I can't relate to modern gaming anymore

[Redfox]

I'm a 40 something and I had been a gamer since I was very young. I grew up going to arcades as a kid in the 80's and 90's, I had the NES, the SNES etc and I was a gamer up to the 360 / PS3 era (Saidaioujou was one of the last 360 titles I got). Then around 2013 I got a good job and was able to jump ship to pinball (yes that's a whole other thing). Anyway I got a switch in 2019 on a whim and have enjoyed the retro games and the indie titles that are like retro games but then a few weeks ago I managed to get a PS5 and wanted to see what I was missing from the more mainstream releases over the last 9 years. I picked up Death Stranding Directors Cut from my library. After like 3 hours I was SO BORED. Same thing happened with Tsushima and Tiny Tina Wonderland. I just can't get into these games! They're pretty, very impressive looking but if I wanted that I'd just watch Norman Reedus in a movie. I don't get the appeal of contemporary big name games. I'm having more fun and putting dozens more hours into Toaplan arcade garage and Deathtiny on the PS5 then I ever tried on these big name titles................Sigh.................I feel like i'm out of touch somehow.

Anyone else feel the same?????

[WelshMegalodon]

The pretty but boring big-name games have been around since the original PlayStation at the latest, so I wouldn't say it's a matter of new games versus old. There's nothing wrong with preferring certain genres to others.

[To Far Away Times]

Kind of in the same boat. Some times I like to play cinematic "press A for awesome" type of games, but most of my time playing is classic games.

[drauch]

Yeah, I can't see Kojima's FedEx simulator winning anyone over who thinks gaming is boring. Since you have a PS5, why not try Demons' Souls remake, or any of the other Souls games if you haven't already. Too much of AAA's problem is an insistence on terrible narratives with worthless exposition and treating the player like you're an idiot. You don't get to find out much on your own.

With the amount of smaller studios and indie projects of quality now you have so many options. I really felt the same last decade; all the big stuff coming out was so vapid. I don't think you're out of touch, just possibly looking in the wrong direction.

[o.pwuaioc]

The past 20 years have had its ups and downs, but honestly I've been checked out of new games since the 360/PS3 era. The Wii and a handful of early indie PC games were the only exceptions. Everything became 3D and brown, FPS became the number 1 genre, voice acting continued to suck, games became even buggier, shmups became almost exclusively bullet hells or boring indie. Yeah, there were exceptions, but the market as a whole really turned me off, and nothing since has brought me back in.

I don't know about you and what you want to do, but my solution was to abandon it altogether (withvery few exceptions, like the Civ series) and return to the glorious days of 8 and 16 bit gaming. Unlike the era from 95-2005, pixel art still looks good years later, and you don't really have to worry about camera problems, quick time events, pretentious storytelling, load times, mandatory updates, or, the worst crime of all, boring "realism." Older games are just better to me: quicker, cleaner, more about fun than "immersive storytelling" from writing hacks.

Things get better once you realize that there are probably hundreds of older games you've never played, let alone beat. No point in dealing with boring, algorithm-driven gamefied experiences when you can instead try to master Ninja Gaiden II.

[BryanM]

I always thought it'd be cool to apply realism and sim aspects to sports games. I don't mean with physics or Football Manager stuff, I mean realism.

So in Baseball, you spend 95% of your time sitting on the bench or standing in the field hoping the ball might drift in your direction. In Football, you get to be a linebacker that just shoves the guy in front of you for the entire five hours the game takes to play.

... I really wonder why the hell team sports are so popular.

[Gamer707b]

I've felt the same exact way since the PS3 era. Was feeling more and more disconnected to modern gaming and that's when I got a Wii and slowly drifted more from Playstation and the "triple A" stuff and started to gravitate more toward Nintendo consoles. Then I got a Wii U in the later half of it's life and that cemented things even more. Fast forward to now and I'm playing and enjoying my Switch WAY more than my PS4. Unless it's Last Of US or Resident Evil, I almost entirely avoid AAA games on PS4. Most of the time I dust it off, is when M2 puts out a game. Switch has made games fun for me again. The first party stuff, the awesome indies and all the good shmups on this system. I am so not pumped for the PS5 that if I didn't get one for another 3 years, I couldn't care less. Sounds salty, but it is what it is. So I know exactly how you feel.

