All this horsepower you get with modern machines, has only contributed to the instauration of a regime of game-development mediocrity. Back then you had very limited (by today's standards) resources to work with, which encouraged creativity and talent as means of overcoming such limitations.

Now it's all about some guy made of a billion polys shooting shit in a city and per-pixel lighting making every texture look metallic :sad

Edit: ain't that the Ministry of Silly Walks? :cool

I feel the same hatred brother :D

New games from this generation = boring 3D shoot em up rubbish, too glitzy, politically correct, old ideas copied.... yawn. What Maren said...

There won't be a market like we have in 20 years time for the Wii/360/PS3 generation because much of it will be extinct after its 5 year use by date (is it me or does the majority of consumer hardware these days blow up after so little time? That includes toasters, kettles etc).

Specs for hardware may have moved on somewhat from 1985, but it just doesn't have the 'wow' factor it did back then for some strange reason.

Put an Amiga 500 with a price tag next to it for £30 and a PS3 for free next to it... and I'd take the 500 everytime... nuts? no. Just don't want to waste my time with crap. :D

P.S. I am in a really bad mood today. Computers, especially the IBM Clone variety pre-loaded with Windows Server 2003 are driving me nuts of late :crying

Hmm, I wow'ed when I saw Quake, Gothic, Morrowind, Doom 3... That's for the 'tech' wow. Also had several gameplay wow's after the C64/Amiga time. I agree that there are too much well known concepts used over and over again nowadays and that something has to change. Yet people seem to buy enough of these games that nobody thinks about change...

One wonders what would happen if companies started developing games for the classic systems again. The C64 online community alone is said to be like 6+ million fans big, now add the miggy, speccy, cpc, st, etc...boy are they completely overlooking a potential market or what?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...ghlight=Knight
You could ask them how their game sells with 6+ million fans around.

Well, look what happened when the market has changed, i mean when the amiga market was dying, aside that we've seen PC games moving toward only 4 kind of games :

1) 3D FPS shooters (Doom-like)
2) RPG games ultra-complicated (Heroes of magic and magic, and so on)
3) Online games (a bit later yep)
4) Flight Simulators

Well, publishers are at fault here, because they mis-educated people...
Arcade games and adventure games have more or less disappeared.

And see where we are today, and what we get.... only the same kind of games.
Not counting the guys saying 'what the fuck? What is this bullshit of porting Megaman X4 on my £800 PC ?' I have read this sentence from a french magazine gametester, who slashed the game just because it was a 'small game console type' on his ultra expensive machine. So what ? because you paid a machine that much, a good 2D game is prohibited? B*llshit! That's the typical reaction Ironclaw is referring at.

Apart some handcrafted games like vampire story, which is beautiful, like a painting/cartoon, i personaly hate games like WOW, ultima online and so on.

Computing was fun since 8 bit days and then Amiga, wow impressive
then win98se (yes this was my first ms- friend is updating to xp and gave me)
it was ok - but most 3d games were a step back, i think this till today about the fun factor.

Everyone gets vista - my friend gave me xp - and i am going back to amiga more and more every day - Computing = fun is not true anymore (in my case)

The games are simply to complex - it's ok for 1 or 2 games,
X3, gtr2, Flatout - and this are (with exception of x3 which you can get for linux) the only reason why i'm using Win - Ehmmm and Winuae, of course:D

What i miss - just to put a game up and have fun for a hour or a half,
without learning whatever

A lot of crap for no matter what system or generation you play but for me most of the really good stuff is normally something from older times

I personally will always like the Atari2600, C64 and of course Amiga days because they were an altogether more charming time - and really that's just down to how much our imaginations took over what were fairly sparse and under realised worlds back

These days very little is left to our imaginations and those same working game ideas that worked before, are now at odds with the visuals and as a result feel more like GAMES

Back in the day, little more than a few squares would be all that was needed to convince you of an item of enemy say but these days i'm very rarely convinced unless i'm pulled in by an exceptional story and interesting believable characters

Seems as things get better, a lot of the innocence goes with it

That said, i simply can't do without playing Halo at least once a week(ODST looks fanastic) and every so often i do absolutely fall under a game's spell - mostly though that's down to how well scripted and acted it all is

I can't wait for Diablo 3 !! :evilgrin

This is exactly what i mean (my fav's Amiga PSX1)
Tokyio Racer extreme zero, Need for speed Underground and equals are
good games for short fun, but they can't reach the countless times i
played Lotus,Jaguar or supercars

Even Final Fantasy ,were i would play more then once, is FF9 the last
really good one

There're always exceptions - Gothik 3 and civilisation (4) are good too
but they are not really new....

Well, my favourite genre is adventure games. And the times when adventure games were mainstream, big budget games are long gone. Most adventure games released these days are mediocre at best.

I also feel games have gotten easier, probably to cater to a much wider audience.

Actually Gothic 3 is a fine example of a new game series that went the wrong way. It's just a really big landscape that feels like 'butter scraped over too much bread' (c) Bilbo Beutlin ;) While the first one was really intense, the second one managed to keep up at least with a lot of the atmosphere and also a really neat story. The third one felt like they tried to go 'elder scrolling' and missed the point. Still not a bad game, but it really loses the 'wow' factor that the first two had. Same with Oblivion btw. Bigger landscape + less content = :( (I know some even feel the same about Daggerfall vs. Morrowind).

till Need for speed underground also a good example
New titles are puplished 3 in 2 years but every a bit worse then
the previous

It probably because your getting old :-D

We already do, and did. But the field of game ideas is much more narrow now. One reason is 3D. The way a game is visualized often contributed large to how it was played back then. You can't really have more than 1st or 3rd person perspective in 3D, and for each year all game 3D looks similar because there's really only one type of "engine" or idea-set. (Same family of texture layers, same software making the content (3dsmax etc, compare this with Another World).

