Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

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Call me old-fashioned, but no Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Mappy, Xevious, Sky Kid, Tower of Druaga, Mr. Driller, Rally X, Motos…
...Galaxian, Pac-Land, Libble Rabble, Rompers, Tinkle Pit [sic]. And others. They were possibly the best arcade devs of the golden age , and no slouches afterwards.

tbh I just kinda forgot they made any fighting games for a sec there. I guess Tekken is kind of a big deal.
 
...Galaxian, Pac-Land, Libble Rabble, Rompers, Tinkle Pit [sic]. And others. They were possibly the best arcade devs of the golden age , and no slouches afterwards.

tbh I just kinda forgot they made any fighting games for a sec there. I guess Tekken is kind of a big deal.
Galaxian is an interesting one to me. It fits in the “iconic and prolific 80s Namco” group (well, it was 1979) but Galaga basically made it obsolete.

And yeah, Tekken is definitely a big deal. But when I think Namco arcade, I immediately think early 80s.
 
Sorry for the double-post, but the retards galaxy brains at GameStop, who previously declared Playstation the "winner of the console wars" after a bad Halo remake was announced for PS5, have now declared that Wii U, PS3, and 360 are now retro consoles.

I don't know what's dumber: the fact that they said Bush was president when the Wii U launched, or that it took them this long to consider PS3 and 360 retro when the Wii (which released after both) has been considered retro for years.
 
All this talk about what consoles are considered retro reminded me of a gaming magazine that I found a couple of years ago that was calling Super Mario Kart a retro game in 1997.

MegaFan Volume 1 Issue 2 (July-August 1997) page 000a.jpg
retro mario kart.png
1997 date.png
 
I’d also recommend the Namco Archives volume 1 and 2.

They’re collections of the Famicom ports of the classic Namco games, with some cool extras like the previously-unreleased Famicom port of Gaplus on one volume and a localized version of Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Grafitti on the other.

The Famicom ports of most of the games were often shockingly good, especially the port of Rolling Thunder.
There early ports are good, but Namco's games on the NES get really shit later on. I kinda of liked Mappy Kds and Splatter House, though you can tell both were rushed out. My Issue with Namco is that in that era they never really found out a way to make good home-console style games. There best games were all in the arcade.

Galaxian is an interesting one to me. It fits in the “iconic and prolific 80s Namco” group (well, it was 1979) but Galaga basically made it obsolete.

And yeah, Tekken is definitely a big deal. But when I think Namco arcade, I immediately think early 80s.
Namco defined the golden era of arcades, mappy is the real stand out for me, i'd take it any day over pac-man or galaga(close second). Xevious is one I never really understood the appeal for. The core gameplay is kind of boring. Same with tower of Duraga, In both games, the player character always feels too slow.

So a six year old game in 1997 for a system that was still getting new games is retro, but a 20 year old console isn’t?
I guess the Graphical leap. The transition to 3d would make anything 2d look primitive back them. Plus the gaming industry has kind of settled since the 2000s. A ten-year gap is nowhere near as radical as it used to be. Games from 2006-8 feel a little different, but the fundamentals can still be seen in modern games (Demon's souls, COD MW), unlike back then where single generational leap would change the entire industry.
 
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Selling some of the NES collection so dusted off the console to test the games. In general it was a lot of fun. Haven't smiled that wide holding a controller in a long time. Anyway found this game I had zero memory of owning called Kabuki Quantum Fighter. It was pretty fun played like the NES Batman game or Ninja Gaiden.
 
I recall people on forums referring to SNES and even late games like Chrono Trigger as "retro" as early as 2001.
I'm re-reading Nintendo Power from the start and the upcoming games include "classics" being released for the console such as Galaga, Pac-Man, Millipede, and Donkey Kong Classics (the two-in-one cartridge), despite this only being 1988 when these games weren't even a decade old yet.

While not quite as completely mindfucked as zoomers are, the dilation of time that comes with age and the stagnation of video games hit about the same time for millennials.
 
Retro has always mostly been a feeling than something concretely defined by the amount of time passed. If you're living in the middle of the explosion of technology as far as video games go, then things can seem "old" really fast. If your current level of game graphics is Tekken 3, then Super Mario Kart from a few years ago is already going to look like an out-of-date game that only "retro gamers" are going back to. If the biggest RPG right now is Final Fantasy X, then Chrono Trigger from 7 years ago is already a retro game that only hardcore gamers are going back to play.

Graphical technology has nearly plateaued for over a decade now, so nothing released since like 2014 feels retro anymore. Some would say nothing since PS3/360 counts as retro, since even early HD games could be seen as closer to modern graphics than SNES games are to late PS1 games. There's nothing odd about "going back" to playing a game from 8 years ago that looks like it could have come out just recently. In fact, a lot the most popular games with normies now are live service slop that's often close to a decade old by now and has just been getting updates since then.
 
