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Gaming was like breathing. It was the biggest part of my life as a teenager, one of my priorities as a college student, and eventually one of my most expensive “hobbies” as a young professional.
Then all of a sudden, after thousands of hours spent playing across genres and platforms, boredom hit me hard for the very first time in my early thirties. Some of my favorite games soon gave me the impression of being terribly long. I couldn’t help but notice all the repeating tropes and similarities in game design between franchises.
I figured it was just a matter of time before I found the right game to stimulate my interest again, but time continued to go by and nothing changed.
Is it that games have failed to innovate, or that real life is ultimately more engaging?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Monday January 07 2019, @07:47PM (27 children)
Controllers suck. Use a mouse and keyboard.
Why aren't you picking up X? Because most games made these days suck. One of the best games ever came out in 1998 and it still holds up better than many new titles.
Other time and money sinks are arguably of more benefit to you. Why not fix up your house, or make some fermented foods? Or read a book.
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(Score: 2) by gringer on Monday January 07 2019, @07:53PM (13 children)
Spyro the Dragon?
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @08:03PM
Baldur's Gate or Half-life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday January 07 2019, @08:08PM (1 child)
For me, it the best console game was (and still is!) MechAssault version one. [wikipedia.org]
I have yet to find a shooter that's anywhere near as fun as that one. Not a lot of pixels by today's standards, but the gameplay — which I maintain is by far the most important element — was nearly perfect.
The story mode is very good, with decent replay-ability, the team-on-enemies mode is awesome to play with a friend, and the online gameplay mode was outright terrific (no longer, the servers are gone.)
Today, specifically to play MechAssault, I still keep an XBox v1 in my theater system, and still often play this game on game night with my friends. I have owned all the other XBoxen and Playstations, a few of the Nintendo boxes, and currently have the latest ones in the system, but... the XBox/MechAssault combo is still #1.
--
On the Canary Islands, there isn't even one canary.
On the Virgin Islands... still no canaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @11:28PM
Not to mention the convenient code execution bug in the saved game loader that let you root the box!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 07 2019, @08:09PM (8 children)
Thief: The Dark Project
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 07 2019, @09:41PM (5 children)
I think I played this, briefly - I also think it sucked mightily... a graphic tour-de-force that forces you to keep to the shadows and when you don't you die, almost Zork style - one wrong move and you're dead, restore from save, try again.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:31PM
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 08 2019, @12:53AM (3 children)
I on the other hand found it innovative and fun. It involved slowly and carefully sneaking up behind unsuspecting guards and whacking them on the head, or alternately sneaking through areas robbing everybody blind and leaving without anybody even noticing.
Oh, and there were ways of recovering from mistakes, such as flash grenades that stunned the guards for a bit while you made a dash to get away.
Thief was really a pioneer in stealth gameplay. If you don't like stealth games, fine, but don't knock it because you don't like the style of game.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:46PM (2 children)
Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, I remember playing for about an hour and not "getting anything" from it but frustration. For simple puzzles I'll go back to Riven, the whole "one wrong move and you're dead" thing just never did much for me.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 08 2019, @03:15PM (1 child)
It's not "1 wrong move and you're dead", it's "1 wrong move and you have to hotfoot it and/or use a flash grenade and/or take advantage of another of the guard's weaknesses."
The game does a fairly good job of teaching you its mechanics. If you pay attention to that, and use the knowledge you've been taught, the first mission goes pretty smoothly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 08 2019, @04:59PM
Might have been a different game, or I just really took a set against it - I do remember whatever hardware I was running it on (reasonably competent for the day) was struggling a bit, might have contributed to the poor experience.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)
oh yeah what a great game that was. all that sneaking and the bow that was great
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:53AM
Moreover, both light and sound factor into gameplay, it encourages players to avoid confrontations, it has an excellent soundtrack and ambient sounds, and the community has created hundreds of fan missions for the engine over two decades (along with modernizing the engine).
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(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:10PM
Total Annihilation came out in 1997. Maybe it was a little late arriving your area.
I was replaying it myself just last week.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 07 2019, @09:32PM (8 children)
One of the things that put me off of Starcraft / Starcraft II was that my mouse hand would go cold from clenching the mouse for 20-30 minutes straight - in really good matches my neck would also get stiff from holding a screen-stare pose for unnatural lengths of time.
