I still play Snake on my mom’s monochrome Nokia phone.
It’s a story of pursue of your desire without end.
Mario is still a story of raging after you held the button for 0.2 sec too long.
How old?
Modern games do not come close to the excitement of titles like
Civilisation (the original)
UFO
Doom
Warcraft II
Lemmings
For every great old game you remember, there were dozens of crappy titles. There aren’t any less good games nowadays, just more bad or just mediocre ones that you can still remember.
Even the good ones that I remember turn out to be shockingly bad when I go back to try and research them. All my old heroes. Bah.
Cas 
True - I tried to play Civ not so long ago and it did feel just a little (a lot) clunky.
Most old (pre 1990) games suffer from severe flaws and very limited graphics.
One must have played them back then to enjoy them today (nostalgia).
The sweet spot is in the games released between 1994 and 2000.
The PS1/Win95-98 generation is IMO the golden age of video games, on all platforms.
Graphics were just right: not too flashy, and believable enough.
The right mix of art, technology and “fun”.
Today’s games are mere technological show offs.
And they (guess who) seem to put more budget on the trailers than on the games themselves.
1994-2000 was pretty good. I still enjoy things like Sim City 2000. It’s almost irrelevant how good the graphics of a game are as long as the level of detail is appropriate to the game. Most old recognizable games, especially Nintendo and Sega ones, are extremely good even if they lack modern theatrical elements.
Having been around since the dawn of computer games (yes I even played SpaceWar on the original hardware though it was already a curiosity by then) I feel as if I’ve seen several “golden ages” come and go.
Some of the middling 8-bit games on the C64 and Spectrum were particularly good fun at the time but nowadays would be lambasted for their punishing difficulty which was a hangover from the concept of arcade games which milked money from punters. Back in the day I absolutely loved Paradroid, Uridium, Iridis Alpha, Ancipital, Dropzone, and a fair few others on my 64, but when I go back and try to play them now they are barely worthy of my attentions, as they frustrate in nearly every way. Sob sob. That’s why I spend my days remaking them so they’re good!
Cas
The difficulty was also right IMO in the 1994-2000 games.
Before that you had to have the reflexes of a ninja to have the smallest chance with shoot’em ups and platformers. Or to become a bookworm with RPGs, keeping your own notes of everything in the game world.
After 2000, even gran’ma could finish your game. No more challenge.
Just sit back, follow the scripted line and enjoy the show with your 3d glasses… yuck.
There are specialized things for that, it’s called movies.
Fortunately for me, enough awesome games were produced in 1994-2000 to fill the rest of my gamer’s life.
There are so many I still want to play.
Indie games tend to catch up, but are still not up to that golden age’s standard. They’re generally lacking in content and overall polish: all the boring stuff for us developers. I’m not blaming anyone though. Simply can’t expect the same result from a team of only 1 or 2 persons with limited means.
A lot of games have adjustable difficulty levels. While I’m nowhere near hardcore enough to go straight to Nightmare/Berzerk/OMGWTFBBQ or whatever they call it, I usually do start games on “hard” these days. But thanks to ubiquitous quicksaves or generous checkpoints, ultimately most games these days are about “time to completion” and not “whether you can complete it”. And frankly, I don’t care, because it’s still fun. You want hardcore, there’s still Super Meat Boy.
I have a massive aversion to the concept of a “difficulty level” in games. I consider it a broken design if a game needs one.
Cas
“Don’t get me started on centipede” ;D
I think there has to be some perspective. Older games not only were more immature as an art form, they had more limitations and often needed to focus more on barebones gameplay.
Modern games, on the other hand, are developed in a very different market and culture, where some things have been proven to work/not work, and there’s a more “disposable entertainment” attitude towards games in general.
I personally like the purity of old or very limited games, going so far as to apply limitations to my own development, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with not liking them either.
As long as we understand that there’s room for everyone, it’s fine.
Oh, and there’s a question on the Escapist Expo Q&A panel that touches on this issue (The question about the idea that games should focus only on what they are good at, Movie Bob answers).
I used to think that there was a “disposable attitude” to modern games nowadays but actually what it is, is that there are simply about 100,000x more games to choose from, at prices ranging from free to peanuts. No point in spending time playing something that doesn’t really float your boat immediately when you can just move on to something else or even just buy something else. Back then, games were a rare thing and you either tried your damnedest to enjoy them or you lost your entire month’s pocket money, or you didn’t have a game to play at all.
Cas
Just played Black Mesa through without stop - its a fan made re-creation of half-life 1 single player, and its stuck to the original down to the last detail. I remember HL1 being awesome, but playing it with modern(at least more modern…) gfx, it bored me senseless.
Still prefer old games like Alien Breed and Fallout (1 & 2), but I find em much harder to get into because they dont seem to engage the senses as easily
When you can’t engage the senses you’ve got to engage the imagination or social interaction… or both.
Cas
I was just thinking the same thing today. First of all, why make me choose? I’ve never played the game so I don’t know what the differences are. Easy-Medium-Hard is completely subjective. The worst difficulty setting options are the ones where they simply tweak variables to give the enemies an artificial advantage. Extra HP, more gold, faster task completion), and multipliers for damage, resource collection, speed, weight, health, etc. Those are all superficially more difficult, but are actually identical to easier difficulty settings in terms of the challenge they provide. The other changes to “difficulty” just limit your choices of effective strategies and penalize mistakes more.
[quote="Oskuro,post:14,topic:39745"] I think there has to be some perspective. Older games not only were more immature as an art form, they had more limitations and often needed to focus more on barebones gameplay. Modern games, on the other hand, are developed in a very different market and culture, where some things have been proven to work/not work, and there's a more "disposable entertainment" attitude towards games in general. [/quote] I would not say old video games were an immature art form. Arcade games are not as great as old or new console based games, but it seems like there was a lot more attention paid to detail. Pacman is a little repetitive and there is the glitch where you could walk past ghosts unharmed, but it has far more replay value than most games. Compared to Angry Bejewels, it is far superior even if the graphics and mechanics are primitive. And Tetris, order of magnitudes better than Pacman, has an artistic quality that is hard to reproduce without reproducing the game itself. Sonic and Mario games are even better. Besides being great games, even the visuals and music are pretty amazing.
I still shamelessly play Mega Man 2 at least once a year to this day. There are few games that I feel anywhere close enough to happy with that are 20+ years old to still play once in a while.
Agreed that many of the old games were just awesome for their time, but that they don’t stand up to today’s games. Even if many of today’s games aren’t much better in terms of game mechanics, many of the control mechanisms alone have evolved to the point where trying to play an old game can feel very clunky.
I think difficulty levels are a matter of usability. Not all players can handle games the same way, and a difficulty setting helps make the game accessible to more people.
Heck, I think that’s why the difficulty option exists. Old arcade games were all about reaching a wider audience, and most had a difficulty setting, so the arcade owner could make the game hard enough to attract as many customers as possible.
The thing I would fix, though, and I know this is a common idea, is to make difficulty adjustable at any time, not just at game start, so the user can fine tune the experience at any moment, just as you would remap key settings or change screen resolution.
This dynamic difficulty adjustment solves the issue of not being sure what difficulty to choose if you’ve never played (You can adjust it as the game progresses).
This makes me think that what I don’t really like, and was typical in older games, is being asked to make binding choices blindly. Like the “choose difficulty when I don’t know the game” complaint, if I don’t know what I am selecting, what’s the point of making me choose? So I have to restart the game in frustration once I realized my choice was wrong?