Why modern gaming sucks.

[Arwing904]

The build quality of post-Dreamcast consoles is a joke and really puts me off spending £200 on one. Even the 3DS is prone to this with launch models suffering from the "Black screen of death" syndrome. Seriously, why dont they all come with a Capcom suicide battery as standard!?

[Skykid]

That guy in the middle is a guy. WTF, long ass RPG with bunch of sillyness. I had my roommates playing this and I laugh at the game and the character design so hard. If that's what the modern man looks like then god help us all. Plus the artwork is computer generated.

Now to Crude Buster:

Big flyer can incoming:

Look at that. Two beefy guys and one of them is puting out his muscles with a fucking cigar in his mouth! Have you ever play the game? Bunch of one-liners and throwing just about everything. Guy in elevator shoes with a snake as a boss, and a mini-boss with a psychogun like Cobra's in his left arm? Fucking sign me up.

And the hand-draw artwork just looks better and more real than the artwork in games nowadays.

It does help that I like simple but hard games. That's why I'm big on the arcade stuff from the 80s to the mid-90s.

To me the biggest problem of modern gaming is that it's all the same. More sequels and stuff that just doesn't interest me that much at all.

Amen to this post. I sometimes wonder what happened to the hero figures of Japanese past and realise regrettably that that was my time, and it's well and truly gone. These days designers pander to a new market of fapping weeaboos who like to dress like girls, and I hold Japan partly accountable for defining the trend.

Bring back the heroes damnit.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Macho has burnt out and such a hero is now only possible as a parody of a parody (Duke Nukem Forever). Similarily, the ladies can't hope for love stories with pilots anymore. Porco Rosso does not resemble Robert Redford at the slightest and it makes sense as there is no turning back to Out of Africa.
I for one miss characters like Samus Aran, Mario and pre-Kojima Ayami Richter Belmont, i.e. professionals, people of hard work, not soldiers.



The first one looks like a man geared up for his job. The other one looks like a ponce. I do not mind, however, somewhat effeminate or androgynous designs, if done well.

Can it be a coincidence that both of your examples were produced by extremely small self-funded teams? Braid would be comfortable on that list as well. Gaming may be doing okay, but it's mostly doing so by outright defying "the game industry". Something is rotten here.

The industry lost me a while ago. Well, maybe Nintendo keeps high standards, but I don't own a Wii and don't feel like getting one just yet, therefore can't tell for sure. Sin & Punishment 2 looks business, but the creepy character design, albeit faithful to the N64 original's aesthetics, damps my ardour towards the game and the platform.

[ryu]

If that's what the modern man looks like then god help us all.

That character is 16.

laugh at the game and the character design

I'm not a big fan of the character designs used in Tales games, but there's far worse. I'd like to point out Ar Tonelico, but I'm afraid it's very likely there's far worse out already.

long ass RPG

It's pretty average if we're talking 1 playthrough.

But yeah the game's really flawed and rather bad.

modern gaming

fucking cutscenes

[Domino]

That character is 16.

THAT GIRLY MAN IS 16? LOL JAPAN.

It's pretty average if we're talking 1 playthrough.

Any RPG is too long in my mind.

fucking cutscenes

I should be watching a movie then.

[neorichieb1971]

Its a cut and paste world. Middle ware engines and so forth. Crysis 2 and Unreal engines make the figures look great. Maybe you can pollish a turd after all.

When I say the Crysis 2 demo years ago and the designer got a hard on for making a rocket have impact on the leaves of trees instead of blowing up. I thought "Yep, greatest play mechanic ever".

[TrevHead (TVR)]

While modern gaming isnt all bad but everything has changed so much this generation. My fav PC devs have moved to console making shitty console FPS games, with western RPGs becoming watered down shooter hybrids. Also due to changes in how the Japanese play their games, many Jap console games are now on handhelds.

Raising costs mean that AAA devs need to make games that appeal to everybody including casual gamers so that games are becoming more watered down and gimicky.

I do think that one part of the gaming industry is in its golden age atm, and thats Indie gaming, with 1 to 5 man dev teams make games as much out of love for their game and its genre then as making money eg Cave story and Aquaria (an amazing game to say that only 2 folk made it). The reason I say were are in indie gaming's golden era is that The big name publishers due to the ever raising costs of AAA gaming are starting to cotton on that there's money to be made in low budget gaming and are wanting a piece of the action. So they'll wash the industry with money in a bid to buy up talent and fuck everything up as devs are forced to create games that appeal to a wider audience so that the publishers can make max profits.

