I have come to a realization lately. I am now a part of an era in gaming that is getting closer and closer to irrelevancy, I love having a digital boxed copy of a game, there is just something nice about going to a store and picking up the latest release. Even in my mid-late 20's not I still get a particular feeling when I open up the case for the first time and pull out the manual to have a peek before I pop the game into my console. The future seems to be digital and while I am not necessarily against having all of your games easily accessible at all times I still feel a bit down at the fact that maybe in five or so years we will have to purchase all of our games this way.
I remember opening up a NES box in the late 80's and pulling out the Castlevania cart, or the Zelda cart and loving every second of taking a look at the box art and the tips in the back of the manual. I think as an industry gaming needs to progress and move forward just the same that all other industries must and as we get older things are going to change. Gaming itself has changed completely even over the last generation. I miss the random RPG's that were released or the lower budget but still well made games. To me story has always been a major selling point to games and because the budget for developing a game this generation has gone so crazy and one bad release can make or break a company we aren't getting as many unique experiences as we did in the past.
This is why I appreciate a company like Atlus so much because they take more chances than most other publishers on console, in the last generation we got some great games from them like the Persona series or the SMT series, and now they are bringing us some unique games on handheld as well as the underrated Catherine last year. It wasn't for everyone but it was a fun and different experience if you were willing to give it a shot. Capcom is someone else who has surprised me recently with the release of Asura's Wrath, I was a huge fan of that and it was nothing that most had seen before. Give these games a shot if you haven't already.
I have come to a realization lately. I am now a part of an era in gaming that is getting closer and closer to irrelevancy, I love having a digital boxed copy of a game, there is just something nice about going to a store and picking up the latest release. Even in my mid-late 20's not I still get a particular feeling when I open up the case for the first time and pull out the manual to have a peek before I pop the game into my console. The future seems to be digital and while I am not necessarily against having all of your games easily accessible at all times I still feel a bit down at the fact that maybe in five or so years we will have to purchase all of our games this way.
I remember opening up a NES box in the late 80's and pulling out the Castlevania cart, or the Zelda cart and loving every second of taking a look at the box art and the tips in the back of the manual. I think as an industry gaming needs to progress and move forward just the same that all other industries must and as we get older things are going to change. Gaming itself has changed completely even over the last generation. I miss the random RPG's that were released or the lower budget but still well made games. To me story has always been a major selling point to games and because the budget for developing a game this generation has gone so crazy and one bad release can make or break a company we aren't getting as many unique experiences as we did in the past.
This is why I appreciate a company like Atlus so much because they take more chances than most other publishers on console, in the last generation we got some great games from them like the Persona series or the SMT series, and now they are bringing us some unique games on handheld as well as the underrated Catherine last year. It wasn't for everyone but it was a fun and different experience if you were willing to give it a shot. Capcom is someone else who has surprised me recently with the release of Asura's Wrath, I was a huge fan of that and it was nothing that most had seen before. Give these games a shot if you haven't already.
Anyway, i suppose that some games become less played as time passes by and games become more and more advanced. But irrelevant? You can go back and play those games because you love them. In some 20 years I'll probably replay all of the Fallout games.
As for CoD, sooner or later people will get bored of them. And by the way, that's probably the most awesome thread title I've seen, "Old Guard" sounds badass.
@TheDudeOfGaming: Thanks, I blew my own mind when I came up with Old Guard, but in a way that's how I feel. And it sounds like you may feel the same way. It just seems like those of us who want unique games that have substance beyond what we are getting now have to stand our ground and try to speak to the publishers and developers and let them know that we are still here and still want good, different games.
I also see myself in 10 years or so going back into the Wasteland or popping Dark Souls in for another go around but right now I want to go to a website or walk into a store and find something that I have never seen before that I think, "Man, that looks really cool."
@Jeust: Totally agree. I have a ton of old games all over the place and I love it. I love opening up the closet in my den and seeing Atari carts, NES and SNES games. Some old floppy disks that I will never play again but its just comforting knowing they are there.
Catherine was fantastic. Even though I have already played through Persona 4 I will be picking it up for the Vita later this year as well.
I'm sure when old men come around and tell how music always way better in their day and you kids don't know what music is really about and all the soul is gone from music nowadays, I'm sure you take them very seriously.
I love most of those games too, but come the fuck on. Just old men clutching their pennies and wishing that Eisenhower was still around.
