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Is it a golden age, or do games get generally better as technology improves? They are bigger, smoother, more complex, better connected, and so on. That's why I don't quite follow this article either. Games are objectively better. Perhaps he doesn't find them as fun or as engaging, but that's less to do with the games and more to do with the person.

That and the DS/3DS is probably the richest game console to date in terms of sheer volume of quality content. If you can't find a game you like on the DS, you might not like games.

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This is highly subjective so probably some people will strongly disagree, but I do think there have been significantly better and worse "ages" in videogames. It's not been constant progress.

For example, I'd say 1999-2005 was a quite crappy age. Dominant consoles were Playstation 1 and 2, the first XBox and the Game Cube, which of course had some fine outlier games but nothing compared to the mind-blowing catalogs of e.g. the SNES or the Neo Geo, which were brimming with gems, many of them are still widely considered among the best games of all time.

In the PC, after breakthrough games in the previous years like Daggerfall, Quake, Master of Magic, Doom, Civ II, Ultima Underworld, Fallout, Warcraft, Starcraft, GTA, etc., most of what dominated the market in that decadence period were sequels of those and others, and unoriginal games.

This opinion is not just due to my being a cranky old timer wanting people to get off his lawn. I do think the situation improved a lot from 2006 onwards. Team Fortress II, the Wii, Portal, Minecraft... were truly revolutionary concepts in the late 2000s in different ways, and indie games began to flourish with titles like World of Goo or Braid (or said Minecraft). Fast forward to now, and we have the Switch, Pokémon Go (geolocation games), and a blooming indie universe. I do think we are at a golden age, it would be a great time to be 15 again and have lots of time for videogames.

I find that statements like this serve only to reflect the writer's nostalgia.

The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single game coming out today.

And perhaps it's fueled by nostalgia, but games like Super Mario 64 and Final Fantasy VII are still acclaimed today despite their aged tech and the creation of better successors. And in some ways they are timeless, in the same ways NES or Atari classics are.

3D ganes were introduced in the 90s, before the dark age I described. I did mention 4: Doom (OK, pseudo-3D), Ultima Underworld (full-fledged 3D in 1992, almost modern controls and has aged better than many games 10 years newer), Daggerfall (extremely ambitious full 3D with a world of a size and scope never since seen) and Quake (full 3D, essentially the same game gameplay wise as most of the later FPSs released until today, just with less detailed textures, and a breakthrough in scriptability and moddability). In the console world I could of course mention Star Fox of the SNES, and Mario 64 of the N64, which were also seminal games, but quite prior to the age I'm criticizing. The 3D games of the 1999-2005 era didn't really introduce significant new elements that weren't in these, they were mostly variations of the same thing, sequels or incremental improvements.

Those systems introduced 3D gaming, like the Atari 2600 and it's contemporaries introduced home video games. However, there's not that many great games from either of those times. I enjoy playing the Atari generation games because of the intense focus on gameplay and immediacy of the platform, but it's hard to get others interested. I expect the same is true outside of a very few 3d titles from that era between load times, poor textures, bad cameras, etc. (But maybe I'm just old and grumpy)

I started playing 3d games with Elite on the BBC Micro.

Edit - and am currently wallowing in nostalgia after downloading Oolite.

Some important early 2000s games off the top of my head:

- BF1942. The Desert Combat mod was a blueprint for the “dudebro” FPS boom

- Counter-Strike, DOTA two mods for other games. Both took aspects of other genres (FPS duels and RTS) and made them more accessible to non-hardcore players.

- GTA3 and sidequels. Vice City really anticipated the 80s nostalgia boom of the mid-late 00s. San Andreas was unlike anything I had ever played before in terms of pure scope.

- MGS2. Insane production values (Kojima described it as a “Hollywood game”) mixed with an interesting story and subverting player expectations. The shitstorm surrounding it reminds me a lot of “The Last Jedi”.

And do people play those games anymore?

I'm not asking about their sequels and follow-ups, like DotA 2. People still enjoy The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past (1991) today when many more good Zelda games exist. But it appears to me that not even nostalgia would compel someone to play an early-2000s PC game.

This question doesn't make much sense given how these titles have evolved as player-made modifications to the originals (Half-Life, Warcraft 3).

That seems orthogonal to what I asked. ALttP has player-made mods (randomizers) too.

Let's put it this way. At this moment on Twitch, there are:

- 4 people playing Warcraft 3 (any mod)

- 0 people playing Half-Life 1 (any mod)

- 1 person playing GTA 3 (any mod)

- 21 people playing A Link to the Past (any mod)

- 13 people playing Super Mario 64 (any mod)

So I am totally on board with Al-Khwarizmi's claim. The role of even the best early-'00s games was to show us what better games could be made. Once those better games were made, the '00s games were abandoned, in a way that '90s games weren't.

That’s apples and oranges, though. Super Mario 64 wasn’t a PC game. For a better comparison, how about Super Mario Sunshine (2002; not as popular as 64 but pretty popular), or perhaps Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001; currently one of the most popular competitive fighting games)?

I don't follow this at all.

