Multiplayer games in general don’t do it for me like they used to. These days I just want to get on and play a few missions in single player then hop off.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole "if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself" rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.
This is when the whole “if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself” rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games.
it's the internet in general.
Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.
I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.
With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.
Same. I play games to enter a relaxation state after a long day at work. Playing a 45 minute cutthroat CS2 match with my friends where I have to be at attention constantly, while they're all screaming at each other for being bad, isn't exactly my idea of relaxation....
Oh yeah! I used to play Unreal Tournament every day for hours. Also played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory a lot in the past.
Nowadays these games just don't appeal to me anymore.
I love MP but I can't bring myself to play due to how incredibly obnoxious it became.
Same. It's enough to team up with people at work so there's no desire to do the same at home. I also don't find grinding as much fun anymore. It used to be a fun way to spend time as a kid because we had too much time. Now, I don't even pick a game which doesn't have basic QoL features implemented.
For me it's the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don't hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.
I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for "the system," but in reality they're only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It's not that the N64 has a top ten, it's that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.
I'm sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef's Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that's the thing: It's always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn't know any better because that's all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.
Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:
Majora's Mask
Star Fox 64
Jet Force Gemini
Donkey Kong 64
Diddy Kong Racing
Excite Bike 64
Paper Mario
~~Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door~~
Pokémon Stadium
Yoshi's Story
Pokémon Snap
Mario Party
Felt at the time that there was always a high quality "AAA" release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.
Obviously a lot of them don't stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven't had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.
Thousand Year Door was a GameCube game.
Good point.
You seem to have forgotten Shadows of the Empire too!
Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)
How many third-party games were any good?
We referred to Rare as a "second-party" developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.
To answer your question on third-party games, some of my favourites were...
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Vigilante 8
Extreme-G
Snowboard Kids
Turok
Bomberman 64
Resident Evil 2
San Francisco Rush
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
But I don't see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it's legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.
Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.
I don't get the hype for Castlevania. I've never liked any of them. I also haven't played one since the SNES.
Well, they took a pretty dramatic turn after that point. Still, Castlevania 1 and 3 are beloved for other reasons.
Star Wars Rogue Squadron?
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer?
Yes my list was not exhaustive either and tried to focus on exclusives to make the point.
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
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Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years...
Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn't exist without them.
Growing up I skipped the PS1/Saturn/N64 generation so I've never had nostalgia for that super early low poly 3D era
I went from getting everything to maybe playing up to 3 new games a year about the same time the PS3 came out. I know what I like and what I want, and the vast majority of games do not deliver these days.
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There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.
Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.
Halo 1 was the first game I ever played online. I played a lot of it.
But I was a very different person then, and replaying it now reminds me of how stupid I was (because I got into a clan that was very based on that kind of person) and the internal ick just his a fever pitch and ruined the game for me.
I never played 2 since that was on Vista and I never went back to it after finally getting Win 7.
After that the series just felt tainted to me. When I first tried it on a console it was really weird with the control setup. I was very used to hundreds of hours on Perfect Dark with the default controls. Having a second stick and rearranging what hand controlled what bent my mind in knots for a while. But it ended up making more sense that way (as you can easily tell by how much it caught on- not saying Halo pioneered it, but it was my first experience with it).
I was a bit young when nes, and snes came out. I am still quiet fond of super mario world 2. But my favorite consoles, hands down are N64, PS1, and PS2. They were really just figuring out open world gaming back then, and they hadn't yet figured our how to make every game constantly online, and/or gaming as a service.
I will say though, a lot of the old games I used to love don't hold up as well playing them as an adult. They are either super hard, or have weird camera and controls, especially 007 GoldenEye for N64.
Another one that turned out to be tedious and hard is Zelda Ocarina of Time, which really surprised me. I thought the game was the greatest game ever as a kid.
I never played n64 (except maybe a couple rounds of Mario kart, but that may have been gamecube). I tried to play ZOoT, goldeneye, etc. and found the controls and camera awful. With no nostalgia for it, I was out in about 30 minutes (I think less on goldeneye be cause of that abomination of a controller).
