I never got the “modern games are no fun!” thing because I’ve always played retro games only. Growing up around my dad and his SNES Station, I ended getting influenced.
With the exception of “buy game”, “disk/cartridge”, and split-screen mode with minigames, this is Endless Sky.
Digital gaming can be great when corpos don’t ruin everything that makes it great.
Because of this and also the whole RAM deal, I’m wondering if some retro trend is going to happen. Like gamers just going back to exactly those games.
Pretty sure it’s already happening, retro console pricing has been going up from what I’ve seen
Retro games and indie games, the golden combo.
They all run in potatoes, are fun, unique, doesn’t have anti-consumer practices built in. It’s all golden.
Honestly, that’s the entire reason i lost interest in consoles after buying the PS4. If i need to:
1 Boot up the console.
2 Update the system (twice).
3 PSN account bullshit.
4 Insert disc.
5 Install the game.
6 Download 50GB update for the game.
7 Install said update.
8 Finally start the game.
9 Login and TOS bullshit.
10 Finally play game.I might just as well use my PC for gaming at that point. The games library is larger and the exclusives are just not worth it. Especially after Sony started releasing those on PC as well.
Especially after Sony started releasing those on PC as well.
They put a stop to that, and now it’s more clear why: they want absolute control over the price of their games.
Arggg too.
PC gaming has more exclusives btw
i’ve never had to spend hours finding the ‘right driver’ for my PS4 to run a game. or having to mod the game to get it to just play.
which is why i gave up on PC gaming, I’m old and I just want to play games, I don’t wnat to spend 2-3 hours ‘troubleshooting’ every game on my PC and having to swap drivers because some games only run on some drivers.
i’ve never had to spend hours finding the ‘right driver’ for my PS4 to run a game. or having to mod the game to get it to just play.
Funny, I’ve never had to.do.those things on my PC.
that makes one of us
Two of us.
And we’re on Linux even. It has its own share of issues. Generally, if a problem is game-specific, the fixes are stuff like “switch Proton versions” (there’s a little dropdown in Steam or whatever launcher you use) or “toss some environment variable in the launch options”. But those are really a thing of the past now, stuff just works.
And it never took installing drivers for a specific game (…huh?). Installing drivers is a thing you do once, if that, during initial setup, just like you’d do account creation for a console.
– Frost
cool. I am not you. I have to do it basically every time i want to PC game, and always have.
even my nephews have to do it frequently and they just bought new gaming PCs that are a few months old.
Yeah you should probably stick with consoles then.
On PC I don’t have to rebuy games because Sony doesn’t believe in backwards compatibility.
This is def nostalgia goggles, so many games were broken buggy messes back then because there was no way to ship updates
No, they weren’t. Most had bugs, but they weren’t game-breaking. A lot of people took joy in finding and exploiting the bugs too. Dupes, etc.
Yeah, some shitty games were loaded with bugs.
bugs? nah, not a problem
whistles in Morrowind
Thats not really fair. Morrowind was so buggy someone decided they needed to remake the entire game engine to play it. I wouldn’t say most games where like that.
Try playing the original SEGA catalog. Lemme know how many of those games work.
Most of them? Care to provide some examples without the ridiculous “don’t work” hyperbole? Clearly most Sega games were functional, otherwise no one would’ve been playing them.
Did you try blowing in them?
That wasn’t actually good for the cartridge, long term. My parents provided us with q-tips, but we were a Nintendo family. I had a few friends that had the SEGA Master System, and though I don’t remember the titles, I do remember several cartridges that we never played, because there were problems with the game a level or two in.
oh so the whole “sega games are broken” thing was just your experience with your friend’s pirated or literally broken cartridges?
Nope. Those were official SEGA games. This is literally the reason that the SEGA vs Nintendo wars started.
i’m pretty sure console wars start when two companies try to fill the same niche, not when one company (according to one person’s anecdote) has broken games
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”
I guess GenAI slop is making me age faster, then
As someone who recently started hoarding old tools I wish that was true for all things.
We just recently got a singer 500a and its still impressive the engineering that went into that thing. The machine work is beautiful, and if you told me it was made in a CNC machine today I would of believed you.
Today modern and new, just means slave labor and plastic molded parts. Besides computers a lot of things haven’t really changed. And often when they have changed it’s for the worst. If I get a sewing machine today it would come with some app and internet connection for no reason, and would have plastic parts that struggle to get through 3 layers of cloth. While the singer 500a was meant to run 24/7 and is essentially the same exact thing.
