So when I was a kid in the 80s, I would always get SUPER excited for getting a new game.
We’d get in the car, drive to Toys R Us, and in the video game section was basically an homage to Nintendo. So much so that the descriptors at the end of the isles didn’t say “video games”, it said “Nintendo”. Sure, they sold Sega and Atari too…but it was the Nintendo isle.
So you’d pick your game, and on the drive home you would flip through your new game manual. Remember game manuals??? You’d learn all about this new world. Who was this “Zelda” if the main character was a boy??? What kind of world was this??? It looks HUGE!!! DO YOU SEE ALL THESE DIFFERENT ENEMIES???
Finally (after like 10 minutes), you’d get home. You’d race to the door, only for you to realize that you need dad to unlock the door. Now, dad was probably walking at a normal pace, but to a hyper 6 year old excited to play with his new toy, he may as well have been a dried out turtle. Or a sloth.
FINALLY he opens the front door, and you go rushing to the TV. You put the cartridge in, and you’re ready to play. You turn the power on, and you’re already at the name screen. After you put in the name “Dork”, because you’re an edgy 80s kid, you’re already in front of a cave. Oh god…what’s in there??? How do I fight monsters??? THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING!!! Oh god, oh god, here we go, we’re going in the cave…
And you all know how it plays out from there.
These days, it’s a bit different. These days a game gets announced and you wait for release day. Then you turn on your console, and you buy the game. Now you gotta wait for an hour for it to download. Thats assuming your console doesn’t need an update. So now you’re waiting…and waiting…and waiting…
Eventually it’s all done, and you boot the game up, but theres a day 1 update. So more waiting. FINALLY after an hour and a half it’s done.
So you boot it up, and you don’t get that same sense of wonderment. It’s because todays games have been done to death. Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphisis is on online play. So now you already know what you’re getting, and you gotta wait again for online lobbies to start.
And when Nintendo released the Super Nintendo it was a radical jump in performance in every sense on a platform that was revolutionary to start with. It was must have technology.
Now, 50% of PS4 users haven’t upgraded to a newer system. And why? Because the PS5 looks like a slight visual upgrade in apperance, and zero upgrade in performance. Games look and feel mostly the same as they would on PS4. And the games are all the same. Microtransactions, unimaginative plots, forgetable characters, sequals reboots prequals. We’re seeing the same franchises, with the same characters doing the same things for 30 years. Mario is still saving the princess for Bowser. At this point, Peach is just LETTING herself get kidnapped. Zelda is going to save Link now in the new game…which would be a new concept, playing as Zelda, except Shiek was Zelda the whole time. Oops, spoilers on a 26 year old game.
Breath of the Wild had that samr sense of childhood wonder. But only if you actively avoided online discussions, youtube videos, social media. It was a barrage of avoiding spoilers, but I did it, and March 3rd 2017 was GLORIOUS. It’s also the last time I felt that need to get a new console.
I regretted buying a PS4, but for some stupid reason I bought a PS5 this year. I regret it. I see no system seller.
And thats another thing. Why can’t the games give you the option to play from disc, rather than install everything? Most games are like 50-100gb. It eats up storage REAL quick. Now you gotta decide "ok, which games do I want to delete, and which am I going to use soon?
Theres NO reason for me to justify 45gb on my hard drive for the PS4 version of Madden 19, when all I do is play exhibition. But I also don’t want to delete it, and reinstall it every few months on the off chance I want yo play 20 minutes of 1 game.
Sure, maybe Madden diehards get use out of that 45gb. I do not. I don’t play season. I do give a shit about those madden cards. I only play exhibition, 1 game, maybe once every 4 months. Same with NHL. Same with MLB.
Why must I take up like 200gb for games I play casually and sparingly, and almost ALWAYS have to sit through an update before I throw the ball? I don’t even care about roster updates. Unless they’re on Cleveland’s team, I don’t know any of these players. I don’t give a shit that Joe Whatshisname used to play for Chicago, but now he plays in New York.