[Gamer707b]

The past 20 years have had its ups and downs, but honestly I've been checked out of new games since the 360/PS3 era. The Wii and a handful of early indie PC games were the only exceptions. Everything became 3D and brown, FPS became the number 1 genre, voice acting continued to suck, games became even buggier, shmups became almost exclusively bullet hells or boring indie. Yeah, there were exceptions, but the market as a whole really turned me off, and nothing since has brought me back in.

I don't know about you and what you want to do, but my solution was to abandon it altogether (withvery few exceptions, like the Civ series) and return to the glorious days of 8 and 16 bit gaming. Unlike the era from 95-2005, pixel art still looks good years later, and you don't really have to worry about camera problems, quick time events, pretentious storytelling, load times, mandatory updates, or, the worst crime of all, boring "realism." Older games are just better to me: quicker, cleaner, more about fun than "immersive storytelling" from writing hacks.

Things get better once you realize that there are probably hundreds of older games you've never played, let alone beat. No point in dealing with boring, algorithm-driven gamefied experiences when you can instead try to master Ninja Gaiden II.

It's as if you are reading my mind. I too checked out during the PS3 era. I too said to myself "everything is brown, grey and dull looking". Games were taking a more "realistic" approach and less about fun. Even more so now. Again, I too say that there are hundreds of old games that I can enjoy. Don't need to force myself to play AAA games with a forced story with bland gameplay. As far as the big companies go, though for all that you can say about Nintendo, one thing they do is there games don't take themselves too serious and they know how to do fun. Indies also know how to hold it down. Can't wait for the new Dot Emu TMNT game and a few others. If not for Nintendo and Indies, I would have giving up modern gaming years ago. Feels refreshing knowing I'm not the only one...

[Sengoku Strider]

This is an absolutely fantastic generation for gaming.

Any genre you care to think of has countless new entries. Something like Octopath Traveler isn't any less 'new' than the annual instalment of BeardGuns Revelations: Evolution. It's still very much an evolved design making use of plenty of innovations & QoL techniques from the past few decades. Things like Hades, King of Fighters XV, Fire Emblem 3 Houses, Metroid Dread, Psychonauts 2, etc. etc. have been keeping the fires burning for all sorts of old school genres while having plenty of modern touches & big budgets.

Then there's the avalanche of availability of older games, including tons of ancient titles once thought lost to time. Who thought we'd be getting multiplatform standalone releases of Thunder Dragon 2 & Gynoug in the past year? Reverently made Toaplan collections? A Valis compilation? High quality Contra & Castlevania collections?

Or the resurrections: things like Streets of Rage 4, the new ActRaiser, the excellent Panzer Dragoon & House of the Dead remakes? A physical retail release of a shiny redone Pocky & Rocky?

Or peripherals - wireless Saturn & Genesis 6-button pads for Switch? Top quality arcade sticks more available than ever? Yes plz.

I've been reading variations of this exact thread on the internet since like the PS2 era. And I understand getting grumpy with the CONSUME 80 HOUR SKINNER BOX NOW tone of games journalism/commentary/whatever. Endless hype cycles obsessing over vapid games based on the size of their ad buys (Cyberpunk was mediocre? Good to know, now talk about something else instead of pretending this is an Issue). But like WelshMegalodon said, the Spectacle For Dummies™ school of game design has been around for decades now, and frankly even those games are much more polished than they've ever been. But considering all the stuff I listed above, the only way one could think there's a problem with modern gaming in contrast to the past is if they're actively trying not to look.

