River of Tears: A Tale of Void Games

It was late in the night. I was not tired that much, so I decided to boot my computer and play this new game I had lately bought. I inserted the disk, started the installation process, grabbed a cup of coffee and started fooling around to waste some time. But all this time meanwhile this game was being installed, I just couldn't help myself wondering. Wondering where the excitement is. You know, the usual trend is that when people buy a new game, they feel excited and to be honest I used to feel the same way up until lately. My head was a big balloon of "so f***ing what"s. My head was filled with these thoughts of uber voidness. I pick the gun, nail some guys. I earn some money or credit points and unlock the new gun or advance in the levels and find that super powerful one-shoot-f***-em-all gun... and then what?

And before I knew it, I found myself uninstalling the game. I uninstalled the game even before I played it! I uninstalled the game even before the installation process was over!

I don't know, maybe the 'fun-factor' in my life is shifting towards other things, but as a long time gamer, I miss those days where games meant to be entertaining; when I could play Super Mario, Sonic or Duke Nukem for hours; when I spent more time playing age of empires that I spent doing my homeworks. When I was counting down to have some spare time to play delta force, max payne or GTA. Yeah I know, some of these games are not even playable to this eye-candy-lover cruel eyes our hours anymore but they just had this charm I run out of words trying to explain. Oblivion was the last of such games I really enjoyed playing. Tens of thousands of games are shipped every year with sky-rocketing budgets fueling them and countless hours of development time gone into them and I find it extremely sad that most of them miss the fun-factor. Nowadays, games are SO devoid of content I just don't feel the burning passion to play them. Every couple of years, there comes a game that really excites me, but that's about it.

These days, games are more of a visual cue of their developers' prowess rather than what they meant to be as "Games"; as an entertaining media. Don't get me wrong. I love beautiful visuals and I do not find visuals controdictory to a great gameplay, but as it turns out, develpment teams are racing for better visuals rather than better, more innovative gameplays.

And I look forward and I see Crysis on the horizion, with extremely beautiful visuals but only 10-20 hours of gameplay and I need a 3000$ computer to play it on the high settings with smooth frame-rates. WTF?

Imagine there was an expansion card to actually enhance the gameplay instead of the visuals, the physics, the sound and the like and we could spend more money to get better, more technologically advanced Gameplay cards to actually be entertained more rather than spending 3000$ every six months to see a bunch of *cool* demos. The hell with that.

And I just can't help myself wondering am I supposed to be entertained?

Buy more console games?

As many good games as there are out there.. there are only a few games that truely give me an excited feeling. You know the feeling..the one where when you finally force yourself to go to bed at 4 in the morning after a long night of gaming, only to find yourself giddy in bed because you just really, really want to play the game. Then despite only getting 5 hours of sleep you get up at 9 in the morning to start playing all over again. You even cancel your plans for the night so you can sit down and play for 8 hours straight; 8 hours which of course go by far too fast.

Nevermind looking at all the technical merits and issues, all the pros and cons of a game.. if a game can give me that sort of feeling, I know it's a gem. I think the last game to give me that feeling was Zelda: Twilight Princess. And before that..surprisingly: Baten Kaitos Origins. Hopefully more to come.

Is it just us jaded older gamers? Is it really that the newer games kinda suck? I believe the answer is a little of both. Us older gamers that grew up in what I like to call the "golden age" of gaming (the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32/64-bit generations) are growing ever older and less surprises us as the days go on... games, for better or worse, have obviously changed too, obviously. Less was at stake back in the olden days, thus game designers had less fiscal constraints to try something new and interesting. Not so these days, where profit is king and the resolution your game is running at is everything.Epoq

That sounds like a load of bull for some reason. Why is everyone crying for a return of Doom and Pitfall? I mean, I grew up playing the Atari, then I gota Nintendo, then Super Nintendo then played PC until I got a Xbox 360. The state of gaming has never been better. I mean how can anyone seriously say that things are growing old or stale? I love Fallout and it's sequel and spin-off, but then you have games like The Witcher and Mass Effect. If what you see being released these days doesn't have you just as excited as you were when you put Super Mario in for the fist time thenmaybe you should take a step back and ponder what in your life is making you so overly critical of the current times. Not that you could be to critical anyways, this generation of games compared to the so called "golden age" or not is just astounding.

