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Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo?
danabnormal writes "Increasingly I'm being frustrated in my attempts to find a game I want to play. In an effort to catch up, I've been using my bog standard Dell laptop to dig out treasures I have missed, such as American McGee's Alice, Grim Fandango and Syberia. I don't often get the time to play games, so I like to have the opportunity to dip in and out of a title without feeling like I'm losing something by not playing it for periods of time. But when I find a title I like, I make the time. Heavy Rain is the last game that gripped me, that truly engaged me and made me want to complete it in a single sitting. I'm tired of the GTA formulas, bored of CoDs and don't have the reaction time to think on my feet for AOE III. Is it about time I tossed in the controller and resigned myself to the fact that the games I want only come out once in a blue moon? Or have I just not found that one great title that will open me up to a brand new genre? Lords of Ultima is going OK at the moment — is there anything of that ilk I've missed? What are your thoughts? Do you stick to a particular genre? Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?"
If you're still playing games even though you're an adult, at least play an adult's game.
Chess is the way to go.
It's all kinds of fun. Kind of virtual lego with some friends. Mount and blade: Warband is fun a good bit different. I don't think I find it harder to like games, instead I suspect the new games are of poorer quality with a lot of dumbing down going on and the games being buggy and unfinished.
Seriously, you could get more enjoyment by watching a DVD and having someone occasionally hit "pause," thereby forcing you to hit "play" to continue watching the DVD. Better yet, have the DVD player programmed to make you press a random button from time to time, or forcibly shake the remote in order to continue watching the film.
Yes. I'm finding it harder to find games worth playing, and I partially accredit that to the fact that the storylines aren't as important as they used to be. I'm spending more and more time playing older games, and that seems to be working out decently. Revisiting gems like the Mother series (Earthbound) and the Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games adventure games seems to be satiating my needs at the moment, but I wonder how long that's going to go on for until I run out of shit I enjoy playing. Bioware seems to consistently hold my interest, more than most current developers anyway. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings these days.
As a college aged kid I'm also finding it harder to enjoy video games as I used to.
It is something that can be grown out of, people change yadda yadda...
All I know is that I can't be mesmorized by a video game experience anymore as I could when I was younger.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
I've been playing Eve Online daily for 2 years now, and still haven't managed to complete it. Sandbox games are good like that.
In fact I don't think I've played anything else in that time, except to join the annual Nethack tournamement for old times' sake.
Have you checked out Auditorium? It just came out on the PlayStation store for PS3..
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
when left4dead came out my freinds and i had MONTHS of fun just playing the campains. Then when we all got togeather and did the vs matches, we had MONTHS MORE fun, L4D2 is here and we are still having fun. I know i hear people whining and bitching about steam and the l4d games. but if you and people you like (eg freinds) play togeather, and can communicate well as a team (and im not talking about clans but friends) then your gaming exprence well be better, thus i give you .team work.
it makes games betters
I recently started playing SC2 after a long time of just playing EVE online or go.
Kinda suck at the multi-tasking and reaction time after so many years only training my strategical skills, but notice it improving little by little. So definitely would recommend trying out something that forces you to gain back some reaction skills.
- These characters were randomly selected.
As a student of game design, AAA console titles are generally designed to be conservative in gameplay and copy what's out there, polish it a bit, and sell it with new art. Now, that's not even close to being ALL of what's out there, but if GTA IV, CoD, and Mass Effect 2 aren't your cup of tea (and you do enjoy Heavy Rain) then the big-advertising-budget titles will likely never appeal to you in the way it sounds you want them to.
If you're willing to buy a game without a proven track record, look at the indie scene (Steam has a good starting selection) and some of the other great titles that have been passed over like Beyond Good and Evil or Psychonauts. They're usually more Grim Fandango or Alice than the bigger games, and you might like them more.
I am become
I was starting to think the same thing for a while, until I thought about it and realized that of all the games I "had to have" growing up, there were only 1 in 10 that truly captivated me.
Same rule applied in the arcades -- there were 1-2 games out of the entire shop that got my attention, the rest I played once or twice, and walked away.
Age does have something to do with it because we see the formula a game is based on and instantly realize "nothing new here" -- but I don't think its as much of a factor as you might think at first.
Good games have always been a rarity in a sea of mediocrity -- just like any other story telling or entertainment medium.
I'd say i understand where you are coming from. I see a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon, trying to make the games that are already making money. A lot of good games i've played recently have been independantly developed or hardly known. Amnesia has been the most recent that had captured my attention and make me sit on edge. I'm tired of the way companies have come, I miss the older days when they tried to pump as many, varied games as they could to hit the best sellers. I remember when sidescrolling duke nukem came out, i couldn't stop playing. Nowadays i see the old cookie cutter games, dressed in new graphics, but no really new gameplay. Except for the occasional instant classics. Good luck in your gaming, and there will be new games always coming out, so don't throw down the controller yet, just let it rest..
and other games...
...until I found Cave Story!
Cave Story immediately comes to mind. It's worth a look, if you're into old-school platformers.
having gone thru several cycles of "whoohoo!!!" to "ugh...", i can tell you that your mojo is indeed gone... if you believe in crap-religions, maybe it (your mojo) got reincarnated in some 12yo in kentucky...
but that is ok - you will (someday) find your mojo (or maybe reincarnate someone -elses-) again... and, in true black-white-fashion, you will either be mojo-full or mojo-free when you pass on from this mortal coil... lol...
naw - as we become adults, it means we start to see things less in black-white and more in grays (hence the hair-color-changes)... but thats ok...
as for specific recommendations ? i have no clue... im a console-gamer that gets 'into' the silly quest-type games... find another hobby - hell, make up your OWN games... life does not have to hand you entertainment - you can find/make it yourself... and resign yourself to the fact that blue-moons do occur on occasion and only blue-haired-folks are mature enough to wait for them... gl, h.
The most engaging game I've played recently is Portal. Unique, and fresh. Looking forward to Portal 2. I've gotten back into Left 4 Dead 2 as mindless entertainment. That's my one FPS vice at the moment. I bought Starcraft II but have not gotten into it as much as I thought I would, RTS games don't seem to hold my interest very long. I really enjoyed GTA: Vice City and San Andreas, so I was surprised when I was completely turned off by Liberty City. I think that was a change in myself more than the game's format.
A little game off steam I enjoyed very much was Machinarium, a delightful puzzle game written entirely in flash that can be had for $5 or less. There are a few more games by the same creator in a similar vein.
I think when you get older, you want care free, relaxing entertainment that can be had in small chunks. No time-sucking MMORPs, ultra-brain intense strategy, etc. Even Diablo you can enjoy very much in small chunks. A dungeon quest here, a little plot advance there. Looking forward to Diablo III.
MMORPs seem to be more addicting social habits than games. Single player games tend to run more like interactive movies, which I guess is what I prefer these days.
At 34, I love playing games. The problem is that I have other responsibilities to adhere to and limited free time (if ever). No longer am I free to live with my parents and dick around in college. It's part of growing up. Who knows. Perhaps when I get old and retire I will have that free time again and start gaming like I did in my youth, minus the "twitch" genre such as FPSs. Who the hell knows what the technology will be then :)
Life is not for the lazy.
So, Poker Night at the Inventory then?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/31280/
...
There are lots of them available. The 2010 IF competition just finished, so there are a bunch of (free!) games of varying quality levels, genres, etc available.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I could've written the OP, if I thought it would do any good. These days I play Minecraft, UT2004 and its mod “Frag.Ops” (because they run natively in Linux, not because I'm still excited about first person shooters), and Go (yeah, the ancient board game inaccurately portrayed in “A Beautiful Mind.” I recently thought about getting an XBox 360, but the only game that really interested me was UFC Undisputed (either year)...and instead I bought Fire Pro Wrestling Returns (it was only $10 new and has a surprisingly deep grappling system, as well as two MMA modes).
It is very late, I'm using too many parentheses, and that's why I'm not saying more or bothering to log in.
Games are not so important for adults. The biggest use for games is learning how to learn fast. Maybe you have that down now and your subconsiously just not as interested.
Go make and raise some kids and let them learn some games. That is a fun, rewarding, and quite complex game. All stages of it.
The games industry is trying to get us into skinner boxes to maximize profit, rather than providing quality entertainment: IT is getting old, not just us.
You can't take the sky from me...
Sometimes, games drag for too long. You just get bored in between. I see you GTA4.
Please, do not try to find new genres. Have you tried a new genre in cinema these days? Dogma movies? Bollywood? The latest new genre I know of in video games has been the plastic guitar video games. Ok - I should also count motion controlled gimnastic "games".
FYI there is something called the indie scene, where you can see something fresh from time to time. World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, 'Splosion Man are nice games, easy to get into. Sure, they may not last 40 hours to you (50% of the gamers do not see the ending credits these days), but at least you will have a laugh.
Let me get back to my WH40k miniatures.
It's time to accept that the nearest you'll come to the thrill of a head shot, is a riveting game of cribbage with the ladies.
I'd ask you to be my bridge partner but it sounds like your reaction times are really sub par.
Be thankful for the cribbage nights. In another ten years when it takes all you can muster to punch A4 on the bingo card, you'll look back fondly on these times.
I still game daily. I am 34 and will never quit gaming on the PC. If you think you are going to get some completely new gameplay each game you buy, you are going to be disappointed. All I can say is if you are burned out try a different genre or better yet try some indie games vs. AAA titles. The indies may have some fresh blood for you if you are bored. I hear Minecraft is cool.... And of the thousands of game that have been release I can bet, you haven't tried half of them.... So get to trying out some games you never played, who knows you maybe missing something great!
