General Retro Discussion

[Kaamos_Llama]

Maybe retro is better defined as games that you played as a child/teenager but now youre older. Whats retro to a 40 year old is different to a 20 year olds perception.

Plenty of PS1 era demakes coming about now, maybe thats a good indicator of the general perception of it?

 

[Colif]

its easier to classify what a retro console is, anything prior to Year 2000. But PC is harder to find a cut off for. I would have a hard cut off of 25 years but then I don't set the rules. It would be a simple floating 25 year period. If you under the age of 25, none of the games released in your lifetime are retro yet.

Pokemon is retro... the first ones released in 1996... explains why people sad about Palyworld, it broke their childhoods... want a hankie? Grow up.

If I make a brand new game, but make it look a lot like a game from the 90's, do you want to call it a retro game?

Games that look retro but aren't? That is half the indie games released each year... no. What they look like isn't enough, or every pixelart game would be. Its not as simple as using a style.

You could exclude game that are still getting played a lot,

Speedrunners don't count towards keeping a game non retro... I mean, Tetris is retro but clearly people are still trying to beat records on it, but not in the numbers associated with say Mind crap.
Golden Eye is retro even with speedrunners playing it.

 

[Colif]

 

[Johnway]

i've been thinking about defining the whole retro thing and what is considered retro etc. The closest i could come across was either

A: The decade (the 80s, 90s, 00s etc)
B: Tech generation (8-bit, 16-bit, 32bit)

For the latter it seems to stop after the 32bit era (maybe we're on 64 bit?) as the technical limitations of our time restricted and influenced what we could be done, especially finding creative solutions to those limitations. For example bedroom coders of the earlier ages, 2d platformers getting progressively more complex and fleshed out etc, but after the 00s it seems like technology was at a point that it seems to have not brought any more advances in the way we play. Almost feels like we're stagnating even when we have better graphics and keep releasing new consoles. The other factor is probably nostalgia and how we experienced the first games of its genre. i mean take FPS shooters, the likes of wolfenstein and doom were amazing when they first appeared. Now when someone says FPS game, we just shrugg , hell we've gone back and releasing boomer shooters now.

i think now its more about celebrating the games/franchise as opposed to generational stuff. We fondly remember stuff like HL2 and yet we can't define a clear era to encapsulate the tech/generation.

 

[Colif]

Time is more clear cut than bit depth.

New 32bit games are still being made... might not be AAA but they exist - https://itch.io/games/tag-32-bit
these aren't all old - https://www.trueachievements.com/32-bit/games?order=TARatio
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_32-bit_games - some of these are only 2 years old.

There is no clear cut between 32 & 64bit. Just like windows, its blurred. As you can play 32bit games on 64bit. There could be one in the future but we not there yet. Consoles might get there and force issue... depends.

 

[Brian Boru]

Consoles might get there and force issue

That's what I was thinking. Please speed the time when we can look back on when games had to be nerfed for consoles—that would be a retro era!

 

[Colif]

One reason will be memory related. 32bit can only access so much, whereas 64bit isn't anywhere near its max yet. This applies to both ram and storage.
32bit max Ram is 4gb whereas storage is 2.2tb... sure, most games don't use the storage amount but that ram amount was restrictive 10 years ago, yet alone now.
Meanwhile, 64 bit max memory is 16 million terrabytes. Max storage size of the drive format that 64bit supports is 18.8 million tb but windows itself doesn't extend to all of that, so the 16tb is all you get. I guess they giving themselves space to grow.

Right now you can't install anywhere near that much and windows can't access it anyway - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/memory-limits-for-windows-releases - max is currently 6tb in some versions and 2tb in the more common versions.

I expect most games now are 64bit just to access more ram.

Most PC hardware has been 64bit for 10 or so years now. AMD made 1st one in 2003 but obviously it took a while to catch on.

Indie games will be the ones using 32bit longer.

Then it would depend on when/if Windows stops supporting it. That will happen eventually but as there are so many programs written as 32bit versions, its not going to happen for a while for backwards compatibility reasons.
Microsoft could release a 64bit only version now if they chose to. Its possible the 64bit version would be smaller as there is coding in windows to cope with 32bit and 64bit drivers as well. It essentially has 2 copies of a stack of files just to be able to run both.

