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Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 9:47 pm
by 3DOKid
I spent this saturday, thanks to the feeble excuse of jet-lag, ploughing through my 3DO collection and playing some of the old games, and I get some weird thoughts - so stay with me!

Many of these games are sort of worlds. I mean, it's sort of a crude world. It's not like the world we live in, a world where everything is interactive and anything possible. It's not even like Half Life 2 or MGS or Resident Evil, where somethings are possible and everyone has been there. No - some of these games, some of these worlds, must have been dormant for nearly 15 years. With only a few stragglers drifting through now and then.

Take for example Dragon Lore. To my knowledge in the last 5 or so years the number of people to have drifted through that 'world' must be no more than 10? 20? a 100? a 1,000? surely? Compared to the Zelda worlds? 10s of thousands, 100s of thousands?

Or Doctor Hauzer, how many westerners have pasted through that world? Me? The previewer in Edge Magazine, Michael Biffa, how many? 40? 50? even a hundred? It's weird right? Like climbing Everest - only warmer and less chance of plunging to your death.

Pyramid Intruder? Burning Soldier?

...it is kind of weird - right? In way, in a weird gaming parallel universe kind of way, I don't know. One day, when all the NVRAM is dead and the CDs have rotted - these worlds will be lost forever.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 10:48 pm
by Mobius
3DOKid wrote:One day, when all the NVRAM is dead and the CDs have rotted - these worlds will be lost forever.
:(

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:03 pm
by wulfren
I think you worded exactly the way I feel when I get into one of my retro kicks


Some years ago, I started to collect old game systems, Mainly I wanted the systems to be able to play all the games that I missed out on while I was a kid. But when I could sit down and actually play and enjoy the games (the Turbo Grafx 16 sticks out in my mind at the moment) your words were my thoughts exactly. I could sit down and enjoy a game, (and a good game at that) on a system that a lot of people had never heard of, much less the game. To me really it seemed like a loss for them, I was very thankful for what I had & appreciated there own merit, IE you can't compare a good 3DO game to say a good Xbox 360 game (most people would say the 360's games would be completely better just for the graphic's or sound) but its not fair to do that, for me at least I have to think and appreciate the time when X system came out, think about what was the "norm" of the gaming world & how this reflects against that. ...heh actually its funny that you should mention the game burning soldier, as i just got it last night and it seems to be quiet a fun game

so i guess long long story short, Amen brother, Amen !

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:07 pm
by 3DOKid
I have mixed emotions about. I like being one of the few to have finished a rare game but then I wish others had played it too!

Burning Soldier was lambasted in the Uk by the magazines. And OK - it's not the best - but it's by no means unplayable or the worst. And how many can say they have completed it?

3DO Kid.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 5:48 pm
by dark
This was an interesting reflection. I would say with the advances in emulation, that gives some new life to the old worlds. People who don't even have the console/system hardware, can locate and play a significantly rare game without having to invest the time and money to find and buy the physical product. People who weren't around at the time of the hardware, and/or people who are just bored and interested in exploring some video game history will dig around and explore these old games.

For example, you mention Dr Hauzer as a game that potentially fewer than 100 westerners may have played. That estimate sounds reasonable for the pre-emulation timeframe for 3do - and yet you may be interested to know that out of curiosity stemming from this thread, I just googled a warez site with Dr Hauzer 3do version for download - and it indicates that no less than 702 people have downloaded it since a copy of it was uploaded in 2011. 702 people, in the last 2 years, have potentially played at least a little bit of Dr Hauzer and this is just on one website!!

Advances in communications technology and how we interact with other people has resulted in greater popularity of old and forgotten games/worlds too - if you want to see many gameplay videos/screenshots or reviews of Dr Hauzer, it is no trouble to find blog entries or youtube videos with individual ordinary people giving their impressions.

It's not like 3DO is having a commercial resurgance, but the barriers to entry to checking out 3DO games have come down significantly. And now that the games themselves and the means to play them float around the world wide web impervious to broken nvram or disc rot or other hardware issues, the digital copies and emulators mirrored across dozens of websites, backed up on thousands of harddrives in countries around the world, these game worlds and the means to experience them, a good semblance of the 3DO experience, are effectively preserved for the immediate future.