There is a text game I have been playing for a few years now at http://www.medievia.com that is a totally different experience. This is the deepest game world ever attempted but just with text, and mixed with all chat all the time. You chat to your formation, clan, town, bloodline, and on other channels as well while you have any of a thousand different adventures. They are now just a few months from opening and hope to create a living world where every English speaking person on Earth can own a home, spaceship, or even a whole planet. Imagine a Google sized living breathing text world open forever for everyone, for free.
I have played many games over the last few years as I continue to play Medievia and have the same opinion you do. The games are all the same formula and leave you wondering why bother. This text game is free and is about the most amazing game I have found because it is so deep. I just recently started learning how to captain a war ship on the ocean and killing giant sea serpents. I hired deckhands and order them around the ship, it is awesome. This games shipping feature is a tiny part of a massively deep game but it in itself is amazing because what they pay attention to are game variables. Other games spend all of their attention on graphics, shadows, deeper draw distances, frames per second, and leave you with a game with very few actual dynamic game variables that affect your player or the adventure you happen to be in. I have adventured with friends in over a hundred Medievia zones and every adventure is different.
Check it out but have an open mind. The game is way deep and takes a while to really get into. They say the upcoming pets feature will make it as easy to learn as World of Warcraft. I really wish them well.
I bought a PS3 recently thinking it would be nice to try some gaming in my down time. Despite a few attempts to sit down and enjoy them, no game has really caught my attention. I don't think it's a problem with the game titles. I don't think I found any of the games boring.. There was just nothing that made me want to dedicate my attention to them.
.etc. are all fun ways to spend your down time.
I guess a certain percentage of gamers grow out of it. Probably there's also a certain percentage of non-gamers who grow into it as well. That's life and if you're not into games anymore then who cares? Save your money / spend it elsewhere. Reading, traveling, eating out, gym/sports/other exercise
I'm in my mid thirties. Used to be a heavy game player - Doom, Duke 3D, Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft, most of the Sierra games. Now? I walk through Electronics Boutique, look at what's on the shelves, and shrug my shoulders. There's not much that grabs me; it's too much of the same thing.
What I do enjoy is getting together with colleagues over lunch for a round of golf on the Xbox 360 (Tiger Woods '10.) I also enjoy going back to some of the classics - the Thief series; Deus Ex (and, to a lesser extent, Invisible War.) I grabbed Cogs when it was on special on Steam, and had fun playing through the levels; still go back to it occasionally, although I've completed them all.
What I'm looking forward to? Deus Ex Revolutions, and Portal 2, are about it. I find that I'm preferring to go out and spend time with people over board games: Ticket to Ride; Pandemic; Race for the Galaxy; things like that. It gives me the strategy fix I crave, but also gives me human contact, which is what I think is mostly missing from the computer games, at least for me.
Everybody is different. You grow, you change, you learn. If you're no longer into games, it's not a problem - it's an opportunity to go out and find something else you enjoy doing.
I really got into Borderlands... great base game, with three out of four great DLCs (the third one being the high point). Great game play, LOTS of replayability (I've been playing it non-stop for a year), and a wicked sense of humor. And multiplayer is a blast if you have any friends to play it with.
I also really liked the original Fallout 3. Fallout New Vegas isn't really grabbing me though.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
There are more people playing games, and thus more money to be made. There's still about as many good game designers, so there are a lot of really crappy games out there. It's just harder to find the gems.
League of Legends is quite a captivating game. Each game lasts usually around 30 minutes. There is a bit of a learning curve though. Once you get over that small hump, the game is a blast to play.
Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?
I have no problem finding interesting games, but I do find it harder to put up with bad ones. The more frustrating thing is that a lot of the games coming to PC now are actually designed and tested for consoles, which results in (at best) stupid UI design, and (at worst) major instability.
Lately I've been finding competitive games to be more fun if it involves more than just personal skill, so I've been gravitating toward co-op multiplayer games. Here are two free games on Steam that are great:
I've also been going back to play Neverwinter Nights, which has so many good 3rd party modules that I could be kept busy for years. It has multiplayer too, if you can find friends to play it with.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed had a good story and fantastic gameplay -- the spiritual successor to Jedi Academy.
Dark Void was fun but really short. The jet pack works for some great gameplay and the story is decent. If you can get it cheap, I highly recommend it. Also probably the best video game score I've ever heard, done by Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary.
Prototype is like GTA meets God of War -- most games start your character off weak at 1 and get you to 10 when you're 80% through the game. Prototype starts you at 11 and somehow keeps getting better, so you never feel short of awesome. The only game to let you glide down to a street, snatch someone up, and run up the side of a building to eat them like some sort of zombie king kong.
Borderlands is fun if you like to mix in a little RPG with your FPS. Get four friends and go at it. Requires some discipline to ensure you don't level past each-other when you don't play together.
I certainly don't play games the way that I used to -- I own and operate two businesses -- but I've managed to find many games to keep me playing an average of 10 hours per week, and it's fun.
Truth is, I dropped all of the games that simulate real work. Big surprise, I have a full-time job. It's unfortunatel because I really used to like the Master of Orion series, and number three was fantastic. But running a galactic empire easily plays 40 hours per week, and has you thinking about it all the time, and that's no longer entertainment for me.
But there are way more genres now than ever before, and some have evolved quite nicely. So here's what I've done.
Used to love the old Sierra adventure games. Now, it's the new Tales of Monkey Island -- the 5 episode thing from last year. Plays the same, but modern story and modern humour.
Never liked racing games. I bought a sports car last year. Played GRID. Had lots of fun. So much fun, that I took my car to a track -- Watkins Glen. Turns out that real-life race tracks are 100% reproduced in today's racing games. Right down to the advertisements. Really quite something. Felt awesome in the real thing in part because of the game thing.
Left4Dead, 1&2, do a great job as playing like a sports team. It's tough to organize a game of football in the park. Easy to organize a game of shooting zombies in steam. The tactics and communication work the same way, so it's fun in that way.
I'm looking forward to the new DeusEx in February. I loved the story in the first one.
In the end, the truth is that there are just so many many games these days, there's plainly going to me a huge number that you won't like. But you can bet that an industry that big is going to have something for you. It's just that big of an industry, and it's dedicated to giving you a good time. But you'll have to spend some time searching. Really. And if you're looking at anything first-person, you're going to have to get used to the modern-day controls of whatever platform you choose. They're different than they were ten years ago -- in every way.
But yeah, if you want to enjoy playing games, and you put in some effort to find those games, you will like them. Remember, some games take over 70 million dollars to create. I promise they do it all for you. But if you don't want to, then it'll be an acquired taste that you'll never acquire.
These days, I'm trying to acquire a taste for Scotch. Don't look up the game, I mean the drink. I've mixed in with amaretto -- something that I simply cannot live without (nor spell consistently) -- and Scotch is still tough to drink. But I want to like it, and I'm on my way. Last you it was french onion soup. This year, it's-a-gonna-be-Scotch.
I know exactly what you mean. I have a pretty busy life, I'm a parent now, I have my sports, my full-time job and my night-school. Always stuff to do. When I'm relaxing it's more and more with my family but I'm also a gamer, who sometimes, when the wife and son are not around, turns on the 360 to have an uncomplicated, immersive gaming experience.
And that's when the trouble begins. As of late I have found myself increasingly less (is that english?) engaged by most mainstream games. I thought about what had happened and I discovered that over the years (while thinking I had a broad gaming interest) my gaming interest had shrunk in scope and size. I can't be bothered anymore to play anything I don't want to play or thurougly enjoy to play. I used to be less complicated.
I have to charish my gaming needs, because it can actually deminish. The way to do that is to make it feel like work. Recently I played L4D2 which should be my kind of game (Zombies, FPS) but it dissapointed me very. (just my opinion, not starting a discussion about a particular game here). After that, I did't play for weeks because I 'did't feel like it'. I assure you, that never used to happen.
My advise to you is, and this has worked well for me: cherry-pick. This seems obvious but it isn't. Cherry-pick the hell out of it. This can mean that you need to invest into several consoles and a PC. These are the games that sparked my gaming mojo lately: Mass Effect2 (360), BioShock2 (360/PS3), Drake's Fortune2 (PS3), StarCraft II (PC).
Basically what I am saying is that there are allot of gems. Don't be afraid to invest in a console to get them. That's one time expendature. Never play a game because it's the next big thing but inform yourself well through site like gamerankings.com. If it scores 90%+ there and it has 30+ reviews, you can almost bet it's a good game. I love that site.
As a nearly 40 year old gamer now - I hear ya' man.
However - a couple of days ago my totally non-backed up home desktop went down - and frantically I thought - I've lost years of pictures of my kids! - my very next thought - was - oh crap - I've lost my f-ing CASTLE!!!
The other 100 Gigs of half played - will get back to later - games - never even registered.
Thankfully I got everything back - but I'm not gonna put my Minecraft saved worlds in that kind of danger ever again!
I stopped caring about games when the arcade graphics got "cartoony". I briefly regained interest with Quake, then went back into remission.
It was an addiction. It was probably unhealthy at times. I spend more time in the big blue room with the bright light now. I'm probably much better off.
Maturity? Embrace it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Many older games are still extremely good, despite dated graphics and more difficult game play compared to modern creations. I suggest checking out adventuregamers.com if you like Grim Fandango, Syberia, etc: http://www.adventuregamers.com/reviews.php reviews -> all -> sort by ratings Most of the highly rated games are very nice indeed. Some can be difficult to find. Ebay/amaazon/etc may have some, gog.com or such may have others, or your friendly neighbourhood p2p archive probably have most of the rest. Telltale games and some other companies do create good modern adventure games as well. Playing together with others also makes it more fun. My wife and I usually play together, and old adventure games are our staple fare. Coop games can be good, but much more difficult to find. Some old RPG games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights are good coop, as well as some more modern arcade games like shadowgrounds and alien swarm. Then there are the MMOs and regular multiplayer, but we have not found any that we both like yet. The good immersive games are few and far between, but looking through forums and fan sites can help find the true gems, whether it is an adventure game that carries you to another world for days, a simulator or fps that is good for a couple of hours, or an arcade that leeches 15min of focus every now and then. List the stuff you really liked then start searching using some of them as search terms.
