Gaming enthusiasm: have you lost it?

[Magicka Emperor]

they had a score bar for Super Mario Bros, a made for console game that didn't need it.

Super Mario Bros. had a SCORE BAR [AND a TIMER] for a reason; and those of us in our 30s (or older) most likely remember it. It was because, back then people used to compare they're SCORE and TIME (together) in many popular games [like SMB] for bragging rights. Infact long before Blizzcon and quakecon, the well hyped 1989 'Fred Savage' movie: The Wizard, inspired a Super Mario Bros 3 World Cup event to later occur in Las Vegas. Thousands of players competed to see who could finish a special edition of the game the most efficently (high score) the fastest.

Sure this may have been a legacy trait from arcade games before it. But considering arcades where still quite popular well into the late 90's; I think it's generally understood that single player console games like Super Mario Bros and Super Star Wars featured a scoring system as a sort of early form of suedo-multiplayer.

The games reflected the time. When i started paying attention to games (1999-2000ish), I noticed games were focused on the story more because the arcade business model had been dying out for several years. You'll still have games like Call of Duty, but overall games are less about the standard tropes an arcade had and it doesn't mean it's better or worse. It's just a trend that has evolved from saturation and it'll go back to it's roots over time. Basically it'll loop like all fads typically do.

Sadily, not in agreement here.

Gaming just doesnt seem like a fad to me. It is, and shall always be, a hobbie. Fads; Beany Babies, Virtual Pets, Boy Bands, Pet Rocks, Bell Bottoms, Routery Phones. But hobbies are sorta conditional, and people who love them are passionate. It takes alot of anxioty and disalugionment to make them part with something that has taken a big part of their lives. Sadily though, like Music, Gaming has become comercialized thanks inpart to the growing awarness of it in popular culture. And like all untapped new markets, it has more-or-less been monopolized in the last 5 or 6 years. New forms of distribution, questionable developer choices, unethical publisher behavior, deep complexities in using the product [such as; overwhelming patching, store/platform specific marketing, madatory DLC, and tedious registering/activations], rampate overpricing, instability in Network Servers, copy-cat multiplayer, dirth of focus on single-player, and the more'or'less requirement that gamers have access to a constant and highly stable wired High Speed Internet service (which is not available to lower-income or rural users) - It does seem that their is a growing notition within the community that gaming has 'been ruined' due to publisher greed and their focus on providing the same genres and franchises annually (like COD and AC), while ignoring a HUGE chunk of the gaming population without access to reliable internet. The fact that they continue to charge $59.99 (us) for the same 5 hour game year-after-year, with the same multiplayer experience found in every other game, ask you to site through countless hours of updating, loading, and registering on different sites and services, and the deliever a product that has been systematically castrated so as to milk you out of an additional$40 for the 'rest of the game' as DLC, all while charging a seperate fee (and futhur complicating a once simple hobby) to use a third-party service such as XBOX LIVE, CODmembership, to play the multiplayer portion of the game. Even singleplayer games like Skyrim, Metro2033, and Diablo3 require the online use of 'servers' just to play the game.

All of this complicating of seems to be mudding the waters of gaming as a hobbie, and has turned alot of people away from the hobbie over the last few years. Simply put, the hobbie of gaming, unlike a fad, doesnt seem to weathering this global storm of financial depression and its own greed and mismanagment. When things get complicated or expensive most people quite and go someplace else, and gaming doesnt seem any different.

The music industry once faced this similar problem, with its longtime fanbase becoming disalugioned after that Napster fiascal in the late 90's. Music Executives greed, mismanagment and a crackdown on piracy while monopolizing the industry almost drow the hobbie into the ground. Thankfully people became aware of this, and completely restructured the marketing, and ditribution of the product - making it easiler and less expensive to enjoy music. And instead of continuing to crack down on piracy to the point that it made music a complicated [and exspensive] misery (like gaming has), they even decided to allow piracy and created a competative business model that continues to compete beutifully with it.

