I quite like the wide selection of indie games out there these days. It reminds me a lot of the crazy times when all kinds of wacky old shareware games were popping up on the bulletin boards, and they would all let you play a couple of levels and then tell you to pony up twenty or thirty bucks for the rest of the game. The difference is now the games are much cheaper (or even free!), and there's just so many more of them – and the vast majority of them will run quite happily on your hardware without any agonizing tinkering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dppczm_TKMA

I think it's a matter of aging. Stuff loses excitement after you've been around it for so many years.

Perhaps it is. When you're a kid, the world is new to you and everything is exciting and has magic to it. As an adult, you become hardened and cynical.

Though it does seem now, a computer is a computer whereas in the 70s, 80s and 90s, computers were more diverse and went through significant changes every few years.

Indeed that is true that modern PCs are just a soulless appliance similar to a toaster or a microwave. However, the hardware is much cheaper and vastly easier to set up and use now. Also thanks to USB, you can buy any peripheral, hook it up, and it just works. In the 80s you'd be like "Oh no I can't use this TRS-80 printer on an IBM PC because it's Centronics standard and I'll produce magic smoke. Oh no, this Commodore printer has a proprietary serial interface. Can't use it." and so on.

Or not having eye-straining CRTs or floppy disks that you can't read in someone else's computer because your drive was out of alignment.

Not everything "just worked" back in the day, and the general feeling among consumers was pure confusion when they wanted to purchase a computer. Not to mention a lot of shonky computer shops who sold you overclocked gear or Cyrix machines, telling you they are "just as good" as the stuff from Intel.

Trying to set up PCs used to be pretty horrible, especially in the early 90s. I have an old book "Secrets of Windows 3.1" and the degree of incompatibility that existed among PC manufacturers then was ridiculous. Things like "Windows may spontaneously reboot on Compaq 286s with the V2.4322a BIOS".

PCs may be soulless appliances now, but for goodness sake at least they work and you don't have to move jumper blocks around or find out that Windows is not compatible with your motherboard.

Just go to Google Groups and find a thread with people whining about the end of gaming in say 1995. That gives some perspective on how pointless and misguided those kinds of thoughts are.

I know that. In the Genesis/SNES days, Usenet was full of crybabies who had Atari 2600s as kids and were like "Games then used to be so much cooler and more imaginative now they're just generic beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage or Street Fighter." Never mind that their nostalgia goggles blocked out the numerous piece of crap Pac-Man and Donkey Kong clones in the early 80s.

I quite like the wide selection of indie games out there these days.

Let us be honest. Gaming today is big business unlike the rugged pioneer days in the 80s. Development times and budgets have exploded compared to when you had one guy in his den typing 6502 assembly language. Consider that the NES had four Dragon Quest and six Mega Man games while now each console gets one on average. Companies don't want to take risks anymore because of the amount of money spent, so they prefer to stick with safe genres like Tolkien sword-and-sorcery or FPSes.

Nowadays, most innovation occurs from either indie devs or on handheld consoles because they're much cheaper to develop for than the main platforms.

swaaye wrote:

I actually like interactive movies, especially watching them on Youtube. :D […]
Show full quote

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Some games, such as Resident Evil or Metal Gear Solid, you can just watch the playthrough on YouTube. It's just like a movie 🤣

I actually like interactive movies, especially watching them on Youtube. 😁

I just bought a sci-fi FMV game that came out in 2010!
http://www.darkstar.gs/

If you can watch them on Youtube, then why buy the game?

I did buy Darkstar and regretted it because it's very unstable and the company doesn't admit it. Quicktime crashes all the time for some reason. Maybe it works better on a Apple.

Anyway yeah I'd rather watch adventures on Youtube anyway. As long as the person recording isn't unbearably annoying. Preferably they don't speak at all.

GXL750 wrote:

Pippy, your chart left out the achievements.

Figure out how to walk-ACHIEVEMENT!
Figure out how to turn around-ACHIEVEMENT!
Figure out how to shoot-ACHIEVEMENT!
Get killed by the first enemy you encounter-ACHIEVEMENT!
Throw your game controller across the room in disgust while vowing never to play this stupid f*ing game again-ACHIEVEMENT!

Achievements arrived with Xbox Live and then to PC essentially via Steam right? It's sure one bizarre game "feature" that I don't comprehend the value of. Maybe the kiddies really dig them?