For the most part the world has kind of been solved sense shortly after the industrial revolution. All the general commodities we interact with where mostly at their peak form back then. Dish washers, fridges, washing machines, driers. They’re all almost exactly the same as they where when they where invented. There have been minor improvements that have been added over the years but for the most part things are in general just shittier.
You can blame so many things, you can say that mass production, trickle down economics, exporting labor etc all causes this. You can say that everyones access to mass produced garbage is an indicator of wealth and poverty dropping. What I don’t think you can say anymore is that things “products” are better than they where in the old days.
I agree with your statement about cultural aspects though. Other than that when I hear some new innovative product the first thing that comes to my mind is its going to be another internet of things device that constantly bugs me and asks for more data, while providing 0 utility over the old version of the product, if anything its going to add more friction to my task, or attempt to insert a paywall into my life where one never existed before.
With games its harder to objectively say things where worse/better, but this infection of syphoning money out of every possible source infects games too. The only reason I can’t say new modern games are bad is because indie games exist. Some of those indie games actually have brought me back to a childhood state where games where actually fun.
We’re 26. The new stuff is crap, and that’s not just nostalgia goggles, it is actually objectively worse.
There’s plenty of new stuff that isn’t crap, like say indie games. But the platforms, the consoles, etc.? Those are intentionally disrespectful these days in a way even, say, the Wii/PS3 era of consoles wasn’t (and they certainly weren’t perfect either, it just started getting way worse way faster after that).
When a game sucked ass then you had a physical product you could sell or trade to offload it. Instead of the whole game getting the servers shut off and delisted within a year if it’s bad today. Even the bad games were better back then because of this
On one hand it’s nostalgia, on another - over-fixation on a certain type of games that are designed to be addictive and drain your wallet. But there are many other games to play that are nothing like that.
i’ve played single player games my entire life and got nothing but shit for it. i guess because they don’t have all the drama of multiplayer games and the constant updates?
Full game on a disk? You new school kids don’t know that 1/2 of the game is loading the 17, 5 1/2" floppies in order just to install your game.
Final Fantasy VII was so big it came on 7 discs
and we all had our own way of stacking the floppies. so you would never install anything with anyone you didn’t trust around, because they might move your stacks.
This is why I sometimes still play Civ2 or SC2K
Okay guys 'n gals. What’s your first game you thought of while reading this greentext?
Mine is TimeSplitters 2 on PS2.
Mortal Kombat: Deception. Honestly, fighting games are one of my least favorite genres nowadays. But as a very young kid (way too young to be playing MK lol), it was a lot of fun.
I always got my ass kicked by my older siblings, so I preferred taking turns in the story mode over playing against other people. Probably one of the reasons I strongly prefer co-op and PvE games even today, now that I think about it.
You should try Tekken Tag Tournament. It’s one of my favorite games because you can play the Story Mode in CoOp and it’s soo much fun!
Turok.
GoldenEye N64
I thought of an era, not a specific game.
Tell me more! :D
It was a time of both plug and play simplicity, and head banging frustration. Consoles were dumb easy, and had to have a catalog that competed with the others. PC games were the wild west. Everything from it just works to eight disc setups, but not a single mainstream way to extract more money after the game had been sold. You could pop your ass on the couch and play the same game for 8 hours and still not do everything in it despite the lack of online capabilities. It was an era of mystery, is this article/friend/kid taking me for one? Or is Yoshi really there at the top of Peaches castle in Mario 64? If you’d never know if you or a friend didnt do it in front of you. Subscription was a thing but they seem modest by today’s standards. Zezima, Athena, and LeeroyJenkins were the names of our Gods.
