Video games old vs new

Hello guys and welcome to blog Thursday. Today I want to tell you a little bit about a few video games I am currently obsessed with and compare them altogether.

To start off, most video games I play right now are retro games from the 90s such as the Commander Keen series. However, I also like some newer ones especially those adventure games where you can make your own decisions and they can influence certain aspects of the outcome of the story.

So let’s talk a little bit about them individually:

The first one, I want to introduce to you is called Commander Keen and consist of six official games, one lost episode and another six fan-made games of which three are already release and another three are yet to come. Like every great video game it also has an amazing plot. In general it focuses on the adventures of Billy Blaze, an eight year old boy who travels through space as Commander Keen. The game itself is a typical jump and run game consisting of different levels and in the end of the last part of the first trilogy you need to fight a final boss.

Another game from the 90s is called Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure and consists of three parts. Concerning the type of game it is a side-scrolling platform game with different levels that are divided by bonus stages in which you can recharge your health level. The story revolves around an alien boy who wants to go to Disneyland with his parents for his birthday but their spaceship is hit by a comet and they are forced to land on an unknown planet. Somehow he loses his parents and therefore he tries to find them and save them from whatever danger they are in.

To talk about a new video game I really like, I want to bring up the video game adaptation of the TV show and comic series The Walking Dead. Not only do I love the TV show itself for its amazing plot and the presence of zombies but I also really enjoy games where you can make your own decisions. So this game is literally perfect for me. The game itself is an episodic graphic adventure and takes place in the same fictional world as the comic and the TV show, occurring shortly after a zombie apocalypse in Georgia. The characters, however, are mostly original and very important for the game since it focuses mainly on character development.

Last but not least, I’d like to put the game Portal forward. It is a two-parted game series in which you are a test subject for Glados, a giant evil computer, in the research facility, Aperture Science. To carry out the tests you use the portal gun, a device created by this company that can create two portals linked with each other. The game itself revolves around puzzles and solving them, although you can also die attempting to do so. Compared to the first edition the second one is much longer and has a more developed storyline.

So now it’s time to compare them:

The two retro games which need the DOSbox application, an operating system from old computers, are way more difficult in general because there is no health bar (Commander Keen) or only a tiny one (Cosmo) and there are many enemies who can easily kill you. In addition, you have to start over from the beginning of the level and do all the tasks over again if you die. The two new games have many more save points and also save files which helps enjoy them more and get less frustrated. The game experience is also very different considering the interactive decision you can make instead of simply trying to reach the end of the level.  

Of course the quality of the graphics and the sound of the newer games is superior compared to the older ones but in my opinion that is no problem at all and I love all of them equally.

Sources: my own experiences in playing them and my video game obsessed brother ;)