We are already starting to see this change with the likes of Ubisoft and EA and their indie dev partership schemes forcing indie games to use DRM like TAGES

[Weak Boson]

Firstly I think it's worth stating that there are a lot of jolly good games released these days. I missed out on owning a SNES/MD so I can't compare now to then but I've certainly enjoyed playing games from that era - but I can't tell if these games were indicative of a healthy industry producing games with a drive for excellence or the result of the individuals’ pursuit for their passion. If, for some reason, I were to suffer from a kind of video game amnesia at the conclusion of this generation I think it's entirely possible that in ten years I could look at the list of my favourite games on the 360 and think "damn, they just don't make them like this anymore". So before I forget the question is how much to do the games we remember an era for actually tell us about the state of the industry at the time? The business of games has undoubtedly changed a lot, but have the interest of gamers like me really been forgotten, or do they just have a different place in the market? Perhaps such a change in position is undesirable, but despite what the future may hold I think now is a pretty good time to be a gamer.

[BryanM]

(games getting shorter? like what?)

This is very much true - it costs an ocean of money to make more stuff. So they clip a few hours out of the game or pad it out and hope no one will notice.

The best example could be Hellgate London. There was about an hour and half worth of stuff, the rest of the game was the same grey zombies from the first zone and pee-stained mattresses everywhere.

Blizzard and Valve can make as much shit as they want to - the guys stuck in the middle don't have that luxury.

Call Of Dookie

Call of Doodies.

I like to call it Call of NFL Blitz, as that both describes the single player extremely well and is even more insulting imo, but no one "gets it".

fucking cutscenes

Oh god yes. Zelda Ocarina of Time: "This is a very important tree. Let me tell you about it one letter every two seconds at a time....."

You're a serial killer called Link, and you're supposed to sit and listen about some stupid tree? Fuck that.

[Despatche]

A fix for OoT would be to play the Japanese version.

[Observer]

While modern gaming isnt all bad but everything has changed so much this generation. My fav PC devs have moved to console making shitty console FPS games, with western RPGs becoming watered down shooter hybrids. Also due to changes in how the Japanese play their games, many Jap console games are now on handhelds.

We are already starting to see this change with the likes of Ubisoft and EA and their indie dev partership schemes forcing indie games to use DRM like TAGES

This, so this. Yeah, I know, they have to make a living and since all the PC players are fucking pirates (like me, 'cause the 100+ PC games I have purchased on retail for the last 13 years, plus the Steam releases I purchased, are all pirated, right...), screw them. Backstabbing at its finest. FPS with pads. Like wine with more water than wine. Like soup without salt. Like spaghetti without salsa, like heavy metal without guitars, like the '80s without the macho action movies and one liners and all the hair metal, like Alpha without the Omega!

Don't even remind me of TAGES DRM on Zeit2 or the brutal SecuROM+GFWL on top of Steam of Batman: Arkham Asylum. I think it was the first time in the last two years that I suffered in first person the DRM scourge. I thank god for doujin PC games and their lack of DRM and how I could buy like 40 of them and only take like 5gb of space on my HDD. I spent over 8 hours downloading that gigantic turd of information (8gb) and another hour configuring fucking GFWL and downloading update after update of pointless stuff just to enter the freaking menu screen.

Someone post that image macro of the "old gaming/modern gaming/DLC" using the Mona Lisa. An image speaks more than a thousand words

Unskippable cutscenes: the bane of the STG player. After playing shooters so much, I just cannot stomach anything that lasts more than 30 seconds.

I want my SHOOTAN GAEM experience to be, well, action packed. I'm a busy man, I don't have time for sob stories and shit or flashy Matrix cameras. Load up the guns on my badass ship/loli/surreal orb, delete that paragraph that pretends to be a storyline and blow shit to kingdom come. It's the Violent City and there is NO REFUGE, baby.

[louisg]

Its a cut and paste world. Middle ware engines and so forth. Crysis 2 and Unreal engines make the figures look great. Maybe you can pollish a turd after all.

When I say the Crysis 2 demo years ago and the designer got a hard on for making a rocket have impact on the leaves of trees instead of blowing up. I thought "Yep, greatest play mechanic ever".

Didn't Under Defeat already do this?

Actually, the videos I've seen of tree physics in Crysis 2 did look pretty impressive, though I realize it won't have any bearing on the gameplay.

