When was the last time you got excited about gaming? I mean genuinely interested, passionately devoted and excited about what was on display. I remember a time when gaming used to really wow me, when games were revolutionary, and when developments in the industry were going ahead in leaps and bounds.
Lets rewind the clock back to 1993, I was only 6 years old then, but I already had countless hours of gaming under my belt on my beloved NES. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Gradius, Super Mario Bros, Excitebike, Castlevania, all of them were in my repertoire. These games still stand out to be some of the greatest moments in gaming for me, not because I was young and impressionable, not due to an attack of nostalgia, simply because they were all top notch games. They managed to take simple ideas, polish them up as best as 8bit graphics could provide, and work with tried and true mechanics that kept you coming back for more.
It was about this time that my parents surprised me with the Super Nintendo, up to this very day my favorite gaming console. From the moment I popped in that Super Mario World cartridge, I was sold that gaming could get no better than this. The SNES provided years of quality gaming for the masses, I owned a total of 30 SNES games back in the day (unfortunately all gone now due to flood damage) and all of those 30 were quality games. Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past is still my all time favorite game.
PC games weren’t lost in this Golden Age of gaming. Point and click adventures have since seemed to fall off the map, but Sam and Max Hit The Road is easily one of the best games around, and even now over 10 years on it’s still provides some of the best humor you’ll ever experience in a game. Lucasarts P&C games were a level of their own, and of course we had the FPS behemoths that were Quake and Doom. Whether you were playing as a Space Marine on Phobos or you were working your way through one of the many rooms on Day of The Tentacle, these PC games had something more to offer than just a game, they had memorable stories, engaging stories, something that separated them from everything else.
As the years passed by, graphics and audio became better and better. We started to see the decline of P&C Adventure games, we saw the demise of Sega, and the rise of Sony.
Here we are, it’s the end of 2008 and Nintendo are still kicking it strong, new comers Microsoft are getting their ground and Playstation is doing well, but the real question is will we be talking about Gears of War in ten years time as being one of the greatest game experiences of all time?
Are we entering the new Golden Age of Gaming? One wouldn’t argue that some of the games that have been released over the last two years are works of art, just look at Bioshock!
What I really am trying to ask is has games lost their WOW factor? I remember sitting there on the SNES thinking “Oh my god, this is so amazing”, then the Nintendo 64 came out and once again I was like “what will they do next?”.
But now it almost seems we’ve hit a dead spot, how much better can we get from here? Graphics already look photo realistic, and for every original game out there, we get 15 - 20 dodgy FPS games that claim to be the next big thing and just don’t deliver.
More importantly, I want games that deliver fun. What is wrong with enjoying yourself and getting engrossed in the stories and characters that a good game has to offer? Problem is these days, not enough games offer good enough stories
Submitted by heller
2 days ago
28
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