«

[scarslilpyro]

ET:QW is good if you can max out the graphics.

I can only run it on minimum with my 9600 pro so it's pretty crappy.

Just get a BUNCH of demos man

[Timpsi]

...right.

Getting back to the main subject matter here, I witnessed the same phenomena a few years back: none of the new titles really grasped my attention, the games I tried seemed utterly bland, and the none of the reviews in game magazines sparked any interest in me. It all seemed to be the same junk all over again with the same washed-put graphics and unoriginal gameplay.

Abandonware helped a lot then. Home of the Underdogs, Abandonia, and all the other sites listed at TUOL offered tons of excellent games to play, and from the depths of my own archives I found many classics I had forgotten about. My free time was spent for example playing the original Pirates!, going through the adventure classics, finally playing through the CPC version of Commando, and beating people in International Superstar Soccer 2 online. All this while complaining about the low quality of the recently released games. Then the real life kicked in, and suddenly I didn't have time for playing anything. Having to finish studies, working abroad, courting a spouse and so on all really do have their own impact in gaming.

But the break from games was a welcome one, in the end. Today I find myself playing games from the times when everything seemed terrible, and I'm being thoroughly entertained (Europa 1400 is surprisingly good and original, Crimson Skies rocks, the new Pirates! sucks only at the dance sequences, Psychonauts is ingenious, and The Longest Journey and Syberia 1&2 are worthy modern adventures). Some of the brand new games look really interesting and I'm even considering updating my gaming rig to meet their requirements. Either that, or I will invest in a new generation console. Of course there is a lot of quickly-produced utter crap out there too, but it has always been so. A true game connoisseur should be able to see through the ever-present marketing mumbo-jumbo anyway (just like he can judge the games on their gameplay values, instead of just admiring everything (s)he can max out the graphics on).

The point is that it does come back after having a decent break. I believe the reason is that I hadn't really accepted and adopted the major changes in games, and rather wanted to stay with the old times. Also, I had played a whole lot all the way from the '80s, and nothing particularly new was coming out; nothing that I hadn't seen previously. The break helped me to see the new games with fresh eyes, and believe I can respect the new and coming titles on their own good.

Of course I still play the old games, but it seems that the new games are not that evil after all. I believe it was all due just to gaming fatigue, nothing more serious than that.

[humorguy]

Timpsi - you do make sense, but obviously to use Syberia and The Longest Journey, both from 7-8 years ago, do not make them modern. They are closer to the X-Coms and LucasArts adventures of mid/late 90's (TLJ was released in 1999 in Europe, 2000 in the U.S) than modern 2008 gaming.

And while Psychonauts and STALKER and some others are brilliant, they amount to less than a dozen titles in the last 4-5 years. What makes the retro gaming era so great is that the average PC gamer was buying a dozen games a year, not a dozen every 4-5 years! That's why I spend more time playing retro games like Darklands, because I can finish a modern game (even one like STALKER with its 90 hour+ gameplay) and have to wait 6-9 months for the next title I am interested in!

[Timpsi]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(humorguy @ Oct 15 2007, 09:27 PM) [snapback]316275[/snapback]</div>

Timpsi - you do make sense, but obviously to use Syberia and The Longest Journey, both from 7-8 years ago, do not make them modern. They are closer to the X-Coms and LucasArts adventures of mid/late 90's (TLJ was released in 1999 in Europe, 2000 in the U.S) than modern 2008 gaming. [/b]

I'd like to point out that the TLJ and Syberia remark was about the years when I didn't play new games due to their blandness: "Today I find myself playing games from the times when everything seemed terrible.." A bit clumsy way to put it, but I was pressed on time.

As for the brand new, modern titles, there seem to be more and more interesting titles coming out: Bioshock, Viva Piñata, Sam & Max, Paper Mario 1&2, Armed Assault (ArmA), Assasins Creed, Stalker, Supreme Commander, Okami, and a bunch of exciting sequels (Europa Universalis 3, for instance). Granted, not all for PC, though.

Besides, the average gamer was not buying a dozen games a year 'back then' either. A few were bought, and infinitely more were carried home in a rucksack full of floppies copied at the friend's.

Of course there's nothing wrong with sticking on the old titles, as there is a lot of proven excellence in there. It's just that with an open mind it is possible to find plenty of things to play from the more recent games, too.

[humorguy]

Timpsi - excuse me but I worked in the games industry from the late 80's to the mid/late 90's and saw lots of trade magazines and retailer numbers, etc. The PC gamer in the early 90's did indeed buy a dozen titles a year. Actually, it was 13 a year in 1994. This was based on much more honest polling that we get today in the console era. Last poll I saw in Computer Trade Weekly in 2006 was that the average PC gamer was now buying 5 titles a year. Two years later and I think we are at 4 per year rather than 6, based on retail sales of titles like Bioshock, STALKER, Supreme Commander, Command and Conquer 3, etc.

There plenty of numbers out there that give clues. One is that the average hit title on xbox sold about 8 copies for every sales of the PC version. Today, Bioshock on 360 sold 16 copies for every PC copy sold. This is as much about the 50% decline in PC game sales in the last 4-5 years as it is about the 360, because the 360 is not doing fantastically better than the xbox in the same time period. In fact, I believe it is doing worse.

This all proves that PC gaming is doing worse than 5 years ago and that the peak in PC sales was in 1995 with a slow decline since, with a little bump around 2000-2001 with a faster decline since then.

[Blood-Pigggy]

Ice burn!

[Timpsi]

No argument there, Humorguy: PC gaming business is definitely not doing as well as it did back in the early '90s. This is probably mainly due to the saturation of the whole gaming field: PC now has to compete with more than just 'childrens consoles' like the 8-bit Nintendo and MegaDrive were. Xboxes and Playstations offer more complex and adult oriented entertainment and thus attract current/former PC gamers.

However, thanks to the modern consoles, the number of gamers has increased exponentially and the business as a whole is doing pretty well.

As for the number of the games bought, I suppose that is something that varies from country to country. The sales figures of the US should be very different from those of the UK, Australia, or the countries of the continental Europe.

[gregor]

well some titles did good on PC latelly (with sales) but then again there are a lot that didn't do as well.

maybe it's also the problem because with console there is not much room for developing some new engine, some new graphics etc. i mean you have a set maschine with set capabilities. you can't develope something that will require a little better graphics card and a little more ram or disk space simple because console doens't have any. so developer is preety much stuck with those system specification. while at PC they keep trying something new and that is why a lot of hours will go into that. hours that might make games cheaper if they weren't there, hours that could be spent on gameplay instead on the new graphics & game engine that will utilize the dual core CPU and all 768 RAM from the GPU.

with console - you are stuck with what you have... so it might well be that development is easier and maybe even cheaper for console market. which brings more income to the ocmpany if it sell the game at good price.

with pc you need to keep upgrading and buying new to be able to run the game as it was ment to be. development could be more expencive. but then again it produces unique titles with graphics oftem way beyond the consoles.

sure the new PS3 or 360 have cool graphics now, but within 2 years this will be old stuff, while at the same time graphics on PC gamesa will improve.

not to meniton that keyboard offers so much more possibilities...

[songnar]

Well, if you're looking for another gem in the rough, may I reccomend Stubbs the Zombie? Fun premise for a game!

[Astral]

I think it's all getting old, while growing we loose the magic... Can u see it, the brain start to absort junks from tv, commercial sh1t and else junk of your era. I yoused 2 it, older games have some point's now games are more special effect's and zillion colour's