@JBG4: Nice! I personally ain't much of a colector, since I don't have anymore my Spectrum, Atari 2600, NES or SNES, but I love having the phisical copies of my PS2, PS3 and XBOX 360 games.
Catherine was the best game I played this year. You do well in getting Persona 4. I also have it for the PS2.
@Brodehouse: I don't give a damn to spend money dude, I have a really good job and buy games frequently. If I were clutching pennies I would have all the things that I do. The whole point of the blog was to talk about how I want more VARIETY and SUBTANCE in games, not how I think they are too expensive.
Also, I'm not saying that I think games were better in my day, I am saying that there was more of a choice, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Now you get more major releases but in between that time there isn't as much substance as there once was. That was the point I was making.
@JBG4: Well with all the kickstarter projects of yore games (and new) , and indie game development we get an influx of games more akin to the old times duder ... keep the hope up ^_^ ... and man I turned 30 last friday , that must meen Im from the ancient guard D: , that doesnt sounds as cool as old guard -_-
@Jeust: Yeah, I am big fan of Atlus if you couldn't tell from the OP. I think that they go out on a limb much more than a lot of other publishers out there and that is good for gamers looking for a little spice. I recently picked up Radiant Historia from Amazon to play on my 3DS, I've heard good things about it.
Yeah, this will be my second time buying Persona 4 and I have no reservations about plopping down more money for such a well made game. It also looks like they are adding more content to the new release which is awesome to me.
@Aetheldod: Yeah, 30 is just around the corner for me too man. It's no big deal though.
I am looking forward to some of the Kickstarter projects that have been funded recently from the Double Fine Adventure game, a new Wasteland, and a new Shadowrun I am pretty excited about that. Indie games have been a nice change of pace too, I have found a bunch that I have really enjoyed, Lone Survivor is the most recent.
@Jeust: Yeah, I am big fan of Atlus if you couldn't tell from the OP. I think that they go out on a limb much more than a lot of other publishers out there and that is good for gamers looking for a little spice. I recently picked up Radiant Historia from Amazon to play on my 3DS, I've heard good things about it.
Yeah, this will be my second time buying Persona 4 and I have no reservations about plopping down more money for such a well made game. It also looks like they are adding more content to the new release which is awesome to me.
Yeah, I'm also a big Atlus fan. Atlus, Cavia, Remedy, CD Projekt RED are some of my favourite developers, because they take risks in their games, presenting something new.
@Brodehouse: I don't give a damn to spend money dude, I have a really good job and buy games frequently. If I were clutching pennies I would have all the things that I do. The whole point of the blog was to talk about how I want more VARIETY and SUBTANCE in games, not how I think they are too expensive.
Also, I'm not saying that I think games were better in my day, I am saying that there was more of a choice, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Now you get more major releases but in between that time there isn't as much substance as there once was. That was the point I was making.
The pennies thing has nothing to do with money, it has to do with change; the removal of pennies as currency. You don't listen to the Bombcast?
Variety and substance. Substance is a weasel word that doesn't actually mean anything. I assume you're referring to gameplay depth, which varies from game to game across all eras. Despite how you might feel, the mean gameplay depth was not higher 10, 20 years ago, in fact the mean would be less due to technology limitations. For every Street Fighter, there was a Pit Fighter. Today's God of War clones were yesterday's Final Fight clones.
Variety is straight up nostalgic blindness. There are more people making more games in more genres than ever before in an age of information redundancies and direct distribution. That you can't see that speaks more of your interest.
You come and state exactly what I was saying in your last paragraph. It's not that there's less games, or less choice of games, it's that you liked it the way it was and it isn't like that anymore. Just like old men who think that their old bands are better than 'these new bands'. In every medium it's the same story. But don't try to mischaracterize the way the industry has always been.
In the late 90s, when the games you think are best were being made, there was an "Old Guard" who said that your silly Ocarina of Time wasn't as deep as the original Zelda. That nothing was as good as Asteroids. Silent Hill 2 didn't have anything on the perfection of the original Metroid. They weren't right then, how would you be right now? That's why "Old Guard" is usually used as a derogative.
