Ah, Monster Hunter... One of my personal favorite series, playing as a larger-than-life hunter as you take on beasts of different sizes and threats, going up through the monster ranks and inadvertently climbing the food chain and becoming the apex predator. I got to play Rise when it came out… And I didn’t like it!
Why? The game was “Too different”, even for World standards. The Silkbind skills were too strange, the game physics were too floaty and the monster roster was too lackluster, unlike the previous titles before World… Huh, now that I think about it, that's a sentiment I have for a lot of modern games, they just lack the same “Omph” the games that I grew up playing have. gasp No, it can’t be… Have I contracted NOSTALGITIS?
Yes, dear readers, today we are talking about the condition a bunch of gamers are contracting as of recent: Nostalgitis.
The symptoms are the following: Sour opinions on modern gaming, rose tinted eyesight for older games and a strange fascination on collecting era paraphernalia, but why is there an increase in this type of behavior? Are gamers just bitter people that can’t make up their minds, or many of their critiques hold weight when shined upon? That's what I wish to discuss with this article today: Nostalgitis, an illness or a symptom of a greater issue?
So, when have these feelings of nostalgia started to bubble up in the community as a whole? I know, tough question considering people always look back with fondness to their formative years, playing on their console of choice and discovering games for the first time, but it is worth mentioning a boom in this type of discontent around the eighth generation consoles (PS4, Xbox One, Wii U) as the industry reached its peak in income and “hype” as some would put it. Every generation of consoles are always marked by heavy hitters and genre defining games; the fifth generation had Crash and Mario 64; the sixth had God of War, Metroid Prime and Halo; the seventh had Infamous, Mario Galaxy and Gears of War; and then the eighth had… Knack… And Re-Core… Hey at least Nintendo made Splatoon, right?! And Star Fox Zero…
Oh boy, what happened? Sure, these games where “launch titles” but hell, the Nintendo 64 launched with Mario 64, the PS1 with Rayman and the Xbox OG with FUCKING HALO! This, personally speaking, pinpoints the beginning of the concern with gamers: Where are we going next? For many, the new release of a new console came with the prospect of better graphics, better processing power, and most importantly, better gameplay, but the eighth gen started off with a wet fart, and we would only get better games, like GoW 4 and Breath of the Wild, down the line of the console’s life span. Sure, the heavy hitters of each gen only came out after a few years of the existence of many consoles, but they had something at least, personally I can’t pick out another game that had its start on the eighth gen, unlike the games I previously listed. How many games tried to live on current gen, only to die after its only release? How many games keep going despite exploring every possibility of its setting with another sequel that adds nothing new? And how many games never see the light of day because “there is no market”?
It's very frustrating the current state of gaming: studios are fractured, fans are raging, and companies are trying to make a quick buck on every single client they can sucker into buying their product. sigh At least we have what came before, right…?
I’ll be real here chief… No. The past isn’t as great as you remember, there where many… MANY duds in the past of gaming; Do you remember the Kinect? Or the PlayStation Move? Or the FUCKING VIRTUA BOY!?
Yeah, some might be saying “Oh but it was only the consoles!” No, it wasn’t. The term “Halo Killer” exists, and the mere fact that it’s used as a derogatory term for any military sci-fi shooter of the time speaks volumes, and for anyone that wasn’t alive for that time, let me explain: Halo was a commercial success for Microsoft, so much so that people were buying OG Xboxes… Xboxs… Xboxsi? Whatever. People were buying the console JUST for Halo, yeah, it’s THAT good, so much so everyone wanted a piece of that Halo pie, so what did they do? They tried to replicate the style of the game… Without understanding what made it work, and every time a sci-fi shooter came out, the “genius” marketing team would label it as “The Halo killer” ... Of course, that didn’t work because we still refer to Halo as the peak of sci-fi shooters over other games like Haze… Or Advent Rising… Or Resistance… Or Destiny (btw, made by the original Halo studio) … Or anything after Halo 3, yeah not even its own series lived up to their fame, but that’s a story for another time.
