[HN Gopher] The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of Doom
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The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of Doom
Author : doppp
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-06-19 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.filfre.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.filfre.net)
| ekianjo wrote:
| > But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was
| here to stay. People would just have to get used to the visual
| crudity for the time being, and trust that eventually things
| would start to look better again.
|
| What? Doom looked already fantastic when it came out, much better
| than hordes of 3D games that games before it. (Check out
| Midwinter just a few years before:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU)
|
| And we did not have to wait for long for 3D games to get even
| better - Comanche in 1992
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y) and Quake 1 in
| 1996. A drastic evolution in a very, very short time, even before
| GPU videocards became mainstream.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| You don't have to agree, but you're quoting out of context.
| Here's the lead-in:
|
| > Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures,
| and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some
| time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games
| the industry had been making immediately before the 3D
| revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of
| studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely
| beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies' rooms
| full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable
| amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this
| nice
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Doom, Mario, and Megaman all work extremely well within their
| limitations. The art is able to unambiguously present a world
| with atmosphere and it's clear what needs to be done. There's
| very little confusing iconography or hard to interpret
| sprites, everything is clear.
|
| They're probably the best examples in the history of the
| medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making
| 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there
| are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot
| actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the
| resolution and particles.
|
| Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered
| from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly
| slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial
| design perspective, they were a mess.
|
| Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most
| prominent example of games that excelled in the two
| dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably
| the most extreme example of form over function in games that
| were successful.
| the_af wrote:
| I strongly agree with most of your post (I think Out of
| this World and Prince of Persia both look and play well
| even today) but I think you're overstating the visuals of
| DOOM vs SuperHot. If you look for clips of DOOM (so as to
| bypass the rose tinted glasses of the mind's eye) and
| compare it to SuperHot, DOOM looks worse in every aspect
| except maybe that it's more colorful. DOOM is pixelated,
| has worse looking environments, and overall looks way worse
| -- though of course it looked great to me when it was
| released! SuperHot looks great in an abstracted,
| decolorized sort of way.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think this is pure nostalgia.
|
| The only people I've heard describe more than a handful of
| old games as "beautiful" have been those old enough to have
| experienced them before newer games came along. The original
| article doesn't seem to have examples of what the author
| considers beautiful, but let's talk about Indiana Jones and
| the Fate of Atlantis, a Lucasarts game from 1992 (since this
| is one I played in the early 90s). The art is ... fine. It
| has a lot of constraints (low resolution, not a ton of colors
| available in its palette) and it's well executed within those
| constraints, but it's not beautiful. I also played Myst
| around the same time. I didn't then, and still don't, see any
| way in which the 2d pixel art was "more beautiful."
|
| The cross-genre comparisons to shooters are also unfair.
| Compare something like Madden 95 on SNES to Madden 64 on N64.
| They both have jagged edges and visual crudity; the "pixel
| art" nature of the former does it no favors.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| The author of this article seems to believe that 2D graphics
| cannot be re-used in a game and/or is unaware of the use of
| tiles, palette-swapping, and other techniques used to make
| production of 2D games more efficient. Very strange.
| yumaikas wrote:
| Yes, 2D assets can be reused, once you have a 3D asset, it can
| be used with a lot more spectacle. Of nothing else, when you're
| animating a change of visual angle, it's a whole lot more
| convincing and easier (animate some positions) vs the 2D
| alternative of having to animate or rotoscoped each of the
| pixels and frames for that gun motion.
|
| And spectacle was one of the biggest sellers of games.
