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Post by Ex on Dec 17, 2019 12:49:54 GMT -5
Well folks another decade soon draws to a close. The '10s are nearly behind us. In that regard, I thought perhaps we should take some time to reflect on the past decade, in a personal gaming sense. When we started this decade the 360/PS3/Wii/DS/PSP were reigning supreme. Iwata was still alive, and Kojima still worked for Konami. Now the One and PS4 are in their twilight years. The Wii U, Vita, and 3DS are dead and buried. The Switch is going strong. And the Xbox Series X and PS5 are looming tall. A dude named Bowser is running Nintendo (of America) now, and Reggie retired. Oh yes, a whole lot happened in the past ten years, including the rise of PC gaming, indies galore, and virtual reality more accessible then ever. Smartphones going crazy and everybody and their grandmother playing them. Many legendary Japanese game developers going rogue. Plus augmented reality gaming. And who could ever have foresaw the amazing impact and unstoppable staying power of that little console that could; the Ouya! So here's ten freakin' questions for you.
In the past ten years...In what ways have you changed as a video gaming enthusiast? Do you enjoy gaming now as much as you did ten years ago? What were your greatest gaming finds (including new to you retro stuff)? Which gaming hardware/consoles have been your favorites? Anything video game related that you hope stays behind with the '10s?
What were your worst gaming disappointments?
Tell us a few of your favorite gaming related memories from the past ten years. What are your thoughts on all the various gaming hardware/platforms that existed in the '10s?
Do you think video gaming has improved or devolved in the past decade?
What are you hopeful for in the next ten years, concerning this medium? - I will be back later with my own responses.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 17, 2019 21:33:02 GMT -5
I'm going to poke at this later, but it's something where I'm going to have to take stock pretty carefully. It feels like the last ten years have all kinda smushed together.
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Post by anayo on Dec 18, 2019 17:28:40 GMT -5
Modern gaming consoles I bought this decade:
2012 - Nintendo 3DS (I played this to death.) 2013 - XBOX 360 (This was basically a Skyrim machine.) 2015 - Wii U (This was basically a Super Smash Bros. machine.) 2017 - Switch (I'm still playing this to death.)
I sat out on the XBOX One and Playstation 4 because I felt they didn’t offer enough of an upgrade over the previous gen. I don’t know if this is because Moore’s Law slowed down or if it’s because making graphics look better is taking exponentially more processing power. But it’s the first time in my life I remember this happening. Well into my late teens, I remember feeling “left out” when cool new video game consoles would come out with better graphics and features. I always wanted the latest and greatest but could rarely afford it. This decade I could afford the latest and greatest, but didn’t want it. It held no appeal for me. It remains to be seen if I’ll feel the same way about XBOX Series X or Playstation 5.
This decade 16 and 8 bit stuff became way more difficult to find at thrift stores. The stuff that did appear was priced very high, as though the employees had researched everything online beforehand. I think this is because of several high profile eBay sales reaching news headlines, such as a complete copy of Stadium Events for NES selling for five figures. After that I noticed more people online would add buzzwords like “RETRO”, “VINTAGE”, “COLLECTIBLE”, and “RARE” to their old video game listings. It was still possible for me to find a lot of cool stuff this decade. But the days of regularly finding piles of Sega Genesis and NES stuff at Goodwill are long gone. I have heard some people predict that as 80’s and 90’s kids age, fewer people will care about the games from that generation’s childhoods, and the price bubble will burst. I’ve also read articles on Kotaku about wealthy collectors hoarding plastic sealed NES games for thousands of dollars because they expect the value to balloon like classic comic books. I have no idea which outcome will come true. Personally I am less worried about my collection maintaining monetary value and am more worried about future young people being apathetic or dismissive about the games I thought were cool when I was growing up. Maybe that bothers me on some existential level.
