Kenny said:
I'm one of those people who are old enough to remember the following names: Starflight, Star Control 2, X-Com, and Ultima, among others. 15-20 years ago, these were considered to be the apex of PC games. In some ways, these games have not been surpassed. Starflight and Star Control 2 gave you giant galaxies to explore with interesting plots, Star Control was astonishingly well-balanced for the number of ships it incorporated, X-Com was an incredibly compelling turn based strategy game that often led to One More Turn syndrome, and Ultima... well, if you haven't ever played Ultima 7 Part 1, you really owe it to yourself to give it a try. One of the finest open ended RPG series to ever exist, before Origin was bought out and ground into the dirt by EA Games. Compared to these classics, it feels like games that are coming out today are nothing more than newer iterations of the formulas that work, with better graphics and little else. In that, PC gaming feels like it has stagnated in recent years. I acknowledge that some of those refinements have led to some truly great games, like Call of Duty 4 and Supreme Commander, but I just can't find any game that brings back the feelings evoked by the classics. Maybe I'm just older, and I just don't have the time to get sucked into games like I used to before university, and maybe it's just part of growing up to lose interest, but there isn't much I wouldn't give to rediscover the "spirit" the old games had, for want of a better word. |
You will never find that same feeling again, even though new games will bring their own fresh contribution. Same as the feeling of the first movie you loved as a child at the theater, or the feeling of the first alternative band you listened when you were 16. Innocence once lost cannot be regained.
I'm one of those people old enough to remember Elite and M.U.L.E., Alternate Reality and Planetfall and REVS. I was at the university when people started playing UFO and Ultima 7 and X-com. And some of my co-eds talked exactly like you, reminiscing the good games of olde :)
Recent years have not stagnated in PC land. They brought us cult pop phenomenons such as the Sims and geeky worlds such as the myriads of community-mantained games based on the Neverwinter Nights engines. Indie games are on the rise, and great developers like Valve and Blizzard have shown what can be done out of apparently estabilished genres such as FPS or dungeon crawlers. Plus there's been the going mainstream of MMOs, that will surely bring interesting fruits as soon as the incumbent monolith of WoW will show its cracks.
Overall, there's plenty of good stuff. Much of it has limited appeal for a text adventure gamer like me, but I recognize my perspective as such.
