On Friday, 20 September 2013 at 19:17:45 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I dunno, I find that my good memories of those old games are quite tainted by nostalgia.
True in some cases, but in others I find myself able to appreciate them even more now. But I avoid the taint by playing them again every few years :)
many annoyances that have been eliminated in modern games.
Oh, modern games have their own annoyances. For example, the NES would flash or glitch. The playstation three freezes up and disconnects its own CPU with its excessive heat.
I'll take the NES though, at least it didn't have such ridiculously long load and boot times!
Gameplay wise.... eh, the new games I like tend to be similar to the old games.
The most creative source of sound that I remember, was an Apple II game that deliberately used the floppy drive to make a grinding sound (IIRC during takeoff in a flight sim type game).
There's a youtube channel devoted to stuff like that: this guy uses old computers grinding floppy drives to create all kinds of symphonies. Pretty cool... but I prefer the beeps!
BTW another nice thing about beep tracks and other stuff is you can hack on them. This is why I live MIDI so much (and why linux pisses me off so much with its absolutely crappy support for it) - you can tweak all kinds of parameters as it plays, modify files, silence tracks, all kinds of cool things that aren't practical with digital audio.
They also loop so well, I can set a video game song playing for 30 minutes straight as real life background music and not get annoyed with it. Sometimes that works with mp3s too, but the video game ones are specifically made for infinite looping so there's no discontinuity as it goes around again.
