Do you mean Super Mario Bros. on the NES or Super Mario World on the SNES? Either way, I just replayed both no more than a few months ago and throughly enjoyed both.
I’m firmly of the belief that fun is timeless, and some of the oldest games are the ones that best realized this.
Mario Galaxy 2 is fantastic though, but Mario 64’s still my favorite.
One phenomenon I do think has cause an erosion of quality is the increasing prevalence of voice acting in games. That’s much more expensive than text since you need to pay multiple actors instead of a writer or two. That in turn lowers the amount of content per game; Morrowind versus Oblivion being an example that comes to mind. It also can get irritating when everyone sounds like the same few people.
And yes I’ve been replaying Oblivion lately…
These two statements seemingly conflict. Being “hard to use” would suggest people who do get adept at them (and there are many) are rather quite good at games. Just because the control method itself limits the speed/accuracy does not mean the gamers are any worse.
Also, the keyboard/mouse setup is not “superior” for every (or even most) types of game, making your statement even more bizarre.
Games were better back in the day because back in the day the coolest games literally created genres. No game today will ever have the impact of Populous, for example. Or if that’s too obscure, WarCraft. All of a sudden a whole new world opened up. I remember when Populous II came out (1991) and my buddy and I connected our computers via serial cable and played head to head. All of a sudden, the multiplayer RTS genre was born, and holy shit that was a revelation. Nothing today can compare with that feeling. A simpler example is the original Starcraft back in the 90s compared to Starcraft 2 today.
I remember Castle Wolfenstein when it was brand new, and shortly thereafter Doom. This was incredible, genre-creating innovation. No amount of weapon choices can compare with the effect of one when FPS does not exist as a genre and the next day it does.
Today’s portal is just yesterday’s Lemmings. (1991)
The best of all, for me at least, was Star Control 2. (1992) An entire sandbox galaxy with an extensive backstory all tied to a central plot that you can navigate in whatever order you please. Just fantastic.
I was born in 1970. For the record, IMO the best music was in the 60s, the movies that most interest me are from the 2000s, the best tv is right now (and it’s getting better every year), and the best video games are from the 90s. Not a one from the 13-20 age bracket, but then again that was the 80s so who could blame me.
Missed the edit window:
Also consider something like X-Com. (1994) Do they even make turn-based strategy games anymore, or is technology so advanced that the very idea of doing something not in real-time is seen as pointless? I don’t honestly know the answer, but if it is yes, I find that very sad.
Gotta run to work now but I can’t believe this is a serious question. Nothing new/innovative in the last TEN YEARS?!?!
If you honestly believe that you fall into the old fogey better in my day crowd.
OK, you feel today’s games are more repetitive and uninspired. Why? And what games do you consider “worse” than the heyday of games (which I think we can all agree runs from 1991 - 1995, the halcyon days of the SNES and when PC gaming was at its finest).
Jeez, I just finished playing Sin & Punishment 2, a brand new rail shooter released in 2010. Just five years ago nobody even remembered what a rail shooter was.
OK, you play a lot of games. Then you should know that there’s a lot of good stuff that comes out every year. Good stuff I’ve seen you champion on this very board, because you’re one of the smartest (OK, second smartest) posters when it comes to games.
Four Crystals of Trazere? That was some thinking.
I don’t think there was much better than the Baldur’s Gate series. NWN was supposed to be…but as someone above put it, it became 3D. Which fucked up all sorts of things.
But…you couldn’t take time in that post to name one?
-Joe
A bit of both, your 20th FPS game won’t have the same impact as playing Doom for the first time. Some very old and simple games have aged well (off the top of my head, Joust, Defender, 2 player Bubble Bobble, Lords of Midnight), but they are a small minority of the crud that was released at the time. Much more powerful computers have given the designers more scope, which has led to new genres of games, but doesn’t automatically lead to good design. As others have pointed out, publishers are very conservative these days (I’m looking at you EA), so innovation is being stifled to some extent. In my view, Half Life 2 is no better than the original, it’s just another FPS.
However, there are a number of real innovations over the last few years that have led to better gaming:
How about Fallout 3? Its arguably one of the very best video games I have ever played…and I go back to Pong! What’s with some of you guys? Gettin’ old and crotchety?
Dragon Age: Origins, Call of Duty 4 (NOT Modern Warfare 2), Mass Effect, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Half Life, Bioshock, etc. If you think that games these days aren’t being made with amazing stories, you’ve been living under a rock. Especially when you compare them to such classic games with amazing stories like Super Mario World, Star Fox, Metroid, Contra… oh… wait…
Valve alone disproves the idea that games are getting worse.
It’s just people’s opinions.
I’ve been gaming since intellivision. IMHO for the most part it’s more of the same as far as most releases go with better graphics. For a second when I heard Star Craft2 was being made I was hoping real bad it was going to be a MMORPG, no another RTS.
I find most games not very entertaining. For I.E. I played WoW for over 4 years straight. I’d log on and say to mysefk ok, I have to do x,y and z in order to collect tokens for said piece of gear or run an instance for the 100th time hoping it drops then hoping I win the roll. I get all that great gear then what ?
Oh a new expansion is coming out 3 months, since your gear is going to be worthless I get to do it all over again. Some people like that I grew bored of it.
In the past 10 years a few games that I consider different and worthwhile IMO like Eve and Left for Dead 2.
My age may also have something to do with it.
But then again this is just my opinion.
I think the answer is that some genres are getting better, and others are getting worse.
