Do you play games on systems that were 'before your time'?

[Alex.]

I really got into Dangerous Dave a little while back, that is just around the beginning of my time. I love old DOS games, platformers like Titus, Prehistorik and Shadow Knights, Wolfenstein 3D, Skyroads and King's Bounty are all great to play even today.

It would be silly to turn your back on past generations of games, good art is timeless.

 

[lulzfish]

You should have made this a poll, like:

"I prefer games from:
before I was born
before I was a teenager
before something else
last year exclusively"

I still like Rock Raiders and the early Windows games, but the pre-PS1 consoles don't appeal to me. The games I play are at somewhat 3-dimensional, or really good 2.5D like Golden Sun. I cannot play old-school 2D games. I tried.

 

[Kramy]

It's true. I don't hate anybody for working on emulators, but I would much rather see native game engines and original games. It's like nostalgia, except people are putting huge amounts of effort into making it work, instead of making games that really use the Pandora to its full ability. Most kinds of nostalgia are just "well I don't really care", but I feel like emulation is actively wasting my time.

Does this make me a bad person?

I somewhat agree with you - but there's gems that make it totally worth it.

Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Spyro the Dragon (I remember that from when I was young - it was fun ), and all the rest. There's probably a few dozen games that I simply *must* replay when I get the time.

I never did finish Donkey Kong 64... I wonder if we'll get a N64 emu that works with it.

 

[danielpwnsricky]

Earthbound. THE game of my childhood

 

[Prometheus]

I do, although perhaps not by particularly long before my time (I'm in my mid-twenties). The bulk of these are arcade and Atari 2600 titles from only a few years before I was born (or from the year I was born, in some cases), though, so perhaps that doesn't truly count as "before my time". :lol:

I do like 'gameplay', but there's only so many styles of gameplay you can have with older systems

Conversely, there are only so many styles of gameplay you can have with newer systems, too, for numerous reasons (for example, it often strikes me that the focus all too often seems to be on having more and bigger graphics ). ;P

and I want to see at least decent graphics while I'm playing.

Graphics are subjective, though - what some consider "decent" may be quite the opposite to someone else. Personally, myself, I'd much rather have NES and SNES era graphics, with bags of personality and nice pixel-art, than I would most soulless, dead-looking 3D titles from more recent times (Klonoa-remake, I am looking squarely at you and your dead-eyed, slack-jawed, expression-free soullessness). But that's just me and my point of view.

It would be silly to turn your back on past generations of games, good art is timeless.

+1 to that.

EDIT: Wow, a whole bunch of posts got in there while I was writing that. That or I'm incredibly slow tonight.

 

[ilovevideogames408]

List of consoles I played for:

Amiga
Atari 2600 [owned]
Atari ST
Commodore 64
NeoGeo [owned]
Sega GameGear [owned]
Sega Masters
ZX Spectrum

When you live in a village in a third-world country, this is pretty much what you got in the 90s

Other than that, everything in the 8-bit family and after I have played/owned/emulated/mooched off my cousin who's into collecting that stuff. There was the NES, Genesis, N64, PSX, DreamCast, GBA, NDS, PS2 and XBox...

EDIT: Come to think of it... I don't own any current gen consoles

 

[Esn]

I don't, no. I only play games from the generation that I grew up with as a kid (that would be DOS, mostly 16-colour EGA) and up. I find it hard to relate to, for example, Atari2600 games. Even NES can be difficult, except for exceptional games such as Kirby.

I do often try consoles that I've never actually owned, such as the Atari Lynx, but they're still within that technological range.

I also do think that games generally became better as time progressed, simply because developers learned what worked and what didn't. So many Gameboy Color games, for example, are actually better and deeper than the technologically-equivalent NES games that came earlier.

 

[Tom`]

Although I'm relatively young (yes, those consoles are "before my time") I had an aunt who owned an NES and a Genesis, and those were the first games I played. The first console I owned was an SNES, so that remains my favorite emulated console, but I also own a N64, and I grew up with those games, too.

There's certainly validity to the idea that I (and probably most people) are most attached to the consoles they played with the most, so even though the SNES was already several years old when I got it, I don't consider it "before my time," or even the NES. On the other hand, I don't use C64, Atari 2600, or any of those early (pre-NES) systems at all. So the generalization is valid in my case.

 

[PoisonedV]

16 bit consoles were on the rise when I was a toddler or so. parents had one but i barely could play it, being 3 or 4. i dont really plan on playing 8bit or less games (although i own way too much atari stuff, but other than that), so i mostly only play stuff i have before or modern stuff- its not nostalgia, but i think 16bit is where things really picked up speed. the most memorable generation of consoles for me was when i had my ps1, and also played on my neighbors n64 all the time. i still love a game of crash bandicoot, spyro, tomb raider, etc

 

[yalborap]

I try to play anything I enjoy, whether it be 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, or whathaveyou. Looking decent helps severely, but as many games show(Classic Megaman, anyone? Or how about Chrono Trigger?), a game can look damn gorgeous with a good pixel artist at the helm.

