Super Smash Bros Next

[nosimpleway]

If I want to fill out the rest of the Spirit collection, I've got to buy a bunch of DLC. Nah.

If I want to fill out the Challenges collection, including the last one or two that have Spirit rewards, I need to either get really good at fighting level 9 AI opponents or really good at fighting other players online who have had a five-year head start on getting gud. Nah.

Weird to think that after at least a thousand hours in Melee when I was younger, I'm just... done with this now.

[Niku]

I felt similarly about Ultimate overall (I mean, I ended up putting a ton of time into it but not nearly what I did with Melee as the gold standard for time sinking) but the inclusion of Pirahna Plant really raised the whole thing like ten levels for me anyway.

[Friday]

The true sign of getting older isn't not having time to play videogames, it's having time and not playing videogames. Eventually we'll all be in our anti-arthritis gel vats with a direct neural link to the entire library of videogames ever made which can be played original style or in full immersive VR, and we'll instead post here about how it's just not the same as 70 years ago and we can't be bothered.

[Friday]

"Elden Ring 5, while being an incredible work of art that absolutely smashes all art before it and I don't mean just videogames but all art, everywhere, including the Mona Lisa, War and Peace and Big Trouble In Little China, and has sold 5.5 billion units worldwide, just doesn't really do it for me like Elden Ring 1 did back in 2022."

-- Friday, age 92

[hngkong]

Damn, I can't believe it's going to be 80 years until Elden Ring 5 comes out.

[Grath]

Damn, I can't believe it's only going to be 80 years until Elden Ring 5 comes out.

[Brantly B.]

If I was 12 years old today I honestly think I would have no interest in playing video games at all.

[Friday]

Well, yeah. In 1988 you could buy a NES and a game for it and go home and play it. Now you need to sign up for an account, a live service, buy the battle pass, open the loot box, subscribe to the newsletter, get the skin, update the console, always be online, get the emote and then the brand new game your were looking forward to playing was released in a buggy, unfinished state and won't actually be playable without immense frustration for another year. Oh, and also you don't own anything.

It's not that games are worse, objectively. But games are worse, objectively.

[sei]

"You don't want games to be like they used to be. You want games that make you feel the way you used to feel" is something I think about a lot while I'm playing.

While not the same genre, I'm not sure I've ever seen a game nail that as hard as Tunic.

Well, yeah. In 1988 you could buy a NES and a game for it and go home and play it. Now you need to sign up for an account, a live service, buy the battle pass, open the loot box, subscribe to the newsletter, get the skin, update the console, always be online, get the emote and then the brand new game your were looking forward to playing was released in a buggy, unfinished state and won't actually be playable without immense frustration for another year.

Or just write AAA studios off, and play indie and AA games, and wait a couple years after release if they ever leave early access.

Piracy was also way, way less accessible on consoles than it is on PC.

[Thad]

I'd say I've been maintaining a pretty healthy interest in gaming, but come to think of it most of what I've been playing is 8- or 16-bit. With an occasional game from the current century like FF10 or KotOR 2.

[Mongrel]

Other than PoE and Tanks, which both have sunk-cost shit going on (i.e. I only play because I have a vast trove of hoarded loot, which is what makes the current game kind of bearable), I basically don't play games I can't mod.

With rare exceptions, I simply don't trust publishers not to either fuck up or be malicious (or both) anymore.

[Brantly B.]

Well, yeah. In 1988 you could buy a NES and a game for it and go home and play it. Now you need to sign up for an account, a live service, buy the battle pass, open the loot box, subscribe to the newsletter, get the skin, update the console, always be online, get the emote and then the brand new game your were looking forward to playing was released in a buggy, unfinished state and won't actually be playable without immense frustration for another year. Oh, and also you don't own anything.

None of that helps, but no.

I've been pingponging a lot between old and new games lately, because I'm fucking depressed, and there's one thing that's pretty much true of all the older games I've played - whether they're games I played to death as a kid or some PC-88 footnote that nobody's ever heard of - and anything I've booted up since about 2014* - whether it's a one-guy POS in GameMaker or the most prestige AAA ever made. The thing is this:

Older games feel like an escape from my current problems. Newer games feel like more problems on top of my current problems.

We're talking about Smash Bros. Ultimate here, which even if you just want to beat people up for a bit demands that you figure out how 76-81 weirdo characters work (whether for you or against you), and if you go online you get to meet most of the same toxic goons that harass you outside of the game. And that's before we even begin to talk about rankings, spirits, challenges and the game's average-48-hour single-player mode. That's about 10 hours longer than it takes to get 100% completion in Ocarina of Time.

There are simpler games, obviously, but there aren't really any less demanding ones. What are you going to play? The how-dare-you-not-love-my-characters game? The how-dare-you-farm-inefficiently game? The how-dare-you-have-a-9-to-5-job game? The how-dare-you-not-master-this-skill game? In the age of social credit, the rare product that doesn't seem to want your cash most assuredly wants your undivided attention instead... even if you're not a player. Especially if you're not a player. How dare you not be a player?

If I were 12 years old today, video games wouldn't be what I'd want to escape to. If anything, they'd be what I want to escape from.


* With the exception of EDF 5, which for all intents and purposes is a game from the 2000s. EDIT: I actually looked at my Steam library and I'll also include Soul Calibur VI, which... ditto.