PS1 maybe
Pretty much, just a Zoomer's opinion here but I'd say anything that can produce anything graphically realistic in a fully fledged game can't be retro, PS1, N64 blah that generation is the maximum retro could really be. PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and anything beyond all have games that graphically could hold up today (if not look better since it had none of the retarded post processing modern games have) :)
 
Retro has always mostly been a feeling than something concretely defined by the amount of time passed. If you're living in the middle of the explosion of technology as far as video games go, then things can seem "old" really fast. If your current level of game graphics is Tekken 3, then Super Mario Kart from a few years ago is already going to look like an out-of-date game that only "retro gamers" are going back to. If the biggest RPG right now is Final Fantasy X, then Chrono Trigger from 7 years ago is already a retro game that only hardcore gamers are going back to play.

Graphical technology has nearly plateaued for over a decade now, so nothing released since like 2014 feels retro anymore. Some would say nothing since PS3/360 counts as retro, since even early HD games could be seen as closer to modern graphics than SNES games are to late PS1 games. There's nothing odd about "going back" to playing a game from 8 years ago that looks like it could have come out just recently. In fact, a lot the most popular games with normies now are live service slop that's often close to a decade old by now and has just been getting updates since then.
Some people don't understand context, they'll point out the dictionary definition of "retro" and argue that it applies to something like the Wii but then the dictionary term for "ancient" could also be similarly applied.

"The PS3 is retro" and "In ancient times, a Kmart was located here" are technically correct in narrow definitions but completely wrong and reserved for ironic uses in all other practical senses.
 
Retro has always mostly been a feeling than something concretely defined by the amount of time passed. If you're living in the middle of the explosion of technology as far as video games go, then things can seem "old" really fast. If your current level of game graphics is Tekken 3, then Super Mario Kart from a few years ago is already going to look like an out-of-date game that only "retro gamers" are going back to. If the biggest RPG right now is Final Fantasy X, then Chrono Trigger from 7 years ago is already a retro game that only hardcore gamers are going back to play.
PS1 maybe
Pretty much, just a Zoomer's opinion here but I'd say anything that can produce anything graphically realistic in a fully fledged game can't be retro, PS1, N64 blah that generation is the maximum retro could really be. PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and anything beyond all have games that graphically could hold up today (if not look better since it had none of the retarded post processing modern games have) :)
The three of you are describing something very different than how we have very much come to use the word retro to mean "old." I can explain with a simple anecdote.

On the same forum where I heard people refer to 5 year old Chrono Trigger as "retro" in 2001, I heard several old curmudgeons talk about how they hated 3D games. All 3D games were just inherently bad. Even games like Grandia or Breath of Fire 3 which are 3D with 2D characters and play like a 2D game were, in their eyes, just bad because they would have been better if they were 2D. The levels would have been better laid out, all the effort to make the graphics more fancy could have been put into other areas of the game.

How can you square the idea of everything since the PS1 being non-retro when the Game Boy Color had visuals on the level of an NES or TurboGrafx? Or when how the same curmudgeons loved the idea of the Game Boy Player to get a "new SNES" by being able to play all the cool 2D Game Boy Advance games?

Conceptually 3D was a big leap and changed the way games are made, played, and evaluated. But we've had many "big leaps" since then. People often like to say PS3 and 360 are the end of retro because there's a clear big leap there with the rise of cinematic games and FPSes, but since then both of those genres have really slowed down over time as we've seen the rise of:
  • digital sales & microtransactions
  • free to play
  • online mega-hit service games
  • open world games beyond just GTA&clones
  • indie games, occasionally these blow up like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Among Us, or Balatro
  • platform homogeneity -- very few games are exclusive these days and most platforms are the same
The idea of a highly polished cinematic shooter like Gears of War or Halo 3 coming out today and being this cultural phenomenon that everyone's playing and talking about, and oh yeah it's only on one console you may not even own yet is completely foreign today. That's why I consider those consoles part of the "retro" or "vintage" crew, even if the later games on 360 came out concurrent to some of the things I mentioned above.
 
platform homogeneity
This is why the consoles are dying, in the 1980s and 1990s you had a very different ecosystem between computer and console, with ports rarely working out successfully, and the consoles themselves specializing in different genres.

In personal news, I've gone ahead and purchased a new battery for my GBA SP. The Everdrive tears into the battery a lot faster than a normal cartridge would, but the battery itself is getting up there in age. At this point I've invested $140 into my Game Boy Advance SP but the only thing I'm playing on the regular is Rhythm Tengoku again.
 
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