So when I was a kid in the 80s, I would always get SUPER excited for getting a new game.
We’d get in the car, drive to Toys R Us, and in the video game section was basically an homage to Nintendo. So much so that the descriptors at the end of the isles didn’t say “video games”, it said “Nintendo”. Sure, they sold Sega and Atari too…but it was the Nintendo isle.
So you’d pick your game, and on the drive home you would flip through your new game manual. Remember game manuals??? You’d learn all about this new world. Who was this “Zelda” if the main character was a boy??? What kind of world was this??? It looks HUGE!!! DO YOU SEE ALL THESE DIFFERENT ENEMIES???
Finally (after like 10 minutes), you’d get home. You’d race to the door, only for you to realize that you need dad to unlock the door. Now, dad was probably walking at a normal pace, but to a hyper 6 year old excited to play with his new toy, he may as well have been a dried out turtle. Or a sloth.
FINALLY he opens the front door, and you go rushing to the TV. You put the cartridge in, and you’re ready to play. You turn the power on, and you’re already at the name screen. After you put in the name “Dork”, because you’re an edgy 80s kid, you’re already in front of a cave. Oh god…what’s in there??? How do I fight monsters??? THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING!!! Oh god, oh god, here we go, we’re going in the cave…
And you all know how it plays out from there.
These days, it’s a bit different. These days a game gets announced and you wait for release day. Then you turn on your console, and you buy the game. Now you gotta wait for an hour for it to download. Thats assuming your console doesn’t need an update. So now you’re waiting…and waiting…and waiting…
Eventually it’s all done, and you boot the game up, but theres a day 1 update. So more waiting. FINALLY after an hour and a half it’s done.
So you boot it up, and you don’t get that same sense of wonderment. It’s because todays games have been done to death. Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphisis is on online play. So now you already know what you’re getting, and you gotta wait again for online lobbies to start.
And when Nintendo released the Super Nintendo it was a radical jump in performance in every sense on a platform that was revolutionary to start with. It was must have technology.
Now, 50% of PS4 users haven’t upgraded to a newer system. And why? Because the PS5 looks like a slight visual upgrade in apperance, and zero upgrade in performance. Games look and feel mostly the same as they would on PS4. And the games are all the same. Microtransactions, unimaginative plots, forgetable characters, sequals reboots prequals. We’re seeing the same franchises, with the same characters doing the same things for 30 years. Mario is still saving the princess for Bowser. At this point, Peach is just LETTING herself get kidnapped. Zelda is going to save Link now in the new game…which would be a new concept, playing as Zelda, except Shiek was Zelda the whole time. Oops, spoilers on a 26 year old game.
Breath of the Wild had that samr sense of childhood wonder. But only if you actively avoided online discussions, youtube videos, social media. It was a barrage of avoiding spoilers, but I did it, and March 3rd 2017 was GLORIOUS. It’s also the last time I felt that need to get a new console.
I regretted buying a PS4, but for some stupid reason I bought a PS5 this year. I regret it. I see no system seller.
And thats another thing. Why can’t the games give you the option to play from disc, rather than install everything? Most games are like 50-100gb. It eats up storage REAL quick. Now you gotta decide "ok, which games do I want to delete, and which am I going to use soon?
Theres NO reason for me to justify 45gb on my hard drive for the PS4 version of Madden 19, when all I do is play exhibition. But I also don’t want to delete it, and reinstall it every few months on the off chance I want yo play 20 minutes of 1 game.
Sure, maybe Madden diehards get use out of that 45gb. I do not. I don’t play season. I do give a shit about those madden cards. I only play exhibition, 1 game, maybe once every 4 months. Same with NHL. Same with MLB.
Why must I take up like 200gb for games I play casually and sparingly, and almost ALWAYS have to sit through an update before I throw the ball? I don’t even care about roster updates. Unless they’re on Cleveland’s team, I don’t know any of these players. I don’t give a shit that Joe Whatshisname used to play for Chicago, but now he plays in New York.
I just want to pop in the disc, and play. No bullshit.
I wish Madden 95 worked on the SNES classic. It’s the last SNES version that Cleveland had a team.
But instead now, every single game comes with forced bullshit
It’s easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80’s kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It’s part of the reason there’s so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn’t put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn’t have the manuals available, so they’d get stuck (before Internet info access).
I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I’ve only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I’ll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it’s mine forever.
That’s setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It’s trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.
Yes with inflation games are proportionately less, but let’s also not forget that wages have stagnated while inflation has ballooned. People literally aren’t earning much than they were in the 90s (well, the average person, the inflation money has gone to the dragons). The price of games relative to mean wage is fairly consistent IIRC.
But yeah everything else is pretty true. And we all look back on games as kids with rose colored glasses. I remember when majoras mask was photorealistic to me almost!
In the US, since the conversation began with an American retailer? No. The larger trend in this reference window–since the early 90’s–is flat wage growth versus inflation (productivity has increased massively, but the implications of that are a whole other conversation). There was a recent, brief period of inflation outpacing wages as a result of the pandemic, but that trend has also since reversed to a small degree. New fast food hires weren’t making $15 an hour in 1992. There’s been wage growth, just closely in-line with inflation over the long term. It’s an apples-to-apples comparison here, unusually so.
Video games are dramatically less expensive now to purchase than they were in the fourth gen. It’s easy to see why, too; the marginal cost of a cartridge-based game was substantial, owing to a relatively complex manufacturing process. That marginal cost dropped substantially with disc media (with a corresponding drop in game prices at retail), and then again to near zero with digital distribution.