GRcade Retro Gaming Chat

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Dig Dug
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Dig Dug » Fri Oct 12, 2018 11:18 pm

I own full collections of NOM from June 2001 (E3) to when it ended (so the gamecube era), N64/NGC for the same period and all but 1 issues of cube. I've been burning through my collection of NOM this week as I've been meaning to read them for a while. I'm planning to get rid of all my magazines at some point so if anyone is after those collections let me know.

Gemini73

PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Gemini73 » Sat Oct 13, 2018 11:53 pm

Question: Do we know class PS3 and Xbox 360 as retro?

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Kriken
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Kriken » Sun Oct 14, 2018 12:25 am

Kind of. Retro enough for me to post ps3 stuff in this thread recently, and I've seen people post psp stuff which is from the same era.

It's over a decade old, has ceased production and of course there aren't really any games coming out for it anymore, but they did have a major release on the console as early as last year - Persona 5 (worldwide).

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Dig Dug
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Dig Dug » Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:22 am

I like to categorise:
First you have real retro with microcomputers, the golden age of arcades, Atari VCS etc.

Then you have popularised retro with the NES, game boy and other such systems.

After that you get millennial retro that covers all the stuff in the 90s, when retro game magazine began years ago the Dreamcast was where they often drew the line on “retro” and for good reason. The medium was going through a huge transitional period that changed the entire landscape for better and for worse. Many of the standards for what we consider good game design were solidified in this period.

Finally you have modern retro with PS2/Xbox/GameCube becoming detached enough from the modern that they are beginning to be seen as retro.

Personally I still find the majority of games made from PS2 onwards to still be very modern.
I definitely don’t see the Xbox 360 as retro when it can play GTA V.

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The Doom Spoon
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by The Doom Spoon » Sun Oct 14, 2018 2:33 pm

Personally I see retro as a style of game rather than an age of a game. Anything 8 or 16bit is retro in my mind even new games like Stardew Valley or Shovel Knight I see as retro styled. 32, 64 and 128bit to me is post modern and anything from PS3/360 onwards is modern.

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Ironhide
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Ironhide » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:10 pm

Gemini73 wrote:Question: Do we now class PS3 and Xbox 360 as retro?


No, they're not quite old enough yet imo.

I think Dig Dug's slightly complicated Retro categorisation is an interesting way of looking at it though.

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kerr9000
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by kerr9000 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:28 pm

I tend to go by a very simplistic definition.... can you walk into a normal game shop like Game for example and easily grab most of the games for it you'd like off a shelf, if you can its not retro, if you cant its retro. The reason I go by this is because its nice and easy.

I often find the easiest way to get games cheap is to grab them just as shops like in the above example are wanting to get rid of them because they don't fit into the range of stuff they want to stock anymore.

By this definition you don't see cube games or ps2 or xbox original games anymore in shops like Game so they are retro..... xbox one and ps4 etc are new and stuff like 360 and ds and wii are the middle ground that game and others are trying to dump off so they will eventually become retro and are kind of at perfect buying time.

Gemini73

PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Gemini73 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:30 pm

I guess PS3 and 360 are on the cusp, but not quite there yet then?

Thanks for the replies, folks. :)

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kerr9000
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by kerr9000 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:33 pm

by my definition yeah there on the cusp... with them likely to be chucked out by the likes of Game in time for the ps5 and 4th Xbox, by which point they will from that perspective be retro.

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Dig Dug
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Dig Dug » Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:49 pm

This post is a bit of a page filler so I've put it in a spoiler box.

Even games that have an older look or are even on that older level of hardware can feel modern to me. I just blasted through Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance this weekend and despite being a GBA game from 2002 it's design is still of a modern standard even if the template it uses was established long before then. I think 2D games more so than 3D games blur the lines somewhat on this as many late 90s 2D games are technically retro while also still being modern and somewhat cutting edge, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is a better example of this than any other game as modern 2D fighting games struggle doing what it does with animation.
Animation for example:
Image Image Image
The strength of the key-frames are themselves outstanding but the animations also manage to smooth out the motion to give a more fluid appearance of motion. The lower resolution helps with this as the characters don't have to be drawn as large but it does demonstrate how cutting edge the game was.
I think Garou: Mark of the wolves also deserves a special mention for being able to do this on ageing Neo Geo hardware in 1999.
Image Image
Once again the key frames are very strong but the fluidity isn't quite on the level of 3rd strike due to the hardware limitations of the neo geo.

If we use a more modern example we can see how newer games still have to rely heavily on key-frames first and foremost to communicate movement. I'm going to use the first Blazblue (2008) for this as I'm familiar with it to a better degree than more recent games.
Image Image Image
The animation is still very good but it does demonstrate the compromises that have to be made when making a 2D game that is designed to be played at what I assume is a native resolution of 1280x720. The characters are displayed at a higher resolution and are therefore bigger. 3rd strike didn't have to be designed with that in mind (I can't imagine the native resolution being higher than 480×360).

But that all said it is still possible to have all these things in a modern game. It took years but skullgirls successfully demonstrates the standard we can expect of modern gaming tech for 2D games if the studio has the resources to allow for it.
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Sadly I couldn't find a gif of the in-game animation but we can see in the video (first attack shown) that more or less every frame of animation is kept intact (watch at 0.25 speed if you don't believe me). Keep in mind however skullgirls is the exception to the rule, very few games are built on this level of detail.