As I've gotten older I notice myself picking games more for the story than the multiplayer aspect as I once did. I used to love gathering friends around a console to play Goldeneye or any number of popular games, but now I've began to realize most of these blockbuster games have the same basic premise where I know the outcome and the only selling point is "buy this game because everyone else will so you can play online together."
I now pick games on how well the gameplay is used to tell the story. The most recent game I played and I'm now playing through again because of the story is Fallout 3. It seems to me I could play through as several different personas and have a different outcome for the story. The game doesn't require lightning fast reflexes to just survive as the enemies are mostly used to advance the story. It should probably be noted I play most games on the easiest difficulty, unless it's a complete cakewalk, because I want the story to unfold and not get stuck in a spot with 5 bullets, a wrench, and a pack of wolves.
The games I enjoy most have usually been out for years - the most gripping strategy games I've ever played are SMAC (or Civ), Settlers (II - IV) (when I want less complexity) AoE II. On the roleplaying and adventure side, very little beats rogue-likes for depth, except maybe the Exile/Avernum series and Myst games. The only space-fighting sim I've ever really liked is Escape Velocity.
Games seem more fun when you're supposed to be doing something else, like working. Even mine sweeper and solitaire were fun at work.
Other than that, if you want somnething good to play at home, try some classic console games: NES, SNES, .... Atari 2600 ..., Commodore, Amiga, Sega, etc. Emulators are OK, but they are more fun to play on the original hardware.
This question is flat out insulting to gamers. First of all he doesn't even like very good games. Alice, Syberia, and Heavy Rain are terrible. Alice I will just link to a fantastic review here: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/56.html
Heavy Rain is about as much a game as those old interactive laser disc games... or Dragon's Lair. So I guess if you are looking for games find yourself an emulator for a Panasonic Laser Active, or pick up Dragon's Lair which is on a ton of different systems. Now all of these games also happen to have in common that their are 'Art Games'. So if you want to get into a bunch more of those you can check out Metacritic as they do fairly well there.
However, the best course of action, if you really have your heart set on playing more games is to start developing better taste. Much as one can acquire better taste in wine, books, movies, and music, one can also acquire better taste in videogames. Videogames can be roughly divided into two types: Action / Strategy. Western developers are much more adept Strategy and Japanese developers are more adept at action.
Japanese: Shmups (shoot-em-ups): Dodonpachi(vertical), Battle Garegga(vertical), R-type (horizontal)
Run-N-Guns: Metal Slug 1,2,X
Action: Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry
Fighting: King of Fighters XI, Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, Blaze Blue
Western: FPS(first-person-shooter): Half-Life 2, Gears of War 2(3rd), Halo 3
RTS(real time strategy): Starcraft 2, Dawn of War 1
Strategy: Civilization IV, Panzar General 2
RPGS: Fallout 1,2, Diablo 2, Planescape: Torment
Best of all these are all either freely or cheaply obtained at this point in time. THESE ARE THE TRUE ARTISTIC HEIGHTS OF GAMING and im sure others could list HUNDREDS more.
Ever tried Minecraft? Works fine for me ^^
You've just graduated to the biggest, and most challenging game of all... 'Outside'. I burnt out my 'gaming mojo' at the tender age of 18, testing my own Tetris clone. Then I started university and discovered women, music, and clubbing. Never got very far with the first, and I don't do much of the last any more 16 years later, but I never got my mojo back - nor wanted it. So much more to life out there than games. Am I alone in this aversion amongst tech-heads? It feels like I'm surrounded by the geek stereotype where I work.
Been there, felt exactly the way you described.
And then I discovered City Of Heroes. Don't let visions of WoW scare you away from it, just because it too is a MMORPG. It is actually a lot of fun, with (generally) very friendly players.
Game studios have become corporations. Middle managers are the people who decide upon form of their games nowadays. They are run-of-the-mill, with little variation. Finding something new and refreshing from big studios is an exercise in futility. Just don't. Wait 5 years and nowadays' games that are fondly remembered then will be the ones worth playing.
Meanwhile, load up Steam Shop and click the "Indie" tab. Not all of these games are worthwhile. But about half of them is. That's where real innovation is nowadays. Where new brave concepts are explored. Sure about half of these concepts is failed. But still, considering the prices, you're better off financially buying 3 Indie games (and enjoying one) than buying one blockbuster (and finding it boring).
Look for games made in Russia. Some amazing artistic enterprises have been undertaken. Some extremely ambitious projects - very realistic flight simulators for example. Ignore flashy commercials for EA, Ubisoft, Activision. Go for the little-known stuff and you'll find where the good games are at.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I turned 66 last Saturday, and I'm still addicted to small games from years ago. Any Zelda older than Minish Cap was fine with me, especially OoT, and I went on a Castlevania tear for while. My favorite is still Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, which requires a modicum of Japanese and a GBC. I confess to playing the Professor Layton series more than once -- lost mojo is an advantage here, because I don't remember the solutions to some of the harder puzzles from two years ago and have to work them out again the hard way. I'm not a fan of most of the Final Fantasy franchise, but still replay 1, 2, 9 and 12. FF13 was an excrutiating disappointment, but in the last chapter there are only three bosses -- the first is easy, the second is either beyond my frayed reflexes or requires more levelling up (a colossal bore at this stage). My current game of choice is GTA Chinatown Wars, which is kind of a mini-mayhem doodle machine (you don't have to follow the main story line), and sort of fun if you rinse out your abused sense of morals once in a while. I don't know about "good" games -- seems a bit subjective to me. But I have no doubt one of the big franchises will uncork a great game again sometime soon. We seem to be living in a magical moment in the development of the Arts -- like Toulouse Lautrec, or Van Gogh, when the great souls are among us, unnoticed by the mainstream.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
From reading your question you seem to be in one of the same ruts that I was in previously with games. Personally I have found tons of great games on Steam lately from non-mainstream publishers. Also as I have gotten older it has become harder for me to appreciate mediocre games and instead I look for games that don't stick to the norms.
Some great examples that I can think of off the top of my head are as follows, and broken down by category:
Unless otherwise stated, these games are all available on Steam.
Strategy:
Braid
Machinarium
Worms Reloaded
Zen Bound 2
Adventure:
Darksiders
Lost Planet 1 and 2
Action:
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Comes out Feb 2011)
Beat Hazard
Brink
Killing Floor
Smashball (Free!)
Trine
VVVVVV
League of Legends (www.leagueoflegends.com)
RPG:
Torchight
Freedom Force
Dragon Age Origins
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2
The Witcher 2: Assassins and Kings
DeathSpark
The Ball
Shank
Misc:
Garry's Mod
I hope this list helps you find some games that you can enjoy. Most all of them are more of a casual style that way you don't have to sit down to play it all at once, though you may be inclined to.
Install yourself a copy of World of Warcrack and welcome to my opium den.
And wait for a title worthy of your tastes.
I'm 27 and share the same opinion.
Most of my friends enjoy every single title they play on Xbox, PC or PS3. Every single blockbuster game that comes out, they buy it. A war game ? They dig it. I almost believe at times that there's something wrong with me for not enjoying most of these games. After all, IGN, Gamespot and Metacritic all give these games 8+ scores.
Well, I've never been a believer and never will be. I'm the kind of person who likes to experiment and judge after.
You see, I think overall, speculation has done the same thing to the gaming industry that it did to the economy. An 8 for a game today is most probably closer to a 6. A 10 is probably an 8 and a 12 simply doesn't exist. Inflation, anyone ? My other thought on this is also the fact that if you give a game a high rating, most people will buy it. Even if they don't like it, they will most probably say it was good because after spending some $60+ on something, nobody really wants to be ashamed of their purchase and admit they flushed $60 down the toilet. This is pure marketing people.
Now, keeping aside the business side of things, I think great games are still cooking and emerging. I think the reason why we feel there are less great titles being made is simply because there are more crappy games coming out than ever. The real problem lies within production. Following our economy's simple rules, any game that is bound to success will eventually fail into mass production. This process immediately kills any possible technological or intellectual breaktrhough since all resources are focused on production. It's a simple rule of thumb.
So if you want my opinion, be patient and wait for a good title. I don't think there's any gamer mojo involved, we simply need to wait for some great idea to be programmed into a game.
Heck, why not do it ourselves ?
Try civilization (IV is prob better than V and you can buy that by 10€), or some another turn-based strategy game. Other game witch addicted me is minecraft. I would encourage you to give a try for either one of them or both.
That's what I do. There's almost nothing in the current game era that interests me but I don't really care since there's enough older material to keep me interested for longer than I'll probably find time for. If you're a graphics whore, it might be a problem though, but if you're not, then certainly go check some older stuff. There are classics in many genres.
