heywood on 14/4/2015 at 21:02

---

It depends on genre.

The arcade action games I used to play as a kid have not aged well. Some years ago, my wife gave me some compilations of old arcade games for XBox1, mostly early-mid 80s classics. We tried playing them a few times but couldn't last more than a half-hour before getting bored. I suspect the same would be true for most NES games.

On the other hand, we still have a C64 which we pull out of the closet once a year or so because some of our C64 games remain fun. I can still get addicted to Project: Space Station and waste hours and hours away, and Archon is still my favorite two-person game of all time. My wife enjoys the Epyx "games" series as much or more than the modern equivalents we have on Wii.

I also think the earlier EA Sports games for Sega and Playstation 1 are better than the more modern equivalents because they have simpler and more direct controls. The modern sports games trade off control to show more realistic and spectacular animations.

The technical sims keep getting better, e.g. racing and flight. But among the less serious, more accessible sims, I haven't really seen any I'd be interested in playing over early 90s classics like SimCity, SimEarth, and Civilization.

The Bioware and Bethesda role-playing games keep getting better.

First person shooters improved a lot in the 90s and early 2000s, but over the last 10 years there hasn't been much improvement aside from graphics. To me, the HL2 trilogy and STALKER: SoC represent the pinnacle of single player FPS games. Multiplayer is pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago. And the most gaming fun I ever had was playing Quake 1 CTF and Painkeep on a LAN with friends.

Sadly, I think hybrid FPS/RPG games have mostly gotten worse, driven by the need to make them more accessible and sell to a larger audience. I blame that on the large budgets required to achieve modern production values. I think the reason why no studio has sprung up to fill the innovation void left by LGS in this niche is that publishers with deep enough pockets to finance it are too risk averse. Like the big movie studios, the big game publishers prefer to milk existing franchises.

I haven't seen much improvement in adventure games either, although I haven't really been looking.

demagogue on 15/4/2015 at 03:27

---

To use the term "better", you need some standard to give it meaning, especially if you want to claim "objectively better", then you'll need an objective standard ... better at making people spend money on it per quarter, better at inducing people to state they had some manner of "fun" with it after playing it some amount of time or clicking a higher number on a rating poll, better at prompting critics to call it the Citizen Kane of Gaming, etc... And then from which baseline perspective, the past or the present? Then once you've picked a question you want to answer, it's an empirical matter. Go and do the study to get the data you need to answer it.

Another route is to toss the "better" question and just go with your bottom description. Past and present games cater to different demographics. Past games catered more to game hobbyists. Present games cater to mainstream tastes. And the design decisions coming out of that lead to games with different characteristics we can see, controlling for differences in technology. That can be a respectable observation all by itself.

Jason Moyer on 15/4/2015 at 05:39

---

I think a lot of that has to do with the traditional ways of finding and sharing new music being obliterated by technology around 2000-ish. There was a time when you had to actually do some legwork to find new new music; now you can get any bullshit you want whenever you want (of course, you still have to do some legwork to filter through all of the bullshit, if you're one of the few who can find the motivation to do so).

When artists were whining about Napster killing the recording industry, I think they mis-identified the problem as piracy when what actually happened is that broadband/MP3 turned music into the North American videogame market circa 1983.

(Sorry about the ramble, I was actually thinking about this for some reason at work today before coming home and reading your post)

As far as the original topic goes, I really have no preference for games from any era, but I do find that a lot of modern games have an alarming tendency to include a mind-numbing quantity of content that is not very interesting. Or it could just be Ubisoft. I've always felt like if it seems that there's more crap coming out, it's because there are so many more games coming out overall rather than a decline. If you look at a classic system like the Atari 2600, which was around for a decade and could be found everywhere, you'll find it has a catalog of roughly 400 games, most of which were pretty rare. As best as I can tell, that's about 4 months of Steam releases.

Judith on 15/4/2015 at 15:06

---

Definitely. Also, even though it looked like we had plenty of choice back then, it's nothing in comparison to what we have now. Tons of review websites, labels and shops, different music platforms with paid subscriptions and instant access to their whole catalogue. You just have to pick one or two (and I guess that may be the problem).



That was similar case to games industry, i.e. Ubisoft still supports that view with their DRM. Similar to Napster, they identify people who can't afford games (or can but just won't) as part of the equation (which is silly). I'm not sure that mp3s or better Internet connections ruined music industry. Probably the labels not willing to adapt. But for artists it mostly meant focusing on hard honest work. With new models of distribution artists now can have more diverse careers and still sustain themselves. Now you can carefully release singles one by one, play as support, record more, have full performances on festivals, remaster and compile your work into EPs or LPs, and be able to get by (off my head: Banks, Kate Boy, FKA Twigs, Jon Hopkins).

Also gone is the era of radio journalists as gods and tastemakers, which is actually good. People will find you through recommendation systems, word of mouth, social media, and other artists. You don't need a silver-tongued middleman to find anything about your favorite artists or seek new ones. On one hand, you don't have to go to the record store, but you still have to search, read, listen, select and discard. That's what music journalists did for you back then. That kind of effort and using (mostly) latest technology to do that is probably what discourages some people, who are more eager to dismiss the whole thing, rather than see it as opportunity (it's a pretty strong tendency in my country btw.)


Anywho, games seem to follow similar pattern. Sure, some of them were made by MIT grades for MIT grades, but there were tons of silly and mindless stuff, like games mentioned above. Remember decathlon games? Their main purpose was to make you destroy the joystick! There was no extensive Q&A back then, some games demanded a lot of your spare time (no saves or checkpoints with codes you had to write down on paper). There was no Internet, so you didn't know about a lot of titles. And as with music, what stays in mainstream is not set in stone. For example, IF games were the thing, but they never vanished, just became harder to find. Many distribution models and no clear recipe for success make us question the AAA model, which can be very conservative. You know, Ubisoft: The Game, but many other titles follow that pattern, especially with sequels. It can also be weird to the point of being ridiculous. Like Bioshock Infinite, where you get an innovative story in a really disappointing FPS, and you can miss 90% of it (I actually saw such playthrough).

On the other hand, we're not exactly sure what indie games are. Ethan Carter is indie, but budget-wise it's more like an AA game, and it's good to see things like that. There are many great tiny games, ideas created on game-jams, released half-finished for free or a low price, then reiterated or remastered with "HD graphics" and becoming a commercial success. People can now vote with their wallets for more niche titles. You can be sucker for nostalgia all the way. And you can buy absolute crap! Tons of it is released every day in steam greenlight, or in early access. In many respects it's a fascinating phenomenon.

All those changes are. In music, games, movies, photography - at least those are the areas I'm trying to keep up with. I don't think any of those changed for worse. We may have to change our habits to embrace it, but I never found it bad.

Tony_Tarantula on 15/4/2015 at 15:28

---

Overrated, with a select few exceptions like the Witcher series. Most of the "choices" have no impact other than to give you slightly different dialogue, access to different equipment, or so on.

Try playing Any of the Mass Effect games as 'good' or 'evil'. All the major events still happen the same way, There's no changes to the major characters on your team, and no impact on future games other than a few dialogue changes.

The same applies to the Elder Scrolls. Sure you're free to wander however you want, but all quests still play out the same way, with only a single way to resolve them, and all the plot points turn out the exact same.