Oldest gamer I know

I’m also admitting I’m half a century old. I’m about 110 hours into PC Forbidden West, and I sometimes question why am I still gaming. Good to see my life choices are still valid. 🤣.

I still have my late 70s Atari 2600, and I started PC gaming on my dad’s IBM XT with glorious games like Spectrum Holobyte’s PT-109 and Falcon.
 
The biggest danger for me is that my hobby (which pays quite a few of my bills) is designing and building modular synthesizer circuits. It's so satisfying. But a game like Factorio or Satisfactory or Astroneer will SUCK ME AWAY FROM MY SYNTH DESIGN because games like that scratch the exact same itch that circuit design does
 
sharknice said:
You guys are still just being old grumps with rose tinted glasses for the past.

Yeah some new games are bad, but plenty of old games were absolute garbage too.


There's plenty of great games that don't do that stuff. And a lot of this stuff you're complaining about is easily avoidable and on you for agreeing to it. Early Access, wait for the full release. Buggy launch, wait for a patch. Microtransactions, don't buy them. Social media, why are you even looking at that? Shitty game, don't play it. There's so many actual good games to play. And you can always just play older games if you want.


Not every game from way back then included mod tools, a lot of them did not at all and people just figured out how to do things on their own.
There are plenty games that include mod tools (probably about the same as did back then) and some are going well beyond what they did back in the day. Look at what Fortnite is doing with UEFN. It's so much easier than it was back then It's something kids dreamed up. And on top of that there are game engines like Unreal and Unity that are completely free to make a full stand alone gams with.
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Lets turn this into a pissing contest. Name some of these good modern games and bad old games. Lets set the epoch to 2006 for defining what old is, since that is when I would consider the microtransaction trend and social media influence to have started: Gaming is for everyone, people who play Farmville are just as much a gamer as people who play Halo, etc.

So...

1986-2005 = old
2006-2025 = new
 
Huh. We all have rose-colored glasses with older games. The lackluster ones just fade away, while new games we love or hate afresh

How about Daikatana? Never played the game, but I vividly remember the offputting publicity campaign
 
AnalogOzerik said:
Huh. We all have rose-colored glasses with older games. The lackluster ones just fade away, while new games we love or hate afresh

How about Daikatana? Never played the game, but I vividly remember the offputting publicity campaign
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Daikatana is an objectively bad game. Aside from the game design issues, it also has a slew of technical issues even with the Romero-endorsed 1.3 fanpatch. One of the reasons it took so long to release was because they couldn't fix all the issues and Eidos wanted it to go out the door after spending $40 million on it (games were just starting to break the 8-figure budget barrier at the time). John Romero, for his part, said his experience in creating that game humbled him and that he wasn't the rock star he believed himself to be after being part of the team that made Doom.

One of the worst parts about Daikatana is the AI. Romero wanted the game to be an "expert's" FPS where you couldn't just run around in a lone power fantasy, so he gave us two companions that have their own health pools and friendly fire. That wouldn't have been an issue had they actually had someone competent at creating AI at the time, like Steven Polge who created Reaper Bot for Quake. But the AI is less than rudimentary, often failing at simple pathfinding and traversing terrain. It also has a long delay to the actions they perform, perhaps to still give importance to the player, but that delay makes them utterly useless. What's worse is that when they are able to fire on enemies, they do so with no concern of the players or the other companion's positioning. So you either have to take it slow and babysit the AI since it's game over if either one of them dies, or command them to stay at the start of every level while you complete it yourself. This defeats the entire purpose of Romero's concept.

It had some interesting concepts, but was a failure in execution. One of the most infamous failures in the game industry. The war of words between Romero and producer Mike Wilson afterward is just as legendary. Good example of a bad "old" game, but it's really low-hanging fruit.
 
