unpopular retro opinions

[Ozcar]

The graphics of donkey kong country don't look great and it didn't even age well compared to the 2d sprites in the snes games. 

 

[heliumlamb]

4 hours ago, Ozcar said:

The graphics of donkey kong country don't look great and it didn't even age well compared to the 2d sprites in the snes games. 

 

Do Not Tell This To George Wood!!!!

[DrRock]

This is the superior Cheetahmen BGM. Fight me. Mark Miller can do no wrong.

[Panzermann11]

• I don't care about Jon St. John's delivery in Duke Nukem 3D 20th Anniversary World Tour, he still sounds like 'ol Duke to me and fits well with the high-quality official Duke voice lines I've heard. (Duke sounds different to me in original DN3D compared to modern entries in the series, and I'm not talking about the bit rate)
• Texture filtering is OK, but only for fully-3D games like Quake and Half-Life.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Panzermann11

[aloysiusfreeman]

Some opinions - 

 

• The Neverhood is one of the best point-and-click adventure games with an insanely good OST
• LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 is one of the best movie-based games and I want to play it again so bad
• Most JRPGs are fun but absolute chores to play
• 90s point-and-click adventure games is like pizza - not all of them are fantastic but pizza is pizza

[Plerb]

I always prefer playing retro games in 4:3 even if there's a way to use widescreen, even though I use a widescreen monitor.

[aloysiusfreeman]

Reading the older posts here had a bunch of comments on Half-Life, and I will say HL is overrated only for that fact that it is unfinished and will likely stay unfinished. 

 

Just speaking on the plot/atmosphere of it, it left enough breadcrumbs for it to feel like a major thought out piece, but potential story/head canon doesn't make it great

[Lippeth]

Amid Evil is more akin to Painkiller: Hell and Damnation than to Heretic or Hexen.

 

On 8/11/2023 at 9:42 AM, Plerb said:

I always prefer playing retro games in 4:3 even if there's a way to use widescreen, even though I use a widescreen monitor.

 

Same. I've been enjoying the Quake 2 remaster by Nightdive in 4:3 lately; 16:9 can make me feel nauseous in games like these, and the extra information on the sides doesn't seem entirely necessary in first person games, especially those originally designed before widescreen monitors became commonplace. Of course one can argue that there's a tactical advantage in a wider peripheral area, but usually the sound cues serve the same function, and also I don't play games competitively.

[taufan99]

We need more actual Commodore 64 style everything.

[WARDUST]

Blade of Darkness was (is) one of the best games of his era. It was after Golden Axe and before Dark Souls. But i've never seen again a combo combat style so intense and perfect.

[QuaketallicA]

I hate "remasters" of old music videos or live performances. They take away the charm of the look of the era, and seeing things in HD is not always preferable. Much of the time, the original video was in very high quality, even if it was in 480p SD. But now if you select the remastered video in 480p SD, it will look way worse than the old video did, due to a crappy bitrate. It's like Youtube compensates for the fact that all video today is in 1080p HD or even up to 4K (I've even seen some 8K as absurd as that is) by butchering the quality of the lower resolutions. If 60 FPS creates the "soap-opera effect" because we associate the extra fluidity with crappy soaps, then 1080p HD creates a "Youtube effect" where HD video feels crappier by association with all the modern Youtube videos that are in 1080p HD.

 

If we're talking video games:
 Halo: Combat Evolved is hugely overrated. It's an okayish game but way too repetitive, kind of boring, and has terrible copy/paste level design towards the end. Seriously some of the worst level design in any game ever.

Call of Duty did not peak in the Xbox 360 era. Advanced Warfare is the best multiplayer experience of any CoD, with Ghosts also being underrated (in multiplayer.). Black Ops 3 had a rather good story mode campaign but weirdly gets treated like it's terrible.

Duke Nukem Forever (2011) is a good game. Well, it's not a bad game, anyway. It's just not the masterpiece that Duke Forever 2001/Restoration Project is. But I like the crass humor and expanded personality John St. John added in 2011.

 

 

[SealSpace]

I still think Corridor 7 is unironically a far more fun and better game than Duke Nukem 3D in every aspect.

 

With absolutely far better and visually more appealing weapons, better sprite art, better map designs (I know it's unfair to compare Wolf3d to Build as an engine and all, but still), wall textures (animated ones that are surreal in the alien levels especially), more colorful enemies and bosses, a genuine atmosphere of scariness and creepiness, sound effects (alien, guns, and doors especially), and far superior music and soundtrack by a mile.

 

I don't give a fuck what anyone says, burn me at the stake if you have to. 

Edited August 19, 2023 by SealSpace

[SealSpace]

I also think Corridor 7 is also a better and more fun game than the original Doom as well.

 

And arguably even RoTT in some aspects as well, especially gameplay and enemy designs.

[SealSpace]

I still think Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold is the superior Wolf3d engine (and FPS) game to Rise of the Triad overall. 

