Ever feel amazed at how far games have come?

[TheLastStarFighter]

RolStoppable said:

SvennoJ said:

It's mindboggling that 500 years after the messy paint on canvas era, we still regard the Mona Lisa as one of the greatest works of art! Some things aren't supposed to be outdone by better technology.

The indie scene is doing exactly what you want, move latterally, since they don't have to worry so much anymore about the technical aspects. Plus we're at the brink of VR, wide open for new possibilities in gaming, thanks to increased processing power. Great games still get made, ofcourse many more mediocre and bad ones as well. It was no different in the past. For every timeless classic 16-bit game there were countless duds. What we have extra nowadays in the AAA games industry, the blockbuster movies of gaming.

Also nostalgia is a powerful force. Actually replaying those 16-bit classics isn't as fun as it used to be when you were a kid. The same way, when I saw the real Mona Lisa in the Louvre, it didn't live up to the hype!

No doubt that I worded that poorly.

The indie scene is too much like the duds of the 8- and 16-bit eras, because they are too focused on imitation while not understanding what made the great games great. Nevermind that Nintendo is also doing what I want, and Nintendo games usually comfortably outdo indie games in all areas.

Thanks to the Virtual Console, I could play 16-bit games that I had never played before. I have no nostalgia for many Mega Drive games and none at all for the TG-16, because that system didn't even release in Europe back in the day. But I still found games that smack the indie games of today and VC is cheaper than indie too. The indie scene has certainly improved over the course of the last five years, but it's still nowhere near to the status of savior of creativity and variety that has been assigned to it. Then again, with Nintendo not wiping out the middleground, there was never a good reason to resort to indie games as the last hope anyway.

This is a great post.  Old doesn't necessarily equal good, and there was a lot of crap back then.  Modern idies do tend to lean far more often to the uninspired titles of the past than the true greats.  Much more Bubsy than Mario.  And to top if off, many try to break the fourth wall and have a humorous take on things, and end up being like the Starsky and Hutch or Baywatch reboots and not like the original series.