Ancestors

Toot

Written by Amin Girasol on 2025-01-24 at 14:52

I think I'm in an extreme minority of enjoying #RetroComputing but finding the on-screen visual design of pretty much everything in this world - type design, composition and layout, colour palettes - uniquely and irretrievably ugly.

Not only that; I find the universe of ideas and tropes for games depressingly narrow and centred exclusively on competition and violence. Settler colonist games. Trading and conquest games. War in the air. War in space. Violence in the city. Violence in some regurgitated Tolkien-esque mythical mediaeval period with magic and orcs. Where's the cooperation, the kindness, the nurturing?

It's almost as though the Capitalist mindset of capture, control, expansion and exploitation had been absorbed and internalised by the people who initiated and set the boundaries of this initially underground, countercultural, subversive world.

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Descendants

Written by Riley S. Faelan on 2025-01-24 at 15:11

@fluidlogic Mostly, technical limitations. The graphics resolutions used to be really low. The memories used to be small, and limiting the numbers of available colours was for years a very popular hardware-level trade-off. On-line real-time communications weren't a thing, making coöperative games not really feasible until late '80s, outside the BBS scene, anyway.

The good thing is, these problems have now been solved, and most of them solved in ways that can be readily retrofitted into retrocomputing world.

Then, there's the issue that the computer scene was aggressively masculinised, often in naïvely toxic ways, in late '70s and throughout the '80s. This problem hasn't really been solved yet.

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Written by Feoh on 2025-01-24 at 15:13

@fluidlogic #retrocomputing is such an INCREDIBLY broad topic.

Are 8 bit era graphics layouts ugly? I mean, sure, if you compare them to modern cinematic experiences like Horizon Zero Dawn they most certainly are!

And your points about violence and conquest are well taken. I suspect that's in large part due to how very male dominated the industry was at the time, and how little effort was put into creating games for anyone but the perceived testosterone poisoned pre teen through adulthood men.

That said there are plenty of examples that go against the grain. Violence and conquest predominates to be sure, but I think it's also way more challenging to create nuanced experiences that appeal to the higher aspects of our nature in 8K with a 320 X 192 screen resolution.

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Written by Binder🅅 on 2025-01-24 at 15:16

@feoh I look at many of the 8bit demoscene entries and am in awe of their creations.

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Written by Feoh on 2025-01-24 at 15:33

@binder Same! And honestly I'm in awe of a lot of the engineering that went into making these machines great for what they are!

Like, I am totally boggled by the fact that some super smart engineers in the 80s could build an architecture in Atari 8 bit machines that could be interfaced with by modern technologies (Hell yes I'm talking about #fujinet - it's amazing!) and still work like a charm!

So what if the floppy drive is actually a network file store? And what of it if the modem is actually an internet socket connection to the BBS you're "dialing".

I am in awe of all of it.

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Written by Wintermute_BBS on 2025-01-24 at 16:00

@feoh @fluidlogic Ant Attack on the ZX Spectrum was an exception. You could choose wether you wanted to play as boy or girl and the theme was rescue and escape. First isometric game design as well.

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Written by Stewart Russell on 2025-01-24 at 16:04

@fluidlogic Hey, me too! There aren't many 8-bit games that I find pleasing. One that is, though, is "Room Ten" (CRL, 1986)

While it's effectively 3D Pong (in Space!!!) it's very well put together. While the Amstrad CPC is slightly prettier, here are some screenshots from the ZX Spectrum version, playable at https://archive.org/details/zx_Room_Ten_1986_CRL_Group

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