Lots of newer game sequels are like this. I like to replay old games.

See the Humble Bundle deals for a similar "avoid the middle man" approach.

I pirated a bunch before I started earning money, now I only pirate things I could not get through other means really. Games I buy, but TV and Movies are impossible to get here in a reasonable timeframe (+6 months) so I pirate them. If it's a really good movie, I'll see it in a cinema.

When I know the money has a more direct line to the creator of the thing, I tend to be more charitable and buy it. I've also bought old games that I used to play, so I feel better about having played them so much.

I stand by that as long as the pirates provide a better service, I would rather pirate it. If the product is good enough, I'll pay for it too.

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

@coolhund
Ah, so you're a PC elitest. They're the worst at being opinionated douche bags, stuck in the past moaning about every game that comes out these days. I prefer my gaming on PC, especially shooters and despise poor ports, but I'm not a total dick about it. Next you'll be saying something like "STFU fag noob!".
I also think you do not understand my comments and instead of actually thinking about what i mean by evolution, like the definition being survival of the fittest, fittest being the games that actually sell, you just attack and start spewing your demented hate. Game design has evolved, many aspects for the better, many IMO for the worse, but denying that it is evolution is retarded.
The current industry works like this. Game development can cost 10s to sometimes 100s of millions of dollars, not including marketing, which again costs millions of dollars and is vital. These days it doesn't matter how good a game is, if it doesn't have branding or good marketing behind it, it wont sell. In some cases not even then because launch window is important too. Very rarely a game comes out of no where and surprises people and becomes a hit, but as I said, rarely. Investors/Publishers are rarely willing to release something totally different or release in a genre they know doesn't sell, and frankly who would be? Would you seriously be willing to risk losing that much money on such a risky investment? It's a business!
You'll be surprised to know I actually agree with you partly, the cause for this is the size of the industry now and the size of it's userbase. However what do you expect to happen to it? Do you expect the industry to stagnate, stay as it was 15 years ago and not grow yet still stay alive just to create your space flight sims? And yes, indie development is where all the ingenuity comes from, low risk and also low reward.
We only recall those nostalgic games we hold dear. Sometimes they live up to modern scrutiny, often they don't (a friend of mine who'd never played System Shock 2 or Deus Ex gave both ago. Loved SS2, couldn't get into Deus Ex). You never recall all the games that were shit. I can barely recall them, but i do remember there being a lot more shit games than good games.
These old classic games will always hold a place in my heart and many of them, especially the phenomenal Quake, I could always fire up (assuming I can get them running) and have a fun time, but that is nostalgia. Indie devs will be the ones to turn to, to experience old school game design. If that's enough for you, wtf are you so angry about? If you seriously expect AAA publishers to release games like that, you're in for a seriously long wait.
Now, I've had enough squabbling with a 30 year old child. Go back to your mother's basement, continue to replay your old games and by all means, don't stop complaining on the internet about how modern gaming has ruined your "life". I'll be here in the present, looking to the future and thinking fondly of the past


Why should I call you something like that? Dont put your standards on others. Well, you still havent grasped what I am trying to say. No wonder.
Yes, I know very well how the market looks right now. I know how it developed and I know whats to blame. That doesnt mean I deal with it. Dealing with it would mean I would have given in, and I never give in when things I like get destroyed. That may be futile in this case, with so many idiots like yourself who have given in and went back to mindless consume, but I dont care.

Games have not evolved. Since 2007 the graphics have not become much better, all in all they have actually gotten worse. The controls and gameplay have become much worse since 2006 or so and the genre variety and diversity has declined a lot.

You really think I grasp too much for classics? I dont care for classics, except for their memories and maybe one or two I still play from time to time. Why would I think a game (yes, a PC game) released in 2009 is the best game Ive ever played then? You know nothing about me and your assumptions are dead wrong. Each and every one. Funnily, my assumption of you being an ignorant prick just got confirmed again.

Yes I know how much marketing costs... or rather how much they make it cost. EA for example spends 2 times as much on marketing than on the game itself (prolly 3 or 4 times in case of BF3). Thats how games get so expensive. Get a clue.

Yeah, I have also wasted enough time on your ignorance and I wont be wasting more time trying to explain anything to you, not even a novel-sized text would help anyway.

@coolhund

Ah, so you're a PC elitest. They're the worst at being opinionated douche bags, stuck in the past moaning about every game that comes out these days. I prefer my gaming on PC, especially shooters and despise poor ports, but I'm not a total dick about it. Next you'll be saying something like "STFU fag noob!".
I also think you do not understand my comments and instead of actually thinking about what i mean by evolution, like the definition being survival of the fittest, fittest being the games that actually sell, you just attack and start spewing your demented hate. Game design has evolved, many aspects for the better, many IMO for the worse, but denying that it is evolution is retarded.

