Dark Soldier wrote:

ME2 is sooooo fucking good. ME1 and 3 are shite, sadly. Wanted to like 3.

ME3 is the best doe.

Fuck games, in general. Except Dark Souls. But fuck that too, actually. About one interesting thing comes along every ten years.

Still waiting for the vs-fighter I like more than 3rd Strike. It's taking its sweet fucking time.

Nah, it's all shite, it's just taken a long time to sink in.

I still seem to find enough time to play games, but I deffo am more aware of what kind of game I'll enjoy and the types that I won't. Bought Fallout 4 but hardly touched it, so I think I'm finally over having to buy every big AAA release just because.

I do often wonder how much more productive I'd be if I didn't play games. I reckon I'd either gets loads of other stuff done or be smoking crack.

I'm going to draw a parallel here. Music. My theory is that as you age you will find that the music you like tends to come from your formative years. Yes - you may like some new stuff, you may like really old stuff like classical , jazz etc too - but in the main it's what you experience growing up - and I'd argue the older stuff you like is what you first experienced during that time too. Any new stuff you come across you like only because if "reminds you" or "has resonance."

Music for me is probably late 70s-early 90s. 1977-93 say when I was 11-26.

Gaming may well be the same. It's what you experienced in a certain part of your life. Modern gaming largely leaves me cold but I'm delighted when I come across something that strikes a chord - something like Geometry Wars and Trials HD which are really rather old school in their sensibilities.

My formative years theory could be tosh but what I would argue strongly is that you get to a point where you know what you like.

That's why you lose enthusiasm. You know what you like and really the time comes when you stop looking for something new. You will want something that fits with you and you may not see that in modern offerings.

I feel blessed to have been of a certain age when the arcades were in their pomp. I hated the 8bit micro era. The medium just wasnt suited to gaming IMO and it almost put me off gaming - it's why I still played a lot of arcade games at that time and held onto the Atari 2600 for so long. The rebirth of consoles (NES for me) got me back into it. The SNES era has all sorts of fine memories as I was in my mid 20s and had got a job I wanted, had bought a house and had found a wife. The N64/PS1/Saturn era was great too but it starts to wane at that point and I see myself during that time looking for certain experiences such as Saturn 2D shooters.

Those experiences are what I still seek. They are to be found but to be honest I can't be arsed putting the effort in to find them. I feel the joy of gaming isn't there any more but I suspect those of a certain age wouldn't  agree.

As you age you don't have the time either. So the older game style with its small demand on time suits but that could just be a coincidence. The older game is what I experienced teens to early 20s and that's what I like.

Games are like drugs - you'll spend your life trying to get that Manic Miner high again but never quite hitting it, until eventually you're just going through the motions, spending a small fortune to feel anything at all.

Kow wrote:

Games are like drugs - you'll spend your life trying to get that Manic Miner high again but never quite hitting it, until eventually you're just going through the motions, spending a small fortune to feel anything at all.

Being 46, myself and others around that age were lucky enough to hit gaming in it's infancy and everything was new. My first games on my 48K Spectrum were Attic Atac and Oracle's Cave. From then there was The Hobbit, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Monty Mole, Avalon, Mountains of Ket Trilogy, The Lords of Time from Level 9. The graphics were so rudimentary or nonexistent that it was your imagination that did all the work.

Now, everything is about realism. VR does nothing for me.

Not everything is about realism. Hundreds of games come out ever year from devs who can't afford anything more than basic art assets, and plenty of AAA studios are more interested than honing their artistic niche than pursuing realism (From, Blizzard).

Im general I can understand the malaise, the idea that the thrill is gone and all that, but we're in the absolute golden age, and the issue is in quantity not quality. If you want a specific type of game, chances are its out or someone is developing it, and therein lies the problem: because it's there or soon to be there, and it's quite likely only going to cost £10-30, it's far easier to easily grab it and become quickly dissatisfied.

No more having to begrudgingly get hours out of rubbish like Vectorman because it was £50 and that was all you could afford for 3 months. Now I've got 5 games sat on my desktop (Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Duskers, Darkest Dungeon, Overwatch) which in any other circumstance would be a crop of genuine genius, but instead they're just game number X on an endless conveyer belt of quality. The shift is in the breadth, not the depth. Spoilt for choice has never been so apt a phrase.

Have you come across Toki Tori 2? I saw a video on it because it apparently has the richest sequence breaking in all of gaming, and it's intentional by design because your little idiot bird character only has 2 moves and never upgrades.

I've played the first one, it's great. Haven't done much if any of 2, but pretty sure it's on my pos, no idea which system fir though

The older you get the more refined your tastes become, at least in my experience. Gone are the days that I play every triple A that comes out. In fact, these days I know I only really like online games with a sense of progression. I get bored very quick with offline affairs. So it's basically games like Destiny, DkS, WoW(esque) and Gears.

Kow wrote:

Games are like drugs - you'll spend your life trying to get that Manic Miner high again but never quite hitting it, until eventually you're just going through the motions, spending a small fortune to feel anything at all.

Maybe buy fewer games? I dunno, but having just one or two games on the go at a time and actually getting the most out of them before moving on seems to work for me. Also, Manic Miner was shit.

acemuzzy wrote:

An issue I definitely found was the combination of more money, narrower tastes, and less time.

M²+n+LT=Get Tae

I'll only disagree because I think you're generalisng a very small part of the actual volume of releases. What's marketed to you is vetted, safe stuff that sells millions and to do so it has to be within a certain remit. 

There's plenty of joy in gaming. Smaller studios may not have the money to apply polish as well as Nintendo, but they don't benefit from this narrow view of gaming that the AAA machine has set its sights on either.