I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, whenever I play a new video game, I quickly become disappointed. I rarely last more than about an hour with a new game and I’m struggling to figure out what the cause of this is. Am I growing out of my love for gaming, or are games just not what they used to be?
The last person that I want to come across as is the “GIT OFF MAH LAWN” senile old git, who thinks the best things happened when he was younger. The problem I’m having now is, I can’t think of a recent game that had the same effect on me as a game like Final Fantasy 7 (or 8… or 9). I know this is an extreme comparison, as FF7 is widely regarded as one of the best games of all time, but it seems that there was about a decade where games were continually blowing me away.
Was that because I was a more impressionable young man, where every new experience was wonderful? Or were games actually better back then? As much as I hate to say it, I think they were. I think the video games industry, in general, has evolved into (for lack of a better description) mainstream Hollywood movies. Substance has been replaced with amazing visuals. The characters and stories are just placeholders to allow you to travel to X location and blow shit up along the way.
I want to love the next video game I play. I really, really do. I recently made a subscription to GameFly, so I could try out a bunch of games I hadn’t bothered to play in hopes of something sticking out at me, but I haven’t yet found anything.
All that being said, every once in a while, something comes along that renews my hope that the next blow-me-away game might eventually happen. Uncharted 3 is a great example out of this, as for the 7 or 8 hours it took me to finish it, it was the most fun I’d had with a game in years.
What do you, the Big Red Barrel community, think about the state of video games? Are you in the same boat as me, waiting for the next great thing while remembering the “golden years,” or am I growing game-senile?
11 Posts in Total
Play Binary Domain. If at one point in your life you loved JRPGs for their hammy charaacters, and you can potentially still enjoy a well-designed third-person shooter, Binary Domain will surprise you.
I agree that there are some gems. I loved Mass Effect 3 and I’m loving The Walking Dead. I never got into Bioshock and I’ve played about 4 or 5 hours of RDR, but am having a hard time staying interested. I played GTAIV when it came out, but lost interest in that too, though I do remember it having an interesting story.