I've been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren't so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that's the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it's made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I'll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
I remember how many damn licensed games came out during that period. There was just almost a game for everything, it was nuts.
American Choppers had a game. Hannah Montana had several. Let's give Dukes of Hazzard a game, let's give Starsky and Hutch a game. Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
There were definitely some good licensed games!
TMNT Turtles in Time and The Simpsons are two amazing beat 'em ups.
The licensed games by Capcom on the NES are generally a safe bet for a good (if not great) game. Even into the 16-bit era, too.
The [X] of Illusion games on the Genesis are great kid-friendly platformers (Mickey Mouse games).
Plenty of great licensed games throughout the generations too. For something more "recent", consider the success of the Lego games...which are often basically doubly-licensed.
The 5th generation (ps1 mostly) has aged the worst (imo) and it’s the generation I revisit the least.
Atari era/Pre-Windows PC era.
The Atari era is mostly because the games are short and have very little replay value. It's a fun novelty especially when you see an angry nerd swearing at them on YouTube. But you'd get the gyst of the game after 30 seconds. Or are so confused that you don't know what to do without the manual... even then it's not that helpful.
Now for the Pre-Windows PC era, mostly DOS and Commodore. It's mostly because I don't have the right mindset to play them, and forcing myself to just makes me not want to hate them. Outside of Police Quest, Wolfenstein 3D, and F29 Retaliator (<- I can't believe this is on Steam) which I like because they are nostalgic to me, I wasn't able to get into Civiliation 1, Ultima, SimCity or other giants from the time.
Pre-Windows PC Era games worth mentioning:
- Wing Commander 1 & 2
- X-Wing and TIE Fighter
- Sierra point & click adventure games like Kings Quest & Leisure Suit Larry,
- Doom
- Quake
- Dune 2
- Command & Conquer
- Warcraft 1 (zug zug!)
- X-Com
- Fallout 1
I certainly feel like people tend to be more nostalgic of the 16 bit era than the 8 bit.
I think because the 16-bit astethic (when done right) still looks amazing today, where 8-bit is just a bit too limiting.
Most handhelds tbh.
I didn't really grow up with "traditional" (home) consoles, but I always had handhelds (and a PC).
I have trouble going back to most handheld games pre-Vita nowadays, even if I remember the PSP (and GBA to a certain extent) fondly, between the controls, smaller screen and cut versions of games vs their home console counterparts, it's hard to go back. Emulation makes it somewhat nicer for me, but still.
And let's not begin with GB or GG games, they have a certain charm, but I usually can't stand them for more than 5 mins nowadays.
Honestly, I pay for top of line parts. I realize I'm limitiing myself on good games, but...
I paid for this shit, I try to keep top of the line because it is still my hobby (though, my time doesn't allow anymore) and I want to push my hardware.
Low bit games, however good, don't get a chance because... god damn, I expect better. I'm a 80s baby, and 90s kid. Nickelodeon early nick toons are my jam.
I paid for it, let me experience it.
I want to PUSH my hardware, and fine tune for play-ability, as expenses allow.
That being said, I love MMOs and realize how hard they can be to "upgrade" for all users... but damn, I don't have the time or energy anymore. I wish I could raid EQ bosses like I was 13 on summer break, but I fucking can't.
At the end of the day, I hope creative minds create new paradigms in gaming with limited resources. At this point, it is the only way we will grow. AAA studios make rehashes of former successes, which fail, and no one wants them. Gameplay has died, its been several years, and as an "old-head" (Quest for Glory 1 was my first PC game, with parser prompts) and I miss games. Even those are simple by today's standard - but they still stand up in a shorter format.
Even though I grew up with 8/16bit I've never really had any nostalgia for it apart from a select few games.
Not so much as stopped feeling nostalgic for, but realizing that there weren't as many great games available as I thought that haven't had better successors or remakes. And for Nintendo consoles, non-Nintendo games that stand the test of time are difficult to find outside of a few franchises that usually have more modern versions on Switch.
We are just spoiled for choice these days when it comes to games, especially with indie games. And indies these days often have better UX than most mainstream games back then.
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