Twenty years ago, a simple game like Tetris could actually make it to the store shelves. Not so today, the game publishers have become as big as Hollywood, and only huge Hollywood movie type game projects are given any funding. It's much more about entertainment (story, characters, famous voiceovers) than idea or depth in those projects.

How to find the good different games that are actually getting the money to be completed? Well 1) don't buy games from store shelves (but if you have a console, who will stock it?) and 2) if you want to order it (or try a freeware game) you'll have to wade through a much larger number of games (for PC), I guess hanging out at some gamesnews portal could be it, but even they don't have the time to try all of them.
Two 1st person shooters. Consoles are better than PC because a few have chipsets or cpu power to do some different styling of polygons. Nintendo also tries some new ideas, which I like.
Piracy was a problem when studios and publishers were small, such as in the home computer heyday. Nowadays game publishers have as much trouble from "those who don't buy games" as "those who don't buy albums anymore".

I.e. young people. Most of us grownups ALREADY HAVE hundreds of cds and games, you see. It's just an expectance on their part that each household's stash of cds/movies/games should increase with at least 50 a year, which is silly. When you already have all your favorite movies, only a couple come along that is a new favorite. Same for games and cds, for most people. 15 year olds with 50GB of mp3 on the harddisk and nothing purchased, that's a different story.

And KG was 100% correct: through all generations and platforms, 99% of the games are just "finished projects" and "similar". Fine for the omnivorous 13yo playing through every single game because he's excited by the yowza graphics and has worked up his eye-hand coordination and hormones finally emerge that gives a nice little adrenaline rush in online competitive games... but I digress.

Us grownups who have seen it all before wrapped in a more lo-fi envelope, we're looking for "The next Tetris" (as in enjoying a new way of stimulating the noggin and fingers that is fun), but whereas stores even in tiny towns sported HUNDREDS of different titles for each home computer in 1989, now you'd be lucky to find 2-3 dozen for each platform.

There were a few windows in time where new technologies turned me on, like the 486 software 3D and SoundBlaster, then the CD-rom, then Geforce 1, and just "moving about in a huge castle" or "driving a car in San Francisco" or "being stranded on a virtual island" was the thrill of a new experience.

Since Geforce 1 though, it's stagnated. Only visual fidelity has improved (well, gotten closer to a tolerable level), and as we know from music, it really doesn't do much for the enjoyment of it in a drastic way. If the music's excellent on LP, it's excellent on CD - and if it's music that never gets played, improving the fidelity won't make you listen to it.

Old games often had a drawback, tho, imo. A very specific quality - they demanded perfect joystick control and much discipline and memorization - often the game was over if you made a single mistake, and you had the choice of drudging through the same level(s) for the nth time again, or do something else.

Phew! If someone would like an article, I could write this up if you want. :)

As for the original post, this is a psychological question.
Some areas of technology, entertainment, life in general, food industry... (I could go on) develop in ways we don't think is "better". All these affect our happiness. Now, those who care about those things are confronted with perhaps a much larger number of people who DON'T care or haven't experienced better and think it's fine. When you find this, it can be hard to deal with not being powerful enough to change it. We don't want to just give up and go depressed, so we put the blame on something or someone and hate them. While better than tying a noose, it's not really productive either.

It's strange that many, even those a generation older than us, say that the late 70s/early 80s was the most fun they ever had in their life, before or since. I find almost all movies from that time extremely enjoyable, it somehow shines through, and you can see how they behaved and want that :) Wonder why that was, because certainly the potsmokers were not less rare than now... maybe something in the air?

Like? You mean any current gen console produces graphics that aren't possible on PC hardware? Talking about 'CPU/GPU power' it's the other way around (for a bit longer time already). Also 'horsepower' has surely nothing to do with designing an interesting different graphic environment to play in. The main reason is (and it will most likely stay this way) you can sell these '3D graphic improvements'. Enough people are willing to pay for the next gen hardware, with the next batch of improved graphics games (which still play the same). Only thing to have an influence is to buy the 'right' games and ignore the rest ;)

This is thread winner :great

I still appreciate a good driving game, Forza 2 & RacePro for instance and soon come Forza 3, but I've never ever been into first person or similar games so a large majority of games in the last 10 years have been redundant for me.

I've bought probably 3 games in the last 3 years tops. I'm still playing them (see above ;) ).

The current gen of games that I see scare the hell out of me when I look at them in mags. Not to mention why would I want to spend many many hours of my life learning control systems, game worlds etc.

So I might not hate everything, but the fun isn't there for me like it was when I was a wee nipper.

yes, where is Flimbo's Quest 2 or something similar

Where is a new non-3D Mario/Sonic/Rayman/anything :crying WHERE???!?!?!!? :scream

I think we have been spoilt. Looking deeper into this. When home computers and home gaming arrived it was aimed at kids, we were kids at that time and it rocked. As we became older and the games matured with us. The Amiga dragged us with it through the awkward teen years, then PC gaming and PSone brought games to young adults. Then it stopped, the idea groups to aim games at are kids who spend parents money and young adults with their first jobs blowing their own money. We are now at the age where we are supposed to buying games for our kids.

White 30 something men are the most neglected consumer group evarrr. This is why we hate everything, nothing is aimed at us. Yeah, I know we still come across games that rock our world, but they were never aimed at us.

I for one am going to apart, and try to learn to love games as I did when I was younger and eagerly wait Mid-life Crisis Simulator for Xbox, PC and PS3, with timed exclusive DLC for the PC and Xbox.