I really got hooked on plants vs zombies recently. It's fun and challenging, with excellent graphics and one of the best game music ever written. It's replayability is also very high. It's only $20, downloadable, with five activations. Excellent deal.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Phoenix Wright (Nintendo DS Adventure)
Team Fortress 2 (PC FPS)
Mass Effect (Multi WRPG)
try some "old" games you haven't yet finished. the lifespan of a game decides how timeless it really is.
in terms of gameplay, the games haven't really gone much further at all in the past decade, and graphics on artistic/functional level have stayed the same as well.
vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, morrowind, deus ex, X(and sequels) and so on, many of them have texture packs and mods available to make it a bit more fresh and also you can play them at high resolutions with antialiasing, modern look with many game studios is to just blur everything with fake focal blur(makes everything look like a cheap sitcom and not a movie.. if you catch my drift). you could even try ascending in nethack.
of course, you could look into making your own and replaying some old and new games with that in mind, you might be amazed with how little original thought or actual content variety some games that ship on two dvd's have. I've been playing mass effect 1 and 2 lately, they suck in many, many aspects(gameplay is VERY repetitive, controls were made worse in 2 etc etc), it's a bit boring when you can guess beforehand where/when enemies will be spawned(just noticing that they're spawned in waves to make it easier on the engine sucks enough, also there's no adventure in m.e, despite having a galaxy to explore, but whats the fun when the galaxy is smaller than your hometown.. and what fun is flying a space ship when it's just a menu. gameplaywise some bbs door games had as much galaxy exploring).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
but there are plenty to keep you busy. My top faves are in no particular order
* SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri). I never played any of the other Civ games, but this one hooked me. High re-playability, excellent plot, challenging. May be hard to find this days. I hear the newest Civ is also amazing, but haven't played it.
* Oblivion (as well as expansions). This game is truly deep and rich. Great voice acting, good plot, many concurrent plots, and a huge world to explore. If you have not played it, it is pretty cheap now, and highly recommended.
* Knights of the Old Republic. A great Star Wars based RPG based on D&D mechanics. Great story with sort of a "Choose your own adventure" progression. Also available cheap, also highly recommended.
* Pikmin. I purchased my GC solely to lay this game.
* Katamari Damacy. PS2. I didn't enjoy the sequels as much, but I seem to be in the minority. Ridiculous, Fun, especially with a group of people.
* Super Mario Sunshine. The very best Super Mario game to date IMO. Silly. Warm welcoming scenery. Challenging and fairly expansive.
* Minecraft is an interesting experiment. Definitely a way to spend a few hours. Also cheep.
* Lego Starwars. Surprisingly enjoyable.
* Exile II: Crystal Souls. A shareware game from the 80s. I did not particularly like the others in the series, but this one was magic.
or...
* Nethack. "You're really going to have to play it for a year or two and see for yourself.". Ridiculously complex, savage, brutal, nearly impossible, endlessly clever. It can be damn frustrating and exhilarating.
In truth, I tend to buy games after they have been out for a while. I also tend to look at Penny Arcade for suggestions; they tend to be brutally honest.
It's just what happens when you grow up - Lego and Scalectrix just aren't as interesting any more either.
Years ago I had more spare time and was able to do things like get all the cheats on Goldeneye for the N64. These days I wouldn't have the time or the patience to do something like that. I hold no illusions about the past though as the games I play these days are far and away better than the games I used to play.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
...and you will love video games again. BTW, these are not the droids you are looking for...
(Despite the snark, I am still looking forward to Cata.)
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Try this if you dont mind bad graphics over good game play. Not for people with weak wills, and lack of patience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Void_%28video_game%29
There is a sequel in production.
I have changed my gaming habits quite drastically the last two years.
I've always been a PC-RPG player, having loved Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, NWN and such.
Last one I played through on a PC was (the great) Dragon Age.
But theese days I never take the time to sit down and play the 5-8 hours I usually did,
I rather download a $5-10 RPG on my iPod touch and play through and hour here and an hour there.
I love titles there like Zenonia 1&2, Inotia, Seed and for sure an hour or two of Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies might work for ya.
I've been PC gaming for about 20 years, with a serious addiction for about 16 years (we all need a hobby). My life is much busier now with a wife, 6 kids, a dog, and several thousand servers to look after. I've canceled all the MMORPG subscriptions, what a money pit! Eve Online was the last hold out because I could still balance work/life/gaming. The best thing that has happened to my gaming experience since has been Valve's Steam. Collecting achievements gives you stuff to work toward. What has been most fun is accessing some of the many indie and smaller distributor titles available through Steam. They have multiple deals a week, and special deals around Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. Occasionally you can pick up multi-packs in the $5-$10 range. Buy a bunch in advance so when you get bored you have something new to try out. So far my collection is about 117 games, but I only keep 20-30 installed at a time.
A few fun suggestions:
- Tank Universal (Tron tanks, done right!)
- Galcon Fusion (try it in retro mode)
- Defense Grid (tower defense, done right)
- Altitude (multiplayer side scrolling air combat)
- Garry's Mod (awkward moments with co-workers)
- X3 (default is lame, add mods and it becomes fun)
- Multiwinia
This can be pretty challanging even in single player if you play as a one of the more difficult countries. I would however recommend starting out with one of the easier countries as the learning curve can be a bit steep. There's quite a few concepts to keep track of in the game and if you're unlucky you'll end up as a one province vassal to France or something the like. Once you get the hold of it you can start setting your goals higher and higher. Or just do crazy things like playing as Ming and explore your way to Euroupe with the goal of converting all the members of the Holy Roman Empire to confucianism :)
And it gets even better in multiplayer with a few friends, provided you can get them all together for a few hours of play each night.
Also, as someone posted above: EVE online.
Personally, my big mistake was treating gaming differently than my other recreational activities. I don't like Top 40s stations, sitcoms, Twilight or Harry Potter, and yet I never once considered the notion that I'd outgrown Music, TV, Movies and Books; but somehow because I wasn't getting into the new Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and Left4Dead, I was starting to think that maybe gaming wasn't my thing anymore.
What I did to restore my enjoyment of gaming was that I stopped listening to paid-off over-hyped reviews, stopped buying games at release, and started looking towards indie developers first and foremost for my gaming needs. Sure, I'm not a "hardcore gamer" because I play things like Dominions 3 and Dwarf Fortress, and you won't see me talking Black Ops with the bros at parties; but I actually enjoy the time I spend gaming now because I found what I liked to play, sales numbers and media hype be damned.
There's nothing wrong with having tastes outside the mainstream. Play what's fun for you, not what's fun for other gamers.
It's a great game, and once you get past being a white belt the tactical aspects really come into a roll. You might look at it and think that there isn't much to it but it's actually very strategic and many times you have to use subterfuge to achieve your goal. For example I get the mount and I set things up so it looks like I'm going for a choke but I've made a mistake and slipped my arm under my opponents arm, as soon as he tries to bridge and escape *blam* I spin and put an arm bar on..tap..tap..tap.
As much as I love playing computer games (I'm still hooked on Empire at War, I just got Starcraft 2 and Force Unleashed II is my next acquisition) I must admit that I am really hooked on Ju Jitsu as a game. The best way I can describe it is physical chess, plus I stripped almost 15kg of fat off (my tummy is almost ripped!), sleep is so deep and there are other benefits. It's not for everyone and the training is hard but I end up playing computer games when I'm recovering from injury. Plus, I think the thinking skills in computer games translate really well to transitioning a new move in Ju Jitsu once you are physically capable of using them in your game.
I find I'm more selective about how I spend my time and a game has to be *really* good to get my attention. Sadly most games simply aren't worth the effort, but it's ok because everything balances out with the time I have available for games. Beside I just don't think I can sit still for that long any more, but the best time for games is when I have a bunch of friends around - that's when computer games are awesome - but still not as good as Ju Jitsu.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
sadly the gaming world is in the grip of FPSwhores right now, not many games made in other genres unless you wanna go play WOW all day.
i personally play an adult game wrapped in a kid like candy shell.
minecraft
think legos but you have to get the blocks yourself while trying to not get killed every 20 minutes when the sun goes down.
Ever since a buddy of mine gave me his old Logitech Momo force feedback wheel and a 3-month subscription to iRacing last xmas it is the ONLY thing I play now. The most real racing simulator there is, and I can't get enough of it. Every single other game I have has not been loaded even once since, literally. I'm beyond addicted to it now, hehe.
"fantastic gameplay" : err, it seems we didn't play the same game.
The license and the physic engine are indeed marvelous. But the camera system is a nightmare : it is alway pointing to the wrong direction and jedis are now ridiculously powerful, like some cheap manga when a single guy is able to break a whole planet.
The sequel (SW:TFU2) is worse because you can finish it in less than 6 hours (for 70$).
I would personally have talked about :
* RED DEAD REDEMPTION : GTA for grown up. The same as GTA but no more gangsta storyline but a good-old-west lonesome cowboy story.
* Assassin's Creed 2 : a strong story, a beautiful execution and a great gameplay
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Quake Live or Quake DeFRaG
My gaming days go back to the Atari console, but for years now I've spent more time reading about games than actually playing them. Minecraft grabbed my attention recently, however, and I've played it more than any other game in the last decade. The appeal lies in its open-ended nature (it's the first game to bring back the feeling I had whilst playing Elite as a teenager) and in the beauty of the landscapes it can create. It also scratches the same itch that Lego does, by giving you a few basic blocks with which to build whatever your imagination can conjure up (castles in the air quite often). It's only in alpha now, but multiplayer support is beginning to take real shape and every update brings new goodies.
Took the words right out of my mouth, in game preference and in "mojo" as you called it. My advice: play the classics you missed! they're classics for a reason Try Gangsters. Steep learning curve but so so worth it.
... being in my late thirties and having been gaming since I was 15.
As far as I can tell, it's a mix of:
Because I actually like RPGs and like to explore "a large world" in games, at the moment I am providing for my gaming needs with MMORPGs, since they have huge amounts of content and a reasonable price. I stick with the no-grind-required ones, explore the content until I get bored and then move to another one. They tend to be fun even in just 1 or 2 hour sessions and are in fact great value for money.
At the moment it's WoW (huge world, nowhere as grindy now as 4 years ago, new expansion coming next month) and before that it was Lord of the Rings Online (now free to play, beautifull world, lots of story, adult mature players, highly recomended).
It's probably not so much that you've lost your "mojo" as your preferences have changed over the years. Also, you probably have less time to kill now than when you were younger.
