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RetroGaming @lemmy.world
Lost_My_Mind @lemmy.world
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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

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48 comments

  • My friend, I think you need to join us indie gamers, especially on PC. DRM free, minimal updates, small installs, high novelty and weirdness factors. I barely play anything "AAA" anymore and definitely nothing that does Games as a Service.

    92

  • 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)

    78

  • 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".

    28

  • 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.

    25

    • 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!

      1

      • 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.

        1
  • Spoiler

    Definitely don't search for Madden NFL 95 SNES ROMS

    RetroArch is really neat.

    Steam Deck OLED is pretty awesome. Microsoft-free PC in your hands.

    Anyway it's all about DRM.

    You will own nothing and you will love it. /S

    You can give your steam info to your loved one and accidentally forgot to tell them when you die 🥹.

    Or there's always GoG.

    I've been🖥️ PC/Linux 🐧 only since 2019, no regrets.

    25

  • 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.

    24

    • 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).

      6

  • Excuse me, I wasn't paying attention, too busy playing Stardew Valley

    21

  • First, you are way older now. You cannot compare any experience in your life to that when you were a kid

    20

  • People are writing a lot of things that I agree with, but I want to chime in with two points.

    The first, which one or two other commenters have touched on, is that in 2024 we have approximately 50 years of content already in existence. There's no need to limit ourselves to what's been released in the last 12 months. Classic books, music, plays, and movies stay popular for decades or centuries. Why feel shamed out of playing old games by 12-year-olds and the megacorps?

    The second thing is, yes, try indie games, and IMO the best place to find them is for PCs on itch.io. Forget 95% of what's marketed as "indie" on consoles.

    18

  • 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!

    17

    • This is a nice story. I like this. My parents would occasionally buy me games, but it was mostly once or twice a year, and they never got excited for my excitement. They would just complain that all I do is play video games. Meanwhile all dad did was watch sports, and all mom did was watch news.

      But somehow I'M an asshole 7 year old for not playing outside, and being glued to the tv all day! I'm ranting, but yes, 40 year old me is still pissed at my parents.

      Getting back on track, I think it's adorable how you not only engage with your kid, and teach him the value of earning things. And participate with your kid.

      Makes me wonder if you were a fan of the aki wrestling games on N64. There's a definate depth to those games that you don't find in todays wrestling games. AEW tried......but I feel like their third game they might start getting it right. For reference, they've only made 1 game, and it took 4 years to make.

      3

      • Same same. I literally have hundreds, if not thousands, of games in my digital libraries. The absolute entertainment value of that is astronomical, but at the same time, the experience of receiving any given game has become devalued to the point of meaninglessness in some cases.

        I wanted to try and recreate that feeling of reading about a game, falling in love with every screenshot and drop of info, and working hard (or begging hard) to get it as one of the 2, maybe 3 games you’d get in a year. You read the manual twice on the car ride home, you save the box, you learn everything about it. I’ve told him about pausing the NES because you just got farther than you ever got before, you only have one life left, and you need to go to school. The idea of having an experience like that is being lost in today’s culture in my opinion.

        Edit: Forgot to answer, no, I have not tried the Aki wrestling games. I only ever played WCW/NWO World Tour for a while in college with my buddies for the four-player bikinis, but I never really was into wrestling games or TV otherwise.

        2

  • "Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphasis is on online play"

    Buys the same game 15 times

    Complains that it's the same game again

    Have you tried not doing that

    15

  • 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)

    12

  • TLDR: Agree on many points but also you are wrong in some things. Certain parts of AAA gaming make modern games feel like a chore or feel bad compared to how AAA games used to feel. But also the market of games is flooded and making more money than ever before.

    Regarding some of your points:

    All the games today are the same

    I get what you're saying, but you're also wrong. There are so many games out there these days that vary widely in art, style, design, gameplay, etc. There have literally never been so many different kinds of game on the market at once. Now, I agree that AAA studios are mostly only making "safe" games they know will sell, and I too am upset that companies these days are so risk adverse that they will refuse to make a new game as experimental as something like Illbleed, but thats what happens when a hobby goes mainstream and investors that are greedy get invovled.

