Someone on IRC linked me to this. It's easily the best Gamefaqs Top 10 list I've ever seen on the site, and many users on this site should enjoy it.
The Top 10 Gaming Skills Of A Bygone Era
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
Wow, really interesting. It has put into nice words some of the feelings we've had about how gaming changed. I especially miss the lack of information we had back then. "Discovery" is what made super pitfall a good game for me, but now the game just looks terrible because it doesn't make sense anymore to have hidden items, or no map... People want to get straight to the point and get what the game has to offer quickly. But discovering tricks and memorizing the game was really fun and that is gone.
I fondly remember the times when I played graphical text adventures on the Spectrum, and had to draw maps to not to get lost. Some games were nice and all the maps were consistent and logical. Other games were more sadistic and had maps which were much more difficult to keep track of and required lots of corrections (eg. going north-east-south might end up in the same room as going east-east, ie. the two northern rooms were actually two rooms apart from each other, an there was no indication of this other than where you ended up, requiring you to fix your hand-drawn map as necessary).
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
"Understanding the Unique and Often Strange Way a Developer Thinks "
Honestly, who needs that. It should've never been there anyway. The designer needs to figure out what how the player thinks, not the opposite.
Just watch some of AVGN videos and you'll find that the shittiest games own on that matter.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
One thing I remember about control stick spinning was that there was a saying that if your skin came off and there was blue-ish flesh below, it meant you were gay. I was quite glad to see a very shiny pinkish red on my hand when it happened for the first time. Only God knows where I'd be now, had it been blue. :/
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
As gaming moved into the 64 bit era, a new radical game design began to take root where the player had unlimited lives. After all, if a game over was functionally the same as a death, what was the point in having a finite number of lives in the first place? Slowly but surely this new idea began to catch on and soon one of gaming’s oldest traditions began to disappear. Most modern games do not have a life system and the handful that do seldom make much of it.
You must understand that they're making games for the new generation of gamers... following this guy's revolutionary trend:
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
"Understanding the Unique and Often Strange Way a Developer Thinks "
Honestly, who needs that. It should've never been there anyway. The designer needs to figure out what how the player thinks, not the opposite.
Just watch some of AVGN videos and you'll find that the shittiest games own on that matter.
I understood the article to be written tongue-in-cheek, ie. ironically. It's humoristically presenting features of old games which truely are a good riddance.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Warp wrote:
I understood the article to be written tongue-in-cheek, ie. ironically. It's humoristically presenting features of old games which truely are a good riddance.
Actually some of the items mention nice stuff, like "Button Input Codes", "Special Move Memorization" and "Cartography" so I think it's just a list of dumped things, both bad and good.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
This is a good list. Some of these skills, like life budgeting, are indeed close to extinct nowadays, which made some of the awesome genres once immensely popular (shmups, run'n'guns) wither and only carry on thanks to the comparatively small amount of loyal and devoted fans. Games where you die in a single hit are now referred to as stupid and too hard, while back in the day it was the norm everyone happily agreed upon.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I understood the article to be written tongue-in-cheek, ie. ironically. It's humoristically presenting features of old games which truely are a good riddance.
Actually some of the items mention nice stuff, like "Button Input Codes", "Special Move Memorization" and "Cartography" so I think it's just a list of dumped things, both bad and good.
As FODA showed, he liked that - However, I wonder how many of these things we remember fondly simply for the sake of nostalgia; i.e. they weren't that great, but we remember them as great because they are from our childhood.
However, I partly agree with P_S. Back in the day, it was an achievement in skill to beat a game. Now all it takes is bloody persistence, with the constant auto-saves. "Poor little snowflake will be upset if he can't complete his game! Think of the children!"
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
One thing I remember about control stick spinning was that there was a saying that if your skin came off and there was blue-ish flesh below, it meant you were gay. I was quite glad to see a very shiny pinkish red on my hand when it happened for the first time. Only God knows where I'd be now, had it been blue. :/
I never heard that; then again I never spun the control stick hard enough for skin to come off.
I likely don't speak for everyone, but this is one of the main reasons why I still play older games, because back then, you actually needed some moderate skill to get anywhere. Nowadays, games are all straight to the point, Press A to not die, infinite ammo, infinite health, life regeneration, uber graphics, and the like.
But I never did like the Mario Party controller stick spinning. I've blistered my hands many times and ruined so many perfectly fine controllers.
Actually some of the items mention nice stuff, like "Button Input Codes", "Special Move Memorization" and "Cartography" so I think it's just a list of dumped things, both bad and good.
I don't know that I'd call button codes a nice thing. I typically don't like any secret that can't be discovered just by playing around with the game. If there will be multiple modes of play, just offer them all at the start. Don't divide up the players and their experiences of the game by what special knowledge they have access to outside of the game. I see this is bleeding over into my feelings about "unlockables" and "downloadables", but at least those serve worthy purposes: Unlockables keep the players playing as they can keep trying to unlock the next goodie, and downloadables or expansions allow a game to stay interesting for longer after its release date.
