rephrase the 90% is awful thing, to get away from percentages. There's thousands of games on all these platforms and yes. Loads are rubbish. 

 

From my perspective, there's only a very slight few old UK microcomputer games that were even worth playing then not even considering in the modern day. The Minter stuff holds up, and some of the isometric platformers and a very small number of odd and experimental games. I love Mercenary for example. 

 

The NES has tonnes of games that are still fun today and even feel really relevant and pure to play. The action platformer was in an evergreen state even then back in the 80's. 

Or you can argue that the consoles were flooded with those types of games because they were an "easy win" on the consoles and suited the basic control methods they had available. Playing them now you realise alot of it is "ten a penny"  platformers.

 

The 8 bit micros had huge variety including text adventures and experimental stuff inc Minter but also Braybrook and Mike Singleton and Ultimate(im not keen on them but see the appeal) and Woakes and and and and - the "fruit of cutting edge games development" was NOT just on the consoles at all... to claim that ignores a huge chunk of games and gaming history. This sort of revisionism grinds my gears.

 

Point is micros, like all platforms, had their fair share of rubbish but were also packed with great games and experiences and experimental stuff... and inspired a whole generation of coders and creatives. The consoles appeared later here (and US) but that was a positive for us not a negative. Also the idea it was UK centric isn't strictly true... the US sold masses of C64s before NES launched there (2 million a year I think) and there were plenty of micro games there for c64 and atari 8 bits before the consoles took over. It just took longer for consoles to take over in UK, the US market for micros was there in 82-86

 

 

[Kevvy Metal]

11 minutes ago, Clipper said:

Or you can argue that the consoles were flooded with those types of games because they were an "easy win" on the consoles and suited the basic control methods they had available. Playing them now you realise alot of it is "ten a penny"  platformers.

 

The 8 bit micros had huge variety including text adventures and experimental stuff inc Minter but also Braybrook and Mike Singleton and Ultimate(im not keen on them but see the appeal) and Woakes and and and and - the "fruit of cutting edge games development" was NOT just on the consoles at all... to claim that ignores a huge chunk of games and gaming history. This sort of revisionism grinds my gears.

 

Point is micros, like all platforms, had their fair share of rubbish but were also packed with great games and experiences and experimental stuff... and inspired a whole generation of coders and creatives. The consoles appeared later here (and US) but that was a positive for us not a negative. Also the idea it was UK centric isn't strictly true... the US sold masses of C64s before NES launched there (2 million a year I think) and there were plenty of micro games there for c64 and atari 8 bits before the consoles took over. It just took longer for consoles to take over in UK, the US market for micros was there in 82-86

 

 

 

See, well that's fine. This is my opinion and I totally disagree with you, Micro computers were my childhood experience of games and I've now revisited everything all recently. 

I find almost nothing of interest or any worth really in that whole microcomputer library where as the NES - which is far more new to me - is an absolute treasure trove of amazing action platformers. Not ten a penny at all, more the genre in it's hey-day. 

[matt0]

On the 8 bit home computers you got incredibly ambitious games like The Sentinel, Elite, Wizardry, Rogue (mother fucking Rogue! Imagine picking that out from a bargin bin of Mastertronic Spectrum games!), the Ultima series (all the way up to 6, which got a C64 version!), Rebelstar, Stunt Car Racer, Exile, Pool Of Radiance, Paradroid, Prince Of Persia... all easily the equals of anything on the NES or Master system when taken at their own merits.

 

Rogue alone is still magnificent after all these years and the blueprint for so many modern games. Rebelstar is another one, the seed of what became X-com and therefore the ancestor of that entire branch of modern tactics games.

[Wiper]

I feel a bit bad for arguing any point made in here (particularly as it's already being argued), but I'd also disagree with the "home consoles good, micros bad" perspective, to a point. 

 

I do agree that the ratio is different - the sheer volume of games put out for the micros means they do have an overwhelming amount of rubbish on them, even moreso than the consoles of the time. But in terms of the number of games which still hold their quality I think they at the very least match their console brethren, albeit not necessarily in the same genres. 

