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| Are 2D Fighters Going Downhill? |
| racketboy - Dec 1, 2004 |
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Cloud121 | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
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Nothing against the board, but if it were strictly about Sega's consoles and everything, things would get boring real fast. As for the "Retro" feel. I really only am able to sense it when I'm in the console specific forums. Even then, it's few and far between. This may be a bad example, but in the Saturn forum alone, the majority of the posts are about modding the console, ISOs/Backups, etc. Where's the nostalgia in that? | ||||
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racketboy | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
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Here's my take on the whole "retro" thing. I don't care so much about the age of something, but I find that retro STYLE games are where the real fun is. I personally don't like many games that are complicated and take a ton of thought. It's not that I'm mentally slow or anything, but when I want to play a game, I want to play a GAME. Something fun and entertaining that I can pick up an play for either a short time or a long time. 3D games tend to add to the complexity of the game -- and not in a good way. 2D games might not be very realistic, but they focus on the core gameplay elements more. And it seems that the games that strive for realism, still have a very long way to go before they are "real" enough. There are some genres that 3D is necessary for. FPS and Racing games would be prime examples. | ||||
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racketboy | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
| Here's some more fodder for your "retro" debates... | ||||
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Jedi Master Thrash | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
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Racketboy, I agree. I enjoy "simple" games. The simplest concepts can be the most fun, if executed well. I enjoyed the reall old sports games, like on Atari. You just moved your character and tried to hit the ball. Nothing else to it. Now-a-days, you can't even get past the first 500 setup screens unless you know which rosters to pick and what plays to choose, etc. Same thing with racing games. You have to sit and pick your brake strength and spoiler angles and shock stiffness and windshield wiper fluid levels, etc. I just want to drive! Left, right, brake, and GAS! Don't need anything else. In fact, I usually don't even need the brake the way I play. The only enhancement that ever did anything for me was the chain whip. Even 2-D shooters suffer the same problem. Old-skool 2D shooters had you weaving around patterns of bullets and shooting patterns of ships, and gaining power-ups to have bigger-sized bullets. But then came the wave of "arcade" shooters, where you can achieve full power-up level in 2 minutes, but there's so many bullets on the screen that you die every 5 seconds anyway so you have to keep chucking in the quarters. And then there's the new-gen graphically-intensive shooters that have so much going on the screen at once (50 levels of scrolling backgrounds, transparent clouds, engine flare, missile trails, super-sized explosions) that you can't tell what the heck is going on. You can't tell if you're running into other ships, bullets, or vapor, or see what you're hitting. A lot of these have non-existent or lame power-up systems. I can't believe the number of dreamcast shooters that don't even have power-ups. They're all about the graphics, or having 3-D backgrounds, even though the gameplay is still 2D. And then there's the fighters. In the old-skool fighters, each button executed a kick or punch. Each button actually did something that you can immediately see and experience. Moving the D-pad moved your character immediately. With a lot of new fighters, and expecially all these WWF wrestling games my friend makes me play, the buttons don't actually do anything. I hit buttons all day and my character just stands there. They don't even move when you move the D-pad. You have to be in the right position first, and the opponent has to be in the right position, and then you need to press R2 + square plus left to begin some move. And then at some point you need to do L1 + circle + triangle to block something. And if you press X at a certain time it does one thing, and if you press X at another time, it does another thing. I just miss that instant responsiveness I got from old-skool fighters. Kick and be kicked. I also wanted to note how much this parallels Anime. I feel the same way about old-skool anime vs. newer "computernime". Anime in the 80's and early 90's was hand-drawn which cells and used watercolor backgrounds and pleasent earthy tones. It was just very appealing to look at. There were a dozen or so well-known studios doing the anime, and each artist or studio had a specific style of drawing that was distinct from the rest. Original characters and plots and stories happened all the time. Anime had that "magic". Since the late 90's, computer-animation has taken over, and commoditized anime. Now it's really easy to churn out anime at breakneck speeds. The quality bar is lowered because volume is so high. Most of the computernime has really bad animation and graphic quality and is just unpleasent to look at. And the anime that tries to mix 3D effects with 2D animatino just looks horrendous. All the plots are cookie-cutter, and all the stores are re-hashed from dozens of previous anime, and never live up to the originals. The characters are flat and boring. And all the characters in all the anime look alike now. They all just look like drawings out of the How To Draw Manga books. No more original art styles between developers. And the earth-tone color schemes and watercolors are gone in favor of brigher, more western solid colors. As with games, there are of course still rare good anime amongst the garbage, and the old-skool anime had its share of garbage. But the ratio of good to bad was orders of magnitude higher before, and even the bad old-skool anime was still watchable because the nice cell graphics were much more pleasing to look at than the ugly computer-drawn anime. And of course, kids today who grew up on computernime and mixed 2D/3D animation simply can't stomach old-skool animation with it's (sometimes) lower frame rate or lack of 3D effects. Very much a parallel. | ||||
