Do you ever feel that gaming has passed you by?

It's a combination of things I believe. The market is flooded with games, many games of which do not do anything unique and do not require imagination. I know back when I was a kid, I never expected had any expectations for games. I think today many people have become accustomed to expecting games to meet certain personal requirements(this may be graphics, gameplay etc). I can say, I didn't have those expectations and that's probably a reason why I enjoyed most games released.

With every new console, people raise their expectation bars. Which is good in some ways... but it exhausts uniqueness and fun very quickly.

I used to buy like 1 game and spent the next 6 months playing it. Now I buy games all the time, play for a bit... don't finish them and walk away with nothing good to remember about them.

I remember playing games and walking up to walls and wondering.. I wonder what's over there? Wouldn't it be cool if I could get over this wall? (The wall was of course, map boundaries). But today, it's all done... most games allow you to go anywhere you see. I guess, the limitations of the old games made them more exciting and mysterious.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the late 80's early 90's and re-live it.

 

Isn't it a bit daft to pretend to know what gaming will look like in 20 years? You honestly think it'll look exactly like it does now but with more polygons? With all due respect, that strikes me as incredibly unimaginative.

 

For me this is largely part of the problem. I've never wanted to play MMOs after seeing just how obsessional people get over them. RPGs I'm very picky about. Mainly its been the fact I can't afford $50 games when for $50 I can get 25+ NES games of high quality. I can't afford a 360 right now nor a PS3. I do have my older consoles and PCs though.

As for the games, they haven't gotten crappier. More sequels get churned out sure but I think its mainly that the majority of ideas have a "been there, done that" feel to them. FPS? Yeh I recall Quake and Half-Life quite well. Whats this? CoD? Didn't I play you to death about a decade ago? Oh no wait that 14 year old is saying Black Ops is the best game ever.

Hmm, no way that is an accurate statement. How many Mario games have we gone through? Zelda? Metroid? Most of us can recall the older titles of those being released. Have they changed enough to warrant having the tag of "originality" still applied? Not by a long shot.

The last few games that have really interested me are either continuations of a story I'd like to see if not purely for kicks (Halo: Reach) or something that seems to offer something a bit new and different (Alan Wake, too many survival horror types have leeched off Silent Hill).

When you've got games like Angry Birds making developers issue statements claiming that consoles are dead and portables are the new console you have to wonder why the fuck they'd care about making good, deep games.

Modern games don't suck universally, but the incentive to produce anything but a cash cow is dwindling.

 

There´s may things that change with the years. Yhe first is available time. I want to play, i really do, but i just can´t, dont have enough time. But, when i can, i must say that i mostly return to my old consoles, new ones just aren´t the same. Game aren´t as good, as fun, or as epic as the used to be. Just my opinion.

 

How much more realistic can an FPS get? and how much more imagination can you put into killing a person? To the point where shooting someone in the virtual world and real life look exactly the same? Or a motion environment where you use real guns?

It's time to sit back and look at where games are heading.

It doesn't look like bright future to me.

 

I m glad we're all wearing some Rose Tinted Glasses (tm) in this thread. Ask your kids when they grow older, they'd swear that their first/second generation of game consoles was the best and that future games are total crap. I think it has more to do with what you consider to be a game the first time you play one. If you don't know any better, which you don't as a kid, you're always going to love your first ones.

 

That's because they never got to experience the better games.

 

but ofcourse

 

Not necessarily. Those who are serious about their hobbies are trying to learn more about it, thus refining their taste. I know only very few gamers who kept playing what they played at kids. Most of them just picked the genre/generation they like the most and specialized on it, like VS fighting, shooters, RPG,...

 

most gamers aren't refined gamers though. We're not the money makers we used to be when we were kids, at a time when we judged a game by its boxart.

Certainly there have been acclaimed titles, but the concept of a challenge as a game is something that's not for everyone. The other day I saw a girl playing a facebook "game" and it wasn't a game nearly at all, it was just a time passer, many assets to look at and borderline retarded challenges/activities to enable more content..oh and cash, many players prefer to buy their way just to have some more art assets.

The video game market has diversified and expanded compared to our days.. all I'm saying is that we find charm in challenge because we had our faces beat to the ground by games as kids. Most common people shy away from that just because it doesn't make them feel that they re "good enough" and that they'll need time to actually improve.

As a big economic branch, the VG business needs to cater to all tastes across the board, hence why there's a bigger variety on each platform's library and thus the games "we" like might look like the minority..and that's because most people can't take a challenge, it's not their definition of a game. They are mostly average-minded folks who like to stare at pretty sights with minimal effort from their side of things.

