Someone once asked me why play these "ancient" games? Don't most of them suck?
Good question - and here's my best response: yes most of them DO suck. But some don't. And since there are more than 6000 classic 8-bit Atari games (whose combined size is roughly equal to a single Zelda DS title), you can have a 98% suck-ratio and still have 120 great games.
These classic games are usually designed by a single person working for several months with an idea they came up with themselves. Sound, graphics and gameplay were a one-man-band. As such, you get a lot of original concepts - many of which don't work but some that work marvelously well. These are pick-up-and-play style games that you can enjoy for 5 minutes or 5 hours - there is no long-term investment as there might be with a modern story-driven game. And these days, programmers can't take chances. New games usually require a production team that can rival the cost and complexity of a first-run movie... and game studios tend not to take chances. If Fortnight is hot, we'll make more Fortnight-like games because we can't afford a $30 Million experiment right now.
Classic games are sometimes developed by hobbyists back when the tools for game creation came bundled with the machines. Most of us in our 50s learned on these simple machines - we learned how to put a spaceship on screen, move it left and right with the joystick and make a satisfying boom noise when it got hit by an enemy missile. This was all new - our parents largely didn't understand it but the younger generation really dug in... and some of what was produced is still highly enjoyable to this day. The key is separating the large pile of chaff from the wheat.
The power of the 32-bit NDS platform allows us to revisit that time 40 years ago when everything was fresh and new. When chances could be taken. When gameplay involved a joystick and a single button. Testing your skill against the programmer who had to perform feats of magic to get these games to run properly. Back when these machines were state-of-the-art, they had virtually no memory buffers for video. So everything had to be drawn as the TV scanbeam was moving across the horizontal line - and if you found a few spare CPU cycles you could do some computations for your game. They called it "Racing the Beam" and if you failed, the image would distort, the TV picture would roll or the game would outright crash. These early pioneers of gaming took systems far beyond what their developers dreamed - and the result was 10 years of amazing progress until better hardware with more memory and more sophisticated video processing started to appear.
So I encourage you to visit this era - if only to sample what was possible "back in the day". The gaming industry today grew from those humble beginnings. Some of these games might be older than you are! And you just might find an additive favorite among the mass of games available. Fortunately with TWL++ and emulators, a decade of classic gaming is, quite literally, at your fingertips.
Good question - and here's my best response: yes most of them DO suck. But some don't. And since there are more than 6000 classic 8-bit Atari games (whose combined size is roughly equal to a single Zelda DS title), you can have a 98% suck-ratio and still have 120 great games.
These classic games are usually designed by a single person working for several months with an idea they came up with themselves. Sound, graphics and gameplay were a one-man-band. As such, you get a lot of original concepts - many of which don't work but some that work marvelously well. These are pick-up-and-play style games that you can enjoy for 5 minutes or 5 hours - there is no long-term investment as there might be with a modern story-driven game. And these days, programmers can't take chances. New games usually require a production team that can rival the cost and complexity of a first-run movie... and game studios tend not to take chances. If Fortnight is hot, we'll make more Fortnight-like games because we can't afford a $30 Million experiment right now.
Classic games are sometimes developed by hobbyists back when the tools for game creation came bundled with the machines. Most of us in our 50s learned on these simple machines - we learned how to put a spaceship on screen, move it left and right with the joystick and make a satisfying boom noise when it got hit by an enemy missile. This was all new - our parents largely didn't understand it but the younger generation really dug in... and some of what was produced is still highly enjoyable to this day. The key is separating the large pile of chaff from the wheat.
The power of the 32-bit NDS platform allows us to revisit that time 40 years ago when everything was fresh and new. When chances could be taken. When gameplay involved a joystick and a single button. Testing your skill against the programmer who had to perform feats of magic to get these games to run properly. Back when these machines were state-of-the-art, they had virtually no memory buffers for video. So everything had to be drawn as the TV scanbeam was moving across the horizontal line - and if you found a few spare CPU cycles you could do some computations for your game. They called it "Racing the Beam" and if you failed, the image would distort, the TV picture would roll or the game would outright crash. These early pioneers of gaming took systems far beyond what their developers dreamed - and the result was 10 years of amazing progress until better hardware with more memory and more sophisticated video processing started to appear.
So I encourage you to visit this era - if only to sample what was possible "back in the day". The gaming industry today grew from those humble beginnings. Some of these games might be older than you are! And you just might find an additive favorite among the mass of games available. Fortunately with TWL++ and emulators, a decade of classic gaming is, quite literally, at your fingertips.
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