Something like Hearthstone you can play without devoting 99.999% of your attention, a lot lower stress.
I think there's a certain psychological value in "screwing off" - doing something that's explicitly frowned upon by respectable society - like drinking alcohol, smoking, etc. Of course, balance in all things, the serious WoW dwellers definitely have taken it too far - once you've had your Saturday night fling, you're supposed to go to confession Sunday morning, then work for your bread Monday through Friday...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mth on Monday January 07 2019, @09:57PM (7 children)
Some people scoff at the term "eSports", but StarCraft is actually a sport, including risk of physical injuries...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 07 2019, @10:42PM (5 children)
Meh, if you don't sweat, it's not a sport.
And if you while sweat playing Starcraft, then you're doing something very wrong.
Golf... maybe - but you better be making good time, and not using a cart.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 07 2019, @10:54PM
Unless sweaty palms count, I don't sweat in Starcraft, but the physical stress is real, and the mental focus required just isn't compatible with parenthood.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:34AM (3 children)
Are you saying that playing Starcraft in a sauna makes it a sport?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 08 2019, @06:54PM (2 children)
Ha! I almost made that joke myself.
Breaks the logic though
"If !a then !b" does not imply the inverse statement "if a then b"
It does however imply the contrapositive: "if b then a".
In this case, "if it's a sport, then you will sweat" is an equivalent statement
but
"if you sweat, then it's a sport" is logically unrelated to the original claim.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 08 2019, @11:19PM (1 child)
That's why the question.
Which didn't get answered, btw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 09 2019, @03:44AM
Fine, fine, I'll go with "No". But only because otherwise reading in the sauna should count too, and I'm not buff enough to be an athlete. :-D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:43PM
Yeah, no, this doesn't change our minds: we still scoff at it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mth on Monday January 07 2019, @10:01PM (3 children)
If you go back and play random games from the 80's or 90's you'll quickly notice that they sucked a lot more than modern games. I played some terrible old games when debugging an emulator. The good games from those days still hold up, but the vast majority doesn't.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday January 07 2019, @11:03PM (2 children)
>they sucked a lot more than modern games
I'm not so sure. You're dealing with a big perceptual filter there that skews your judgement: old games look bad by modern standards, and we subconsciously project "ugliness" to also possessing lots of other negative qualities.
A great game can become engrossing enough that you mostly stop noticing the visual ugliness.
A merely mediocre game on the other hand - its ugliness puts all its other faults on prominent display. Faults that aren't necessarily actually any worse than those in a modern mediocre game.
That said - there has been a consolidation, of AAA titles especially, around really "tried-and-true" gameplay formulas. In essence just various "reskinning" of the same polished game formula with different graphics, ad infinitum. That does sort of set the baseline at "highly polished pablum". But is that that actually an undisputed improvement over "promising, but infuriating"?
(Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:33AM (1 child)
I don't mind the visual look of a lot of old games, but I do have a particular complaint with old FPS games that makes me wonder how I managed to play hundred hours of Doom and Quake in the 90s: a lot of them control horribly by modern standards. To my knowledge it was Half-Life that introduced the "WASD" layout, enabled full-time mouse-looking, and made the default left and right keys "strafe left/right" and not "turn left/right."
Trying to go back and play an old 3D game without remapping nearly every key can be a nightmare.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:33AM
WASD + mouse was in the original System Shock four years earlier, along with jumping, multiple levels of crouching and leaning, and (key based) looking up and down, though they also used keys for turning and didn't use mouse-look, instead having an old-school FPRPG-style free cursor to interact with the world and interface. Not bad for a contemporary of Doom. (And a truly excellent game, one of the all-time classics in my book. I've played through it several times over the years, longing for mouselook more strongly every time - until eventually someone made a patch that added it. I wonder if they ever got it working properly in the fully free-rotation cyberspace...)
2-axis mouse-look by default was definitely a big advancement, and it is hard going back. But while I would definitely say a modern game without mouselook would almost certainly be bad on those grounds alone, I don't think its fair to judge games created before it was dreamed up by those standards.