 

The vast majority of computer platformers and run 'n' guns, for example, have aged awfully, particularly compared to the general quality of console games in those genres, 8- and 16-bit eras. But there's a wealth of puzzle, adventure, RPG and strategy games on the systems which hold up fantastically well, and overall there are at least as many home computer games I return to as console games, even if we choose to imagine that I suddenly like Mario and Zelda games.

 

I don't want to create a list of games, but as a brief example, the combined works of Bullfrog, Jeff Minter, Lucasfilm, Origin, Mike Singleton and Sensible Software provide a wealth of brilliant titles on their own (dropping Bullfrog and Sensi if we're only talking 8-bit). Not many great platformers between them, admittedly, but even sticking to that handful of "big names" we get a great set of games, and that's without recourse to the less prolific/less "reliable" developers. 

[Lorfarius]

I don't get Jeff Minters games, never have and always been very unimpressed every time I've tried one. Had more fun with stuff like R-Type than those Camel games.

[ScouserInExile]

24 minutes ago, Lorfarius said:

I don't get Jeff Minters games, never have and always been very unimpressed every time I've tried one. Had more fun with stuff like R-Type than those Camel games.

o/

 

I remember a mate excitedly showing me the "amazing"' Attack Of The Mutant Camels on C64 and just really not understanding why he thought it was so great. 

[ulala]

22 minutes ago, ScouserInExile said:

I remember a mate excitedly showing me the "amazing"' Attack Of The Mutant Camels on C64 and just really not understanding why he thought it was so great. 

 

Isn't it just ripped off from start wars/ defender?

[Qazimod]

1 hour ago, Lorfarius said:

I don't get Jeff Minters games, never have and always been very unimpressed every time I've tried one. Had more fun with stuff like R-Type than those Camel games.

 

They're hit-and-miss for me. I wasn't keen on Sheep in Space or Hovver Bovver, I liked AMC and the Tempests, and Iridis Alpha is up in my top 10 all-time favourite games.  

[ulala]

1 hour ago, Wiper said:

I feel a bit bad for arguing any point made in here (particularly as it's already being argued), but I'd also disagree with the "home consoles good, micros bad" perspective, to a point. 

 

I do agree that the ratio is different - the sheer volume of games put out for the micros means they do have an overwhelming amount of rubbish on them, even moreso than the consoles of the time. But in terms of games which still hold their quality I think they at the very least match their console brethren, albeit not necessarily in the same genres. 

 

The vast majority of computer platformers and run 'n' guns, for example, have aged awfully, particularly compared to the general quality of console games in those genres, 8- and 16-bit eras. But there's a wealth of puzzle, adventure, RPG and strategy games on the systems which hold up fantastically well, and overall there are at least as many home computer games I return to as console games, even if we choose to imagine that I suddenly like Mario and Zelda games.

 

I don't want to create a list of games, but as a brief example, the combined works of Bullfrog, Jeff Minter, Lucasfilm, Origin, Mike Singleton and Sensible Software provide a wealth of brilliant titles on their own (dropping Bullfrog and Sensi if we're only talking 8-bit). Not many great platformers between them, admittedly, but even sticking to that handful of "big names" we get a great set of games, and that's without recourse to the less prolific/less "reliable" developers. 

 

My point exactly

 

when you have an open platform like the microcomputers where absolutely anyone can make a game and self-publish a tape - of course the quality will be less. There is no gatekeeper of standards.

 

Nintendo had a huge advantage, in theory, of producing the carts themselves and of course taking a cut for the production. Far fewer games, with an element of "seal of quality". In reality, i think they just checked if the carts worked or had any game-breaking bugs/ crashes. It certainly didn't stop some absolute stinkers being released.

 

The NES had 700 releases, the Famicom had about 1000. There was a lot of crossover. Compared to the micros, its far fewer. The ZX Spectrum had 12,000 games released.