I wasn’t talking about LAN but playing online on public servers. And I wasn’t saying it as a bad thing, just tempering expectations. Iirc, you have to patch the game, then create an account for the GameSpy replacement. There were some stability issues, too, but if you find a decent server it was ok.
But after all of that the main issue was, of course, lack of players.
Warhead was like Crysis 1.5, actually. But I have tried playing the original Crysis online a couple years ago and it’s possible. Not super convenient, but possible.
I mean, they listen sometimes. But the point is, they, as any other company, were doing it to pretend that they are cool and progressive. As the result they got mostly negative reactions. So why bother with the effort if you’re only gonna reduce your already dwindling player base. IIRC, they were very small symbolic events anyway.
I can understand not liking the genres or having different stylistic preferences, but saying that new Mario games are shovelware? Have you played them? SMB Wonder was the most fun my brother and I have had playing a platformer in like 20 years. The game is full of creativity, almost every level introduces a new game mechanic that could easily be its own game.
IMO, that’s the wrong direction. The right direction is to apply some good CRT shaders. Those games were designed for CRT and low resolutions and they can never look great when rendered at higher res. Upscaling works much better for PS2 generation and up.