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Here's why modern gaming suuuuucks.

So when I was a kid in the 80s, I would always get SUPER excited for getting a new game.

We'd get in the car, drive to Toys R Us, and in the video game section was basically an homage to Nintendo. So much so that the descriptors at the end of the isles didn't say "video games", it said "Nintendo". Sure, they sold Sega and Atari too.....but it was the Nintendo isle.

So you'd pick your game, and on the drive home you would flip through your new game manual. Remember game manuals??? You'd learn all about this new world. Who was this "Zelda" if the main character was a boy??? What kind of world was this??? It looks HUGE!!!! DO YOU SEE ALL THESE DIFFERENT ENEMIES???

Finally (after like 10 minutes), you'd get home. You'd race to the door, only for you to realize that you need dad to unlock the door. Now, dad was probably walking at a normal pace, but to a hyper 6 year old excited to play with his new toy, he may as well have been a dried out turtle. Or a sloth.

FINALLY he opens the front door, and you go rushing to the TV. You put the cartridge in, and you're ready to play. You turn the power on, and you're already at the name screen. After you put in the name "Dork", because you're an edgy 80s kid, you're already in front of a cave. Oh god.....what's in there??? How do I fight monsters??? THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING!!! Oh god, oh god, here we go, we're going in the cave.....

And you all know how it plays out from there.

These days, it's a bit different. These days a game gets announced and you wait for release day. Then you turn on your console, and you buy the game. Now you gotta wait for an hour for it to download. Thats assuming your console doesn't need an update. So now you're waiting.....and waiting.....and waiting.......

Eventually it's all done, and you boot the game up, but theres a day 1 update. So more waiting. FINALLY after an hour and a half it's done.

So you boot it up, and you don't get that same sense of wonderment. It's because todays games have been done to death. Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphisis is on online play. So now you already know what you're getting, and you gotta wait again for online lobbies to start.

And when Nintendo released the Super Nintendo it was a radical jump in performance in every sense on a platform that was revolutionary to start with. It was must have technology.

Now, 50% of PS4 users haven't upgraded to a newer system. And why? Because the PS5 looks like a slight visual upgrade in apperance, and zero upgrade in performance. Games look and feel mostly the same as they would on PS4. And the games are all the same. Microtransactions, unimaginative plots, forgetable characters, sequals reboots prequals. We're seeing the same franchises, with the same characters doing the same things for 30 years. Mario is still saving the princess for Bowser. At this point, Peach is just LETTING herself get kidnapped. Zelda is going to save Link now in the new game.....which would be a new concept, playing as Zelda, except Shiek was Zelda the whole time. Oops, spoilers on a 26 year old game.

Breath of the Wild had that samr sense of childhood wonder. But only if you actively avoided online discussions, youtube videos, social media. It was a barrage of avoiding spoilers, but I did it, and March 3rd 2017 was GLORIOUS. It's also the last time I felt that need to get a new console.

I regretted buying a PS4, but for some stupid reason I bought a PS5 this year. I regret it. I see no system seller.

And thats another thing. Why can't the games give you the option to play from disc, rather than install everything? Most games are like 50-100gb. It eats up storage REAL quick. Now you gotta decide "ok, which games do I want to delete, and which am I going to use soon?

Theres NO reason for me to justify 45gb on my hard drive for the PS4 version of Madden 19, when all I do is play exhibition. But I also don't want to delete it, and reinstall it every few months on the off chance I want yo play 20 minutes of 1 game.

Sure, maybe Madden diehards get use out of that 45gb. I do not. I don't play season. I do give a shit about those madden cards. I only play exhibition, 1 game, maybe once every 4 months. Same with NHL. Same with MLB.

Why must I take up like 200gb for games I play casually and sparingly, and almost ALWAYS have to sit through an update before I throw the ball? I don't even care about roster updates. Unless they're on Cleveland's team, I don't know any of these players. I don't give a shit that Joe Whatshisname used to play for Chicago, but now he plays in New York.

I just want to pop in the disc, and play. No bullshit.

I wish Madden 95 worked on the SNES classic. It's the last SNES version that Cleveland had a team.

But instead now, every single game comes with forced bullshit

34 comments
  • You do not miss old games. You miss being a careless happy kid.

    You can easily ignore the whole corporate AAA games-as-a-service bullshit.

    There was never a better time to be an indie gamer. Arcade, platformer, racing, RPG, shooter. You can find a GOTY contender in each category under 5 USD each year.

    • Exactly this. For me it becomes obvious, when I play older games. Sure, A Link to the Past is still a gem, Super Metroid or SMB3, too. But many of those older games, we have fond memories of, kind of suck today. Just a bit, they are still fun. But the magic is gone. Saw that with Sands of Time a few weeks ago. Then the System Shock Remake came and gave that sense of wonder back.

