Retro gaming is just as bad (and good) as the modern day – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader argues that most genres and industry complaints from modern gaming have their roots in the very earliest days of video games.

Is the interest in retro gaming about respect or rose-tinted glasses? Let’s be honest, it’s a bit of both. The mind-blowing graphics of old games look decidedly crude in the modern world. The passable sound effects wouldn’t cut mustard in any triple-A production that has hired a whole orchestra. But there is more to it than that. Some classic games remain, well… classic. Even some of the chiptunes of yesteryear hold up quite well (as an aside, I find it slightly amusing the SNES sound-chip was created by their later rival Sony). In fact, the music and intro sequence for Probe Software’s Supremacy still brings joy to me today.

Aside from the abomination of the E.T. game and the painful loading times, the seventies and the subsequent decade were fundamental. Laughing at Sinclair machines was mandatory for Commodore owners. But even though Uncle Clive wasn’t an avid computer user, his machines helped manifest the landscape of British gaming. I gather many video game creators today, of a certain age, owe a fair bit to Mr Sinclair.

This era showed us genres that are still stubbornly with us. Graphical adventures, simulators, and even, to an extent, game creation programs. Before Dreams on the PlayStation 4, we had the cruder but similarly themed 3D Construction Kit. The Media Molecule product is a million times better, yet it has strong family links in ambition to Incentive Software’s game builder.

Open world games are hardly a new genre, but they stretch back a long way. One of the more obvious and well received 80s example is Elite. The space battle and trading simulator managed to seduce the