Point is: There are a lot of bad games, and I mean A LOT. Very few gamers from the 80s kept their passion for the medium alive through the years, so they are the very few that can comment on the utter state of shit the original NES had, hell I’m 22 years old, I didn’t live in that age, my only contact with such games was through the selected, cherry picked hitters that would become main staples of The Big N, and through AVGN that made a living telling younger people how BAD these games where, I mean come on! Look at this:
This is a graph of the best-selling games of the NES, we all have great titles… All of them first party, excluding Tetris. Now I ask you, where is the Robocop game? Where is the Back to the Future game? Or the Ninja Turtles game? “Oh these are all IP picks, and established IP games suck” Not entirely true, as of recent we have some decent to amazing tie in games that make just for fans of the original work and for people first experiencing the IP through the game, but sure for the sake of argument let’s cut half of the NES library of shitty cash grab movie-games, we still have games such as Super Pitfall, Deadly Towers and even Metroid… Yes, as a Metroid fan, I must admit that the original Metroid was, indeed, terrible… But why was it bad?
I have had this idea brewing for a while, and along side some discussions outside of the forums, I came up with some theories regarding this topic, so it is important to state this: this is by NO means a in depth study, merely a spit balling of ideas that I have been mulling over and did some research upon, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
So, why was the first Metroid bad? Was it the gameplay? The confusing progression? The difficulty? The answer is: all of the above! There is very little about the first Metroid that worked, mainly its concept, but it was being held back by something: The technology of the time.
Let me tell you the brief history of the Diode, trust me it’s interesting: In 1904, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, had noticed a strange phenomena, that a direct electric current would only flow from a heated metal filament in the bulb to the other electrode only if the latter had a positive voltage. Later, John Ambrose Fleming would use this phenomena to invent a two-electrode vacuum tube rectifier, little did he know that this little device would play a major part in the history of electronics…
In 1946, the world’s first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, is made and at the time was the largest electronic machine ever made, with a total of 18.000 vacuum tubes and weighting in at a whopping 30 tons, it occupied a 160-square-meter room (roughly 5650,35 square-feet if you use the empirical system), suffice to say this is one huge computer! Imagine having one of these in your house? Well thank Alan Turing, because this is no reality we live in… Speaking of, have you thanked him yet? Alan Turing was a homosexual atheist that invented the first mechanical computer in WW2 to decipher The Enigma, a Nazi secret code that was used to pass forward secret attack plans, and was instrumental in the victory of the war, so thank you Alan, without you we wouldn’t be using our own personal computers:
In 1955 the first transistor radio was released in Japan by Sony, yes the same Sony that would later create the PlayStation, and it replaced the old vacuum tubes with semiconductor transistor devices, because of that radios became smaller, lighter and consumed less power, and fun fact: while trying to improve the yield of a transistor manufacturing process, the company’s R&D team accidentally the quantum mechanical effect of “tunneling”, I kid you not!
In 1965 Moore’s Law is announced, where Gordon Moore (who later became a co-founder of Intel) made a simple prediction: the integration rate of LSIs would double every 18 months, this implied that in 3 years it would quadruple and in 15 years it would become 1.000-fold denser. This prediction was made analysing historical trends of computer manufacturing, and such prediction turned out to be almost as exact as Moore predicted, here’s a graph that exemplifies what was predicted:
And it’s worth noting that there will be another graph that is eerily similar to this one, so pay attention to that…
In 1977 the world’s first personal computer was released, the Apple II. It was a commercial success and it helped Apple in its early growth to the industrial giant that it is today, and for the time it influenced the development for more personal computers and softwares for the general masses, removing ever so slowly the barrier of entry computers had at the time.
And finally… In 1983, all this advancement in computers and semiconductor technology has led us to this point, to the broader accessibility of family entertainment. A Japanese toy company at the time wanted to create a computer system specializing in computer games with an 8-bit CPU, it used a cartridge base system for easy software swap and it was as simple as plugging into your TV and using the personally made controllers to play! Of course, I am talking about the Family Computer, or for shorter, the FamiCom,but for many here in the west, it was known as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or yet again for shorter, the NES.
Phew It took us some time, but finally we reached the point that I wanted to make. It took us 79 years to reach the first console the Big N ever made, not the first video game console, but this one is worth mentioning since well… It’s Nintendo, say what you want about them nowadays (especially after the Switch 2 price drop) but they are incredibly influential to the history of video games, and also because their system pushed the envelope forward to the history of semiconductors, so without this piece of technology we would have skipped a step in our technological growth.
clap SO! To answer my own question, why was technology a limiting factor to the quality of Metroid? Well simple: The idea, at the time, was too ambitious for the technological prowess at the time, the team wanted to make a isolationist space adventure with 8 bits of processing power, and not one bit more to spare! It just was too impractical to make and it shows, there is no background art only a deathly void of nothing, the areas are too samey making you get lost with no point of reference and there is no map system, in a Metroid game? That’s a death sentence for the player and the game.
