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Koko Ricky

Anyone else have this problem with connecting with modern games?

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I was "in the loop" with the video game world up until the early 2000s. It was at that point I began to experience a disconnect. I had witnessed the transition from two to three dimensions, and found a lack of interest in most newer games, unless they were throwbacks to older gaming sensibilities ("Twisted Metal: Black," "Katamari Damacy" and "Doom 3" being examples).

Whenever I see trailers for new games, I find it unsettling how detailed they are, despite my fascination with real-time graphics, and I feel very awkward trying to accept the naïve attempts at adding cinematic flair. Is it possible I've already become too jaded to appreciate the new generation of games? Or am I looking in the wrong places for a satisfying contemporary experience? I admit I have no knowledge of the indie gaming world.

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I concur. It all looks horribly generic and uninspired from here. I swear, even the myriad Sonic and Mario clones of the '90s were more varied than the current gaming scene.

Could just be my rose-tinted spectacles though.

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I get the feeling of homogeny, too. Even across vastly different genres, the photorealistic trend is evident, with few games utilizing a more adventurous art style. The sense of being immersed in a world very familiar to my own is just not interesting, despite fantasizing about that very thing as a kid.

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Yeah, I get that. Yesterday I started (late to the party, but I always am) playing Rage. It's nice enough, but... found myself pining for Borderlands and Doom 3 - neither of which I consider to be great games, but both are more escapist than Rage; Borderlands with the visuals and Doom 3 with the setting.

Mind you, I encountered a fuckton more invisible walls in one hour of Rage than I did the entirety of those other two. I guess this visual realism comes at a price, and one that destroys the illusion somewhat; "I should be able to jump over a fucking SOFA!"

And so on.

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GoatLord said:

Or am I looking in the wrong places for a satisfying contemporary experience?

Yes you are. The triple-As are relatively homogenous with the occasional gem here and there, the "cool" stuff is in the indie and handheld markets.

Fun fact: Most people here who whine about modern games play nothing but FPSs. Gee, maybe if you widened your horizons a bit you might just find something you like.

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Keep in mind that I'm not whining so much as trying to understand how to relate to modern gaming. I feel like I'm stuck in a time warp and have failed to "get" the new generation, which is what I'm attempting to do.

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You know, I did make an indie games thread to help disenfranchised folks out.

Seriously, gaming now is probably better then it's ever been and there really is something for everyone out there now. If you can't find something to like out there then well... video games might just not be for you anymore.

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I grew increasingly estranged from the console market after the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation. Gamecube was the last console I bought but I barely played even that one. After that, my buying habits for big budget gaming diminished to becoming nearly non-existent.

Now I'm just observing the corporate part of the industry from a distance. At the same time I'm very optimistic about gaming thanks to the resurgence of the smaller to mid-tier market. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare was probably my game of 2012 and it really brought back the joy of regular multiplayer gaming for me. Now there's even more very promising Kickstarter titles on the horizon.

It seems to me like an awful lot of people have this strong emotional attachment to the traditional, brick and mortar part of the market even though it has gotten ridiculously polarized over the past generation. Indie or DD games don't "count" with such a mindset and when they feel they aren't being served well by the corporate AAA side they seem to think the entire industry is doomed, since it's all they seem to care about.

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Modern Shooters.... too many, too real looking. I'd rather just play Team Fortress 2.

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The most modern stuff I can stomach are various puzzle games for Nintendo DS, and some retro-style RPGs like Dark Spire. Otherwise, I just run some emulators for 8/16-bit systems or game engine remakes (preferably ones that remain faithful to the original). Also, roguelikes in real ASCII mode! Not that fake-ass SDL crap! :-)

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The thing I love most in modern games is when they go surreal. In my opinion, this is what video games do best. For instance, those moments in Arkham Asylum (Scarecrow segment) and Point Lookout (Fallout 3 DLC). But those interludes are always too short, and I haven't seen a whole game based around them in way, way too long (thinking of Psychonauts here). I guess Farcry Blood Dragon is a step in the right direction, but it's basically a palette-swap of Farcry 3. Not weird enough! Developers, loose yourselves from the yoke of realism! Embrace low gravity and abstract designs which would make Euclid vomit and Escher spin with glee in his grave!

