As do most live service publishing companies. That is the whole problem. They aren’t bothered by simply looking bad for not preserving them.

It was a service, but my point is less how much was paid, but that much of it is dead and gone. A completely free game that shuts down its servers and becomes unplayable is still a loss to our culture.

Maybe but it would also be immensely more time consuming. Why not use AI to accelerate the process?

It’s just as much game killing than any live service today. Satellaview relied on server connection, there’s no official lasting copies that anyone can own.

Media today might be less sexist but I think part of it is also that it became drastically more sex averse. Mortal Kombat is gorier than ever for anyone to see, but god forbid anything shows a nipple.

People used to bring up Kratos in these discussions but before these new games he seemed far more likely to bite someone’s face off than to kiss anyone. There’s a difference.

I think there is space for both sexualized and non-sexualized characters, as long as they are treated evenly. This is entertainment, they don’t need to be all business serious.

I dread that in trying to be perfectly respectable, the medium might err to the side of prudishness and sexual repression.

Yeah, but that is just another facet of marketing for men. Sexy dress-up vs tighty whities. Definitely not intended to get women interested.

Worth considering that if Alien was produced today, there would be a lot of criticism of it being “too woke”. Not only progress doesn’t just happen, but it’s also not granted to stick unless people are still pushing for it.

Just because we don’t usually see backlash it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.

Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven’t agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.

I’m also a progression-driven player yet I’m suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I’d rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.

If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I’m sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate “company controlled” with “fair” or “fun”, and it’s curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.

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Interestingly I think the 2D Zeldas aged less than the early 3D ones. ALttP is pretty good to this day.

I’m almost certain this is why so much blurring and flare was pushed as “realism” a couple generations ago. The devs and artists needed their eyes checked.

As someone that already has to deal with a somewhat blurry perception, I don’t want any more of that, ever.

The games really need an option to just turn off tutorials. I imagine it’s a little bit trickier than that because they need to be designed in a way a small child won’t accidentally turn it on without realizing. But there must be a way to do it.

Persona 1 and 2. As a Persona fan I see some people saying how great they are, and the story does seem interesting, but I can’t deal with that map movement, battle system and endless random battles.

Really, any RPG with random battles is a little harder to get into compared to overworld monsters you can avoid or target at your own pace.

It’s not about holding up, it’s about playing pretty much the same, while mostly just looking prettier.

While lines are never quite so clear cut, from SNES to N64/PS1 we unlocked a whole variety of 3D games, and by PS3/XB360 we added open-world games, immersive sims and console MMOs to our repertoire. But what new horizons were unlocked by technological advancements since? Only battle royales come to mind.

Surely today’s games are larger, more beautiful and have embraced QoL aspects that we discovered along the way. But today’s games don’t feel as markedly different as any previous leaps.

It doesn’t feel right to count that generation as retro, for reasons like GTA 5, which was initially released for those consoles, yet it’s still considered a current game, with no significant overhaul beyond graphical fidelity. It’s the greatest example of how games haven’t drastically evolved since then.

Compared to the jump from SNES to N64 and PS1, or from PS1 to PS3, we haven’t had any major breakthrough, just moderate incremental improvement.

Funny enough it was Link’s Awakening that led all the games after that being more story oriented. It also started the trope of the long trading quest

Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.

Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.