This really took me back to the 7th generation. I remember chatting with my coworkers about how the gaming industry was hitting hit its peak and it would be difficult to evolve from there.
These days, we're in the 9th generation, yet it feels like we're still stuck in the previous one. And that old debate we had about how tough will be to evolve seems to hold water after all.
Gaming is interesting because I think it was stagnant for a very long time then seemed to grow insanely fast within a very short space of time; games from about 1980-1994 all had similar DNA but gradually improved in technology and design then from 1994 to about 2001 it all advanced so quickly.
It does feel like the PS4 and Xbox One never really ended, Covid had a large hand in that but it's been a few years now, we can't let companies use the excuse forever.
I like how you went backwards. The further back in time you went, the more interesting and varied the consoles were, each one having a more unique identity. I honestly couldn't tell you what an Xbox is for today as a result.
They're utterly lacking in character and even unique libraries for the most part now; if it wasn't for Gran Turismo, I'd never be mulling over a PS5 purchase
The issue with the 6th generation is very simple and concrete: 480i. Targeting this bullshit resolution made graphics blurry, dim, and wasted a full HALF the rendering load on fields never displayed. We could have had 60fps across the board with crisper, brighter visuals to boot if they just stuck with good old 240p until the advent of HDTV.
To be fair, many games (although often the option was hidden or requires 3rd party tricks to unlock) often were able to swap that over to 480p and look incredibly crisp; the Ratchet And Clank games had this available in the menu and look amazing on a CRT to this day as a result.
You have to remember that before the 6th generation, most games didn't have 30, let alone close to 60FPS. In PAL regions (mine) N64 games maxed out at 20FPS for the most part and most PS1 and Saturn games didn't go much further. I'm of the mind that certain games need 60 frames (FPS games, fighting games, platformers) but most are fine without.
In short? It wouldn't have been a good look to still have such a low resolution I don't think.
Quick Edit: another thing, European CRT's usually were 50Hz and not 60 which caused all sorts of issues and would have locked us to 50FPS too.
In the US there were tons of TVs that simply didn't support 480p input despite having component ports. In fact I'm pretty sure it was nearly all of them. Europe was better with SCART but they had their own 50hz problems. It wasn't worth it, and it pretty much ruined my childhood. I could never understand why my PS2's own games looked so much worse than the first three Spyros...
I think you're right in general about modern genre saturation but I think part of it is just the sheer volume of marketed titles combined with our closeness to it. The complete, decade-long libraries of any individual console pre-PS1 would fit on a couple scrolls of the Steam new releases tab, and take you back to... a week ago. And since we're on top of it looking at all the garbage and scams and DLC for garbage scams, we don't have the filtering of a generation's worth of memories to parse out what came out that was good and unique... yet. And if nobody bothers to dig through the trash every once in a while, we'll never have that. That's my excuse for playing things that come completely unrecommended, anyway.
Just bunged the question into google and there's around 4000 PS1 games; over 15.000 are released on Steam every year. This number gets even more insane when you realise that the N64 had less than 300 games ever made for it and the Saturn had around 1300 if memory serves. Certainly pre-PS1 those numbers get smaller still.
I can't imagine working in the games industry as an actual game maker, I've had friends and family suggest it to me but you look at the hours, the salaries, the amount of competition, the potential for abuse... fuck that.
I agree with a lot here but I want to defend motion controls a bit. Absolutely true they were used too often in situations where a button would be better but they gave us gyro aim in the end. So I’d argue that ultimately their legacy is positive even if the road to get here was bumpy.
I do agree but at the time they were an absolute nuisance. By 2017 though and the launch of the Switch, developers learned moderation and what situations they actually thrive in, like correcting a slightly off aim.
Man, the 7th generation was so broken. My first 360 died five minutes after I plugged it in. I'm on my third PS3 right now, the only Sony console I've ever had to purchase more than once. I still have my launch Wii, which still works! Say what you will about Nintendo, their build quality is usually really solid.
