honestly I don’t think anything EA put out then was particularly remarkable, outside of maybe mirror’s edge, but it was still a lot better than what they’ve become since.
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played a lot of gears 2, i think that was pretty good. 2007-2008 was the first time i had just enough of a little bit of money to buy Big New Vidcons regularly and my memory is of playing like bioshock and assassin’s creed and mgs4 and mass effect 1 and just being like… what the fuck
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in full fairness, I should say that I’m using ‘notable’ to only mean ‘aesthetically notable’ rather than influential; games that while not necessarily great, are worth talking about years after the fact, regardless of how popular they were at release.
Ghost Trick is indeed a very good game (though for my own spreadsheet purposes, I had it listed under 2010)
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The text heavy PC RPG → terrible action game pipeline was so bad. I literally could not believe that people enjoyed Mass Effect or Fallout 3.
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ah
From my time in the beast I no longer feel comfortable making those judgments but leadership should mean accepting how the machine reflects back on you, even if you don’t control it
You know, yesterday I was excited to pick up a copy of Too Human for my mountain of Bad Xbox Games Through Time but I’d never touch Dante’s Inferno. What a disaster.
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…rockstar table tennis…
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gaming in the obama years
defined for me almost entirely by dragon quest DS remakes and being stoned watching other people play call of duty
wouldn’t trade it for the world
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Halo 3 got a lot better after CoD4 blew up.
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The Club came out in 2008! That’s an all timer!
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It’s worth remembering that Riccitiello was sued for sexual harassment just two years ago.
Personally I probably played the most games during this time period in the form of Nintendo DS with mod cart, hacked Wii, and Xbox 360 with custom soundtracks running off USB. All of which were so sick…good time for me
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same, was legit ready to sell up everything besides the ds
and then i imported demon’s souls
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Oh shit I left that off, dang.
But AC4A is enough to save a year for me.
Edit: and original Yakuza 2.
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you say this but he would have literally overseen the first DICE efforts to add a single player campaign (BC1 and 2, and let me especially single out 2) and Medal of Honor 2k10
also his regime introduced Online Passes, so, yeah
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like I know EA made cool games then but like all the shit people hate about the selling of games, EA was doing a decade ago
if you told me he walked over to EA Vancouver and opened up his head and the design document for FUT came out, I’d believe you
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Come to think of it, is there any videogame publisher whose bosses inspired nearly as much thinly veiled contempt in notable videogame releases as EA’s? Ultima VI presenting Trip Hawkins as a psychopath pirate, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst trying to make Andrew Wilson its villain, Suda hating Riccitiello so much that he’s dedicated most of his last big release to hating on him and Unity (and then he decided to create one more game where Riccitiello’s the big bad, don’t care for all the superhero stuff I’ve seen so far but I’m there Day 1 for this level of pettiness)
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Still not entirely convinced any exist tbh
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yeah… i guess worth remembering a lot of the reason some indie boy genius types who are more widely mocked now (Jon Blow, Jason Rohrer) held so much sway in The Conversation at the point that they did… not to mention that everyone was constantly talking about Bioshock… was because the industry was at a pretty big low point creatively. i want to think that part of my extreme dislike of the period is maybe this was just because i was in college/just out of college (and the economy had collapsed) then and largely disengaged with any sort of new games, so if anything big was happening i wasn’t aware of it anyway. and while i do think nostalgia for the old days can be a bit overstated, there is no question that something happened during that period.
but honestly i don’t really feel like we ever really got out of that 2007-2013 slump, it’s more that there are a lot more games that double as like broad content platforms (fortnite, minecraft, roblox, league of legends etc) and what was considered “indie” has now become like a pretty significant wing of the game industry so it’s taken focus away from them. but like the business practices behind bigger budget games, the massive team sizes and focus on scale, the finding about 10000 different ways to retell some sort of “heroes journey” story and not make it seem too generic hasn’t really changed.
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imo, moderately ambitious, technically advanced games got way, way better from 2010-2020. that arguably coincided with a foreclosure on doing anything much more interesting with the medium in terms of how it’s broadly regarded, but to be honest I think people’s memories of the PS2 tend to vastly overestimate the potential that was there. mainstream games are still by and large thematically dumb and mechanically exploitative but the past decade was way way way more fun than the preceding one.
like, modern racing games are as exciting in relative terms as gran turismo 1-2 again, likewise shooters with quake, etc. there are a dozen cool IDEs with varying amounts of commercial support, even lawnmower sims are typically interesting about once a year, 2019 alone probably had a quarter to half of an all time top 20 for me.
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the xbox 360 times were bad, and it doesn’t even take hindsight to know it. even at the time, me and my friend would talk about how during the ps2’s heyday there’d be more games we were excited about every month than there were on 360 each year.
unless you like arcade racing games, which are dead
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absolute nonsense. Wipeout VR just came out like 3 years ago and is amazing. Sprint Vector might be definitionally the most “arcade” racing game I’ve ever played. Driving a Fiat Spider in forza horizon is the most arcade racing experience I can imagine. The switch version of virtua racing rules. Wreckfest has the best deformation physics I’ve ever seen. etc
conversely, the “cel shading drift paradise in unity!!!” stuff that seems to come out every 6 months now is pretty representative of what I’d identify as one of the worst industry trends right now – way way too many paper thin executions of a theoretically interesting concept that can get mulched up by game pass or twitch prime or whatever. It’s “you can pet the dog”-ism. nothing to it, astonishing that someone went through and finished making a “game” with that little substance without quitting halfway through, all because the joke sounded good (though arguably these are all half-done at best).
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