I’ve made a handful of posts in the past where I criticized the current state of modern gaming, particularly AAA and the more mainstream side of the indie scene. I thought of making something positive for a change.
- Who is this thread for?
• This thread is for brocels, struggling to reconnect with the lost feeling of innocence and pure joy they felt from a once beloved hobby.
• This thread is for brocels who are not very familiar with videogames, and are wondering where & how to start getting into one of the more superb and luxurious yet oddly perplexing methods of coping.
• This thread is for brocels who are interested and already identified good games in gaming, but would just like to continue reading for the hell of it.
• This thread is for anyone who may or may not be interested in gaming at all.
Before we begin, we need to first establish and determine what a good videogame is.
A good game is something that makes you feel like a child, while a bad game has the opposite effect: constantly reminding you of being an adult. A good game will bring the youth in you. Blissful. Not a care in the world. Rejuvenated. While the bad game will remind you of responsibilities, chores, and all the making a man out of horror Mother Nature entails. The bad game is something you want to be done with as fast as possible just to justify your decisions, but the good game is something you wish could last forever. The bad game often takes itself “too” seriously, while the good game is open to interpretation.
These are “quotes” from myself actually. They’re not really unprecedented, and you’ve probably heard them before. I conjured them upon my first time emulating Super Mario Galaxy. It was during the pandemic, and I’d just gotten into emulation. A game, one that came out more than a decade ago, was able to squeeze more joy out of and life into me in the first hour, than most modern games are capable of in the span of 30hrs. That game was so heavenly, all I wanted to do, as an adult, was to be a kid again, was to go back from school and desperately try to finish it all in one sitting.
And then it suddenly struck me. It wasn’t me who changed, it was the games. Games are now shit. Too hyper focused on being something that they are not. Lost their touch thanks to being catered to the antithesis of the passionate individuals who once defined them. They were made by love, for people who loved them. They’re no longer about innovating a unique tailored experience on a cutting-edge surface, but more about “hey, how can we get as many clueless people as we can to mindlessly gobble our risk-averse cookie-cutter carbon copy of what was done before and give us money in return?” and the answer to that is simple: pretend you’re ANYthing but videogames.
Thankfully, this makes our job easier. In retrospect, ‘the death of escapism’ mightn’t have been a bad thing afterall, it helps weed out the garbage and find the truly top of the line copes faster. Instead of handing you a list of every good game I have played, I am going to offer you my piece instead: you’d have to figure it out on your own.
What should you NOT look for in a game? What are you supposed to avoid at all cost? It’s not a tricky question, here they are, here are the games you should avoid like a plague lmao:
God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, Watch Dogs: Legion, Dying Light 2, Dead Island 2, Alan Wake 2, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Borderlands 3, Horizon: Forbidden West, Far Cry 6, and pretty much every other AAA game that’s come out in the past 5 years or so.
The plebeian family would want you think that these games are good, but the reality is, they are creatively bankrupt and dangerously mediocre. They all have some things in common, and outlining them would take too long, and I’d much rather not go there, but boiling it down: they are fucking loud, pretentious and arrogant, just like the people who’ve made them. No quiet moments because subtlety and reflection are newly nonexistent concepts for these people. What killed gaming was politically correct entities incapable of discerning art as anything but the quagmire of a boycotted era. They probably thought of games as “misogynistic” or something that “has to change for the better.”
Games are contemporary, a product of their time and culture. Often disposable (but timeless if really good). Example: 2D games were obsolete during the early 00s. Why? Well because every platformer was still trying to be Mario 64, and every non-platformer was trying to pull off a GTA III. It was a weird era where we thought 3D is the new hit shit, and that we should bid farewell to 2D. Moving forward, this started to change by the time we’d realized they can both co-exist without collision.
Which brings me to my final conclusion. Games are increasingly becoming less creative, and as a result, they are becoming less enjoyable.