The gaming industry unfortunately doesnt seem to agree with this. And unless things change, their own greed and totalitarian hold on this over monopolized market will continue to suck, both the fun and the soul, out of things to the point that even the most dedicated of us will throw down our controllers in frusteration.

[Mr. Nemo]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Holy jeez, this is a great example of trigger words versus context. The second quote you used reflect the actual context of what I wrote. The score bar wasn't needed but reflected the times. Whether people use it is another subject entirely. Instead of seeing fad for what it was referring to (arcade vs narrative), you went on a tangent unrelated to it. Games are not a fad, the style of games are the fad in the same way clothes are a fad that change based on location and social structure.

I forgot to add one more thing in relation to the actual topic. I rarely look for game-related information and time has affected it. I've been burned so many times when buying expensive titles a reviewer recommends that I usually don't respect it. Only when seeing actual footage do I make my decision, or if the price is so low, it wouldn't hurt the wallet if I took a gamble.

[Gypsy]

Spoiler warning:

I agree with Gypsy on this one. I think a lot of what makes an older title great is nostalgia more than anything. Sure, there are a few out there that will forever stand the test of time, but a large portion of the reason the games were more difficult was usually because of some bullshit control scheme (only having two buttons greatly limits what you can actually do in a game), or the game requiring muscle memory in order to actually be able to beat it (I'm thinking of games like Battletoads, the first Mega Man title, Super Mario Bros., Metroid, etc). None of these games were meant to be beatable on your first playthrough -- you were meant to play the games over and over again in order to learn almost every aspect of the game before you were ever going to beat it. (Battletoads is an extreme example of this)

I realize these aren't the arcade style games that you are referring to, but arcade titles follow a similar rule. Those games aren't meant to be beaten -- they are meant to be enjoyed until you die. No one was supposed to be able to get to the kill screen in Donkey Kong or Pac-Man -- I don't even think the developers know that they existed. The enjoyment from playing most arcade style games was to beat your friends or to beat yourself -- the game was just the competition method used. Besting your own high score is a fantastic feeling, but beating your best friend's score is even better. That is what made those games thrive, in my opinion, and facets of those original arcade titles still exist in games today, just in different forms. Online leaderboards, time trial comparisons in racings games with people on your friends list, etc... they are all different forms of the same thing.

If the "games of old" followed the same rules as today's games, most of those games could be completed within an hour, simply due to memory storage on those small cartridges. That would not keep anyone entertained. Similarily, if games today followed the same rules as games of old, we would have games that take 100+ hours to complete being the standard instead of the exception (with pretty much the entire JRPG genre being excluded from that statement). As games became more popular and more people started playing them, the "die-hards" (people who have been actively playing games for the majority of their lives) all seemed to start complaining about how most games of the modern era have moved so far away from their roots. Part of that is because games aren't really being created with them in mind anymore -- games are being created for the status quo, and the status quo does not want to pour 100+ hours into a game when they have so many other aspects of their lives going on.

The most interesting statement I've ever heard about video games as a media was actually in a comedy clip that I watched:

Spoiler warning:

For people who don't feel like watching (although I highly recommend you do, it's hilarious), the basic summary: video games are the only form of media that will actually lock you out of content because you don't have the time to dedicate to mastering each game (and each game is just a little bit different) in order to finish them. This wasn't a huge problem in "the old days," when the content of a video game was the gameplay, but now that people are demanding actual stories and whatnot with their games, it's become a bit of a problem. Do you punish people who cannot finish a game because they don't have in their daily lives to dedicate to playing it every day for at least an hour until they beat it, or do you make the games a little bit easier to complete so that people can actually enjoy the content that they bought without having to dedicate all of their free time towards it?

This is pretty much the argument that started the entire debacle with Jennifer Hale earlier this year, and it's one that will never be resolved, because every single person plays games for slightly different reasons, and finds enjoyment out of them in different ways. All I know is that the market trend for console/PC gaming has moved towards the second game, and I highly doubt that the first will ever be the standard ever again. Then again, the "arcade style" gameplay has resurfaced lately with social and mobile gaming, so maybe it will make a bit of a resurgence.