I like having the actual hardware and games, and can understand arguments that emulation is not exactly the same experience - but I appreciate that even these minor unpopular relatively unknown titles are preserved for the future. Gaming is starting to have a significant history, and old forgotten unpopular stuff sometimes becomes relevant or of interest many years into the future. The availability of experiencing the older stuff, and having it available for study, is a pretty cool aspect of gaming.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 7:52 pm
by Trev
Nice post. :)

I'm happy to own every game you mentioned, and I have fun with all of them. We are the few, the proud, the 3DO gamers! And these games get to live on when we chat about them here on the forums.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 9:07 pm
by goldenband
This is a great post. And yeah, I love the feeling that I'm exploring a world that's fallen into desuetude, love the idea that I'm bringing old stories to life again. I get that from old and forgotten books/movies/games, and from games as well. And sometimes I even find something that (as far as I know) no one has ever noticed before -- that's especially cool!

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2013 4:24 pm
by NeoGeoNinja
That Pyramid game has definitely only ever had 15 ppl through it, ever.

Max.

I'll definitely add that one day...

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2013 6:54 pm
by Martin III
Indeed, awesome post, Dark!

It really amazes me that there are so many opportunities to have good discussions about old games. I mean, we're in a gaming market that is so obsessed with new stuff that people will pre-order games that are in digital format, and buy consoles at launch fully aware that in just a year those same consoles will be available for $50 or so less. Yet I can still chat with people about games that are two decades old. I love it.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2013 6:19 pm
by OfManNotMachine
Great post! I totally agree.

Something I feel has been lost in the current generation and going forward is gameplay. So many games today just dont offer the gameplay of classic games.

I feel like while games today obviously offer better graphics n sound...gameplay has been sacrificed to bring in a larger mass of people to sell the product to.

This is why I have recently fallen in love with so many indie games on my pc. Its a return to what matters most to me, and thats quality gameplay mechanics.

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2013 6:21 pm
by OfManNotMachine
Also I forgot to mentiom that while emulation isnt quite the same experience I feel it helps to preserve the history of games. Eventually it will be the only way to enjoy these worlds. Given the choice in the distant future Ill take playing an emulated version over it being lost forever

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:26 am
by dark
I was just thinking about how people like the Angry Video Game Nerd have used their celebrity to make an infamous unpopular game more famous. For example, AVGN did an entire episode on Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. A youtube video of this episode shows that it has been viewed in excess of 2,300,000 times.

I went to the same warez site that I looked up Dr Hauzer on to check the stats for Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. This is what they are:

Since being uploaded in 2011, an ISO of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has been downloaded 5412 times on this one website.

Some other stats from the same website:

Crash n Burn, 1423 downloads since 2011
Total Eclipse, 993 downloads since 2011
Doom for 3do, 1398 downloads since 2011
Killing Time, 1282
Poed, 574
Offworld Interceptor, 595
Gex, 1733
Strahl, 670
Stellar 7, 527
D&D Deathkeep, 1956
Road Rash, 1936
D, 1018
Lemmings, 612

Body Conscious (18+), 2505 downloads since 2011
The Coven (18+), 2988
Endlessly (18+), 2913
Immortal Desire (18+), 2429
Sex (18+), 6397

This is an interesting reflection on the popularity of 3DO games among contemporary players and the casual crowd

That is all :lol:

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2013 3:54 am
by Austin
LOL, nice catch, Dark! :lol:

Re: Why I love doing this.

Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:31 pm
by Martin III
Part of it may be the rarity of official copies of the game. Note how many downloads Deathkeep has compared to games of far greater renown, and all those 18+ games are several times as rare as Deathkeep. People who can't find official copies may resort to ISOs. In addition, there are probably fewer ISOs floating around for the rarer titles, so more downloads at one site doesn't necessarily mean the game is being downloaded more often overall.

I wonder if my review of Bodyconscious will have a significant impact on the stats. I uploaded the review to GameFAQs just two days ago, and it already has 64 hits. (By comparison, my review for Psychic Detective went up a full month ago and still has only 19 hits. In both cases, my review is the only one GameFAQs has for the game.) It seems likely that most people who downloaded Bodyconscious had no idea what it is - I mean, why the heck would anyone knowingly download a poorly filmed video of a fake nightclub? - so with luck my review will cut down on the number of people wasting their time on that particular ISO.

Then again, Sex used to have a review from Arguro which firmly dispelled any notion of appeal to that disc, and that doesn't seem to have done much for its traffic, so maybe I'm just dreaming.