Eternal Sonata is one I can recommend wholeheartedly. One of the best JRPGs in years. By the time the end credits were rolling after 45 hours, I felt the same way I did when I watched the end of Return of the Jedi for the first time as a kid - the feeling that you've just witnessed something truly special.

I think the industry is starting to suffer from a post-boom situation where things are leveling out, but publishers (and developers, some of them) are still looking for more growth and more money, at the expense of quality, sometimes.

I'm predicting things will even out, but possibly after a minor (if we're lucky) crisis.

There are very good old games AND very good new games (especially indies, but also some AAA titles).

The difference in favor of the older games in our perception is sometimes nostalgia (the "played & enjoyed at the time" feeling). And us (the old gamers) often overlook the old games' deficiencies that surely we wouldn't bear in a new game. ;)

Perhaps you just have too many games and get burned out. Try doing something else. :-)

I forgot to add one thing in my previous post. Something that plays a large role when this happens to me is the "Used to it" factor.
Old games that I enjoy are far from perfect. They have a lot of things that are irritating. The reason I still enjoy those games is that I've gotten used to those irritating things so they don't bother me any more.
When I find something irritating in a new game it need to have a lot of plus to balance it if I'm to continue playing it because of the reasons I wrote in my previous post.

I thought i had that issue. Bizarrely going through my collection has made it easier to do gaming. You can take more time and feel less rushed with less games to get through.

Also, playing a variety of games is a good idea. I was getting a bit sick of long rpg's, so thankfully i have a wide selection of games in terms of genre.

New games are fine, as long as i find them interesting (such as Alan Wake and Riddick were on GOG). I also played the Wheelman (retail) which was a high octane driving game.

Even with the games I consistently love, sometimes I sit down to play and after five minutes I'm like, nope, just not into it. I then realize I need to get up and do something else instead.

Also, most old games have already been "filtered" by time.

http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/1998/

Even those 250 fifty are already "the best" of that year. And those are only the tip of the iceberg. There have been a lot more "turd releases" in the past (indies aside, but at least they are cheap).

Really? My impression was totally the opposite. Art style and music and combat were great, but the story was preachy and full of fluff, and everything was stretched out and explained over and over and over again to the point where I felt like the game was insulting my intelligence. The talking part at the credits where the characters are looking at straight at you could very well be the first instance where I made it all the way through a game just to ragequit at the very end. Different strokes, I guess.

For someone who loves FF8, I'd recommend Lost Odyssey. Familiar oldschool mechanics, pretty visuals, and little text-only stories you run into that flesh out both the world and your characters. Love those little things.

As for new games versus the old, I think we tend to remember the good games and completely shut out the memories of the old ones. We think of classics spread out over several years while judging them against games that have been released within a much smaller frame of time and go, "Aha, I knew it!" Some things are generally improved while other things have had less emphasis put on them, but in ten years we'll look back fondly on the 5-10 good games released in the past few years and lament over how things used to be better, completely forgetting the (many) awful games that had to be waded through to get to those few gems.

You're right, the passage of time is an important filter. We often forget the huge number of bad games in the past and just remember those great games that marked us. Hence, to think that any past decade was a golden age that never repeats itself there's only one step.

EDIT: Ninja'ed by 227 ;)

Thanks for the recommendation. I might end up buying 2 at some point then. In the first I got annoyed by the game in that early mission of following someone. I just couldn't get it to work, and while I managed eventually and continued past it, that feeling of this being a chore meant I enjoyed the game less later.


As for the subject, I think it's just easier to play games you already know. You know you enjoyed them which makes the barrier to entry a lot lower. It's not a matter of old or new, just a matter of being familiar with it. When I get an old game I'm not familiar with, I actually find it a lot harder to get into than a new game I'm not familiar with. That's because the old games usually look bad or have harder to use controls. (Not to speak of compatibility problems, even with GOG games.)

Even when the game is the same as another, I'll pick the familiar one. I played the original NWN a couple of times through, but later starting with one of the expansions meant working on creating a higher level character, and it felt like too much work, so I didn't. In recent years I started playing NWN2, but also stopped when I died. Yet I'd probably still play NWN without problem. Similarly I will play Torment again, but I remember stopping playing the original Baldur's Gate early on, which means I'm less likely to try it again.

