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Games were simply better before the mid 2000s. Developers actually put pride into making fun, polished products instead of just trying to rush crap out the door and leech people's wallets for more profits. The indie scene is a nice antidote to all the BS from the mainstream publishers and developers, but it's not a perfect replacement for how things used to be.

Anyway, my least favorite trends in modern gaming include:

- Overuse of cutscenes, dialog, and scripted events
- Games released to retail in a borderline "beta" state, requiring numerous patches
- DLC and other microtransaction BS
- Yearly iterations of popular franchises (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, etc.)
- DRM on PC games
- Artstyles that don't change from game to game; every popular game nowadays seems to have this dull pseudo-photorealistic look
- The excessive amount of hype attached to new releases
- The whole "free to play" model which should really be called "pay to win"
- Games that clone one another; FPSs copy Call of Duty, open-world games copy GTA or Assassin's Creed, MMORPGs copy World of Warcraft, etc.
- The level of linearity in modern single player FPSs. What happened to being able to explore sprawling levels, like on DooM or Goldeneye?

Yep, pretty much all of that. But it's really not too hard to find games that completely avoid all of those negative things.

For example, FPS games that play like Doom or similar games from back then; dodging fireballs that are flying everywhere, while getting lost in some big maze; there's been about a billion variations on this theme at this point, many of which are very good (as this is the type of FPS that I *will* actually play and am good at). Rogue Shooter is a favorite of mine, despite the bloody stupid name. It plays like Wolfenstein 3D did, though with elements of a roguelike in it; level exploration is a must, as is mastering the bazillions of weapon types, though it's the enemies that really steal the show with this one, having a huge variety of creative attack patterns. The game gets difficult fast, and the pacing is very, very quick; try to just hide behind a wall and snipe at things, and you're likely dead within 10 seconds. Running and dodging is key (and everything moves very fast), just like what something like Doom was (whereas the original Wolfenstein 3D's enemies were a bit too simple, and fighting with them was slower than that of Doom). And there are plenty that then play more like Doom itself, complete with all of the switch flipping and key grabbing.

Or something like platformers; there's things like La-Mulana, which plays like older platformers on machines similar to the MSX. Except with extreme complexity/difficulty and very confusing puzzles... the sort of difficulty that older games didnt hesitate to throw at you. If that one's too complex, perhaps something like Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. Giana Sisters is a very old series that started about a billion years ago, which originally mimicked Mario pretty heavily. In it's current incarnation, it's an extremely colorful platformer, complete with high difficulty and a bazillion things to collect as you run through each level, just like collecting coins/bananas/whatever back in older ones.

Then there's some of the more hardcore stuff, for example games that play like the old Wizardry series. Those interested in that type of game might look up one by the name of Paper Sorcerer, which is an excellent homage to games of that type, playing pretty much exactly the way that it should in order to recreate the gameplay style and feel that games like Wizardry had way back when.


And that's just games that tend to play like things that were from my own favorite era of gaming. There's tons of examples that go way beyond just the sort of things that *I* am into. And these arent things that are pale imitations of what once was; these are games that can actually equal those, and they're extremely common.

Yet even with this, people seem to get this bizarre (and annoying) idea that indie titles are all simple, little games.... Flash games, for instance. And that.... isnt even close to true. That sort of game actually is the minority. Annoyingly, that sort of game is also the most well-known, thanks to sites like Kongregate and similar places that host exactly that type of dinky little Flash titles. I personally wouldnt be into these sorts of games if they were all like those... I dont like the super-simple sorts. Never did, never will. It doesnt help that you actually have to seek these out, and go looking for yourself. Thanks to modern major developers, alot of gamers seem to now be VERY used to games coming to them, instead of the other way around. Publishers these days will jump up and down and shriek and practically launch piles of their game at you in order to do ANYTHING to grab your attention. Indie devs either A: dont need to do this, because they didnt spend 20 trillion dollars to make said game, or B: just dont care about that type of advertising (or simply dislike it, which seems to be the case for many)... they just put their game in the right place (such as Steam or Desura or a bunch of others), maybe get some mention on certain sites, and that's it.... and really, that's enough, just like it was way back when, before the internet was gigantic and before games cost so very much to make. Old games used to do exactly this sort of thing; you might see mention of them in magazines, but that was often about it. You learned about many games by actually browsing stores, and looking at the boxes. It's very similar to that. Or perhaps you learned about them by word-of-mouth.


It's not JUST indie titles, either. While they're much less numerous, there's also still plenty of games that are simply alot more obscure, yet put out by larger devs. For example, take the most recent SimCity game. That series was freaking legendary. And SimCity 4, which was superb, came out many, many years ago... everyone had waited so very long for a new game in the series, and number 5 comes out... and is absolutely terrible, because the developer became too bloated, thanks to The Sims and the presence of EA. So I went looking for a replacement, and found a game called Anno 2070, which is actually put out by Ubisoft. "Anno" being a long-running city-builder series from over in the UK, having hardly ever come to the US (I think only one other game in that series ever came here). But holy crap, this one is so freaking good. They absolutely nailed the gameplay, yet it's different from what SimCity is... hard to explain how, but I ended up vastly preferring it to the Simcity series overall. And the game is freaking GORGEOUS. It's one of those that will explode lesser machines, if you want to put the graphics at full. I dont normally get at all impressed by graphics these days, but THAT game managed it. Absolutely fantastic.


My overall point is, it's very worth really looking for stuff like this, going alot further than just seeing ads or stuff of that nature, or hearing about only the most popular games of this sort, like Minecraft. There's so much to be found there, and it can be every bit as good as games from the era you speak of. It's just that it takes some real effort, as there's LOTS of them out there. As opposed to just waiting for something to appear.


Ho boy, much longer ramble than I intended. Ugh. I've had way too much caffiene again. I get started with the typing and just keep going....

Another weird thing is that developers assume everyone has a smartphone or something now. I tried playing through Fez a few weeks ago, was getting along with it and having fun, but then suddenly there's a puzzle with a QR code in it? What the f**k am I going to do with that? Am I just unable to complete this game now? Spoiler: I cheated and looked online. But still, they're designing games now to interact with your phone, even non-video games with remote controlled devices are being controlled by phones. I wouldn't want a smartphone for any other reason, I hate having to charge them constantly, let me do everything from my laptop at the least, stop trying to drag me down with this so-called 'casual' market.

Does anyone else here play games sometimes because of how broken they are? I loved Oblivion, but all my time with Skyrim has just been about trying to break it, I love to do everything a game doesn't want me to do just to see what happens and it turns out Skyrim reacts pretty poorly to it, which I love. I wish they brought back static paintbrushes, arrow cloning and 1 second level 60 frenzy spells though.

Did anyone here ever play Banjo and Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts? Easy to miss because it wasn't a platformer, but that game had tons of game-breaking potential (doing big challenges in under a second etc.).

I don't use tablets or smartphones either. I still have a PC and a standard TV with an RF hookup so I can keep playing on my older systems. But I must admit, the PS2 sure looks good hooked up to a high-definition TV.

The Dreamcast is one of the most flexible systems ever made as far as hookups go. You can play it on an old RF unit, a standard AV cord, s-video, OR a VGA adaptor that can connect to a computer monitor or hi-def TV, which ramps up the graphics to Xbox 360 territory. Pretty cool if you can get it to work for you.