So does that mean the idea was bad?...No, it took two more games to show, but Super Metroid is still revered to this day as one of the all time classics of the gaming medium, and it’s a straight upgrade to what was done in the first attempt on the NES, so by all intents and purpose the idea was a good one!
So is the issue the technology that limited the games of the time? Well… Also no, because we have bits to spare today but for some reason we can’t release a game without a day 1 patch for crying out loud! So what is happening? Well, allow me to introduce this handy graphic I found:
The graph is self explanatory so I won’t be going in detail, but I will use it to illustrate my point: At the very beginning we have phase one, I would put games like Pong or anything you might find on a Atari on it, very basic and rudimentary gaming, as people not only figure out the tech but figure out what kind of games to make. In phase two, I would put the aforementioned Metroid and for a simpler example, the original Mario Bros. since they are polar opposites, one was a smashing success with its simple concept and great execution, while the other had ambitions but the tech wasn’t there yet. In phase three, essentially everything after the 8 bit era as we got into the “bit wars”, a more rudimentary “console wars” before Sony and Microsoft had their cock fighting with the PS3 and Xbox 360, but during this time we had the SNES and Sega Genesis going at it, with their whole 16 bits of super power and explosive exclusives, also creating their own sub war, the “mascot wars” with Mario and Sonic, their company reps being one compared to the other as to see which one was the “coolest” like, let’s be real, MegaMan is way cooler than these bozos, but it is worth mentioning that a bunch of genre defining games where born during this era, as the industry started to get a grasp at what works and what not works, while still pushing the envelope forward with more technically and conceptually complex games. And now, I would say that we are currently on phase four, that is the bubble of the industry is about to burst, as gamers and the industry as a whole realize the limitation, not only in tech but in concept, now I’ll be the last guy to say that “everything is recycled” because that guy is VERY annoying, but damn, everything needs to have souls combat… everything needs to be open world… everything needs to be connected to an online server at all times… yeah, the fatigue is real. So what’s the point? Is the industry forever doomed to repeat its own mistakes as a statement of its own hubris? Is the bubble gonna burst and we gonna realize the hard way the limitations not only in tech but in the creation process? Or is it all gonna fade away as people move on to more engaging experiences? Who knows maybe the next big thing to take over gaming might come out next year, the next month or the next week. The future is uncertain…
I reach the last segment of my article with a personal anecdote, as many of the old heads of the forum can remember, I left it for personal reasons as I wasn’t feeling good at the time, I’m still not 100% but I’m way better than what I used to be at the time, and during this time I kept thinking about writing this article, and among other things, I decided to replay Rise with the Sunbreak DLC, and suffice to say… I actually enjoyed my time this go around, why? I don’t know, something clicked this time, maybe it was the new Charge Blade moves, or the addition of both old and new monsters of the series (Lunagaron my beloved), or the sheer amount of content that rivals that of Generations Ultimate, but alas I really can’t pinpoint the reason why I’m enjoying my time with Rise this time… but that doesn’t really matter, does it?
My final say is this: If you played something you didn’t like, try to verbalize why, and after a few weeks, or months, or hell even years, try to play it again. Who knows, maybe you can be like me and enjoy it the second time as you give it another chance. As for the state of gaming, not all is bad, remember my Robocop example? Well, some months ago (roughly 5 to 6 months ago) Robocop: Rouge City came out, and from what I’ve seen of people playing it, it's fun! It’s just a game about Robert Cop, going around doing Robert Cop things in Old Detroit (I wanted to make a joke about the location being Detroit, but it actually is Detroit lol) and honestly, that’s everything a game of this kind needs to be, just fun times with a silly IP, so I guess Robocop got the Metroid treatment, that is it took a hell of a lot time to get something good to come out, but it did.
I look... I want to look hopefully into the future, because if not, what’s the point? I want things to be better, not only in gaming, but I guess as to not trail off the track I’ll keep strictly to gaming. There are a lot of releases that I’m looking forward to, thank God Metroid Prime 4 is coming to base Switch because I ain’t buying a Switch 2 for that game lol, and there are smaller releases I’m also looking forward to, the new Digimon games looks good, some smaller indi projects got my eye as I wishlist them on Steam, and overall the tech that’s coming out of big gaming might be lackluster, but all the small stuff from other companies look pretty nice, the handheld GameCube emulators look great! Among other handheld personal computers, I’m sure Alan Turing would look at today with a smile and a single tear of gleaming pride in his and our work…
Thank you all, and I hope everyone has a beautiful evening.