As for the argument of "old vs. new," I think a lot of that comes from when you started playing games. I personally started playing on the NES, and I still consider the games I played when I was younger some of the best games ever, because they defined what I enjoyed as a gamer. When I see most people's "Best of the Best" games lists, a lot of the titles on those lists are either games that they played growing up, or games that hold similar features to the games they played growing up. When I look at the games that I really enjoy now, they are all very similar to games that I grew up playing: Dragon's Dogma/Kingdoms of Amalur are similar to Ocarina of time; Alice: Madness Returns/Rayman: Origins are similar to Super Mario Bros. & Mega Man; Ratchet & Clank/Uncharted are similar to Jet Force Gemini; Demon's Souls is similar to Castlevania. These are some of my favourite games that I have played in the last year, and I can easily see their roots in several games I still play and love on my NES, that I grew up playing.

As long as games are made for my niche I don't really care what else is being made.

Also about best game lists. Yeah those are a funny thing, looking at a list you can pretty much tell when someone started gaming because everyone is biased in some way. I think a top 10 list based on sales (with things like inflation and market share taken into account) would be depressing. XD

I forgot to add one more thing in relation to the actual topic. I rarely look for game-related information and time has affected it. I've been burned so many times when buying expensive titles a reviewer recommends that I usually don't respect it. Only when seeing actual footage do I make my decision, or if the price is so low, it wouldn't hurt the wallet if I took a gamble.

Lol video game "journalism".

Yeah you have to judge a title yourself.

[Magicka Emperor]

Holy jeez, this is a great example of trigger words versus context. The second quote you used reflect the actual context of what I wrote. The score bar wasn't needed but reflected the times. Whether people use it is another subject entirely. Instead of seeing fad for what it was referring to (arcade vs narrative), you went on a tangent unrelated to it. Games are not a fad, the style of games are the fad in the same way clothes are a fad that change based on location and social structure.

"!" Woah, sorry that looks like I'm attacking you're wording - I'm not. I used you're wording as a jumping point for a opinon, but never meant it to comeoff as nit-picking you're own opinon. Sorry bud.

I forgot to add one more thing in relation to the actual topic. I rarely look for game-related information and time has affected it. I've been burned so many times when buying expensive titles a reviewer recommends that I usually don't respect it. Only when seeing actual footage do I make my decision, or if the price is so low, it wouldn't hurt the wallet if I took a gamble.

I try to read and absorb as much info about the game months before its release, and then follow up both the reviews and opinons of lots of different printed and digital sources (whether it be PCGamer, OXM, PSM, NP, GI, Gamespy, Gamespot, 1up, Kotaku, etc.), and even look for trials and demos, before I play a game. I think overtime, as a gamer, you come to know what you're tastes are for certain genres, and what developers (and series) hold you're intrest best. I think a thourogh knowledge of the developers prior games, is infinitely better than any review though. I know that when EPIC makes a shooter, ROCKSTAR games a sandbox, MONOLITH a JRPG, BIOWARE a PC RPG, and SCEA a Platfromer, exactly what to expect no matter what game it ends up being. They all have a history, and a certain smell/taste to their work.

Yeah those are a funny thing, looking at a list you can pretty much tell when someone started gaming because everyone is biased in some way

Not completely true. I started gaming in 1987. But most my favorite games are generally from 1998 - 2003 (Tomba!, MGS, Zelda Oot, Zelda MM, RE2, FFVII, Crono Cross, Skies of Arcadia, Onimusha, Radiata Stories, etc.), and none of those are from 1987...or close (props to SMB3 and Battletoads though).

[shin kai]

Nah, still got it. However, with new responsibilities in life, I can't enjoy every game like I used to or every genre for that matter. I've become picky of the anime I watch as well as the games I play. Either the games have to be particularly unique or of a franchise that I like or I may not decide to play it through.

