~Asteroids Is Best

~By Martin Keen


Its a sign your getting old. You look back to the past and fondly 
remember how things used to be. And the older you get, the better the
old days become. Ask someone in their 50's about the past and you'll
get a tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Go visit your Auntie
Ethel and she'll recall the war years as 'the good old days'. Its all 
to do with the memory, and that odd little nack it has of forgetting
the bad times, and magnifying the good.

In the computer industry everything is, as always, much faster.
Nostalgia is generated much quicker. Where as old Mrs Brown only looks
back to her youth fondly 30 years later, the old and twisted computer
gamers already see the 1980's as the good times. They justify their
claims by talking about 'real' playability in those days, and they 
like to call their opinions RETROGAMING.

These characters are easily spotted. They're males in their mid 20's
whose first computer was a ZX81. They rubbish any game with good
graphics, and won't stop telling you how they "spent 10 pounds every
day in the arcades playing Space Indavers, 'cos it was SO addictive".

Are these people right? Should I dig out my Spectrum again and play
nothing but Monty Mole and Horace Goes Skiing? Would it be for the 
best if software houses stopped making mutli-million dollar games, 
and concentrate in fitting their entire product into 48k of memory?
Somehow, I don't think so.

The main argument of a retrogamer is that modern games concentrate on
the graphics and sound, at the expense of gameplay. Sure, there are a
few duff CD-ROM games out there created by a development team whose 
only aim is to create the best looking objects in 3D Studio they can, 
and leave the gameplay to fit around the graphics. But most new games
are created by a huge team or programmers, artists, musicians, and 
even storyboard writers. And as for the latest games having basic
gameplay, well just look at Manic Miner. This game is still hailed as
a classic but it is basically the most simplistic platform game one
could find. Just 20 one screen levels, and each has the same 
objective - collect all the keys.

Having said that I was playing Manic Miner on my Spectrum emulator, 
and I was completely addicted for a week. But not because it was such
a good game (by today's standards anyway), but becuase it was the 
first computer game I ever played, so brought back fond memories of 
getting a Spectrum on my 9th birthday.

Modern games are getting better and better. The look and sound better,
and many play better too. In the early '80s we had Zork, now we
have Sam & Max Hit The Road. We used to play Star Wars, now we get
our space flight fix from Tie Fighter. Way back we played Knight Lore,   
now its Doom 2.

But perhaps the retrogamers are right with two points. Firstly there
isn't much imagination when it comes to game genres; no longer are we
surprised by the innovation of Ant Attack. Also, I don't remember too
many compatibility problems when we all had the same machine. Games
didn't regually crash because they didn't like the soundcard (although
this can quite easily be explained by saying the Speccy and its crude 
computer chums didn't so much as have sound - more a pathetic range of
piercing beeps).

If you did have a computer at the dawn of the computer game age then
getting it out for a couple of hours one wet Sunday afternoon might
conjure up a big of nostalgia, but when the novelty wears off you'll 
be reminded just how far the computer games have come in a little over
a decade.

Retrogaming? Pah - don't these people have any real life memories to
look back on with a tear in their eye? Maybe we should feel sorry for
the poor bods!


Don't agree? Then mail me at: t_030f3_mk@southampton-institute.ac.uk

PS - Could this be the first article in Cheet Sheets to not even  
     mention the game in it's title?

This Article Copyright 1995 of Martin Keen.
Written for Cheet Sheets Magazine.