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I do agree with you on many points, and there's one thing that I think has been pretty good in recent years is the indie /small studio scene which has produced some really entertaining and unique games. Probably because there's the lack of the greed they have in for example big corporate EA so I'd argue there's the similar mindset of early game development.
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@matt-jd
Square Enix seems to be one of the few big publishers/studios valuing quality.
They published several, high quality, JRPGs (Bravely Series, Octopath Traveler) and the surprise hit "Life is Strange".
Notably, in LiS case, Dontnod tried to pitch the idea to several publishers, but Square was the only one, not demanding changes to the story. -
Naming the best games from every console will naturally give you a list of very good games. The fact that they're remembered even now is a testament to how good they were, so your selection is heavily biased. You just don't know and/or remember and/or play the crappy ones from those generations. That's hardly equivalent to saying that games were better in general.
Every generation has good games, cash cows, pathetic management fuelled bullshit, dumpster fires, absolutely legendary stuff, and so on. Yes they did some pretty insane stuff on the old games with very little, but modern game hardware and engines are incredible achievements too.
Personally I feel there's absolutely no lack of great modern games that compare favourably to the ones from the past, and I say this with stuff like Chrono Trigger being in my favourite games of all time list. -
I remember an era before consoles. My first computer was a Commodore Amiga 2000, and I fed it with games copied from friends (I think I only ever owned one original game). I also had several friends with Commodore 64's, a few with MS-DOS PCs (that were slowly starting to show acceptable graphics and sound), and one deranged individual with an Atari ST. Those were fun times…
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@p100sch i didn't notice that I missed it... guess I should stop doing tired rants.
@theKarlisK it was meant to be the most common answers and i was running out of characters.
@RememberMe Correct, but the ratio of good-to-bad was much better than it is now.
@metamourge i'll have to check that one out.
@melezorus34 Wait, really? -
@Parzi obviously not. It has a small screen, you know. You can play it on Wii tho
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@Parzi irrelevant, that's a function of how much money gaming rakes in and how hard it is to make games.
What actually matters to you as a player is how easy it is to find good games. And it's incredibly easy now because of digital distribution. Getting good games back then was *hard*. So I really don't buy that argument. In just about every way gaming is better (and cheaper) right now, not worse. And to top it all we have access to retro games too for extra choice.
If you don't care for big corporate greed fuelled games, don't play them. Or play them in moderation, with friends. You're not required to conform to a given way to play things. I avoid FIFA, CoD, BF, Fortnite, etc. like the plague because I'm too busy having an amazing time in Nier Automata, Witcher, Dishonoured, Deus Ex, XCOM, Borderlands 2, Divinity OS and OS 2 etc. for example. -
@melezorus34 oldcoding in the modern era, with official backing?
God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.
Examples and predicted responses:
-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.
-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.
-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...
-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...
-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)
-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.
-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.
-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.
-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...
-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.
Now, a harder one:
-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.
-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.
-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.
Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.
If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.
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