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed curious. Bungie's _Marathon_ series of FPSs of the same
| era also did palette swapping for the sprite-based NPCs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The author is an extremely comprehensive game historian who is
| probably into the hundreds of thousands of words at this point,
| so they almost certainly are aware of it and you'll find it
| mentioned in another article.
| TonyTapper wrote:
| Slightly offtopic: Can we please get rid of blog themes that omit
| the year from the post date? "19 Jun"... of which year?
| Especially with older blog posts or unmaintained blogs it's
| frustrating that you essentially have to look into the HTML code
| (or URL if you're lucky).
| iso1631 wrote:
| The URL puts it as 2020, and the bottom of the post says
| "Posted by Jimmy Maher on June 19, 2020"
| TonyTapper wrote:
| Sure, but why have a pretty date at the top and then make it
| incomplete? I don't want to scroll down to figure out if a
| blog post is recent, or look at the URL. This theme (or a
| variation) is used on many blogs, and not all of them use
| pretty URLs with a year in them.
| saberdancer wrote:
| My bank does this! The assumption is that when there is no
| year, it is the current year. They are trying to be smart
| with dates and I don't like it.
|
| Funny thing is that when they developed this feature, they
| made a bug so if you scroll down to the year before, the
| years appear, but now dates from the current year are wrong
| as they appended the year before. That's what you get for
| trying to be a smartass.
| unilynx wrote:
| Is this safe (no spoilers) to read if I'm still in the first
| chapters of "Masters of Doom' ?
| Majromax wrote:
| > The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of
| interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors
| they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games' vision
| proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and
| mechanics alike. [...] A shocking percentage of the new games
| being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres:
| the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.
|
| Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect
| an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?"
|
| Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a
| reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the
| page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top
| spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the
| latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting
| that some games are listed as multiple genres)
|
| From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of
| gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply
| misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea,
| however, I point out the Old Man Murray article
| (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of
| adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so
| wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became
| impenetrable to new players.
| zerocrates wrote:
| This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console gaming,
| which tilts the balance more toward those genres. There _is_ a
| bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in most "gaming"
| discussion, I'd say, despite their significant popularity, but
| they've also never been as much of a force on the PC as on
| consoles or arcade.
|
| If you read the blog, you'll also note that that the author
| makes no secret of his fondness for graphical and text
| adventures, and the blog has covered both extensively,
| including their declines.
|
| Interestingly, particularly since you brought up 1998, the Old
| Man Murray article you linked to was written by Erik Wolpaw, a
| well-known game writer who later worked with Double Fine
| (founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts fame, the designer of
| 1998's Grim Fandango, basically the swan song of the LucasArts
| adventures) and Valve, purveyor of 1998's acclaimed FPS Half-
| Life.
| chongli wrote:
| _There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in
| most "gaming" discussion_
|
| They kind of should be overlooked, if you're talking about a
| particular year in gaming. They don't follow the same release
| cycles as other games. Most of the time, the only prominent
| change from year-to-year is the update to team rosters and
| player statistics. In that sense, sports games are more like
| an annual subscription to a single game (with the occasional
| engine update or refresh) than a series of games.
|
| Of course, there are some (non-sports) game sequels that are
| little more than a content refresh but they are the exception
| and often receive negative criticism unless the content
| itself is really good.
| Majromax wrote:
| > This blog focuses more on computer gaming than console
| gaming,
|
| That's true, but on the other hand the article quotes a
| Sierra executive as saying:
|
| > "What we think of today as a computer or a videogame
| system," wrote Ken Williams of Sierra that year, "will
| someday assume a much broader role in our homes. I foresee a
| day when there is one home-entertainment device which
| combines the functions of a CD-audio player, VCR, videogame
| system, and computer."
|
| ... which exactly describes a console. Not quite the consoles
| of the late 90s, but 2000's Playstation 2 was price-
| competitive with stand-alone DVD players. It feels selective
| to lament the path of the game-industry as a whole while
| defining that industry to exclude the systems that look like
| the supposedly-unfulfilled prediction above.
|
| Perhaps this is just a problem of context, since I'm coming
| to this series of articles in medias res through with this
| 'part 5' link.
|
| > There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in
| most "gaming" discussion, I'd say, despite their significant
| popularity, but they've also never been as much of a force on
| the PC as on consoles or arcade.
|
| Honestly, I think if we're going to name overlooked genres,
| the elephant in the room is the hidden-object genre. These
| games aren't often included on _lists of games_, but as I
| understand it they're quite popular and profitable,
| especially on mobile platforms.
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(page generated 2020-06-19 23:00 UTC)