I just want to pop in the disc, and play. No bullshit.
I wish Madden 95 worked on the SNES classic. It’s the last SNES version that Cleveland had a team.
But instead now, every single game comes with forced bullshit
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My friend, I think you need to join us indie gamers, especially on PC. DRM free, minimal updates, small installs, high novelty and weirdness factors. I barely play anything “AAA” anymore and definitely nothing that does Games as a Service.
I gotta agree here. Every game doesn’t feel the same if you don’t constrain yourself to the world of overhyped overmonetized AAA slop.
In my library I have a game about running an alternate-history navy sitting next to one about being a scrapper in space. The next one over is about terraforming a planet with your own labor. Then there’s a pure-bred Igavania next to a quirky game about power washing.
Sure, there are multiplayer titles in there as well but virtually none that even bother with anti-cheat bullshit because coop beats competitive in my opinion.
(For the record, I do own overhyped AAA slop but it’s nowhere near the majority of what I play.)
I mean, you’re 40 now (or close to it). A lot of your nostalgia is also wrapped up in being 5. I too was an 80s kid but if the market hadn’t changed your reaction would. You probably aren’t sitting under a blanket learning the names in Dave the Diver. You have an income now so you probably wouldn’t just wait till your parents bought you Hades 2. You’re probably not running around with your friends right now pretending to be Helldivers. Games have changed but so have you. The Indie market is carrying the torch of these bygone days. A lot of the stuff you want wouldn’t have the same impact on you today. I am however watching my own children glom into game characters. My daughter loves Mario and Mega Man without going to Blockbuster to rent the cartridges.
(Btw madden 95 does work on the SNES classic, they’re pretty easy to jail break and fill with your own ROMs)
Spoiler
Definitely don’t search for Madden NFL 95 SNES ROMS
Steam Deck OLED is pretty awesome. Microsoft-free PC in your hands.
Anyway it’s all about DRM.
You will own nothing and you will love it. /S
You can give your steam info to your loved one and accidentally forgot to tell them when you die 🥹.
Or there’s always GoG.
I’ve been🖥️ PC/Linux 🐧 only since 2019, no regrets.
- 🎮 #BazziteLife 🕹️
Big fan of this solution. Switch emulation is also pretty great on the steam deck and gets rid of most of the modern grossness (always on, obtrusive DRM, etc) that comes with playing on they physical device.
Are you just using the last release of Yuzu or something? I’ve become relatively keen to emulate my Switch games on Steam Deck because it’s just so much more comfortable to hold, at least for me.
Im using the latest release of RyuJinx and it plays most games really well.
You do not miss old games. You miss being a careless happy kid.
You can easily ignore the whole corporate AAA games-as-a-service bullshit.
There was never a better time to be an indie gamer. Arcade, platformer, racing, RPG, shooter. You can find a GOTY contender in each category under 5 USD each year.
First, you are way older now. You cannot compare any experience in your life to that when you were a kid
And second?
But seriously: in a way, you’re right. New games don’t appeal to me. The kind of “child wonder” I get nowadays is by playing games that are similar to the ones I used to play when younger. Fantasy consoles have pretty much an endless supply of these games, and I enjoy discovering new, interesting ones. No spending, no gigabytes of data.
As soon as consoles required to be “always online,” I was out.
tl;dr: “Growing up sucks because it makes everything look the same old.”
I mean… yeah. That is why you have to stop wishing for “the same old” over and over again and embrace the new. And yes, I (also) think DRM has no other purpose than to hinder performance.
t. am (also) a 80’s “kid”.
It’s easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80’s kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It’s part of the reason there’s so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn’t put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn’t have the manuals available, so they’d get stuck (before Internet info access).
I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I’ve only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I’ll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it’s mine forever.
That’s setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It’s trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.
“Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphasis is on online play”
Buys the same game 15 times
Complains that it’s the same game again
Have you tried not doing that
Oh, I haven’t bought ANY of them. I dislike the whole genre as a whole. Never played a Halo a day in my life. Last the only 2 shooters I ever played were Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Both on N64. Neither of which is anything I described.
