This is personal preference, but what if it's just the attitude of a certain period of time. People now are very different than the people who were playing games in the 80s and 90s. The attitude of society has changed dramatically. Some might find this a positive change and others a negative. For instance most gamers didn't care much about exercise, fitness, and life. They just played a lot of games. What was acceptable in terms of sex and violence in games is much different now. Especially on the side of sex. Objectification of people is now highly frowned upon now. It was quite acceptable in those days. Games often had a darker tone to them in the 90s especially with games like Diablo. The art style was much different then what you will see in most modern games. The closest would probably be the Witcher series of games. There was no expectation of others being intelligent as a gamer. In fact being dumb was the in trend for a while. It was much more relaxed in that sense. People were also more into the macho attitude. Again it depends on what you want like I suppose.
Is this even for real? Two companies who have essentially released one game each? Not to mention one of them just got torn a new asshole for a horrible console port? I'm assuming sarcasm. Either that or you're too young to remember 5 1/4 floppy disks.
yes its absolutly real, Kerbal Space Program is better than anything Serriea released other than maybe No One Lives Forever.
people tend to hold an overly exaggerated un-thought out affection to their childhood
I guess it depends what you're into. Sierra has a long list of games that I really enjoyed playing, Including Ultima 2 and the King's Quest series. Kerbal is fun, but to suggest that a one-hit wonder is 'greater by a huge margin' than a company with a three-decade track record of good and great games... I guess it just depends what you're into.
On topic, with crowdsourcing and such easy access to egines, SDKs and development utilities, it feels like a golden age of gaming right now. The OP bring in the topic of MMORPGs, and in that subset of PC gaming, I'd say its golden age was long ago. My thoughts on that are here for those interested.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
There is just simply an avalanche of games out there, we the consumer are just flooded with new releases, where in those days you would wait 6 months at a time for something worthy of your time. Now EVERY THING is marketed in such a way as to make people believe its worthy of there time and most none of it is. Its just a blur now.
It was also a small community and everyone was talking about the same release most everyone was pulling the same direction. Today we literally have gamer "factions" duking it out trying to impose their wills type of game on everyone else.
There are so many choices today that developers have resorted to just give content away to get you in the door, hoping your inconvenienced enough and stick around long enough to buy a sparkle pony in the cash shop.
That's the majority of today's games, you have to look really really hard these days to find something good, those games are still out here they are just lost in the marketing noise of everything else.
I regard the late 1990s and early 2000s as basically being the dark ages of gaming. 3D graphics were the big new thing, but the technology was primitive enough that they typically looked worse than 2D graphics. Many game developers hadn't figured out how to do 3D gaming with a usable camera view, resulting in games that were perhaps pretty in some esoteric sense, but basically unplayable. Now, not all games did that, but it ruined a whole lot of them.
Imagine if over the course of the next few years, 2/3 of the games that launch were made for the Oculus Rift or some competing device, but in a way that you just can't consistently see the 3D effects and don't find the game playable. Would you regard that as a golden age of gaming? That's about how I view the late 1990s.
I find your excitement at the difficulty in obtaining games on launch day to be absolutely mystifying. How is that better than being able to get a game when you want to get it?
Police quest 1, when you got stuck, you really got stuck in a game. "Do sobriety test". Will never forget that line, took me a long time to make that up so the quest would continue.
A friend and I would often order our games in Great Britain, so yeah I remember rushing home and hoping there was a package waiting for me.
I still love gaming and I still have that same feeling for a release day. Gaming might have changed in 30 years, it's still a fun hobby.
Comments
On topic, with crowdsourcing and such easy access to egines, SDKs and development utilities, it feels like a golden age of gaming right now. The OP bring in the topic of MMORPGs, and in that subset of PC gaming, I'd say its golden age was long ago. My thoughts on that are here for those interested.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
It was also a small community and everyone was talking about the same release most everyone was pulling the same direction. Today we literally have gamer "factions" duking it out trying to impose their wills type of game on everyone else.
There are so many choices today that developers have resorted to just give content away to get you in the door, hoping your inconvenienced enough and stick around long enough to buy a sparkle pony in the cash shop.
That's the majority of today's games, you have to look really really hard these days to find something good, those games are still out here they are just lost in the marketing noise of everything else.
Imagine if over the course of the next few years, 2/3 of the games that launch were made for the Oculus Rift or some competing device, but in a way that you just can't consistently see the 3D effects and don't find the game playable. Would you regard that as a golden age of gaming? That's about how I view the late 1990s.
I find your excitement at the difficulty in obtaining games on launch day to be absolutely mystifying. How is that better than being able to get a game when you want to get it?
A friend and I would often order our games in Great Britain, so yeah I remember rushing home and hoping there was a package waiting for me.
I still love gaming and I still have that same feeling for a release day. Gaming might have changed in 30 years, it's still a fun hobby.