Quote Originally Posted by Shiny View Post
Yes, I think games have gotten better. The music is of a higher quality -- it's not in midi form anymore for most games.
This is a weak point because today's video game music is based on generic emulations of hollywood music. Whereas if you look back at the 16-bit RPG's we played, some of them have incredible compositions with a lot of complexity and thought put into them. I said this in the Shining Force thread, but if you look at games like that and Final Fantasy, you can actually recognize parts which are the chorus, the verses, and the bridges. I assume if you looked at Uematsu's sheet of the notes, it would probably be insane and something music students could study.

It's not just one button does one thing and another button does another thing anymore. You can now program buttons to do several different things for certain games.[/QUOTE]

But that's just a different way of doing something, it could easily be implemented poorly. It's a subjective decision that has nothing to do with objective quality, a game that doesn't do this could be infinitely better for an array of reasons.

[QUOT=Omecle]I disagree. When you look at movies, they've made many years of developing techniques and theory behind framing, composition, lighting, etc. whereas video games have not. In fact, the video game industry had a huge crash before Nintendo came out.[/QUOTE]

I'm pretty sure you're referring to something else, but films brought up a great point. When you look at those Noir movies from the 70's, there's a certain kind of eeriness to the ambience of the way they were done and constrained by technology that produces a surrounding feeling unpalpable to today's films, which look generic with their standardized usages.

I think the same holds true for games. FFVII, utilizing 3d models over 2d graphic art, interspersed with cutscenes and 3d battles, evokes a crazy feeling that today's game completely rendered in real time could not emit. This isn't nostalgia for the feelings it evoked at the time - playing it the other night made me amazed at the color pallette, the certain darkness of the battle environments, and the way the slowed down framerate works to enhance that feeling.

I'm not saying games are worse today. IMO, Metal Gear Solid 4 is (maybe) the best game I've ever played and it could not have been achieved without Blu Ray and the Cell Processor of the PS3. I think some things are only possible with technology.

But there will always be games from other years that outshine most from recent ones. I just have a problem with someone saying that games are definitively better in every way now than they were before.