User name checks out, I really enjoy your writing. Do you keep a blog?
Games, as much as anything else, is a hobby and are something that people have to have a passion for to stay up with it. Just like the hobby of your coworker, who hits up the car show circuit every summer weekend, can cite every part number for the general Lee dodge charger out of the Dodge parts catalog, might be intimidating to someone who isn’t a car person. Our hobby has time and financial commitments that gatekeep others out too. We love it anyway.
Chasing an authentic or definitive experience, is like going for tops at a car show. A goal worth striving for but not required to enjoy the hobby.
Just like we can talk about how Donkey Kong, or Super Mario Bros. or Doom impacted gaming forever. So could your car guy about thunderbirds, corvettes, or some other third thing.
Equally sad is cars today, like games, are engineered to make as much money as possible and not for repair or longevity. Meanwhile the classics will always have a community dedicated to preserving them even as the stock of parts grow thin and less accessible.
In 30 years no one is going to be able to drive a car from the near future even if they wanted to as they get reduced to required apps to start and LTE connectivity for the on board computer functionality, the same way Fortnite won’t exist even though Super Mario Bros still plays fine on OG hardware
The 80s had some great games. Donkey Kong. Pac-Man. Galaga and Galaxian. Super Mario Bros 1,2,3. Zelda 1 & 2. Contra, Castlevania, Megaman
But the 90s had Mario World and Mario Kart. Super Metroid. Link to the Past. Donkey Kong Country. Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Crash and Spyro. Sonic. Medal of Honor. Goldeneye. Half - Life.
I’d probably take the 90s slightly over the 80s. Heck even the 00s have Half-Life 2, the GTA series, the good Call of Duty’s and Halos. And the 2010s had RDR2 and GTAV.
2020s haven’t had any super great games yet though.
Call of Duty: United Offensive on PC. I just recently came back after a decade of not playing (and over 20 years after release) and the community is still there just smaller and the game is still just as fun
I don’t think he’s being nasty to you. His frustration is with Rockstar for abandoning GTA to sell microtransactions instead of make content. A lot of people are mad at valve for not making Half-Life/Portal/Left4Dead 3 just like a lot of people are mad at Rockstar for taking 13 years to release a new GTA game.
The price is too high. They are going to sell skins and characters. The game is going to be fluffed with open world sections instead of actual content. I probably won’t enjoy it.
I agree with the author’s assessment that Uncharted and the Last of Us use the right tool at the moment for their stories.
I don’t get the criticism about Call of Duty and Halo following Half-Life’s success of limited cutscenes and scripted events to tell their stories. In fact as soon as the article started these were the exact games I thought of to rebut his point. They are the best story based FPS games of their generation and they don’t need an open world that’s believable in absence of its own protagonist.
Far Cry/The Division/Ghost Recon are all Open World shooters with a believable world. They have terrible (IMO, feel free to disagree) stories though.
I thought his analysis was interesting just not sure what the point was and if it was what I thought it was that Half-Life negatively influenced stories in games then I disagree.
Upscaling an old game on fixed hardware that can’t output at high resolutions is good.
Upscaling a new game as part of the graphics pipeline instead of optimizing it is terrible and shouldn’t be accepted by gamers that have to spend $1000+ on a GPU
That quote is just horribly disturbing to me. He’s basically letting the mask drop that their endgame isn’t to make great games, it’s to make you hopelessly addicted to screen time that you obsessively play and spend
All time favorite game is so hard to narrow down. I’d traditionally always say Mario 3 and I stand behind that but there are so many great games that stand beside it. Donkey Kong Country, Half Life, San Andreas, red dead redemption 1 and 2.
I think if I was trapped on a desert island, I’d be fine with any of these as my only game
I have no idea about the game and whether it actually contains gambling content or is just being auto flagged due to the title but this kind of crap is why I hate big tech and is why I hope we eventually have a future where decentralized services rule over big tech.