Video Games Went Down the Wrong Path!

And I need to make a trip to this:

16-bitbar.com/columbus

Games are free. Drinks...are not. Kind of the opposite of your Vegas casino.

The*Mad*Gamer wrote:

You want better control and immersion? Get an Occulus Rift, a Virtuix Omni, and a Gun controller. I got to play Alien Isolation this way and it damn near scare the shit out of me.

Probably scare the shit out of me also! I want high control but low to medium immersion... I don't want to get sucked into an entertainment medium I can't get out of!
I also played Space Invaders this weekend, the first video game I ever played and I remember at the pizza parlor there was a line for it! There was a guy there playing pinball shaking his head, saying that Pinball was much better! Little did he know what was coming at the time! HA

It was the most control I have ever felt in a game. Specifically there was a part when I was hiding in a locker then the xenomorph walked by. I instinctively leaned back and in game the character did the same. But she hit her head on the locker and the alien turned and killed me. I had to stop and have not used an occulus rift since then. I agree, low to medium immersion is the way to go, but if you get a chance I highly recommend trying the setup, it is an incredible experience. Heck just using the Rift with a steering wheel and pedal setup for Assetto Corsa in amazing. The problem with immersion is the higher you go, the more likely your brain will freakout until it gets used to it. Most people get very seasick when they first use a Rift, because your brain cannot handle the signals. They call it Virtual reality sickness and it is very similar to getting seasick.

sagrilarus wrote: That right there is the "wrong path" Mr. Weeks speaks of. I wouldn't call it the wrong path, I'd call one of the two parallel paths that just doesn't mean much to me -- "prettier is better." A focus on graphics is not a focus on immersion, it's just a focus on prettier paint on the same jalopy.

A fair statement. I will counter with graphics need to hit different levels for immersion for different people. The misdirection of the industry toward pretty graphics = better game is ofcourse a false economy which is quickly losing pace. The closer and closer we get to "full immersion graphics" as the tag line calls it, the closer and closer we are getting to the uncanny valley. Its the eyes. Those soulless dead eyes with the unmoving glimmer, staring back at you through the screen.

sagrilarus wrote: I want a new jalopy. I want to see new directions, and instead the first demo game for VR is Bullet Train, another First-Person Shooter with the same gameplay as every other First Person Shooter since Wolfenstein. I liked Wolfenstein, but I'm done with Wolfenstein and I'm not interested in the same game with "more realistic" graphics because it's the same damn game!

Though I know you are exaggerating, this is like saying every war game is like Little Wars. The difference between Wolf 3d and Half Life are similar to the differences between Axis and Allies and Memoir 44. They look similar to a casual onlooker, but they are very different games with very different approaches to the same style.

Gaming had to adapt to match the home market. Games like Gauntlet are made to eat quarters, that did not convert to home play. That is one of the reasons why the Tengen port of Gauntlet to the NES is crap but the home ports of Gauntlet Legends are actually alot of fun. Sure game development could have gone down a path where it would keep innovating, and there are always people who will, but you all know that these are businesses. Sadly innovation does not always sell. Take Sundance for example. It was an incredible Tim Skelly game released in 1979 that I am sure none of you know about. It was a pseudo 3d vector game with bouncing suns and moving panels. However it had a very high difficulty curve and flopped at trade shows and in its limited release because of it. Later was discovered to have a critical design flaw in that the daughter board was prone to shorting out the monitor and only a few are known to still exist.

sagrilarus wrote: To some extent I think the more limited graphics and processing forced publishers to take more risks, because they couldn't use paint to rerelease the same game. Back then creativity may have been the easier commodity to acquire on short notice.

I agree completely, and I think the indie gaming renaissance of the last few years has jolted gaming in ways that I think yall would appreciate. We are back to an era when a guy in a garage can make a mainstream game. Take something like Spelunky for example. Derek Yu created a game that took one part Pitfall, one part Spelunker, and one part Rogue, rolled them into a ball and created what is one of the best games of all time. Yes you have played a game like it, but you have also read a book or seen a movie based on the Hero's Journey. Not a good enough example? How about Super Hexagon? It is a Golden Age arcade game reinterpreted and set to a crazy soundtrack.