Some might say that innovation isn’t the main thing, but I think it is. I think what‘a killing gaming is the complete lack of coming up with new ideas, not being able to make anything novel, but can you blame the developers in today’s highly consumeristic landscape? Zoomers want to play the newest thing, just like how they want to support the most current thing. Say you’ve got billions to make your game; will you risk all of that trying to go against the grain for a tasteless crowd that might never even pan out financially? Or refurbishing the same product that you know will sell well regardless of the quality?
What else do those bad games have in common? Care to take a wild guess?
That’s right. They are all needless sequels, prequels, remakes and remasters. Nothing new. Which further proves my point.
Forget what I said about not making a list, why did you want to play Starfield so badly just to be disappointed when you haven’t even played Fallout: New Vegas yet? Why are you looking forward to the Silent Hill 2 remake (that looks like fanmade liquid sewage) when you haven’t even played the original game? Why are you trying to play any game when you haven’t even played Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pikmin 2, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Halo 2, The Arkham Trilogy, Rayman Legends, Shadow of the Colossus, Inside, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Hollow Knight, The Last of Us, Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, Bioshock, Soma, Papers Please, The Walking Dead, and a hundred other good games? Why???
Start from Metacritic’s front page instead and work your way down from there (yes, you should never put review scores above your own personal rating, yes, they’re not always trustworthy and you may not like some of them which is obviously okay unlike normies screeching, but that list will help facilitate a more straightforward approach). Every game I brought up here offers something unique. Something exceptional. Some of them were so good, none dared to replicate, and if they did, they’d miss out on key elements that made them special in the first place (take Dark Souls for example, it reinvented its predecessor’s hiccups, went on to become a cultural phenomenon, and then every clone that came after failed to realize what made it special in the first place, i.e., atmosphere, ambiguity, subtlety, world-building, a brilliantly metroidvenian design in 3D, etc.)
It’s really not that hard, is it? Find the source of “aha moment” in games, stick to it.
Ultimately and what you need to understand: games are on a spectrum. Most of what you play is mediocre. If 10% of them are bad, and only 5% are good, then that leaves 85% of them being okay at best.
Play the 5%.
You didn’t grow out of it, you just don’t know where to look for or haven’t fully discovered what you like most in videogames & what works best for you.
- Who is this thread for?
• This thread is for brocels, struggling to reconnect with the lost feeling of innocence and pure joy they felt from a once beloved hobby.
• This thread is for brocels who are not very familiar with videogames, and are wondering where & how to start getting into one of the more superb and luxurious yet oddly perplexing methods of coping.
• This thread is for brocels who are interested and already identified good games in gaming, but would just like to continue reading for the hell of it.
• This thread is for anyone who may or may not be interested in gaming at all.
Before we begin, we need to first establish and determine what a good videogame is.
A good game is something that makes you feel like a child, while a bad game has the opposite effect: constantly reminding you of being an adult. A good game will bring the youth in you. Blissful. Not a care in the world. Rejuvenated. While the bad game will remind you of responsibilities, chores, and all the making a man out of horror Mother Nature entails. The bad game is something you want to be done with as fast as possible just to justify your decisions, but the good game is something you wish could last forever. The bad game often takes itself “too” seriously, while the good game is open to interpretation.
These are “quotes” from myself actually. They’re not really unprecedented, and you’ve probably heard them before. I conjured them upon my first time emulating Super Mario Galaxy. It was during the pandemic, and I’d just gotten into emulation. A game, one that came out more than a decade ago, was able to squeeze more joy out of and life into me in the first hour, than most modern games are capable of in the span of 30hrs. That game was so heavenly, all I wanted to do, as an adult, was to be a kid again, was to go back from school and desperately try to finish it all in one sitting.
And then it suddenly struck me. It wasn’t me who changed, it was the games. Games are now shit. Too hyper focused on being something that they are not. Lost their touch thanks to being catered to the antithesis of the passionate individuals who once defined them. They were made by love, for people who loved them. They’re no longer about innovating a unique tailored experience on a cutting-edge surface, but more about “hey, how can we get as many clueless people as we can to mindlessly gobble our risk-averse cookie-cutter carbon copy of what was done before and give us money in return?” and the answer to that is simple: pretend you’re ANYthing but videogames.