 

[Mark1970]

Being born in the good year of 1970 this pretty much puts me in line with all the consoles out there. Me and my brother (1972) were exposed to a pong machine my uncle had. Bright orange, two jog controls, blue and white buttons on the console for starting / resetting and two orange sliding knobs on the console to select wonderful things like soccer etc. Moved up to a Philips G7000 which was replaced by a G7400 because of broken joysticks. Got a c64 and a whole array of computers - thanks to my forever upgrading and novelty freak uncle.

Was exposed to (played games and programmed them) spectrum, msx, amiga, atari ST, c16, c128,pc (8088, 486SX-25, 486DX-2 66, 486DX-4 100, Pentium166, Pentium 200MMX, AMD K6-2-300, AMD K6-2-350, Pentium III-640Mhz, Pentium III 1.4Ghz, Pentium IV 2.8Ghz, Pentium IV 3.4Ghz, PentiumM 1.7Ghz, Core2Duo 2.4Ghz) and of course Apple (LC II, LC III, 6100 (PPC 601), 7100 (PPC 601), iMac (PPC 603), PowerMac G4 Digital Sawtooth (G4 1.2Ghz), iBook (G4), MacBook Aluminium Unibody (2.4Ghz Core2Duo)

Consoles like the nes, snes, sega master system weren't around me when I was a kid but I bought a japanese famicom, snes, MSX-2 machine when I was in college - early 90's. This got my retro console addiction going. Been playing them ever since.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I'm in the same boat as the older folks.. I was born in 1974, and I followed the Atari 2600 (Yars Revenge, yes, I owned E.T.) / C64 / Arcade / 286 (Star Control 2!!!) / 386 / x86 / Wii (I have kids now) path. I did play some PS1 (my wife was a video game tester for a time), but not enough to know the games she wasn't working on. I'm looking forward to playing those games, and Soul Blade (We nicknamed our oldest Seung Mina for a time for all the kicking she did in the womb) on the PS1 emulator

I find a hard time getting into the NES/SNES/Saturn/Genesis games everyone else here grew up on, except for those which had direct arcade equivalents (I find myself playing not much else other than SMB on the NES). I feel kinda bad for not being able to get into some of the Amiga games, which I saw from afar from my 286 (circa 1988 to 1991) but never really got into (Cannon Fodder on the Amiga kicked ass though).

C64 still gets TONS of playtime on my GP2X. It was the machine of my youth. I'm hoping Pandora VICE gives some better load times though, that 1541 floppy drive is hell to emulate..

 

[skeezix]

I'm glad I posted this.. a lot of interesting histories and thoughts coming out

Theres definately an attachment/fondness for your firest systems, regardless of what they were. (ie: You could be a kid now and your first machine be a 2600 you stumble across, and you'd still love it.) But it is interesting to see peoples thoughts on going back to older machines _now_, that were before their time _then_, for instance.

It does bring up issues like .. it is often felt that 3d ages poorer than 2d; ie: 3d games on DOS or the Saturn or even early PSX .. it is often said if yo didn't love the game then, it is hard to love them now, but for 2d we are much more forgiving.

I'm still a fan of text adventures (and it makes my heart glow knowing people are still writing them, yay for Inform/etc); I have a great fondness for a vast array of machines since they were all in my time (Vic 20 and up), but I do love discovering great gems ... my family mostly owned the computer style machines (Vic 20, Atari ST) and not games consoles (never had a NES, picked up my own SNES not all that long ago, never had a Genesis/MegaDrive.) Myself, being a handheld/mobile coder I've obsessed over mobiles, so I picked up a Turbo Grafx Express for instance.

So for me, the GP32 helped me discover a lot through emulation .. GPengine ftw! As an emu author I've learned insane amounts of detail over some specific machines, but I code more than I play.. so I have found ebay and emulation to be invaluvable in discovering the gems of the past that we didn't have available or couldn';t afford at the time. (I mean, for your 'first platform', you likely only had a handful of bought games right? No one had 1000 SNES games like they 'could have' now..)

Now, while I argue old movies (black and white say) are perfectly fine, even I find some old games just too brutal to deal with .. either a brutal UI that was forgivable once, or just bad use of artwork. Its "always about gameplay", but even sometimes, the graphcis can be _so bad_ that you can't forgive them anymore. Funny that.

For UI .. I was a big fan of RTS in the Dune 2 through Starcraft days, though I find it too clickhappy now (Supreme Commander, how I wish I coudl enjoy thee... ) but going back now .. I really loved DOS based 'Z' back in the day, for it had some really interesting design decisions. But it lacks the usual RTS UI keystrokes .. no unit grouping, no select group by hitting a number, and certainly nothing like Total Annihilations awesome waypoint system. So I find old RTS... just unplayable,m until they hit a certain level. Weird, and a shamre, but true. Theres a 'threshold' even despire nostalgia

... or maybe not .. Wing Commander is pretty nasty graphicly, and yet it is still so damned awesome.

I still love me my Vic 20, and of _course_ pretty damned much everythign on the 2600 and ST (my bitches), and I have really grown to adore the Turbo Grafx, with some great gems on the Genesis and SNES ...