At the same time, my collection has approached the saturation point. I have had to implement a “play one console/platform per year” policy to make any meaningful progress on clearing through my backlog because I was accumulating games faster than I could play them. I think this has been a positive development. I’ve been able to focus more on a particular generation of gaming and reflect on what that era had to offer rather than arbitrarily hopping around.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 18, 2019 22:04:49 GMT -5
Hmm, going to be hard to remember when I bought stuff like anayo , but I'll try! - Nintendo 3DS (2011): I bought this right before the price drop and got the ambassador games... and I got the price drop, because Walmart dropped it early. I haven't gotten as much mileage out of it lately, but I've definitely put some time in over the years. I actually ended up selling my original one and getting the XL, which I've held onto until now. - Wii U (2013): I got this a year late, in 2013, along with Super Mario 3D World. Fantastic game, and despite the hate it tends to get, it was a great system. A painful failure, but it led the way for the Switch, so not a total loss. - PS4 (2015): Still lagging behind a bit here as well. I got the one bundled with Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, but it wasn't physical. Darn. Should have bought at GameStop. Anyway, I've enjoyed the system, even if I didn't spend nearly as much on it as I did with the 360/PS3. - PS Vita (2015): Well, I didn't realize it, but apparently I got the Vita and the PS4 around the same time. PS4 on Black Friday, Vita for Christmas. Sadly, I haven't put the sort of time into it that I'd like; I want to love it, but there's not enough stuff that I really dig on there! Had a lot of fun with Tales of Hearts R, though, and also thought Ys: Memories of Celceta was super solid. - Switch (2017): So there's a way to immediately hit my weak spot when it comes to systems, and that's to launch with a Zelda title. I bought the Wii in the first week (despite having a Gamecube), and I bought the Switch (pre-ordered, even!) even though I had the Wii U. The problem with having so many systems, though, is that you really don't put as much time into one as you'd necessarily like. Interestingly, for all the Switch owners here, you can get some stats on your playtime and whatnot at the following URL: switch.nintendo.com/year-in-review/Surprisingly, my stats were pretty low for this year: only 120-ish hours. Bloodstained was a huge chunk of that, followed by Blaster Master Zero and Link's Awakening. But I've also hit the retro pretty hard this year; I might even end up with a 75/25 split the opposite way, which is pretty crazy. I don't remember exactly which retro systems I bought in the last decade, but I think I got the following: - 3DO - GBA SP - PC Engine Duo - DS Lite (again) - DSi XL This is also the decade I hit flash carts really hard. While it wasn't my first (I messed around with both GBA back in the day, as well as DS), this is the first time I've had options for non-current systems. The SD2SNES started me out, then an EverDrive N8, the Mega EverDrive V2, the Turbo EverDrive, and last year, the EverDrive-GB X3. I really love the ability to play on real hardware on top of the emulation I do, so these things were awesome. I'll see if I can hit some more stuff later. Including some gripes, of which I certainly have a few! anayo: Yes, NES and SNES in particular are really hard to find at decent prices. Everyone looks up the prices now. The bargain-hunting days might not be over, but they sure are tough for semi-casual collectors.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 19, 2019 17:52:04 GMT -5
So I'd forgotten I'd even posted this on TT sometime last year, but I have a top 10 games of this decade now. There's some jostling that could occur since I have a few 9/10 games, and there are a lot of those through the decade, but here's the list, in no particular order:
- Alan Wake - Ys VIII - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Skyward Sword - The Last Story - Super Mario 3D World - God of War (2018) - Shovel Knight - Super Mario Odyssey - Breath of the Wild
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 21, 2019 23:37:07 GMT -5
Dark Souls saved gaming.
I'm not joking. I've seen a few site headlines mention it and was hearing it joked about (positively) on the Game Informer podcast today. Dark Souls truly is probably the most important game/series this decade. The influences have sunk through literally everything by now (Star Wars Fallen Order for the latest one) and the pushback on lazy tutorials/easy difficulties that was overtaking games got slapped. Personally, Demon's Souls will always be my favorite and it's criminal when people skip it, but I won't deny that Dark Souls is what shook the industry and for the best. As of 2019 From Software are pretty much my favorite developers in the business.