Map-making, though, that can be a fun and educational experience. But it also requires a lot of dedication to one game to work well. I wonder if more labyrinthine games should offer a "no map mode" at the start so that players can decide how challenging the first play through should be. It's a similar problem to the "RPG preparation" issue, where the heavy amounts of preparation and management can be fun to figure out, but you have to be able to slog through all those extra turn-based battles without going crazy.
moozooh wrote:
Games where you die in a single hit are now referred to as stupid and too hard, while back in the day it was the norm everyone happily agreed upon.
Hey, I didn't happily agree upon it. When I was a little kid, I could rarely pass the first level on most Nintendo games. (The Super Mario Brothers series was an exception: I would finish the first two levels easily, use a warp, then forget how to find the second warp zone and struggle through the middle of the game for a while. Much later on I found out it was easier to simply play through every single level and stock up on lives.)
But I could complete many of Apogee's shareware games for MS-DOS like Commander Keen, even when they did kill the character in one hit, because they didn't completely swarm the player with enemies and traps most of the time. Now maybe that's to lure in customers to buy the other parts of the game (business model where part 1 is free but parts 2 and 3 require registration), but I bought the other parts of those games a few times, and they were never much harder than the first part. They were still fun and interesting, though, with all the different stages I got to see and figure out.
I think it is a problem when players get stuck on an early level for so long that they never end up seeing the majority of the game. Why would I pay for a game where most of the content is essentially a "secret" known only to the very best players?
t3h Icy wrote:
But I never did like the Mario Party controller stick spinning. I've blistered my hands many times and ruined so many perfectly fine controllers.
Hey, I did have some fun competing with my siblings for the record on Mecha Fly Guy. But it was NOT fun to try to pass Tug O' War on Mini-Game Island. And it did help to have some ice water handy.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
The best way to spin the control stick is to hold your left palm out, then hold the controller with your right hand and gently press it against your palm. Then you move the entire controller in circles with your right hand. (reverse hands if you're left-handed). If you do it like he describes in this article, you are much more likely to get blisters.
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
I consider most of these "lost skills" to be obsolete and rightly left behind. Lives and continues just don't belong anymore, not when I'm buying the game outright. Passwords died almost immediately after they were invented because having a saved game was better in every way.
Memorizing special moves is still important, but having in-game movelists is a just convenience. Same goes for maps. I shouldn't have to refer to a notebook when playing a video game.
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
You must be doing it wrong. I never got a single blister while attempting control stick spinning. The technique that I used was to put the control stick between the bases of my two middle fingers, and spun my hand wildly.
Same goes for maps. I shouldn't have to refer to a notebook when playing a video game.
The computer building and showing the map as you go may be a huge convenience, but there just was something cool about drawing the map yourself. It was a bit like a side-hobby while playing.
In fact, I would say that the game giving everything to you without any work from your part (besides simply advancing in the game) could be considered boring, if not even detrimental to mental acuity. It becomes mindless shooting.
Having to draw the map yourself with pencil and paper, however, gives you more to do, requires you to pay more attention as well as training your spatial cognition capabilities, and sometimes might even require imagination and creativity (especially if the map is more complicated than a strict 2D grid of rooms, all of the same size). I'd bet it's also physically good because you will be doing something else with your hands than pressing buttons for hours and hours.
I think it's sad that there aren't any such games anymore. Advances in technology make people lazier, even to the point where they actually consider it a bad thing if you were forced to do something else than press buttons for hours.
I have some meticulously hand-drawn maps of Pokemon Silver somewhere. Also I've made maps of areas in MUDs and that maze in FF8 and god knows what else. Creation is more interesting.
Passwords died almost immediately after they were invented because having a saved game was better in every way.
Every method of saving has its own drawbacks that can cause you to lose your file, so I appreciate when a game has multiple ways to save. Did I ever tell you how RockMan Complete Works 2-6 let you mix saving to a memory card with the original password systems?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
You must be doing it wrong. I never got a single blister while attempting control stick spinning. The technique that I used was to put the control stick between the bases of my two middle fingers, and spun my hand wildly.
That still seems like you would develop a blister between your fingers.
A kid I knew actually tore a half dollar sized piece of skin out of the middle of his hand attempting Mario Party spins. I guess that's why they started selling a glove.
Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 688
Location: WA State, USA
Of the items on the list, cartography is probably the worst casualty. I wasn't really around back when games rarely had maps, but going back and playing games without maps I find something really compelling about mapping as you go. It's hard for me to describe really, but Warp described one of the cool aspects of it. Plus, it totally makes you feel awesome once you figure out the layout to a level/area.
Granted, I've heard of some games that actually attempt to thwart mapping efforts. For instance, I've heard that some of the early Wizardry (?) games, which were first person dungeon crawlers, had squares on the map that would randomly rotate you or teleport you to an identical looking area in the dungeon with no warning or indication whatsoever.
I don't think I need to say anything more about that.
Oh, and on a related note, whoever invented stick-twirling can and should die in a fire.
Nach wrote:
I also used to wake up every morning, open my curtains, and see the twin towers. And then one day, wasn't able to anymore, I'll never forget that.