The current industry works like this. Game development can cost 10s to sometimes 100s of millions of dollars, not including marketing, which again costs millions of dollars and is vital. These days it doesn't matter how good a game is, if it doesn't have branding or good marketing behind it, it wont sell. In some cases not even then because launch window is important too. Very rarely a game comes out of no where and surprises people and becomes a hit, but as I said, rarely. Investors/Publishers are rarely willing to release something totally different or release in a genre they know doesn't sell, and frankly who would be? Would you seriously be willing to risk losing that much money on such a risky investment? It's a business!

You'll be surprised to know I actually agree with you partly, the cause for this is the size of the industry now and the size of it's userbase. However what do you expect to happen to it? Do you expect the industry to stagnate, stay as it was 15 years ago and not grow yet still stay alive just to create your space flight sims? And yes, indie development is where all the ingenuity comes from, low risk and also low reward.

We only recall those nostalgic games we hold dear. Sometimes they live up to modern scrutiny, often they don't (a friend of mine who'd never played System Shock 2 or Deus Ex gave both ago. Loved SS2, couldn't get into Deus Ex). You never recall all the games that were shit. I can barely recall them, but i do remember there being a lot more shit games than good games.

These old classic games will always hold a place in my heart and many of them, especially the phenomenal Quake, I could always fire up (assuming I can get them running) and have a fun time, but that is nostalgia. Indie devs will be the ones to turn to, to experience old school game design. If that's enough for you, wtf are you so angry about? If you seriously expect AAA publishers to release games like that, you're in for a seriously long wait.

Now, I've had enough squabbling with a 30 year old child. Go back to your mother's basement, continue to replay your old games and by all means, don't stop complaining on the internet about how modern gaming has ruined your "life". I'll be here in the present, looking to the future and thinking fondly of the past

@Hawkinson
Agreed.

Amusing video, but I don't lament the fact games have evolved. There are many things a lot of games back then did wrong, but as kids we were more patient and willing to overlook them. However, I do wish sometimes games would more often take a few more cues from old games in their design. Bulletstorm and Resistance 3 were a breath of fresh air in a stale FPS genre.
Also, Hard Reset was not the game I was hoping it would be. It was clunky and very dull, a massive step back from the superb Painkiller.

I guess I stand corrected, most gamers are now grumpy old men pining for the glories of yesteryear.

Fuck me, no wonder they advertize Viagra during X-Play.

I hear what you guys are saying, I just don't feel the same way. I guess part of it is that I don't really get the appeal of first person shooters anymore. I sorta liked 'em back when Doom was a hot name in gaming, and when I was young enough to think Duke Nukem 3D was groundbreaking for its mature themes. The last one I really liked was Half-Life, but that's because it heavily incorporated story elements, not because of the game mechanics (which were far from groundbreaking).

I thought Gears of War was a refreshing change of pace, and IMO presented the first real gameplay innovations we've seen in shooters since Doom. I'm glad there's been a lot of copying of their cover mechanics, since it adds real tactical considerations like cover fire and flanking to firefights. It's not enough to really make me a shooter fan again, but it's enough to keep me from being annoyed at developers for just continually putting new paint on 20-year old game mechanics.

I guess I just generally prefer action-adventure or sandbox games nowadays. Combat shouldn't be 100% of what games are about anymore as far as I'm concerned. If developers still want to make shooting the centerpiece of gameplay, then it should at least require some thought along the way, and force you to change weapons and tactics every now and then so it doesn't get stale.

Reverting back to "classic" shooter mechanics just seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.

Oh, and full disclosure, the only modern shooters I've played are Resistance, Gears, and Halo. Maybe I'm just missing out on something new and unique that everyone knows about from CoD or Battlefield, but from the sound of the reviews, I kinda doubt it.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I'd like to experience some of the good old days of shooters again not because games were better back then, much of the design has moved on, but now days there is just a flood of games all using the same mechanics as each other with no variety or substance.

Resistance 3 was a breath of fresh air, old school style gameplay mixed with modern mechanics. The health system, however was imbalanced. They could've done more to make it work better, but overall though, i really enjoyed Resistance dispite a few questionable design decisions. The fact that you can carry all the weapons at once nearly made me tear up.

