This is such a bad-faith reading of what I said. None of that was implied at all, in fact, what was stated actively contradicts it.
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Thatās why I mentioned a āmediumās maturityā in my post about this. Because while I do think a medium as a whole experiences āprogressā in the creative tools available to the artist, and some pieces of media āageā worse than others, one cannot just point to old things and say they are inferior or superior for their oldness. Things must be experienced on their own merits!
I run into this argument (not your argument, to be clear) sometimes, that older games have been outstripped by newer ones because the graphics are ābetterā and the skinner box more devious, or (in its more stripped down form) that there is an āobjective quality measureā one can apply to a game. I always find it facile.
The only thing that matters in the end is what speaks to you, the player, and your ability to articulate why.
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Iā¦donāt know what your argument would be then I confess?
You further went on to clarify later that you considered doom to be āworseā than more modern shooters without mentioning anything other than the ānewnessā of these games and their access to newer technology.
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I feel like Iām just derailing stuff now but Doomās a special case since I know a lot of folks here are involved in the modern Doom scene and for them, thereās constantly new high quality innovative levels rolling out that theyāre Nightmaring through. So thereās still a degree of āprogressā happening within the 2.5D confines of a game old enough to have been dumped by Gilbert Grapeās brother.
Thatās also why I donāt get a lot of the new retro shooters, because those classics are very much alive. But some people just want to trade up like Leo.
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Wait youāre playing Minecraft finally?
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Time is one framework for looking at games but as the only one it ignores a lot. āVideo Gamesā are heavily geographical as well as temporal, places in Latin America vs North America have entirely different relationships to arcades, consoles, PCs because of differing economic/political conditions, etc. Those are entirely different lineages or timelines of video games across huge populations.
Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) is very much a product of technological, political and monetary ability specific to the time & place it released. Halo could not have come out, and received the attention and discourse it did, at any other time. The exact same is true for Snow Brothers 3 (2002) whose entire existence is predicated on a developer w/ no ties to Toaplan or Japan or legal copyright, successfully making an arcade hit sequel.
A unique set of aesthetic possibilities is available to us specific to the time & place we find ourselves in. Creating Art is an intentional narrowing of those possibilities through technique, and receiving/responding to art is essentially the same. THen u post on a forum
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Whoās gonna make the James Burkeās Connections of video games and time a shot around someone getting the 200,000 point rocket in Gameboy Tetris?
Edit:
I nearly forgot about this
But seriously @Myspace_Mavis have you ever tried on a leisure suit? I think we have a tv show to make here.
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Ok fair enough.
What I mean when I say graphics, sounds, frankly even the use of colors or the amount of text available in games now compared to OoT allow for them to be better is, a competency of possibility.
Iām not saying Doom, OoT are bad because theyāre old. Many older games are best because within their limits whether be by tech, self-imposed by genre, or keeping the game focused, they reach the heights of what they are trying to do.
This is less a binary view of good or bad. But finding some likeness in not only the area of video games, but video games in a genre, or for lack of critical language accepted around games āscrathing a similar itchā.
Maybe some of the disagreement comes down to how we view these games. OoT for example is a game I experience by playing a slightly touched-up from while co-oping (passing the controller) with a friend online. Near as I can tell it wanted to be a swashbuckling adventure, with the use of items, and exploring the theme of ācoming of ageā. Now leaving behind the coming of age theme, but more widely having a theme tying a swashbuckling adventure with the use of items, nearly every other Zelda game Iāve play, every Ys game has scratched the itch more successfully. The combat feels tighter and more engaging (a la that Sequalitus video from a million moons ago) the navigation feels better, the lack or more bolstered audio culminated in something that grabbed my heart strings more. Iām incredibly bias again the N64/PS1 era of things. The look, the sounds, the controls/responsive-ness of those pioneer 3D games never satisfied me, and I feel it doesnāt take much to make a ābetterā game. To play close to the root of the game though I think the level design, and enemies are all either incredibly boring or overly difficult. Like playing ping pong with gannon to me feels like one of the lamest moments in a game Iāve ever suffered through.
To extract further though the sum of the more quantifiable parts, graphics, sound, etc can be a factor thatās easier to see as a boon when talking more positive about games from that era. For me my favorite game from then (that I played much later) was MGS1. Yes Iām a vanilla taste person. But in so many ways the audio holds that game back. Brilliant vocal performances, but no boss themes, you can hear the audio compression because they didnāt have sound booths to record in, or evenā¦ quiet rooms. The graphics look surreal by todayās standards. But a lot of the design, items, fights, etc hold up. (Sniper wolf, and the difficulty curve are knock backs). But yes the series wasnāt a linear progression of quality. I love about half of the MGS games all for different reasons and tolerate the others while knowing say 4 is just less than any of the others in every aspect.