Hell, go back & look at how utterly stupid 'the good old days' were. Westerners don't have the patience for rpgs! Nobody would ever buy a visual novel! Shin Megami Tensei? Nuh-uh, too offensive to Western sensibilities. Or this game with the anime people? It looks way too Jap, this is America! At least have Boris Vallejo paint the cover. Games with girls as lead characters you say? Yukky! NO GIRLS IN THE TREEHOUSE!

The early dominance of the Xbox brand and its 'everything must be online open world sportsguns DORITOSMOUNTAINDEWBRO' identity made much of the PS360 era pure soul poison, but once they went Kinect & sank that ship? It's been gravy ever since. Even as a guy who spends most of his money on old games (landed Spriggan, Super Fantasy Zone & Macross: Eternal Love Song on Yahoo auctions all this week, baby!) I recognize things were never this good overall before.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I always thought it'd be cool to apply realism and sim aspects to sports games. I don't mean with physics or Football Manager stuff, I mean realism.

So in Baseball, you spend 95% of your time sitting on the bench or standing in the field hoping the ball might drift in your direction. In Football, you get to be a linebacker that just shoves the guy in front of you for the entire five hours the game takes to play.

... I really wonder why the hell team sports are so popular.

They've had this for years in the FIFA games, but it's rarely mentioned due to all the money grabbing microtransations the thing is notorious for these days. You can career mode a single player. Which includes goalkeeper, if you want to stand around doing nothing for 90% of the time with a decent team in front of you

[Durandal]

High-profile games that are coasting entirely off production value and fancy graphics have been a thing since antiquity. The only difference between then and now is that the bigger games have such bloated advertising budgets now that they can monopolize all the hype and attention for themselves at the cost of other games. Every now and then a game will break through the noise by sheer force of word-of-mouth and show you that gaming can be different, such as with Elden Ring or Hollow Knight or ULTRAKILL, but you shouldn't rely on miracles like that.

The main takeaway here is that people still consume information from the Internet as if it's still the 00s, when in reality the paradigm has changed. It used to be that you got your gaming information from *shudder* gaming magazines or specialized bulletin boards like this one, because that's all you had at the time. While I'm not very fond of 'zines qualitatively, they at least made an effort to try and cover as many games as they could in a single issue which meant that you were always exposed to a whole variety of them, even if some games had more space dedicated to them than others.

Nowadays, 'zines have become rather old-fashioned because people can simply get the most recent news immediately rather than every month, as most people now get their gaming info from social media or gaming sites or influencers. There's only one problem: these new mediums are less efficient when it comes to presenting as many games as possible per second. YouTubers have an incentive to make a separate video for every little game and draw out its length for ad revenue, but the viewer only has so much time and attention they are willing to spend on reading news. The format of a news website and most social media makes it so that people only click headlines that already appeal to them in some way, whereas the format of a monthly magazine would make you ravenously consume every page and word regardless of its subjects, as you had to make an entire month do with one issue. The relatively limited throughput of social media/influencers/websites is then of course monopolized by big-name games because they have the biggest marketing budget and hype behind them, at the expense of coverage for smaller more interesting games. Then of course most people jump on those for the sake of FOMO and being able to follow The Discourse. I used to watch the newer Star Wars movies not because I had any innate interest in them, but purely so I could follow the discourse surrounding it. At some point I realized that the discourse itself was a cyclical waste of time as well, so I just quit the whole thing cold turkey.

This is also why it appears like modern gaming is all doodoo, because our information channels of choice have changed in a way that allows larger companies to more easily monopolize what people see and talk about, which combined with FOMO make the big-name games seem more relevant than they actually are. With the advent of the internet, monthly 'zines are unlikely to have any news value left, and most likely can't be brought back. The only way to then really learn about a more diverse amount of games is to curate and diversify your own news sources. Cut out the garbage, find sources that are of actual interest to you, keep tabs on your favorite developers yourself to see if they're doing something new. If you're gonna let the homepage for reddit or YouTube dictate your gaming news, you're going to be miserable.

[Gamer707b]

This is an absolutely fantastic generation for gaming.