DNF is a good example of totally cocking up the "old school" approach by implementing the WRONG modern features. Firstly the regenerating health. This right away causes a problem; you can regenerate your health, so for some challenge we need to make the enemies do a lot more damage to keep the player from abusing the system. What happens? You are almost always sitting back behind cover while waiting for your health to regen before firing again. That's not Duke Nukem! I heard other ideas were that you needed to kill an enemy to regain health, THAT is Duke.
Then there's the 2 weapon limit. George Broussard in all his game design incompetence said they couldn't find a way to implement a weapon wheel effectively on consoles... Resistance 3 seemed to do it fine. So did HL2 years back. Moron.

Regen health and 2 weapon limit can and do work for some games like Call of Duty, Halo and Gears of War, but FFS let's try something a little different once in a while. But some developers use them as a development crutch; less testing, balancing and design required. Less effort in other words. Or they use it to make the game less complex, which is a bad thing. Ninja Gaiden is a good example. It seems to be going down a path of less and less substance, there's only the combat. This is terrible. The original game's store, upgrades, potions, rewards for exploration, non-linear main world all helped to pace the game better rather than an exhausting trudge through constant unrelenting combat seen in Ninja Gaiden 2 and from the sounds, even more so for the third game.

>> ^NetRunner:

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.
Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.
I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.
Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.


I think Yahzee isn't technically a reviewer of games, he's oped'ing about games with humour. His reviews aren't particularly objective but they never claim to be.

And yeah, a lot of us do spend time wishing for old mechanics to come back. Winning a fight with a few % health left against all odds is far more satisfying than hunkering down behind a wall, regen'ing, popping out to shoot, regen'ing etc. Leaning around corners (rather than sticking to the wall and suddenly getting a huge panoramic as far as the camera can scan) is another example. No, we don't generally want verbatim copies of old games to come back, but some of the meatier bits would be nice.

I'd humbly submit that older games don't hold up against modern games because they aren't supposed to. That doesn't mean older game concepts don't hold up. eg. Dead Island doesn't have regenerating health or a cover system, which really do help ramp up the 'survival horror' factor.

I'm starting to feel like Yahtzee is a bad reviewer of games. I haven't played Resistance 3 yet, but all I got from this was that he loves it because its mechanics are old-fashioned.

Maybe all of us gamers are starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but I've not become particularly nostalgic for "the good old days" of gaming. I mean, do most gamers spend a lot of time wishing old game mechanics would come back from the dead? I've played enough remakes of "classic" games I loved to realize that most of them don't hold up in comparison to modern games. Gaming has largely moved on.

I for one love the addition of cover and regenerating health to shooters, and don't really like the idea of going back to health pickups and strafing in and out of cover.

Oh, and maybe I just don't play a lot of shooters, but are any of the top-tier series really still all/mostly brown? The only ones I know of are Gears and Resistance...in their first iteration only. From hearing Yahtzee, you'd think this was some mistake developers are still making, but I can't recall the last game I played that didn't make use of a healthy portion of the color wheel.

> why not just update games like Doom & Quake with modern net-code?

they are incredibly crude by todays standards?

You should try Bad Co 2 at 2560x1600 with a high end video card. Antialiasing is not required at all at these resolutions. It looks insanely incredible. BF3 is going to go that much further. The old games are nostalgic but if you are pining to stick with them I suspect you have not been exposed to enough high end PC gaming of today.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

>> ^shagen454:
I really wish people would just get back into the original Quake. Not many people play it online but I still think the multiplayer game mechanics as well as the blocky, dark, graphics are better than nearly all multiplayer games to this day. I've been playing it here and there the past couple of weeks but it's usually only a couple of people from Europe.

I definitely enjoy the old arcadey shooters more than the pseudo-realistic shooters that are everywhere now, but I no longer have the reflexes required to kick ass at them.


Me too. I replayed some old games and ugh I suck in them. LOL! I don't play new computer games anymore, even demos nad betas (very rare) due to lack of free times and motivations. I do play Flash games as you can see on AQFL.net.

>> ^blankfist:

Two comments in and you're back to your old games again. Where did I say "all" immigrants will be poor or "all" immigrants will refuse to pay taxes? Notice I mentioned US citizens as well. But you probably missed that while only listening to what you wanted to hear.

I was asking a question, not impugning your character. What I got in response (quoted below) was an attack on my character.

Comes across as hostile to me.

He's saying his exposure to the more refined version of OOT, Twilight Princess (and to lesser degree other modern Zelda games) made OOT just seem outdated to him.

People who were first exposed to OOT can't understand this position, as probably a lot feel OOT is a better game and that Twilight was a good copy but not great, even though it fixed a lot of the smaller issues.