Signed: Hikari.EXE
Why? The game was “Too different”, even for World standards. The Silkbind skills were too strange, the game physics were too floaty and the monster roster was too lackluster, unlike the previous titles before World… Huh, now that I think about it, that's a sentiment I have for a lot of modern games, they just lack the same “Omph” the games that I grew up playing have. gasp No, it can’t be… Have I contracted NOSTALGITIS?
Yes, dear readers, today we are talking about the condition a bunch of gamers are contracting as of recent: Nostalgitis.
The symptoms are the following: Sour opinions on modern gaming, rose tinted eyesight for older games and a strange fascination on collecting era paraphernalia, but why is there an increase in this type of behavior? Are gamers just bitter people that can’t make up their minds, or many of their critiques hold weight when shined upon? That's what I wish to discuss with this article today: Nostalgitis, an illness or a symptom of a greater issue?
The present
So, when have these feelings of nostalgia started to bubble up in the community as a whole? I know, tough question considering people always look back with fondness to their formative years, playing on their console of choice and discovering games for the first time, but it is worth mentioning a boom in this type of discontent around the eighth generation consoles (PS4, Xbox One, Wii U) as the industry reached its peak in income and “hype” as some would put it. Every generation of consoles are always marked by heavy hitters and genre defining games; the fifth generation had Crash and Mario 64; the sixth had God of War, Metroid Prime and Halo; the seventh had Infamous, Mario Galaxy and Gears of War; and then the eighth had… Knack… And Re-Core… Hey at least Nintendo made Splatoon, right?! And Star Fox Zero…
Oh boy, what happened? Sure, these games where “launch titles” but hell, the Nintendo 64 launched with Mario 64, the PS1 with Rayman and the Xbox OG with FUCKING HALO! This, personally speaking, pinpoints the beginning of the concern with gamers: Where are we going next? For many, the new release of a new console came with the prospect of better graphics, better processing power, and most importantly, better gameplay, but the eighth gen started off with a wet fart, and we would only get better games, like GoW 4 and Breath of the Wild, down the line of the console’s life span. Sure, the heavy hitters of each gen only came out after a few years of the existence of many consoles, but they had something at least, personally I can’t pick out another game that had its start on the eighth gen, unlike the games I previously listed. How many games tried to live on current gen, only to die after its only release? How many games keep going despite exploring every possibility of its setting with another sequel that adds nothing new? And how many games never see the light of day because “there is no market”?
It's very frustrating the current state of gaming: studios are fractured, fans are raging, and companies are trying to make a quick buck on every single client they can sucker into buying their product. sigh At least we have what came before, right…?
The past
I’ll be real here chief… No. The past isn’t as great as you remember, there where many… MANY duds in the past of gaming; Do you remember the Kinect? Or the PlayStation Move? Or the FUCKING VIRTUA BOY!?
Yeah, some might be saying “Oh but it was only the consoles!” No, it wasn’t. The term “Halo Killer” exists, and the mere fact that it’s used as a derogatory term for any military sci-fi shooter of the time speaks volumes, and for anyone that wasn’t alive for that time, let me explain: Halo was a commercial success for Microsoft, so much so that people were buying OG Xboxes… Xboxs… Xboxsi? Whatever. People were buying the console JUST for Halo, yeah, it’s THAT good, so much so everyone wanted a piece of that Halo pie, so what did they do? They tried to replicate the style of the game… Without understanding what made it work, and every time a sci-fi shooter came out, the “genius” marketing team would label it as “The Halo killer” ... Of course, that didn’t work because we still refer to Halo as the peak of sci-fi shooters over other games like Haze… Or Advent Rising… Or Resistance… Or Destiny (btw, made by the original Halo studio) … Or anything after Halo 3, yeah not even its own series lived up to their fame, but that’s a story for another time.
Point is: There are a lot of bad games, and I mean A LOT. Very few gamers from the 80s kept their passion for the medium alive through the years, so they are the very few that can comment on the utter state of shit the original NES had, hell I’m 22 years old, I didn’t live in that age, my only contact with such games was through the selected, cherry picked hitters that would become main staples of The Big N, and through AVGN that made a living telling younger people how BAD these games where, I mean come on! Look at this:
This is a graph of the best-selling games of the NES, we all have great titles… All of them first party, excluding Tetris. Now I ask you, where is the Robocop game? Where is the Back to the Future game? Or the Ninja Turtles game? “Oh these are all IP picks, and established IP games suck” Not entirely true, as of recent we have some decent to amazing tie in games that make just for fans of the original work and for people first experiencing the IP through the game, but sure for the sake of argument let’s cut half of the NES library of shitty cash grab movie-games, we still have games such as Super Pitfall, Deadly Towers and even Metroid… Yes, as a Metroid fan, I must admit that the original Metroid was, indeed, terrible… But why was it bad?