Any genre you care to think of has countless new entries. Something like Octopath Traveler isn't any less 'new' than the annual instalment of BeardGuns Revelations: Evolution. It's still very much an evolved design making use of plenty of innovations & QoL techniques from the past few decades. Things like Hades, King of Fighters XV, Fire Emblem 3 Houses, Metroid Dread, Psychonauts 2, etc. etc. have been keeping the fires burning for all sorts of old school genres while having plenty of modern touches & big budgets.

Then there's the avalanche of availability of older games, including tons of ancient titles once thought lost to time. Who thought we'd be getting multiplatform standalone releases of Thunder Dragon 2 & Gynoug in the past year? Reverently made Toaplan collections? A Valis compilation? High quality Contra & Castlevania collections?

Or the resurrections: things like Streets of Rage 4, the new ActRaiser, the excellent Panzer Dragoon & House of the Dead remakes? A physical retail release of a shiny redone Pocky & Rocky?

Or peripherals - wireless Saturn & Genesis 6-button pads for Switch? Top quality arcade sticks more available than ever? Yes plz.

I've been reading variations of this exact thread on the internet since like the PS2 era. And I understand getting grumpy with the CONSUME 80 HOUR SKINNER BOX NOW tone of games journalism/commentary/whatever. Endless hype cycles obsessing over vapid games based on the size of their ad buys (Cyberpunk was mediocre? Good to know, now talk about something else instead of pretending this is an Issue). But like WelshMegalodon said, the Spectacle For Dummies™ school of game design has been around for decades now, and frankly even those games are much more polished than they've ever been. But considering all the stuff I listed above, the only way one could think there's a problem with modern gaming in contrast to the past is if they're actively trying not to look.

Hell, go back & look at how utterly stupid 'the good old days' were. Westerners don't have the patience for rpgs! Nobody would ever buy a visual novel! Shin Megami Tensei? Nuh-uh, too offensive to Western sensibilities. Or this game with the anime people? It looks way too Jap, this is America! At least have Boris Vallejo paint the cover. Games with girls as lead characters you say? Yukky! NO GIRLS IN THE TREEHOUSE!

The early dominance of the Xbox brand and its 'everything must be online open world sportsguns DORITOSMOUNTAINDEWBRO' identity made much of the PS360 era pure soul poison, but once they went Kinect & sank that ship? It's been gravy ever since. Even as a guy who spends most of his money on old games (landed Spriggan, Super Fantasy Zone & Macross: Eternal Love Song on Yahoo auctions all this week, baby!) I recognize things were never this good overall before.

Absolutely! There's more variety than ever for ANY type of gamer. I was referring being out of touch with more of the AAA/mainstream stuff. The stuff that most of the big companies do seem as if they're not made for me. However, some of the most innovative stuff, be it peripherals, games, even clone consoles are coming out of indies and occasionally Nintendo. There's so many games. Too many games, that I can't possibly keep up. I used to buy a game that I was "a little" interested in to try out. Now I only buy games that I almost for certainty know I'll like. And even then, I can't keep up. games Best time to be a gamer and I've gameing for over 40 years.

[Rastan78]

One thing I think has hurt the more mainstream modern gaming area is the diminishment of what you could call AA games. Those that had a budget, but not a massive GTA sized budget. Now it seems to be more AAA or indie with not as much in between. I can recall having a good time dicking around with games like Crackdown, Alpha Protocol, or Red Faction: Guerilla during the 360/PS3 era. You went in knowing that you weren't playing the game of the year and had fun anyway. Even well known games like Far Cry 2 or Fallout New Vegas almost straddled that line between AA and AAA. It was ok for big games to have rough edges.

I'm sure many factors have reduced the number of those AA type games coming out. Among them has to be Metacritic. When everything is boiled down to a number and your studio can practically get shut down over night by a parent company because you only got a 78 Metacritic, something is very wrong.

