I was born in the same year, 1976, and I really don’t feel the same way. Pretty much every era has bangers and also really bad games.
I have really good memories from the '80s (games like Pitfall II or the MSX Konami games), the '90s (playing MUDs with my college pals, the classic SNES JRPGs like Chrono Trigger or the classic PC CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate and its ilk), the '00s (games like Silent Hill 2, Morrowind or GTA: San Andreas), the '10s (pretty much every FromSoft game from that decade, NieR:Automata or the Rocksteady Batman games) and the '20s (games like Elden Ring, Hades, etc.). And many more games I didn’t mention.
Some decades have been better than others, but there are incredible games in all of them.
Not really. I am just a bit younger, growing up between the 80s and 90s. I still play old games, only those that aged well though, but sometimes decades after their prime. I play new games a lot too. And games from any time in between, as long as they do something right.
And there are many, many games around which you can bond just as well as you could back then. Not even talking specifically about multiplayer games (which I don’t play very much at all) I’ve always been a fan of “co-piloting” games, just sharing the experience of playing, spectating, commenting around a game.
Some games are fantastic for this. Some games are rich enough that you can share your experience and discover other people do stuff completely differently. This sort of always existed (for example, what’s the right way to complete Legend of Zelda?), and this is still true even for somewhat simple games, but possibilities have only increased in range. I am pretty sure nobody plays a game like Rimworld or Tears of the Kingdom the same.
Honestly? Not really. My best memories of gaming were in my 20s in my student flat. Lots of Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
I played games in the early '90s and don't have much nostalgia for most of the games themselves. The late '90s had the PSX and N64 and whilst Mario Kart 64 is probably the best in the series I can't say I feel most of the games of those platforms were "the best".
I think I would say that the best games are the PC games that came out between 1998 and 2002. Those I can genuinely enjoy today.
I cannot say the same for much that came out in the 1980s. Most of them entertain me for about thirty seconds, without hyperbole.
Once we get past the early 2000s I'm hard pressed to find any games that I think are truly "the best". 2007 was pretty damn good as was 2009.
When it comes to gaming with friends any game can be good. The game is practically just a framing device. I've not made many friends whilst gaming. I've gamed with friends but mostly I've found that people either just want to be arseholes or are extremely serious about playing online. In person I've found that the skill disparity means that it's a complete crapshoot. I played a lot of Mario Kart 64 over a ten year period and don't have any outstanding memories of it being the best thing ever (I think it's the best MK game but that's because the others are worse).
Mostly I like games that I can use as escapism. Exploring fun places and getting away from the day to day. I've rarely had all that much fun gaming with other people. Exceptions exist though - playing through the recent TMNT game with my teenaged niece was a blast. Playing KeyWe with my wife was also great.
If we're sharing honest opinions minus filter here: if you worded your question differently, more people would answer, and they would be less defensive and have more interesting answers. You've limited the people who will reply.
Condescensing and annoying people like myself will still have a lot to say, but people with fun stories and heartwarming anecdotes will not want to put themselves out there for what seems like will be a snarky put-down as a response.
Specifically, the "kiddie game" opening was fine, but the way you worded the followup came across less like you were confused and more like you wanted to have a group shit-on of adults who play mario kart. Being a little more vague would've been your friend here. "but it looks like i was wrong" might've convinced people who don't want to be shit on to give an answer.
The part about it being unfair by design was fine, but the last paragraph again comes across as "anyone want to hang here and make fun of the losers who like this obvious bullshit?"
anyway, i don't play party video games generally but my impression is they want to appeal to different skill levels, abilities, and ages, so they often have additions that level the playing field so it's not just Gamer Frieda winning while everyone else gets bored and gets out the playing cards (which can also have a random quality that means sometimes the newbie will win or at least not be bored and frustrated).
These catch up elements add extra elements for dedicated players to account for, which is more memorization and reflex training, which is a kind of fun for the type of people who play outside parties.
Good question! I found it more complicated because you have such a wide variety of resources needed to build everything and only so much storage on your ship so multiple trips and not as convenient fast travel if outside your system.
More than that though is the ridiculous cargo system. You have to create machines to pull out the resources from the ground then a machine to store them and a transport one to get it to the cargo link then it only goes to one side of the cargo link as an outbound resource. Just needlessly complicated and poorly explained in my opinion.
For all the faults Nintendo embody, they know how to make tutorials, especially with the Mario series. You may think “there are no tutorials in Mario” but that’s part of it. Nintendo’s design formula for making stages for Mario games consist of “introduction, escalation, complication.” First they throw a new mechanic at you, maybe the stage has rotating cylinders you need to stay on top of to progress, and not fall down. Then they up the difficulty a bit, adding more factors to the gameplay like introducing enemies that you have to dodge simultaneously. Then finally they turn the new concept up to 11 towards the end, by making you have to juggle both the new mechanics and some other modifiers, perhaps having to fight a boss at the same time, or perhaps requiring some more advanced platforming maneuvers to progress. That way a stage can be a tutorial, and you don’t even realize it.
Like fallout 4 and other games, I pointedly ignored building the outposts et al. I didn’t even mod the ships that much because that was a ball ache as well.
Fallout 4 with the settlers of the wasteland (I think that’s the name) mod becomes a cool base management game alongside the normal fo4 stuff. It makes the whole system feel worth interacting with, in my opinion. Give it a try if you haven’t and are interested.
Guess I’m an outlier. For me, games were the way to disconnect from the stress of relationships. I’ve been an introvert since the beginning, and so games’ positive associations for me are a safe place away from social pressures.
I also imagine every “retro” generation thinks its games are the best. Like, there was a meme post about joy at finding a PS2 torrent recently with strong implied nostalgia, and that’s ok. People usually experience video games at an age where the games teach them archetypical feelings of intellectual pleasure, the first time they experienced joy at solving complex problems for example. That becomes a core association through life.
So I think we’ll all have strong feelings linking the systems we played at our formative years. And again, that’s ok. That we can form such strong associations is an expression of the basic human value of video games, as an art and modern cultural necessity.
The first level literally is designed to progressively teach you everything you need to know how to play the game and it doesn’t even have a single line of text to do it.
Although I do have to say it is a bit funny that Dark Souls’ tutorial is just some messages on the ground and the first one tells you how to move. But you have to move over to it to read it in the first place.
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