Armenius said:
.. One of the most infamous failures in the game industry. The war of words between Romero and producer Mike Wilson afterward is just as legendary. Good example of a bad "old" game, but it's really low-hanging fruit.
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I did NOT know any of that, good lord what a disaster. I engage with games for the sake of their art and design much more than for the challenge. God-mode and a pensive stroll through a chaotic level with explosions everywhere is a lot more fun to me than -- good grief -- a pair of incompetent murderous companions

Any insight into the ET game for Atari? May be the lowest of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to bad games
 
AnalogOzerik said:
I did NOT know any of that, good lord what a disaster. I engage with games for the sake of their art and design much more than for the challenge. God-mode and a pensive stroll through a chaotic level with explosions everywhere is a lot more fun to me than -- good grief -- a pair of incompetent murderous companions

Any insight into the ET game for Atari? May be the lowest of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to bad games
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Romero has an autobiography out called Doom Guy: Life in First Person where he goes into some more detail on Daikatana's development. I haven't read it yet, but people say it's really good. Romero claims to have hyperthymesia, so that probably explains why people say it has really good pacing and detail.

E.T. falls out of my 1986-2005 range, but the game only had 5 weeks of development time from concept to cartridge production because Steven Spielberg wanted the game out in time for Christmas. The lead designer brought his concept to Spielberg and he rejected the idea, wanting simpler gameplay mechanics like Pac-Man. The designer went forward with his concept anyway and that is what people played. In relative monetary terms it was probably as big a financial disaster than Daikatana because Atari spent $25 million in 1982 money for the licensing rights to E.T. and produced 5 million copies of the game 2.5 million copies were sold at $9 a piece, but a third of those copies were returned for refunds (Daikatana reportedly sold only 40,000 copies at $30 a piece when it came out in 2000). This single boondoggle led to the video game crash of 1983 because the movie was so beloved by people that the game soured the public's opinions on video games as a whole.
 
AnalogOzerik said:
Any insight into the ET game for Atari? May be the lowest of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to bad games
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Adding on, some people have improved the game significantly (caveat, I haven't played it this way) http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ Some of those changes could have likely happened with a couple more weeks of development. Falling into pits unexpectedly wasn't ever fun, although I'm a youngin and played ET much later than release, and I was weird and read manuals. Most of the Atari library doesn't really need a manual to play, but ET is a deeper game, and the goals are non-obvious, but there's no way to have in game help, so that's a factor, too.
 
Since we're talking about bad 2600 games, anyone remember Swordquest Earthworld? That game pissed me off so bad.
I traded Combat for it and regretted it instantly.

I think there was another one called Fireworld too.
 
Oldest game i seen did not know what to do was Spacewar but was not mine a friend of a friend neighbor.
 
Armenius said:
Lets turn this into a pissing contest. Name some of these good modern games and bad old games. Lets set the epoch to 2006 for defining what old is, since that is when I would consider the microtransaction trend and social media influence to have started: Gaming is for everyone, people who play Farmville are just as much a gamer as people who play Halo, etc.

So...

1986-2005 = old
2006-2025 = new
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Going by that time frame, the year 1999 when Microsoft bought FASA and KILLED Mechwarrior. They basically turned it from what felt like a simulator to an arcade game. I had played MW 1-3, and I was even tickled when the Voodoo edition came out. I'll never forget that first time I launched a PPC and saw the mountain next to it glow as it passed it.
 
I will be turning 50 in a few months. I have known Starfalcon, a member on this forum, for over 35 years IRL.

My dad had a pong set at one point. My grandma bought us an Atari 2600, and my dad got a Commodore 64 which ended up changing life directions for multiple people. I think I'm in IT now because of that machine. We also gave it to a younger kid when we got a Commodore 128D and he disassembled and reassembled it. He eventually became a "white hat" hacker as a career. My uncle gave us his old Tandy, and eventually in '98 I purchased my first PC on my own.

I hope to game as long as I can...
 
Hawkwing74 said:
I will be turning 50 in a few months. I have known Starfalcon, a member on this forum, for over 35 years IRL.

My dad had a pong set at one point. My grandma bought us an Atari 2600, and my dad got a Commodore 64 which ended up changing life directions for multiple people. I think I'm in IT now because of that machine. We also gave it to a younger kid when we got a Commodore 128D and he disassembled and reassembled it. He eventually became a "white hat" hacker as a career. My uncle gave us his old Tandy, and eventually in '98 I purchased my first PC on my own.

I hope to game as long as I can...
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