Wow that alien isolation stuff sounds super intense and cool

On the topic of long plays defeating the model: Like Barnes, I was a BMFer at Tempest. I sprained my wrist after notching a few million points over four hours on that game. I also loved that Star Wars game that Weeks mentioned in the first post, although I was awful at it. A friend and I got so good at Double Dragon that we started playing to see how many times we could kill each other before we reached the end with one life left. And I object to the idea that classic arcade games had no narrative: Dragon's Lair had tons of narrative, when you could actually find one that didn't overheat or skip (Laserdisc technology!) after 20 minutes.

Still, probably my favorite period from the arcade days was comparatively late in them, for me: Gauntlet. Having four people mixing it up was more fun than almost anything else ("Elf! Shot the food!"), especially when I was playing the Warrior and could push the others into Death ("Death in a box! Run!") so I could get away...

RobertB wrote: And I need to make a trip to this:

16-bitbar.com/columbus

Games are free. Drinks...are not. Kind of the opposite of your Vegas casino.

I went there. It was UNDERWHELMING. I expected a full-on arcade that just happened to have a bar in it. It is in fact a full-on bar that just happens to have lined its walls with a bunch of sub-average arcade machines. However, two doors down is a real dive-y lounge that was a good time.

It's true, a side benefit of limited processing and graphic power is the oddball characters and settings of the old days. Yars Revenge (a robotic space fly) and Qbert (an armless muppet with a bent nose)...wth? On top of that though, there are some things that modern 3d can't do. A game like Dig Dug can only be done in 2d.

For me, games went down the wrong path during the PS era of the late 90s and early 00's. When characters like the Prince of Persia or Cody from Final Fight went all grimdark to chase the M ratings. I checked out.

I really don't think that the "eating quarters" digs deep enough. When it comes down to it, what people see as being designed to take your quarters is something very subjective and not reflective of the actual artistical and commercial concerns of arcade games which were often expressed in subtler and often unknown to the general public ways. I think it's quite telling that Street Fighter II, which takes at best 5 minutes per play, and was the biggest revenue source of its time is not seen as a quarter muncher while other games which allow much longer play do.

The main sources of increased arcade revenue were often very basic stuff:

- Increased player counts (Fighters, beat'em ups, Gauntlet, X-Men)
- Shorter play cycles (Fighting and puzzle games got faster and faster over time, this is a big reason for that)
- Allowing continues (Continues were heavily favoured by Western operators as they increase revenue and eventually became industry standard but many classic titles either limit them or disallow continuing completely)
- Replacement of checkpoints in favour of instarespawn. (See, for example, Toaplan shmups as released in different regions)
- Reduced downtime (Faster menues, etc.)

Games that actively manipulated difficulty in an obvious attempt to kill the player are somewhat uncommon and are rarely mentioned in these discussions. The best examples I can think of are most beat'em ups by Konami, specially stuff like The Simpsons or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. More gimmicky games like Rail Chase were also more likely to pull this stuff, but when it comes down to it, those that were really douchy were the American operators.

Sag talked about people not wanting to put 50 cents into a machine, and this was a huge problem for operators because paying a quarter per play was fine in the 1980s, but was too low of a price a decade of inflation later. And they really didn't care about building a community or anything like that so American operators pushed hard for a faster game burnout through ideas like 3 minutes per play, coop in shmups or tweaked difficulty levels than the Japanese ever did. Really, a good half of all Japanese games I want to play had some fucked up thing done to them for release in the US. Double Dragon 3 didn't have a shop on the original release, for example.

RobertB wrote: Sag's absolutely right. In the mid-80's there were games that a good player could play for as long as the player could stay upright. My brother could play Robotron until he got bored or got enough points to win the monthly high-score contest. Heck, I could get 20-30 minutes off of Galaga or Xevious. That wasn't good business, and beat 'em ups fixed that problem. Twitch gaming and platforming went to home consoles, along with games that had storylines and plot.