For me, I think it's mainly having less time and patience which makes the difference. When I was younger I didn't mind agonising for minutes or hours about getting through a part of a game. Now if I get to a problem I can't cross within like ten or twenty minutes, or get to a place where I need to replay the last ten or twenty minutes, I'm likely to not play again. With old games, I know I passed them, and there's even a chance I'll remember how, so the frustration element isn't there.

This is something I've given a fair bit of thought to, because I've noticed a similar effect: I get more excited over (and get more enjoyment out of) older games, even ones I never played. Looking at trailers for most newer games just makes me feel... tired, somehow. I don't want this to be some "Rarr new games suck!" rant, but I find the topic intriguing, so here are some possible explanations I've toyed with. (They're by no means mutually exclusive, either.)

Possibility #1: Old games really were better.
Evidence: when I go back and play older titles, even ones I'd never heard of, I'm far more likely to end up digging them than equally unfamiliar newer games. Interestingly, I've also been getting a lot of fun out of the recent surge of innovation coming out of the indie market, which may suggest that there really was a 'fallow period' in game development, and that we're now at the beginning of a new renaissance.

Possibility #2: I like games that remind me of how gaming made me feel when I was a teenager.
Evidence: My brain was a better 'reality simulator' when I was younger. As a teen, it took very little prompting for me to immerse myself in the alternate world a game presented to me. Nowadays that doesn't come as easily, so maybe I just have an easier time of it with games whose appearance triggers associations with that time in my life. This could also explain why, even among newer indie titles, I tend to gravitate more towards games that have retro graphics and gameplay.

Possibility #3: I just don't dig 3D graphics.
Evidence: This could be a parallel explanation for why I gravitate towards 2d/'retro' titles even among new indie games. My brain's "reality simulator" still works pretty well when I'm looking at 2d art, but with 3d, I just can't shake the feeling that I'm looking at empty boxes with no weight to them. I have the same problem with CGI in modern movies. I can still achieve immersion, but it requires more heavy lifting on my brain's part than 2d does; maybe this accounts for the 'tired' feeling I get when watching newer trailers.

Possibility #4: The benefit of hindsight.
Evidence: posters above have already noted the tendency for history to "pare it down to the gems". I'd like to add a little to that notion. I often get the feeling with newer games that I've "seen it all before" - any time a game does something innovative, it gets endlessly copied and played out until I'm sick of it. The thing is, I didn't really encounter that problem with older games - I know it happened, but I started gaming comparatively late in life, so I already had the benefit of other people telling me which were the standout titles. When I look at all the trailers for modern games, I just see this vast ocean of sameness. I've taken to ignoring the current generation of games, and then once its day has passed, I ask people "Okay, so which of those were really worth playing?" I find that I can maintain a fairly consistently high level of quality gaming experience just by being patient and waiting for time and experience to wash out the dirt and expose the gems.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts; might add more later if they occur to me.

I'm kind of in a similar position to the OP, but for different reasons.

In my case is about multi-player.

Most modern games don't have any kind of split-screen, or local capability anymore, even consoles do this now. You have to have a second computer/console hooked up to a second monitor/tv plus the time it takes to setup a game, go through a sometimes un-skippable tutorial/intro just to start playing. It's aggravating.

We have a Dreamcast hooked up to the TV almost permanently with Gauntlet Legends on it, do you guys know how long does it take to turn it on, load up three characters and start playing? Under 60 seconds, that's how long. And the couch is very comfortable and the TV is big enough and the cables long enough.

Where the hell do i get something like that with modern games?

You're both right. But it's the best thing about retro gaming!

I may enter any gaming site with "the best games of last decade" and it's almost certain that many of them will be good for me.

Less risk - more fun :D

Also you can get the opposite: you pick an old game universally acclaimed (that you hadn't previously played)...

... and you find that you can't bear its clunkyness / slowness / whatever. :D