The PS3 too? Wow that's unlucky. I almost listed the unreliable hardware but chose this instead; I know the PS3 fats are getting to the age now where they start to break down and the 360 was never reliable to begin with but not heard much about the other PS3 models.
Nintendo get a lot of stick for the Switch and Wii-U but for sure, their stuff is usually built to last, there's that famous Gameboy that survived an explosion with a US serviceman and I've literally never heard of an N64 breaking unless it's waterlogged or something else similarly fatal for electronics.
The 4th generation remains my favorite: the one that made me a retro gamer because I never really wanted it to end. I was running ZSNES by 1999. So your remark "the SNES went on slightly too long without a replacement" is gibberish to me. In Japan, they were still releasing SFC games as late as 2000, which I can sympathize with fully!
I also don't think the arcade-to-SNES ports were that bad, for the most part. SF2 (and its updates), MK2, Turtles in Time, and Sunset Riders were all great. Probably some others I'm forgetting about, especially from Capcom and Konami.
But I do think the remark about *PC* ports is on point. And speaks to my belief, which I might have shared before here, that this was also the golden age of PC gaming, though that ran into the following console generation as well. What was interesting was how little overlap there was between PC and console gaming. I had the privilege to participate in both, and I didn't think of either as strictly superior. It was just a matter of genre. Doom was obviously the target of every console gamer's envy, but strategy and simulation games -- which I loved from an early age -- were clearly PC games, even if the original SimCity port on SNES was great (unlike the SimEarth port: a game I enjoyed a lot on PC). Ultima VII was an amazing PC RPG that received an awful SNES port; Final Fantasy IV and VI and Chrono Trigger were very different but still awesome console RPGs that had nothing comparable on PC.
And when games crossed between worlds, the results were almost always bad, in either direction. The Street Fighter 2 port on PC is reportedly atrocious, though I never played it. I did have the misfortune to play Mega Man on DOS, though its origins were mysterious at the time: a pirated 3.5" floppy was shared among my friend group. It was unclear to me if this was even a game you could buy in a store.
It might be my younger age talking but the SNES always feels like a bit of rerun of the NES to me, I love these games but in their design and gameplay, I don't really feel much difference apart from them being bigger and prettier, so I enjoy how varied early 3D gaming felt and gravitate more towards those, since a lot of my favourite genres were born around this time too and it's very hard to make 2D platformers/action games feel distinct.
They weren't that awful but to a lower standard than what came later. Saturn and Dreamcast ports especially were often fantastic even if sacrifices were made and I can't think of quite as many high profile terrible ones.
I'm inclined to agree on PC gaming. In general though I would say that 1994-2007 was the golden age for all gaming, on every platform, beginning with games like Super Metroid, Doom II and concluding in 2007 with games like Halo 3 and the original Mass Effect. I think the lack of overlap speaks to how vast the gulf in hardware was back then, today's consoles are at least as good as midrange PC's but the likes of the SNES were kind of pitiful by comparison.
That's a big reason why I find a lot of the unironic PC master race stuff to be obnoxious. 9 times out of 10 a game running bad on PC, or console is 20% how hard the game is to run and 80% the developer making a piece of shit port.
3D definitely opened up some new experiences. But I guess this is my personal quirk that, besides Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, few of those experiences in the 5th gen really interested me. I played most of PS1's most beloved games, but my favorite game on that console, by far, has always been Symphony of the Night. I did really enjoy FF7, but in practice that also plays like a 2D game. And I hated its crude 3D character models while nonetheless really enjoying the 2D background art.
My point on that being the golden age of PC gaming is that the 90s were the moment when PC had the most to offer in contrast to consoles. The final great, mass-market PC exclusive was probably World of Warcraft (2004), but things were thinning out a lot by then. Good PC exclusives still continue to come out, but they're distinctly niche and largely in more strategy/sim/management types of genres.
In the 90s, even vaguely contemporary PCs were undoubtedly more powerful than consoles overall (I had a 486 for most of this era), but I think in practice consoles did some things better due to a fundamentally different architecture. I ran this question past an LLM and here's the executive summary, which runs true to my crude understanding:
>>>
What the SNES did better: Real-time 2D graphics effects (lots of sprites, parallax scrolling, affine rotation/scale via Mode 7, per-scanline tricks, hardware color math/translucency), plus consistently high-quality sample-based audio—all deterministic with low input latency and no driver overhead.