    Why can't I just play from disk

    Because load times would be astronomical. Disk read speeds are still slow, way slower than solid state drive read speeds. Your 10 second loading screens would be longer than 45 seconds, even the PS1 would probably load games faster. In this case, some data may not be loaded completely by the time the game decides to let you in, as some assets in games now are streamed from the drive as needed instead of being loaded directly into RAM at the start of a scene. Relying on a slow mechanical disk laser to stream that data in a manner that wouldn't cause crashing or missing assets would not be feasible. They could try solid storage but that comes with its own caveats and increased manufacture price.

    Complaining about storage

    I agree, but also games have big textures and better quality audio these days compared to the old days. Sure, not all games need that, but if storage space is a complaint then play any one of the ten trillion indie card battlers. The bigger files also increase load times, more data in general needs more time to search and load.

    Complaints about MTX and such

    I agree, predatory monetization sucks. The only times I am okay with inclusion of MTX/Lootbox/Gachapon etc is if the game is free. The developers have to make money somehow. I play occasional gacha games, usually developed for mobile devices but I like to play on PC. I really enjoyed Super Mecha Champions, but they will probably be ending support sometime soon as they have gone into maintenance mode. But I have been very surprised with Zenless Zone Zero. I kinda hate how much I like the game, honestly.

    Point is, while I agree that MTX suck, in a free game its acceptable IMO because the developers have to make money. Gacha is really big in Asian culture, and I am not one to police someone else's culture or say what they do is bad, its just different. MTX on any paid game is just sad though.

    ---------BotW Rant-----------

    IMO Breath of the Wild was a terrible Zelda game. Like, Zelda II Adventure of Link bad, not Wand of Gamelan bad though. It isn't a bad game in general, I would give it maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10 (unlike many people today I actually like to use all 10 numbers), it just felt average because it was. I laughed like a maniac when Tears of the Kingdom cane out and made Breath of the Wild look like a sad tech demo, and every reviewer that gave BotW a high score now suddenly looked like the biggest idiot on the planet because they were scoring TotK the same despite it being the clearly better game.

    Zelda, ever since the 3rd game in its series, followed a clear formula. When people bought a Zelda game after Link to the Past, they had an idea of what to expect. Its like people going to a burger joint because they know they sell burgers. BotW though, deleted all of that in an attempt to go back and repeat what only ONE game in the entire Zelda franchise up to that point had done. A game that the franchise had largely moved on from, it had built upon that concept in its later iterations. BotW was a downgrade, because a lot of people going to that same burger joint were now suddenly getting served ground beef, without any of the other ingredients in a burger.

    TotK was much better in being an actual Zelda game, but it still was missing a lot of what people expect from a Zelda game. No real, large and elaborate dungeons, just a pitiful attempt (albeit still a better attempt than BotW) at a 4 room "dungeon." No pieces of heart, no hookshot or magic instrument, no bottles to collect, etc. It felt like I was playing an Ubisoft open world game cosplaying as a Zelda game.

    -----------BotW Rant Over------------

    10

  • Have you tried indie games? There's more games and variety than ever, and you're lumping everything into these neat little easy-to-criticize packages.

    Gaming doesn't suck. Your expectations do.

    8

  • You're playing the wrong games if you think modern games are all the same. Buy a half decent mini PC, install Steam, and play indie games.

    There are even a ton of retro games on Steam. Not vintage, but retro. New games with old school graphics and appeal, like The Messenger.

    8

  • Feels extremely relevant.

    7

  • did anyone else break the plastic on their new game and stick their nose in it and inhale that brain damaging chemically new game smell?

    God that was better than heroine for me.