Also OOT felt a lot more epic when it was released, both due to the current gens age back then and also just because back then it was epic in comparison to the games around it. Now it feels positively small and if you're going from modern games, back to old games, without a nostalgic experience to blend the flaws of time, you don't quite "get it" and would rather play the modern versions.

As he highlights, the Water Temple has some enigma as being brutal but I just played through it last night and he is pretty much bang on, it was hard for kids. I only played OOT when it came out so I had remembered nothing, it was brutally easy, I was actually kind of sad, I was some what looking forward to the hellish experience I remembered.

As I play OOT 3DS, I still think "Wow this really is the best game ever" but he still has very valid points.
>> ^direpickle:

Wait. Is he saying that he liked it, or that he didn't? I'm totally confused.

>> ^blankfist:

Two comments in and you're back to your old games again. Where did I say "all" immigrants will be poor or "all" immigrants will refuse to pay taxes? Notice I mentioned US citizens as well. But you probably missed that while only listening to what you wanted to hear.

Seriously blankie, what's with the hostility? Forgive me for just this once talking like a normal person and saying "all" when I should've said "disproportionately."

I was mostly just asking about whether you thought immigrants were a special class of people with different demographics than the indigenous population, because I don't see the how you link immigration to the solvency of a social safety net unless you presuppose that immigrants are either going to be disproportionately poor, or disproportionately likely to commit some form of fraud (tax or entitlement).

>> ^blankfist:
It's not that "all" immigrants are poor, it's that if you were poor and you realized you could go somewhere and have access to things you'd not normally have access to, then what're the odds of you exploiting that?
It's a numbers game. The more you allow for exploits in a system, the more it'll be exploited. Etc. Same goes with citizenry and citizenry birth. But the real difference, I believe, is that if you are stable in your home country, you're probably less likely to migrate somewhere just for the entitlements. The opposite is probably more likely however if you're not stable. Is that not a reasonable assumption?


So here's the part where I walk on eggshells and gently point out that you do seem to be saying that immigrants will be disproportionately likely to be poor or commit fraud.

You're also tossing in that you think native born citizens will be that way too. If that's the case, then we're back to "so what does immigration have to do with anything?"


Let's say we turned America into a Finnish-style welfare state -- taxes are high, infrastructure is modern and in good repair, our public schools are the best in the world, our health care system is both cost effective and provides quality care, unemployment is low, our budget is in surplus, our unemployment benefits are generous (and have no time limit), and we have a growing private sector with a heavy technology focus.

If we then threw the gates wide open on immigration, I think you're right; most of the people coming here would be poorer than the average American, and at least in the short run, it'd be bad for the government's net fiscal situation -- more people on welfare, without a completely offsetting tax revenue increase.

But over the long run, I think the situation would reverse. The immigrants and their children would get a free, quality education. They'd get first class health care. They'd have access to public transportation, and a healthy jobs market. For the most part, they'd "exploit" the advantages offered to them to bootstrap themselves into a more productive, wealthier, tax-paying lifestyle. In the long run, the state's investments in the human capital of those immigrants would pay dividends that go beyond mere economic growth, it'd also diversify and enrich the culture of their nation, and bring new ideas and different ways of thinking into the shared project of their society.

Which is to say, I don't think immigration poses a fiscal problem for welfare states.

Bigotry on the other hand, that poses a problem for left-wing policies of all kinds. I don't really think that's a strike against the policies of the left though.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^blankfist:
The fear is that immigrants come over and are allowed access to certain entitlements. For instance, hospitals cannot turn anyone away, so some US citizens and immigrants use this loophole to receive free health care. When they don't pay their bills, the rest of us subsidize them.
I guess I'm still not sure why this would be a problem. Are you assuming all immigrants will be poor? That all immigrants will refuse to pay taxes?
I don't really see why population growth through immigration would be substantively different than population growth through birth. I can see why politically it would be viewed differently, but I don't think shrinking the social safety net would reduce anti-immigrant sentiment.


Two comments in and you're back to your old games again. Where did I say "all" immigrants will be poor or "all" immigrants will refuse to pay taxes? Notice I mentioned US citizens as well. But you probably missed that while only listening to what you wanted to hear.

It's not that "all" immigrants are poor, it's that if you were poor and you realized you could go somewhere and have access to things you'd not normally have access to, then what're the odds of you exploiting that?

It's a numbers game. The more you allow for exploits in a system, the more it'll be exploited. Etc. Same goes with citizenry and citizenry birth. But the real difference, I believe, is that if you are stable in your home country, you're probably less likely to migrate somewhere just for the entitlements. The opposite is probably more likely however if you're not stable. Is that not a reasonable assumption?