I certainly wouldn't have said that in 2009-2010, hah! I played Demon's in 2012 for reference. And I think 2012 is where the groundwork was laid for where I've been with gaming the last decade.
Prior to that, ~2007-2012 (early) seem like they could lump into the last era I had. Post high school, early off and on community college, while I sometimes worked part time or full time in between, while still living at home. So things were pretty casual back then and I was kind of finding my place in life at that stage of early adolescence. One key thing that keeps standing out about this subject, is that I WAS really big on Halo and CoD4 back then. It's fascinating to think about where we were politically in ways too back then, not to get into details since this isn't the place for that, but I just think about how insane XBL was in its early stages. I certainly don't miss it, but kind of laugh at how terrified kids today would be if they heard what people my age or older grew up with in the earlier stages of the internet and online play. We all had bigger brass objects I'd say. Main point here is that I played one online shooter semi-constantly throughout those years it seemed. Halo was earlier, with Reach and 4 being the last ones, then CoD4 and MW2. I'd play for hours endlessly online at home, then even spend days at a friends while we switched off every death or had LAN's. For CoD4 I hit the max prestige (10 times) and had some gold weapons, literally just about 101%'d that game, even online.
I swear guys, I think I could still get into a shooter like that thesedays too and even crave it sometimes. But modern trends in gaming are what pushed me back! It's funny to think about. I was already getting sick of CoD when the yearly annual releases started happening. Then DLC and map packs were a thing. Then all this other garbage like skins and other features. The menu's and systems continued to get more and more cluttered. Maybe they've course corrected by now but I doubt it, THIS GENRE LEFT ME BEHIND. Not the other way around. Developers forgot... sometimes less is more. Keep it simple.
Either way, I think it was inevitable that I'd be where I am now in gaming, because it feels like when I made the hard jump from the 360 to the PS3 being my main in 2012 and kind of went "offline", I started feeling like a kid again. I stopped suckering into a lot of the AAA stuff that I got into during the last gen, I look back and regret like 80% of the 360 games that I own. Now on the PS4 I've only sold 2 games out of 48 on my "beaten" shelf. I remembered that I favor Japanese developers and certain franchises or genres. It felt like I got more focused again and my intuition knew best. Maybe in a way, I have become a little more narrow minded in some ways, but I don't hesitate about this at all when things like the indie boom give us dozens of new game releases by the day. It's a strange time to be alive with so much entertainment at our fingertips, it's easy to get lost in this madness. So I think it's best to get meticulous about your hobbies and really know your areas of specialty and laser focus on them.
Overall I don't think my roots or values ever changed much. As expressed plenty across HRG already, I never stopped playing retro games, so that was always there. Forums like these have certainly helped me know where to go next in exploring games and locking in on things I may like from friends and members recommendations. Zelda, Mega Man, Metroid, and Doom are a few of the things permanently in my DNA, alongside the birth of third person intense action/slash games in the PS2 days like Onimusha, Devil May Cry, and Ninja Gaiden (Xbox), then of course there's my affinity for sci-fi and mecha. Give me things with some of these ingredients and I'm happy.