    7

  • I remember reading about Elite in a (paper) magazine, and I WANTED IT. Counted my pocket money. Drove my bike to a mainly photo related retailer (only one reachable for me, they also did PC games as a side job), and there it was, box art in the window! Went in, told em I wanted that, and - big disappointment - they had to order it. THEY HAD A DISPLAY OF THE BOX ART, BUT NO COPY OF THE REAL THING! I had to pay upfront, cash, and then had to ride the bike there, again, two times, within a fornight, cos there was no notification of arrival then. The joy, tension, reading through the manual, while it was installing... unbeatable. Spent most of my afternoons in game, doing my "homework".

    6

  • 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.

    5

  • Grew in that age too. Just cause you are playing games that are shitty doesn't mean games are shitty now. The game market is bigger than it's ever been. Game has forced online play and microtransactions? Don't buy it.

    There was tons of absolute garbage in the 80s. There's tons of great stuff now. If you've lost your sense of discovery that seems more like a you thing than a "games are bad now" thing.

    P.S. go play Tunic if you haven't already.

    5

  • You need to realize the reality: we live in a cyberpunk world now.

    4

  • I'm lucky enough to live next to a retro game store. I can still walk over see a random ps1 game, glance through the manual and play it at as soon as I get home. Still lots of great stuff out there and that's just one system. The game I just made a post about only cost me about $10.

    I hate the install/download times for new stuff too. I'm hoping for some sci-fi/tech miracle that solves the whole thing.

    4

    • I mean... My FiOS 300/300 is $39.99/month (what's a landline/cable?)

      I do have fancy NVME 4.0 Drives...they don't really cost more than comparable SATA III SSDs now...

      It is totes insane we have 1TB+ MicroSD cards now 🤯

      Like consoles are a trap, subsidized hardware/sold at cost to trap you into their software/DRM. And also really just crappy specced PCs.

      I live near game stores too... But I also Live near MicroCenter 🥹

      8

  • In the '80s, we had to travel > 40 minutes each way. I could afford a game maybe once every month or two, but I ended up getting more into D&D instead and spending my money on those books (both game books and novels).

    When Blockbuster got games for rent, that was great because my town actually had one and it was only about 15-20 minutes each way.

    I mostly stuck to computer gaming into the '90s, though. I played a gamecube or N64 a couple of times, but never really got into it (and we certainly couldn't afford to buy them). It was still kinda the same deal for computer games, though; do I have enough RAM for this? Can my Amiga work with a RAM expansion? I guess there were less things, but they still existed. Probably on the C64 as well, but I remember that less.

    I do miss the manuals, though; that's for sure.

    3

  • Opening a new SNES or PS1 game was the best.

    3

  • I know, right? I feel the same way.

    I own multiple consoles right now, but I also have a Switch that I often put away and cancel my NSO subscription because where I live online functionality is limited in the countryside.

    I had learned not to play ‘the latest and greatest titles’ of the current generation out of stigma.

    Because modern games sometimes flop too.

    Most of my consoles are older, but I have different reasons to put them up though because it’s not healthy to play to frustration with games.

    Or the games typically do something I don’t like.

    For example, I had played Ocarina of Time to the point where Phatom Ganon is just too much for me excluding all the minigames I avoided because I wanted to advance the plot.

    And in FFVII, apparently Cloud Strife gets told by Aeris to…dress like a girl and enter an adult entertainment place…just to reach a friend?

    And the game is rated T for some reason?

    But that’s my take on the PlayStation that some if not all of the games are too mature for my tastes.

    What I’m trying to say is this: I resonate with your post though I’m divided over my own systems.

    I do have an Atari 2600 and Sega Genesis though that I enjoy personally and I collect my own titles for each system depending on my current mood.

    You would probably enjoy my systems because not all of them have Internet besides my own Dreamcast, which connects with a DreamPi and private servers that I had help with years ago.

    Though I made a living playing PSO before, I just couldn’t get back into it anymore so I put that up.

    My other systems matter to me as well, and not even they have Internet for the most part.

    I totally validate your experiences with games.

    I may not play NES like you, but that’s because I was ripped off by mine (the expansion port case broke on me) unlike my own Atari 2600 instead.

    That system worked out better in my opinion.

    But it’s okay that you like games from the 80s because you grew up on that in the first place.

    It’s really neat to me, though I’m different.

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