The point is: it has nothing to do with the games, it has to do with YOU. How you felt about those games in that period and your memories of it. The "games aren't as good as they were" is the exact same "movies aren't as good as they were" and "music isn't as good as it was" stuff you hear from everyone. The secret is you, and I, and everyone like good games and don't like bad games. There are good games in every era and a ton of bad games, and it's no different today than it was different a decade ago or a decade before that. No era was special, not this one, not any other one. Tastes and style changes, genres rise and fall, but the truth of good games and bad games just goes on. The golden age of survival horror was the dark age of adventure games. You like survival horror, so of course games were better then! Unless you liked adventure games. Then the early 90s were better, and all these Inhabitant Wicked games ruined it. So it goes. So it goes.
@Brodehouse: As a matter of fact I do listen to the Bombcast. Every week.
Chrono Trigger wasn't made in the late 90's, neither was Super Mario Bros or Zelda. I'm not saying games were better in a certain time, I am saying there was more of a selection at that time. We can talk about the late 90's and the RPG rush of the PS1 era. There was so much for a fan of that genre to choose from during that time that it was ridiculous. The lesser known games were sometimes just as good as the high profile ones. Take Wild Arms for example, it wasn't a huge game but it had a fantastic story. I really enjoyed it anyway.
It does have to do with the games. My personal taste does sway my opinion on this subject, there's no doubt about that. However, as I get older and have come through many generations of gaming I am seeing that there is a change in the games that are released and the games that can be released because of the money that a company is will to back them with. I may be a little cynical in regards to this subject, but I can be that way. We are all entitled to our opinion, you and I included. I agree with you that there are great games released in every era, the point I am trying to make is that the selection is not as deep as it used to be for console gamers. PC gamers get more abstract games and that is great. I play PC games so I get a lot of my fill from that and I have no complaints about finding a good indie game on there and having a great time with it.
We can agree to disagree on this topic, that's fine. I still play games and hell I still enjoy some of the same wicked games that I think destroyed the industry. No, I think the game industry is fine, it has evolved into much more than it used to be, there are a ton of big budget games nowadays that are great achievements in entertainment. The smaller games that I loved so much have found a home on Steam or through indie distributors and that's great. I'll continue to play those. I will still refer to myself as "The Old Guard" because I think it sounds cool, no matter how derogatory it may be, it still sounds wicked awesome.
@Brodehouse: I disagree - I don't think games are analogous to movies or music in this regard, just by virtue of how young this medium is. I think there has definitely been a shift from game development being an art towards it being a science over the last 20 years, particularly for games with any kind of budget. Nobody had a clue about the 'proper' way to make games back then, and that's what made it so exciting to grow up with.
Genres may rise and fall, but that doesn't seem to be happening very frequently anymore. The WoW and CoD4 blueprints have been sat at the top of the pile for ~5 years now with no change in sight. The top end of the industry -where most of the top talent works, where most of the money is spent and thus where most of the high quality games come from- work on a far narrower scope of games than used to be the case.
@Jimbo: I couldn't agree with you more. That is exactly the point that I was making through most of my OP, I think that games are now so processed that many of the experiences that we have now has such a feeling of sameness. It isn't just because once game tries to copy another game, its because most publishers are so worried about failure that they feel they need to iterate on ideas that have already been used, instead of, using original ideas to excite gamers.
You know the funny thing about the blandness of the high-budget segment of the market while longing for the non-game value of physical-media purchases, they're kind of corollary. The publishers that have the economic wherewithal to maintain a physical distribution model, multimillion dollar ad campaigns, and massive-scale development operations have been driving proportionally less innovation than their smaller and/or independent counterparts as a percentage of the investment capital this industry gets. People's nostalgia for the "old ways" is creating a big-publisher bubble that will one day burst, because that model will only seem economical as long as people buy big-budget disc games *because* they're big-budget disc games.
I for one embrace the massive cost savings and wild innovation that independent/downloadable games have brought forth this generation and hope that it can continue onward in the future, while hoping that these new development models get embraced by the bigger publishers.
I say this because almost all of my favourite games this generation have been made available for download upon release:
Bionic Commando Rearmed Braid Empire Total War Fez Half-Life 2 Episode 2 Limbo Portal and Portal 2 And so on.
@JBG4 There absolutely was not a greater selection, only a greater selection (and even then, there's PLENTY of JRPGs out there) in a specific genre that you prefer. They are still making Wild Arms games. And like I said, it's not special. There were less adventure games out ten years ago. An adventure game fan would fail about how the industry is just shitty survival horror and JRPGs. Perspective is the issue, not 'the industry'. Same as it always has been.