Eg. the authentication servers for online play (which I'd argue is the main component of HL/CS/WC3/...) are down.

It's impossible to play these games now, so how there could be anyone playing them?

I do enjoy some early-2000s games today more than recent AAA titles (PlayStation 1,2 Gamecube, and I'd throw the Sega Dreamcast in there too).

On the other hand, I grew up with a SNES emulator with more than 300 games, I played a lot of them, and despite the unusual gem like TloZ, most SNES games were totally unmemorable, to say the least.

My point is, that I don't see a fundamental difference between SNES-era games and the early 2000's, both were markets saturated with crap, and a few gems that have stood the test of time.

You can search for active CS 1.6 servers right now, there are thousands of them.

Counter-Strike (2000, last major release in 2003) had a peak of 20,000 players today, making it one of the top games on Steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

There were lots of trash games for PC in the early 2000s, but I think that is normal for any console.

Are you a game journalist by any chance? I am asking because this is the opinion I used to see on the gaming sites when I still read them. I suspect it's because the 6th generation made games mainstream and brought in "normies" to their despair.

Games like GTA3, really popular MMOs (WoW, Lineage, RO etc all had subscriber numbers many times over the previous generation of UO and EQ), online play accessible to normal people (before Halo and SOCOM you had to lug your Xtr33m g4mIng PC to some "LAN party" with other geeks), piles of unique yet well made games never done before like Katamari Damaci, Ico, Rez, music and dance games, MGS, 3D metroids, crazy shit like voice controlled pinball or bongo-operated Donkey Kong or Tekki with a giant controller etc. etc. This was not a crappy age by any measure you'd like to apply other than extreme bitterness.

I'm not a game journalist and have no specific interest or reason to be bitter about a particular age, as I have been playing games quite uninterruptedly since the 80s to now, including those years I don't like. Which were in fact quite good years of my life that I don't have any reason at all to be bitter about. And in which I played a lot of videogames, but mostly from the 90s because the games of the time weren't just hooking me in that much (even though I tried many).

GTA3 is a sequel and the vast majority of gameplay ideas were already in GTA (1997). WoW indeed is popular but a grindfest and tremendously shallow compared to UO. Halo has nothing original with respect to e.g. Quake and you will still find many people playing HD overhauls of Quake I, you'll have a hard time finding anyone playing Halo. The dance games started AFAIR in 1998 with DDR. MGS is from 1998 and in the early 2000s we only saw sequels. Metroid Prime, yeah, that was an outlier!

By the way, it isn't elitism either, few games were more mainstream that e.g. Super Mario Bros, World, Kart or 64 and I count those as masterpieces.

As I say it is subjective, probably there's many people that like games from that generation, but I can perfectly see where the game journalists you mention are coming from. It was a boring period of sequels and incremental ideas. For someone who hadn't ever played a FPS, yes, Halo could be good because it was their first, but those of us who had played Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Blood, Quake, etc. were like "So what?" But it's not elitism. I can see the worth in many mainstream games from other periods when they are really good and original, e.g. I see Pokémon Go as revolutionary with all the elitist bashing it gets! But the vast majority of games of the early 2000s were just reskings of things done earlier, and often better.

Sure, all the SNES RPGs, fighters and platformers were extremely original, every single one of them :) And Nintendo first party games of course. So many original games. Mario Party 7 was a blast and nothing like Mario Party 6!

My main point, though, was about the impact. GTA3 was a revelation for millions of people who have not even heard of GTA1 and GTA2. Saying it's "a sequel" is as meaningful as saying FF XI is a sequel. Millions of people first online shooter was Halo (2), not Quake. Millions of people first MMO was WoW, not UO. MGS2 was the game people could not believe it's real time, it was nothing like MGS1 on PSX.

In the 6th generation games became mainstream. I dare you to name a movie, where adults play games, made before 1999. I don't recall a single one. After 2000 it's a common scene where young and not so young adults play games. The main guy in House of Card plays games. This alone makes the 6th gen special even if you don't care about all the original games it produced.

PS. Actually, an adult plays game in Clerks, though the scene is to show how nerdy he is.

Swingers (1996), although in fairness an exception, shows adults playing NHL in a non-nerdy context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaAtavKP0-4

Over at filfre, an article held a quote from one of the game devs from back around the C64 era.

It boiled down to the notion that the gaming industry have a (bad) habit of resetting itself whenever there is a solid change in hardware available. Resulting in years of glitzy but shallow games as devs spend time showing of what they can make the hardware do more than making deeply engaging game.

So it may well be that recent years of lagging Moore's Law payouts have resulted in game devs having to refocus their effort on something other than graphics prowess to get their games to sell.

Higher-tech games are not objectively better, though that's a very common fallacy among "hardcore" gamers and hardware devs. You can do things you couldn't before, which opens up new kinds of gameplay, and it's certainly nice when games are extremely pretty, but the indie revolution of the last decade should have conclusively killed the idea that tech trumps gameplay. Just for one example, Spelunky essentially founded the "roguelikelike" genre and played a huge part in kickstarting the indie surge, and it (at least in its first incarnation) could just about have run on the SNES.

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