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"Spoilt Rotten"

We all remember our childhood days when we got our first gaming console. We handled it with care only the royal family gets nowadays and we were touching it with tremor and even with great respect. We considered our consoles a treasure and quite frankly most of us were lucky to be able to afford consoles. Therefore we didn’t take video games for granted. We were happy with what they had in terms of graphics and gameplay and somehow almost every game we played seemed to be good because of our views on them. In the late 80’s and the early 90’s the video games were considered to be the hippiest thing on earth. They were the good times….

So what has changed now you may ask? Video games are as popular as ever before, there is a wide array of consoles and games to satisfy even the most bizarre of tastes and their prices are very affordable and inviting. But somehow when you sit down in front of your television on a cold wintery night and switch on your compact little box, you just don’t get the same feeling you would as little as 6 years ago. Then people were appreciative of the work game developers have done in order to bring joy into our homes. Games were as much a communication device for the society as e-mail and telephone. Friends were made, tournaments were organised and it seemed that whole families were around the television to marvel at the achievement of software companies.

Now in the 21st century, the consoles are composed of powerful processors, unimaginable amounts of memory and all the rest of the technical mumbo-jumbo. Games now look as good as cinematic releases and make use of superb state-of-the-art technology. As many of us would expect, games have detailed and mouth-watering graphics to supplement the gameplay and totally immerse players in their expansive worlds. In the recent years, though, gameplay has been in the long, black shadow of graphics as companies tried to out-do each other in the graphical departments of their releases. And this is where it has all gone wrong…

Gamers all over the world have now come to expect superb graphics from any game they pop into their new-age games console. They expect unrivalled gameplay that is bound to change the way people think about games. And once a great title appears on the shelves, a benchmark by which the genre is then judged, people expect every forthcoming game to better one another. Our expectations have risen beyond imagining – its either outstanding or its bargain bins for the game. Developers are aware of that, they spend more time to polish the graphics, cram in as many unnecessary game modes as possible and in the end ignore the fun factor. It’s a kind of a never-ending loop that has appeared gradually with powerful consoles entering the market.

Another factor of gaming becoming less of an “event” if I can put it like that is that developers are constantly try to aspire to games that have already achieved success on the market. This makes certain titles dreadfully similar to each other and there is a feeling creeping in that developers are more interested in cashing in on the use of licenses and pretty graphics rather than making games fun and different from others. Gamers are left with what stinks of products that have been purely created in order to provide an alternative for other games in the same genres. Whereas just 10 years ago, there was much less jostling for the position market and more time was left to fine-tune different aspects of a gaming experience.

Neither was there a present sense of laziness within the gaming industry just a decade or so ago. Whilst I have to admit certain companies such as Codemasters are trying their best to present us with original stuff, which does not look and feel as a hurried remake of the original. These very same developers preferred to spend their time making as many games in as many different genres as possible rather than churning out half-ars** sequels year in year out.

Of course it is understandable that production of video games requires great dedication and funding on the part of the developers and the publishers, but we cant help but feel that there are better ways of making money than sitting on your chair and muttering something like –“aha here is an extra stadium, here is an extra costume-that will do for now-payrise here I come”. Okay, a decade ago many were unfamiliar to the whole concept on playing games inside their homes rather than smoke-filled dingy arcades; but if you were to ask some of the hardcore fans who have been around to witness some of the best gaming experiences until now, I have a feeling many would say that gaming was a pure, fun and exciting experience. Even the most simpler of titles had a nifty ability to stay in your minds, and kind of make you feel good about yourself. You were left feeling cosy and games made you smile to yourself. Bright colours and simple blocky graphics caused you to feel warm inside. This may sound unfamiliar to some of you, but this is what it used to be like.

You were never left sitting there wondering about how poor the graphics are or how silly this particular set-piece is. Our thoughts have changed over the years and gamers are picky, ungrateful and almost expect to see the very best in this era of high-spec technology. Now gaming is an almost not emotive and only acts as a way of passing time. And this is very sad to see, because we are spoilt for choice that is presented to us. Companies do try and they work very hard to satisfy our needs but we are simply not grateful for their efforts anymore. Every time people have something negative to say about any game and they sit there grumbling about how this could have been made better. Come on people – that never worried us few years ago: we were happy with what we got and I there were hardly any complaints then. I will miss the excitement playing videogames gave me, the warmth and cosiness I felt when controlling my favourite characters…Games may have become better in many ways, but that great unexplainable feeling of satisfaction seems to have gone and is not coming back for some time…

I agree with you that it is naturakl of us wanting certain improvements to be made of games to enhance our experiences and that we totally deserve to be picky for our money that we are shelling out for games nowadays. You then swayed off the point slightly there and this is where I might have to disagree with you.

I was saying that considering how innovative and special games were a decade ago, I do not feel that developers should really be presenting us with bad conversions of games or more to the point shoddy variations of the games that fall into a particular genre. We are spoiled for choice but if we cut down the number of dire games among those hundreds of games, we can understand that the developers are not doing as good as they could be. As usualy money are involved here and the competition for the top spot in each genre is too great. But I dont see why some developers (even if they are on tight budgets) cannot take that little bit more time to have a definite structure before producing their games.

Gaming is most certainly brilliant now that we can enjoy the wonders of new technology but that feeling of playing something special every time has kind of veered off into eternity...

Hmm, we may well be spoilt rotten, and we may well be very picky in what we buy, but we do have a right to be like this surely? We spend the £40 we pay for a game and expect that it will be good, we have to, otherwise whats the point in buying a game that we wont like to play all that much at all.

