Having grown up in the age where gaming consoles ( like the super famicom or
Nintendo entertainment system,
Sega Megadrive/Genesis,
Super-Nintendo entertainment system ) pretty much dominated the gaming scene at the time, one has to ask oneself the question: What the fark happened to gaming since those days? I find myself plowing through title after title, finishing some and discarding others, never really feeling satisfied or at any stage engrossed or nailed to my seat.
Back in the day I often spent my free time pulling all nighters (sometimes with sleepover buddies ) playing some or other platformer like Shinobi 3, a shooter like Biohazard battle, or a Beat 'em up like Streets of Rage, reluctantly going to bed the next morning out of the necessity to get some sleep.
I remember the one occasion where I was getting the 8-bit cartridge for the NES of my favorite arcade game at the time:
Streetfighter 2: The World Warrior, I literally couldn't sleep nor could I contain my excitement with any success (short of changing my pants). These days I'm lucky if I play for 3 hours at a time without getting bored out my skull.
Trying to make sense of the weird "gaming lull" that seems to have struck out of nowhere, some questions needed to be looked at closely:
* What changed?
* Why did it change?
* For better or worse?
Certain major changes definitely came along that "revolutionized" ( errr. yeah ,let's call it that ) games, round about the time the
Sony PlayStation hit the shelves. At the time I opted for the
Sega Saturn ,purely because I had some of the best gaming years of my life as owner of previous Sega consoles. Apart from the fact that near arcade-perfect-conversion of games were now theoretically possible given the nature of the hardware under the hood of both the Playstation and Sega Saturn, I didn't like what I was seeing; more and more attempts were being made to move away from 2d ( side scrollers , top-down scrollers etc. ) into 3d gaming.
That in itself is not really a issue. Except that when you try to do that with hardware that wasn't capable of decent
3D Acceleration, you quite frankly end up with a game that looks like a seagull swooped in and took a huge crap on a beautiful painting.
You can still make out the image, but you'd rather not look at it more than you have to. (pixelated mess).
I think that was the beginning of the end for me. I sold my consoles and bought a "computer graphics card" that had proper 3D acceleration capabilities.
For a while all was dandy again in my world, except that satan decided to develop the playstation 2 and it started it's onslaught on the gaming market , really good games started drying up for the PC altogether.
Developers started churning out hundreds of shallow disk shaped turds masquerading as games, focusing on eye candy instead of substance, replacing decent background music and atmospheric sound with tasteless grating that could pass for porn music when they wanted atmosphere ,or a garage band audition when they wanted to convey a feeling of suspense or high paced action. they started pushing out hordes of Quake 2/Medal of Honor clones, flooding the already filled "septic tank" with even more grimy crap. The the PS3 came out with it's impressive capabilities, but with games hitting the shelves at R500-R700 ( $71 - $100 ) a piece.
What the Hell??
Luckily it wasn't all bad through the years , games such as Starcraft, Fallout 1 and 2 ,the Wing Commander Series, Baldurs Gate,Carmageddon , Command and Conquer, Starcraft2, Titan Quest, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, kept me somewhat interested in gaming.
Maybe I'm getting too old for this....Bah! I'm going out for a beer.
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Not really sure how this is going to be any different to "X-men Origins Wolverine" , but hey , it's Marvel Studios and as we all know , they don't screw up.
