Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Isn't it?



I bought Watchdogs day 1 back in the day. Fool me once.

They replaced the gamer devs with activists

And now you see the results

Nope.

It is the dogs who are watching you.

Downloaded FF7 Rebirth (freaking 160gb and I hope it's justified with the usual FF eye candy) like a month ago. Still haven't bothered to turn it on. It just feels daunting.

Then booted Xanadu Next from my backlog.. and it's been a BLAST!
Who knew an N-gage(!) game from 2005 would feel this refreshing.

I played Xanadu Next on Steam.

It is indeed a charming game. I had loads of fun with this little gem.

We're in such a drastically different online/gaming landscape than 20+ years ago that I don't think you can overstate the impact it has on how we judge games now vs then.

Just about every game I bought when I was younger was me just looking at the back of the box, or asking a friend or someone at the game store. Now people have consumed 50hrs of content, opinions, livestreams, reviews, breakdowns, alpha/beta/early access testing, dev blogs, and seem to know a companies financials, before they even boot a game up. That combined with the 900000 other ways we can all occupy ourselves in front of a screen, we're not even living in the same world as back then lol.

If a game sucked when you were 13 you just left it in the drawer and got something at blockbuster that weekend and went about your business. Now people pay their bills perpetuating the content rat race that imo is built on negativity for engagement. So yeah some new games suck but is it really that the games are that bad? Idk

At this point??? Welcome to Dec 2019.

He? Many stupid people died without help from Fauci. Not enough I admit.

Its all been downhill since Monopoly.

@Vrye I still miss your chipmunk.

Marvel Tokon is incredible. What a time to be alive for fighting games.

When's mahvel?

Every era of gaming had their busts. I was watching a series on the Virtual Boy the other day. You mentioning Blockbuster made me think of it, I remember seeing one you could rent and then it feels like it was never there again. There was also the bargain bin junk pile at Walmart full of trash titles (fun video on some of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0agxQv2gSls).

Personally though, it feels like games in the 90s and early 2000s there was always something new. I remember the first time I cut a mob in half in Shadow Warrior, when I heard someone on the radio in Half Life, picked up a monsters gun in Halo, summoned a ton of skeletons in D2, met the butcher in D1, saw boobs in Duke Nukem 3d, the list goes on. Even now, I play titles I missed then like Ultima Underworld and feel like the game has so much more character. I hadn't played Thief in years and the remaster being announced got me playing it again, the sound design, tools available, and level design just feels like it's put together with so much passion and care.

It's kindof an unfair comparison, because games in the 90s and 2000s were a new thing and today it's harder to make wide scale innovations compared to then. OTOH, it feels like a lot of games that I play today just kinda fall flat. I finish them, move on, don't think about them again. I just play to finish it rather than actually enjoy the little victories along the way. It feels more like a compulsion. Some exceptions, of course, like I mentioned before. Sometimes all the pieces are there, like I should like it, but something just feels dead about it. We mentioned it earlier, Dark Messiah and the ability to kick mobs off, hearing them scream on the way down, that's such a small part of the game as a whole but it's a little detail that makes it feel alive. Stuff like that just feels like it's missing from most modern games.

That and writing feels to me way worse across the board. The stories just aren't as engaging, but that isn't just video games, it applies to a lot of TV and movies also.

Online games are their own shitshow too. I used to play CS with friends and straight up quit because of the toxicity. I like ARPGs a lot also, but it gets old with how micromanaged they are today, feels like you can get a build going then it gets nerfed and you have to start over. In prior eras, patch cycles were slower, nerfs happened but they felt more limited, now dev sees something make big boom, can't have that, now little boom.

It's probably less that they are "that bad", there were a lot of trash titles in the 90s and early 2000s, it's just that they aren't good enough to justify the time investment for me.