What PCs did better: Raw CPU throughput, memory/storage capacity, resolution and color depth (especially with SVGA), general-purpose flexibility, and—by 1992-93—CD-ROM audio/MIDI ecosystems.
>>>
[Affine is a new vocab word for me]
Also it's easy to forget that getting DOS games to work was a headache, opening a wider gulf between theory and practice. Ultima VII was a great game, but it was infamously difficult to get running due to its devs having to invent a whole RAM architecture for it. I could never really get the sound and music on it to work properly, even though my 486 had a SoundBlaster by that point. Initially my 486 came to me as a hand-me-down with no sound card, forcing me to run sound out of the PC speaker. So for a while I experienced this weird contrast between better-than-any-console SVGA graphics and worse-than-Atari sound effects. PC gaming friends were often in similar boats.
You have great taste, Symphony of the Night might also be my favourite PS1 game: that or Metal Gear Solid. I mentioned it in a previous post but I think a lot of it comes down to N64 games aging relatively well compared to the PS1 and of course, the Saturn had few true 3D games and those often looked worse but offered extra content to make up for the fact. I've never been a JRPG guy but those models are stunningly ugly for sure, even compared to something like the Saturn version of Resident Evil.
Very hard for me to agree: I think PC had the most to offer compared to Saturn and PS1 but I just love the N64 library too much to declare PC unanimously better; Doom 64 looked better than Doom 2 and played great for example. I know Half Life is mentioned as a highlight but I gotta be honest, never liked those games.
I think something worth mentioning too is just simple ease of use. Old C's took forever to load whereas on console you could have a game running in 60 seconds.
For some of the reasons and experiences you list, I've always believed PC gaming would have died without Steam.
I want to be clear that I'm not declaring PC unanimously better.
There was always a tradeoff, which at the time I found very cool, that entering into PC gaming felt entirely different. The point about PC load times is also valid, though in many cases it wasn't load times so much as navigating the DOS command prompt. Load times are something that bothered me a lot about early CD-ROM (both console and PC), by the way, which wasn't mentioned here.
But this was the era when there was the most for console gamers to envy, which showed up in some very bad ports in both 4th and 5th gen to try to serve this market despite the hardware not being up to the task. Doom and SimCity 2000 stand out the strongest in the 4th gen. In the 5th gen, I'd probably point to Red Alert and Starcraft. Maybe Wing Commander 3. But I'm sure there's a lot I'm forgetting here.
It has been a long time since console gamers had any PC exclusive to envy. I'm marking World of Warcraft as the last game where I imagine something like that happening, since it was a whole cultural phenomenon in its early days.
And good point about Steam. I think back to all my PC games being organized in Windows as shortcuts in a folder. That wasn't going to last in the long run. Of course, PC gaming would still always exist as a niche, with various fan projects and so on, not to mention emulation, but publishers would bring a LOT fewer games to market without a storefront like Steam.
No worries, I didn't think you were, just taking an opportunity to beat up a strawman I guess hah
I miss that kind of thing too. It really felt like two different spheres of gaming until the early 2010's where consoles started to catch up big time and cross-platform was popularised; that's part of what made the Dreamcast awesome back in the day, could play with PC players and KB&M. Limited by age unfortunately, I don't remember the days of DOS, only that I've tried to play DOS games before and found it an enormous pain in the ass to work with.
That's a fair point, about having the most to envy, I think I agree especially as a lot of the best console games at the time (Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, so on) were usually way better on PC.
I'd have to say Arma 3 or HOI4 since these were the games that got me into PC gaming but even Arma is on consoles now with Reforger and I suspect Arma 4 will not be an exclusive either.
DOS games usually aren't tough at all these days if you're buying games through Steam or GOG. They've usually configured things to run through modern PCs pretty seamlessly, I suppose using DOSBox on the back end.