Anyway, the big shift really seems to be that interesting or small-scale games tend to always be released as a cheap download these days. It kind of has a psychological effect of de-valuing the software I think, because they'll never be "real" games that you might pay $60 for to have on your shelf. But, any number of those games like PacMan CE, Trials HD, that 2 player co-op Tomb Raider, Afterburner Climax, Jett Rocket.. that's all good stuff, but I think we might be overlooking them because they don't somehow seem official enough. And, I should point out that a lot of that isn't really divorced from the game industry and still manages to be interesting.

[Blackbird]

Eh, I think gaming is just finally going the way that all other forms of media have been going in the last few decades. There are so many hands in the corporate pot now, so many people invested that want to see their investment pay off, that the creative industry is absolutely terrified of taking creative risks and seeing a title flop. This is true of Hollywood, and it's true of the game development industry, which has in recent years become increasingly like Hollywood.

So much money is spent developing big-budget "summer blockbusters", first person shooters, platformers, or rpgs that look extremely flashy but don't offer too much substance. Most will be forgotten by the time the next year's hit comes out. Such a huge budget invested in cutting edge graphics means that companies literally cannot afford to lose profit on a game. On the other hand, indie games with smaller budgets can still afford to take some risks. The underground scene resembles the games that I remember a little bit more closely, but without as much first-party polish.

The advancement of consoles and the demise of PC gaming saddens me, though. I miss the creativity and diversity of games that worked best on the PC. I definitely prefer to play my WRPGs, Real Time Strategy games, and FPSs on PC, but there are only a few developers that even bother with the PC anymore.

[CMoon]

Great post Blackbird! This is what I've been thinking. Namely, games are too huge an investment for a small team with their own vision to decide how a game will turn out. Instead, we get kitchen-sink efforts on games that don't end up being remarkable at anything. On the other hand, I think this gen has painted itself into a corner. It has become all about graphics, making games enormously expensive to produce. You'd think the download scene would provide a backdoor, but truth be told, most of the download titles I've tried are rather lacking in quality.

Where the current gen consoles shine is when it they can somehow manage to turn out a passion project, like Demon's Souls or Oblivion. True, this is a long, long ways from the arcade style games most of us crave, but they're still outstanding titles. It's probably also true that this generation has pretty much been oversaturated with FPS titles, and it's time for something else.

[MadScientist]

That guy in the middle is a guy. WTF etc...

Amen to this post...

Bring back the heroes damnit.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Eh, I think gaming is just finally going the way that all other forms of media have been going in the last few decades. There are so many hands in the corporate pot now, so many people invested that want to see their investment pay off, that the creative industry is absolutely terrified of taking creative risks and seeing a title flop. This is true of Hollywood, and it's true of the game development industry, which has in recent years become increasingly like Hollywood.

So much money is spent developing big-budget "summer blockbusters", first person shooters, platformers, or rpgs that look extremely flashy but don't offer too much substance. Most will be forgotten by the time the next year's hit comes out. Such a huge budget invested in cutting edge graphics means that companies literally cannot afford to lose profit on a game. On the other hand, indie games with smaller budgets can still afford to take some risks. The underground scene resembles the games that I remember a little bit more closely, but without as much first-party polish.

The advancement of consoles and the demise of PC gaming saddens me, though. I miss the creativity and diversity of games that worked best on the PC. I definitely prefer to play my WRPGs, Real Time Strategy games, and FPSs on PC, but there are only a few developers that even bother with the PC anymore.

Yea this is kinda what I ment with how the big publishers fuck up everything they can get their hands on. While the gaming industry has always been about money, It wasnt as bad as it is now due to most of the industry been in the hands of the corporate execs and their shareholder masters who dont give a shit about the game only statistics, pie charts and max profits. Activision has gotta be the worst in this regard as they are quite happy to pratically destroy their own IPs and genres in just how aggressivly they milk their big name IPs in such a short length of time. (COD and Guitar Hero)

While Japan has been big business for a while now they traditionally arnt as bad as their western counterparts as they allow their dev teams and lead devs more freedom and independance. Although now the Japanese industry are playing second fiddle to western devs im affraid all this will change as they emulate western ways to making games.

[Blackbird]

Yeah, the Activision vs Infinity Ward lawsuit is just appalling. Look it up if you aren't in the know. It made me so angry that I refuse to purchase Blizzard + Activision games for the foreseeable future.

I do feel some hope from indie games though. They have smaller development teams and fewer producers trying to make the game more marketable, so the end result has a lot more character, in my opinion.

I felt extremely encouraged by titles like Crimzon Clover and Cave Story, which showed that the dedicated effort of a handful of individuals can make a game that compares favorably even to mainstream games.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

@ Blackbird have you played Aquaria? Even if you dont like the gameplay you wont beable to stop marvelling at the level of craftmenship that the 2 man team plus musician has put into it.