You didn't specify how old you were when you were at your peak, but I'm guessing you were a heavy gamer in the late 90s or early 00s. You'll find a ton of games from that era from Good Old Games that ought to keep you busy for a while. There are lots of games there that I couldn't afford and/or my machine couldn't run decently back then. You could also try free retro-clones of your old favorites.
I agree with the other posters that you ought to try your hand at writing your own games, maybe surprise yourself in the process.
Its good fun, its playable on spare times and its gorgeous. :)
Besides that I play League of Legends online from time to time, I invest on Minecraft and from time to time I go back to MAME. :)
I'm finding that as I grow older, I need to find more family games, which can be played in your living room with your family -- if you're not too dorky to have one -- or just your partner. Being a full-time software engineer by day, student of computer science by night, the free time I have with wife and kid demands that I not be in front of a pc and instead in the lounge/bedroom. And obv, automatically the platform changes, and if you're going to play with your wife and kids, then the type of game changes too.
My wife has taken a fancy to God Of War, Tekken, but she doesn't much like Tomb Raider. So my choice in games has evolved to family games, or at least games that we both like. Also, to games that can be played while entertaining family/couple friends.
blog.idigitall.com
id go with indie games mainly as i still find a ton to play that are good and im a 17 yearold who has ton of time,
btw do u have time for minecraft?
warning pointless sig
VVVVVV is one of the best and most challenging Indie games I've played in quite some time. It's a platformer/puzzle game with an absolutely fantastic chiptune soundtrack and striking C64-style visuals (some objects in the game are inspired by classic C64 games and demos).
Caveat: It can be very difficult... but if you're anything like me it'll sink its teeth into you and demand that you complete it.
Doing Things The Hard Way is an absolute fscker tho. :P
What's really missing from the games is depth. Part of this is because the more they try to out-do each other with fancy effects and eye-candy, the more it appears to be like a loud commercial rather than a nicely done presentation. But beyond that, games are now churned out like Hollywood does - all scripted, simplified, and by the numbers.
For instance, they take time to explain *everything* in such horrendous detail and have trainers and all sorts of idiot-hand-holding. Compare this to Baldur's Gate. You knew nothing, you had to learn it as you went, and there was a real sense of a story, precisely because they didn't tell you everything that was happening. Deus Ex? didn't tell you much of anything. Diablo didn't either. In fact, the "great" games were designed to be a good game first and never worried about trophies or making it so that some addle-headed eight year old could get 100% on it on their XBOX or PS3. They were "hard" because you had to think. And they didn't have guides and books available before the game itself came out, either.
Now, compare that to Mass Effect 2. I liked the game, but it was so much more simplified than it had to be. Even the Citadel level was a coupe of barely larger than room-sized areas and was designed so that even a moron couldn't get lost. Everything was possible to obtain as well as complete. Compared to the first game, it was a massive let-down. You never could get off-track with your missions. You never could get lost in a city. You never ran out of ammo. I mean, with that much space on the DVD, they actually *shrunk* the square footage of almost every level in the game.
Depth. Hardly any. Replay-ability? Nearly zero. It doesn't feel like we're entering a world so much as watching a made for TV movie. And, it's everything now. Assassin's Creed? I've played games from the 80s with more depth to the character interactions. Shoot, they couldn't even randomize the dialogs for the city missions. Just the same 4 or 5 canned scenarios. Would it have really killed them to spend another 5-10 hours to bring that up to 20 or 30 so we feel like it's a realistic mission? And, this gets worse as you get older. Eventually you want something that isn't mature because it has lots of sex and violence in it, but because it respects your intelligence enough to not treat you like a child while playing it.
From rubber-band AI to canned dialog to overblown effects and "trophies" for the most useless and inane things possible, it's no wonder people are so nostalgic for the days when gaming meant more than sitting through an 8 hour interactive movie on their screen.
I just want the X-Wing and Tie Fighter franchise back. Nothing like it since! Lucasarts, are you listening?
I remember playing the Demo of Crysis and my gaming machine couldn't handle it at all back in 2007. Now that it's 2010 I purchased the game and still my machine can not handle the highest settings but I found the game one of the best first person shooters I've played in a long time.. It even beat F.E.A.R 1 & 2 when it came to the graphics & special effects. Interesting plot, if you crawl or walk with your gunsite up then the invisibility enables lots of stealth play or if you prefer you can just level everything (even cut down trees, houses) I still think that if you could play Crysis on all the highest settings it would beat any FPS that's been released this year and a few years back.. I can play everything at medium without much issue so it's not that bad. Currently playing the second one Crysis Warhead and not bad so far.
Manufactoria - http://pleasingfungus.com/
Best programming-related Flash game ever.
The older you get more FarmVille you'll play
And so is your taste changing, gone are the days of endless reaction twitchfests, you now want more story, maybe you should go more for adventure games.
Favourites of mine that are all amazing:
Mass Effect 1 & 2
The Longest Journey + Dreamfall
Good & Evil
I think you need to resign yourself to the fact that you're not so much a gamer, as you are simply a viewer. It's clear from your preferences that you prefer a far more passive medium than that which video games provide.
Now, I'm not much of a fast reaction time player either. I prefer to take my time and plan out my strategies. But a key element of any video game is the challenge and rising to meet it. Only through this can real player satisfaction be gained. Viewer satisfaction on the other hand can be provided by a fairly linear quasi-interactive experience.
For you, I would recommend a game like Uncharted 2. I recommend it to you for the exact reasons I didn't like it. It's a "gripping interactive experience", but an awful pudding of a game, which I think is really what you're looking for.
May the Maths Be with you!
I've 45 and the game that I keep coming back to is LittleBigPlanet.
The game designers ingeniously included a level editor that is unlocked when you finish the game. They encourage you to build and publish your own levels and reward you for participating in the community. This has resulted in a rich online community of players and level builders so there's ALWAYS new content. The last time I turned it on, there were 3.3 MILLION user-published levels. 14,000 new levels had been published since the last time I played a few days earlier.
Are all of the levels great? Of course not. But there's a sophisticated rating system that makes it easy to find levels you will enjoy and level builders whose work you appreciate.
What I admire most about LBP is that in addition to creating a fun and compelling game, the game designers created an environment in which players can create their own games. The creativity out there is astounding and they made a game where players can make whatever they want and publish, get feedback, and refine.
Don't like what you find? Think you can do better? Fire up the editor and try your hand at it. Publish and get instant feedback and try again. I find it brings a whole new level of admiration and appreciation of my fellow gamers.
Curb your dogma.
The last game I really enjoyed, had no plot, storyline, cinematics or any of those things, just a bunch of zombies walking towards my house. Plants vs. zombies its simple, fun and well done. It has a good learning curve and funny parts. I know, it just does not look for grown up players, but, damn, I had a hell of a time. And it has no bugs.
My own personal favorites include Batman: Arkum Asylum - the story line and game play is first rate. BioShock, another very immersing FPS. Bioshock II was "give me some more of that" and also highly recommended (if you enjoy sometimes being kind of terrified). LotR online and D&D online are both free to play (so you can jump on for a couple days every 6 months and not feel like you are being screwed by the man because you payed 6 months subscription). World of goo is very nice as is Plants vs Zombies and even kingdom for keflings is a hoot for a builder game.
Now to the question of whether you have lost your mojo... it is easy to see the game for the math that it is - a simple counter (if I click in the right place enough times, "I win" - whatever that means in a virtual game). Once you understand a game, sometimes the senselessness can make even the idea of the playing seem rather like a waste of time and so you project that feeling onto other games thinking you have been there, done that. But it's not true. Batman is completely different from any other game I've played - and completely changed what I thought was possible. With the new input devices (I'm thinking kinect here) and new display capabilities (3-D is pretty wicked on games that program for it), I think there are games coming out that will make even that pale in comparison.
Get a huge hard disk. Enormous. 1.5Tb or something only costs as much as a game or two now.
Dig out all the old CD's of games that you used to play, buy them off Gog.com or Steam if you don't have them any more. Read all the iso's onto the disk and / or install the Steam/GOG games onto there.
Remember all the games / systems that you've ever played. Find emulators for them all.
Have everything set up so that you can run any of those games from a couple of clicks and no technical hassle (nothing kills a gaming session more than having to diagnose your PC in the middle of it). By the time you get here, you'll have remembered several games that you never completed but loved. You'll have got back into playing all sorts of older games. You'll remember hearing of their sequels / prequels and want to try them out. You'll have been exposed to numerous games on Steam / GOG.com that you find interesting, and also others for the systems you are emulating (even if that's only DOS).
I did this and it's great. No more cutting-edge PC required, just double-click and go. A quick game of Chaos on the Spectrum followed by learning how nice a game Comix Zone was on the Megadrive (bought it on Steam because it came with some other Megadrive games that I wanted for free), followed by a quick bash through a handful of indie games. Hell, I have 200 games on my Steam account now and most of those have been purchased since I did this.
Most importantly - stop buying those headline games until a year or so after release. Headline games are only good for "I got it first" arguments among kids. It takes a year or so to realise whether a game is actually any good or just another FPS and you could have saved your money.
Browse through the Steam store's less than £4 section. Some wonderful things in there and if you click through you can often get a whole series of games for the price of a single modern one. Don't buy *everything*, just buy yourself a couple of things that seem relevant. Demos are always good here. If it doesn't have a demo, wants a brand-new PC, or has some icky DRM attached to it - ignore it for a year until those problems go away. Suggestions from others for particular games are unlikely to inspire and most of those games are only purchased if you come back to it later and decide that *you* want it.
Just get back into the gaming mindset - don't spend forever on purchases, don't await hyped-out games, don't struggle to run the latest games, don't wait for the 10 minute intros to cut through. Just get into the game (even if that's a slow-paced adventure) at a double-click whenever you like. All that matters is the time on the game, not all the related gumph. And if you get frustrated with something, kick back to a game you last played when you were a kid at the touch of a button.
They're fun.
