There’s an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call “Halftower” without a drop of irony.
Sorry I’ll be explicit: I’m making fun of how pretentious you sound and can’t take anything you say here seriously. I actually agree that a monster sound system can greatly enhance a movie or game experience, but the difference depends on the specific media. I saw Fury Road three times in the theater because I knew my home system would never match the experience. Something like Star Trek TNG or My Cousin Vinny or, as the topic of this post, Kirby’s Air Ride hinges far less on the audio quality to deliver the intended content. Gatekeeping enjoyment behind speakers makes you a colossal ass.
“Roguelike” has also become very watered down. I see “roguelite” used less often, though it’s more accurate, but there isn’t a good alternative term right now. Turn-based-dungeon-crawler-with-permadeath is historically accurate but there’s a tendency to lump action games like Rogue Legacy and Enter the Gungeon in that needs to be accounted for.
(And no I haven’t played Rogue but I did play a bunch of NetHack)
As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work.
Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?
PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.
That’s one of the reasons Mario 64 still holds up. Despite being so early in 3D platforming it did a really good job with the controls and camera choices. It’s a real mixed bag to go back to that era of gaming, Generation V, but I kinda like that. There wasn’t preconceived notions of what 3D games should be so they tried everything.