Retro vs Modern (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack II: Smack Harder)
If you tuned into Retroblique a week or two ago, you’d have noticed my response to Blake Snow’s Top 5 Reasons Moderns Games Beat Retro Games article for MSNBC’s tech & gadgets blog. True to his word, Snow recently posted a similar article, this time offering his Top 5 Reasons Retro Games Beat Modern Games.
Well, here at Retroblique we’re no strangers to pedantry or arguing for argument’s sake, so without further ado here I go disagreeing with him again!
Retro Games Play Longer
“If retro games were a ‘king size’ candy bar, modern games would be the ‘fun size’ (aka lame) version. While both taste good, the latter seriously lacks longevity. This is one of the reasons gamers keep returning to retro games.”
I’d argue that the opposite generally tends to be true. When I fire up the likes of Sanxion, Paradroid or Rescue on Fractalus! on the C64, I’ll probably spend no more than half an hour in their company—maybe an hour or two if I’m determined to play them through to completion—before they’re placed back in the proverbial box (I actually play them on VICE these days). On the other hand, when I embark upon yet another play through of STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots or BioShock, I’m hooked into a gaming session that will last considerably longer—and I’ll be playing it every day, without fail, for the next few weeks.
Still, it’s all swings and roundabouts really. Civilization, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are prime examples of retro titles with plenty of meat on the bone, while the likes of PixelJunk Eden, Flower and Geometry Wars are modern snack-sized titles.
Retro Games Are More Challenging
“In addition to containing more levels, retro video games are significantly harder to beat. As a result, the feeling of achievement is a lot greater after finishing a retro game than a modern one.”
Most games should, by definition, provide some degree of challenge.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that retro games are more challenging. They certainly provide their own specific style of challenges, mainly as a consequence of the limited technology. Unless you were playing a text adventure or role-playing game, opportunities to save your progress in many 8-bit titles were rare. You’d therefore be required to complete the game in a single sitting with a limited number of lives. Certainly a more significant challenge than a game in which you can save your position at any point and thus have a convenient rewind feature should you come a cropper.
Modern games acknowledge this crutch and adjust the challenge accordingly. Your typical narrative-driven action game will divide the challenge into a number of peaks and troughs, the former represented by intense action set pieces and the latter by slow periods of exploration, introspection and exposition. On console platforms these troughs are often populated by save points. As the gamer begins to climb a peak, the difficulty typically rises, to such an extent that they’ll often fail and need to try climbing that peak several times.
Pluck a NES gamer from the 1980s, sit him down in front of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and ask him to save the White Forest base—on the hardest difficulty level—and chances are he’ll be reduced to a nervous wreck. (If you look at the Steam stats for Episode Two, you’ll see that fewer than 50% of people completed that challenge.)
However, it is true to say that modern games are, by default, a little easier to play than their retro counterparts. Contemporary developers have a much bigger casual gaming audience to consider. Today’s “normal” difficulty mode is yesterday’s “easy”. I’ve known many veteran gamers who complain about today’s games being a bit too easy, only for them to admit that they stuck with the “normal” difficulty mode (or, in some cases, actually started on “easy”). Personally, I always fire up a game in the highest difficulty mode from the outset. It’s the only way I can be guaranteed a significant challenge.
In short, today’s games can be as difficult as you want them to be. Even if you find the hardest difficulty level to be pretty easy going, you can always impose your own set of restrictions, such as forgoing the ability to save your position. In fact, a whole bunch of people are doing just that at the moment with Far Cry 2 and writing up their experiences.
Retro Games Are More Straightforward
“Pong’s objective is simple yet elegant: Avoid missing ball for high score. That I can understand. What I don’t understand is some convoluted revenge plot taking place across three continents and involving 50 unrelated sub missions — a complex task that plagues far too many modern games.”
It’s hard to disagree here, although that straightforwardness is a double-edged sword. Not every modern gamer wants a “straightforward” experience. Some gamers thrive on a non-linear experience with multiple strands of narrative. For the prices we’re paying for our games these days, you’re damn right I want more than a repetitive side-scroller with a simple “save the princess” narrative. I want my Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Ken Levine and Warren Spector epics that take weeks/months to complete, not some wam-bam-thank-you-ma’am tiddler that shows me everything it has to offer within the first five minutes of play.
Retro Games Are More Durable
“Modern video games hardware is great and all, but today’s consoles break like nobody’s business. Retro gaming hardware, on the other hand, is known for its resilience. Remember what it was like to throw a controller at a wall without fear of it breaking?”
I can’t say I ever needed to resort to throwing a controller at the wall, but I guess Blake Snow’s mileage varies.
I’ve been rather fortunate in that I’ve rarely suffered any significant hardware glitches during my many years as a gamer. I do, however, remember many idiosyncrasies associated with older consoles and computers. The ZX-81′s 16K RAM pack remained awfully sensitive to things like breathing and mayflies sneezing half a mile away. There merest hint of a whisper would dislodge the RAM pack from its socket and cause you to lose all your data. The ZX Spectrum’s joystick extension port didn’t fare much better. One accidental prod of the squishboard would be enough to instigate a crash, which was never much fun when you were a goal up with a minute of full-time remaining at the end of a Match Day marathon.
The catalogue of disasters doesn’t end there. The Atari VCS and Mattel Intellivision’s cartridge slots would become clogged with dust and goodness knows what else over the years, requiring the dependable Blow Method™ to get your games loading up in the first place. Oh yes, talking of loading: remember having to adjust the volume on your cassette players in order to get many BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum games loading properly?