I could see how directly interacting with DOSBox's UI would be intimidating for someone who never used DOS (or Linux, or made much use of Windows' command prompt). Though for me it's soothing. In practice I think you're only going to need to do this if you're playing abandonware (which I'll admit I sometimes still do).
Early Windows titles are usually a bigger pain. Especially if they have a CD-ROM. I would like to be able to play Civilization 2 with all of the original videos and music that were on the CD-ROM, instead of the hacked version that circulates that cuts all of these out in order to reduce file size by 90%, but alas, I don't have the patience these days to set that up, and the game has never been for sale online.
I know it's just a case of old man yells at cloud, but maybe if he yells loud enough...
Genre saturation is so frustrating. Within that frustration is a core of white hot rage: I was a poor kid playing free games in the 90s when I found Nethack, IVAN, and the magical world of "traditional" roguelike. Seeing the explosion of that genre is probably the closest I'll ever come to sympathy with radical jihaddists. And Deck Builder Roguelike makes me want an asteroid to destroy the earth.
If Dwarf Fortress were Hegel, the roguelike genre is 21st century fashionable socialism.
More to your actual point, I remember playing the hell out of Perfect Dark with my buddy in the day, but I got ahold of that recently and it should be called Unplayably Dark with all that stupid fog.
When something is made 'accessible' or becomes adapted for a mass-market is always loses its essence; Elden Ring added a pointless open world and slop dungeons to Dark Souls, Skyrim got rid of all traces of RPG gameplay from The Elder Scrolls, I could go on and on with examples.
I also tried playing Perfect Dark on N64 not too long ago, Goldeneye didn't run well but it was playable, however, I found PD to be impossible to finish.
Isn't that a rich irony? Nethack is free; you have to pay for crap.
In my view, the other culprit is recommendation engines. Steam *requires* pigeonholing, therefore pigeonholing is rewarded. It would be interesting to have a platform that expressed "What is it?" purely in terms of inspirational geneology (not restricted to video games.) It would probably be a change for the same, but it would at least be less offensive. That is, most titles would still be [Dark Souls, Dwarf Fortress, Dune] but at least we could say, no it ain't, without it becoming a genre purity holy war.
That's part of why I don't fuss about genre too much in my reviews. A lot of people will start a review by saying "This is an *X* game made by *Y* and launched in *Z*" But I find it more helpful to link it to other titles.
If I say Metroid Prime was a 'Metroidvania FPS' that sounds boring as shit but if I describe the game better and describe the gameplay: if I tell you it's like Goldeneye mixed with Super Metroid? Now that's interesting.
There is always that risk too, get too obsessed with genre and it turns into those stupid arguments mental fans have "No no no it's industrial-turbo-retrofolk-dick and balls metal!"
Agree with the 7th generation, that was my favorite too. I enjoy modern gaming but stick to PC now. I do also agree that souls games are very oversaturated as a souls fan too. Most of them don’t understand why souls games are good in the first place.
I am a huge junkie for difficulty so I don't entirely agree but I do believe those are a very important part. I have watched more Elden Ring and Dark Souls lore than any other game except for maybe Destiny. The art direction and enemy design is a huge part of it for me, I love how creative the bosses get. Now a lot of bosses are just tall generic knights.
I love difficulty too but when you're into retro then Dark Souls/ER in the grand scheme of things aren't too difficult, they're at least fair which most classic games are not.
I always loved the medieval gothic of the original Dark Souls and preferred it when they stuck close to that.
That is fair. Fromsoft has my ideal difficulty to where it is not too hard but not too easy. I usually make it harder on myself with challenge runs. My favorite souls aesthetic would be bloodborne but I am also a huge fan of the original Dark Souls.
I love the aesthetic of Bloodborne too but just could never get along with the gameplay, I remember playing for 10 hours and never finding any new weapons, felt really restricted in what I could do combat-wise.
This really took me back to the 7th generation. I remember chatting with my coworkers about how the gaming industry was hitting hit its peak and it would be difficult to evolve from there.