I generally stay away from things like online play. I don’t have PS+ or Nintendo Online, and I’ve never owned an XBox of any kind.
That doesn’t mean however that I don’t see that this is the direction the industry headed 20 years ago, and hasn’t looked back. They keep making call of duty, and all these other shooters because that’s what people buy. OTHER people make it popular, not me.
There’s a lot of games that do very well that don’t fall into your stereotypes.
Sure, CoD sells the best. That doesn’t mean Disco Elysium sucks though, or Citizen Sleeper, or Stardew Valley, or Sekiro, or Psychonauts 2, or Hollow Knight, or any number of great games. Games that were impossible when manufacture was monopolized by Nintendo’s cartel, or when cartridges were required and made games cost $60 in 1995.
Gaming is not immune from dialectics. It too exists in a tension between contradictions. It is both terrible, and wonderful, as it was during the golden age you are highlighting from the past, when games cost far more money and were available to far fewer people. When there was no way for one person (Stardew) or two (Hollow Knight) to be able to make and distribute an entire game without submitting themselves to subservience under a publisher.
You’re getting so many responses that are just “have you tried indie games?” or trying to dispel the rose-colored glasses. I suspect it’s because of the headline saying modern gaming sucks, which I think can be pretty objectively disproven.
That said, I can tell you about my experiment. I’ve instituted a program with my 12 year old stepson where he can earn marbles through chores and other tasks, and he can trade those marbles in for retro games I find in local stores and flea markets. One of the things he can also buy for a very low price is a downloaded retro magazine from retromags.com - he can ask for an issue with a particular topic in it and I’ll find one and send it to him. He isn’t really very internet savvy yet, so he’s not likely to hit up IGN for info or anything.
The result of this so far (only a few weeks in) has been serious excitement and engagement. He has access to Xbox Series and PS5 consoles, but getting to own physical games and accessories (we play them on a Retron 3 HD console) has motivated him more than I’ve seen almost anything else do. He keeps asking me if Street Fighter 2 will come to the “store” anytime soon because of my stories of how badly I wanted that game as a kid his age. Little does he know that for Christmas he’ll be getting an excellent condition, complete in box copy of Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition for the Genesis. He’s gonna flip.
The upshot of all this is that I really do think there was a certain magic to the experience back then. I’m doing my damnedest to recreate that magic for him, and so far it’s at least kinda working!
This is a nice story. I like this. My parents would occasionally buy me games, but it was mostly once or twice a year, and they never got excited for my excitement. They would just complain that all I do is play video games. Meanwhile all dad did was watch sports, and all mom did was watch news.
But somehow I’M an asshole 7 year old for not playing outside, and being glued to the tv all day! I’m ranting, but yes, 40 year old me is still pissed at my parents.
Getting back on track, I think it’s adorable how you not only engage with your kid, and teach him the value of earning things. And participate with your kid.
Makes me wonder if you were a fan of the aki wrestling games on N64. There’s a definate depth to those games that you don’t find in todays wrestling games. AEW tried…but I feel like their third game they might start getting it right. For reference, they’ve only made 1 game, and it took 4 years to make.
Same same. I literally have hundreds, if not thousands, of games in my digital libraries. The absolute entertainment value of that is astronomical, but at the same time, the experience of receiving any given game has become devalued to the point of meaninglessness in some cases.
I wanted to try and recreate that feeling of reading about a game, falling in love with every screenshot and drop of info, and working hard (or begging hard) to get it as one of the 2, maybe 3 games you’d get in a year. You read the manual twice on the car ride home, you save the box, you learn everything about it. I’ve told him about pausing the NES because you just got farther than you ever got before, you only have one life left, and you need to go to school. The idea of having an experience like that is being lost in today’s culture in my opinion.
Edit: Forgot to answer, no, I have not tried the Aki wrestling games. I only ever played WCW/NWO World Tour for a while in college with my buddies for the four-player bikinis, but I never really was into wrestling games or TV otherwise.