I have no problem finding new games worth playing. I have more great games in my collection I want to play than I can possibly manage. My wishlist on BGG is over 500 games. Right now, I want to play String Railway, The Three Musketeers, Palais Royal, Atlantis, Cities, Airships, Dominion, Valdora and of course all the classics like Settlers, Carc, TTR, Showmanager, Niagara, Power Grid...
There were over 600 new games shown at Essen Spiele 2010.
Oh, you mean computer games. Oh, well, poor you. Try playing modern games with real people across a real table dealing in real time. Go look on boardgamegeek.com.
Games need to ditch the realism and come up with off the wall designs.
Spread the mushrooms around the office etc...
Half-Life and TF2 were and are refreshing games to play because it didn't try to rigidly model the real world not inspite of that fact.
Games today are fighting to emulate real life but real life is boring and they can't do it anyway so it ends up being more frustrating than anything else.
They also lack challenges as they all try to mimick what went before and I know how to point and click to kill something.
We need puzzles like HL2 had as inspite of some people complaining at the time, it mixed up the game play so it didn't get too repetitive.
Not saying HL2 was a perfect game but it had these elements and even if you didn't like them, you probably had an alternative similar game that also did the same thing.
"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11
E Proelio Veritas.
Most people, as they get older, find it harder to get into new games, new music, new movies, new food, new sports, new friends, etc. Getting into new stuff takes effort, uninterrupted time, attention span, and a certain kind of ignorance that comes with youth and that lets you see warmed-over crap as exciting and fresh. You eventually reach an age at which it's hard to find anything that seems genuinely worth your excitement; you get jaded . It doesn't work that way for everyone in every arena, but that's generally how it goes.
As i have gotten older as a gamer (mid 40s) I have found myself moving aroud the different types of games to being settled into one game type (MMORPG) I find the use of PVP in games to be over done, so I aim at games with more of a community and more professions that don't make you sit there aiming at someone with a gun.
I also find myself playing games for a good 4+ years. I just finsihed playing Entropian Univese (6 years) after the devs got too greedy about money, and am now playing afterworld.ru, which is a Indi game about to go gold.
I recommend finding a niche and enjoying it.
Dad
You might try out Sword of the Stars or Dragon Age (this was mentioned before).
The former one is particularly 'gripping' in MP, the later has awesome between-character dialoges.
("And now we have a dog, and Alister is still the stupidest member of the party")
M.A.M.E is your friend!!! I have the XBOX (the old one, not the 360!) filled with all the classics, so I can play them once in a while. You don't need so much time or dedication to play a couple of (emulated) quaters on these games: Xain'd Sleena, TMNT, Slap Fight, Ghost 'N Goblins, Rally-X, Star Force, City Connection, and a very long etc. :)
Even my wife plays Pacman once in a while!
And playing TMNT/Sunset Riders/The Avengers with 3 more friends that share the memories of old days at the Arcade, in a 50" TV, is a priceless experience
Now, I'm getting a Pinball (a real one) to put on my home. I think The Who - The Pinball Wizard from Data East will be a nice one to have. And, by the way, I'm 32 years old, running three business... so I have little time for my passion of Arcades, but still got the mojo!!
-- Francisco Rivas C.
Hi There,
It seems you and I play similar games. Recently I found a combination of older games from gametap.com & gog.com and new sleepers from steam hits the sweet spot for locating good solid story driven games. Mind that some old ones (like the elder scrolls, might and magic or wizardry series) are not represented but there is a lot of new blood hidden away especially on steam.
Recently I've found Wizard101.com to be allot of fun and sans the usual mmorg drama. The buy is quite reasonable - about US$9.99 for the subscription (or they have a pay as you go plan that sounds complex but is less expensive then the monthly fee when taken over a whole year and bought while their sale is in effect).
Other sources I've used are:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/
http://www.freemmogamer.com/2008/09/best-free-mmos-list.html (yes this is an old list -- if the game is still working then it's not likely to be a fly by night operation).
You should know that pure story driven games are dying; if they don't include some serious fps or don't get very casual they are not likely to make it financially outside the indy crowd. Steam seems have a good representative of the newer games, but they are poorly marketed thus well hidden away in page 4-10 ^_^.
hth
Sam S.
Oh yeah. Great idea. Been hearing good things about that one.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
You should look into a game called ARMA 2,
Yes, I have this exact same experience. And even though there are some 'old gems' I still should try (Grim Fandango certainly being one of them), I also find that I've come to dislike certain games that I used to be quite fond of. For example all Sierra Online adventures, which seemed quite lengthy and rich in content at the time, now seem somewhat shallow and really short, even though I can appreciate the music or ambient sounds much more nowadays (or less, when I play a game with an awful soundtrack, such as Kings Quest V for that matter).
Currently, I only like games like HL2, L4D1 and 2, and some others. Civ 5 didn't manage to grab me yet, and all those fancy shooters don't seem interesting at all.
I think there are two reasons for this. One is that I used to marvel at the worlds in which I would be able to escape, but as I've grown older I've seen movies and read books which were much better in 'sucking me in', to the point that games' experiences just are too shallow to me. Even though games have one clear advantage over books, and that is the way in which a player can shape her/his own story.
The second reason is that several years ago, games seemed to become more and more advanced and pretty. Right now, the difference between a new game and one that has been out for, say, some years, just isn't big enough to get me all enthusiastic (admitted, I don't have the means to run such a game anyway). I used to marvel at all games reviews in the magazines; now, when I go to, say, GameSpot, chances are pretty much 50% that I'm bored to tears at what I see, no matter what graphics these games feature...
No, it's not you or your mojo, it's the games. They are getting better and better 3D graphics, and the gameplay is getting more and more boring. In many of the games, you can't really die anymore, you get arrows pointing where you need to go, and often if you just twitch fast, you win.
I really enjoy that game but I would only recommend it if you like Texas Hold'em and the characters represented in the game, otherwise you're not going to feel like you got your $5 worth.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Dude, Deus Ex
Im 35. for a long time i have been rather forcing myself to play games as a pastime. (there is nothing else to do every weeknight, is it) but recently im not even doing that, havent touched any games.
... we played all the legendary games that broke barriers at the time they came out. we also played A LOT of games.
maybe we grew up. but, more than that,i believe, we played too much games. we are the first gamer generation. i played my first computer game in 1982 on a zx spectrum at age 6-7 or so. then msx, then c64 then pc
you know, after a point it ends up like hollywood movies - if you have seen a lot, its like having seen all of them. they all resemble each other. you get bored, of the same pattern.
of course the extreme corporatization, industrialization of gaming didnt help. fifa xvIIIXImcMii, Flying Dragon XVIVII, rehashes, or, bastardizations of existing game types all for not risking losing one single penny for shareholders (fuck those bastards), made gaming a repetitive affair. even mass effect 2, i only played it for a few hours before forgetting it. polished 'same old'. dragon age. same old, but very polished. (and made harder so 'game time' will increase peh).
yeah, i think we played a little bit too much.
Read radical news here
I've been gaming since at least the late 80s and I find this a great time to be a gamer. There are more awesome game tat capture my attention then I have time. Just looking at my Steam account - over 200hours on Fallout NV. Probably even more on DAO with expansions. Civilization and Galciv are always awesome. Also play SC2 when I get the chance , DA2 and DNF are coming, it's a very exciting time!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I have the same problem. I tried nearly all mmorpgs out there and in the end, I spend more time playing puzzle games.
:)
A good game to play is to start studying again, I like the thrill when you hand in the assignments etc.
You need to play Katamari, any of them. The only downside is that it's available only for Sony systems, but I bet you can buy a used PS2, right? It's fun, easy to learn to play, crazy (If you like pot, holy shit!, you're in for a treat) and addictive. It's very different from everything. Go get it, go go go!
We need just a little more variety within a game. Specifically I mean we need to either combine a couple elements into one game or add them to an existing experience. This is not very hard, and I am surprised so few games implement this. Its not about resources, or capability of the games/engines. Its about poor game design.
Here's an example. take one of my favorite games types FPS. These are traditionally action games. But they can easily be better by adding just some extra elements. Or combined with adventure/strategy games such as Half Life or Far Cry 2 did! Why has no one else followed there lead? You don't need to create a massive Far Cry 2 enviroment, but you can add an element to make your game somewhat enjoyable!
Consider this: If some of the money that was spent making over the top redundant games was spent on added one or two elements to design, investors would make a much larger profit!
Look at multiplayer games which peeked with Quake series. A simple run-and-gun. Then came along Counter Strike (which was a Mod by the way because video game industry made boring games). Same type of game attributes but they simply added two elements. Bomb planting/defusing, and hostages. Now look how much more entertaining that was? And where is this game today? Still being played and now sold!
Here is a synopsis of what I enjoy in a FPS (for example). These are examples of the the variety I wish existed in other games such as COD, MOH, Quake Wars, etc.
1. Larger or free roaming maps like with "Delta Force 2" (an awesome game for its time.), with the ability to actually practice stealth or run/gun (Socom, Red Orchestra style).
2. I want different objectives, or multiple ways to accomplish them (Bad Company 2, destroy boxes with setting a time or explosives). I also liked how missions made game play soooo much more fun such as with Delta Force 2's 'Seek and Destroy' or missions in Socom.
3. Ability to use vehicles (Bad Company 2, BF series).
4. The ability to set traps or booby-trap vehicles (BF Vietnam) was awesome!
5. The ability to use the environment. I like how fun games such as Bad Company 2 lets you do this. You don't have to have an awesome engine either. Take "Age Of Chivalry" an older HL2 Mod. This game lets team mates build siege towers, prompt falling rocks, open/close doors, and interact with stationary weapons. It certainly makes the game much more enjoyable and every map a new experience. All on an outdated engine by modders.
Why do new games suck so much? Cause they haven't changed anything. Their still vanilla.