[Blackbird]

I have not heard of this game, but I will check it out asap.

Edit: I actually have seen this game before! I just did not attach the name to the game. I'm not too keen on the graphical style, but the amount of effort put into it is obvious.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Shame you dont like the artstyle, I love it (by Derek Yu the spelunky guy) as it reminds me of vannilaware's Odin Sphere

[ChainsawGuitarSP]

I do not mind, however, somewhat effeminate or androgynous designs, if done well.

Yeah, sometimes they're even manlier than so called 'macho' men. Igniz makes anyone who plays KoF01 his bitch.

[Skykid]

Yeah, sometimes they're even manlier than so called 'macho' men. Igniz makes anyone who plays KoF01 his bitch.

Anyone who plays KOF 01 is already a bitch.

[bulletcurtain]

I have to agree with whoever said that we're currently in a golden age of gaming. At the moment, there are so many games being released that I'm genuinely interested in that I don't have time to play. For example, I haven't yet had a chance to play vanquish, sin and punishment 2, monster hunter 3, fist of the northstar, bulletstorm, star craft 2, radiant historia, etrian oddysey 3, dead rising 2, pink sweets/muchi muchi pork, etc... All of these games are worth playing, and were released in the last 12 months. If you include XBLA and PSN games the options are limitless (this is a bit of an exaggeration).

Furthermore, as someone who started out in the 8bit/16bit era, I can guarantee that the ratio of quality/crap games was no better then than it is now. That being said, my biggest gripe with modern games is that they don't tend to be as weird or crazy as older games used to be. I'd like to see more boss fights that are as bizarre as the ones found in games like Wings of Wor (Gynoug). Actually, I'd just like to see more boss fights in general.

[Skykid]

I have to agree with whoever said that we're currently in a golden age of gaming.

Excuse me while I puke.

[neorichieb1971]

We are in the golden age of mega millions of bucks. The bread definitely got more stale this generation.

[Skykid]

Nobody suggested we were in a golden age of gaming anyway, Trevhead said it was a golden era for indie developers (and I'm inclined to agree.)

[maxlords]

Sry...this turned into a monologue...

I'll boil this down for the lazy :

1. Every generation has great games...no question
2. Genres change over time, some get better, some get worse and new ones appear!
3. There's just too much stuff out there!
4. As we get older we generally have less and less free time
5. We generally always look back on stuff we played as kids with happy memories

Wow....a lot of conflicting viewpoints in this thread! I've been a pretty hardcore gamer (yes I know that term IS overused) since about 7th grade myself. I started really COLLECTING em in 1995. Started really playing games on the C64 myself and upgraded to the Amiga, SNES and Genesis (I mostly missed the NES era and was kind of too young for Atari). That being said I think there's no such thing as a "golden age" of gaming. Games evolve. Atari was great for what it was....very fun stuff. So was NES. So was SNES/Genny/TG16/etc. And then on to the Saturn/PSX/N64....still fun. DC/GC/PS2/XBox? Still fun! 360/PS3/Wii? Still damn well fun stuff! But not ALL of it. Were there better games earlier? I'd say no. I'd say there were DIFFERENT games earlier.

IMO the best recent example I can think of this is Genetos. It jumps literally from shmup generation to generation in style and gameplay...and all of them are fun. And you can attribute certain unarguable classics in EVERY generation!

That being said, some genres have faded from prominence, become stale, etc, and others have matured and become more involving and exciting. I've been feeling very little love for modern JRPGs for example but I still dig a lot of the classics. Same goes for strategy games, both turn-based and real-time, and even FPSs for that matter. I've found fewer and fewer games in those genres that I enjoy.

On the other hand I'm starting to get more and more into the modern 3rd person action games. They're more fun than they used to be overall. The same goes for indie games...they're getting WAYYYY better than they used to be....just look at some of the stuff available on Steam or the doujin titles out there! Some mind-blowingly great games are popping up.

Gaming...like everything else...evolves. The same way novel structure has changed from Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley to Stephen King and Tom Robbins. The same way music has changed from Mozart to Nirvana (too hard to pick a good modern Mozart equivalent lol). Or comics have changed from Pogo to The Walking Dead. And some people...let's be honest...don't like change. I'm guilty of this sometimes...we all are. I look back on stuff with rose-colored glasses too. It's human nature. But there's just as much good stuff as there's always been.