Really, this is the only modern shooter than made me sit up and pay attention in a long, long time:

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GeckoYamori said:

Now I'm just observing the corporate part of the industry from a distance. At the same time I'm very optimistic about gaming thanks to the resurgence of the smaller to mid-tier market. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare was probably my game of 2012 and it really brought back the joy of regular multiplayer gaming for me. Now there's even more very promising Kickstarter titles on the horizon.


Agreed, the kickstarter titles are whats interesting me the most at the moment, most of the Next Gen AAA titles just kind of blend into each other and are lacking the creativity and originality of Mid to Late 90's titles.
The games interesting me the most are the next Carmageddon, ROTT, Shadow Warrior, War for the Overworld, Shadowrun Returns rather than the next MGS/Assasins Creed/Battlefield/CoD/Halo etc.

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GoatLord said:

I feel like I'm stuck in a time warp and have failed to "get" the new generation, which is what I'm attempting to do.

In short, triple-A games are expensive to make, so they need to sell a lot of copies to just cut even. To do that, they need to target the lowest common denominator in the player base. That includes making games simple to play, blend together and all gruff so that Chad from Sigma Alpha Nu can enjoy them.

Conversely, indies can do whateverthefuck they want since they're paying the development from their own pockets and they know they don't have to please absolutely everyone to make a profit. Handhelds (3DS and Vita) fall somewhere in between triple-As and indies: The games are cheaper to make than triple-As, but they also can't focus as much on fluff as CoD and others can, so there has to be more emphasis on the game itself.

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I couldn't care less about the FPS genre these days. If anyone needs a shoulder to cry on over that, I'm here for you.

Making huge generalisations about "games" seems a little unfair, though.

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I'll admit to owning the usual slew of 'realistic' military shooters (the CODs, BLOPS, BF3, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, MGS4, etc.) and actually enjoying them. Each time I promise it's the last one, but there's definitely fun to be had, to varying degrees, but I really do miss the looseness and creativity that was afforded to developers back in id and pre-id days.

For what it's worth, I haven't bought a military shooter since Tom Clancy's GR:FS. I don't see that changing unless one comes out that's that sells me on something other than solid shooting mechanics (MGS5, for instance).

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It's called analyzing your media. It's an enjoyment enhancer more commonly applied to movies and books, but it works for games, too. The biggest downside is that one comes off sounding snobby to people who play thoughtlessly.

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Aside from linearity issues, it's precisely the attempt of realism that takes me out of modern games.

It's hard to appreciate artwork if it tries to be realistic but ultimately doesn't manage and just looks fake.

On the other hand, older games that tried to create environments that resemble the real world still looked more or less cartoon-ish which made the effort much more appreciable.

I think the uncanny valley not just exists for human characters but for all kinds of stuff.

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schwerpunk said:

The biggest downside is that one comes off sounding snobby to people who play thoughtlessly.

Indeed. If I always voiced my opinion about what my friends enjoy in games (and movies and other things, too), I probably wouldn't have any :p

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Everything is upside down in our time of Caligula marrying his horse and survival of the least fit, including games. The oligolopy has monopolized, centralized and hijacked all significant game related media and proprietary bit tyranny platforms. Its just another propaganda network to add to television, netflix, facebook and everything else. That's why in Condemned 2 for xbox 360, a police helicopter flies overhead at one point telling people to stay inside their homes, foreshadowing the post boston bombing martial law, and why the least worst games are made sure to be military recruitment propaganda called Call of Duty. But this is only a bonus mid term goal until they reach their ultimate goal on this front to run videogames completely into the ground. They'll destroy them because they know playing videogames can get people interested in programming, something that allows people to be too free. So they'll shut off that "leak", until they are in a better tactical position to simply use law and licenses to make programming illegal or impossible, by crushing the spirit of gaming over time using tactics like:

* Replacing computers with locked down phones
* Eventually, you will have to face scan to use the new generation consoles, and if this scan determines that you are of a race not equal to the current president of the USA, you will not be allowed to play. The face scans will be coded glitchy on purpose to generate lots of false positives but there will be zero tolerance for them.
* Continuing the trend of putting cumbersome unwieldy input in awkward places, controllers will be 100% analogue sticks, no buttons, and designed to manipulate them with your palms, not fingers.
* All good game companies will be secretly bought out then crashed, or paid off to suck more than call of duty. The remaining core is a single eugenics based cartel, just using names like sony and microsoft as shields.
* The giant button in the middle of an xbox 360 controller was a beta test to see how people will react to an annoying button in the middle of your controller which is accidentally pressed all the time because its where something like 'start' would normally go, but only brings up ads to pay fees for xbox live. It now will be 3 times bigger and self push once an hour. This will connect you to the xbox welfare and eugenics network where you can unlock achievements by agreeing to sterilize yourself. TSA agents will arrive very soon because chances are a few people on your block work for them and have been monitoring you through the kinect 'always on' surveillance system.
* Make gaming shitty and the platform feed back to sewer stream tv propaganda, so people will willingly watch jersey shore because its at least better than what gaming has become
* Make all games based on motion detection
* All profits will be used to fund dirty tricks against free software and lobbying, so really the whole videogame industry will be their sneaky way to make us pay for our own enslavement.

There is one decent modern triple A game though, Cliffy B's Bioshock Infinite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FylamIJ19n8

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Oh yes I too was "in the loop" from the early-mid nineties to the early 2000's. I too disconnected, but however, I dont know if its because of the games being suckier or that I just grew up/out of it. Most probably both, though.

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After the 1990ies, the only gaming franchise that I stayed connected with was Sonic The Hedgehog. And yet, even that connection didn't go all the way; partially due to me being a reserved PC gamer who only emulates whatever is possible to emulate, and partially due to the pace at which Sega kept releasing new titles (which was just too damn much for a grown man with limited spare time to be keeping up with).
So yeah, the very last game in that franchise which I connected with was Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Winter Games. Everything else which was released after that is either too redundant and unnecessary or just unemulatable on the PC.
I feel much more interested in collecting the Archie Sonic comicbooks rather than collecting the rest of the modern Sonic games. Seriously.

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Technician said:

Sonic the Hedgehog is the worse series currently still being produced.

I agree. Oh lord how I agree. It's gone over-the-top. They're releasing things fatser than people can beat them. And the new releases and new characters don't really add anything new or meaningful. Enough is enough.

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I can't really agree with that anymore. I mean, around 2K6, yeah, because the quality took a humongous nosedive, but Colors and Generations (the latter of which, I'll note, has a native PC version) were pretty good. Not great, because there were still some control issues when you weren't boosting, but very playable and actually a lot of fun.

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Shadow Hog said:

I can't really agree with that anymore. I mean, around 2K6, yeah, because the quality took a humongous nosedive, but Colors and Generations (the latter of which, I'll note, has a native PC version) were pretty good. Not great, because there were still some control issues when you weren't boosting, but very playable and actually a lot of fun.


Never played Sonic 2006, but Colours and Generations were great games. In fact, Sonic Colours is one of my favourite games of 2010 as I felt it played really well, so the few issues I've noticed with the game I easily ignored.

Growing up in 2007-2009, yeah, I also unfairly judged the newer games without properly playing them and spending too much time with older titles which I enjoyed more, which is no good reason to say, 'All new games suck', so really and truly it's not fair to generalise newer games to all be shite to be honest. Now, I can actually enjoy some newer titles, such as Fifa 13 (I like Football/Soccer), GTV IV, Metal Gear Rising (barely can ignore its bad camera, haha), Hitman Absolution and other titles I have that I can't really remember at the moment.

Sure, I love the 90s games, but for me, they equally have the same crappiness this current generation of gaming has. So I don't see what's wrong with them to be honest.

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The 90's equivalent of reiterative CoD crap was mostly token 2D platformers. But in terms of game design, an analogy with those FMV CD-ROM games is much more apt.

Hopefully this is just another phase the industry is going through and we're going to look back on this period with the same distaste as we do for 90's FMV games. Or we'll get some revision history where those were in fact brilliant games too far ahead of their time to be appreciated for their cinematic ambitions.

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