And then lock it up.

something unique, better even, something fun.

Outside of shoot em up or hack and slash. Something with a good story that involved real coop to win. Not many.

Exactly. Several limits were loosened or removed entirely. The SNES was the first console with actual pixel transparency, the PSX, despite being weaker than the Saturn and the N64, was the king of the 90s. The jump in graphical and sound quality was always night and day from the Atari era all the way to the PS3/360 era (sound probably peaked in the PS2 era, with DVD quality)

Even on the PC, the jump from 3 years’ worth of advances was astonishing. Just compare the original Doom, 1993, with Quake, 1996

And here’s Quake 3, 1999

the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine

Is that the goal? I want more from my games than just poking my brain. I sometimes play games that challenge my reactions, sometimes ones that challenge my thinking. Superhot and Braid provided interesting time-related puzzles. Portal had some good lateral thinking puzzles.

I’m not exactly playing educational games, but when I played Assassin’s Creed games, the historical bits I found interesting were things I could learn more about outside the game. When I played Hearts of Iron 4, it was global politics around the time of WWII. Uboat and other sub games taught me a bit about submarine tactics in WWII. Oxygen not included taught me things I didn’t know about thermodynamics and materials, even if it is extremely simplified. Age of Empires and Total War were gateways to learn about medieval styles of warfare.

Even Sea of Thieves, which involves incredibly simplified sailing was what prompted me to learn about how square-masted sailing ships actually worked.

And, of course, all the flight simulators I’ve played over the years has taught me a lot about how to actually fly planes.

To me, if all you’re getting from a game is a bit of dopamine hits, you’re really missing out. It’s like watching the same movie over and over, or reading the same book over and over.

Strong rumors of Valve’s new VR launching this year. Quite excited for that. Otherwise, the status (in my opinion) is stagnant. I still have fun occasionally getting into VR though.

regrettably, Meta is the state of the art for VR. the Meta Quest 3 is stunningly crisp for the price point. it’s almost retina-scale with the pixels, the head/spatial tracking is extremely accurate and doesn’t require any base station or wired attachment, and you can fluidly stream VR games from your PC wirelessly at 1080p and like 120fps with nearly no latency or reality sickness.

I played Myst and Riven while I was sick with COVID last year, and it was one of the top five visual experiences of my lifetime (along with seeing the Grand Canyon and taking psychedelics.)

Meta has also recently finally cracked the holy grail of non-chonky AR glasses with full FoV, though the gallium nitride waveguide process is quite expensive and yields are too poor for them to sell it. but they look like slightly nerdy glasses that let you see holograms superimposed on your vision, even outdoors in the light.

unfortunately, VR is still anti-social and there’s not much content there, and the company leading the way is awful. but even just for Riven alone it was worth it to me.

I have to think it’ll stay an arcade and power user thing indefinitely. The full experience needs large, clear section of your house, and housing is getting more expensive. Break down your costs per sq ft and see that you’re paying an awful lot for it.

Games like Beat Saber don’t have to move around too much, but the experience will always be limited if games have to keep the player in one spot and can’t use room scale. That said, Beat Saber can be pretty decent cardio workout if you put effort into swinging your arms (as opposed to lazily flicking your wrists around). Sweat buildup on the headset can be an issue, though. Keep some alcohol wipes around.

Racing/airplane sim stuff is one of the best uses. People who are into that are willing to drop a lot of money.

Final Fantasy XIV has only been out for… Hmm… Well, yeah, I guess it’s gonna be one of those days.

This is me except it’s RuneScape

In my biased opinion, The Finals has a really interesting mechanic that you can’t find anywhere else. The destruction absolutely feels “next gen”, all the rubble is synchronized so everyone sees and actually interacts with the same destruction. It’s different than just blowing up a wall for an entrance, it’s a core part of the gameplay.

Everything in game design is a meaningful choice. What does the choice of making the game for VR mean, exactly? I started this sentence planning to follow up with a few ideas but I’m honestly coming up short.

I think Gabe Newell said in an interview, VR is actually moving to fast. There is no point in pushing a product to market and spending all that time and money needed for that, when by the time you make it to the market the research has moved so much, your tech and product is obsolete already.

At some point they will release products again and they will be amazing (hopefully) but we dont get the continuous advances like with grafics back in the day

Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.

The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AAA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is the gameplay itself, where the improvements from the naturally emergent gameplay of multi-player were a one-off and have been more or less stuck at the same point for a decade.

For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that kind of game improvement seems unlikely before the end of the decade.

I think you would notice a big difference from a 10 year old phone.

except its not just nostalgia, is it? over 50% of this meme is dedicated to dumb culture war shit.

I remember being so impressed with King’s Quest 7’s graphics that looked like a cartoon. Big improvement over KQ6, which itself was a big improvement over KQ5, which was so much of an improvement gameplay-wise over KQ4 that I gave up trying to play 4 after later getting it on some abandonware site (it was a “type what you want to do but the engine will have no idea what you intend unless you use the very specific wording they programmed into each scene”).

But yeah, before that, cover art often had little to do with the game itself. I have a vivid memory of receiving a birthday gift and experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions as I was excited to get a new video game, then dissapointed when I realized it might be a movie instead, follwed by happiness again when I noticed the Nintendo logo, confirming it was a game. The cover art just looked like the generic cartoon art that was popular in the late 80s/early 90s.

Oh and on that note, most cartoons sucked back then compared to today. I can understand why many people thought cartoons were just for kids because most of them back then were so awful only kids could enjoy them and even the better ones were usually only able to trigger wholesome kind of vibes (like most Disney ones prior to Aladdin). There were some exceptions, like Looney Tunes. But most of it was like minimum effort to sell some shitty toys.

Don’t you dare knock Adventure!

No, it’s rated (E for children). I’m not a big fan of what it became or how inaccurate weapons were but it did offer something new to shooters when it came out with the construction mechanics and it has plenty of skill expression.

The more damning indictment is that something in the industry hasn’t displaced it, but it’s not like it’s any worse than a yearly Modern Warfare or FIFA release.

I’d say an even more damning indictment is that HellDivers gained the popularity it did.

That grind simulator game fucking sucks and is clunky and ugly, but it found success because the market is a trash desert.

What’s the point? I thought I got it, and that I agreed, but now I’m not sure anymore.

Zoomers aren’t teenagers anymore. Well, some might be; I’m not sure where the cutoff is exactly, but the oldest zoomers might be 30 already.

Though I’d also say that millennials, Xers, and boomers got each of those games, too, if they were interested. Hell, even the silent and greatest generations probably have members that enjoyed those games, though probably not so much for the WW1 generation.

And in the other direction, I’ve enjoyed games that were popular before I was born, so if gens alpha and beta want to claim them as well, I’d allow it.