I guess this post is somewhat more article-based than what usually goes in this forum, but it doesn't really qualify as a "User Review," so I put it here.

Leave it to the gaming community to make me feel like a fossil at the ripe old age of 28. I've posted on forums for a while, though this is the first forum that was specifically for gaming, and I tend to feel that I've always been a little out of place in this field. On the one hand, I've played games for most of my life, and I currently work at a video game retailer, but as far as gamers go, I'm not really. My job forces me to be a bit more knowledgeable than the standard casual gamer, but by no means does it place me among the hardcore. The problem arises from the fact that the era of gaming that I am most associated with comes dangerously close to pre-dating a lot of my customers, and I'm even talking about the ones that CAN buy the "M" rated titles. I was particularly disturbed when a topic popped up at another site's forum, asking which "old-school gaming console" was their favourite, and amongst the options was the Playstation 1.

Maybe I'm not quite keeping with the times, but I find it quite difficult to consider any game "old school" once a character starts to incorporate more than 10 polygons. Maybe the PSX isn't so terribly far from this, but I'm thinking of games like 4D Boxing over here (which, incidentally, is perhaps one of the greatest boxing games, ever). What confuses me the most about all this is that there are gamers my age, and a lot of them, and we grew up on the same games from the NES forward, but a lot of them still have no clue what I'm talking about when I mention certain titles. I'll talk about Prince of Persia 2, and they'll assume I mean The Warrior Within, rather than The Shadow and the Flame.

It was at this point that it truly struck me; the reason why most of my gaming knowledge borders on the obscure is because I was gaming on the PC back when some of the people I was growing up with didn't even know what games the "IBM" had to offer. People were huddled around the schoolyard talking about Super Mario Bros 2, at around the time that I was obsessing over Maniac Mansion. I was invited over to friends' homes to play Castlevania because nobody really wanted to come over and play Police Quest. Sure, people think back and remember fondly about The Secret of Monkey Island, and I'm left to wonder how so many people remember that game, but nobody remembers Loom? (Don't get me wrong; Monkey Island is a GREAT game, but so many other games from that time period were ignored, even though there was obviously SOME exposure to PC gaming.)

So, I know that it's been something like a decade since the first Resident Evil introduced the masses to survival horror in a big way, but at the time, I didn't really like it all that much. Not that it wasn't a good game, but I felt it was borrowing heavily from the much older Alone in the Dark, which was far more scary. Discrepancies also follow when everybody remembers Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, but it's hard to find anybody to reminisce with me over games like Syndicate, Crusader: No Remorse and The Incredible Machine. Everybody's going crazy in years of anticipation over Spore. I'm sure it'll be a great game, but I can wait, because I got my fill from playing SimLife. The PC gamers champion Fallout as one of RPG's greatest chapters, and for good reason. But where are my fellow DarkSun fans?

And now, I think at where I am now, compared to where I was, and my focus has almost entirely shifted towards the consoles, with very few PC exclusives to feel particularly proud of. American McGee's Alice was a wonderful experience. I want to give UFO: Extraterrestrials a try, but mainly because it's an almost carbon copy of one of my favourites, X-Com. And that's about all I can really name off the top of my head.

So, what brought about the 180-degree switch? How can I, a once-proud PC gamer have almost nothing to do with the platform anymore? I don't even play World of Warcraft. Even my roommate plays that, and he's about as far away from a gamer as you can get. Well, I think I've figured it out.

Back in the day, PC games were always trying to find a balance between cutting edge technology and widespread appeal. They didn't want to exclude too many people from playing their games. So long as you had a 1MB SVGA card and 32MB RAM, you were set for about 5 years. Nowadays, programmers seem to be taking more pride in the fact that people CAN'T play their game. Look at Crysis; they actually recommend that you build a new computer in order to play their game to the fullest extent! When Doom 3 came out, they sent free RAM chips with their review copies. Trying to make sure that a game will actually work on your computer has become more of a chore than a hobby, and an expensive one at that. I simply cannot afford to keep up, and even if I could, there's nothing that's really compelling me to do so.

When I buy a console, I know that when I buy a game for it, it will work, unless it's defective or suffers from a major glitch. I don't have to worry if my video card is above a certain model of a certain brand and has more megabytes of video RAM than the hairs on my head.