[Immryr]

I'm a 40 something and I had been a gamer since I was very young. I grew up going to arcades as a kid in the 80's and 90's, I had the NES, the SNES etc and I was a gamer up to the 360 / PS3 era (Saidaioujou was one of the last 360 titles I got). Then around 2013 I got a good job and was able to jump ship to pinball (yes that's a whole other thing). Anyway I got a switch in 2019 on a whim and have enjoyed the retro games and the indie titles that are like retro games but then a few weeks ago I managed to get a PS5 and wanted to see what I was missing from the more mainstream releases over the last 9 years. I picked up Death Stranding Directors Cut from my library. After like 3 hours I was SO BORED. Same thing happened with Tsushima and Tiny Tina Wonderland. I just can't get into these games! They're pretty, very impressive looking but if I wanted that I'd just watch Norman Reedus in a movie. I don't get the appeal of contemporary big name games. I'm having more fun and putting dozens more hours into Toaplan arcade garage and Deathtiny on the PS5 then I ever tried on these big name titles................Sigh.................I feel like i'm out of touch somehow.

Anyone else feel the same?????

get returnal and sekiro.

[BulletMagnet]

the only way one could think there's a problem with modern gaming in contrast to the past is if they're actively trying not to look.

I mostly agree with this.

As you quite correctly note, at this point in the history of the medium there's an utter treasure trove of pretty much any genre you could possibly want to try just waiting out there, and much (though not all) of it is easier to access nowadays than it's ever been, plus the myriad new entries showing up at a constant clip; if the stuff that grabs the headlines doesn't interest you, it's not just possible but incredibly easy to completely ignore every last one of them and still have more games you want to play than you'll ever get around to.

BUT, the one caveat I'd add to my take on the situation is that for all the positives that have resulted from gaming's growing more diverse, widespread and accessible is that whatever meager "gatekeeping" ever existed back in the day is now all but completely gone, and while in some ways that's another positive it's also brought forth considerable downsides; now that so many more people can not only play but make games than ever before, if you're in the mood for something outside the breakthrough successes you're all but forced to wade through enough fly-by-night zero-effort garbage to make the Wii and NDS libraries look like the Louvre.

While the very best off-the-beaten-path stuff can often manage to garner enough attention to rise above the flood of sewage, lots of other good quality material is never able to find much of an audience simply because combing through storefronts attempting to suss out the paltry handful of worthwhile no-name releases from the endless trash pit is such a never-ending chore; seeing so many of the people making the awful stuff succeeding thanks to teenagers "ironically" gifting them to each other just makes your soul die faster.

So yes, absolutely, if you think there's nothing left out there for you to play you're probably not looking hard enough; however, in at least some ways "looking hard enough" is a good deal more time-consuming and frustrating than it used to be.

[o.pwuaioc]

So yes, absolutely, if you think there's nothing left out there for you to play you're probably not looking hard enough; however, in at least some ways "looking hard enough" is a good deal more time-consuming and frustrating than it used to be.

Agreed 100%. No one is saying that zero good games exist today. That's a strawman. But the effort it takes to find them and the impossibility of owning them physically (i.e. losing access to them when they're no longer updated) means they're often not worth pursuing. And frankly, I'm tired of being in front of my computer all the time, so all these Steam-only indie games are even less attractive when all I want to do is relax on the couch with a beer.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Honestly, with the amount of lovingly crafted indie games (tons of which have authentic pixel graphics - check Xeno Crisis and Battle Axe for quick run'n gun arcade gameplay or Owlboy for more Metroidvania fun) there's no need to waste time on AAA titles.
Get Hyperlight Drifter for your Zelda fix (would be one of the best Zeldas if it was reskinned) and Blasphemy (great Metroidvania, ridiculous amount of amazing pixel graphics).
Then there's Limbo and especially Inside (Jesus Christ, what a game) for great jump'n run puzzlers with amazingly dark and moody atmosphere.
I honestly believe that many of today's indie titles are as good as the best 8 and 16 bit titles of the 80s and 90s. Plus you can play almost everything from the 70s to the 00s for free via emulation. I'd go so far as to say we're in a golden age of video gaming, and the only reason we're not as blown away by all the great shit that's been released in the last ten to fifteen years is we don't look at these "new" games through our nostalgia goggles. Plus we're old and cynical, of course...