I only ever played WCW/NWO World Tour
That’s the first of the US released Aki games! It went in order of release:
WCW/NWO World tour
WCW/NWO Revenge
WWF Wrestlemania 2000
WWF No Mercy (considered to this day to be the greatest wrestling game of all time).
I only mentioned them because I had fond memories of couch co-op with my friends. It’s one of those games that started with a starting point (the one you played), and each new game they added more and more content to the new game, while keeping everything from the old game.
I was just hoping with your son getting that appriciation for anticipating a new game, that you could start him with the first game, and end with the 4th.
But it’s one of those games that new people tend to struggle with, due to not holding your hand at ALL. It was just assumed you knew what you were doing…and the fighting system is sooooo complex, yet simple once you “get it”.
Short tap A, weak grapple. Long hold A, strong grapple.
Same with B and punches.
You CAN try to just so strong punches, and strong grapples, but if your opponent hasn’t been weakened they’re likely to reverse. They MIGHT still reverse a weak punch or grapple too, but they need much more precise button timing. The worse they’re beaten up, the harder it is to reverse. And eventually you might land a strong punch or grapple. You can taunt to raise your spirit meter. Your spirit meter also raises as you do well in a match, or lower if you do worse.
Throw your opponent down and do a short taunt before he gets up to stop your taunt, and you get an instant small boost in spirit. Do a long uninterupted taunt, and get a big boost in spirit.
But if you attempt a taunt, you leave yourself open to an easy attack against you, and if that happens you lose spirit proportional to what you were attempting to gain.
Its a very balanced game where every action has an appropriate reaction. It’s up to you to time those actions, and choose what you think you can get away with.
It’s such a weird game that an experienced player vs a rookie will result in an unfun lopsided match. But evenly matched players might have 1 match last an hour.
Oh, haha I thought I’d heard of Aki in the context of wrestling games, but assumed I must have been thinking Yuke’s.
Currently we’re sticking to 8-bit and 16-bit, though we’ll eventually start graduating into PS1 and so on. He doesn’t really have any awareness of or demonstrated interest in wrestling yet, but I’ll keep it in mind. I always did envy WCW/NWO Revenge when it came out…
Most modern AAA games sucks. Mainly because majority of them have started to go with the online only bullcrap when it is not even necessary. Not to mention that trend too where games are sold half baked with the rest of the game being delivered later as separate to purchase DLC(s).
I have already embraced Indies. Fun fact: Baldurs Gate 3 is an indie game (although the quality is very much an AAA game and also some argueably saying it is not because Larian is a large private company that independently publishes their games)
TLDR: Agree on many points but also you are wrong in some things. Certain parts of AAA gaming make modern games feel like a chore or feel bad compared to how AAA games used to feel. But also the market of games is flooded and making more money than ever before.
Regarding some of your points:
All the games today are the same
I get what you’re saying, but you’re also wrong. There are so many games out there these days that vary widely in art, style, design, gameplay, etc. There have literally never been so many different kinds of game on the market at once. Now, I agree that AAA studios are mostly only making “safe” games they know will sell, and I too am upset that companies these days are so risk adverse that they will refuse to make a new game as experimental as something like Illbleed, but thats what happens when a hobby goes mainstream and investors that are greedy get invovled.
Why can’t I just play from disk
Because load times would be astronomical. Disk read speeds are still slow, way slower than solid state drive read speeds. Your 10 second loading screens would be longer than 45 seconds, even the PS1 would probably load games faster. In this case, some data may not be loaded completely by the time the game decides to let you in, as some assets in games now are streamed from the drive as needed instead of being loaded directly into RAM at the start of a scene. Relying on a slow mechanical disk laser to stream that data in a manner that wouldn’t cause crashing or missing assets would not be feasible. They could try solid storage but that comes with its own caveats and increased manufacture price.
Complaining about storage
I agree, but also games have big textures and better quality audio these days compared to the old days. Sure, not all games need that, but if storage space is a complaint then play any one of the ten trillion indie card battlers. The bigger files also increase load times, more data in general needs more time to search and load.