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Des-ROW | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
| People like to press buttons and just see how things move around - game depth or actually having to think are not something "popular", right? | ||||
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it290 | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
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JMT, I have to disagree with your assessment of modern shooters. Very few, if any, shooters are developed as graphics showcases. Every new one that comes out has a gimmick to keep the gameplay interesting. Sometimes these gimmicks fail miserably, but by and large shmups are focuses on gameplay alone. Sometimes it is nice to play a simple, old school shooter where you can just focus on blasting stuff and not on scoring, though- I'll agree with you there. And Des, a game does not have to be complex to have depth -- just look at chess- simple rules, near infinite depth. Too many options can be a bad thing. Often in modern games, the amount of freedom given to the player forces the designer to limit the gameplay in some artificial way, or something will slip past the designer's notice and the player will be able to cheap their way through the game without having to develop a coherent strategy. | ||||
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Des-ROW | Dec 8, 2004 | |||
Exactly, most Cave shooters are still in low resolution, just like Mushihime, dodonpachi DAI-OU-JOU or ESPGaluda, and are still great - while others like Gradius V (Treasure/Konami), which are 3D and have great graphics/effects and high production value, keep the gameplay pretty intact and very very very fun. Retro gamers should be less discriminative. | |||||
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Cloud121 | Dec 8, 2004 | |||
Same goes for people of this generation, that can't accept anything pre-PlayStation. | |||||
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Des-ROW | Dec 8, 2004 | |||
That is really relative... many games these days are still in low resolution and even 2D, so what you just said would not apply really. | |||||
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ExCyber | Dec 8, 2004 | |||
As anyone who's played the SNES port of Gradius III can attest.  | |||||
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Dud | Dec 8, 2004 | ||
I can agree with some of what both Des-ROW and Jedi Master Thrash are saying, my gaming habits are a mix of both of their points of view. For quick or long-term enjoyment got to go with 2D gaming. However playing just mindless games all the time is an insult to gamer's intelligence (that is if you play as much I do) so sometimes I play deeper more involved 3D games. Does it really matter which type of gaming is better? It all depends on what your thing is, but for Des-ROW I'm going to go ahead and say 2D games are better.  | ||||
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racketboy | Dec 9, 2004 | ||
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Des, if you are referring to me in any of your recent posts, you REALLY don't know me. People aren't always as shallow as you think they are. | ||||
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Des-ROW | Dec 9, 2004 | |||
Not at all darling, I am just generalizing, and using JMT as my point of comparison/example. | |||||
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racketboy | Dec 9, 2004 | |||
k - just checkin  | |||||
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Jedi Master Thrash | Dec 9, 2004 | |||
First, just becuase the controls are simple doesn't mean the game isn't. Even in a simple old-skool shooter, it still took a decent amount of fast-thinking to avoid the bullets and to figure out the boss pattern and what maneuvers you needed to use to destroy it. And even with old-skool fighters with responsive controls, you still needed to plot a strategy to beat each character. Figure out their strengths and weaknesses, when to use a block or to chain a combo, when to hit with a special move, etc. But it's nice to have games you can just pick up and have quick fun with. When I want something more "thinking", I enjoy the puzzle genre. But as I mentioned a bit in this thread: http://forums.segaxtreme.net/index.php?showtopic=1... we really haven't had a decent slue of puzzle games since the NES days. There's tons of great puzzly games on the NES. Heck, even most non-puzzle games like action-platformers are really puzzle games at the heart of the engine. How many times are you stuck frustrated playing a level on some NES game for hours because you can't figure out how to get past a level or defeat a boss. In old-skool games you used to just sit and think regularly during a game, rather than constantly avoiding onslaughts of bullets and enemies (i.e., the "hack-n-slash" genre, which is more mind-numbingly simple than any old-skool games) The only puzzle games we have on new systems are columns clones (of which puyo-puyo is one, though I personally enjoy puyo-puyo more than any other clone, including columns itself) and bubble-pop clones, which never was a particularly mind-challenging game. Of course there are some exceptions, like chu-chu rocket which I absolutely LOVE. QUOTE(RolfWrenWalsh @ Wed, 2004-12-08 @ 04:34 PM) Nothing against the board, but if it were strictly about Sega's consoles and everything, things would get boring real fast.[/b]
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Why'd you ever sign up here again?
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Yeap.