For me, sadly, one of the genres that is definitely getting worse is the independently-developed roguelike; the days of NetHack, Angband (and its panopoly of clones), ADoM, and even Stone Soup are gone. Indie game designers have simply moved on. There’s no money or cred in putting together a roguelike or being on its dev team; obviously there’s not much in indie game design in general, but it’s more than zero. Short of me winning the Powerball and the Mega Millions in consecutive weeks and setting up a design team myself, we’re never going to see another great roguelike (and no, good as they are, I don’t consider Diablo 1/2/(3) or Torchlight to be great roguelikes–far too much reliance on graphics rather than story or strategy).
On the other hand, there have been some greatly creative games recently. The Katamari series has been a favorite of mine, and I’ve got to play more Portal. I’ve just started replaying Fallout 3 in preparation for Fallout New Vegas; it’s still so impressive. I suppose if there’s a complaint about modern games it’s that the great games are so much better than the mediocre games that one doesn’t want to play anything other than (for example) Fallout 3 or Oblivion in the RPG genre.
But the innovation in gaming, especially in the last five years, gives me hope that we’re in for Another Golden Age in gaming.
Hey man, I know…I’m just engaging in some middle-aged ball breaking. And I absolutely love your guitars!
This isn’t about the games, it’s about the gamers.
Like literature, movies, television, cars and ice-cream, the genres have been established and classics have been put on pedestals and worshipped. The only distinction is that video games haven’t been around long enough for their fan-base to grow old, so our classicists are in their late twenties to early thirties, to the degree that they exist at all.
That’s an easy one. Most of the flagship series seem to have gotten worse since then. Mario World and Yoshi’s Island beat any of the newer ones simply through better controls. The single most important element of any game in my opinion. In Mario64 you spend more time fighting the uncooperative camera than doing everything else combined. Galaxy isn’t much better despite the years between them. It also had rather boring and repetitive level design. At least in the first 10 or so stages I never got further than that before getting bored and quitting. Though I’ve been meaning to give it a second chance. I cant hook my Wii up until I figure out some way to hook it into VGA, DVI, HDMI, or YPbPr.
Metroid is probably an even better example. Super Metroid being the single best executed game I’ve ever played. The only one in the series that’s even come close to it is Zero Mission and it didn’t come that close. Fusion had those interminable cutscenes and comparably uninteresting power ups and a general “on rails” feel. Prime had shitty first person controls and tedious boss battles. Prime 3 improved the controls but the boss battles remained boring little minigames/puzzles. In fact the combat in general was boring thanks to every enemy taking dozens of hits before dieing and with the way the game’s played you can’t really just dodge the enemies like you can in the 2d ones, at least not in most rooms, so you end up having to spend minutes in each room just unloading shot after shot after shot into each enemy. Bloody terrible. And platforming in first person is rarely fun. The less said about Hunters the better.
And then there’s Final Fantasy. And indeed console RPGs in general. Unlike Mario and Metroid these weren’t worsened by the 3d transition but instead were wrecked by the increasingly misguided attempts at imbuing the game with better story. Only the developers misinterpreted “better” as “more”. And “Story” as “5 minute video you probably can’t skip and if you could you wouldn’t want to, despite the writing(and possibly voice acting) being terrible and the camera often pointlessly lingering over the character walking into the room for thirty seconds or panning over the terrain to get to the actual god damned scene as you yell ‘get to the fucking point already!’ because then you’d be lost”.
It’s not just the voice acting - it’s the whole “chrome” thing. To give another example from a different genre, Europa Universalis II was a classic 2D strategy game. For Europa Universalis III the series went to 3D. The 3D graphics looked frankly awful, were a processor-hog that caused endless videocard/driver issues and most of all were completely unnecessary, since everyone plays the game in map mode anyway. The fanbase asked the developers “why did you waste time on this?” and got a simple answer “because if it wasn’t 3D, no store would stock it.”
It’s the same in other genres - throwing in realistic models/digitally rendered backgrounds/“name” voice actors or whatever may objectively be a waste of resources that would be better spent on gameplay, but if you don’t have eyecandy for the previews and adverts, your game won’t get onto the shelves, much less off them. Add in industry conservatism, gamer conservatism (with games costing $50 and up, people tend to stick with what they know) and the tendency to rely on the crutch of ever-faster processors, and you end up emphasising chrome over gameplay. And that’s a problem, because while chrome may make people buy a game, gameplay is what makes them remember it.
As ye olde gamer, I often feel that a golden age has passed. But I am also no longer the guy who was excited to break out the graph paper and map a dungeon. If I were, there are still some Gold Box games I never finished. But the golden age, really, was the time when the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment and Fallout were coming out seemingly in a continuous stream.
Games now are better than they used to be, and not just in graphics. We have beautiful, immersive sandbox worlds to play in. The music is no longer tinny. A lot of the tedious overhead, like having to map the world yourself, has been stripped away. A lot of that is part of a general dumbing-down of games to attract a larger audience. But a lot of it is efficiency of design. Interfaces have benefited greatly from innovation, criticism, tweaking, etc. The greater attention to graphics and voice acting for story telling is terrific, though it robs us of the experience of actively imagining the world as we used to.
There are trade-offs, but honestly it’s not an overall slide in quality that prevent me from being as excited now as I was then. It’s that I can never be that young man again. There are loads of those games still out there that I’ll never have time to play through these days. What I really wish is that I could send them back to my young self to enjoy when they meant something. It’s like that Housman poem:
When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.
Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?
As an avid PC gamer, I value immersion almost above all else. I want to suspend my disbelief. I want to play Bioshock late on a stormy dark night with my nose pressed against the screen in a dark room with the sound cranked up. I want to be thrilled, scared, shocked, amazed, stunned.
Games are way, way better at this now than they’ve ever been, and I love it.