Doom isā¦ a weird case here. When I say I think Doom has been surpassed, it feels obvious in my head. It was an FPS where you can really even move the gun up or down. Sure it was great but come on! If you want a game where you can go PEW PEW PEW, pretty much any random FPS now does it better. I wasnāt thinking tough. A lot of high level DOOM players are in it for more the speed component of some kind of bizarre Pac-Man like quality, or pathing while being shot and growled at, that I donāt think many games since have really tried to adopt until the term āboomer shooterā came about semi-recently. OR as @LaurelSoup pointed out the ever-expanding community aspect of new content, and probably the connection and communication therewhithin. So, ya that was something objective lost along the way.
But I also want to address this ālinarā idea. No art does not progress in an linar fashion. Nor does direct comparisons often offer the most academic or interesting thoughts of what a piece, or body of any set of works can offer. For who among us could truly say the Mona Lisa is better than Hentai Girls? Citizen Kane better than Gex:Enter the Geko? No. But as certainly up through Iād say around the 360/PS3 era every generation had more techicncal potential to work with, I believe the games that reached the heights of those limitations were pushing things forward and making games better.
But the Cannon exists, and as things become either settled into memory at the forefront of whatās ready to be talked about we do often group into Mediums and Genres, time periods. āWhat was the best FPS of 2006?ā I think we by and large move forward, not in a linear fashion, but though refinement, trying new things seeing what works, then rinse repeat, and seeing the oddities that shove games in a new direction. I would rather play a random PS5 game than a random MSX game to put it to an extreme.
I can also somewhat argue against this, as videogames have somewhat settled into design via marketing buzzwords. With a set of ideas or mechanics tied to an overly defined genre, maybe mixed with another, and add an aesthetic choice then spit out a game. Less do we see people trying new mechanics or ideas. Basically devs saying āIām gonna make one of thoseā over and over, and that has halted the general progress Iām talking about, and has led to in general older games being better than many newer entries.
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I definitely didnāt see that similar moment in Link to the Past this way when I was 10, but when I replayed it later in life, I thought that was a cool history of games sort of meta moment.
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limitations are not flaws if the game is designed around them!
one could even argue thereās a limit to how much āpotentialā teams of humans can practically wield, and constraints help focus the design and force them to come up with creative solutions and applications inside those limitations!!
this is an argument for average quality, not peak quality.
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Mods can this be put in its own thread?
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stuff like this has always made me interested in things like a total conversion of Doom in the Wolf3D engine. obviously the rendering engineās ability to have floors of differing elevation and non-orthogonal walls was a part of Doomās success, but how much of a part was it really? like, how much of it instead was the teamās general Game Design chops improving, an increase in the production budget, or seemingly unrelated technical advances such as more RAM allowing for enemy sprites to face more directions?
questions like these keep me up at night
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I didnāt realize by pulling the master sword free I would be sending sb back to a time of arguments of pc vs console, graphical abstraction, design decisions enabled by hardware limitations, doom being old, etc. Is this the power sealed within the temple of time, or just another day in the war without end (bringing up zelda on sb)?
I donāt know what to make of ganondorfās moms being the twin gerudo witches who can merge into one person and you murder them and they argue for a bit before noticing they have halos above their heads and then theyāre ascended up to heaven, which apparently exists in hyrule.
what I should do next is start up that xenogears replay Iāve dying to do for a long time now but I want to wait til I got some kind of 4k display for that. I think itās back to like a dragon world now while Iāve got this xbox subscription thing, didnāt realize the new one was coming out so soon.
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So this Portal64, was that really a thing back on the N64?
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hey listen if iām gonna get gamefaqsād about ocarina of time can you really blame me for being unable yo resist the urge to defend the honor of pc games a little i barely fuckin got to play console games until the 2010s and I felt robbed as fuck but itās not like the games I was playing were all trash!!!
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i starting picking out posts to split the thread but thereās no way to cleanly separate them so letās just flood hyrule before this one hits the cap in 51 posts ok thanks everyone
if yāall want to start a new goty 1998 thread vaya con dios but not in gypt 999 the nonary thread
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doki doki idol star seeker is really good
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