The best time to be a gamer was the early 90's to late 90's for me. It really was a time when graphical and gameplay leaps were so amazing. When I moved from Master System to Mega Drive, the boost was incredible, and even more so when I moved onto the Saturn. After the Dreamcast era, my excitement for a new gen began to wane and was never again wowed by the "latest and greatest" machines. These days consoles are basically stripped down PC's with the same stuff releasing across them with very little difference between them, which doesn't do anything for me. I have a Switch which I used for years but these days it gathers dust, I'm hoping the Switch 2 will peak my interest in modern gaming again.

Yes. If you're one of those people who can't enjoy things, then great news. You can hook up your old console and play in 2024. Or you can emulate things. Sure triple a games suck, but the sheer amount of creativeness from indie studios is insane. Games are better than they have ever been, even better if you ignore all the money hungry companies :)

I would agree. I feel like the discourse in many communities/forums has been more pessimistic than past generations.

But the actual games, technology, accessibility, hardware, is on a different level. When it comes to PlayStation at least, their first party has never been stronger, and their approach to backwards compatibility/ legacy content has been fantastic. The Dualsense is a true evolution of controllers and is going to push gameplay immersion even further.

I'm not that surprised about the complaints of creativity while the indie scene is completely overlooked.

Everyone wants Sony to make AA games again, but when we actually see indies or AA games during a State of Play or Showcase, it gets shredded online lol. Or people rooting for live service games to fail but immediately turn around to start scolding publishers for shutting down studios. Even "boycotts" for games like Hogwarts Legacy. There's always something to get upset about.

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)

Very false. Nothing compares to the 1990s. Lets just look at releases for a 3 year stretch, it's absurd. New hardware: N64, Sega Dreamcast, Game Boy Color (Pokemon). Birth of esports (basically) with Starcraft and Half-Life. Essentially the FPS becoming a dominant genre which continues to this day (GoldenEye 007, Quake, etc.). 

1996 -
Super Mario 64
Resident Evil
Wave Race 64
Super Mario RPG
Quake
Tomb Raider
Mario Kart 64 (Japan)
NiGHTS into Dreams
Elder Scrolls II
The House of the Dead
Diablo
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Killer Instinct Gold
Crash Bandicoot
Virtua Fighter 3

1997 -
Final Fantasy VII
GoldenEye 007
Castlevania: Symphonia of the Night
Tekken 3
Star Fox 64
Diddy Kong Racing
Quake II
Star Wars Jedi Knight
Fallout
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
Oddworld
Mortal Kombat 4
Blast Corps
Tomb Raider 2
Crash Bandicoot 2
Time Crisis 2

Street Fighter III

Gran Turismo

1998 -
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Metal Gear Solid
Starcraft
Half-Life
Resident Evil 2
Baldur's Gate
Sonic Adventure
Banjo-Kazooie
Crash Bandicoot Warped
F-Zero X
Xenogears
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Marvel Vs. Capcom
Pokemon Red/Blue
Parasite Eve
Ridge Racer Type 4

Technological leaps were amazing too, in the span of like 4 years (1993) you went from like Star Fox (SNES) and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to like Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy VII and even the leap from PS1/N64 to Sega Dreamcast (Soul Calibur, NFL 2K) was impressive. 

The arcades were still a thing (Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, even later on things like Virtua Cop and Sega, Capcom, and Namco putting out tons of arcade bangers) and PC had its own distinct blockbusters (Half-Life, Starcraft, Quake, Civilization, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, etc. etc.). Industry was so much more vibrant and exciting, felt like every 2 years there was something amazing and new shaking up the entire industry. 

The 90s had a VR wave as well ;)


Also Stereoscopic 3D as I was playing Descent II in stereoscopic 3D on a 72" screen using a 2nd hand CRT projector with NVidea shutter glasses.

Wipeout 2097 was also great on the projector!

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.

Oof. 30 fps VR. 🤢