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Questions for OLDER GAMERS


anne amère
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Oh snap, did your cabinet use a joystick, or did it use the original (and hilarious) trackball?

Original trackball, all the way. That's why the 4-5 of us were all getting seriously into it. We also tried doing 2-player, but given how... animated we were, we kept running into one another (in person, not in the game).

The D-pad is just no substitute for the trackball, unfortunately...

Does anybody else here still try to play games on a real NES/SNES instead of emulating? One of my gamer quirks is that I like to play games on the original hardware if at all possible.

It might just be my imagination, but playing NES/SNES/Genesis games on the original hardware feels like it gets a lot better reaction time and control versus emulators. Since I mostly play RPGs, though, this isn't much of an issue. But it's really noticeable when playing, say, Mariokart or Starfox. KF

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You can E-bay most NES games for <$20.
Hell, that's nothing - my sister got an N64 game for 7 cents. It was some crappy wrestling game, but still - 7 cents. Of course, s&h was 2$, but that's still pretty amazing, hence why I don't emulate N64 games. They're just so cheap (except for Ogre Battle 64, but it was worth the 60$ getting it - the game is absolutely amazing).
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Once you've reached the upper levels in Yar's Revenge as I did, everything else is child's play or uninteresting.

QF Fucking T.

Yar's Revenge is the shit.

Anyone remember Starmaster for the 2600? That game was bad ass. There were so many controls for the game that a joystick with one button wasn't enough. You had to use buttons on the console to run the game. The B/W-Color switch turned your map on and off, The Game Select switch ignited the hyperdrive. The difficulty toggles on the back switched the targeting computer on and off. It was freakin awesome to see the hardware used in such an unusual way. My dad kicked ass at that game.

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I have fond memories of the Commodore 64, but some of the games that were released on that system were just plain EVIL.

Waiting ten minutes for a game to load and then losing all your lives within thirty seconds of starting it (sometimes even requiring you to rewind the tape and load everything again if it was a multiload game) could drive the most patient of people insane.

Oh well, at least we were treated to some awesome SID tunes while waiting for the torture to start :)

Just in case you do not know of it, RKO has many excellent remixes of C64 songs.
QF Fucking T.

Yar's Revenge is the shit.

Anyone remember Starmaster for the 2600? That game was bad ass. There were so many controls for the game that a joystick with one button wasn't enough. You had to use buttons on the console to run the game. The B/W-Color switch turned your map on and off, The Game Select switch ignited the hyperdrive. The difficulty toggles on the back switched the targeting computer on and off. It was freakin awesome to see the hardware used in such an unusual way. My dad kicked ass at that game.

Was that the one where you had to dock with a space station by lining up your crosshairs? That was a really fun game, but I was not very good at it. Or maybe I'm thinking of Star Control? I can't remember.
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I'm ashamed to admit but I was never THAT GOOD at many games, especially for the NES. (Bear with me here, I've had memory issues for anything happening before I was 16 so, while I believe this is quite accurate, may be revised after asking my Mom about it later :tomatoface:)

Story-time again: Birthday, 1991. I got TMNT for the NES and, like most kids of that time, was just really excited to play with those shelled-heroes on my tv. Now, if you haven't played it, this game is not only quite different from the TV show, but INSANELY FRIGGIN' HARD FOR A 6 YEAR OLD. After breaking two, yes two, controllers for the system, Mommy thought it was time to get another game. While at Toys R' Us, I was distracted by this new shiny box that had a pixelated GAME GENIE logo on it. The "master your games" tagline was enough to sell me. Cue typical child pestering at toy store to get such-and-such toy. And thus began a life-long habbit of relying on the easy way out if games were too hard (exclude any two-player games, I wasn't that much of a douche).

So yes, way back when games were meant to be harder. I guess you could say the harder the game meant the longer you played it, and the longer you played it the better value it seemed to have to your parents/the game creator/the retail that sold it to you. I'm probably way off there, but the point is it's what people were used to. Nowadays, many more games focus on multiplayer, and the difficulty factor is lower due to either a lower attention span in general or any other number of factors one could claim. I would just take it as gaming's progress.

Example: Contra was a ridiculously hard game, despite a cheat code that made it much more beatable, was still a blast. Look at something like Vampire Rain now, with a large difficulty factor attributed to buggy design and terrible production decisions.

I know there were a number of topics I brought up that are debatable, but that's just my opinion on things.

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Games are generally easy now. There are still hard games, and most at least have harder difficulties...but games like Battletoads and Contra didn't have difficulties. You just pressed start and saw how far you could get.

It seems to me like achievements are a way to replace the "prestige" of beating older games. Everyone may have beaten Crackdown, but how many people can say that they found all of the agility orbs? That kind of thing.

It's not the same as beating Contra without dying a single time, but it's something, at least.

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It's a little weird, but record yourself playing some difficult game that your pretty good at. You notice a lot of freaky limbic responsiveness shit going on, like when I watch myself play Contra I notice myself jumping between three to four bullets on different trajectories then ducking under a fifth bullet to get a clear shot off some dude.

I'm sure I didn't actually plan anything like that out, but due to a series of responses that went off in my head my fingers just went through the motions. Anyone notice that strange effect?

It only happens when your familiar with the game (or at least with the genre) - give it a shot :nicework:.

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It seems to me like achievements are a way to replace the "prestige" of beating older games. Everyone may have beaten Crackdown, but how many people can say that they found all of the agility orbs? That kind of thing.

I wish they would've had an achievement system when I got every single piece of treasure in Spyro for PSOne. Nobody believes me. :(

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I wish they would've had an achievement system when I got every single piece of treasure in Spyro for PSOne. Nobody believes me. :(

I got every single piece of treasure in all 3 Insomniac Spyro games

nobody has disbelieved me yet

you probably just suck at convincing people

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