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What popular game/system is "before your time" that you hate?

All western consoles and microcomputers from the 80s just suck ass.

Atari, Commodore, Amstrad, SPECTRUM...

Ps: some may had amazing and advanced hardware for the time (Commodore...) But catalogue wise? AWFUL.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
Nothing was before my time i think, my first vg was pong at 3 years old, is there anything older than pong?
 
Spectum ZX. People love this machine but the games didnt make any sense and were awful to play.
It's pure nostalgia based love. There may be some sort of interesting looking games bearing in mind the super limited hardware that Spectrum is, but gameplay wise it suck ass.

American and European developers just didn't have anything to do against the japanese back in the 80s (and probably early 90s too)
 
Happy Dance GIF by Charlie Mars

Just putting this here since broccoli triggers you.............

I'm old though, so for me it is also the Atari 2600, and to a lesser extent the 5200. Intellivision and ColecoVision were both better and had better games than the Atari 2600. There are extraordinarily few games I want to revisit on the 2600.
 

MP!

Member
I'm so old that the only thing really before my time was the atari stuff... and I don't really hate it

I hate overwatch and fortnite and League of Legends... or rather I hate what it represents
 

Kadve

Member
Rather than specific consoles, it is more about the visuals they produce.

For 2D I can't stand consoles that display only palettes of 4. It rarely looks good, and most of the time it looks like a patchwork of ugly puzzle pieces. 3 colors sprites look awful.
What? You mean the Fairchild Channel F wasn't the height of Graphical fidelity in 1976? xd

alien_invasion.jpg


6 colors + B&W!

mpT0Z3i.png
 
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DryvBy

Gold Member
3D 90s shooters (from a visual standpoint). They never looked good and i don't understand what people see in low quality brown polygons.

As for systems? Tried the N64 recently and i cant undertand how anyone can use that stupid controller.
You'd adjust your hands depending on the game. Typical gaming was left hand in the middle, right hand on the right side. That's 99% of N64 games.
 
Hate is a strong word, but basically everything that is truly before my time (everything older than NES). The games just moved along too slow and were too limited on those older systems.
 

AndrewRyan

Member
Used to be able to mentally switch between games where the panning is reversed but wont anymore (with Steam you can remap now).

30fps action games.

Used to be very forgiving when it came to the quality of handheld games but now my expectations are sky-high due to the steamdeck. Now I expect real games that are actually fun- not merely time wasters.

Point-and-click adventure games: Click on every mf pixel just in case you miss some obscure thing a person decided to hide somewhere.
 

Kadve

Member
Used to be able to mentally switch between games where the panning is reversed but wont anymore (with Steam you can remap now).

30fps action games.

Used to be very forgiving when it came to the quality of handheld games but now my expectations are sky-high due to the steamdeck. Now I expect real games that are actually fun- not merely time wasters.

Point-and-click adventure games: Click on every mf pixel just in case you miss some obscure thing a person decided to hide somewhere.
Should point out that most P&C games made since 2005 has adopted a highlight system. I.e., you press button and everything that's interactable in an area is highlighted.
 
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Mossybrew

Gold Member
Yeah I'm with the old gaffers here since nothing was really before my time, played the Atari 2600 as a kid. Can't say I hate it, it was fun enough for its time, but even back then I was never really in love with it, I preferred running around outside playing with the neighbor kids or playing with my toys.
 

Krathoon

Member
Happy Dance GIF by Charlie Mars

Just putting this here since broccoli triggers you.............

I'm old though, so for me it is also the Atari 2600, and to a lesser extent the 5200. Intellivision and ColecoVision were both better and had better games than the Atari 2600. There are extraordinarily few games I want to revisit on the 2600.
Yeah. I have been messing around with the Flashback consoles for the Intellivision and Colecovision and they blow the Atari 2600 out of the water.

The Atari 2600 won because it was cheaper at the time, but it was not the best. I like the Colecovision the most. I will have to check into geting an emulator setup with the Colecovision controller. There has to be a usb adapter for it.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
It's pure nostalgia based love. There may be some sort of interesting looking games bearing in mind the super limited hardware that Spectrum is, but gameplay wise it suck ass.

American and European developers just didn't have anything to do against the japanese back in the 80s (and probably early 90s too)

You have no idea how little time we had to make games back in those days. Worse, the tools with which to make them were really limited, and often non-existent so they then needed to be built in the same window of a few weeks!

I'd also add that particularly with systems that used the classic config of an 8-way digital joystick and a single fire-button you're really limited controls-wise. Similarly, when you are working within extremely tight memory/graphics limits a lot of small things that you'd consider "standard" features, become luxuries that you have to think carefully about implementing.

I'm talking about really basic stuff we take for granted like hit-reactions on shots connecting; its all got a cost both in implementation and memory footprint.

I've recently started making a new C64 game, because that was the system I first got paid to develop on, and honestly I've always loved the simplicity and physicality* of 6502 assembler. Going in, a big part of my design process has been to make a game that feels "modern" by paying attention to the sort of details I just described. And even with modern dev-tools and tech to ease the process, its very apparent why we didn't do things like that back in the day!