Is it just us jaded older gamers? Is it really that the newer games kinda suck? I believe the answer is a little of both. Us older gamers that grew up in what I like to call the "golden age" of gaming (the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32/64-bit generations) are growing ever older and less surprises us as the days go on... games, for better or worse, have obviously changed too, obviously. Less was at stake back in the olden days, thus game designers had less fiscal constraints to try something new and interesting. Not so these days, where profit is king and the resolution your game is running at is everything.Epoq

[QUOTE="Epoq"]Is it just us jaded older gamers? Is it really that the newer games kinda suck? I believe the answer is a little of both. Us older gamers that grew up in what I like to call the "golden age" of gaming (the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32/64-bit generations) are growing ever older and less surprises us as the days go on... games, for better or worse, have obviously changed too, obviously. Less was at stake back in the olden days, thus game designers had less fiscal constraints to try something new and interesting. Not so these days, where profit is king and the resolution your game is running at is everything.donny666

That sounds like a load of bull for some reason. Why is everyone crying for a return of Doom and Pitfall? I mean, I grew up playing the Atari, then I gota Nintendo, then Super Nintendo then played PC until I got a Xbox 360. The state of gaming has never been better. I mean how can anyone seriously say that things are growing old or stale? I love Fallout and it's sequel and spin-off, but then you have games like The Witcher and Mass Effect. If what you see being released these days doesn't have you just as excited as you were when you put Super Mario in for the fist time thenmaybe you should take a step back and ponder what in your life is making you so overly critical of the current times. Not that you could be to critical anyways, this generation of games compared to the so called "golden age" or not is just astounding.

Fallout is a great game and that's exactly what we're talking about. You have to wait a couple of years for a really great game to come along and even IF that game lives up to gamers' expectatons, then you're going to need another 3000$ computer to play that.

I don't think that it's that we don't like newer games. I for one, love games with great visuals, but just as somebody said they lack new astonishing ideas. Oblivion was very entertaining to me since the idea had not been exploited to death. Older games on the other hand didn't need an uber computer to look good, neither did they need astnoishing visuals to be exciting. These days you see ALL kinds of shoot-em up games with very little modifications. You're part of Special Ops or good ol' marines in a WWII franchise. To me, they all play the same. Doom was exciting since it introduced gamers to a new form of gameplay AND it had great graphics for its time, but I bet Doom didn't mean sh** if you plug the FPS part ( = the innovative idea fueling it ) out.

Besides, our expections of what a great game should be, is also shifting. All we care now is the graphics and to a less extents the AI and physics. "How good it looks" is really all we can think of these days. GS sadly played an important role with their old scoring system. I found out that a 9 on Graphics was all that people were looking for. Most people don't even notice that non of GTA games had top-notch graphics neither they had astonishing AI. Most of the characters just stayed with a Uzi in their hand shooting around and all missions were scripted, but it is the brillliant idea that have fueled the franchise for all the years. How many games have you played in which you can have the role of a pimp?

I don't need jaw dropping graphics and a next to no-good gameplay. I need acceptable graphics and a great gameplay full of new, brilliant and astonishing ideas.

[QUOTE="Epoq"]Is it just us jaded older gamers? Is it really that the newer games kinda suck? I believe the answer is a little of both. Us older gamers that grew up in what I like to call the "golden age" of gaming (the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32/64-bit generations) are growing ever older and less surprises us as the days go on... games, for better or worse, have obviously changed too, obviously. Less was at stake back in the olden days, thus game designers had less fiscal constraints to try something new and interesting. Not so these days, where profit is king and the resolution your game is running at is everything.FlaminDeath