These days, we're in the 9th generation, yet it feels like we're still stuck in the previous one. And that old debate we had about how tough will be to evolve seems to hold water after all.
Gaming is interesting because I think it was stagnant for a very long time then seemed to grow insanely fast within a very short space of time; games from about 1980-1994 all had similar DNA but gradually improved in technology and design then from 1994 to about 2001 it all advanced so quickly.
It does feel like the PS4 and Xbox One never really ended, Covid had a large hand in that but it's been a few years now, we can't let companies use the excuse forever.
I like how you went backwards. The further back in time you went, the more interesting and varied the consoles were, each one having a more unique identity. I honestly couldn't tell you what an Xbox is for today as a result.
Great post!
Glad you enjoyed it!
They're utterly lacking in character and even unique libraries for the most part now; if it wasn't for Gran Turismo, I'd never be mulling over a PS5 purchase
The issue with the 6th generation is very simple and concrete: 480i. Targeting this bullshit resolution made graphics blurry, dim, and wasted a full HALF the rendering load on fields never displayed. We could have had 60fps across the board with crisper, brighter visuals to boot if they just stuck with good old 240p until the advent of HDTV.
To be fair, many games (although often the option was hidden or requires 3rd party tricks to unlock) often were able to swap that over to 480p and look incredibly crisp; the Ratchet And Clank games had this available in the menu and look amazing on a CRT to this day as a result.
You have to remember that before the 6th generation, most games didn't have 30, let alone close to 60FPS. In PAL regions (mine) N64 games maxed out at 20FPS for the most part and most PS1 and Saturn games didn't go much further. I'm of the mind that certain games need 60 frames (FPS games, fighting games, platformers) but most are fine without.
In short? It wouldn't have been a good look to still have such a low resolution I don't think.
Quick Edit: another thing, European CRT's usually were 50Hz and not 60 which caused all sorts of issues and would have locked us to 50FPS too.
In the US there were tons of TVs that simply didn't support 480p input despite having component ports. In fact I'm pretty sure it was nearly all of them. Europe was better with SCART but they had their own 50hz problems. It wasn't worth it, and it pretty much ruined my childhood. I could never understand why my PS2's own games looked so much worse than the first three Spyros...
I think you're right in general about modern genre saturation but I think part of it is just the sheer volume of marketed titles combined with our closeness to it. The complete, decade-long libraries of any individual console pre-PS1 would fit on a couple scrolls of the Steam new releases tab, and take you back to... a week ago. And since we're on top of it looking at all the garbage and scams and DLC for garbage scams, we don't have the filtering of a generation's worth of memories to parse out what came out that was good and unique... yet. And if nobody bothers to dig through the trash every once in a while, we'll never have that. That's my excuse for playing things that come completely unrecommended, anyway.
That's a fantastic point.
Just bunged the question into google and there's around 4000 PS1 games; over 15.000 are released on Steam every year. This number gets even more insane when you realise that the N64 had less than 300 games ever made for it and the Saturn had around 1300 if memory serves. Certainly pre-PS1 those numbers get smaller still.
I can't imagine working in the games industry as an actual game maker, I've had friends and family suggest it to me but you look at the hours, the salaries, the amount of competition, the potential for abuse... fuck that.
I agree with a lot here but I want to defend motion controls a bit. Absolutely true they were used too often in situations where a button would be better but they gave us gyro aim in the end. So I’d argue that ultimately their legacy is positive even if the road to get here was bumpy.
I do agree but at the time they were an absolute nuisance. By 2017 though and the launch of the Switch, developers learned moderation and what situations they actually thrive in, like correcting a slightly off aim.
Man, the 7th generation was so broken. My first 360 died five minutes after I plugged it in. I'm on my third PS3 right now, the only Sony console I've ever had to purchase more than once. I still have my launch Wii, which still works! Say what you will about Nintendo, their build quality is usually really solid.
Entertaining post, as always!
The PS3 too? Wow that's unlucky. I almost listed the unreliable hardware but chose this instead; I know the PS3 fats are getting to the age now where they start to break down and the 360 was never reliable to begin with but not heard much about the other PS3 models.