Write your own game. Since you're bored with the current crop, you are less likely to reproduce them and might just come up with the next Angry Birds or Meat Boy concept.
I felt the same way you did not that long ago and now I've got a functioning prototype using the Unreal Development Kit. If you can image it, you can do it. Git 'r' dun!
I'm 31 and still play the original mario brothers games although lately I play more lost levels w/mario(too easy w/luigi) than anything, on the computer it's bejeweled blitz, reminds me of my tetris days and i'm number 1 every week amongst my friends, without spending a dime! you could also invest in an older system(game cube, dreamcast) and you can try out tons of games for $10 and under, although the really great ones are a bit more
Modern games suck because they're developed by evil corporations run by overly affluent evil people. These people only care about themselves and are incapable of producing quality.Is it any surprise that greedy and selfish people are incompetent and destroy everything they touch?
I made the switch a few years ago. BGs are all about the gameplay. There's even a number of solo games. For a start try Agricola and Arkham Horror.
I am not sure what age has to do with it. I am 54 and still play computer games regularly.
My preference is for empire building games. The Civilization series has been a constant favorite. I am playing Civ5 now and really enjoying it. I am also a Masters of Orion fan. The Total War releases are some of the most involved strategic and tactical games I have played.
I am also quite fond of RPG type games. Neverwinter Nights being a good example of such.
Though, I have to say, I am occasionally hooked by a real time action game. The last one to really suck me in was Assassin's Creed. I have Assassin's Creed 2 sitting beside the PS3 waiting. Maybe I can carve out a block of time during this holly-daze season.
If I have friends over and we want to jump into some quick and easy game playing, there is always Tekken and similar combat games.
I'm generally less interested in video games than I used to be. I have other demands on my time now: big ongoing projects (one of which has a deadline at the end of the month), a love life, a new city to explore, people to go hang out with... I'd really rather try and sit in front of the drawing board to get some art done than grind through another lengthy game that has the same narrative cliches and the same gameplay as every other game I've played in its genre.
It's harder and harder for someone to offer me a new experience. I've played more than enough shitty games in my life; I don't need to play more of them.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Great post. I, too, turned 40 this year. What I'm finding is that when I play with others that I know and love (or like - a lot - if love offends you), the game becomes much more enjoyable. Even for games that I've played before, when my kids get a hold of them, they are a ton of fun because it's great seeing them getting into them. If you don't have kids, the games I'd suggest are the ones developing characters.. like D&D. Dungeons and Dragons Online is good for this, and is especially fun when you can join up with someone you know and with the same character levels, dropping in and out much you do.
I think it's a normal function of "growing up" - certain hobbies or activities are more fulfilling than others, and as we age, priorities change, demands on our time change, and as a result, the less fulfilling activities lose their appeal. Ten years ago, I was into multiple hobbies - video gaming, astronomy, model rocketry, model railroading, to name a few. I tried to keep active in all of them, but with kids, a job, and just generally less "energy", it was too much. I no longer own any rockets, or participate in the hobby in any way. My telescopes sit forgotten in boxes in the basement closet. Piles of video games sit unplayed, except an occasional round of Civilization (rare). The railroading is where I spend my free time now, at home, at club events, shows, etc.. It provides everything I need, relaxation, a creative outlet, interaction with others, and it's fun.
I always go back to Team Fortress 2. Fun FPS. If you can stand to get ribbed a little you can be a middling player and still have fun if you pick a good community online.
The more frustrating thing is that a lot of the games coming to PC now are actually designed and tested for consoles [...] I've been gravitating toward co-op multiplayer games
I thought co-op multiplayer was better on a console because console games were more likely to support sharing a screen with player 2 who is using a gamepad.
Get four friends and go at it.
That's harder if you have to buy four copies of the game and dismantle four PCs to make a LAN party.
I stopped caring about games when the arcade graphics got "cartoony".
Let me guess: you hated Celda too.
Eve Online and the Total War games offer a deep and varied challenge.
I don't know if it's I've lost my mojo or other things have come up. You know, when work/commute take up about 10 hrs a day and then you have to make/get dinner there isn't that much time. (Especially if you're like me and you developed migraines in your twenties like me. I can't game if I've got a migraine.) What I've found is I have an over/under of 10 hrs. If a game can keep me engaged for 10 hrs then I'll really get into it and complete it. If it doesn't then'll I'll forget about it. The last 2 games to do that for me were Batman:AA and Red Faction Guerilla.(AKA Grand Theft Martian.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Try Vendetta Online. Like you, I also enjoyed the first 2 MOO games. Like you mentioned, MOO3 was so much like work I can get paid for (planning, managing resources in tedious detail) I never got into it. I also enjoyed DiabloII (spent YEARS in game addiction mode on that one), HoMM and Might&Magic series. I also spent time with the Doom, Hexen and Heretic FPS' as well as the excellent RoTT (which I believe now has an Open Source Linux version.) For a while I dabbled in Everquest, Ultima Online and Earth&Beyond. In recent years I tried Guild Wars, Titan Quest and Hellgate London. However, I got really tired of booting Windows just to play games, so never tried Eve (the emulator didn't work and I wasn't in the mood to dink with it to make it run on my PC.) So I was poking around and ran into a VO link on a Linux gaming site. I've also tried some of the games in the $10 bargain bin at Walmart/Target/etc, but having to boot Windows to load them really takes away part of the enjoyment. Maybe some rich guy will resurrect Loki games someday, so we can have more choices on Linux again.
i dont think its really fair to pitch Asteroids or Pac man in the lot beacuse they're from a very different era were it was just about getting more points or doing the same thing but faster!
Except people still like to play and watch games that involve "getting more points or doing the same thing but faster". Look at the annual Big Game of the American NFL, or the Olympic Games: it's a matter of doing the same thing, only harder, better, faster, stronger.
I used to make money playing games on the internet, funded 3 semesters of college on it.
I lost my gaming mojo some time ago, when I was winning all of the time I was 18-20 or so, then I took a break so that I could actually pass college.
When I play now, even though I am "good" as in "very good" when I play, the gulf between me and someone who is 14 and plays every night is vast. The 14 year olds that play competitively are far better.
In pub games I can generally win handily, in say Call Of Duty style games, or Unreal style. But when it comes to competitive players, and I mean the ones who might win money, I am very slow and out of "gaming" shape.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but it was some time between the release of Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2 were my "real" life started to take priority over being good at games.
About the only game I am still "awesome" in is Mechwarrior Living Legends (a mod for Crysis) and that is mostly because the game I earned most of my money in back in the day were mechwarrior gaming tourneys, and I never lost my head for the style, as it relies more on carefully thinking about what you are doing, rather than twitch skills.
In a game like COD4, being well placed and well set up gets you only so far against someone who can spin around, shoot you in the head, and move on before you have finished killing their bouncing figure moving through the map.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I was seeing myself in this question. I'm pretty much done with most games - they seem to be remakes of the same old stuff. Then I ran across a rather refreshing game - Portal.
In the game, you have a single device (not really a weapon) - the portal gun. In effect, you can create two linked wormhole-like holes that teleport objects from one to another. You can also pick up objects. That's it. Simple.
In the game you find yourself in a bit of a puzzle - you enter a section and simply need to exit the section, but have obstacles to overcome, with nothing but the portal gun. It is a thinking mans game, and you can stop at any time.
You really should check out the video at Valve's web site, as my description does not do it justice. This is the most entertaining game I've played in years. It's old enough that system requirements are pretty low. Great fun.
Place nail here >+
If one wants to see something fresh, indie games are the way to go
Say I want to see something fresh, but I want to experience it with friends who are visiting my home. Indie games rarely come to consoles (apart from World of Goo when one of its developers was friends with the manager of a Starbucks), and other Slashdot users tell me there aren't enough gamers with home theater PCs to make a split- or otherwise shared-screen co-op mode on a PC game worth the development time=money to add. Now what do I do?
MMO's. I know that sounds dirty and people are going to be like "omg addiction" but really its all that's done it for me since I was about 16.
Ever since Ultima Online I have been completely ruined for single player games. They feel like sitting inside playing with a ball and cup vs playing a game of touch football with the neighborhood.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Considering you still show an interest in gaming, I would never say that you've lost your mojo. As new games come out, including repeats of each other, it sort of makes it difficult for the long-term gamers to adapt. I mean, Call of Duty, as great a game as it is, is certainly not a fresh experience unless you just haven't played it in quite some time. Call of Duty and Halo have reshaped FPSs on console so they are nowhere near the same as before... which makes it easier for younger, newer gamers to come into the picture and become good at it. Those same gamers though would most likely get reemed playing us at Counter-Strike though. ;) (For the most part). As far as wanting to go back and play old titles... it's just like when you go to a restaurant and order the same thing. Sure, you want to try something else, but do you want to waste the money on something you might not like? Or just buy what you know you will like?
I stay active as I can with gaming. I love all the old games I've played and enjoy a lot of new games. My suggestion to you would be to ask around, see what your friends like... play some demos, etc. Find a genre you like and check out other games in that genre (Obviously there's no game like Heavy Rain, haha). You said you didn't like AoE 3, so stay away from RTSs. And also stay away from sandbox games like GTA (Mafia, Just Cause, Saints Row, Red Dead Redemption), etc. You should look into some of the newer style FPS hybrid genre games like Bioshock, Fallout, etc. Or even trying some of the newer RPGs like Mass Effect, Oblivion (few years old I know), etc. I would say... never give up on the gaming spirit. The fact that you asked Slashdot about this means you still show interest. Gaming for life!
