playing new old games
 

I am writing article and need to spice up with some anecdote/funny/inspiring answers on the questions below:

- do you run abandon games, which you didn't played before (aka do you run "new old games")? How often compared to other oldies?
- music / graphics / story / game idea - what part of the games got generally BETTER in the new games?
- Do you have some time in a year, in which you tend to play nostalgia games more?
- Why do you play old games?

1024 Thanks!

Yes, whenever I find out about one that looks interesting (or get a copy of one that I've been looking for for some time for the same reason).
Debatably, graphics. I do have something of a preference for early-to-mid-90's sprite-based graphics than for high resolution 3D, but that might just be me.
Music/FMVs not really. The only genuine improvement is in the amount of space that can be allocated to them nowadays, allowing for higher sampling rates.
Digital speech... well, rather definitely. It's admittedly more related to storage capacity permitting greater use and better sound quality than any true improvement, but the presence of digitized speech is now a rule rather than an exception.
Not really. They're what I play most of the time to begin with.
First, they're not as hardware-demanding as the newest and greatest hits. Second, as I've said I find ancient 2D sprites more enjoyable than state of the art 3D. Third, I still partially live in the mid 90's. :p

- do you run abandon games, which you didn't played before (aka do you run "new old games")? How often compared to other oldies?

Of course, in the weirdest ways possible - for example, I like to run text-based adventure games on a C64 emulator on the J2ME environment of my mobile phone. Or games under Win3.1 emulated under DOSBox emulated under WinXP emulated on Ubuntu Linux. I like to try new games, it's just I don't have much time - but my all time favourites are adventure ones as always.

- music / graphics / story / game idea - what part of the games got generally BETTER in the new games?

The boobs. Just follow the evolution of the Duke Nukem and Lara Croft series (however, the 2012 remake of a remake of a remake Tomb Raider game will be, well, more realistic).

- Do you have some time in a year, in which you tend to play nostalgia games more?

Holidays - winter, autumn, summer, spring - doesn't matter. Well, about six months ago this special time when I only played dos games or something else was called "friday night", but now I focus on newer ones.

- Why do you play old games?

A lot of reasons - back then I had very few games, most of them 90s era stuff - then because my computer broke down, and it was never fixed again (I had to buy a new one after like 8 years). It could only run DOS games stable enough to enjoy. But then I just got hooked I guess.

I hope this was useful.

Certainly. Older people find older games interesting, but not only because they played them back in their time, and even if they didn't. Myself I play "new oldies" more often than "true oldies", as I didn't have a computer until quite late. Not that I play a lot nowadays, I played most when I was 16--20-something.

Arguably graphics, back in time GPUs didn't even exist as we know them nowadays. But...

I agree on this. And actually considering how popular hand-drawn 2D art can be nowadays outside video games, take Frank Miller's comics and movies for example, it's not trivial to understand why the market prefers computer rendered 3D graphics ALL the time. I think it's because if you think about it, nowadays having full software support along the whole drivers, libraries and tools line, contrary to popular belief making 3D graphics is actually far easier than making something yourself, no matter how many computer resources it takes.

No, but when a game manages to make me want to play, after I'm done with it I'm more willing to search for other games to play on a streak.

Because If I find them more entertaining than whatever new games I may have--I don't have any, I only have a wide gamut of older and less old games. And because often I find them available for download (gasp) in decent websites with interesting communities and the FBI doesn't go after me as a consequence.

So true. Still, Horseman will agree with me that Sophia Hapgood will always be #1 in our hearts :)

Of course. Whenever I find one which is interesting and I didn't play before. I consider myself a true gamer, an hardcore gamer. Not only do I consider it my duty to try out games but I also think it would not be fair not to try them and give them a chance. Whenever I find a great game I share it with my friends and close family who also like to talk about old games.

Some people consider themselves sport men. Some people consider themselves geek. Some nerds. I consider myself a gamer. That's what I do.
Well, there is a lot of areas that I consider actually got worse with new games... But what really got better with time with games is the interface and also the "newbie friendly" attitude. Back in the days it wasn't rare to find a game with an idea so great it practically made the whole game up... But which also used such a terrible interface, it was really painful. You kept playing those games because of the former and usually never played it again for the later. The newbie friendly attitude come first and foremost because old games needed to cut on installation space so much... You had to fit your game in a few 1.44 megs floppies max after all... With new games and a practically infinite amount of data storage with CD and later DVD, developers started adding more content to the games. Some of those contents were in the form of tutorials, detailed offline help files, data sheets... Heck, even the manuals often get digitized and packed on the CD so even if you lose your manual you're still good to go. In the good old days reading the manual was so critical sometimes you could not even play the game well without it.

Those two points are really what I'd consider the best improvement overall, for all genres.
Not really. The reality is more around "I play games whenever I actually have time to spend playing them". That's the burden of "growing up" and "getting a life"...
I generally consider old games to have way, way better gameplay than new games. Old games are also more original and new games tend heavily to end up being clones of something else. Because of this I actually consider old games a great deal superior as a whole versus new games.

After a while it pretty much get summed up as: "The Simpsons already did it". :p

I completely agree with that. Especially since I'm a strategy fan and that I think that 3D or elaborated graphics usually get in the way of a strategy game. Sprite graphics usually conciliate nice enough graphics with practicability.

-I do run old games that are new to me, it's how I discover all these gems like Chasm, Beyond Castle Wolfenstin, Alphaman, etc

-Music quality and graphics got better, but I think ideas generally went downhill and hit a steep decline in recent years. Thanks to music quality being better we can get amazing soundtracks like the Deus Ex soundtrack. Graphics are something that I don't care about, just so long as the game is fun!

-No, I mainly play old games to begin with, nothing new has really grabbed my attention.

-Old games are just generally better in every sense. They got great ideas and classic stories and events like Another World, or they dared to do new things like Neverhood with the use of claymation which was amazing and I wish games were more daring as opposed to "let's be like Halo or COD."

and that's my 2 cents.