SvennoJ said:
firebush03 said:
I feel like you miss your childhood more than you miss N64. (Nostalgia does wonders in warping my perception.) Personally, my preference is for games of today over any time of the past. |
N64 was way past my childhood. Still much better time for gaming.
In that time period we frequently brought our consoles to work, to play during lunch in the meeting room. N64, Dreamcast 4 player split-screen Re-Volt, taking turns on MGS on PS2. At the end of the day we played LAN Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament and Quake. The hype for Halo was unreal. We had a demo on PC that everyone wanted to try (before XBox came out)
Then after work we would frequently go to each other's places, end up playing split screen games all the time. Come back from clubbing, wind down with some split screen racing or Micro Machines.
That all changed when my workplace 'grew up', however nowadays people just go home and play online.
Gaming was also far cheaper back in those days. You only needed one copy to play with many people in LAN. 4 per copy of Half-Life it was. Split-screen, couch co-op of course meant only one had to buy the game to play together. Different friends with different systems, could play it all together. Now you need (mostly) the same system and your own copy of the game to play together.
Sure there's more cross-play and shared game libraries, yet just this weekend we found out that GTA5 is excluded from Steam sharing, and has no cross play with XBox. No wonder it sold so many copies! Back then we either copied each other's games or simply borrowed them.
Also where did the LAN parties go as well as game conventions, E3 is dead. When I grew up there used to be computer expositions multiple times a year, in our small town. I got many games from those as well as some hardware. It was always exciting to visit and see the latest technology.
Nah it was much more exciting to be a gamer in the 90s. Computer shops everywhere, specialized game stores springing up, games sold in book stores, video stores rented out video games and consoles. (Very handy when going to a cottage) |
While we also had more options for Game Stores plus Arcades were around. Loved Arcades. 7/11 and Pizza Hut had arcade machines. I liked a store called Media play. Sold books. Movies. Small electronics and games. New games but they also had a bin of loose SNES games all for 5-10 bucks. I had a schoolmate work there and told me about some new console coming from SEGA that was so powerful it could produce visuals from Myst in real time. (We were naive) So from there on out I followed the Dreamcast in magazines. It looked so futuristic. Had online features. the ASCII stick was futuristic and odd-looking. Then saw Shenmue and my mind was blown. Lip sync. Individual fingers. Viens on hands. Pick up any object in a room. Go into a bunch of stores. Flip light switches? The magazine had to explain the graphics were not CGI/Pre-rendered as that was some concern. DC is the first time I saw cloth physics in DOA2/SC
Aside from resolution, I can barely tell the difference between most PS5 games from a PS4 games now. People mention indies and some of it is indeed great but indies are also prone to the trap of doing a lot of the same things. The thing is in the 90s indies existed but the term did not. By modern definition original Doom/Wolfenstien was indie. PC was made by indie games in the 80s and 90s. A lot of games became big franchises that people now would never consider the term indie with them.
