Gaming is dead/Long live gaming.

Originally Posted by Bolivar

LOL this line is epic although I do feel for your wife a little bit man she's putting up with your bizarre obsession with these weird games from Japan!

To be fair, I had shelves filled with a few hundred video games and boxes filled with what must at this point be thousands of comics when she met me and I made no effort to hide these facts from her. She knew what she was getting into, though I'm sure there are some days that she regrets not turning around and running the other way.

Originally Posted by Pike

I want old strategy games with manuals the size of the Bible and UIs that lean dangerously close to being too complicated.

Let's not stop at too complicated though. Let's include buttons and menu's that do everything in their power to completely obfuscate their function from the user, while still conveying some bare minimum of clues as to what they do. I'm looking at you X-Com. I may love you, but sometimes you make me feel like a battered wife. You're so great the rest of the time that whenever I have to press a button I convince myself that you really do love me, and you're not this obtuse all of the time.

You guys are in luck! X-Com's coming back and it's going to be an immersive and mindblowing first person shooter!!!

I remember reading a PS1 magazine (it's like a games website made of 'paper' or something, my memory is hazy), well over a decade ago now, where in the letters section was a rant from some guy complaining that 'all games nowadays are just sequels, nothing original anymore'. Nostalgia goggles, my friend.

There was also a prophetic letter from somebody saying that 'a Final Fantasy game mixed with Disney characters would be awesome!'.

EDIT: Oh, and another one about how, far into the future of 2010 we'd be driving in our hovercars to buy a holo-copy of GTA7. The future sucks.

Originally Posted by Pike

I just want Microprose and oldschool Firaxis and Maxis to come back. I want Paradox to keep doing what they're doing (minus all the DLC.) I don't want any of this social gaming crap, I want old strategy games with manuals the size of the Bible and UIs that lean dangerously close to being too complicated.

I don't speak for everyone, of course. I speak for myself and for MILF, though.

Europa's pretty speshul.

Originally Posted by Bolivar

You guys are in luck! X-Com's coming back and it's going to be an immersive and mindblowing first person shooter!!!

If I wasn't certain that you were joking you'd be dead to me.

I couldn't detect the sarcasm. I was going to ban him. You saved his ass Vivi22.

^ Thanks, Jiro!

NetHack exists, therefore gaming can never be dead.

I am pleased to say I have found some redemption and found a little faith in gaming by Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Where is my Heart. That means some of you have been right: I may have not been looking hard enough for gems like these. Dark Souls and the first Deus Ex are now on my wanted list, and I hope they will be gems for me too.

Edit: Deus Ex: HR's normal difficulty is called; give me a challenge. It could not have been more fitting as a response to this thread.

We are waiting for you.

this isn't the main thrust of the thread, but I think the point is important anyway. once games started allowing instant or on-demand saving (years ago), they became much much easier. Plus, regardless of the relative difficulty of games, we as players get older and more experienced. Of course the first games we play will seem hardest because we are youngest and have the least skill. And generally, aging leads us all to complain that things used to be better than they are now, for a number of reasons.

I don't play a ton of video games anymore (nor do I have the time), but the ones I do are amazing. Uncharted 2 and 3, Fallout 3, Portal and Portal 2, etc.

I don't agree that auto saving has to make games 'easier'. In fact, it allows the developer to create a much more difficult encounter.

Lets say you want it to take 1 hour to get past a certain part of your game. The old way would make you do 10 minutes per try because you have to re-do everything to get to that point. If you auto-save right before you can do one attempt every minute, allowing you to tune it difficult enough to require 60 attempts to complete instead of 6. In theory it allows you to make it 10x more difficult.

Unfortunately whenever a game developer wishes to capitalize on the 'hard game' market niche they do so by making the game moderately more difficult and adding a lot of repetition to pad every attempt.

I guess a good example of what I am talking about would be 'Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?' You start the game with 1000 lives and there is a checkpoint like every 30 seconds. It is also exceedingly difficult.

I think he means easier in the sense that you can go haphazardly through the game, knowing you are only losing a few seconds or minutes at most of your time if you make a wrong move. You have to think less about every move you make, and that makes it easier.

Originally Posted by VeloZer0

I don't agree that auto saving has to make games 'easier'. In fact, it allows the developer to create a much more difficult encounter.

Lets say you want it to take 1 hour to get past a certain part of your game. The old way would make you do 10 minutes per try because you have to re-do everything to get to that point. If you auto-save right before you can do one attempt every minute, allowing you to tune it difficult enough to require 60 attempts to complete instead of 6. In theory it allows you to make it 10x more difficult.

Unfortunately whenever a game developer wishes to capitalize on the 'hard game' market niche they do so by making the game moderately more difficult and adding a lot of repetition to pad every attempt.

I guess a good example of what I am talking about would be 'Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?' You start the game with 1000 lives and there is a checkpoint like every 30 seconds. It is also exceedingly difficult.

Originally Posted by Delicious Murder

I think he means easier in the sense that you can go haphazardly through the game, knowing you are only losing a few seconds or minutes at most of your time if you make a wrong move. You have to think less about every move you make, and that makes it easier.

Both are valid points, and both would suit different types of games I think.

I remember a few moments in Vagrant Story where I was on the edge of my seat nearly begging for a save point in the next room. Thrilling indeed.

It doesn't make it easier, it makes it less stressful. Part of the point I was making is that there are so many more things at play than how 'easy' or 'hard' the actual gameplay is.

Perhaps one of the problems is the 'hard game' desiring community hasn't drawn a distinction between all of the different things that can be used to make a game 'hard'. Punishing consequences for failure, exceedingly steep learning curves, extreme dexterity, all of these things can be used to different extents in games. A hard game doesn't have to be all of these things all the time.