Features - QOTW: Are computer games better now than they were 20 years ago?

[Saracen]

People need to ditch the rose-tinted glasses. Gaming gets better every year.

Much as people have a massive fondness for the games of their youth, try and *actually* go back and play them. You'll find that, by and large, they're crap. There'll be a handful of games - maybe five - released in the lifetime of a system which don't drive you up the bloody wall within minutes due to design affectations that we simply won't stand for today.

Hell, I'd go a step further and say there isn't a single NES game worth playing - and I say that as someone with a reasonably extensive NES collection, with all the "10/10 buy this now" titles as reviewed by the mags of the day.

Are games easier than they used to be? Sure. They're also more fair. How often did we say "I TOTALLY PRESSED THE BUTTON!!!" at a failure back in the 80s and 90s, and how often now? A game where you feel you have no influence over your own demise is not a fun game, and that's almost all we had back in the oldern days.

And today, today we have fabulous experiences. Journey, for example, is better than almost any game from the SNES era, despite not being "hard". Okami is the best Zelda game ever shipped (spoken as a man with an autographed Zelda 3 cartridge).

Every year brings us new creativity and new experiences, refining and streamlining and above all never failing to try new things.

Can you come up with a selective list of modern turds to compare to retro classics? Sure. Easily. And I can do the reverse just as easily.

I've been collecting games since 1989, and I absolutely don't feel that the old games were better. A few gems stand the test of time, but honestly, I look forward, not backward.

I've been collecting games since the late 70's, and I completely disagree with you .... BUT .... it depends how you look at it.

Self-evidently, many old games are going to look dated if you go back and replay, though that has some charm in it's own right, but that's not a fair comparison, because old games had to run on the hardware available at the time.

For me, it's about how much enjoyment I used to get compared to how much I get now. And I used to get far, FAR more, from most games at least. The days or weeks and weeks, of long nights, are gone. Maybe that's partly me that's changed, but mainly, I think it's because far too much of the effort and time goes on graphics, etc, and too little on innovation and gaming. Original, fun games didn't need to be fancy graphcs - examples would be Monkey Island, or years before, Kings Quest or early D&D games, or early platform games.

So much of the innovation took place in the past, with the first Civ, or first Flight Sim, or first Elite, or first Myst, or Monkey Island, etc, .... well, you get the idea. But for many of what we might now class as a genre, are basically me-too adaptations.

The problem is this. In those old days, computer gaming was in it's infancy, and genuinely different, innovative games were (relatively) easy to do, 'cos almost none of it had been done before. But coming up with something genuinely new, now, is so much harder. So almost every game comes with often clear heritage that can be traced back, so it's never, or very rarely anyway, genuinely new.

In other words, I've seen variants of almost everything that comes out these days before, so it cannot possibly hold that excitement that comes from something genuinely new.

[NathanieCannedy]

In my near 30 years of gaming. I've found the games are getting easier but also look better.

The term 'game over' no longer really exists

Yeah nowadays games are really easy I wonder about the term "Game over" which doesn't really exist.