I just wanted to ramble, I'll try to hit up the specific questions later.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 22, 2019 14:00:46 GMT -5
I do think Dark Souls has been highly influential, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say it "saved gaming". Certainly, it was a game that showed it was acceptable to bring difficulty back to gaming, but I'm also not entirely sure it ever left; games like the aforementioned Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and others were still carrying the "GIT GUD" torch. And the rise of indies birthed a whole myriad of games that weren't afraid to punish the player because they took inspiration from old-school roots. As with most influential games in the medium, though, others take lessons from it and try to bottle that same lightning. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I do know that we've reached peak copycat when I roll my eyes at yet another mention in a new game of " Souls-like" gameplay. It's as bad as "Metroidvania", and that's a genre I love! I do think I've changed slightly since the start of the decade. In the late PS2 era, I stopped trying to keep up with nearly every RPG release. That continued into the PS3/360 era; many of the JRPGs that were released just didn't appeal to me. I know the Neptunia games hold appeal for some, for example, but I figured out real quick those weren't for me. I also started cutting out SRPGs, especially when it dawned on me that I wasn't really finishing many of them at all. My brain still tells me I want them, but more often than not I bounce off of them. Lest it sound like I'm narrowing my tastes too much, though, I've also quite enjoyed the opportunity to branch into games that I wouldn't normally play. DOOM is a masterpiece. Quake wasn't as much my speed, but I appreciated the history lesson. Ex and others got me to play Thief Gold, and I feel the wiser for it. Club Retro forced me to finally sit down with a bunch of Master System games, and I found a few worthy classics in the mix. And King's Field! Certainly not a game I'd have normally given more than an hour to before quitting, and I'm glad I didn't. Perhaps I will feel that way about Dark Souls when I finally get to it. As far as modern gaming goes, while I still play modern games, it's pretty clear that I still gravitate towards retro-styled games. Shovel Knight, Castle in the Darkness, The Messenger, Rex Rocket, Freedom Planet, Iconoclasts, and others have kept the olden days alight in my mind. I'm still very much a product of the tastes of my childhood, and games that give me that same joy are going to rate very highly. Anyway, rant over. Xeogred, apologies if any of my Dark Souls rant comes across harshly!
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 22, 2019 14:41:29 GMT -5
No worries, you still agree it was hugely influential. Maybe I'm being a bit over the top saying it "saved" gaming. But no doubt I think it altered the course of the whole medium and influenced so many developers and designers. People who cover games can never got around it when there's a clone or something pulls elements from those games, it's practically a meme at this point, but they still have to acknowledge where these ideas come from if they prop up in other new games. I'm even one that finds the difficulty of them exaggerated a lot of the time myself, but compared to the direction of where things were going and a lot of popular modern games, it was a bit of an anomaly that electrocuted the industry. Some of the examples you mentioned have been sparsely dormant, or finally made a comeback after nearly a decade (DMC5 and I'm not counting Ninja Theory's DmC... 2012 since Ninja Gaiden 3, I hope it comes back someday. Although they're doing Nioh now which is amazing). Souls to me felt like 8bit philosophies perfectly found way into a modern series, trial and error is key, the player is who makes the mistakes, and there's no hand holding so you can explore these worlds on your own pace. So simple, yet so many developers lost sight of this. So yeah, I think the Dark Souls thing is both overstated at times but also still true. A legend and one for the history books in this medium. Although it came out in 2011, it would be cool if you and Ex go through it in 2020. Maybe even plan it out to co-op the experience, that was fun when I did that with a friend during Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. We would share and discuss things we discovered while playing them, before the internet and everyone had the answers. Though, if you haven't Sarge , you gotta start with Demon's Souls. Skipping it would like going into Mega Man X (Dark Souls) and loving it while completely ignoring Mega Man NES, when people skip the king game that started it all. And I can say as someone that has mastered all four Souls games, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, Demon's still stands tall among them all. An absolute masterpiece. This part made me laugh a little: "In the late PS2 era, I stopped trying to keep up with nearly every RPG release." If someone were to divide up JRPG's and WRPG"s, I could maybe see this being possible, ONLY if said player just played this genre and absolutely nothing else, at this point. This is a tough train to get back on once you fall off haha, I'm still trying to play catch up on a lot of JRPG's I missed on the PS2. Still some stuff across the PS3-PS4 that interest me as well.