Gemini73

PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Gemini73 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 4:31 pm

Great post, Dig Dug. :D

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Jazzem
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Jazzem » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:42 pm

Oh my, wasn't prepared for that, love me some pixel art :wub:

Super interesting points raised too, wish I had more to add ha. It seems 2D will always have that retro tinge, not necessarily a bad thing but as you say is an interesting contradiction to how high end they can still be

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Green Gecko
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Green Gecko » Sun Oct 14, 2018 10:40 pm

I kind of feel it's a mix of anything 10+ years old where stylistic elements or some aspects of gameplay have gone out of fashion. For example the Skeuomorphism of the X360 dash, the heavy use of gradients and pointless graphical effects and abstract sound on PS2 startup, right back to pixel art, these are somewhat outdated effects of their time. The sounds for the XB1 startup are now laughable, the GC startup sequence is oddly cutesy but the moire and rainbow sheen of the rotating cube there is just not in place today.

I expanded on that more than I expected but as a designer I'm probably going to think that way. Respective game aesthetics haven't really changed that much, a "photoreal" game is still going to be as "photoreal" as it could be on the PS1 as it is playing Forza 6 on XBO, just better/not as good. A Disney film is still Realist animation whether it was drawn on cell and watercolour tablets on drawn on a computer.

The technology gets better but styles are still consistent. So for a game to be retro to me it has to be at least one of both, if it's both it's definitely retro. We might simply replicate these aesthetics in the future but they are still "retro". In essence the term has two different meanings, but I wouldn't call being into games like Towerfall, the original BIT TRIP Runner or Resogun "retro gaming".

An interesting aside on that is the Wii U interface design was outdated aesthetically the day it launched because while Nintendo were originally emulating Apple they didn't have an original aesthetic to go on so they just carried on with Wii's - one very small of many factors why that console failed, because the brand and the look was off. That's how video games tie in fashion and design trends and can have a pretty strong impact on how they succeed.

For example, the western and eastern designs for the NES are so different because it was originally designed to look like a VCR, along with the name "Nintendo Entertainment System" because Nintendo wanted to distance themselves from the toy-like and furniture-esque aesthetics of the home computer generation. Nintendo were actually using the same strategy as Sony did with the PS1 except 10 years earlier. It's the same but bad gaffe MS made with the original XBox which looked ridiculous and now makes no sense in the living room and very much a retro-looking machine. You don't really get any timeless console designs which is why retro gamers in general are so tied to the physical aspects of gaming like hardware and shelves of disks etc. because it's an important part of the very definition of "retro". With the hobby floating on the economics of the second hand market of old stock that's also an intrinsic element, so if you didn't have to go somehow out of your way to play a game like set up an emulator or hunt down a physical copy, I don't quite consider that somebody "retro gaming", as it's part of the experience. If that weren't true we wouldn't see replica consoles or microconsoles like NES Mini, it's a market created almost entirely by nostalgia (and some might say quality of gameplay ;) ) which is largely due to the kinaesthetic experience of playing these older games adding to their quality.

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jawafour
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by jawafour » Tue Oct 16, 2018 7:24 am

Image

I've stumbled across a retro computer game artist who posts designs on the site Old Skool Pixels. Some of the designs look terrific; they keep the retro aesthetic but twist the angle to add varying degrees of a 3D effect.

If I had some cash to spare, many of the images would be tempting.

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Victor Mildew
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Victor Mildew » Tue Oct 16, 2018 7:38 am

Boulder Dash :wub:

Hexx wrote:Ad7 is older and balder than I thought.
jawafour
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by jawafour » Tue Oct 16, 2018 7:44 am

Ad7 wrote:Boulder Dash :wub:

I know, man... a genuine classic! Two of my pals used to play the game obsessively and could get through nearly all the levels. Even in those days I used to - naturally - only play the first couple of screens.

That Boulder Dash 3D image looks so cool :datass: .

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Victor Mildew
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Victor Mildew » Tue Oct 16, 2018 7:49 am

I was so gooseberry fool at it. I remember only being able to get a few levels in for ages, then one day finding a level select feature from the title screen by using up and down on the controller.

Hexx wrote:Ad7 is older and balder than I thought.
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Corazon de Leon » Tue Oct 16, 2018 12:00 pm

I'd argue that if the console could walk into a bar in the UK and order itself a pint legally, then it should be classed as officially retro. So the Gamecube is just on the cusp, and the XBox 360 isn't a million miles away either.

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Cheeky Devlin
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PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Cheeky Devlin » Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:04 pm

I've always looked at it as the generation prior to the previous one. So PS3 and 360 I wouldn't consider retro yet, but Xbox, PS2 and GC absolutely.

I'm wanting to get in on a PS3 collection now though while the games are still dirt cheap.

Gemini73

PostRe: GRcade Retro Gaming Chat
by Gemini73 » Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:12 pm

Cheeky Devlin wrote:
I'm wanting to get in on a PS3 collection now though while the games are still dirt cheap.


That's what I've been doing with PS3 and 360 titles the last year or so. Amassed quite the collection.


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