Simple fun..
Maybe I’m just getting old. The header video sums up how I feel when I look back, but doesn’t everyone’s childhood era feel like the best to them? The 90’s may have been the best for me, but the decade in which you were approximately 12 was the best for you.
Everything is better when you’re 12, and around that age is when your tastes are really forming and you’re getting to know who you are as a person.
Things are different at that age. You’re not hindered by the price of things, you have friends (and enemies) you see in school everyday, your parents take care of you, sometimes you get stuff for just being you, and you don’t have to worry about whether a game is good or not. You either like it or you don’t.
Thinking about it, it really was the best.
It’s depressing to look at video games today and find yourself alienated from whatever industry name is claiming to be the “core audience” and to question what that term even means anymore.
I’m inclined to believe the “core audience” is whatever the industry deems the most profitable, since the majority of core gamers are certainly not happy to get fed tired franchises homogenized to cater to every demographic. It’s like getting pasteurized processed cheese product when all you wanted was real cheese. I just want some goddamn cheese.
Where’s the ingenuity? Where’s the willingness to take a risk to create the ideal game? I can’t help but wonder if I’m just not seeing something. The video game industry is one of the biggest in the world, and more people enjoy them than ever. So why is it I’m enjoying them less?
I haven’t “grown up”. I still find the odd gem and find myself playing games for 10+ hours a day, but I don’t see anything special in all these big releases that people get excited about. Developers making changes to appeal to special interest groups, the overall difficulty being toned down, most big releases lacking any real flavor or leaving a lasting impact – It really is just like pasteurized processed cheese product, minus the heavy marketing.
Is it just me? I don’t think I’ve forgotten the fun, and my tastes are pretty far off from what I enjoyed when I was 12. Maybe I’m too picky, and maybe the hidden few who complain are too picky as well. Then again, how can we really tell?
As I addressed in this article, it’s not like we can depend on review scores to give us a real idea as to the quality of a game. We the internet people can base our opinions off of those with similar tastes and try to make a judgment before purchase, but your average consumer doesn’t have (or want) that ability.
Rewinding back to the initial point of this article, it’s not like we can go and rent video games so easily anymore sans services like GameFly. If there was one thing I would say for certain that was better in the 1990’s, it was the ability to easily try games through rental stores and the lack of PR fist-bumping we see molding gaming reviews and exclusives today. In some ways, things were even more transparent at that time than they are now. I think I miss that more even more than Saturday morning cartoons.
PS.
Pasteurized processed cheese product is gross. Pay attention to your cheeses, man.
