Re: CRAP Poll: Favorite Era of Gaming

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

This month it's a fun one: Video games have been around for a long
time, and have gone through various phases. Of them all, which was the
era in which you had the most fun playing video games? Not which you
feel was necessarily the BEST era with the best games, but the one you
had the most fun with.

I'm going to cheat and say right now.  Because right now I can play
amazing games that couldn't have existed years ago.  I'm not talking
about how graphics have gotten better either.  There are games being made
today that just weren't being made a decade ago, even if there graphics
easily could have been.  Part of it is how hardware has improved and
what faster CPUs and mere memory allows, but I think a lot of it is how
the market has changed.

The video game market is big business right now, but it's not completely
dominated by big businesses the way other entertainment industries
are.  There's more room than ever for less popular games to succeed,
meaning they can be more ambitious.  Two games I played a lot this
year are example of this, Oxygen Not Included and Against the Storm are
examples of this.  Niether has impressive graphics, the first looks like
a Flash game, the second like it was made 20 year ago.  So no way any
big publisher is going to get behind them.

So they're both "indie" games, but they still had enough of a budget,
their cheaper graphics helping a lot here, to invest in design and
gameplay.  Oxygen Not Included's 2D world could've easily been a lot
simpler, like Terraria or Starbound which it resembles, but instead they
added a number of details (like different layers, pipes that can be next
to each other without connecting) that would have been too ambitious
for an indie game from a decade or more ago.

Against the Storm was less mechanically impressive in it details,
but amazing on how it innovated on basic city builder gameplay with
an addictive rougelite gameplay loop.  The way it gradually ramped
up the difficulty was also amazing, forcing you to optimize how you
do things more and more, but without throwing you into the deep end.
I progressed a lot farther in the game than I had thought I could at
the start, or would have if the game had forced me to adapt much quicker.

These are both games that would have to been much less ambitious if
they were indie games from 10 years ago or more, assuming they could
even find publishers.

But the cheat part that makes now an especially good time to play games,
is that I can still play all the old games from way back when that I want.
So if I want to play Wizardry, Wing Commander, Deus Ex or Fallout:
New Vegas, I can.  Plus the experience will be better because of faster
loading times and bigger screens.

--
 l/  //   Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca:11068/
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