[Knightshade]

Enthusiasm no, time yes that I've lost I have nowhere near the time I once had to play games I love.

[Zaladane]

NEW GAMES SUCK TROLOLOLOLOL.


Nah pretty much still into it, I have my phases though. Right now I can't get into RPG's and am more into some mindless action.
I bounce around.

[Iamerror]

I think it's a lack of free time. I can only seriously play during the summer. I still spend a lot of time playing, though not as much as when I was younger. I still can sit and play an RPG for days. The excitement of a new game isn't the same, but I think that's a part of getting older. I still can be impressed with the story, graphics, or gameplay of a game. I have played several games recently that made my jaw drop. Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound are a good example. So I guess I still have some left.

[treos]

unfortunately, yeah, nowadays games just aren't that exciting anymore to me. i'll still get and play a game from start to finish but as i've been doing with skyrim on xbox 360 lately, i can just stop mid-game and go play another then come back to this one later or some such.

my usual complaints of games being too short/easy nowadays tends to really be aimed at those that look like most of the focus was on developing the graphics and i can usually just blaze right on through them with little to no difficulty. actually, i think the newest game i bought and actually enjoyed all the way through from start to finish... well at least on the 1st playthrough, was Dark Souls (man is that game ever hard). only complaint with that one was this, i had best weapon/armor in the game and hit new game+ (1st ng+ playthrough) and soon as that happened all that gear became utter trash and even the weakest enemies at the start of the game could just about 1-hit me

but overall, this is why i tend to stick to older games now, getting the newest games, unless its a long standing series such as sonic or megaman, just doesn't interest me as much anymore

[Magicka Emperor]

I DO look forward to a future Ucharted game; and the idea of a MUCH LARGER, Higher production value The Legend of Zelda game - in HD no less - completely excites me in a way that gives me hope in atleast a few good games in my future.

And if SquareEnix ever gets around to finally producing Kingdom Hearts III, or that Final Fantasy VII Remake, then I'll die a happier man. I think theyed be a fantastic last offering in what appear [at this point] as videogaming's twlight years.

[dutchmasterkilla]

To me it's not worth the money to invest into it. Developers half-ass it with the ability to rely on DLC or updates. They release dull, unpolished games constantly. A friend of mine thought RE:ORC was an older game for instance when it was only a month old. It will be even worse when they force advertising on you, or don't allow you to play the content you already paid for on the newer systems. When you have to go and buy a completely new version like an HD collection simply because the machine that used to be "cross compatible" doesn't play the old games anymore, it's like a kick to the chops. I bought into the PS2 for that simple fact, above all else. I remember getting a PS1 and it literally cost an arm and a leg and did next to nothing back then. Now they play movies and have internet but I feel like it offers even less, because it's ultimately about the games. Force feeding things like always on internet connections on us to play games is going to kill it unless things go the route I've said for a long time, and that's the fact that the internet should be free for everyone, everywhere they can get it with no exceptions.

That's my take.

[Slacker Magician]

Requiring a connection to play single player games is unbelievably stupid. I don't agree with the internet being free.

[LeftyGuitar]

I guess the spark of excitement for a new game is kinda gone for me. I remember being younger and being stoked for a lot of games. I used to play all kinds of games, for hours on end. Now a days, it isn't really the case. I still play a lot of games today, but I don't play them for nearly as long as did with previous generations of gaming. Games these days are not as appealing of some of the older games, but there are some good games today. A lot of games this generation have been oversaturated, the same game with a few minor tweaks here and there. However, the Wii U is peaking my interest. I guess the classics will always have soft spot for us.

[Rok124]

I see myself starting to lose the gaming enthusiasm occasionally

i sometimes promise myself on my perfectly free days that i would watch anime and play on some emulation all day long but what i end up doing is sleeping and roaming around the house ranting about how bored i was =/

[Sheras]

I would say that i have lost most of my enthusiasm. I used to play for hours on end on many of my games in one sitting and now i barely last for over an hour on any given game.