In the current state of affairs, I wonder if PC gaming is dying as a culture, since the majority of its games are ports from console versions. Sure, you can pump up your PC to perform better than the consoles, but it's just not worth my time, energy and money to do so. And there are fewer and fewer unique gaming experiences on the PC unless I want to play Ravenhearst. But then I think back on the days when PC gaming was ripe with innovation, unique gameplay and accessible fun, and realize that those games are faded away into the foggy cabinets of the cult division, and I wonder if PC gaming was ever truly alive to begin with.

It happens to us all in the end mate. Personally I don't mind getting older, it's the fact that I still only look like I'm about twelve that gets me (I am pushing thirty). Plus the fact that I constantly use the word 'awesome'.

These things are all relative aren't they? I personally never think of PCs as being old school - I first played Prince Of Persia on the Archimedes, and Monkey Island on the Amiga. This was after years of Spectrums, Commodores and what nots. PC was the new kid on the block, that for some reason was brought in only about a month before my GCSE Computer Studies course finished (yeah thanks for that Mr Genius IT teacher).

I still think of anything from the nineties as being 'just a few years ago' but that just isn't the case unfortunately. The Playstation was released in 1994 - in a world where technology moves at lightning speed, I guess a fourteen year old console IS old school.

I don't think the PC is dead just yet. Look at last November, when every pc game in the world was released simultaneously, to the massive detriment of my bank balance. Give it a couple of years, and the current consoles will be looking a bit old, and the pc will be riding high. And then the next generation of consoles will come out and the whole cycle will repeat itself, ad nauseum.

This post deserves some kind of award.
And PSX is NOT old school >.< (This coming from a 15 year old)
Also, it's funny. A recent survey of Australian video gamers found that the average age was...wait for it...28. ~.^

Also, I agree with what you say on American McGee's Alice. Despite never having played it.
I want it so badly... :(

I'm sure that when the makers of PC hardware and software realize that a PC doesn't go through generations like a console, things'll get a lot better.

Even if the PC does get some games on it, I'm almost certain I won't care. The only games that come out exclusively for PC are MMOs, single player games that play like MMOs, and games whose sole purpose by the designers is to make sure that absolutely nobody is able to play it at the time of launch. Oh, and the latest pack of Sims 2 add-ons and railroad simulators. If it weren't for RTS games, the PC would be almost useless, and I don't particularly like RTS games, so I'm pretty fucked. I won't get back onto the PC market until all of the following occur:

1) programmers start working within limitations so that people can actually play their damn game, and I don't have to constantly pay copious amounts of cash to keep up,

2) the PC actually gets some interesting and/or innovative titles; I don't think there's been a game I simply MUST have since American McGee's Alice,

and 3) the PC gets video editing software that's as good as Final Cut, or at least better than Premiere.

I honestly think game makers collude with hardware manufacturers to artificially feed the technology situation on the PC.

end_boss:
nobody remembers Loom... The Incredible Machine... where are my fellow DarkSun fans?... one of my favourites, X-Com.

Here's someone who fondly remembers those games. Shattered Lands was always so much better than Wake of the Ravager...

I replay those old games fairly regularly. I'm currently playing the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack, including the awesome Pipe Dream and a less awesome version of Tetris than the Game Boy had.

Thank you my WEC Crusader armored friend. You have made this gamer feel even older than his 26 long years :p

I grew up with DOS, later DOS Shell and Windows 3.1. Back at my parents' house I still have an old copy of PC gamer announcing a new OS called Windows 95, and I remember my hatred of early '95 because it wouldn't run many of my older games. As PCs evolved, my game selection shrunk because DOS era games were top notch, and peerless for enjoyability.

I remember many of the games you mention, but some of my even more favorite games predate even 16-bit graphics...

Sleuth0, Sopwith, Castaway, Castle, and Lander were all Ascii or text based Q-Basic games I LOVED. Sleuth0 in particular, which you were a lil one-text-character happyface wandering around one of two house designs searching for clues, a murder weapon, and which room it happened in. It was like Clue, but single player and very challenging. I LOVED it.

