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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 04 May 2025 14:08:03 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?
Date: Sun, 04 May 2025 10:07:48 -0400
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On Sun, 4 May 2025 09:32:40 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

>On 02/05/2025 15:58, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>> Well, I can't speak specifically to the Speccy. It wasn't my device of
>> choice and I've very little familiarity with its software. But a lot
>> of the ports to PC and Apple (where I did have familiarity) did suffer
>> from the problem. There were, of course, exceptions but even in games
>> like "Zork" you could sense this underlying philosophy; make things as
>> hard as possible for the player to extend the duration of the game.
>
>I tend to agree. With their limitations there was only so much content 
>you could put in so if you knew exactly what to do you could 
>play-through a game in a few hours or so. As you say to increase the 
>actual game time the easiest option is just make it hard to know exactly 
>what you had to do.
>
>I remember some of the early text adventures and you could easily spend 
>half-an-hour working out just how to get past a problem. Then there was 
>Manic Miner with it with its massive single screen level count of 
>twenty. I spent many hours playing that but I never got past probably 
>level fourteen or fifteen.
>

And yet... the games WERE fun, weren't they? Because for all that I
point out the foibles of early game design, I never want to imply that
we didn't have a blast with them, or that they weren't well-made
games. 

Just that they reflect a different design philosophy and I think that
modern games (mostly) use a better one. But it's this conflict --as
well as various technical issues, not the least being the god-awful
controls of yesterday's games-- that makes it hard to enjoy a lot of
these older titles. And it makes the few exceptions all the more
impressive when they --despite their eye-gouging visuals, ear-bleeding
beeps, hand-cramping controls and ruthlessly antagonistic mechanics--
still manage to hold up as good games to this day.

It's one of the reasons I dislike modern 'retro' games in general,
because they are aping the form without realizing it's not the
pixelated graphics/etc. which made these classics so beloved. We love
them DESPITE those limitations. We love them because they SURPASSED
those limitations. Just slapping on a veneer of retroism is a lazy
appeal to nostalgia without an understanding as to why we're nostalgic
in the first place.