More than a few times I want to play some of the very good, older game titles whose gameplay started a trend, or defined a standard a specific game genre would be judged against. Games that look simplistic and downright ugly to some for today's visual standards, but whose core gameplay still holds up well, and hasnt become as obsolete as the 16bit routines it was built on.
Games such as Wolf3d, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, Doom, Strife, built the foundations from where modern FPS games derive the elements that make up their gameplay, with varied degrees of artistic freemon, which provides different layers of complexity to their gameplay. For RTS games, there was Dune II, a genre defining game from which household names like Warcraft and Command and Conquer took pointers from. Of course, both of these games added extra elements to their gameplay, like the hero system in the case of warcraft III, but those elements were an evolutionary, not revolutionary step.
Not very long ago, since around last year, these older games have found a renewed interest from gamers both oldtimers and newcomers, with reasons going from simple nostalgia to the curiosity and the "strange" nature of these games to those who grew up with halo. GOG, an online store which specializes in selling only classic, old-era games, has gotten lots of press attention and critical praise for its online delivery system, as well as their expanding catalog of classic games. Id software's John Carmack this week released an modified version of wolf3d specially for mobile phones, to high reviews.
Maybe portability is another appealing aspect of this games, and the possibilites which that aspect opens up for them. The rising popularity of the light notebook computers, usually called "netbooks" driven by it's amazingly low prices, are providing these older, lighter, less resource intensive games a new home, just like they provided a new home to the windows xp system. These netbooks, as well as newer more powerful mobile devices, provide a mobile, "to-go" gaming experience, and the classic games bring an additional much needed option to on the go players to their usual lackluster mobile game options.
Another aspect that could be making these older titles so appealing might be its modding possibilities. In many cases these games have had its original source code released by their developers, giving way to a new, unofficial, community-driven support for the games. Some efforts mostly deal with porting the game to newer platforms, like netbooks or mobiles, or correcting errors left by the original developers. Other more interesting modding efforts (to the majority of the gaming audience) deals with updating or modifying the games' content instead. Adding new graphics, high poly 3d models to replace it's original flat 2d gfx, sometimes adding completely new campaigns not included in the original title, turn these games into some sort of sandbox games which give way for experimentation and fun derived from changing the games' rules.
It will be interesting to see the number of this generation of games' titles which will be replayed many years down the road, long after their impressive visuals have been turned obsolete, after directx 10.1 is old, and long after its original movie tie-in is sold off for chump change. There is one reason why it's said that the classics dont die.
addendum:
Here is one example of the possibilities for older games:
This is a complete remake of the music tracks from the game Rise of the Triad Dark War. They were made from scratch, in MP3 format, remastered and remixed individually, updating the original game's MIDI format. (needs a copy of the original registered version of the game).
http://www.tinyurl.com/rott-addons
This is a compilation of custom made levels for Rise of the Triad (you can see that I am a big fan of the game), which I made on and off throughout the years. They require an original copy of the full game as well.
http://www.tinyurl.com/rottlevels
Digg this!