Oh man. Amen! Thank you for this awesome text. I’m just 26 years old, but I think this is the golden times. Not like, those are the best games or stuff, it’s just… I kinda feel like those were the good times. Even tho even then there was many shitty games. Probably even most of the games. It’s hard to describe this feeling. :/
The games are still there. Nintendo may cost an arm and a leg now but it kinda did then too and Zelda still never asks where your season pass is. Some games are the classic games in disguise like Flock Around is just Pokemon Snap without rails. Theres this game called Star Garden thats Kirby Air Ride with a Chao Garden thrown in. Cassette Beasts is Steam Pokemon. I host my own Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2 server. Its all still there and still being made. The golden era never ended, its just the giants aren’t peddling it anymore and the river is so wide it can be a chore to wade. But, have you slain Olga Flow in the depths of the world? Or repelled the second coming of Orochi with a stroke of your celestial brush? Or discovered the mystery behind what happened to Darth Revan? Theres thousands of hours of games to get through before the modern era. Vimm’s lair has 1/4th of it. Kindle your soul and keep the age of fire burning a little longer.
Yeah, while my mind did go to GoldenEye, this really applied to NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and ps2, out of the systems I have/had.
My wii u games are still playable, though they might try to connect to a server that no longer exists to look for updates. Similar with ps3 (though I think my system needs an overhaul because it’s running pretty slow these days, like many dropped frames in rock band 2 or even some in GH3).
For the ps5, I’m not sure what will happen when Sony no longer wants to support it. I mostly have physical games, maybe I should try disconnecting the internet and see what happens if I try to fire up random games, both ones I’ve already played and ones that haven’t left their case yet.
Anyways, I mostly thought of the era of the first paragraph, since the others have updates.
Oh definitely Gauntlet Legends on the N64, I ruined the game cartridge I played it so often. Good times
Super Mario World on SNES
Goldeneye
I gotta play it. Sadly as I grew older, those old FPS with low FoV give me motion sickness in like minutes. Can’t even enjoy Build Engine games anymore, which were my favorite old school games back then. :c
While not my absolute favourite 2 player game, my friend and I sunk hours and hours into Champions of Norrath 1 and 2. We must have played new game+ like, 5 or 6 times. Loved it!
(Most love probably goes to Street Fighter 2 on the Megadrive)
Perfect Dark
You mean Goldeneye 2?
Soldier of Fortune
Mario kart 64
That and Quake II are the only console games I’ve ever sunk an enormous amount of time into.
Super Mario World
That game is like 50% secrets and still Nintendos best work IMO.Goof Troop… Surprisingly hard to beat that game in co-op 😂
Halo ce
DK64. I see so much hate for it now, with people saying there are way too many collectibles, but those people fail to realize that back then most kids only had a few games that they just had to play over and over again if they wanted to play video games at all. To have a game that always had a new thing to collect even when you went to the same level for the 1000th time was a godsend.
I loved playing as Lanky Kong.
I had that, 007, Pokemon Stadium, Tony Hawk, and Turok. Anything else I had to rent from Blockbuster.
Ratchet and Clank - Up your Arsenal
Spyro the Dragon. Man I need to find the time to play through that entire stack of games again…
The remake of the trilogy is pretty good, if you haven’t tried it.
I have, and i loved every minute of it. 😁 But it has been to long since i played the PS2 and PS3 games…
At least with those games you had a collectible figure once the game was finished.
???
-Oh you talking about Skylanders? Never got into that. I was talking about the original games.
Oh yeah I forgot there was the other game.
Gotta agree here. That game was so much fun. Just remember the monkey assistant mode (don’t know what it was called in english, the german localization called it “Affiger Assistent” which translates to “monkey-like assistant” or “silly assistant”) in multiplayer!
As a fellow German, I feel ya. The monkey was also my favorite char when playing pvp. lol
Divinity and then Dark Souls
Jet Force Gemini
Bubble Bobble, but it was on my boyfriend’s C64. I wasn’t allowed a computer (and was thus obsessed by them, lol)
Super Monkey Ball 2 on GC. My brother and I spent more time playing the mini games than the game itself.
Pokémon Leaf Green
Twisted Metal on PS1
Golden Sun 😊
Fuzion Frenzy even though it doesn’t really apply because it wasn’t really single player at all, it was only local co-op mini games like a Mario Party kinda (with no board.)
Even though it doesn’t really match what the greentext is describing, the vibe of just, like, enjoying video games in your living room with no DLC nor microtransactions made me think of it. It’s a game that was, like, moderately successful but not enough that I ever run into people on the internet that know about it, so it almost feels like a kind of secret I share with my sister, and the game had strong art direction that was really early 2000s that hits me with nostalgia too.