I don't think this all came out right, but .. rejoice brothers, we all love our retro games!

jeff

 

[Lylep]

I play some but not a lot.
For example I was still pretty much dribbling and hugging batteries when the SNES was in it's heyday but I play a lot of emulated SNES games, and some of my favourite games are SNES ones (Final Fantasy VI, Street Fighter II, Bahamut Lagoon to name a few), and I remember when I first fired up Kirby's Adventure on the GP2X and I loved it. However when Lulzfish says:

"I lay awake at night worrying that the Pandora's computational prowess will be wasted on emulating consoles I don't even care about"

I can definitely see where he's coming from, I look through the GP2X archives and I see all kind of emulators for obscure and arcane systems I've never heard of and have no interest in emulating.

There are some great games for old systems though, and I try to play as many of these as possible, before my time or not.

I really got into Dangerous Dave a little while back

Dangerous Dave! That bought back some memories ^_^.

 

[lingenfr]

As I can remember when our family got a Pong game machine, I guess the answer would be 'no'.

 

[ilovevideogames408]

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/play ... 42/1310463

Teh DreamCast rulez

 

[banjeed]

I mostly play games I grew up with (NES/Genesis), but also have a deep seated love for DOS games I had (X-Wing, Normality, ROTT, HEXEN). I have an original xbox that serves only as an genesis/n64/nes emulator, and a 360 that might as well be a Fallout 3 standalone arcade machine. I remember my uncles busting out their Odyssey system they found in the attic when I was younger, and remember having a blast playing those games (when I wasn't assigned to be the one to change the taped overlay to the TV).

I recently stumbled upon an Atari 2600 at a yard sale with Pac-Man, Adventure, and Frogger, but I'm afraid it's not in perfect working condition. At least the controllers aren't. I did think it was funny when I loaded up Pac-Man and saw that on the 2600, his shape always faces right regardless of the direction you're going. Til then I had only played the NES version (who else remembers that funny looking black cartridge?)

I'm psyched to get into the 2600 arena, even though it was before my time.

 

[urjaman]

I fit the description exactly (Born 1990 - 18 now).
Anyways i dont play much (i code much more than play)...
- but i do like some SNES games (Zelda - A Link To The Past is great)
- so is Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control II - but i've only played UQM)
... so yeah those i'll propably have on my pandora - but i'd like to extrapolate a bit on my fondness on "old"/low performance 8 or 16-bit machines (on topic for "before my time" but OT as far as i dont play games on them).
- I had great time helping my friend in making his 8088 clone (640k RAM,20Mb HD) play videos (google "8088 Corruption") with music
- I have a 80286 16Mhz with (now) 5Mb ram (maximum that the MB supports) ... it ran minix 2 (and might still boot) but the SCSI HD i had for it is failing so i dont use it - atleast until i get a new mass media for it.
- I have an AST 486SL 25Mhz laptop with 8Mb of RAM and an 1Gb CF card for a hard disk with a fully customized linux originally built with buildroot on it. Okay, that's from 1993 so i was 3 when it was "born" but anyways i got it a year ago or so.

OT:
- I'm now programming an 8-bit Atmel (ATmega328p) + an ENC28J60 ethernet controller (+ my soldered in SD card) to be a webserver (just included because the system is 8-bit 12.5Mhz with 32kB of Program Flash and 2kB of SRAM - pretty oldschool specs (it's a microcontroller, but..))

 

[LastPucho]

Now that I think of it... I've been a retro gamer since I started being a gamer... :huh: I remember my parents bought me an Atari 2600 when the SNES was already out and available in my country... And I didn't complain; I had a lot of fun with it. Too bad it was on of those black plastic 2600 models, that were more modern-looking but cheaper... they don't seem to last very long, and it's been out of service for a long, long time.

Well, I'm about to turn 29 this year... so yeah, pretty much every console has appeared during my life span (glad to see so many gamers of my age - or about my age - here, by the way!). And yeah, I'm planning to get a good taste of everything playable on the Pandora. I really don't know what surprises might come with that.

For example, I never, ever played a game for the TurboGrafx-16. A few days ago, just for curiosity sake, I tried one, with the help of an emulator on my PC. And... oh, boy... what a great console it was...

 

[OrR]

I was born in 1985 but I didn't get much access to games in my childhood. I started playing on our 286 and a friend's SNES and my first own game console was a Game Boy Color I got when Nintendo sent me a free copy of Pokemon Silver.
I love to play older games that were before my time, though. Mostly because I like to know my gaming history but also because some of that stuff is just awesome. The last NES game I played was Mother. I bought an Atari Lynx because it is one crazy piece of technology. I'm in love with the Vectrex even though I still haven't got my own. I plan to use the Pandora for a lot of 2600 and C64 emulation as I almost haven't played anything on those systems. While I sometimes use emulation to relive childhood memories, I mostly use it to discover all the great stuff I missed. I'm also looking forward to all the great PS1 games I did not play, yet. While I do sometimes have problems with unforgiving difficulty, weird user interfaces or repetitive gameplay of old games, bad graphics never put me off.

I'm also a big Game King fan.