My friend, I think you need to join us indie gamers, especially on PC. DRM free, minimal updates, small installs, high novelty and weirdness factors. I barely play anything "AAA" anymore and definitely nothing that does Games as a Service.

I mean, you're 40 now (or close to it). A lot of your nostalgia is also wrapped up in being 5. I too was an 80s kid but if the market hadn't changed your reaction would. You probably aren't sitting under a blanket learning the names in Dave the Diver. You have an income now so you probably wouldn't just wait till your parents bought you Hades 2. You're probably not running around with your friends right now pretending to be Helldivers. Games have changed but so have you. The Indie market is carrying the torch of these bygone days. A lot of the stuff you want wouldn't have the same impact on you today. I am however watching my own children glom into game characters. My daughter loves Mario and Mega Man without going to Blockbuster to rent the cartridges.

(Btw madden 95 does work on the SNES classic, they're pretty easy to jail break and fill with your own ROMs)

tl;dr: "Growing up sucks because it makes everything look the same old."

I mean... yeah. That is why you have to stop wishing for "the same old" over and over again and embrace the new. And yes, I (also) think DRM has no other purpose than to hinder performance.

t. am (also) a 80's "kid".

It's easy to forget the negatives involved here (or some you maybe never knew as a kid). Games used to be very expensive for 80's kids. Adjusting for inflation, you can get two full-priced AAA games now for what A Link to the Past cost in 1992. It's part of the reason there's so much more choice now. Also, games came with manuals because they were so strapped for storage space that they couldn't put tutorials and instructions in the games themselves. Kids that rented games or purchased them secondhand often didn't have the manuals available, so they'd get stuck (before Internet info access).

I agree with the others that you should look into PC gaming; aside from the occasional live service game, I've only ever updated my games when I want to. In general, indies are a good way to go to mitigate many (if not all) of the issues brought up, but so are quality PC ports. For example, I just bought Trails through Daybreak from GOG, which so far looks like something I'll never have to update, I can be in the game action within literally four seconds of launching it, and it's mine forever.

That's setting aside all the value considerations like access to mods, full control of your save storage, getting to play with the gamepad of your choice, supporting small devs/publishers, etc. Even without diving into indie gaming, there are tons of quality AA titles around, too. Compared to a console, It's trivial to offset the larger hardware costs with cheaper games.

RetroArch is really neat.

Steam Deck OLED is pretty awesome. Microsoft-free PC in your hands.

Anyway it's all about DRM.

You will own nothing and you will love it. /S

You can give your steam info to your loved one and accidentally forgot to tell them when you die 🥹.

Or there's always GoG.

I've been🖥️ PC/Linux 🐧 only since 2019, no regrets.

• 🎮 #BazziteLife 🕹️

You do not miss old games. You miss being a careless happy kid.

You can easily ignore the whole corporate AAA games-as-a-service bullshit.

There was never a better time to be an indie gamer. Arcade, platformer, racing, RPG, shooter. You can find a GOTY contender in each category under 5 USD each year.

Excuse me, I wasn't paying attention, too busy playing Stardew Valley

First, you are way older now. You cannot compare any experience in your life to that when you were a kid

People are writing a lot of things that I agree with, but I want to chime in with two points.

The first, which one or two other commenters have touched on, is that in 2024 we have approximately 50 years of content already in existence. There's no need to limit ourselves to what's been released in the last 12 months. Classic books, music, plays, and movies stay popular for decades or centuries. Why feel shamed out of playing old games by 12-year-olds and the megacorps?

The second thing is, yes, try indie games, and IMO the best place to find them is for PCs on itch.io. Forget 95% of what's marketed as "indie" on consoles.

You’re getting so many responses that are just “have you tried indie games?” or trying to dispel the rose-colored glasses. I suspect it’s because of the headline saying modern gaming sucks, which I think can be pretty objectively disproven.

