I'm finding myself wondering when the first time was when I felt that newer games were overcomplex and that the era that I grew up in was dying off - saying all new games are worse than older games is an untrue blanket statement, but there's definitely some sort of apparent magic missing from them compared to when they were new and mysterious things while I was growing up. It's strange to think of the same logic being applied to older points in time, and a game that would have been in the 16-bit golden age for me instead being a modern and overcomplex jump from the "classic" 8-bit era.
I think that the last game that really amazed me compared to what I'd seen before was Unreal Tournament in 1999, and how the apparent smoothness and noise of it compared to the earlier first-person shooters that I'd played was a huge surprise to me - but I was stepping directly up from playing things like Rise of the Triad, and UT's new ideas about how a multiplayer first person shooter should be run were huge jumps for me. Later than that, I remember being excited about the release of Soul Calibur 2 and it being the first time that I'd actually cared about a game being released for a while... I can't define a hard line between the stuff I grew up with and the "modern" era, but the difference was probably somewhere in the couple of years that I almost stopped playing games altogether, at about the start of the PS2 era. No doubt my ignorance of the just-released set of next-generation consoles (which are all nearly three years old) will eventually hit me by surprise once again.
Additionally, I've got to play this - I saw it down the road and nearly bought it but got Hotel Dusk instead, which I still haven't played as I'm still working my way alternately through Sonic Chronicles and Phoenix Wright.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-05-02 08:29 pm (UTC)I think that the last game that really amazed me compared to what I'd seen before was Unreal Tournament in 1999, and how the apparent smoothness and noise of it compared to the earlier first-person shooters that I'd played was a huge surprise to me - but I was stepping directly up from playing things like Rise of the Triad, and UT's new ideas about how a multiplayer first person shooter should be run were huge jumps for me. Later than that, I remember being excited about the release of Soul Calibur 2 and it being the first time that I'd actually cared about a game being released for a while... I can't define a hard line between the stuff I grew up with and the "modern" era, but the difference was probably somewhere in the couple of years that I almost stopped playing games altogether, at about the start of the PS2 era. No doubt my ignorance of the just-released set of next-generation consoles (which are all nearly three years old) will eventually hit me by surprise once again.
Additionally, I've got to play this - I saw it down the road and nearly bought it but got Hotel Dusk instead, which I still haven't played as I'm still working my way alternately through Sonic Chronicles and Phoenix Wright.