Since I posted this in 'Software Galore', I'm not talking about politics - as if most of you would have to become conservative in the first place in that field

I'm of course talking about games! Back in the old days, I always anxiously tried out every game I could get my hands on. That was only logical because in the pre-Internet days, my games collection wasn't that big (by today's standards) and I didn't have much of a choice.
In the last years, this didn't change very much: even having access to an almost unlimited amount of old games, I still always wanted to try as much as possible.

In the last few months though, I find myself doing that less and less! Two days ago, I opened the sealed box of Star Control 3 which had been standing here for a long time to finally try it, and what did I do? I noticed the CD also contains the first two parts of the series and installed the second one instead! Again, no luck for a 'new' game.

The reasons for this may be many, lack of time ('learning' a new game requires more time than re-playing a known one) being quite a logical one. I'm not so sure about that anymore though. Maybe it is only subjective nostalgia (i.e. the urge to relive childhood experiences) after all and no or only very little objective liking?

I don't know... I play just as much new games as old games... I really like neverwinter nights and games like hot pursuit 2 but I can just as much enjoy a game of actraiser or zero wing... Games like Money Island are of course a league of their own ...

Maybe because there were new ideas for games back then, but now there are not. Take Lemmings for example... It brought that kind of game to its pinnacle. It really can't be bettered. Also this might be why games like Pokemon succeed so greatly. All they are are new ideas.

Tuss

I wasn't so much referring to 'old games versus new games', but meant 'old games you know from your youth versus old games you've only just heard of'. I seem to become less willing to try out something 'new to me' with every day!

I noticed the same thing Mr Creosote did. I doubt we can slim down the reasons for this into a few universal points, but these are my reasons for sticking more and more with old games:

* The decrease in quality. Simple and plain. You can say whatever you want, games are simply getting worse and worse. The last two new games I played were Lord of the Rings and Civ 3: Play the World. LotR had awesome graphics, but I was done with it in 8 hours. I have yet to finish the 1990 version by Interplay... Play the World doesn't even run without a patch, and after applying the first patch, the PC didn't recognize the CD anymore.
* Multiplayer. More and more games are aimed at a multiplayer audience. For example, while Red Alert 2 is decent, there's no more than 12 hours of gameplay in single player mode. As a single player, I see no reason to buy it then...
* Been there, done that (and better). So far, there was only one original game this year. A single one! And Infogrames, its publisher has never ran any advertising campaign to support it, so most likely you won't even know it exists.
* Nobody to trust. Back in the days, I had a series of game reviewers and friends I trusted. If they said a game was good, I got it. However, they didn't hesitate to tell me when a game was awful. Not anymore: right now, a 50% rating means an awful game, and anything below 80% is considered to be bad. As such, I don't have anybody to trust, and so I buy much fewer new games. I don't even read many new reviews anymore.
* Test of time. After all those years, there's lots of old games that are still playable, in this age of overblown graphics and sound. That means that their design and maybe concept must be better than that in new games, to offset their technological defficiency. Playing those old games is simply much more fun

Again, some interesting points, but not exactly on the point

Of course on the point. All I was saying was that I'm not conservative, I'm pragmatic. The new games suck - plain and simple .

And as clearly stated there, this thread wasn't meant to be about new games

Well, it seems to me that you were comparing old and new games, and were looking for reasons why you are staying with the old ones .

Ok, to elaborate on this a bit more: to me, it is a proven fact new games are crap and that there are no exceptions. That is why I didn't even include them in my thoughts. What I'm comparing is two categories of old games:

1. Old games I've first played several years ago.
2. Old games which probably knew of back then, but I only got the chance to try recently.

My observation is I continue playing and liking games of the first category. Games of the second category however, I don't try that much anymore. Not because I think they'll be crap for sure, but because I always have another game belonging to category #1 I want to play even more.

My questions are the following:
Has anyone else made similar experiences or do you still dig through collections of 'old unknown' games?
What do you think causes this ignorance on the 'old unknown' games?

Okay, seeing that the arugement was based on oldgames vs oldgames, I have to say I have not experienced the same problems as you seem to have. I still look through a lot of old games sites, but I don't download every games. If the review catches my interest, I'll give it a go. I have thoroughly liked and still play games such as Transport Tycoon, M1 Tank Platoon, and others this way.

Now those games may not be 'unknown' to you guys, but they were to me at the time.

Tuss

Oh... This makes much more sense .

Let me first disagree with you: from time to time, there are some really good new games. For the past 12 months, I can name Capitalism II, Wizardry 8 and Moonbase Commander, for example.