That said, I can tell you about my experiment. I’ve instituted a program with my 12 year old stepson where he can earn marbles through chores and other tasks, and he can trade those marbles in for retro games I find in local stores and flea markets. One of the things he can also buy for a very low price is a downloaded retro magazine from retromags.com - he can ask for an issue with a particular topic in it and I’ll find one and send it to him. He isn’t really very internet savvy yet, so he’s not likely to hit up IGN for info or anything.

The result of this so far (only a few weeks in) has been serious excitement and engagement. He has access to Xbox Series and PS5 consoles, but getting to own physical games and accessories (we play them on a Retron 3 HD console) has motivated him more than I’ve seen almost anything else do. He keeps asking me if Street Fighter 2 will come to the “store” anytime soon because of my stories of how badly I wanted that game as a kid his age. Little does he know that for Christmas he’ll be getting an excellent condition, complete in box copy of Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition for the Genesis. He’s gonna flip.

The upshot of all this is that I really do think there was a certain magic to the experience back then. I’m doing my damnedest to recreate that magic for him, and so far it’s at least kinda working!

"Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphasis is on online play"

Buys the same game 15 times

Complains that it's the same game again

Have you tried not doing that

Most modern AAA games sucks. Mainly because majority of them have started to go with the online only bullcrap when it is not even necessary. Not to mention that trend too where games are sold half baked with the rest of the game being delivered later as separate to purchase DLC(s).

I have already embraced Indies. Fun fact: Baldurs Gate 3 is an indie game (although the quality is very much an AAA game and also some argueably saying it is not because Larian is a large private company that independently publishes their games)

TLDR: Agree on many points but also you are wrong in some things. Certain parts of AAA gaming make modern games feel like a chore or feel bad compared to how AAA games used to feel. But also the market of games is flooded and making more money than ever before.

Regarding some of your points:

All the games today are the same

I get what you're saying, but you're also wrong. There are so many games out there these days that vary widely in art, style, design, gameplay, etc. There have literally never been so many different kinds of game on the market at once. Now, I agree that AAA studios are mostly only making "safe" games they know will sell, and I too am upset that companies these days are so risk adverse that they will refuse to make a new game as experimental as something like Illbleed, but thats what happens when a hobby goes mainstream and investors that are greedy get invovled.

Why can't I just play from disk

Because load times would be astronomical. Disk read speeds are still slow, way slower than solid state drive read speeds. Your 10 second loading screens would be longer than 45 seconds, even the PS1 would probably load games faster. In this case, some data may not be loaded completely by the time the game decides to let you in, as some assets in games now are streamed from the drive as needed instead of being loaded directly into RAM at the start of a scene. Relying on a slow mechanical disk laser to stream that data in a manner that wouldn't cause crashing or missing assets would not be feasible. They could try solid storage but that comes with its own caveats and increased manufacture price.

Complaining about storage

I agree, but also games have big textures and better quality audio these days compared to the old days. Sure, not all games need that, but if storage space is a complaint then play any one of the ten trillion indie card battlers. The bigger files also increase load times, more data in general needs more time to search and load.

Complaints about MTX and such

I agree, predatory monetization sucks. The only times I am okay with inclusion of MTX/Lootbox/Gachapon etc is if the game is free. The developers have to make money somehow. I play occasional gacha games, usually developed for mobile devices but I like to play on PC. I really enjoyed Super Mecha Champions, but they will probably be ending support sometime soon as they have gone into maintenance mode. But I have been very surprised with Zenless Zone Zero. I kinda hate how much I like the game, honestly.

Point is, while I agree that MTX suck, in a free game its acceptable IMO because the developers have to make money. Gacha is really big in Asian culture, and I am not one to police someone else's culture or say what they do is bad, its just different. MTX on any paid game is just sad though.

---------BotW Rant-----------

IMO Breath of the Wild was a terrible Zelda game. Like, Zelda II Adventure of Link bad, not Wand of Gamelan bad though. It isn't a bad game in general, I would give it maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10 (unlike many people today I actually like to use all 10 numbers), it just felt average because it was. I laughed like a maniac when Tears of the Kingdom cane out and made Breath of the Wild look like a sad tech demo, and every reviewer that gave BotW a high score now suddenly looked like the biggest idiot on the planet because they were scoring TotK the same despite it being the clearly better game.