 

I still think Blake Stone: Planet Strike is unironically the single absolute best game on the Wolf3d engine overall, not RoTT

Spoiler

(even though I personally believe Planet Strike could still actually be more perfect and complete with more maps, longer playthrough, more replay value, and more content in general like one more ultimate weapon and more monsters and more satisfying and challenging bosses)

 

[SealSpace]

I still don't think Operation Body Count is the worst FPS game or even the worst Wolf3d clone (

Spoiler

that would go to Super Noah's Ark 3D in my opinion for my personal reasons even though that's not a completely bad game either per se

), even though it's pretty mid-tier for a game on the engine at best and could still be a lot better (like have secret/bonus levels or something).

 

And it has some of the best damn music/soundtracks of any video game of all time.  

 

 

[SealSpace]

I still think Hexen and Heretic are solidly better FPS games than Doom and their characters as well too. 

 

I still think Strife is unironically the single absolute best game on the Doom engine overall, not Doom.

Spoiler

REKKR is the only other game that can compete with Strife for that title and maybe Hexen 1 at its best to an extent.

 

[tzen]

On 8/11/2023 at 12:42 PM, Plerb said:

I always prefer playing retro games in 4:3 even if there's a way to use widescreen, even though I use a widescreen monitor.

 

I think most people just care that it's formatted correctly and not stretched or squished, regardless if it's 4:3 content on a widescreen display or widescreen content on a 4:3 display

 

As for me, I think Dark Forces is the best "Doom clone". Better than any of the build engine games or Outlaws or anything else I can remember at the moment. It's just so satisfying to blast the Imperials. I think it's actually the best Dark Forces game, even.

Edited August 17, 2023 by tzen
opining

[ApprihensivSoul]

I'd schill Blood, but it's actually a pretty common opinion that it's the best Doom-style game. (Not the majority, just not rare either,) 

Here's my unpopular opinion.

I fail to understand why Mario 64 is not seen as an abject failure on the part of its creators, an insult to the series, and a broken and unfinished beta for a misguided product. 

I am not anti-nintendo (they're my favorite company,) anti-3D mario (I prefer 2D, but I found Sunshine and Odyssey to be alot of fun,) or anti-n64 (which I am a huge fan of alot of hidden gems on the system.)

But it is overwhelmingly obvious that that game is one of the worst games on the system, and what I see about it I feel you'd have to be blind not to.

[aloysiusfreeman]

@ApprihensivSoul

 

o.O unless I'm missing something, definitely an unpopular opinion. Mostly saying this cause I absolutely love Super Mario 64

[plums]

@ApprihensivSoul well you definitely came to the right place to post that!

Edited August 17, 2023 by plums

[Plerb]

12 hours ago, tzen said:

I think most people just care that it's formatted correctly and not stretched or squished, regardless if it's 4:3 content on a widescreen display or widescreen content on a 4:3 display

Yeah, stretching something to the wrong aspect ratio looks awful. I don't mind letterboxing, though. However I almost always play games in windowed mode on my computer anyways.

[dasho]

10 hours ago, ApprihensivSoul said:

I'd schill Blood, but it's actually a pretty common opinion that it's the best Doom-style game. (Not the majority, just not rare either,) 

Here's my unpopular opinion.

I fail to understand why Mario 64 is not seen as an abject failure on the part of its creators, an insult to the series, and a broken and unfinished beta for a misguided product. 

I am not anti-nintendo (they're my favorite company,) anti-3D mario (I prefer 2D, but I found Sunshine and Odyssey to be alot of fun,) or anti-n64 (which I am a huge fan of alot of hidden gems on the system.)

But it is overwhelmingly obvious that that game is one of the worst games on the system, and what I see about it I feel you'd have to be blind not to.

 

I refuse to believe you were actually a child when Mario 64, or even the N64 itself, debuted. The only way I can see someone having this opinion is viewing it through the lens of later generation consoles being your first experience.

[Lippeth]

I never owned or played much of Mario 64 other than at friends' houses as a kid, but I do remember thinking "This is interesting and different, but I'll just wait for the next real Mario game to come out before getting a Nintendo 64", not realizing at the time that I meant a 2D game, and also not realizing that nearly all games were about to go through the most painful transition to polygonal models and 3D camera controls. Once I realized there was no going back, playing the "3Dified" versions of games like Mario, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, Goemon, Earthworm Jim, Castlevania, etc felt like a minor betrayal, only because the SNES versions were so fun to play and beautiful to look at, even the 3D modeled sprites of Donkey Kong Country. It wasn't until playing games like F-Zero X and Perfect Dark that I started warming up to 3D games and by that time I suppose I was generally more accustomed to ugly looking games with awkward controls and kind of just went with it.

 

So @ApprihensivSoul, while I don't share your sentiment exactly, I can somewhat relate to it.