      Downloads are no problem. Disk space is cheaper then ever. Go have fun discussing games on Lemmy while waiting for the download, watch a Video about it or whatever. It is just harder to have fun, because we have sooo much to choose from and because some of us became old grumpy farts (myself included).

  • I mean, you're 40 now (or close to it). A lot of your nostalgia is also wrapped up in being 5. I too was an 80s kid but if the market hadn't changed your reaction would. You probably aren't sitting under a blanket learning the names in Dave the Diver. You have an income now so you probably wouldn't just wait till your parents bought you Hades 2. You're probably not running around with your friends right now pretending to be Helldivers. Games have changed but so have you. The Indie market is carrying the torch of these bygone days. A lot of the stuff you want wouldn't have the same impact on you today. I am however watching my own children glom into game characters. My daughter loves Mario and Mega Man without going to Blockbuster to rent the cartridges.

    (Btw madden 95 does work on the SNES classic, they're pretty easy to jail break and fill with your own ROMs)

  • You’re getting so many responses that are just “have you tried indie games?” or trying to dispel the rose-colored glasses. I suspect it’s because of the headline saying modern gaming sucks, which I think can be pretty objectively disproven.

    That said, I can tell you about my experiment. I’ve instituted a program with my 12 year old stepson where he can earn marbles through chores and other tasks, and he can trade those marbles in for retro games I find in local stores and flea markets. One of the things he can also buy for a very low price is a downloaded retro magazine from retromags.com - he can ask for an issue with a particular topic in it and I’ll find one and send it to him. He isn’t really very internet savvy yet, so he’s not likely to hit up IGN for info or anything.

    The result of this so far (only a few weeks in) has been serious excitement and engagement. He has access to Xbox Series and PS5 consoles, but getting to own physical games and accessories (we play them on a Retron 3 HD console) has motivated him more than I’ve seen almost anything else do. He keeps asking me if Street Fighter 2 will come to the “store” anytime soon because of my stories of how badly I wanted that game as a kid his age. Little does he know that for Christmas he’ll be getting an excellent condition, complete in box copy of Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition for the Genesis. He’s gonna flip.

    The upshot of all this is that I really do think there was a certain magic to the experience back then. I’m doing my damnedest to recreate that magic for him, and so far it’s at least kinda working!

  • Your experience from 80s is similar to my experience now with Switch games (it's not the same only because I'm not a kid). Download times do suck but I have a really simple solution for them: I simply do something else until it's finished. And there are great games that don't take much space space on your storage, Balatro is first one that comes to mind.

  • Most modern AAA games sucks. Mainly because majority of them have started to go with the online only bullcrap when it is not even necessary. Not to mention that trend too where games are sold half baked with the rest of the game being delivered later as separate to purchase DLC(s).

    I have already embraced Indies. Fun fact: Baldurs Gate 3 is an indie game (although the quality is very much an AAA game and also some argueably saying it is not because Larian is a large private company that independently publishes their games)

  • It's easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80's kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It's part of the reason there's so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn't put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn't have the manuals available, so they'd get stuck (before Internet info access).

    I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I've only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I'll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it's mine forever.

    That's setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It's trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.

    • Yes with inflation games are proportionately less, but let's also not forget that wages have stagnated while inflation has ballooned. People literally aren't earning much than they were in the 90s (well, the average person, the inflation money has gone to the dragons). The price of games relative to mean wage is fairly consistent IIRC.

      But yeah everything else is pretty true. And we all look back on games as kids with rose colored glasses. I remember when majoras mask was photorealistic to me almost!

      • In the US, since the conversation began with an American retailer? No. The larger trend in this reference window--since the early 90's--is flat wage growth versus inflation (productivity has increased massively, but the implications of that are a whole other conversation). There was a recent, brief period of inflation outpacing wages as a result of the pandemic, but that trend has also since reversed to a small degree. New fast food hires weren't making $15 an hour in 1992. There's been wage growth, just closely in-line with inflation over the long term. It's an apples-to-apples comparison here, unusually so.

        Video games are dramatically less expensive now to purchase than they were in the fourth gen. It's easy to see why, too; the marginal cost of a cartridge-based game was substantial, owing to a relatively complex manufacturing process. That marginal cost dropped substantially with disc media (with a corresponding drop in game prices at retail), and then again to near zero with digital distribution.

  • tl;dr: "Growing up sucks because it makes everything look the same old."

    I mean... yeah. That is why you have to stop wishing for "the same old" over and over again and embrace the new. And yes, I (also) think DRM has no other purpose than to hinder performance.

    t. am (also) a 80's "kid".

34 comments