Limitations and Creativity
I have had this idea brewing for a while, and along side some discussions outside of the forums, I came up with some theories regarding this topic, so it is important to state this: this is by NO means a in depth study, merely a spit balling of ideas that I have been mulling over and did some research upon, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
So, why was the first Metroid bad? Was it the gameplay? The confusing progression? The difficulty? The answer is: all of the above! There is very little about the first Metroid that worked, mainly its concept, but it was being held back by something: The technology of the time.
Let me tell you the brief history of the Diode, trust me it’s interesting: In 1904, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, had noticed a strange phenomena, that a direct electric current would only flow from a heated metal filament in the bulb to the other electrode only if the latter had a positive voltage. Later, John Ambrose Fleming would use this phenomena to invent a two-electrode vacuum tube rectifier, little did he know that this little device would play a major part in the history of electronics…
In 1946, the world’s first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, is made and at the time was the largest electronic machine ever made, with a total of 18.000 vacuum tubes and weighting in at a whopping 30 tons, it occupied a 160-square-meter room (roughly 5650,35 square-feet if you use the empirical system), suffice to say this is one huge computer! Imagine having one of these in your house? Well thank Alan Turing, because this is no reality we live in… Speaking of, have you thanked him yet? Alan Turing was a homosexual atheist that invented the first mechanical computer in WW2 to decipher The Enigma, a Nazi secret code that was used to pass forward secret attack plans, and was instrumental in the victory of the war, so thank you Alan, without you we wouldn’t be using our own personal computers:
In 1955 the first transistor radio was released in Japan by Sony, yes the same Sony that would later create the PlayStation, and it replaced the old vacuum tubes with semiconductor transistor devices, because of that radios became smaller, lighter and consumed less power, and fun fact: while trying to improve the yield of a transistor manufacturing process, the company’s R&D team accidentally the quantum mechanical effect of “tunneling”, I kid you not!
In 1965 Moore’s Law is announced, where Gordon Moore (who later became a co-founder of Intel) made a simple prediction: the integration rate of LSIs would double every 18 months, this implied that in 3 years it would quadruple and in 15 years it would become 1.000-fold denser. This prediction was made analysing historical trends of computer manufacturing, and such prediction turned out to be almost as exact as Moore predicted, here’s a graph that exemplifies what was predicted:
And it’s worth noting that there will be another graph that is eerily similar to this one, so pay attention to that…
In 1977 the world’s first personal computer was released, the Apple II. It was a commercial success and it helped Apple in its early growth to the industrial giant that it is today, and for the time it influenced the development for more personal computers and softwares for the general masses, removing ever so slowly the barrier of entry computers had at the time.
And finally… In 1983, all this advancement in computers and semiconductor technology has led us to this point, to the broader accessibility of family entertainment. A Japanese toy company at the time wanted to create a computer system specializing in computer games with an 8-bit CPU, it used a cartridge base system for easy software swap and it was as simple as plugging into your TV and using the personally made controllers to play! Of course, I am talking about the Family Computer, or for shorter, the FamiCom,but for many here in the west, it was known as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or yet again for shorter, the NES.
Phew It took us some time, but finally we reached the point that I wanted to make. It took us 79 years to reach the first console the Big N ever made, not the first video game console, but this one is worth mentioning since well… It’s Nintendo, say what you want about them nowadays (especially after the Switch 2 price drop) but they are incredibly influential to the history of video games, and also because their system pushed the envelope forward to the history of semiconductors, so without this piece of technology we would have skipped a step in our technological growth.
clap SO! To answer my own question, why was technology a limiting factor to the quality of Metroid? Well simple: The idea, at the time, was too ambitious for the technological prowess at the time, the team wanted to make a isolationist space adventure with 8 bits of processing power, and not one bit more to spare! It just was too impractical to make and it shows, there is no background art only a deathly void of nothing, the areas are too samey making you get lost with no point of reference and there is no map system, in a Metroid game? That’s a death sentence for the player and the game.
