Daily Dose of English 172
Retro Games
Daily Dose of English 172
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about retro games. Retro games. We've talked about games before, video games, board games, card games, but there's another genre of games that I find pretty interesting, and those are retro games. So retro, I actually don't know what the root word is. Maybe it's retrospective or something like that, but a retro thing is something from the past. So let's see, retro definition. Does it come from a different word? It says it's just a prefix, but I've, oh no, there's the adjective. Yo, that's just the whole word, retro. Okay, so there is no base, longer word. Cool. But a retro something that is retro is that it used to be in fashion, it's old, or it's maybe nostalgic of some kind, in some way. And so things from like the 80s or the 90s or the early 2000s can be considered retro because they're from the past. They might be cool or interesting and have that different touch that isn't as modern. So you can find things like retro fashion, retro music, right? Vinyl, for example, is sort of retro nowadays, because it's not many people use vinyl as their daily music listening. So it's considered retro. But today we're talking about retro games, which are video games from really like this, pretty much just the 80s, 90s era eras, because like their video games are relatively new in human invention. Pong was in like the 60s or something. Let's see. That was I think the first official video game pong original date Let's see if that comes up with something 72 so yeah early 70s and then I think like the 70s were when like there were some arcade games nothing super duper really uh, that like sticks out in our minds, I guess. And then like towards the late eighties, late seventies and eighties is when video games started to become way bigger and definitely in the nineties, um, nineties video games were totally popping off, um, really popular. And then in the two thousands even, right. And that's, so if anybody that kind of grew up in the nineties or the two thousands, definitely, um, video games were a part of that childhood, um, almost assuredly. to the point like it and now mobile games, video games are humongous among everybody. Not even like because it started out as a more niche thing, right? Usually younger boys would play video games in and then it started basically expanding to everybody and now we're at the point where Um, pretty much everybody has played a video game at some point that everybody has heard of them. It's, it's super mainstream, basically like, um, movies and the video game market is massive. And the retro game market is actually also really interesting because you might think that things have just gotten better and better and better. And in some ways they have, but also they've just gotten different, right? There's a certain point where video games were good enough to be amazing right like Same thing with movies. There are movies nowadays that look better that are really good that are bigger crazier more wild But that doesn't mean that they're necessarily better than movies from the 60s, right? There's movies that can be pretty old and have a really great story have really good characters be really interesting and fun because the there's a certain point where the technology is good enough that you can create top-tier art, top-tier creation without being limited necessarily. And so these retro games that have a lot of these constraints about like what you can do, you can't do amazing visual graphics, you can't have too complex of storylines because you only have five megabytes to work with, right? The games were constrained in a lot of ways, but there was a lot of, options and possibilities. There was enough options and possibilities to create something truly amazing. So there's a lot of people that like these older games and they play old video games. They collect things about them because that is the style that they really like. Um, I've said before that I don't really play a ton of video games. Um, recently, actually just a couple of days ago, I started recording some, um, video game play through things for this, this channel, um, playing a game that I like. And that's like the first time I played a video game in like a year. Um, but I still find them interesting. I follow like. big news, I watch people play them sometimes, and I occasionally, actually that's not true, I have played other video games because I have a little handheld device called a Miu that runs retro games. So it's about, it's smaller than a phone, so it's smaller than my phone, it's about the same weight though, it's relatively heavy, and it's a fairly simple computer that runs old video games. And it can run them because old video games require basically no power to run, no real computing power, I guess. And it's a great way to spend a couple hours on an airplane because they are simple games to understand, to control and it's mostly story and text based which is really great for like my interests because I don't really want to like learn how to play a really complicated fighting game or massively multiplier online game or whatever and so I much prefer the sort of the simpler style of a game that I might know and understand and you can just read text on screen and follow a sort of relatively simple video game that is still a lot of fun. I'm definitely not, I wouldn't say like a big retro gamer. I don't collect retro stuff. I don't have a CRT television, which is an old style of TV that actually runs better for old games, which is interesting. But I do think that they're really interesting. And I think I'm running out of time because I've been babbling about random things. But one of the reasons I find retro games to be really interesting is because of this idea of constraints or of restrictions making more creativity or restrictions breed creativity. And what that means is that when there are restrictions in place saying you can't do this thing, you can't do this, you can't do this, you have to do this. it makes people be more creative. So the example I like to use is the music in a lot of old video games has a very distinctive sound, right? When you hear it, you immediately think that's from an old video game, that's from the Game Boy, that's from the NES, right? There's this very distinctive music. um look it up if you don't know what i'm talking about look up like nes music or something like that and you'll hear this like distinctive style of music and that music but it sounds like that because there's relatively simple um physical hardware that can play music in these machines. And they're relatively constrained to, I think like eight different kinds of sounds. And they function based off of very simple sound waves. So you get very, you don't really get like an instrument sound. You get a very specific like artificial music sound. However, if that's all you have to work with, that can create really, really interesting music. And there's actually an entire genre of people that make music, even now in 2024, just out of that, those sounds, right? I think 8-bit music, if you look it up, you can find a ton of different things that make 8-bit music, which is very simple, this sort of very simple sounds that can become really, really interesting and creative. And there is some amazing music made just in this style. Absolutely incredible. And for example, one of my favorite soundtracks for an old video game is for the Fire Emblem 8 soundtrack, which you can probably look up and just hear the music. And it just doesn't sound like it has all these constraints to it. It sounds like an artist making music and creating something amazing for a video game. But there is a relatively, um, simple back, like specific sound waves that are being sent to our ears. And that I think is really cool. And those constraints make for pretty interesting games. So whether you go play old games, like games like the original, I think the original, or like whatever, whatever generation of Pokemon, or like I said, some of my favorite games growing up were the Fire Emblem games, or old Mario games, even like good Gideons, like the PlayStation 1, There's a bunch of games with Crash Bandicoot, a bunch of different Street Fighter games. There's so many really good games from that time period when there was actually a good bit of constraints to building a video game. And I find that really interesting and I do enjoy playing video games. When I play games like on an airplane or something, I often do it as a Retro game because I find that interesting but yeah, okay. I'm gonna stop rambling on I didn't actually get to as many things I wanted to talk about today, but hopefully you enjoyed and Learned a little something. Let me down in the comments below. Did you ever play retro games? Do you like them? Do you find them interesting, but I'll see you in tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye
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