Nintendo get a lot of stick for the Switch and Wii-U but for sure, their stuff is usually built to last, there's that famous Gameboy that survived an explosion with a US serviceman and I've literally never heard of an N64 breaking unless it's waterlogged or something else similarly fatal for electronics.
Glad you liked it!
This was a fun read.
The 4th generation remains my favorite: the one that made me a retro gamer because I never really wanted it to end. I was running ZSNES by 1999. So your remark "the SNES went on slightly too long without a replacement" is gibberish to me. In Japan, they were still releasing SFC games as late as 2000, which I can sympathize with fully!
I also don't think the arcade-to-SNES ports were that bad, for the most part. SF2 (and its updates), MK2, Turtles in Time, and Sunset Riders were all great. Probably some others I'm forgetting about, especially from Capcom and Konami.
But I do think the remark about *PC* ports is on point. And speaks to my belief, which I might have shared before here, that this was also the golden age of PC gaming, though that ran into the following console generation as well. What was interesting was how little overlap there was between PC and console gaming. I had the privilege to participate in both, and I didn't think of either as strictly superior. It was just a matter of genre. Doom was obviously the target of every console gamer's envy, but strategy and simulation games -- which I loved from an early age -- were clearly PC games, even if the original SimCity port on SNES was great (unlike the SimEarth port: a game I enjoyed a lot on PC). Ultima VII was an amazing PC RPG that received an awful SNES port; Final Fantasy IV and VI and Chrono Trigger were very different but still awesome console RPGs that had nothing comparable on PC.
And when games crossed between worlds, the results were almost always bad, in either direction. The Street Fighter 2 port on PC is reportedly atrocious, though I never played it. I did have the misfortune to play Mega Man on DOS, though its origins were mysterious at the time: a pirated 3.5" floppy was shared among my friend group. It was unclear to me if this was even a game you could buy in a store.
Glad you enjoyed it!
It might be my younger age talking but the SNES always feels like a bit of rerun of the NES to me, I love these games but in their design and gameplay, I don't really feel much difference apart from them being bigger and prettier, so I enjoy how varied early 3D gaming felt and gravitate more towards those, since a lot of my favourite genres were born around this time too and it's very hard to make 2D platformers/action games feel distinct.
They weren't that awful but to a lower standard than what came later. Saturn and Dreamcast ports especially were often fantastic even if sacrifices were made and I can't think of quite as many high profile terrible ones.
I'm inclined to agree on PC gaming. In general though I would say that 1994-2007 was the golden age for all gaming, on every platform, beginning with games like Super Metroid, Doom II and concluding in 2007 with games like Halo 3 and the original Mass Effect. I think the lack of overlap speaks to how vast the gulf in hardware was back then, today's consoles are at least as good as midrange PC's but the likes of the SNES were kind of pitiful by comparison.
That's a big reason why I find a lot of the unironic PC master race stuff to be obnoxious. 9 times out of 10 a game running bad on PC, or console is 20% how hard the game is to run and 80% the developer making a piece of shit port.
3D definitely opened up some new experiences. But I guess this is my personal quirk that, besides Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, few of those experiences in the 5th gen really interested me. I played most of PS1's most beloved games, but my favorite game on that console, by far, has always been Symphony of the Night. I did really enjoy FF7, but in practice that also plays like a 2D game. And I hated its crude 3D character models while nonetheless really enjoying the 2D background art.
My point on that being the golden age of PC gaming is that the 90s were the moment when PC had the most to offer in contrast to consoles. The final great, mass-market PC exclusive was probably World of Warcraft (2004), but things were thinning out a lot by then. Good PC exclusives still continue to come out, but they're distinctly niche and largely in more strategy/sim/management types of genres.