Sometimes they're fun, I generally don't care about them. They can boost replaybility though, give you a motive to play again, just for completion's sake or feeling proud 😜?

with most games i dislike achievements because i can't help myself from trying to get them. which results in playing the game in a way i do not like thereby making the games less fun to play 😒 .

Why can there not be an option to DISABLE those stupid achievements.

swaaye wrote:

Achievements arrived with Xbox Live and then to PC essentially via Steam right? It's sure one bizarre game "feature" that I don't comprehend the value of. Maybe the kiddies really dig them?

It's a way of seeing who has the biggest e-peen when your score goes up on the ranking boards.

amongs the current games,
the multi-platform games (DNF for example) are somehow sucks when compared to games that aimed/produced for specific platform.
But i'll see companies will keep making multi platform game, as there where the money came from.

Check this deal out from GOG:

http://www.gog.com/pick_5_pay_10

We're knee deep in quality DRM free indie games are available for a couple of bucks each, and they're all only a few mouse clicks away. From a gaming point of view, we've never had it so good! (IMO)

Agreed with badmofo. Steam sales also allow you to get some games dirt cheap.

badmofo wrote:

Check this deal out from GOG:

http://www.gog.com/pick_5_pay_10

We're knee deep in quality DRM free indie games are available for a couple of bucks each, and they're all only a few mouse clicks away. From a gaming point of view, we've never had it so good! (IMO)

Took their Interplay 32 games bundle for $35 recently. Digital keeps it handy for non disc-and-box collector like me (I only pursue few select titles for collectibles)

That current offer is also nice, ... problem is, there are way more than five good games there...

Btw, Oculus Rift might be one of the things that would make gaming fun again. I know many of you hate FPS, but games like Myst also use first person view, so it doesn't have to be limited to just FPS games.

And of course we need some major breakthroughs in game design. And theme. War-and-violence is getting so boring.

Btw, Oculus Rift might be one of the things that would make gaming fun again. I know many of you hate FPS

Oh you mean Sergeant McBiceps Shoots Random Terrorists With His Freedom Rifle. Those games.

And of course we need some major breakthroughs in game design. And theme. War-and-violence is getting so boring.

Aw, but people have always been complaining about stale game design. See attached picture. Guy complains 90% of NES games are exactly the same and there's no innovation exception on the Amiga and Atari ST.

kao wrote:

Btw, Oculus Rift might be one of the things that would make gaming fun again. I know many of you hate FPS

Oh you mean Sergeant McBiceps Shoots Random Terrorists With His Freedom Rifle. Those games.

Or zombies. They're everywhere. 😒

And of course we need some major breakthroughs in game design. And theme. War-and-violence is getting so boring.

Aw, but people have always been complaining about stale game design. See attached picture. Guy complains 90% of NES games are exactly the same and there's no innovation exception on the Amiga and Atari ST.

Fair enough. I'm thinking more in the line of a massively multiplayed game that will actually help people collaboratively create tangible wealth (in addition to the intangibles -- emotional, spiritual etc) in the real-world for participants and non-participants alike. Vague I know. And for you I'll let that be. 😜

But you're right about indie. Just out of curiosity, do you by any chance read/follow Gamasutra?

archsan wrote:

Fair enough. I'm thinking more in the line of a massively multiplayed game that will actually help people collaboratively create tangible wealth (in addition to the intangibles -- emotional, spiritual etc) in the real-world for participants and non-participants alike. Vague I know.

I can think of two possible responses to that:

1. They're called message boards. Or Facebook.
2. The Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory prohibits the creation of any such viable thing over the long term.

Jorpho wrote:

I can think of two possible responses to that:

1. They're called message boards. Or Facebook.

And nowadays they're also called Kickstarter.

2. The Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory prohibits the creation of any such viable thing over the long term.

Aye. The "darkness". Need some light.

But you're right about indie. Just out of curiosity, do you by any chance read/follow Gamasutra?

No. That old Usenet post has a good point though since console games from the NES onward are indeed extremely formulaic because they're expensive to develop for and risk-taking does not exist among devs. The C64 and Amiga had loads of really weird, different games like Wizball and weren't simply Scroller #544323043. Or Ballblazer like the guy notes, although most people would find that too esoteric for their taste.

Of course people are known to look at the past with rose-tinted goggles. In the early 90s, you had these guys who were kids in the Atari era going on Usenet and complaining that SNES games were stale and generic (conveniently ignoring the large number of terrible Pac-Man and Donkey Kong clones that caused the crash).