As to Playstation 1 being oldschool, it isn't.
I had an original NES a couple weeks before official release in Canada. Later, a friend had the SNES and another the Genesis when they were current, but I still only had my NES. We never had the SNES, Genesis, 3D0, 32X, Sega CD, or Saturn. It wasn't till the 64 came out we finally had a new console, and shortly after I got a Playstation. Oldschool to ME is everything BEFORE the 64/PS because that's when consoles started to compare to computers in capabilities.

I find myself agreeing with you and this thread proves why I enjoy your posts elsewhere. I can't say that I have your breadth of gamer knowledge as I have stuck to console gaming for basically the reasons you stated for why you avoid it now. Checking computer specs to see if I can run a game always seemed like techno-masturbation and thus I avoided it.

Funny thing is that when you mentioned Dark Sun, I was thinking the D&D campaign setting it was based off of, which I played.

PS1 isn't oldschool, what is are things like the Comadore64 and the NES, you aren't old, just come from a different understanding of video games.

It isn't just the PC thats suffering from a lack of innovation, there are very few games that can claim to be truly innovative. Thanks to EA, no less. I class myself as a PC gamer, and my PC is reaching the end of its tenure (it would have been considered high end 3/4 years ago) and there are many games I want to play, but cant, so I'm gonna wait for hardware to come down in price and get all the games like Crysis then.
I also grew up playing the commodore, NES and the like. If its post NES/Master System era its not old-school. I do miss them old games, regardless of how old they make me feel.

It's awesome to see that I'm not alone here. Certainly, the video game industry is one that looks to the future and moves with the times, but I'm glad that there are people who still remember some of the unsung classics. When I write reviews (poorly) on this forum, I mainly focus on the games that I like, for two reasons:

1) I find it criminal that so many games are being immortalized for how bad they were, and awesome games are fading into obscurity. Everybody remembers Superman 64, ET, and hell, people even think back to recall Custer's Revenge. And yet, Planet's Edge, the single most underrated title of all time, and the best space adventure I have ever played, isn't even listed on GameFAQs. Obviously, if you never played it, you won't remember it, and I only played it because I worked in a used computer store and somebody traded it in. I was looking for another game at the time, whose name I couldn't remember, and it had been 10 years since I played it for 10 minutes at Egghead Software. For point of interest, I did eventually find the game I was looking for, and it was called "Lightspeed" - an awesome space dogfighter. But I bought Planet's Edge on a whim, thinking it might have been the long lost game I was looking for, and it turned out to be the best space RPG I've known to this day. (For the record, I haven't played Mass Effect, and I played the first KOTOR for all of 20 minutes before I realized it wasn't my cup of tea)

2) I'm trying to keep positive to cancel out the trendiness of gaming trash-talk. Yahtzee is a great reviewer, and I look forward to his segments every week. But now EVERYBODY is trying to copy him. Then I look for independent reviewers on YouTube, and find that EVERYBODY is trying to be the Video Game Nerd. Why the FUCK would you want to be like the Video Game Nerd? For people who want to get into a nice groove with reviewing, I think that people should be trying to find their own styles, rather than volunteering to live in somebody else's shadows.

end_boss:
I'm trying to keep positive to cancel out the trendiness of gaming trash-talk. Yahtzee is a great reviewer, and I look forward to his segments every week. But now EVERYBODY is trying to copy him. Then I look for independent reviewers on YouTube, and find that EVERYBODY is trying to be the Video Game Nerd. Why the FUCK would you want to be like the Video Game Nerd? For people who want to get into a nice groove with reviewing, I think that people should be trying to find their own styles, rather than volunteering to live in somebody else's shadows.

Amen.
I like Yahtzee's reviews, but people who try and copy him just can't seem to get it right.
A review should be done with your own style, to give it some impact.

Maybe computer gaming has gone mainstream enough that most computer shops are now places like EB or Game, and so only sell the 'big' games. Independant games retailers have a harder time competing, and so the smaller, independant games have a harder time getting sold. That's ok. Most of the old games are infinitely replayable.

I recently upgraded my computer so that I could play Warcraft 3 slightly better. I can now see the battles on screen without the game slowing down to useless levels, and my computer can handle an 8 player map.

