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[ibot66]

Games that hold your intrest, and make you think are the ones I like. or stupid, violent shooters. and ragdoll games. I like games that use ragdolls.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

I bought DW3-6 and 6 empires without any qualms, but I almost regretted buying 6.

[fenrif]

I severely enjoyed dynasty warriors gundam, played the hell out of that. Though that may be because its god coop, and even a crappy coop game is more fun than an awesome singleplayer game.

[ChairmanPoo]

bah, most game reviews are covert ads in all but in name. IMO it's better to ask around, to people who play it, and (important) to people who disliked it. And play demos if avaiable.

[Puck]

I was expecting some serious arguments for the claim that "Games Are Getting Better".

It's a pretty darn complex topic, and going by review score average might be the most stupid approach I could imagine. Seriously, I wouldn't know where to start to RAEG about this. How about, since the beginning of video gaming the media covering that area has evolved so much, you can't even remotely begin to compensate for that, no matter what form of dark voodoo math skills you might wanna use. Or the fact that paying off reviewers gets more common every year?

If we believe in the wonderful movie "Idiocracy" we could argue that people are getting more stupid all the time, and hence games look better to them. And the quality of the metacritic article might even be a good proof for "people are getting stupidurr".

I might be onto somehting here, and hey, it seems to stand on firmer ground than the original claim!

[subject name here]

If we believe in the wonderful movie "Idiocracy"

don't. the only people who ever bring up that movie these days are assholes who want to pretend they're smarter then all those dumb sheeple.


to answer the question about if games are getting better: of course they are getting better, i can't be the only person in the world who remembers how horrible the nes library was. seriously it was like 10-30 good games:2500 horrible ones and i owned most of the horrible ones. i still have the cartridge to platoon and i will shove it down the throat of anyone who tries to say the things were so much better in "the good olde days".

the only reason it might seem better is because unlike me you owned most of the few good games it had. same thing with the snes/oldeydayescompootergames/etc. who wants a jbilble sandwich?

wanna play some platoon with me maybe we can finally get past the damn jungle

[Josephus]

BAHAHA

I remember that one circus game, where you passed through three stages, and each one was a different act.

I fucking sucked at that game.

At any rate, when people say "games are getting better/worse", they're using a relatively recent timeframe - mostly from the late 90's to 2010, when most of us were consciously playing and enjoying games. It's an unspoken assumption that a game's age is not, in fact, an indicator of quality - that quality is distinct (hopefully) from the game's age. Rather the age of a game probably happens to coincide with a time in most of our lives when we were enjoying the hell out of ourselves playing video games. Correlation is not causation, as we've all heard before.

On the other hand, I'm not really a fan of the whole "shinier is better" route that games are taking nowadays, but that's because the laptop I use for games is pretty shitty. So, you know, selfish reasons.

[subject name here]

the best games were made when you were ten - some wise guy

[ChairmanPoo]

On the other hand, I'm not really a fan of the whole "shinier is better" route that games are taking nowadays, but that's because the laptop I use for games is pretty shitty. So, you know, selfish reasons.

Is that the only reason? I have a low specs computer as well, but am not very happy with most modern games (when I have played them elsewere) because they favor eyecandy over everything else. Granted, not every single one of them, and granted, this has always been a problem, to some extent (not as much as nowadays, methinks). But as far as I am concerned the phase of buying things basing myself exclusively on the "OOH SHINY" department is long past.

[Josephus]

The new generation of games are moderately fun, and can be decent time wasters, but nothing to blow a night's sleep over, so perhaps not entirely selfish reasons. But mostly, yes.

[olemars]

On the other hand, I'm not really a fan of the whole "shinier is better" route that games are taking nowadays, but that's because the laptop I use for games is pretty shitty. So, you know, selfish reasons.

Is that the only reason? I have a low specs computer as well, but am not very happy with most modern games (when I have played them elsewere) because they favor eyecandy over everything else. Granted, not every single one of them, and granted, this has always been a problem, to some extent (not as much as nowadays, methinks). But as far as I am concerned the phase of buying things basing myself exclusively on the "OOH SHINY" department is long past.

If it's any consolation, this Nintendo bigwig agrees with you.

My belief is we should not blame the bad economy for the cause of slow sales of video games. The slow sales must be due to the lack of great software that everyone wants to buy. [...] I think the whole industry should be more cautious about how we act and how the general public perceives us. In the past, the formula was to make the computer graphics more gorgeous. It used to fit the taste of the majority of the gaming audience, but it doesn’t work so well in this day and age. It’s more difficult for us to come up with something new and different and show people how different we are. The whole industry has to recognize that.

[ibot66]

the best games were made when you were ten - some wise guy

I can prove him wrong. I like games that where made before i was born. warcraft 2.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

One of my favorite games was made when I was 15.  One of them isn't technically released yet...  This wise man sure is wrong a lot.

Oh wait, he's a "wise guy"...  Nevermind.

[Muz]

Reminds me of our education ministry which regularly says that "our students are getting smarter every year, because scores have gone up". Well, they did scale the scores. And it was possible for a score of 18 to be scaled to 50, or so my math teacher said about it then. It's just worse standards, and Metacritic sets their own weighting. I could give a game 4/10 on some blog, but Metacritic would just give my rating a low weighting.

Not to mention there's more 0 and 10 reviews on user reviews, meant to deliberately bump up or down the game's rating. I've seen someone give a 0 for a "It's a good game, but it was too similar to that other game".

But just because reviewers are getting worse, it doesn't mean games are getting better. I play more modern games than old games. I stopped playing Dungeon Keeper for DF. I don't play ADOM or Nethack, I play Dungeon Crawl. I don't play Masters of Magic, I play Fall From Heaven 2 (Civ4 mod). FIFA 2010 is significantly better than FIFA 2006. Games are getting better, assuming you ignore all those browser games and Facebook ones.

There always appears to be a dip in quality after an epic game comes out, but overall, with it's peaks and valleys, games are getting better. Metacritic took the wrong method to it, though.

But IMO, games are getting a lot more elitist and political. I've stopped reading game reviews, most of them are rubbish. Good sites like Eegra seem to have gone down and only the most populist or fanatical ones remain.

[Calhoun]

Games are definitely getting better. Honestly. If you were to browse through the catalog of the SNES the whole thing, the amount of good games would be quite low. Compared to the catalog of say, the Xbox 360. There are more Good and okay games, less GREAT titles, but there are much less total shit games.

I'm a firm believer that the average game today is much better than the average game of yesteryear.

Even when people give me examples of amazing older games, (Like the OP.) those were standout titles. I can list a bunch of great modern games.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying review standards aren't slipping. All I'm saying is games are getting better.