The main advantage beat'em ups have from a revenue standpoint is cooperative play, though. Lenght-wise they aren't much different from most other games. It's also interesting to mention Xevious as I feel it was the game that moved gaming from endless point-scoring and into the realm of level design. It's definetively not the same kind of game as Galaga or Centipede.

I'm confused what you mean by "twitch gaming" because I can't think of any genre that was popular in arcades that could fit the bill that moved to consoles, specially after the fighting game boom.

Erik Twice wrote: I really don't think that the "eating quarters" digs deep enough. When it comes down to it, what people see as being designed to take your quarters is something very subjective and not reflective of the actual artistical and commercial concerns of arcade games which were often expressed in subtler and often unknown to the general public ways. I think it's quite telling that Street Fighter II, which takes at best 5 minutes per play, and was the biggest revenue source of its time is not seen as a quarter muncher while other games which allow much longer play do.

Maybe I misread you, but for me SFII is clearly not a quarter muncher in the same sense as a TMNT/Simpsons, Gauntlet, timed racers, rail guns, etc. These latter have mechanisms designed to knock _all_ the players off the machine whether it be cheap, powerful bosses, impossible swarms, or simply ending the game after one race regardless of position. Sure, SFII swallows a ton of quarters, but it's spread out amongst all the competitors in line. Plus, if you're better than those in attendance...you keep playing all day on your $.25. The machine doesn't have a cheap trick to knock you off.

"Winner stays, Loser pays".

Erik Twice wrote:

I'm confused what you mean by "twitch gaming" because I can't think of any genre that was popular in arcades that could fit the bill that moved to consoles, specially after the fighting game boom.

Yeah, thinking about it, there really weren't any home games of the day that filled the niche that Robotron and Defender filled. Activision's Kaboom for the 2600 was pretty much pure reflex, to the point of it being Zen and the Art of the Paddle Controller. And that might have been it,

Here's a pic of the Atari 800 Robotron control setup. Since I was playing it on a 13" set, it wasn't quite as much fun, but it was still pretty good.

http://imgur.com/N7INs9c

hotseatgames wrote:

I went there. It was UNDERWHELMING. I expected a full-on arcade that just happened to have a bar in it. It is in fact a full-on bar that just happens to have lined its walls with a bunch of sub-average arcade machines. However, two doors down is a real dive-y lounge that was a good time.

Aw man, you're breaking my heart. I was looking forward to getting owned by those old '80s games.

Mr. White wrote: Sure, SFII swallows a ton of quarters, but it's spread out amongst all the competitors in line. Plus, if you're better than those in attendance...you keep playing all day on your $.25. The machine doesn't have a cheap trick to knock you off.

The point I'm trying to raise here is: Why is a game in which a credit must be consumed in less than five minutes not considered a quarter muncher? Limiting play to one three minute match* is one of those "cheap tricks", it was the way they kept you putting credits in the machine. And so was "winner stays, loser pays"!

After all, not everyone can win and play forever so someone's quarters are always being munched. Every three minutes, probably even faster than that, Street Fighter II munches a credit which is exactly in line with arcade standards of the time after accounting for the two players. Probably a bit lower than that, actually, since few games to actually have a barrier at five minutes, that's simply where they stop being nice and accessible.

Ultimately, what I think is that the monicker of "credit muncher" and associated rethoric seems to be based more on a perception of what is fair, or a good deal than on actual expense. And what we regard as a good deal is very subjective and heavily washed over by marketing and other outside factors.

I see your point, and maybe the 'quarter muncher' is based on what we deem 'fair'.

All I know is that when I played SFII in the arcades, my $5 would last a lot longer than playing something like TMNT. Either because I was able to win some rounds and stay on the machine or I had to move to the end of the line and wait my turn. With something like TMNT, you'd get to the point in the game where you're pumping in quarters every 30sec as you try to beat some cheap boss who's too fast, does too much damage, and you have no really good way to block.

Plus, again, I didn't feel I was cheated if another player beat me (SFII). If it was just cheap programming (TMNT) on the other hand...I felt they stole my quarter.