In the 90s, even vaguely contemporary PCs were undoubtedly more powerful than consoles overall (I had a 486 for most of this era), but I think in practice consoles did some things better due to a fundamentally different architecture. I ran this question past an LLM and here's the executive summary, which runs true to my crude understanding:
>>>
What the SNES did better: Real-time 2D graphics effects (lots of sprites, parallax scrolling, affine rotation/scale via Mode 7, per-scanline tricks, hardware color math/translucency), plus consistently high-quality sample-based audio—all deterministic with low input latency and no driver overhead.
What PCs did better: Raw CPU throughput, memory/storage capacity, resolution and color depth (especially with SVGA), general-purpose flexibility, and—by 1992-93—CD-ROM audio/MIDI ecosystems.
>>>
[Affine is a new vocab word for me]
Also it's easy to forget that getting DOS games to work was a headache, opening a wider gulf between theory and practice. Ultima VII was a great game, but it was infamously difficult to get running due to its devs having to invent a whole RAM architecture for it. I could never really get the sound and music on it to work properly, even though my 486 had a SoundBlaster by that point. Initially my 486 came to me as a hand-me-down with no sound card, forcing me to run sound out of the PC speaker. So for a while I experienced this weird contrast between better-than-any-console SVGA graphics and worse-than-Atari sound effects. PC gaming friends were often in similar boats.
You have great taste, Symphony of the Night might also be my favourite PS1 game: that or Metal Gear Solid. I mentioned it in a previous post but I think a lot of it comes down to N64 games aging relatively well compared to the PS1 and of course, the Saturn had few true 3D games and those often looked worse but offered extra content to make up for the fact. I've never been a JRPG guy but those models are stunningly ugly for sure, even compared to something like the Saturn version of Resident Evil.
Very hard for me to agree: I think PC had the most to offer compared to Saturn and PS1 but I just love the N64 library too much to declare PC unanimously better; Doom 64 looked better than Doom 2 and played great for example. I know Half Life is mentioned as a highlight but I gotta be honest, never liked those games.
I think something worth mentioning too is just simple ease of use. Old C's took forever to load whereas on console you could have a game running in 60 seconds.
For some of the reasons and experiences you list, I've always believed PC gaming would have died without Steam.
I want to be clear that I'm not declaring PC unanimously better.
There was always a tradeoff, which at the time I found very cool, that entering into PC gaming felt entirely different. The point about PC load times is also valid, though in many cases it wasn't load times so much as navigating the DOS command prompt. Load times are something that bothered me a lot about early CD-ROM (both console and PC), by the way, which wasn't mentioned here.
But this was the era when there was the most for console gamers to envy, which showed up in some very bad ports in both 4th and 5th gen to try to serve this market despite the hardware not being up to the task. Doom and SimCity 2000 stand out the strongest in the 4th gen. In the 5th gen, I'd probably point to Red Alert and Starcraft. Maybe Wing Commander 3. But I'm sure there's a lot I'm forgetting here.
It has been a long time since console gamers had any PC exclusive to envy. I'm marking World of Warcraft as the last game where I imagine something like that happening, since it was a whole cultural phenomenon in its early days.
And good point about Steam. I think back to all my PC games being organized in Windows as shortcuts in a folder. That wasn't going to last in the long run. Of course, PC gaming would still always exist as a niche, with various fan projects and so on, not to mention emulation, but publishers would bring a LOT fewer games to market without a storefront like Steam.
No worries, I didn't think you were, just taking an opportunity to beat up a strawman I guess hah
I miss that kind of thing too. It really felt like two different spheres of gaming until the early 2010's where consoles started to catch up big time and cross-platform was popularised; that's part of what made the Dreamcast awesome back in the day, could play with PC players and KB&M. Limited by age unfortunately, I don't remember the days of DOS, only that I've tried to play DOS games before and found it an enormous pain in the ass to work with.
That's a fair point, about having the most to envy, I think I agree especially as a lot of the best console games at the time (Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, so on) were usually way better on PC.
I'd have to say Arma 3 or HOI4 since these were the games that got me into PC gaming but even Arma is on consoles now with Reforger and I suspect Arma 4 will not be an exclusive either.
DOS games usually aren't tough at all these days if you're buying games through Steam or GOG. They've usually configured things to run through modern PCs pretty seamlessly, I suppose using DOSBox on the back end.