[BryanM]

Plugging a computer into a tv has gotten a hecka lot easier with HDMI.

... the thought of playing DoDonpachi using s-video out in tate mode makes me feel sickly nostalgic. Something only people coming of age during the ~90's will ever experience in all of history.

[o.pwuaioc]

Plugging a computer into a tv has gotten a hecka lot easier with HDMI.

... the thought of playing DoDonpachi using s-video out in tate mode makes me feel sickly nostalgic. Something only people coming of age during the ~90's will ever experience in all of history.

It's the only way to play. Not sure what I'll do once my last CRT kicks the bucket.

[Sengoku Strider]

Plugging a computer into a tv has gotten a hecka lot easier with HDMI.

... the thought of playing DoDonpachi using s-video out in tate mode makes me feel sickly nostalgic. Something only people coming of age during the ~90's will ever experience in all of history.

Well yeah, we can all use SCART now.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Honestly, with the amount of lovingly crafted indie games (tons of which have authentic pixel graphics - check Xeno Crisis and Battle Axe for quick run'n gun arcade gameplay or Owlboy for more Metroidvania fun) there's no need to waste time on AAA titles.
Get Hyperlight Drifter for your Zelda fix (would be one of the best Zeldas if it was reskinned) and Blasphemy (great Metroidvania, ridiculous amount of amazing pixel graphics).

To Bulletmagnet's point, this is the first time I've even heard of some of these games. Maybe briefly in passing before but for me it's hard to pick these out of the indie crowd. They all look the same. I also frequently loathe the visual style. Mainly another discussion but it does turn me off from playing some of them. Ftr thought the first two here looked solid, where the visuals would not prevent me from playing. Blasphemous looks decent too. Hyper Light Drifter otoh I would not touch.

So yeah, I'm certainly not buying random indies to find out which ones are decent. Kudos to the brave souls that wade through the garbage to find the gems.

ETA: Gonna try Blasphemous. It is exactly the kind of game I love. Hope it's great.

[Sengoku Strider]

Honestly, with the amount of lovingly crafted indie games (tons of which have authentic pixel graphics - check Xeno Crisis and Battle Axe for quick run'n gun arcade gameplay or Owlboy for more Metroidvania fun) there's no need to waste time on AAA titles.
Get Hyperlight Drifter for your Zelda fix (would be one of the best Zeldas if it was reskinned) and Blasphemy (great Metroidvania, ridiculous amount of amazing pixel graphics).

To Bulletmagnet's point, this is the first time I've even heard of some of these games. Maybe briefly in passing before but for me it's hard to pick these out of the indie crowd. They all look the same. I also frequently loathe the visual style. Mainly another discussion but it does turn me off from playing some of them. Ftr thought the first two here looked solid, where the visuals would not prevent me from playing. Blasphemous looks decent too. Hyper Light Drifter otoh I would not touch.

So yeah, I'm certainly not buying random indies to find out which ones are decent. Kudos to the brave souls that wade through the garbage to find the gems.

ETA: Gonna try Blasphemous. It is exactly the kind of game I love. Hope it's great.

If you enjoy Blasphemous, check out Salt & Sanctuary, it's another take on a 2D souls-like.

Indie games fortunately aren't the obscure basement of gaming they once were. If an indie game has chops, mainstream outlets & YouTubers - who are always desperate for new eyecatching content to stream - will give it coverage.

Things like Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, Hades or Disco Elysium got more attention than a lot of ...dependie? ...larger publishers' titles did (tell me how much you read about Riders Republic). And games like Among Us & Human Fall Flat became outright phenomena.

The kids of the past decade grew up with things like Undertale & Five Nights at Freddy's, the indie/mainstream distinction really doesn't mean anything to them. If anything they're more likely to play indies, given how dirt cheap they are when they go on sale.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Tried S&S before, didn't grab me but appreciate the shout out.