Next statement, another case of an idealized past. They didn't make games for free back then either. Capcom wasn't making Resident Evil because they wanted to push artistic boundaries, it got produced because it could return its investment. "Back then it wasn't about the business" is pure nostalgia. You just didn't know about the business back then. It's the same for every medium. Everyone thinks their era was the "true" artistic era and then businessmen ruined it all. And everyone has their scapegoat, whether it's television, color film, MTV, or the Internet. Pure nostalgia filter.
I don't intend to sound as strident and pointed, but I heard this exact argument against perfectly good games of yesteryear, and now hearing it from my contemporaries is agonizing. Nostalgia is fun in personal, horrible when applied to the greater culture. Nostalgia is how real history gets muddied by perspective. Truth is better than nostalgia.
@Jimbo you're talking about process v experimentation. Process is born from experimentation, true. There was plenty back then, but there was still process. Now there are more processes, and still as much experimentation. The industry is wider than it ever has been.
Once again, let's not be nostalgic. The past had as many clones or more as modern games do. There's follow the leader with Battlefield and Call of Duty, just like there was with Unreal and Quake. And Doom before that. Look at Hexen, dude. Today we're dominated by modern military and 2D platformers with an art style, five years ago it was World War 2 and rhythm games, five years before it was alien invasions and mascot kart racers and tank controls, five years before that it was shooting your way through a Slayer album and blocky 3D platformers with awful cameras and spiky haired heroes with amnesia. Some of the faces change but the program remains the same. So it goes.
If you believe the industry is less diverse than it had been, you aren't remembering the past clearly, and you're not looking at the present clearly. Fez came out last month. Talking about narrow scope.
I love games that were made 20 years ago. I like some games that are made today. That's it. Fez is awesome, I'm not saying that everything made today is shit, I'm saying that everything that I don't like is shit.
For me it's simple, if I had boxed copies of all the shit I have on Steam, I wouldn't have any room and I would look like an insane hoarder. I already have a lot of physical copies as it is across gaming history, so I'm glad I can finally draw the line somewhere. I'm still interesting in collecting old games, but the fact that I don't have to have newer ones physically piling up that much is a nice feeling.
I think one of the problems is that, speaking for me at least, as a kid I got one game a month if I was lucky. And that game would last you for the whole month, some times years, The whole time i had a NES from 1989 till it broke 7 years later, i had 3 games. I have 18 PlayStation 2 games, and 34 Xbox 360 games. This is not counting the 250 pc games i have on steam.
All of this just blurs together, and so you remember Super Mario 3 like it was the best thing ever because you kept coming back to that, and each time you did your emotions would keep compacting, and compacting, you took your time, playing the same levels over and over. On the other hand you blew right threw Saints Row the Third so you could play Skyrim.
@MikkaQ: I agree and can respect that. I like collecting old games and I'm going to keep that up. I have a ton of stuff on Steam and I'm the same way, I would be sleeping on videogame boxes and would probably be divorced if I had physical copies of all of them but I still love the feeling of opening up a new game. When I opened the box to Starcraft 2 I was in heaven, especially considering how long we all waited for that game.
@Brodehouse: I said the top of the industry has a narrower scope than it used to. The industry used to be comparatively 'flat' (seemed like anybody could and would make just about anything on any given day) and has now spiked up into more of a pyramid, with only 2 or 3 blueprints being used by the top third of the pyramid.
There was 'follow the leader' back then, but the difference is the leader used to actually move occasionally. If they didn't, they would quickly become irrelevant. Now it's more a case of 'jump up and down on the leader'. Between '93 and '98 we went from Doom to Half Life. Between '07 and '12 we have gone from CoD4 to what is (so far at least) essentially still CoD4. The real battles nowadays take place in the marketing and PR departments, not in the development studio. Success is determined by who can throw the most dollars at advertising and who can best manipulate the media. Even -perhaps especially- in the indie space, success is determined by who can best manipulate the media, with gimmicky business models or having your friends give you awards (twice) being the order of the day.
I'm not suggesting it's reasonable to expect the same levels of innovation anymore coming from the top studios (though we could hope for more than stagnation), but it's silly to pretend that period of extremely rapid progression didn't happen or to write it off as nostalgia. It happened, it isn't nostalgia and it isn't happening anymore.
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