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Comment on Hypothesis: Modern retro-inspired indies are much more enjoyable than the retro games themselves

I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.

Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.

I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advantages that have happened in the intervening years.

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doomcanoe@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Your point more or less comes up alot in discussions around Lord of the Rings compared to modern fantasy novels. There are a lot of people who, while the appreciate what it did for the genre, find the novels dated and feel like they have seen the ideas too many times and/or done better elsewhere.

Though on the flip side, I personally find sometimes it just takes a few hours to “see past the age”. For example, I was introduced to Fallout by 3. The show made me want to try the originals, and after a few hours of struggling through the ui and dated graphics, it started to “click”. Now the original only competes with NV in my list of favorite Fallout games. Had a friend who had basically the same experience with the original KOTOR.

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Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.

This becomes SO obvious when you look at “the great classics”. Citizen Kane is, by all modern standards, a pretty boring and uninspiring movie about a really lame topic.

But at the time, it was absolutely groundbreaking. It basically pioneered half a dozen techniques such as “letting foreground and background be in focus at the same time” and “nonlinear storytelling” (which of course was hugely telegraphed, because it was new) and “using a montage” with “Sound to make transitions”. He also used such amazing techniques such as “long takes” up to several minutes. He moved the camera around, not just taking a stage-view, but low and high angle shots, and then he added lighting to make things stand out.

Stuff like that is now SO basic that they might not even teach it in filmschool, simply because people are inundated with it from modern media. Orson Welles basically invented all of that though, and it was revolutionary. Now it’s just boring a movie about an asshole’s sled.

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Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I feel like I’ve also heard this discussion from a friend regarding neon genesis evangelion, which I still haven’t seen

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- Redkey@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I haven’t kept up with anime much for many years now, but I can easily imagine that this is the case. There had been mecha anime with angsty pilots and behind-the-scenes politics before, but Evangelion pushed it all to a whole new level by adding mysticism and psychological dread into the mix. I know that almost immediately following the initial release of Evangelion we got Gasaraki and RahXephon, both of which bear obvious influences from Evangelion.
  
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