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Amen my friend amen, I know what you mean. I played to many FPS I can't even look at one without being disgusted... I played soo many MMORPG I get nightmare about starting a toon at first level. I too dont have the time to master games like StarCraft, AoE and other RTS. I like racing game a lot because thats the game thats sooo easy to let go and then come back and know where you're at. I still like RPG (non MMO) since they are story driven but the latest Final Fantasy make me think about the old Mystic Quest on the SNES... easy as hell without a hint of challenge. So yeah I understand.. my latest game is not so much great but its fun, its indie so Im helping a fellow coder and its cheap enought. Hegemony, Philip of Macedone. Good game, could have been better but the game play is simple enough and its still a bit adictive. But I've been playing it for only 3 sessions so I know im at the begging so I cant tell you if it stays good in the long run.
As an older player (just about 30), I find that I have no taste anymore for blockbuster games. I don't want to play a $60 epic about some superhero rampaging around and killing every bad guy in sight. When I have a couple of nights free to mess around, I look at the inexpensive games on XBox Live (just bought Monkey Island: Special Edition for $5 on sale and need to try it), or even the XBox Indie section (just made legendary status in Carneyvale, enjoyed Soulcaster a while ago), or I want to download some small game off of Steam that my online friends recommend (Recettear was fun for the meta-conversations). I think some of that lost mojo might just be that we're tired of seeing the same old crap over and over again. It's a refreshing to just pick up something small and weave your way through it than to sit through some epic journey again.
(Then again, please don't ask me how many hours I've spent playing expert drums in Rock Band...)
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?"
Actually, I found it hard to justify the expense and time investment of keeping up with games. I know people who buy every new console that comes out, with the requisite library of games. It's thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours, and as I get older I find I'd rather do other things.
Dropping out of the gaming community has been curious... a lot of the stuff coming out now looks amazing graphically, but the play mechanics don't seem to have changed in the last five or ten years. From the outside it looks like the same three games being re-skinned and re-released over and over. And I really don't miss the frustration of DRM, buggy releases, the patch-it-later mentalities, and the ballad of shame and broken promises of games that get overhyped.
I have a lot of fond memories of my hardcore gaming days, and bear no ill will for the people who are still into it, but I feel happier for having left it behind. When the need for a gaming fix returns, I find just firing up GtA or Half-Life 2 scratches the itch as much as buying a new game.
So yeah, I guess I'm old and stuff.
It's not a big deal that you have a hard time finding games you like. There are more games around, games get more ad coverage than ever, and you're getting older.
Plus, if you really think about it, the games you go back to again and again are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the games you used to play, or was able to play, as a kid. There's always been a ton of cruft to sift through to find the gems; it's no different now, but it seems worse since your tastes have changed.
Just relax, keep gaming for fun, and you'll find the modern gems eventually. It's not a huge deal and a bit inevitable, really; you simply have less free time to sift through the muck now that you're older.
The first factor, which doesn't get all of us, is that as you grow older, there is a greater chance that first person shooters will make you motion sick. (I know about frame rates, but as you grow older, I'd argue that frame rates naturally increase as hardware gets cheaper.) I played Doom and Doom 2 for hours, but can't play a FPS for more than a few minutes these days without getting nauseous.
Second factor, let's face it, you just don't twitch as well in your forties as you did in your twenties. Compensation for that is life experience, better strategy and reasoning capabilities, but your reactions are going to be a touch slower.
Third factor: Unless you're a hopeless sociophobe, you probably have more interests outside gaming. This takes away from the long hours you spent in front of the screen, so naturally you're going to get a little rusty.
But in any case, games are just not that important. (Horrors!) They were useful when you were young and thought you had gobs of time to spare, but truthfully, you really didn't then and you have even less now.
That said, I'm marginally interested in the Alice and Mechwarrior reboots (if they ever come out), and Diablo III (ditto), because I used to play the originals a long time ago. I might even buy them. But the days of staying up to 3:00 AM on a weeknight trying to get to the next level are over.
That said, earlier this year I had to give my copy of Warcraft to my daughter and tell her to hide it from me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Go find a girl man.
manutriplex@hotmail.com
WTF? half life 2, starcraft 2, portal, left 4 dead, civilization 4 & 5, plants vs zombies, osmos... the list goes on. it isn't a lack of good games s, there are too many.
That would be B4 you whippersnapper!
I've found two new interest in games.
...if there was a forth style to catch my eye it would be lego. button mashing fun!
Ones that feel more like a movie. (the latest i played were; uncharted and batman arkham asylum) they are more engaging than movie, and usually have a good story line.
my number two go to are cheap downloads. they are fast fun and engaging... some addictive some are just a one time play thing some are puzzles... they are a great tie over till that next game but sometimes you find a Gem that is worth more than $10 - Monsters (by pixel junk), deathspank, castle crashers, echocrome, fat princess...)
for a third, little big planet.
dunno if anyone suggested this yet, but online racing is a great way to regain your gaming mojo. i'm a shooter-gamer and didn't really get into racing games except for the odd arcade game like need for speed, always thought sim's were too hard.. then about a year ago a friend introduced me to Race 07 and it's two add-ons GTR Evolution and the new Race On.. wow, talk about awesome gaming fun for an old guy! It's easy and quick to get into, the game is open ended so you can drive any car on any track without having to "level up" .. take as long as you like learning a new car/track while building your skills with other like-minded and mature drivers
Check out these racing communities..
http://www.racedepartment.com/
http://www.simhookup.com/
What! Do I look like a people person?
There are a lot of areas where having a story is important or lends to the game, the big trick is not to make the rest of the game SUCK.
RPG's - to me - seem to be dying because they *lack* a good plot. Look at the fairly recent Final Fantasy XIII... scanty uniforms, flashy effects, and otherwise very, very lame. The given plot could have had promise if they hadn't been too busy with their angsty teenage personas, super-duper-background-rendering, and big boobs. That series is not pretty much dead to me.
Most RTS's I've played don't need a storyline to be fun, but it can add to the game. For the most-part though I've always enjoyed multi-player RTS the most, so no story needed.
FPS often seem to be a drone of "same ol' same ol'", however I will add a few exemptions. Half Life 2 does an EXCELLENT job of integrating a story, and elements of a physics puzzler to the RTS. Doom3, which got bogged down in repetitive gameplay, actually had a semi-decent take on the story as well.
Gameplay counts, but don't discount the value of a good story. I'd certainly rather have a good story (AND gameplay) then more flashy explosions, laser FX, and females in tight lycra uniforms.
I gave up on games after I started to feel the treadmill effect of doing the same thing over and over. I pulled out the instrument I gave up for a decade and started actively entertaining myself rather than passively. This led me to home recording and then onto music production.
I've never been happier since I stopped consuming and started creating.
Hire me...
$5 worth (well, its now about $4.80AU, I love the currency conversion at the moment).
Crap, it cost me more than that for breakfast this morning.
I really love cheap steam games, you know all you need to do is play it for an hour to get your moneys worth, hell I have played PNatI more than I played some of the latest AAA titles.
...
The last game that I really dedicated time to was Resident Evil 4 (played on the GameCube).
It was just a good game, that even managed to scare me more than once.
Tried the previous RE and RE5, but they didn't do it for me.
The industry is about making money and because of that they are making games that will net the the most cash in the short term vs games that are good.
Now clearly that is not the case across the board but it is true to such a degree that it does color what we older gamers, who have seen a lot of games, will deal with. I personally have a hard time dealing with any RTS that does not have the depth of RON at this point but that RTS's depth was pretty crazy deep and coupled with its failed sales there is the idea that nobody wants to buy something like that. (Nevermind the fact that one of the bigger reasons it failed with a lot of the RTS community was it's awful MP support when dealing with NATs at a time when everyone starting using a NAT.)
I don't want to sound like Yahtzee too much but there comes a point when it's like this game is good but it's so much like God of War but not really even as good that why should I bother even trying something new? I can just keep giving my $15 a month to Acti-Blizzard for my WoW sub and deal with the imperfections there that I know and have come to love vs something new that will just annoy me.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I'm 47 and have been playing Darkfall for 2 years now and have no interest in playing anything less thrilling (which is most titles).
I thoroughly recommend it, and no I dont not have a financial interest in it.
Feel free to google it, but be prepared to be immersed.
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Youtube and look up Guild Wars 2 Manifesto. GW 2 out within the next year, no monthly fee, no ripoff company store. Been playing GW 1 for the last 5 1/2 years. Geek game, playable solo, rather a challenge; need to be able to read forums and the wikis. Excellent music, graphics rather like playing inside an oil painting. Lots of quests, missions. But beyond that even more to do if you are a self starter. Only game I play these days, whether I have a few minutes to spare or an evening. Guild Wars 2 will be a much different game from either GW 1 or WoW. Keep an ear open for GW 2 release info.
Video games are for (a) kids, and (b) sad case single men with "learned helpnessness" (look it up) who are forever whining that they can't get a girlfriend.
If you are the latter, you need pull yourself together, sort your life out, get a girlfriend, get married, have children, and GET A LIFE.
Of course you don't have to. You can live out your life in denial, on your own, and die a sad lonely individual who never experienced anything worthwhile.
It sounds like your tastes are just changing to more serious and thoughtful titles. You'd rather play an interactive story instead of a press-the-button-when-the-flashy-thing-blinks-game. Good thing for you is, it's right in the middle of a resurgence.
The relative success of Heavy Rain and Telltale's success with reviving the adventure game formula is bearing some really awesome fruit. Check out LA Noire by Rockstar - I think it'll be right up your alley. http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/agegate/ref/?redirect=
Also I hear great things about Red Dead Redemption and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Both are purported to have great stories to go with gameplay that's not quite so frantic.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
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When introducing yourself to Scotch (Even Single Malt) don't be afraid to add a bit of water to it. You actually allow more of the fragrance of the alcohol to diffuse as you dilute the drink, and so the flavor maintains very well, while reducing the pure alcohol burn which turns off many exploring drinkers.
The constant munching of pills...
Meta will eat itself