So does that mean the idea was bad?...No, it took two more games to show, but Super Metroid is still revered to this day as one of the all time classics of the gaming medium, and it’s a straight upgrade to what was done in the first attempt on the NES, so by all intents and purpose the idea was a good one!
So is the issue the technology that limited the games of the time? Well… Also no, because we have bits to spare today but for some reason we can’t release a game without a day 1 patch for crying out loud! So what is happening? Well, allow me to introduce this handy graphic I found:
The graph is self explanatory so I won’t be going in detail, but I will use it to illustrate my point: At the very beginning we have phase one, I would put games like Pong or anything you might find on a Atari on it, very basic and rudimentary gaming, as people not only figure out the tech but figure out what kind of games to make. In phase two, I would put the aforementioned Metroid and for a simpler example, the original Mario Bros. since they are polar opposites, one was a smashing success with its simple concept and great execution, while the other had ambitions but the tech wasn’t there yet. In phase three, essentially everything after the 8 bit era as we got into the “bit wars”, a more rudimentary “console wars” before Sony and Microsoft had their cock fighting with the PS3 and Xbox 360, but during this time we had the SNES and Sega Genesis going at it, with their whole 16 bits of super power and explosive exclusives, also creating their own sub war, the “mascot wars” with Mario and Sonic, their company reps being one compared to the other as to see which one was the “coolest” like, let’s be real, MegaMan is way cooler than these bozos, but it is worth mentioning that a bunch of genre defining games where born during this era, as the industry started to get a grasp at what works and what not works, while still pushing the envelope forward with more technically and conceptually complex games. And now, I would say that we are currently on phase four, that is the bubble of the industry is about to burst, as gamers and the industry as a whole realize the limitation, not only in tech but in concept, now I’ll be the last guy to say that “everything is recycled” because that guy is VERY annoying, but damn, everything needs to have souls combat… everything needs to be open world… everything needs to be connected to an online server at all times… yeah, the fatigue is real. So what’s the point? Is the industry forever doomed to repeat its own mistakes as a statement of its own hubris? Is the bubble gonna burst and we gonna realize the hard way the limitations not only in tech but in the creation process? Or is it all gonna fade away as people move on to more engaging experiences? Who knows maybe the next big thing to take over gaming might come out next year, the next month or the next week. The future is uncertain…
The Future…?
I reach the last segment of my article with a personal anecdote, as many of the old heads of the forum can remember, I left it for personal reasons as I wasn’t feeling good at the time, I’m still not 100% but I’m way better than what I used to be at the time, and during this time I kept thinking about writing this article, and among other things, I decided to replay Rise with the Sunbreak DLC, and suffice to say… I actually enjoyed my time this go around, why? I don’t know, something clicked this time, maybe it was the new Charge Blade moves, or the addition of both old and new monsters of the series (Lunagaron my beloved), or the sheer amount of content that rivals that of Generations Ultimate, but alas I really can’t pinpoint the reason why I’m enjoying my time with Rise this time… but that doesn’t really matter, does it?
My final say is this: If you played something you didn’t like, try to verbalize why, and after a few weeks, or months, or hell even years, try to play it again. Who knows, maybe you can be like me and enjoy it the second time as you give it another chance. As for the state of gaming, not all is bad, remember my Robocop example? Well, some months ago (roughly 5 to 6 months ago) Robocop: Rouge City came out, and from what I’ve seen of people playing it, it's fun! It’s just a game about Robert Cop, going around doing Robert Cop things in Old Detroit (I wanted to make a joke about the location being Detroit, but it actually is Detroit lol) and honestly, that’s everything a game of this kind needs to be, just fun times with a silly IP, so I guess Robocop got the Metroid treatment, that is it took a hell of a lot time to get something good to come out, but it did.
I look... I want to look hopefully into the future, because if not, what’s the point? I want things to be better, not only in gaming, but I guess as to not trail off the track I’ll keep strictly to gaming. There are a lot of releases that I’m looking forward to, thank God Metroid Prime 4 is coming to base Switch because I ain’t buying a Switch 2 for that game lol, and there are smaller releases I’m also looking forward to, the new Digimon games looks good, some smaller indi projects got my eye as I wishlist them on Steam, and overall the tech that’s coming out of big gaming might be lackluster, but all the small stuff from other companies look pretty nice, the handheld GameCube emulators look great! Among other handheld personal computers, I’m sure Alan Turing would look at today with a smile and a single tear of gleaming pride in his and our work…
Thank you all, and I hope everyone has a beautiful evening.
Signed: Hikari.EXE
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