You are right in saying that gaming has come along way in a very short space of time, but with that, so has our expectations of the big titles, its only natural. If things are getting better all the time then we expect the best all the time, and thats something that the developers have to accept, and the ones that do, are the likes of Konami and Namco, and we know how big these companies are.

In the end, we are spoilt rotten in the amount of games that we get to choose from, but thinking about it, out of all the games that come out on one console during the year, how many of them are actually really worth buying. Not a huge percent by any means, thats why often our games collections do not exceed the 100 games number. But that could come down to cost also, which then leads back to my original statement, we have the right, and we need to be picky about what games we buy.

If everyone went and bought any old game that could damage the market even further aka: Fifa. We dont want a load of them type of games do we.

In my opinion, gaming now is every bit as good as it was 10 years ago, it is different though, obviously the change in technology shows that, but i enjoy gaming on my PS2 as much as i did on my Nes (which i still do).

However, i do agree with the fact that gaming, back then was more of a privilege than it is now, we all take it too much for granted that we have ready access to this form of entertainment now, and that does take that 'specialism' out of gaming at times.

We all remember our childhood days when we got our first gaming console. We handled it with care only the royal family gets nowadays and we were touching it with tremor and even with great respect. We considered our consoles a treasure and quite frankly most of us were lucky to be able to afford consoles. Therefore we didn’t take video games for granted. We were happy with what they had in terms of graphics and gameplay and somehow almost every game we played seemed to be good because of our views on them. In the late 80’s and the early 90’s the video games were considered to be the hippiest thing on earth. They were the good times….

So what has changed now you may ask? Video games are as popular as ever before, there is a wide array of consoles and games to satisfy even the most bizarre of tastes and their prices are very affordable and inviting. But somehow when you sit down in front of your television on a cold wintery night and switch on your compact little box, you just don’t get the same feeling you would as little as 6 years ago. Then people were appreciative of the work game developers have done in order to bring joy into our homes. Games were as much a communication device for the society as e-mail and telephone. Friends were made, tournaments were organised and it seemed that whole families were around the television to marvel at the achievement of software companies.

Now in the 21st century, the consoles are composed of powerful processors, unimaginable amounts of memory and all the rest of the technical mumbo-jumbo. Games now look as good as cinematic releases and make use of superb state-of-the-art technology. As many of us would expect, games have detailed and mouth-watering graphics to supplement the gameplay and totally immerse players in their expansive worlds. In the recent years, though, gameplay has been in the long, black shadow of graphics as companies tried to out-do each other in the graphical departments of their releases. And this is where it has all gone wrong…

Gamers all over the world have now come to expect superb graphics from any game they pop into their new-age games console. They expect unrivalled gameplay that is bound to change the way people think about games. And once a great title appears on the shelves, a benchmark by which the genre is then judged, people expect every forthcoming game to better one another. Our expectations have risen beyond imagining – its either outstanding or its bargain bins for the game. Developers are aware of that, they spend more time to polish the graphics, cram in as many unnecessary game modes as possible and in the end ignore the fun factor. It’s a kind of a never-ending loop that has appeared gradually with powerful consoles entering the market.

Another factor of gaming becoming less of an “event” if I can put it like that is that developers are constantly try to aspire to games that have already achieved success on the market. This makes certain titles dreadfully similar to each other and there is a feeling creeping in that developers are more interested in cashing in on the use of licenses and pretty graphics rather than making games fun and different from others. Gamers are left with what stinks of products that have been purely created in order to provide an alternative for other games in the same genres. Whereas just 10 years ago, there was much less jostling for the position market and more time was left to fine-tune different aspects of a gaming experience.

Neither was there a present sense of laziness within the gaming industry just a decade or so ago. Whilst I have to admit certain companies such as Codemasters are trying their best to present us with original stuff, which does not look and feel as a hurried remake of the original. These very same developers preferred to spend their time making as many games in as many different genres as possible rather than churning out half-ars** sequels year in year out.

Of course it is understandable that production of video games requires great dedication and funding on the part of the developers and the publishers, but we cant help but feel that there are better ways of making money than sitting on your chair and muttering something like –“aha here is an extra stadium, here is an extra costume-that will do for now-payrise here I come”. Okay, a decade ago many were unfamiliar to the whole concept on playing games inside their homes rather than smoke-filled dingy arcades; but if you were to ask some of the hardcore fans who have been around to witness some of the best gaming experiences until now, I have a feeling many would say that gaming was a pure, fun and exciting experience. Even the most simpler of titles had a nifty ability to stay in your minds, and kind of make you feel good about yourself. You were left feeling cosy and games made you smile to yourself. Bright colours and simple blocky graphics caused you to feel warm inside. This may sound unfamiliar to some of you, but this is what it used to be like.

You were never left sitting there wondering about how poor the graphics are or how silly this particular set-piece is. Our thoughts have changed over the years and gamers are picky, ungrateful and almost expect to see the very best in this era of high-spec technology. Now gaming is an almost not emotive and only acts as a way of passing time. And this is very sad to see, because we are spoilt for choice that is presented to us. Companies do try and they work very hard to satisfy our needs but we are simply not grateful for their efforts anymore. Every time people have something negative to say about any game and they sit there grumbling about how this could have been made better. Come on people – that never worried us few years ago: we were happy with what we got and I there were hardly any complaints then. I will miss the excitement playing videogames gave me, the warmth and cosiness I felt when controlling my favourite characters…Games may have become better in many ways, but that great unexplainable feeling of satisfaction seems to have gone and is not coming back for some time…