[ApprihensivSoul]

1 hour ago, dasho said:

 

I refuse to believe you were actually a child when Mario 64, or even the N64 itself, debuted. The only way I can see someone having this opinion is viewing it through the lens of later generation consoles being your first experience.

 

Close guess, actually. I was around at the time, but we didn't have access to it.

Actually we didn't have game systems, we were a Dos family back at the time, so I had to go back for other reasons. I did play the 2D ones alot growing up, thanks to emulation, so that adds to my admitted bias. The big defining factor for me was hearing criticisms of other N64 games that were present to a larger degree in Mario 64, which somehow got immunity of those critiques. For instance the controls in Mario being more slippery than in Castlevania 64, which was often maligned for slippery, imprecise controls. Camera especially. That's just one example, but again, the comparison was directly to other N64 games, especially in the same genre, and the reputation they had by the time I had access to them, for sure.

(That's really simplified, but I hope I was able to clarify the idea.)

[Koko Ricky]

@QuaketallicA, on the subject of music videos, it's worth noting that there are three formats from the older era: Clips shot on film and preserved on a master reel; clips shot on film and preserved on SD tape; and clips shot on tape at SD. This results in some pretty wide variance in quality, and may not match how you remember them on a CRT, where the combination of scanlines and everything being reduced to a 60i SD broadcast is just an aesthetically different look. 

 

Older YouTube uploads tend to screw up remasters, because even though they have access to 16mm or 35mm prints, the bitrate of uploads was lower back then, leading to blotchy artifacts. Some uploaders zoom in on 4:3 videos to make them 16:9, a bad move made worse if the original video is limited to SD. Official videos that are old should be replaced with a higher bitrate version, but it doesn't seem to happen. 

 

Recently, the best quality I've seen of older music videos has been on Pluto TV, a free TV app with scheduled programming. A number of videos on their 80s and 90s channels, although rarely broadcast in HD (either because the masters are SD or the network doesn't have access to the scanned film reels), seem to have a really decent bitrate, possibly better than YT.

Edited August 18, 2023 by Koko Ricky

[enigma101]

Most media about the history of videogames (especially in the 80s and 90s) is extremely Americanized, and the history of the videogame market there. I've seen some media talking about the history of videogames with small sections about the impact of early PCs in Europe, but that's it. It's boring hearing for the thousandth time about how the 1983 videogame crash destroyed videogames/arcades and how Nintendo "rebuilt" the industry by releasing the NES without any mention of how most of that never happened in Europe because of the popularity of PCs over home consoles.

I know that this is probably just because Europe is made up of so many countries that it would be impossible to talk about the videogame industry in each country, but some other perspectives on the history of videogames would be way better than hearing the same story repeated in every book and video.

Edited August 19, 2023 by enigma101

[Noiser]

On 8/18/2023 at 10:32 PM, enigma101 said:

It's boring hearing for the thousandth time about how the 1973 videogame crash destroyed videogames/arcades and how Nintendo "rebuilt" the industry by releasing the NES without any mention of how most of that never happened in Europe because of the popularity of PCs over home consoles.

Not only Europe, in Brazil there was no crash as well. In fact everyone continued to enjoy the Atari 2600 through the 80's. 

Another thing that bogs me a bit is how people believe in that myth that Atari (or even worse, just ET) was solely responsible for the crash. They really think it was due to "shitty games" (whatever that means) and lack of quality control, something that Nintendo never really cared about either. AFAIK, the crash happened mostly due to an offer\demand discrempancy with publishers and resellers - it was a new media at the time so there was a lot of trial and error involved.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Noiser

[taufan99]

Wasn't there also an earlier video game crash back in 1977, due to the influx of Pong clone home consoles?

[Captain red pants]

29 minutes ago, enigma101 said:

Most media about the history of videogames (especially in the 80s and 90s) is extremely Americanized, and the history of the videogame market there.

Hmm, you might want to check out Kim Justice on youtube. Sure, it's mostly retro british stuff, but that includes a lot of ZX spectrum titles which importance are largely under represented in long form video essays as far as I can see. She talks about the culture as well.

Edited August 19, 2023 by Captain red pants

[SealSpace]

37 minutes ago, enigma101 said:

Most media about the history of videogames (especially in the 80s and 90s) is extremely Americanized, and the history of the videogame market there. I've seen some media talking about the history of videogames with small sections about the impact of early PCs in Europe, but that's it. It's boring hearing for the thousandth time about how the 1973 videogame crash destroyed videogames/arcades and how Nintendo "rebuilt" the industry by releasing the NES without any mention of how most of that never happened in Europe because of the popularity of PCs over home consoles.

I know that this is probably just because Europe is made up of so many countries that it would be impossible to talk about the videogame industry in each country, but some other perspectives on the history of videogames would be way better than hearing the same story repeated in every book and video.

Japan, Britain, and the rest of Europe and possibly East Asia: Are we all a joke to you? 

Edited August 19, 2023 by SealSpace