 

I say that when once there were very few games, with very similar characteristics and resources, all games could be lumped together, like the first few movies made. Then movies diversified, then home movies came, and also Television and Video, and now Internet videos and whatnot.

The same should happen to gaming, now that many types of machines can play games; gaming can no longer be generalised. There are many types of gaming now, and they shall diversify wider.

Still, console games of today ARE indeed suffering "Hollywood Syndrome", and just like movies, it's the ones with better, deeper messages, not the ones made to be cash cows, that we connoisseurs like.

But in general, cash cows get more attention and more business, and it's very sad that they will take the place and recognition that better, less known games, should have.

Just like movies.

And well, people who like and make cinema like specific types of movies - good commercial movies, hollywood blockbusters, or art cinema.

We are the connoisseurs of the art of gaming, and we like old school stuff. The connoisseurs of good cinema would probably hate 98% of all movies released because they're shitty.

 

I totally get your point, in fact right now I'm grinding my teeth at the thought that I have to check if my X360 its compatible with the new shitty antipiracy system they are going to put in place, then about the hours I'll have to waster with tech support to see if they send me one of those ugly SX360s as replacement, and from that at the data transfer from one HDD to the other.

But you want to know what really bugs me? that I'm not missing out on anything

I missed on the PSX, I had a N64 and a Saturn and didn't want a 3rd console, big mistake since some of those games were great at the time, but now I cant even get close to one of those pixelated titles. Just like dumb CG movies I've been spoiled by HD graphics and now all those old 32bit-era games are too ugly to play, just like old scifi movies are sometimes too ugly to watch.

But right now I'm not missing out on anything, there are no amazing games that change the way you play anymore, you get all worked up on some upcoming game, you go to great lengths to play it (change consoles, an HDTV, or in PC a whole new Rig) and it's NOTHING NEW, same old crap but with some twist that even your granny could've thought of.

Is not that quality has gone down, I actually see less crappy games now than before, problem is ideas, imagination! theres almost nothing left, the last 2 games that struck me as great were Dead Space 2 and Portal 2 which were SEQUELS to other games than already did that, but since others devs have done nothing to innovate like these did (like incorporating some of those ideas to their own games) even the sequels to those 2 games are more "original" than most of the other games out there.

 

You know, this is an interesting point, and it is one that I have pondered often, and to be quite frank with you, I disagree.

If you ask my Dad what the best videogame console of all time was, he'd probably say the SNES. If you asked me what the best console of all time was, I'd be inclined to go with the Saturn, but the Dreamcast and SNES wouldn't be far behind. These systems, of course, weren't the first or even second generation of consoles we had come in contact with.

Also, I don't know many avid gamers from the Atari age that still consider the old Atari systems the best. I mean, I know they're out there, but most people I've encountered tend to think of the SNES, NES, or Genesis as the best console unless they're under the age of 21.

My issue with gaming today is that there is no real challenge. In every FPS, all I have to do is duck behind a wall and I'm at full health again. Meanwhile, I can remember scrapping through the FPSs of the '90s and feeling I had accomplished something in doing so. In a more general sense, games these days are too big to provide any challenge. You couldn't save in a Sonic game or a Mario game back in the day, you had to suck it up and make do with what you had. This isn't so anymore.

I dunno, I think gaming, in terms of quality gameplay, has taken a dive in recent years. That said, there are current games I enjoy. But do I buy games now like I did back when the DC was alive and kicking? Not even close.

 

The difference is, for us in our 30's, games were still a relatively new media when we were growing up. Not their infancy, but the groove had definitely not been found yet. My Golden area of gaming is late 80's early 90's arcade. System wise, I'd go w/ Saturn, and it wasn't close to my first system. So, that's probably my 4th generation. I think it was the 6th generation to completely turn me off, and I like quite a bit of stuff between it and when I started.

 

Here's a great article decreeing this generation as being the greatest generation of consoles ever. A choice quote:

" Back in the old days the majority of games were platformers or fighting games. I know it may feel like almost every game released these days is a generic shooter about totally-not-gay burly space marines, but in reality games have never been so diverse. Now we get photography games, RPGs, shooters, platformers, music action games, motion controlled games, erotic horror titles, as well as*the classic*puzzlers, platformers, and fighting games."

Wait, what?



http://newbreview.com/2011/05/19/weve-never-had-it-better/

 

The problem is, 99% of them suck...even the "classic" puzzlers & platformers. I won't even get into how pussified the games are to appeal to the masses.

For me though, part of the magic from the old days was squeezing everything out of the hardware. For arcade games, it was squeezing all you could out of hardware for maybe only a couple of games until you had to learn the next one. Now, arcade games are the most boring hardware on the planet: PC-based.