Thankfully, this makes our job easier. In retrospect, ‘the death of escapism’ mightn’t have been a bad thing afterall, it helps weed out the garbage and find the truly top of the line copes faster. Instead of handing you a list of every good game I have played, I am going to offer you my piece instead: you’d have to figure it out on your own.
What should you NOT look for in a game? What are you supposed to avoid at all cost? It’s not a tricky question, here they are, here are the games you should avoid like a plague lmao:
God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, Watch Dogs: Legion, Dying Light 2, Dead Island 2, Alan Wake 2, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Borderlands 3, Horizon: Forbidden West, Far Cry 6, and pretty much every other AAA game that’s come out in the past 5 years or so.
The plebeian family would want you think that these games are good, but the reality is, they are creatively bankrupt and dangerously mediocre. They all have some things in common, and outlining them would take too long, and I’d much rather not go there, but boiling it down: they are fucking loud, pretentious and arrogant, just like the people who’ve made them. No quiet moments because subtlety and reflection are newly nonexistent concepts for these people. What killed gaming was politically correct entities incapable of discerning art as anything but the quagmire of a boycotted era. They probably thought of games as “misogynistic” or something that “has to change for the better.”
Games are contemporary, a product of their time and culture. Often disposable (but timeless if really good). Example: 2D games were obsolete during the early 00s. Why? Well because every platformer was still trying to be Mario 64, and every non-platformer was trying to pull off a GTA III. It was a weird era where we thought 3D is the new hit shit, and that we should bid farewell to 2D. Moving forward, this started to change by the time we’d realized they can both co-exist without collision.
Which brings me to my final conclusion. Games are increasingly becoming less creative, and as a result, they are becoming less enjoyable.
Some might say that innovation isn’t the main thing, but I think it is. I think what‘a killing gaming is the complete lack of coming up with new ideas, not being able to make anything novel, but can you blame the developers in today’s highly consumeristic landscape? Zoomers want to play the newest thing, just like how they want to support the most current thing. Say you’ve got billions to make your game; will you risk all of that trying to go against the grain for a tasteless crowd that might never even pan out financially? Or refurbishing the same product that you know will sell well regardless of the quality?
What else do those bad games have in common? Care to take a wild guess?
That’s right. They are all needless sequels, prequels, remakes and remasters. Nothing new. Which further proves my point.
Forget what I said about not making a list, why did you want to play Starfield so badly just to be disappointed when you haven’t even played Fallout: New Vegas yet? Why are you looking forward to the Silent Hill 2 remake (that looks like fanmade liquid sewage) when you haven’t even played the original game? Why are you trying to play any game when you haven’t even played Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pikmin 2, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Halo 2, The Arkham Trilogy, Rayman Legends, Shadow of the Colossus, Inside, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Hollow Knight, The Last of Us, Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, Bioshock, Soma, Papers Please, The Walking Dead, and a hundred other good games? Why???
Start from Metacritic’s front page instead and work your way down from there (yes, you should never put review scores above your own personal rating, yes, they’re not always trustworthy and you may not like some of them which is obviously okay unlike normies screeching, but that list will help facilitate a more straightforward approach). Every game I brought up here offers something unique. Something exceptional. Some of them were so good, none dared to replicate, and if they did, they’d miss out on key elements that made them special in the first place (take Dark Souls for example, it reinvented its predecessor’s hiccups, went on to become a cultural phenomenon, and then every clone that came after failed to realize what made it special in the first place, i.e., atmosphere, ambiguity, subtlety, world-building, a brilliantly metroidvenian design in 3D, etc.)
It’s really not that hard, is it? Find the source of “aha moment” in games, stick to it.
Ultimately and what you need to understand: games are on a spectrum. Most of what you play is mediocre. If 10% of them are bad, and only 5% are good, then that leaves 85% of them being okay at best.
Play the 5%.
You didn’t grow out of it, you just don’t know where to look for or haven’t fully discovered what you like most in videogames & what works best for you.
