While I'm certainly not the oldest gamer out there(the first console I can remember getting is the NES and a Gameboy). I think games have improved in some aspects, however a lot of interesting old ideas have been completely forgotten by the big business. I'll focus on mainstream games so that people can relate.
In 4X4 Evolution people on Mac's, PC's, the Dreamcast, and I feel like there was a 4th option could all be in one game. The cross platform worked magic because it made the community bigger. Another interesting feature in that game was that when you joined a pre "race" lobby the hosts map choice was automatically distributed to people without the map/track. So anybody could make a challenging course and distribute it to anybody regardless of their platform. The game itself had poor physics, and a loading splash screen had a picture of a truck you could not get, so in some ways it represents what you used to get in gaming. It had tons of amazing fun, but lacked visuals and certainly any complicated physics. But because it was an arcade game the physics where not first priority, and the tracks took advantage of the physics it did have by adding washboard sections, big jumps and drops and fun water hazards. There are tons of games today that could be cross platform and very fun, however since they choose not to be, 4X4 evo from the Y2K offers more creativity and more features despite having less advanced technology to do it, so it is superior to most racing games today. I've avoided comparing it to new racing games because most of the good ones are console exclusive and this is about PC games. I'll use GRID just because it can be had in the PC flavor. GRID is a terrible game by any measure of the word game(except the figure 8). Most of the racing in GRID brings no creativity to the genre, it's an arcade style game without arcade style elements, the tracks are supposed to seem real, the cars are too, there are no jumps or interesting turns too dangerous for real life courses and the crashes are trying to be realistic. This means that 4x4 evo is superior as an arcade game and as I mentioned before, it's cross platform!
Counterstrike is a very popular game today, but back when I played it on a Pentium 2 350Mhz powered computer it was a fairly fresh concept. It introduced a game that I feel represent what many games have become. It was more like a sport than an actual game, when I started playing it before steam took over, a lot of my friends in junior high didn't like it because it was too simple and it felt like quake for people who couldn't function when things moved too quickly or moved vertically. Counterstrike was possibly superior ~10 years ago because it was a newer idea and it hasn't changed much at all in nearly 10 years, so it's up to you to decide.
Command and Conquer is another game series that has moved through time and as far as most old gamers opinions go, it has become worse. I've played since the first one through to C&C3 and lost interest as the years moved on The series hasn't changed much from 1995 up until generals, however at generals they seem to have gone a new direction. The new direction generals took focused on less is more and made the game more like a generic 3D strategy game by taking out the key feature of the game which is strategy. Quite often people say that Generals was great because it simplified C&C and made it faster, but they seem to forget that C&C is supposed to be a strategy game so those to things they like about it actually make it not a strategy game. The recent releases definitely aren't superior to the old ones and in some respects they offer less, but they also offer far better graphics. To sum C&C up, neither the old or the new are superior, it all depends on who you are. Though I'm obviously not a fan of the new stuff.
Need for Speed is another game that has been around for a fair span of time and it also has a fair amount of discussion about which is better. While the old games where more "fun" and arcade-like, they certainly lacked when compared to car selection and eye candy. But they always showed that they where created by people and not the pretend people who work for a huge business. They had amazing and often fitting music, awesome intros and the occasional outlandish car. The new ones seem to focus on grit and pop culture, using real music also manufactured by pretend people in other industries. But they do succeed in beating the old games at a few things, mainly a slightly better use of physics, a larger selection of cars and tracks. So though the old games are superior as games, you won't feel as cool playing them because you won't be in a Mercedes on 30 inch rims with a 2 lane wide wide body kit listening to FatJoe rap about how money is great.
The point all of this is getting at is that the gaming industry has a few main issues that make gamers like myself feel that the older games are usually better, and all of them come down to what a game is, and not what a game has.
Oh and the future should have cross platform multiplayer because the point of multiplayer is not to play by yourself.
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