I think the real problem is that there's so MUCH stuff compared to what there used to be that it's harder and harder to actually FIND the good stuff though. There are something like 100X the number of books available in most any given genre now compared to when I was a kid, and that doesn't even include the older stuff that's still in print! Or comics....there's at least 20X the number of monthly titles out there now. Or music....lord knows I can't even keep track of all the different KINDS of heavy metal for example...much less figure out ALL of the ones I'd like...and that's just one tiny genre of music. There's more and more of everything because EVERYONE wants their slice of the pie these days and rampant consumerism and more accessible medias have made it so every niche can be filled to the brim.

And then we get to games. It used to be a handful of games came out every month. Libraries of some games numbered in the hundreds or less. The NES...one of the bigges systems ever...had a library of what....1500 titles total? Less? And now systems have 5000 titles or more? I don't even know how many PS2 games are out there for example....but I have about 150 and honestly my collection barely scratches the surface of the system.....that would be 10% of the NES library and a pretty damn good cross section. The DS library is starting to rival the PS2 as well.... Literally there are SO many games that it's hard to find the good ones, hard to decide what to buy, and IMPOSSIBLE to play them all, no matter HOW much time you have! Even PC games have been coming back with a vengeance due to things like Steam....small companies and big ones are making good games again....a LOT of them! I played about 75% of the SNES library at least part way through, and probably the same for the Genesis. But with each succesive generation...more and more games come out...and I play less and less. There's just not enough time. And at the height of my gaming....I had probably 5X the free time I have as an adult and played games heavily...and I still didn't even get to all the good ones THEN!

And yes, we have reached a point where there are a lot more mega-corps out for our bucks....not just in gaming but in every aspect of our lives. And yeah, we get a lot more CRAP than ever before....but I think there's just as much of a percentage of good stuff out there as there used to be.

So yeah....the OP is definitely WRONG in many aspects. Maybe it's that way for him.....but it's definitely not that way for everyone or even most people.

WHEW! *pants for breath and stretches fingers*

[Evilmaxwar]

I think there's no such thing as a "golden age" of gaming.

But there is a golden age of video game music!

No seriously I cant argue against any of those 5 points but i can add a sixth one.
6. The face and feel of mainstream gaming has changed.

I believe there is the element of video games now being a multi billion dollars industry. I recall reading a few years past that the VG industry had officially gotten bigger than the movie industry. That would have been a crazy idea in the early days. Back then budgets were smaller, teams were smaller, visions were more focused and for all these reasons many aspects of game making was being tackled by a less specialized individual than nowadays. Your do-it-all service geek had a bigger say in the overall face of mainstream gaming. This often resulted in a somewhat more experimental, somewhat rougher, weird, out of the norm product than what you would expect from a multi-million business. This is something you can still find nowadays in smaller companies and indies studio but is no longer a representative aspect of mainstream games.

Also, back then there was more room for experimentation, new game genres were being prototyped and experimented upon alot. When talking about the time they started working on DooM John Carmack Once said something like: " back then it was just like, Hey lets make a game! nowadays its impossible to consider the business of making a game this lightly".

I agree we old school types tend to glorify the old days but this is arguably justified by the way game makers back then were pioneers, explorers, there were the geek equivalent of a daredevil. They were free entities by opposition to the armies of disciplined mercenaries that make video games now. This certainly adds some romance to my perception of older video games. All of this reefers to the mainstream aspect of video game of course, indies makers are different, and you still have exceptions.

Anyone remembers Croteam? These croatians actually scared the shit out of the big guys in America when they came out of nowhere with Serious sam. They pop out of their garage with a better 3d engine than anyone else had at the time and they sell their new game for a ridiculously low price. Serious Sam was a great game but was a bit weird and did not take itself very seriously, it had stellar aspects to it but at the same time had some obvious letdowns. That somehow made it more charming to me, just like some older mainstream games used to be. Sadly Croteam could not afford to make much publicity for themselves and the big guys made all they could for them to remain in the underground. Serious sam is just now Being re-released on XBLA and is fairly popular as far as an xbla title goes. People are like: Hey this game is pretty cool and the graphics are all right for a Xbox360 game, not realizing its actually a 10 years old garage project from a bunch of geniuses in Croatia.

On a finishing note : I may be what you would call a proud retro-gamer but i have no problem to enjoy modern games when it suits me.

[BryanM]

Serious Sam 3 is like Duke Nuke'em Forever, except for reals.

[Evilmaxwar]

Serious Sam 3 is like Duke Nuke'em Forever, except for reals.

You wont see me buying a game at release date often, but i will be there for SS3.