racketboy.com

You bring up some interesting points, Green Warrior. Let me offer some possible context. The reason consoles exist is because computers and electromechanical arcade machines are expensive. Miniaturization was allowing the development of practical circuits in small packages, and if you made things simple enough you could sell them at a reasonable price to people with TVs in their homes.

So consoles basically arose to create a cheaper, and often lesser, experience in the home for the kinds of games being developed for both dedicated arcade machines and expensive computers. When computers like the Apple and later the Commodore 64 heralded computers a family could afford to put in the home, that created competition, but the consoles were designed to feature faster, more responsive movement where the general purpose computing devices had more RAM and bitmapped graphics (and often lacked smooth, fast motion).

But of course video operations on computers got faster and costs started coming down for monolithic general computing CPUs, and prices on bespoke chips didn’t, necessarily, at the same rate. The reason the current crop of consoles are basically PCs (or mobile devices in the case of the Switch) is because that’s just what makes sense. The R&D and manufacturing costs of bespoke processors just wouldn’t make it worth it in the face of what the massive commodity market for mobile phones and PCs has done to hardware costs in those spaces.

The console model of old is dead for a reason. The singularity is nearly upon the industry. I miss it, too, but it is unlikely to ever return.

Tempest wrote:I hate how modern games are released in broken states and the publishers expect you to pay full price for them. Then, when they've eventually updated them to what they should have been on release, they're a 10th of the price.

You just described my buying strategy. lol

By the time I get around to playing some of these triple-a games, they're in the bargain bin and fully updated with bug fixes. This is more like a feature of modern games to me. lol

opa wrote:By the time I get around to playing some of these triple-a games, they're in the bargain bin and fully updated with bug fixes. This is more like a feature of modern games to me. lol

By the time I get around to twenty-year-old games they've at least spent time in the bargain bin and are fully updated with bug fixes because they got it right the first time.

dsheinem wrote:

Raging Justice wrote:It's like I'm always reaching for the past.

your use of “bimbo” made that pretty clear…

also, a wall of text to complain about too much talking? *chef’s kiss*

I briefly peeked at this thread after having ignored it for seven months intending to make a well-reasoned argument about why some modern games suck but others are the absolute peak of their series, but then I saw this first reply and realized that nothing I could say could possibly top this.

I think a lot of modern AAA games fall under a few categories:

1. Open world
2. Competitive online
3. Heavy Story

For me the issue is none of these styles of games really interest me. Theres always exceptions though and the indie scene definitely adds a lot to the diversity of game styles and that’s where most of the interesting stuff is for me. Usually I just rather play an older game though.