* Boring coder stuff follows: This might seem like a weird way to describe it, but I think its extremely accurate. 6502 code has an extremely limited instruction set, and a lot of the time you find yourself writing self-modifying code out of convenience if not necessity! By the 16bit era cpu's started having instruction/memory caches that made such techniques really bad practice, and of course with the rise of OOP its almost unthinkable to actual write into program address-space, let alone directly re-write machine code on the fly. What I'm getting at is the actual "feel" of writing to the metal (no safety-nets) is very different, and I think really fun.
 
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3D 90s shooters (from a visual standpoint). They never looked good and i don't understand what people see in low quality brown polygons.

As for systems? Tried the N64 recently and i cant undertand how anyone can use that stupid controller.
Definitely holds firm in the dumbest controller design in history category. Fanboys still swear by it though. I do however like quite a few of the games emulated with a normal person controller.
 

Azelover

Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.
I was there for the Atari 2600 and I enjoyed it.

I guess maybe Pong.. it's a simplistic game but it's not bad. You can still have fun with it.
 

Kagoshima_Luke

Gold Member
Atari. I was tiny when I played my cousin's Atari and it seemed super lame. Would way rather be out running around, playing with my toys, etc. A few years later I moved to Japan and was introduced to the Famicom, and was like:

amazed-shock.gif
 

reinking

Gold Member
I do not hate any of them because for their time they were fun.

One of my favorite toys as a kid...

811px-Mattel_Baseball%2C_Model_2942-0320%2C_Made_in_Hong_Kong%2C_Copyright_1978_%28LED_Handheld_Electronic_Game%29.jpg
 
I'm on the verge of turning 46...started with handme down atari 2600, intellivison and IBM Xt, also family apple iic. They were all great for their time.

Now one system I don't understand is atari lynx, and jagaur. What was on them? Nothing besides tempest would even make me consider.

As for games... Unpopular opinion.. Fuck pokemon. I never understood the kiddie appeal. And I love Mario and sonic. I also like some cutsie anime dragon quest is awesome also can jive with the some of the Atelier games... But damn pokemon. Maybe it was my age. I was into magic the gathering whr. It came out. Pokémon seems like a elementary school kids version. Yet it's popular with people my wifes age (she is 3 years younger).

Also fuck gaas, fortnite,overwatch, apex and valarant especially (awful looking characters). First descendant looks nice and so does warframe and Poe, both other than those nah..

Lastly, let's piss more people off. Blizzard sucks. Most mmos suck. Diablo 1&2, and warcraft/starcraft were thr only good games. Wow is shit. Shit graphics, shit quests, made people not play other things. Nah. Eq2 and star wars galaxies was better than wow. Janky ass vanguard was better than wow. Conan hyborian adv. with its boob physics was especially better than wow. Diablo 4 is crap compared to d3 and especially d2. Overwatch is not for me so fuck that too!

Am I doing it right 😁🤣
 
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Text adventure computer games. I can do choose your adventure books just fine, but those annoy me. Even later ones like Oregon Trail.
 

kevboard

Member
I don't like Atari 2600 anything. I don't understand how anyone has nostalgia for Pong or Adventure. They're turds.

I wouldn't say I hate it. but yes, the 2600 is broadly speaking terrible and 99% of games on it are awful, irredeemable trash.

but it does have a handful of really good games...
 

kevboard

Member
Rather than specific consoles, it is more about the visuals they produce.

For 2D I can't stand consoles that display only palettes of 4. It rarely looks good, and most of the time it looks like a patchwork of ugly puzzle pieces. 3 colors sprites look awful.

whaaaat?

screenshot04


26069.png

e6793b800a1599979042a8123a44371004489ee3.gif
 

Ozzie666

Member
I can't really go past Coleco Vision, although I have a lot of fondness for the 2600 and Intelivision. Some nostalgic games on both. But they are both difficult to go back to now and enjoy.
NES is pretty safe and enjoyable to go back and play. I guess I don't hate anything since for me gaming really started with the 2600 in my mind. But god did I hate the controllers for those early systems.
That leaves something like the Odessey.

Texas Instruments Computer, I didn''t like that one much at all. The Vic-20 was better.
 

CashPrizes

Member
I owned an Atari and an Intellevision, so not before my time, but both those systems are shit and nothing on them is worth playing. NES has at least 30 great game that you could still play today and have fun (Mega Man 2, Contra, Castlevania 3, Mario 3, Zelda) but yeah 95%+ of the NES library is not worth revisiting.

16 bit gen is when gaming actually got good. There is like 80-100 SNES and about the same number of Genesis games worth playing. PC games got a lot better too in the early 90s with the advent of CD-Rom and Lucasarts hitting it's stride.

I think the N64 is a piece of crap, I owned one just for Zelda 64. There are like 5 good games on that system total.
 
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kurisu_1974

is on perm warning for being a low level troll
I hate the look and feel of ZX Spectrum games and in a lesser way Amstrad CPC stuff.

And there is some overlap here, but I also really hate most British games from the 8-bit and 16-bit era except for some of the music.

Edit: good call on the N64 from CashPrizes CashPrizes that is a "recent" one that I dislike very much, just hate how games look on it.
 
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