[Mongrel]

I mean, the core of the problem was when publishers large and small decided that "being fun" was not the most important thing about a game. Whether it's a ruthless desire to squeeze money out of people, or simply some fucked up ideology about what Games Should Be and how they Should Be Played, it's all so much missing the forest for the trees.

I get that different people have different ideas about fun, but players and publishers seems to be overlapping less and less as groups on this with each passing year.

[Thad]

Come to think of it, if I'm not mistaken the most recent game I've finished, by release date, is Guardians of the Galaxy, which by modern standards feels like a throwback in terms of how short and linear it is.

It's not even a great game, but it's got a great script and a great soundtrack and it turns out that makes up for a lot of just-okay gameplay. It is a game that seems to prioritize making the player have fun over impressing the player with its scale. There's something to be said for that.

[Brantly B.]

I don't want to get too far into what I think about things but I want to make a point that I do not believe publishers are to blame. If they were, then self-published games would naturally be not a problem... but they're some of the worst.

I'll tip my hand a bit and say this: You know that bit in The 300 where Leonidas asks all the mainland soldiers what their profession is, and they respond with a range of normal jobs, and then he asks the Spartan soldiers what their profession is and they all just kinda scream in unison? The old generation of game developers were mainlanders, because nobody was a "game developer" as a profession back then, they just all got cobbled together in these little offices to try making something out of this weird new medium. The new generation is all Spartans, and like Spartans, they're not good for much if they don't have an opportunity to put their specific training into practice - and they're very aware of it.

[Upthorn]

The Spartans, for all their extreme military focus, were even worse at war than the other Greek city-states

[Friday]

Breath of the Wild felt like a legit escape when I played it a few months ago. It doesn't demand anything of you. It was good for my depression because it felt nice to just slip into a green world that I could just fuck around and ride horses in. Doubly so when I discovered Hawaii was in the game.

Not saying your assertions are wrong, just that BotW could be an exception for you if you hadn't tried it.

[Brantly B.]

I rushed to finish up a second modded playthrough when TotK came out.

I've played about two hours of TotK now, because I kind of just... am not in much of a hurry to do all that a third time.

(So I went and replayed all of Zelda 1 and 3 instead.)

[nosimpleway]

Realizing that I am currently grasped in the calloused paw of anhedonia more than usual lately but on-topic I don't think that would have changed my impressions of Smultimate all that much

[Thad]

I don't want to get too far into what I think about things but I want to make a point that I do not believe publishers are to blame. If they were, then self-published games would naturally be not a problem... but they're some of the worst.

I do think that in some ways it's us and what we, specifically, are looking for.

I felt it, hard, when you mentioned "the how-dare-you-farm-inefficiently game" (I'm going to assume you're talking about Stardew Valley but it doesn't particularly matter, I think this probably applies to any farming sim); I hit a point in Stardew where I had to quit because I realized it had stopped being a chill, relaxing experience and had turned into a crushing exercise in min-maxing my time management. Which, as you say, is the exact thing I'm trying to get away from in those moments I have time to kick back with a game.

But it seems pretty clear to me that a lot of people don't get that from it at all, that a hell of a lot of fans of the game have been able to maintain that chill, relaxing vibe over the long haul.

So I'm not so sure that it's a problem with the game, or the farming sim genre, it's just that I have a personality that bounces off it.

(Okay, I can't resist: the fault, dear Brentai, lies not within our Stardews, but within ourselves.

I apologize for nothing. Except the meter.)

Something more aimless, without the time constraints, say Animal Crossing? I bounce off that too. Tried it, it was charming enough, but after the first couple days it bored me. My wife digs it, for basically the same reasons I don't, and that's fine, if a little disappointing that we can't really enjoy it together. (TBF that's also because the multiplayer is so thoroughly half-baked -- and that's a concrete, objective, mechanical criticism, in contrast to my other criticisms which are largely matters of personal taste.)

I'll tip my hand a bit and say this: You know that bit in The 300 where Leonidas asks all the mainland soldiers what their profession is, and they respond with a range of normal jobs, and then he asks the Spartan soldiers what their profession is and they all just kinda scream in unison? The old generation of game developers were mainlanders, because nobody was a "game developer" as a profession back then, they just all got cobbled together in these little offices to try making something out of this weird new medium. The new generation is all Spartans, and like Spartans, they're not good for much if they don't have an opportunity to put their specific training into practice - and they're very aware of it.

I think there's something to that, too.

And the thing about both publishers and indies is that for the most part everybody's imitating somebody else -- the big studios imitate what sells, and the indie devs imitate the games they liked when they were kids. There's nothing inherently wrong with taking a familiar formula and refining it, but I don't feel the sense of wild innovation we used to have in the old days.

(OTOH my favorite era in gaming is the 16-bit console era, which I'd say in general was a period of refinement, in contrast to the invention of the 8-bit consoles that preceded it or the early 3D era which followed it.)

At any rate, on the one hand I'm not sure I'm as down on current games as you and some of the other folks here, but on the other I've spent the last couple of weeks playing a heavily-modded version of FF6, a lightly-modded version of Crystalis, a restored-content mod of KotOR 2, a colorized version of Wario Land, a couple obscure Game Gear games I read about on Retronauts, and fan-made ports of Sonic 3 and Mega Man 4, so it occurs to me that if I'm not criticizing recent releases that may be because I don't actually care enough about them to engage with them.