Okay that looks REALLY interesting. Thank you for sharing! Gotta share one thing: Bishi Bashi! PSX game that’s also a minigames collection. Pretty fun, quite high quality as far as I can tell. Haven’t found someone to play it atm. :c Still, looks fun af!
when can i stop living in this universe and switch back to the one we originally were on? man i miss it so much. That and original pizzahut
Convince another weasel to dine on the particle collider in Switzerland.
and those planters cheeseballs. the new ones don’t have as much msg
you never did and you never will.
games cost about 4x what they do today back then. you were paying 40-80 dollars per game, and they never got discounted really unless they became a huge hit and got a best seller release and maybe they went down to 20-30, in 2026 dollars, that’s between 40-160 dollars per game. which is the reason why most folks only bought like 2-4 games a year if they were lucky. now you are buying dozens of games per year for like $100-200.
i agree with you in a way, its true that in the 2000’s i could only buy about a game a year also because you weren’t switching consoles as frequently as we do. I could wish for a game from Xbox and i would never play it because the console i had at home was playstation. Nowadays that is leveled, but this goes hand in hand with the things related to the amount of games we have vs what games we finish. And back then i fisnished all small amounts of games and we recall every nook and cranny of the games, nowadays its really cool to look at a 200 game library but we are not taking the best of them because of the diversity, we have so much we quite cant click as easily (at least this is how i feel but i have found people with different opinions)
i buy two games per year for $100 tops but more like $50 after shipping and taxes. my personal and local public library give me plenty to do.
-Actually belongs to you -Developers can’t delete it
It’s usually publishers who are the villains here, not devs.
You’re completely right, whoops
The sweet spot was getting the full game on disc and getting included DLC, having the ability to mod the game, and run private servers. It was kinda the golden era of this stage in gaming. Computers were powerful enough to give a great visual experience and studios were still interested in producing engaging storylines in triple A releases instead of just banging out battle royale games.
You could just enjoy the game as-is with a really good singleplayer campaign and then with whatever online offered. To this day I still have great memories of Half Life, Crysis, or even MoH:AA, especially the Snowy Park map. Do they compare graphically with today’s games like Fortnite? Not a chance. But you remember the story and how the game was way better at pulling you into it.
Some of the mods from this era turned out to be just as popular, if not moreso, than the original base game. Some of them live on to this day.
Sure, some Steam games offer mods and the like, but it certainly isn’t the same thing as what we had 15 or so years ago.
If you haven’t grabbed it, Black Mesa is like $3 right now during the summer sale
Never played it. I’ll have a look. Thanks.
It’s a modern day Half Life 1. Fan remake, with greatly expanded Xen levels. Obviously they got Valve’s permission, given the whole companion cube steam machine fiasco.
Back in 1997 I bought the game KKnD (Krush, Kill n’ Destroy) in a local store for what would now be 110 dollars only to discover that it was broken and wouldn’t run on my machine and there was no way to get a patch for it.
But I guess you could get your money back?
Nope :) I mean, I was 13, so maybe I could have if I’d pressed it but I was a kid and figured it was just bad luck.
Like, we weren’t online - you couldn’t look up consumer protection rules and shit back then, you had to rely on some adult who wasn’t a complete moron knowing what to do.
I randomly got KKnD Crossfires for PS1 and we played countless hours in split screen :D
Well, that’s just rubbing it in, isn’t it? :P
I genuinely do not regret jumping off the video game train back in 2015.
Everything I have heard about the evolution of the gaming industry since has surpassed my pessimistic predictions back then, which could be summarized as: video games are becoming predatory and I feel like they eat my time and money for dismissed returns.
It was especially the consol market and the whole online aspect that made me wrinkle my nose. Feels like nowadays you actually can’t buy and play a game offline.
But what do I know. I only tune in when my friend is playing on twitch and we talk about life over Signal. We have gone back to retro games recently too. Jake and Daxter 🎉
Plenty of good stuff still happening in games.
Indies are bigger and better than ever. Yeah, the shitty stuff is front and center, but its not hard to find games made with genuine passion either.
Looked at different, we are a in a new golden age of games. Not for giant AAA titles or hardware.
But for the fact that game engines and tutorials on how to use them are readily available, and lots of normal people with neat ideas are making them into real games.
one of the things I like about my thirties is that a bunch of people who grew up interested in and liking the same things I did now have the skills and ability to create things I like
Indies are bigger and better than ever.
Are they? Most I play are from the 2010s, even if they are still being updated in some cases. What are some good recently released ones.