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Post by Ex on Jan 2, 2020 8:52:03 GMT -5
Perhaps I will feel that way about Dark Souls when I finally get to it. Personally I'd much rather you play through Demon's Souls first. I am not exaggerating when I say that Demon's Souls is in the top 10 games I've ever beaten in 35+ years of video gaming. It is absolutely amazing, and I think once DeS got its hooks in you, you'd be surprised at how much you end up enjoying the experience. I can't speak for Dark Souls, as I've not played it yet. I do plan to play Dark Souls this year though. I've put it off for far too long. I am most interested in seeing how it compares to DeS, especially in the difficulty department. Beating DeS without any outside aid was tremendously challenging. But there's a whole lot more to love about DeS than just its balls-busting difficulty.*
*Providing one doesn't play as a magic-spewing royal - that's easy mode DeS.
Demon's still stands tall among them all. An absolute masterpiece.
I agree 100%. I wish everybody could play through DeS. Normally I'm all for console exclusives, but DeS needs to be available on other consoles at this point. I don't really want it on PC though, as too many would just cheat their way through it.
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I am going to attempt to provide my own answers to this thread soon! I kind of forgot about my own thread. The holidays were very busy for me... I'm glad they're over.
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Post by Ex on Jan 2, 2020 11:06:24 GMT -5
In what ways have you changed as a video gaming enthusiast?When the '10s started, I would normally beat any game I started, even if it was bad (sunk cost fallacy). I now have no qualms dropping a game if it stops being fun. I also used to refuse to play more than one game at a time. But nowadays I tend to have a few games going simultaneously (I blame this on Sarge's influence), which I bounce around between. I used to be obsessed with trying to collect every game that was even mildly interesting for systems I owned. Now I'd much prefer to focus on collecting only the truly interesting stuff (less hoarding). I put far less emphasis on valuing the opinions of critical ratings from people I do not know, meaning buying games based solely on their aggregate ratings just isn't happening. Also I've beaten some mammoth sized games in the past 10 years, I'm talking about putting over 100 hours in a single RPG. I never did that before the '10s. Do you enjoy gaming now as much as you did ten years ago?Yes and no. After you've been gaming for as long as some of us on HRG, there tends to be a point where you've kinda seen it all before. Part of what makes video gaming so exciting, is experiencing new concepts and fresh gameplay experiences. That aspect is prevalent for younger players. But that kind of excitement becomes rarer and rarer, the more time you spend with the medium. So at this point I am not often surprised, thus the novelty factor of video gaming is quite low for me now. Also "amazing graphics" don't mean much at all to me, I have never been a "graphics whore". So for me to finish a game, it has to have consistently competent gameplay above all else. I know that seems like an obvious point to make, but in reality a lot of folks' gaming fervor is driven by novelty, graphics, hypetrains, and being part of a "cult of the new". To cut it short; I still love video games, no matter how old or new a game might be, as long as the core gameplay is well designed. But finding video games that I consider to have well designed core gameplay, happens less often, after so many years of exposure. This is probably why I enjoy off the wall stuff like SCUBA diving adventure games. It's something DIFFERENT. Also in recent years I've gotten heavily into analog gaming, and that tends to distract me from playing video games as often.
What were your greatest gaming finds (including new to you retro stuff)?