 

[neogunhero]

What I’m wondering is when will see see “modern retro” games that try to recapture PS3/XB360 era of games? 15+ years ago we started to see “retro” pixel games based off the NES and SNES eras of gaming, then more recently we’ve been seeing a revival in “boomer shooters”, recapturing the feeling of 90s FPS games. The next step in that trend will be to make games in the vein of PS3/XB360 era games, and I’m curious to know how and when that will happen. As great as some of those games from that era are, they aren’t the same technological innovations that the games industry saw with full 3D environments or slick sidescrolling platformers. They did a lot for graphics and narratives in games, but if you compare a modern FPS game to a XB360 FPS game the differences aren’t that big. We have been able to utilize more hardware capabilities but in terms of pure gameplay innovation, there hasn’t been a whole lot over the past 15 or so years. Not dissing the game at all, but that recent Robocop game seems as if it could have been released on the PS3 with reduced graphics. I say that to prove the point I’m trying to make, I feel like we are stagnant and haven’t made great innovations to the way that we play, we have just been able to do more of it in a better way. Random timeline here, but it seemed that between 1980-2005 there was a major new technological innovation for the games industry that totally changed everything every couple of years. Between 2005-2024, we’ve gotten, uh, better graphics? Better voice acting and animations? While that’s all good and dandy, it seems like we’re just improving upon the innovations of the past to make them better without actually making that major of a technological leap as something like the PS1 did in 1995.

Side-rant, but I feel a lot of these same sentiments towards ray tracing. Sure it looks great and makes games look more realistic, but why are we banking so much time and effort into it if it’s not actually making the games more fun?

 

[Colif]

Between 2005-2024, we’ve gotten, uh, better graphics? Better voice acting and animations? While that’s all good and dandy, it seems like we’re just improving upon the innovations of the past to make them better without actually making that major of a technological leap as something like the PS1 did in 1995.

VR?? It might take off eventually... the metaverse wasn't it...

We got 3d games that worked a bit better than previous attempts. Like 3d TV, It might take off one day.

Depending on width of screen, your 1st paragraph is either 16 lines long or 3... still a lot to ask people to read, but as its not a question that needs an answer, what does it matter... but walls of text sure stop other people from reading them.

 

[neogunhero]

VR?? It might take off eventually... the metaverse wasn't it...

Personally I have no idea if VR will really take off in the way traditional games have. It’s been over 12 years since we have modern VR as we know it today, and the adoption rate isn’t great. If I had to guess that’s mainly due to high prices and requiring a powerful PC, so overall the barrier for entry is quite expensive for the average person.

I’d love to see VR become a mainstream way to play. I used to have a Dell Visor my old manager sold me for $80, it wasn’t very good but I got to experience the basics of VR and had a fun time with it, but eventually sold it. I would definitely have a better experience with a better headset.

 

[Zloth]

I pulled out an old Byte magazine - the edition celebrating 20 years of Byte, published in 1995 right as Windows 95 was showing up.

One section was going over some of the bugs that really made a splash. Anybody remember the Pentium Bug from 30 years ago? The calculator that came with Windows made bad calculations for the first few years, too.

What I’m wondering is when will see see “modern retro” games that try to recapture PS3/XB360 era of games?

This morning, I was watching this video:

View: https://youtu.be/2zRcNSh8VUQ?si=8Rqsn-7zRgUFT_QV&t=100


I skipped the first few minutes of intro (and made my link skip them, too). It was until the end of the video that I figured out that he wasn't exploring a game from about 15 years back, but an indie game in EA right now!

Side-rant, but I feel a lot of these same sentiments towards ray tracing. Sure it looks great and makes games look more realistic, but why are we banking so much time and effort into it if it’s not actually making the games more fun?

Because it DOES make games more fun! The pretty stuff is prettier, the ugly stuff is uglier, the majestic stuff is more majestic, and so on. Graphics really do help a lot. (Same with higher quality music, though that maxxed out eons ago.)

 

[Colif]

 

[Pifanjr]

Interesting stuff, but it would've been nice if it didn't take 20+ minutes.

The TL;DW of the video is that nostalgia can hold games back either because the developers only copy the most iconic pieces of another game without understanding those weren't what made the game great or because copying the iconic parts of another game makes players unable to adapt to the differences of the new game, even if the changes are otherwise good.

 

[Colif]

They take the appearance but don't capture the magic of the old games. or they make the players remember the other games and want to play them instead.

Basically what you said.

Or they are a legit replica of what came before but players only remember the good parts. Like what happened with the Banjo Kazooie sequel game. Some people liked it for that reason but others wanted it to be more...like new games... that isn't how retro works though. Only if you are Blizzard and make a new version of classic wow... but I digress.

 

[Pifanjr]

Only if you are Blizzard and make a new version of classic wow... but I digress.

Even then people started asking for "Classic+".

 

[Colif]

They didn't have to wait as long as I did for the expansion. Whatever 1st one was called. I spent 1 year at 60 (of ingame time) making new characters for something to do... perhaps that is where that started. I didn't enjoy the expansion so I stopped playing in 2008 or so, and never really looked back. Game changed so much since then. You know game is old when its classic version starts to catch up with expansion versions... do they start again when it does?