Complaints about MTX and such
I agree, predatory monetization sucks. The only times I am okay with inclusion of MTX/Lootbox/Gachapon etc is if the game is free. The developers have to make money somehow. I play occasional gacha games, usually developed for mobile devices but I like to play on PC. I really enjoyed Super Mecha Champions, but they will probably be ending support sometime soon as they have gone into maintenance mode. But I have been very surprised with Zenless Zone Zero. I kinda hate how much I like the game, honestly.
Point is, while I agree that MTX suck, in a free game its acceptable IMO because the developers have to make money. Gacha is really big in Asian culture, and I am not one to police someone else’s culture or say what they do is bad, its just different. MTX on any paid game is just sad though.
---------BotW Rant-----------
IMO Breath of the Wild was a terrible Zelda game. Like, Zelda II Adventure of Link bad, not Wand of Gamelan bad though. It isn’t a bad game in general, I would give it maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10 (unlike many people today I actually like to use all 10 numbers), it just felt average because it was. I laughed like a maniac when Tears of the Kingdom cane out and made Breath of the Wild look like a sad tech demo, and every reviewer that gave BotW a high score now suddenly looked like the biggest idiot on the planet because they were scoring TotK the same despite it being the clearly better game.
Zelda, ever since the 3rd game in its series, followed a clear formula. When people bought a Zelda game after Link to the Past, they had an idea of what to expect. Its like people going to a burger joint because they know they sell burgers. BotW though, deleted all of that in an attempt to go back and repeat what only ONE game in the entire Zelda franchise up to that point had done. A game that the franchise had largely moved on from, it had built upon that concept in its later iterations. BotW was a downgrade, because a lot of people going to that same burger joint were now suddenly getting served ground beef, without any of the other ingredients in a burger.
TotK was much better in being an actual Zelda game, but it still was missing a lot of what people expect from a Zelda game. No real, large and elaborate dungeons, just a pitiful attempt (albeit still a better attempt than BotW) at a 4 room “dungeon.” No pieces of heart, no hookshot or magic instrument, no bottles to collect, etc. It felt like I was playing an Ubisoft open world game cosplaying as a Zelda game.
-----------BotW Rant Over------------
did anyone else break the plastic on their new game and stick their nose in it and inhale that brain damaging chemically new game smell?
God that was better than heroine for me.
You’re playing the wrong games if you think modern games are all the same. Buy a half decent mini PC, install Steam, and play indie games.
There are even a ton of retro games on Steam. Not vintage, but retro. New games with old school graphics and appeal, like The Messenger.
I remember reading about Elite in a (paper) magazine, and I WANTED IT. Counted my pocket money. Drove my bike to a mainly photo related retailer (only one reachable for me, they also did PC games as a side job), and there it was, box art in the window! Went in, told em I wanted that, and - big disappointment - they had to order it. THEY HAD A DISPLAY OF THE BOX ART, BUT NO COPY OF THE REAL THING! I had to pay upfront, cash, and then had to ride the bike there, again, two times, within a fornight, cos there was no notification of arrival then. The joy, tension, reading through the manual, while it was installing… unbeatable. Spent most of my afternoons in game, doing my “homework”.
07 Commander 🫡 I’ll be casually playing Elite Dangerous till the servers go offline. 🥹
My first experience was Elite on N.E.S. they should let us play that on our Fleet Carrier Captain chair console.
FRONTIER does, I believe give a 🆓 PC Copy and Mac Copy of Elite FYI.
I need more context. Why did they not have it?
It was a small shop, they only had a corner with “electronic” things, some computer stuff. They probably only odered a copy or two, not believing it would sell. But it did. Remember, this must have been the 1980ies, computers were somewhat rare and exotic back then. I think I was one of two in my class who owned one.
Have you tried indie games? There’s more games and variety than ever, and you’re lumping everything into these neat little easy-to-criticize packages.
Gaming doesn’t suck. Your expectations do.