Zelda, ever since the 3rd game in its series, followed a clear formula. When people bought a Zelda game after Link to the Past, they had an idea of what to expect. Its like people going to a burger joint because they know they sell burgers. BotW though, deleted all of that in an attempt to go back and repeat what only ONE game in the entire Zelda franchise up to that point had done. A game that the franchise had largely moved on from, it had built upon that concept in its later iterations. BotW was a downgrade, because a lot of people going to that same burger joint were now suddenly getting served ground beef, without any of the other ingredients in a burger.

TotK was much better in being an actual Zelda game, but it still was missing a lot of what people expect from a Zelda game. No real, large and elaborate dungeons, just a pitiful attempt (albeit still a better attempt than BotW) at a 4 room "dungeon." No pieces of heart, no hookshot or magic instrument, no bottles to collect, etc. It felt like I was playing an Ubisoft open world game cosplaying as a Zelda game.

-----------BotW Rant Over------------

Have you tried indie games? There's more games and variety than ever, and you're lumping everything into these neat little easy-to-criticize packages.

Gaming doesn't suck. Your expectations do.

You're playing the wrong games if you think modern games are all the same. Buy a half decent mini PC, install Steam, and play indie games.

There are even a ton of retro games on Steam. Not vintage, but retro. New games with old school graphics and appeal, like The Messenger.

did anyone else break the plastic on their new game and stick their nose in it and inhale that brain damaging chemically new game smell?

God that was better than heroine for me.

I remember reading about Elite in a (paper) magazine, and I WANTED IT. Counted my pocket money. Drove my bike to a mainly photo related retailer (only one reachable for me, they also did PC games as a side job), and there it was, box art in the window! Went in, told em I wanted that, and - big disappointment - they had to order it. THEY HAD A DISPLAY OF THE BOX ART, BUT NO COPY OF THE REAL THING! I had to pay upfront, cash, and then had to ride the bike there, again, two times, within a fornight, cos there was no notification of arrival then. The joy, tension, reading through the manual, while it was installing... unbeatable. Spent most of my afternoons in game, doing my "homework".

Grew in that age too. Just cause you are playing games that are shitty doesn't mean games are shitty now. The game market is bigger than it's ever been. Game has forced online play and microtransactions? Don't buy it.

There was tons of absolute garbage in the 80s. There's tons of great stuff now. If you've lost your sense of discovery that seems more like a you thing than a "games are bad now" thing.

P.S. go play Tunic if you haven't already.

Your experience from 80s is similar to my experience now with Switch games (it's not the same only because I'm not a kid). Download times do suck but I have a really simple solution for them: I simply do something else until it's finished. And there are great games that don't take much space space on your storage, Balatro is first one that comes to mind.

You need to realize the reality: we live in a cyberpunk world now.

I'm lucky enough to live next to a retro game store. I can still walk over see a random ps1 game, glance through the manual and play it at as soon as I get home. Still lots of great stuff out there and that's just one system. The game I just made a post about only cost me about $10.

I hate the install/download times for new stuff too. I'm hoping for some sci-fi/tech miracle that solves the whole thing.

Opening a new SNES or PS1 game was the best.

In the '80s, we had to travel > 40 minutes each way. I could afford a game maybe once every month or two, but I ended up getting more into D&D instead and spending my money on those books (both game books and novels).

When Blockbuster got games for rent, that was great because my town actually had one and it was only about 15-20 minutes each way.

I mostly stuck to computer gaming into the '90s, though. I played a gamecube or N64 a couple of times, but never really got into it (and we certainly couldn't afford to buy them). It was still kinda the same deal for computer games, though; do I have enough RAM for this? Can my Amiga work with a RAM expansion? I guess there were less things, but they still existed. Probably on the C64 as well, but I remember that less.

I do miss the manuals, though; that's for sure.