*with the times*

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

If you get this reference THEN you're too old.

Now excuse me while I chase some kids off my lawn with my walking stick...

Actually, in defense of EB and GameStop, there are quite a few smaller games that adorn the PC game walls, but they're nothing spectacular, either.

Inside the mailbox was a grue, you have been eaten by a grue.

Its not just computer games that suffer compared to older titles... Look at pen'n'paper games.

Shadowrun is barely limping along since the Fanpro/Wizkids buyout from FASA. The novels suck in comparison, and the game is getting stale.

Battletech died in childbirth, when its offspring MW Dark Ages tore it a new one and left it bleeding out what fans it still had.

Rest in Peace TSR Inc, your children are with you. Mystara, Spelljammer, Darksun, Planescape, Al-Quadim, and Oriental Adventures are with you in the afterlife. Your son Ravenloft has twice been risen from the dead, but he is an empty shell now, devoid of plot and reason. Worse, he still carries the taint of his White Wolf disease. So too alive but dead is your other son Greyhawk, who lives in a state of obscurity while his adoptive parents WotC cannot decide if he is family or not. But fear not, for two of your children yet live to carry on your good name. Dragonlance is fighting the War of Souls Cancer, but may yet recover, and Forgotten Realms is doing quite well.

maybe mainstream PC gaming is going astray, but the indie scene is alive and well. in a lot of ways, i feel the current PC indie scene is reminiscent of the old days (i'm 24). you see tons of innovation, playful creativity, and none will require you to buy more RAM.

2 good sites for indie PC games:
http://www.manifestogames.com
http://www.gametunnel.com

download a few of their top-rated games - i think you'll dig.

there's also Portal.

evilsandwich:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

If you get this reference THEN you're too old.

Now excuse me while I chase some kids off my lawn with my walking stick...

That brings back so many memories.

"My tines be long, my tines be short, my tines end 'ere their first report."

say Lightning

BOOM!

- J

Khell_Sennet:
Inside the mailbox was a grue, you have been eaten by a grue.

Its not just computer games that suffer compared to older titles... Look at pen'n'paper games.

Shadowrun is barely limping along since the Fanpro/Wizkids buyout from FASA. The novels suck in comparison, and the game is getting stale.

Battletech died in childbirth, when its offspring MW Dark Ages tore it a new one and left it bleeding out what fans it still had.

Rest in Peace TSR Inc, your children are with you. Mystara, Spelljammer, Darksun, Planescape, Al-Quadim, and Oriental Adventures are with you in the afterlife. Your son Ravenloft has twice been risen from the dead, but he is an empty shell now, devoid of plot and reason. Worse, he still carries the taint of his White Wolf disease. So too alive but dead is your other son Greyhawk, who lives in a state of obscurity while his adoptive parents WotC cannot decide if he is family or not. But fear not, for two of your children yet live to carry on your good name. Dragonlance is fighting the War of Souls Cancer, but may yet recover, and Forgotten Realms is doing quite well.

Actually, Oriental Adventures came back too. I enjoyed it. *shrugs*

The Zork references bring a fond tear to my eye... lol

Oriental Adventures was brought back in 3.0 D&D, but abandoned before v3.5 and there are no plans for it to be included in D&D v4.

Oriental Adventures more-or-less just got rolled into the Forgotten Realms, the same way remnants of Spelljammer and Planescape did.

Edit: I forgot another... Council of Wyrms also got abandoned with the closing of TSR.

I wouldn't call you 'old.' I'm 24, I started playing games with the huge black monstrosity my dad brought home in the late 80s. Used the large floppies, didn't have a hard drive as I recall, and played some awesome black and white games where you could pretty much just jump over stuff... it did have a nice flight sim (i think in CGA colors) and a torpedo boat sim. I have also played commodores (cousins), amigas, ataris, original nintendo's, etc. I also remember the days of 286s, 386s, 486s, pentium 1s, and the like, and was using DOS at the tender age of 7 (surprising i'm not in more of a computer based career).