Slay the Spire is basically the GOAT deck builder imo. Hades is great too, basically everyone played it which is how I came across it.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Hyper Light Drifter otoh I would not touch.

I certainly will not tell you what you have to like and what not to, but in all seriousness, if you pass on HLD, you will miss out on one of the best, most fun, most atmospheric games of the last decade. Also, it's got tons of hand-pixelled, butter-smooth animations...

[Steamflogger Boss]

It's the visuals, they make me want to cut my eyes. Just a personal preference art thing. Gameplay looked fine.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Plugging a computer into a tv has gotten a hecka lot easier with HDMI.

... the thought of playing DoDonpachi using s-video out in tate mode makes me feel sickly nostalgic. Something only people coming of age during the ~90's will ever experience in all of history.

It's the only way to play. Not sure what I'll do once my last CRT kicks the bucket.

Get another one from Craigslist for almost nothing? I mean it probably won't be Sony Trinitron, but still...

[pegboy]

I got over this a long time ago. My solution is to just not worry about new "games" at all. There are so many incredible games made from the 80s to maybe up to 2010 when everything now that you can spend the rest of your life playing those and not worry about it.

Most of the modern stuff just boils down to lame interactive movies without any real skills requirements. These are not real games, but "content" that must be consumed and then quickly forgotten about so you can move on to the next thing that they want you to consume.

I mean if you like watching bad movies or are a complete undiscerning person maybe this stuff is appealing but no thanks.

That said, if a gradius vi or new CAVE game came out I'd probably give it a look, but lol I'm not holding my breath for that.

[KPackratt2k]

It's the only way to play. Not sure what I'll do once my last CRT kicks the bucket.

Get another one from Craigslist for almost nothing? I mean it probably won't be Sony Trinitron, but still...

Unfortunately, CRTs are getting harder to come by without giving into scalpers who like to charge PVM prices for run-of-the-mill consumer sets. I can't speak for other areas, but where I live I have to be patient and (sometimes) be willing to drive far to get a CRT for free or less than $20. It took a while for me to get my two Trinitrons without having to spend any money, but it was well worth it. I can't imagine how hard it will be to even find them 10 years from now.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Most of the modern stuff just boils down to lame interactive movies without any real skills requirements.

Sorry mate, but that's just silly uninformed nonsense...

Unfortunately, CRTs are getting harder to come by without giving into scalpers who like to charge PVM prices for run-of-the-mill consumer sets. I can't speak for other areas, but where I live I have to be patient and (sometimes) be willing to drive far to get a CRT for free or less than $20. It took a while for me to get my two Trinitrons without having to spend any money, but it was well worth it. I can't imagine how hard it will be to even find them 10 years from now.

Fair enough! Let's keep our fingers crossed!
...
Just did a quick check on the local classifieds. Was very happy to find that where I live (deep south of Germany), there's an abundance of almost free CRTs... phew!

[Sengoku Strider]

Most of the modern stuff just boils down to lame interactive movies without any real skills requirements. These are not real games, but "content" that must be consumed and then quickly forgotten about so you can move on to the next thing that they want you to consume.

This is another comment I've been reading in various forms since the PS2 era. But fortunately, it's really not the case.

These were the top 10 games of 2021 by Metascore:

Forza Horizon 5
Psychonauts 2
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
It Takes Two
Streets of Rage 4: Mr X Nightmare
Deathloop
Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart
Metroid Dread
Monster Hunter Rise

We've got a 2D Metroid and a Streets of Rage expansion getting love, while none of the other games fit the description unless you want to throw the 'no skill cinematic fluff' accusation at Mass Effect, which in its defence is billed as an rpg.

And these were the top 10 best selling games of 2021:

Call of Duty: Vanguard
Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War
Madden NFL 22
Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl
Battlefield 2042
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mario Kart 8
Resident Evil: Village
MLB: The Show 21
Super Mario 3D World

While the default difficulties of Call of Duty campaigns are indeed set to 'drunk frat guy,' one can hardly say those games aren't skill-focused. Nothing else really fits the bill here either.