[Barrin92]

>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children

if you spend some time on youtube and look at people too young to even have been around play through those games it just becomes evident very quickly how wrong that assessment is. There's an energy even among young audiences when they're playing games like Metal Gear Solid 1&2 for the first time that you hardly see for anything coming out today.

There was a level of artistic talent in that generation, also in animation of the time, that simply doesn't really have a parallel today and brushing it off as nostalgia has a lot to do with he inability of people to recognize that there's no linear progress in art. Talent can be lost, some periods are better than others, just having more cpu and gpu cycles available does not produce better art.

The fact that almost 30 years after games like MGS it's still Kojima and a lot of Japanese guys now with increasingly gray hair who end up getting a lot of awards and pushing the envelope that should tell you something.

[sapphicsnail]

I think people forget there were a ton of shit SNES/PSX/whatever games. I personally have a soft spot for the 16 bit era but there are plenty of indie games coming out that are just as beautiful and creative. There's also way more exploration with narrative structure now then there was back then.

[vlunkr]

I can name 2 games too. Look at games like animal well or balatro. They’re wildly original and not made by old Japanese dudes.

[Barrin92]

yes but it's important to note they're indie games, on the periphery of the culture for a reason. Animal Well is an explicit 16bit scanlines retro game. The first game that comes to your mind is one harkening back to the aesthetic of the 90s. In 1998 you had, and this is of the top of my head: MGS, Starcraft, Thief, Half Life, Baldurs Gate, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, Xenogears, Unreal and I'm probably forgetting some all in the same year.

That's not just games but entire modes of expressions and genres being invented. So successful the industry is still occupied with reproducing those franchises, not inventing new ones.

Animal Well was great, but it's also so exceptional now, like Expedition 33, that people frantically celebrate each AA title in an otherwise extremely bleak culture.

[vlunkr]

To each their own, but I don’t know how you can call it bleak. This is a golden age of gaming if there ever has been one. So many phenomenal games, amazing sales, way more cross-platform games. Yeah there are assembly line AAA games, just don’t play them.

[recursive]

It kind of reminds me of "No good music comes out anymore". There's more music coming out now than ever before. It's all bad? No. It's just that the music with the biggest marketing budget isn't to your taste. Whatever you like, even if you don't know it exists yet, there's new music coming out to your taste right now. It might take you some effort to find it.

[GoblinSlayer]

That's a systemic problem of sorts. First, there are already more games than you can possibly play. Second, modern games contain a lot of bullshit and are not in your taste. Third, you need a whopping battlestation to play even pixelart platformers. It's not clear if modern games are even worth to bother.

[pjerem]

Look at my list here [1] but I think it’s coming back. Sure the big studios are all collapsing from everywhere and extracting value from everywhere like any shitty corporations. Nintendo feels like they are surviving a little more but even them are more and more doing corporate shit.

But what I see is also happening in parallel, is that the people nostalgic from the 90s era of video games are now 30 to 40, are now senior programmers and they are determined to create another batch of truly good games.

Sure the biggest studios have the biggest marketing budget but when you read a little about them, they are just all slowly dying. Most news about big old studios are about firing thousands of people, being bought by other corporations who will also fire people.

Sure, Expedition 33 feels like an outlier, but it’s just a game from ex Ubisoft employees. Ubisoft which is sadly also slowly dying.

—- [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821175

[necovek]

I think Nintendo and Sony were almost the pioneers of "corporate shit": yes, Nintendo has a bit different style of gameplay they target, but their business practices have been corporate-protectionism for decades.