Some I have put a lot of hours into: KSP, Factorio, Rimworld, Kenshi, Vintage Story. They might be better games than they were back then but it’s still those games. X4 is fun, not sure if that counts as indie, should play it again, apparently it has diplomacy now rather than just shooting people you don’t like.
Windrose is a giant indie success that shat all over Ubisofts attempts at satisfying people wanting a pirate game.
More. Not all meet the technical definition of indie (the studio being 100% self-pulished)
But all of these games are quality projects that have good traction without massive budgets.
- Haste
- Sektori
- Kletka
- Peak
- Species: Unknown
- Routine
- Buckshot Roulette
- Crow Country
- Deep Snow Delivery
- NEBULOUS: Fleet Command
- Jump Space
- Motorslice
- Hades 2
- Sifu
I could literally keep going if I went into games that are older or that I haven’t gotten to yet.
My wishlist is getting longer, not shorter. I am finding games I want so much faster than I can play them.
Hmm, skimmed over a few and some of those seem kinda interesting. Not sure if they are the sort of thing to put many 100s or 1000s of hours in though.
Good start.
Fortunately whether you in particular are impressed by a fraction of what one random person happens to like, has no bearing on whether we are in fact getting more good games than ever, nor is the amount of hours you get out of game a metric for quality.
That you like the types of games you can immerse yourself in for those amounts of time is a matter of taste. A game can have a runtime of 15 minutes and still be worth both making and playing.
Let me keep going.
- Crying Suns
- Lumencraft
- Death’s Door
- Frostpunk 1/2
- Moonlighter 1/2
- The Long Dark
- Iron Nest
- Dead Cells
- Slay the Spire 1/2
- Project Zomboid (theoretically still not 1.0)
- Outer Wilds
- Hollow Knight: Silksong (ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE TITLE, and it’s indie)
- Ultrakill
- Signalis (One of my favorite horror titles of all time, maybe “the” favorite)
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Nuclear Option (speaking of games you can sink hundreds of hours into)
- CAIRN
- Risk of Rain 2
- Judas (upcoming)
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- Schedule 1 (another massive title, while I’m personally uninterested)
The point, is that things are going fantastic. Whether one or none of the new games succeeding today are up your alley. That you already found your evergreen timesinks, is great. But it is a fact that more indie titles are getting traction than ever before, and more people are opting out of AAA titles with expiry dates.
That’s the thing. You can keep playing your 2013 titles forever. And more games that work like that are being released, and succeeding, than ever before.
That’s a good thing no matter how you look at it.
There is genuinely so much to play I can’t keep up. I regularly discover stuff from the last several years I had no idea existed, but which is exactly the type of thing I like.
Go look. Tons of these games have absolutely no ad campaigns, and I find a lot of them through word-of-mouth via friends, or the communities of other games I play.
I wouldn’t think of zomboid as a new game, got it ages ago. It’s alright, not a massive fan of permadeath though. Especially in a game with easy potential for many many hours of progress on a save. If a run is fairly short then I am ok with it. Like extraction shooters typically do, just dislike the PvP aspect of a lot of them.
That actually brings me to zero sievert - that is pretty good. Though it doesn’t feel like it’s really balanced around the mode where you lose your inventory on death.
I’ll take a look into more on the list later. I used chatgpt last night (yeah, perhaps not the best source of info) but it did find a few games that sound interesting. Got a list on my PC to search through later, some are so cheap on gog right now I might grab them. A £2 game is probably fine even if it only has 10s of hours of playtime.
Man, you have been missing out on the golden age of indie games. Sorry to hear that.
i think a lot of people are (me included) because its just force of habit to gravitate towards the AAA games and even tho there are some famous indie games out there like hollow knight those might not be for everyone and we lack maybe the will to search for them? I am probably switching to pc and i wil be searching for more indie games for sure. Maybe some good might come out of this!
I enjoyed watching some playthroughs of a couple of games over the years, but then I sorta lost interest. Used to follow John Wolfe a lot and watch his playthroughs. He was good at finding never heard of indie games in the horror genre, so I witnessed a few gems through him.
How? Factorio, Kenshi and Rimworld are games from before 2015
That’ll be $75 (for N64 cartridges).
I knew Nintendo was done when playstation started selling games for twenty dollars
Hope you like 20fps with drops.