If anything, my modern consoles have been a lot more durable. My PSX, N64 and GBC are still alive and kicking after more than 12 years of use. Likewise, my Dreamcast and GameCube are perfectly healthy. Haven’t had a single problem with my PS3. I’ve built my own PCs over the last 10 years and, with the exception of a video card that was DOA, no problems there either—despite running Windows! I’d take all that over wonky Sinclair connectors, sensitive cartridge slots and cassette players requiring fine volume tuning any day of the week.
Retro Games Are More Creative
“You would think the inferior technology of retro games might dampen creativity. Wrong! In many ways, modern technology often hinders imagination, as developers get complacent with the tools at their disposal.”
Unimaginative games are hardly restricted to the 21st century. For every annual update of Tiger Madden’s NBHFL there’s a third class Space Invaders clone. For every World War II-themed first person shooter there’s a… well, World War II-themed top-down shooter. And don’t get me started on the endless procession of atrocious movie tie-ins, all of which were the same side-scrolling action platformer, albeit with vaguely different sprites. (Yes, Ocean/Imagine/US Gold. I’d be looking at you lot if you were all still around today.)
You only have to look at the likes of Shadow of the Colossus, Photopia, Portal, DEFCON, Galatea, STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl, BioShock and Professor Layton and the Curious Village to see that there’s an abundance of creativity within the gaming industry. With homebrew, retro remakes, special editions and rereleased classics in addition to all the modern games out there, there’s about three decades worth of gaming history and creative diversity at every gamer’s fingertips. Would you really forfeit all that for the much narrower choice presented by yesteryear?
Who Wins? Modern or Retro?
While I’ve taken apart Blake Snow’s articles purely for fun, he’s come under fire elsewhere for his two apparently contradictory posts. But those taking a more aggressive stance against him are missing the point. Snow’s not attempting to suggest that one generation of games is better than the other. Every era has its classics and barrel scrapers, its Shigeru Miyamotos and Derek Smarts, its Sensible Soccers and World Cup Carnivals.
Young gamers with no experience of anything further back than the PS2 and Xbox undoubtedly find it difficult to appreciate titles on older systems. The language, logic and semantics of video games have changed significantly over the years and only a few of us have been lucky enough to walk that evolutionary path in its entirety. It goes without saying that someone brought up on a steady diet of 8-bit gaming experiences is going to find it easier to continue engaging with them today. What must also be considered is that older games lean more towards the abstract, whereas modern games lean more towards the figurative. Just look at North Atlantic Convoy Raider, Lords of Midnight, UMS: The Universal Military Simulator and Medieval II: Total War for examples of how military strategy games can sit on very different points along that abstract/figurative line.
If you favor a more figurative approach to gaming, then a sudden shift to the abstract side of things can be bewildering to the point of frustration and resentment. But it works both ways too—there are numerous account of old school gamers, some of whom haven’t owned a computer or console since the 8-bit days, picking up a PS3 or Xbox 360 only to be overwhelmed by control methods, disorientated by the spatial awareness required by a third dimension and generally alarmed at the bombastic assault of noise and color.
As a gamer, you create your own comfort zone. As long as you’re happy within its confines, all is well with the universe. But if you haven’t already done so, consider stepping outside that comfort zone once in a while. Old school gamers holding on to your 8-bit ideals: try a modern game. You hip and trendy youngsters: play something that came out before you were born. You might just like what you see.
I think you hit it right with the last part, about appreciating older games depending on what generation you started. I started with the NES and computers of the time, and i find it difficult to find appeal in games older than that generation, but i can still enjoy some Atari!.
It's all a matter of preference and age, and to know that the most important aspect is gameplay, better graphics and pyshics don't make a better game (but they can help); and even though i'm a retro gamer at heart i still enjoy new games with something new and innovating.
Everyone seems to have their own cut-off point at which visual fidelity becomes a significant obstacle to enjoying a game. I often wonder if we'll ever reach some sort of threshold at which visual fidelity becomes irrelevant.
I can understand a kid brought up on Xbox 360 games finding 8-bit games too visually abstract to relate to, but in 20 years time will the likes of Resident Evil 5 and Crysis look too old to be playable?
I think the biggest divide is actually the 2D/3D barrier. In terms of basic design, it's a much bigger gap. I remember a few friends who considered themselves hardcore gamers back in the 8-bit days really struggling to get to grips with the spatial awareness required in some 3D games. Some first-person games would just leave them feeling disoriented and confused.
Unless our core 3D game design principles change radically over the next decade or two — possibly in response to full body motion sensor controllers — then it's difficult to imagine something like Crysis being impenetrable to a gamer from 2029. Unless the whole concept of having to use a mouse/keyboard or a gamepad you hold in two hands is completely foreign to them.
Great post
Although I think the visual gap between older generation titles and current gen titles isn't going to be quite as large as in the past, simply because the availability of games, and games discussion has grown considerably thanks to the internet, we'll always have avenues to look back on older titles more easily from here on in.
Fantastic site, I will be subscribing and reading more from here on in.
You hit the nail on the head there, Michelle.
We have just emerged from a period in which the video game industry, as a whole, has turned a blind eye to its very own past. Publishers were so consumed with a forward-looking vision that they never stopped to consider preserving their very own history.
Thankfully fans were on hand to ensure huge chunks of video game history weren't lost forever, which is why the hundreds of thousands of titles released on 8-bit and 16-bit systems have been preserved in some form, regardless of the legalities involved.
The explosion of cellphones, Blackberries and other handheld devices has given publishers new avenues to explore and their existing back catalogues are chock full of games that can run on these lower spec devices.
In short, it's nice to finally emerge from that dark age where video game history was verboten, into an age where a kid can pick up an iPhone, enjoy a game of Doom or Pac-Man and even rave about the experience.