It's funny but everything that's coming to mind for me predates the '10s. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and Aquanaut's Holiday: Hidden Memories all came to mind immediately... and all predate 2010. (Also telling that those are PS3 and not Wii or 360, take that as you will.) But I didn't play such games until the '10s. Without a doubt though, my greatest new-to-me gaming find in the '10s was getting into the King's Field series. Playing through all of FromSoftware's first person dungeon crawlers was by far the greatest gaming experience I had in the '10s. Pure magic. Also playing through the Sorcery! series on Android was freaking great. Some of the best adventure-RPGs one could ever hope to play. Which gaming hardware/consoles have been your favorites?Of the systems that released in the '2010s... definitely the 3DS and Vita. Especially the Vita. What a sexy darling of a platform, with tons of Japanese delights to play in its library. Everybody who loves the Switch owes the Vita a nod of respect! The Switch probably wouldn't have existed had the Vita not been a proof of concept first. Anything video game related that you hope stays behind with the '10s?The whole anti-sexiness in games thing. I'm talking about people trying to censor scantily clad females from appearing in video games. There were many examples from the '10s, and it negatively affected plenty of Japanese game localizations in the west. I hate censorship, and I love beautiful ladies, so obviously this practice grates my nerves. If it's cool for Japan to have, it should be cool for USA to have. If someone doesn't like the "lewd" graphics, don't buy the damn game. Vote with your money, not whiny social media posts resulting in a vetoed pixel blockade. What were your worst gaming disappointments?The rise of DLC, pay to win, gatcha... just anything that focused on the sheer monetization of gaming. Shallow game designs that flooded the smartphone market. Oh and MOBAs specifically. No offense against MOBA lovers (you're in the majority), but that sort of game design where you just battle online incessantly without end... holds no interest to me whatsoever. Tell us a few of your favorite gaming related memories from the past ten years.My best gaming related memories all have to do with getting my wife into video gaming when we first started dating. (I started dating her in January of 2010.) The first three or four years of our relationship were filled with fantastic coop gaming sessions. Sadly we hardly ever do that anymore, mostly due to a lack of that level of free time together since moving close to her family. (I regret doing so, but that's a rant for a different thread.) Anyway, beating cooperative action-RPGs with a spouse is a beautiful thing. What are your thoughts on all the various gaming hardware/platforms that existed in the '10s?By "existed" I'm going with "released in" the '10s... 3DS = Big fan of the system. I just wish it didn't have such a potato resolution. That said, the 3DS has a killer library, especially if you're into JRPGs and SRPGs. Nintendo Switch = I've never been excited about this thing. First off it's a Vita ripoff, which so many people seem to fail to realize, and instead credit Nintendo with conceptualizing. Secondly the Switch has precious few quality exclusives. The vast majority of games I see praised on the platform also exist on other platforms. That said, there are of course high quality Nintendo-made Switch exclusives. So the system is worth having in that regard. Shame about those prone-to-breaking Joycons though. Nintendo Wii U = Basically Nintendo tried to make a hybrid of the best selling DS and best selling Wii... and nobody cared. Touch screen gaming was no longer new and sexy, thanks to everyone having smartphones, and too many waggle games had killed people's interest in motion control. Despite all the odds stacked against it, the Wii U still has some great exclusives in its library. I'm glad to own my Wii U, but I understand why relatively nobody cared about this thing. Ouya = The little console that couldn't. PS4 = Basically the same thing Sony always does - a more powerful version of what came before, without much innovation or paradigm shifting. That's not really a bad thing though, as consistent quality counts too. I plan to get a PS4 eventually, as there's quite a few PS4 games which look interesting to me. I might even buy one in a few months from now. Vita = Criminally ignored amazing little system. Especially the OLED model. Everybody complained about the memory card prices. Never bothered me, as I only bought physical games, and thus only needed memory space for saving games. The default 4GB is plenty of space for saved game files. Despite Sony's unbelievable neglect of the Vita in the west, it still got a lot of love in Japan - meaning if you enjoy modern Japanese game designs the Vita is a must own. Xbox One = Microsoft...
Do you think video gaming has improved or devolved in the past decade?
Overall it's improved, as more people are playing video games now then ever before. That's an improvement right? But with popularity comes homogenization, and with homogenization comes catering to the lowest common denominator. And that has a detrimental effect on creative risk taking. Thankfully there are still lots of retro '80s/'90s titles I've yet to play through, from the golden wild west years of this medium. What are you hopeful for in the next ten years, concerning this medium?My #1 hope is that VR gaming becomes better and better, while become cheaper and cheaper. I'd love a quality VR setup that costs $200. Believe it or not, I think Nintendo could be the company that could do it. No really. With today's better technology and Nintendo's better management, the Virtual Boy could be resurrected and done correctly. I'll take one Virtual Man please! I'll wrap this up with a link you all might find memory-reinvigorating to read:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_in_video_gaming
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