I could see how directly interacting with DOSBox's UI would be intimidating for someone who never used DOS (or Linux, or made much use of Windows' command prompt). Though for me it's soothing. In practice I think you're only going to need to do this if you're playing abandonware (which I'll admit I sometimes still do).
Early Windows titles are usually a bigger pain. Especially if they have a CD-ROM. I would like to be able to play Civilization 2 with all of the original videos and music that were on the CD-ROM, instead of the hacked version that circulates that cuts all of these out in order to reduce file size by 90%, but alas, I don't have the patience these days to set that up, and the game has never been for sale online.
I know it's just a case of old man yells at cloud, but maybe if he yells loud enough...
Genre saturation is so frustrating. Within that frustration is a core of white hot rage: I was a poor kid playing free games in the 90s when I found Nethack, IVAN, and the magical world of "traditional" roguelike. Seeing the explosion of that genre is probably the closest I'll ever come to sympathy with radical jihaddists. And Deck Builder Roguelike makes me want an asteroid to destroy the earth.
If Dwarf Fortress were Hegel, the roguelike genre is 21st century fashionable socialism.
More to your actual point, I remember playing the hell out of Perfect Dark with my buddy in the day, but I got ahold of that recently and it should be called Unplayably Dark with all that stupid fog.
When something is made 'accessible' or becomes adapted for a mass-market is always loses its essence; Elden Ring added a pointless open world and slop dungeons to Dark Souls, Skyrim got rid of all traces of RPG gameplay from The Elder Scrolls, I could go on and on with examples.
I also tried playing Perfect Dark on N64 not too long ago, Goldeneye didn't run well but it was playable, however, I found PD to be impossible to finish.
Isn't that a rich irony? Nethack is free; you have to pay for crap.
In my view, the other culprit is recommendation engines. Steam *requires* pigeonholing, therefore pigeonholing is rewarded. It would be interesting to have a platform that expressed "What is it?" purely in terms of inspirational geneology (not restricted to video games.) It would probably be a change for the same, but it would at least be less offensive. That is, most titles would still be [Dark Souls, Dwarf Fortress, Dune] but at least we could say, no it ain't, without it becoming a genre purity holy war.
That's part of why I don't fuss about genre too much in my reviews. A lot of people will start a review by saying "This is an *X* game made by *Y* and launched in *Z*" But I find it more helpful to link it to other titles.
If I say Metroid Prime was a 'Metroidvania FPS' that sounds boring as shit but if I describe the game better and describe the gameplay: if I tell you it's like Goldeneye mixed with Super Metroid? Now that's interesting.
There is always that risk too, get too obsessed with genre and it turns into those stupid arguments mental fans have "No no no it's industrial-turbo-retrofolk-dick and balls metal!"
What a poser, it's totally nordic post-dick death balls dronecore
Agree with the 7th generation, that was my favorite too. I enjoy modern gaming but stick to PC now. I do also agree that souls games are very oversaturated as a souls fan too. Most of them don’t understand why souls games are good in the first place.
It was never about the difficulty to me and everything about the storytelling and atmosphere.
I am a huge junkie for difficulty so I don't entirely agree but I do believe those are a very important part. I have watched more Elden Ring and Dark Souls lore than any other game except for maybe Destiny. The art direction and enemy design is a huge part of it for me, I love how creative the bosses get. Now a lot of bosses are just tall generic knights.
I love difficulty too but when you're into retro then Dark Souls/ER in the grand scheme of things aren't too difficult, they're at least fair which most classic games are not.
I always loved the medieval gothic of the original Dark Souls and preferred it when they stuck close to that.
That is fair. Fromsoft has my ideal difficulty to where it is not too hard but not too easy. I usually make it harder on myself with challenge runs. My favorite souls aesthetic would be bloodborne but I am also a huge fan of the original Dark Souls.
I love the aesthetic of Bloodborne too but just could never get along with the gameplay, I remember playing for 10 hours and never finding any new weapons, felt really restricted in what I could do combat-wise.