I remember loom, monkey island (i still prefer monkey island over loom), played the original 2 prince of persias (btw if you just click parry and attack incessantly and at the same time you never lose a swordfight), kings quests 3 was one of my faves, kings quest 1 i couldn't play since i didn't know enough english back then, space quest series is still one of my all time greatest game series, loved lands of lore, red baron, privateer, star con 1 was even good (although 2 was better), wing commander, The Incredible Machine was fun, Leisure Larry (my mom had no idea what the hell we were playing back then), moving onto Planescape and Baldur's gate (which are still top rated RPGs in my mind), Morrowind more recently... I don't own a console, but I am debating it now, PC games haven't been awe inspiring lately, and they seem watered down versions as they are console ports have the time (here's looking at you Bioshock and Oblivion).

Anyway, there were not that many hardcore PC gamers back in the day, nintendo was still more popular than PC. The people who remember many of those old PC games, which for most part were written better than almost any games out today, are few and lucky.

it's actually quite hard to say which consoles are old school. It's pretty relative, if you ask me. The SNES mightn't have been an old school console back in the 32/64bit era, but now it is (at least imo). For me, a console can earn the name of "old school" once they're 20 years old. But then we have consoles like amiga, commodore, etc, who also get older as time goes by. What do you call them? "old old school"?

I also like yahtzee's reviews, and i honestly haven't seen any imitators besides the "some punctuation" guy, and he did the job quite well.

As for the system specs thing, pc game developers try to keep with the consoles in this subject. Console ports don't help either. As each console generation pushes the graphics to the limit, the pc has to go after them. PC game developers are afraid of losing their audience to the console gaming market if they don't keep pushing it in the graphics department. What they don't realize is that they're losing it anyway, as they try to make pc games' graphics as good as console games' graphics. It's a lot more expensive to upgrade or buy a new pc than it is to buy a new console. I see no hope for pc gaming if all we keep getting are mmo's, console ports, or games that just beg for a console port *cough* crysis *cough*

WALL OF TEXT HITS YOU FOR 42 DAMAGE!
CRITICAL HIT

Time passes us not, my friend. I too have given up on the new PC games for reasons not dissimilar from yours...aka I'd rather pay my mortgage than buy a new vid card. The best we can hope for, i think, is to keep our feelers out for the games that we feel don't suck & preserve those that we deem worthy for our children to enjoy with us.

And I don't feel its "old school" unless you needed a screwdriver to hook the consoul up or it came on 5¼" OR cassette tape...

Now the mention of floppy discs makes me feel old... Less because I know what they are, more because I specifically built my ultra-modern SOTA PC to include a 3.5" floppy drive in it so I can still play Solar Winds and Castle of the Winds.

ah the old days when floppy disks were actually floppy.
i miss goblins when i had a black and white moniter(if you remember the game you may understand why it took me 30minutes to get into the game)it was sooooo good when i finally got the colour moniter and could finally read what people where talking about in startrek 25th anniversary

Don't get me wrong, there are things I'll consider "old school" in relation to today's standards, just to acknowledge the passage of time. I've been playing games for a long time before the original Alone in the Dark came out, but it was one of the pioneers of polygon graphics, a forefather of survival horror, and probably the template from which almost the entire genre is based. Yes, it's not "old school" in terms of comparing to the C64, which is my first computer gaming experience, but I feel it deserves the title. Also, just about any game, including those which venture into VGA territory, I might consider "old school" because they still use the text parser or SCUMM interface, which carries from the old-school tradition dating back to Zork, and probably further, but whatever. But the PSX being old school? I don't find that it truly deserves the title by any stretch. When I think of old-school RPGs, I think about games like Wizardry, the Genesis-based Phantasy Stars, even if they're not the oldest of the old, but they go back to before the RPG experience was 10 minutes of gameplay per 30 minutes of boring cutscenes.

Basically, I break it down like this:

Before the Commodore 64 and Atari, I consider my "pre-historic" stage, because they date back before I was gaming.

Even though it spans a few eras, anything from the Atari, C64, Amiga, NES, or PC games that still run on my Hercules Monochrome, no hard drive, XT computer are old school by default.

Games of the 486 to early Pentium era CAN be considered borderline "old school," based on certain qualifiers. Most of them, I do not consider old school in any way, but some of them defined an entirely new genre, and may pass as "old school" when taken in context of that genre. For instance, AITD, Dune 2, or 4D Boxing.