As for your question, I tend to return to the good old games, but I also spend a lot of time trying out new old games. I guess it depends on the type of old games you like to play; for example, no matter how good a game is, the replay value of a good RPG will always be lower than the replay value of a good strategy game. As a primarily RPG player, I can't really afford to stick with the same old favorites all the time. On the other hand, games like Civilization, Colonization, Warlords or Master of Orion never leave my hard drive...

We play old games we know because, lets face it, old games in general look and sound crappy. They aren't intuitive, you have to play around sometimes to get them to work properly, and 99% of the time there is a new game that does the same thing better. Why screw with an old game if you have no attachment to it?

Also, the old games you used to play are probably the genre that you like, the ones you didn't play back then are not.

Its also about nostalgia. I have a copy of Bards Tale on my class computer. The 18 and 19 year olds who sit next to me can't believe I spend time playing it, because it looks so bad and is so primitive. The only difference between us is that I have fond memories of playing it 15 years ago and they don't.

and don't forget that a lot of old games were bad even back then, just like many new games are bad.

Another thing is, I have extra money now to buy games that I didnt as a kid. For example, I love sports management sims. As a kid I would slowly scrape up sims of this type over time. Now I can just walk out and buy the best one whenever I please. Theres no need to experiment as much now.

Couldn't agree less with that. As you might have read from my previous posts, I don't play any new games for the simple reason I consider them way inferior to old ones. The graphics of new games suck (ugly, no style), and as for sound, I constantly find myself powering up my Amiga and loading a game there just as a 'jukebox'!

That is something I agree on. Not related to buying, because the games I'm interested in aren't for sale anymore, but with the Internet, 'everything' is available, if something doesn't catch my attention immediately, there are always hundreds and thousands other games to try out...

Do new games really suck or are we just less tolerant of problems than we used to be?

I remember having fits trying to get some of my games to work in the early nineties, and even if I could set them to work with my hardware, many of them were flat out buggy. Tech support and patches were nonexistant.

I put up with crap from Daggerfall and the Front Page Sports games series that I would never tolerate now.

Yes, they are crap in my opinion. The genres I like have died out completely, games are a lot more buggy, they're all pretty stupid, it's always just about 'cool graphics' which just look like someone has vomited on the screen. Where's the fun in that?

Yeah, but thats kind of a stereotype. I don't think you are a text-based sports sim guy, but games like Out of the Park and Front office Football are deep, not dependant on graphics, and were unheard of in 1990.

There are a lot of bad new games, mostly caused by the notion that most gamers are 16 and younger, so developers write to that audience. But there are a lot of good ones, too. Dungeon Siege is good. The Sims is good. Out of the Park is good. You just have to be able to spot them.

There were a lot of shallow games in the past, too. Who can forget immortal titles like "Breakdance", and "Megarace"? I was just playing Telengard about 10 minutes ago. I like it a lot, always have, but lets face it, there isn't much to it.

We're shutting down now because of the snow. Hopefully I can continue this debate tomorrow :-)

Well, you're using examples I never liked. Manager sims, I played the original Football Manager a bit, but that's it. Telengard is an RPG, the worst genre ever!

Breakdance and Megarace aren't old games, in fact I consider them the forefathers of today's common standard. Take Megarace for example: it has these extremely cheesy video clips which everybody marvelled about 'back then' because it was something technologically new. The game itself is just a very bad action racer (a genre which for some time after this game accounted for almost 50% of all games!). As soon as the technology moved on and video clips got common (and better), nobody even looked at the game anymore.
And that is exactly how (almost all, I won't deny there might be one or two exceptions every five years) new games are. If I could, I'd name a few of the biggest hits from two years ago now (it's just that I can't remember any of the names...), then you'd see nobody plays those anymore - even the people who considered them the greatest games ever then! 'Our' old games on the other hand still have a following. It may be small, but beats the number of remaining active fans of 'new old' games (let's say anything published between 1996 and 2000) by far!

Yes, I was really disappointed when I got Mega Race. It stinks horribly. There is no skill needed to drive the car or shoot. The instruction manual is more exciting.

I really hate how new games never get released completely done anymore. Many older games were solid right out of the box, but lately, when I get a new game, I go straight to the internet and *boom* there are already patches for it. Take Diablo 2... How long ago did that come out? They are still patching it, and it's not exactly a complex game.

You can't use Diablo II for that kind of example, simply because it's mainly a multiplayer game. I can say by experience that you can install the smallest version of the game and have absolutly no problems playing it.

The main problem is more, like NetDanzr said; new games are thought to be multi-playered. The single player option is only meant to be a "practice mode" where you learn the game.

That's why the majority of the new games suck.