2023's Remakes Are A Reminder That We Really Did Have It Better

Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, and Metroid Prime are linear games that actually let you explore.

[Flawlessmic]

Yep those older games ftw , none of the games I played as a kid were loaded with all this rubbish bloat that's fills our games now

[isarai]

Complete experiences out the box packed full of things to keep you busy long after you beat it, so by the time the next game came around, the memory of that series or studio was still fresh in your mind and you could trust the thought of buying the new one. Some games still follow that philosophy, but it's so extremely rare in the AAA space, a bit more common in the mid tier market, but nothing like things used to be

[MrBaskerville]

Except most games from that time period sucked. I don't want to go back, games are better now than ever. There's actually variety, that wasn't really the order if the day on ps3. If you liked hyper lineat cover shooters and fps's with brown colors and bald mainguys, then sure. But I like horror games, Immersive sims, turn based jrpgs, boomer shooters and stuff like that. All the cool stuff that has been making a comeback in recent years. Good thing now is that indies have improved enough to fill out the AA space, so we aren't overly reliant on AAA anymore.

On ps3 you could play AAA games, artsy indies or hope that Japanese developers didn't drop the ball. Even Fromsoftware had a rough couple of years before Armored Core 4.

[MrBaskerville]

Just the perspective of a person who liked games with depth and who hates boring ass tutorials and turret sequences. Almost quit gaming back then. Luckily it got better.

Ps1-2 era and 90s pc gaming was amazing. Only 2007-2009 sucked major ass. With a handful of exceptions.

[0hMyGandhi]

2007 had Bioshock, Halo 3, God of War 2, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Crysis, Uncharted, The Orange Box, Super Mario Galaxy, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, Forza 2, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Unreal Tournament 3, Skate, Super Paper Mario, STALKER.

2008 had Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4, Dead Space, Persona 4, Mirror's Edge, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Little Big Planet, Gears of War 2, Braid, Burnout Paradise, Battlefield: Bad Company, Resistance 2, Fable 2, Prince of Persia, Soul Calibur IV, Ninja Gaiden 2.

2009 had Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 2, Uncharted 2, Resident Evil 5, Borderlands, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Infamous, Assassin's Creed 2, FEAR 2, Killzone 2, New Super Mario Bros, Ratchet and Clank: A crack in time, Halo 3: ODST, Prototype and Bayonetta.

Selecting that specific date range of 2007-2009 forced me to look it up, because I always remembered those years as being absolutely incredible for gaming. I ended up typing every title by hand and listing the games I personally played, so there's probably even more.

2007, in particular was amazing for games, but also just as good with movies, with There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men fighting it out for Best Picture.

[MrBaskerville]

@OhmyGhandi
There is some good stuff, but living through those years it took forever. And most genres that I enjoy were borderline dead because they were deemed "too old". I remember you had to research games beforehand just because there was a risk that they had made some stupid respawn system like in Prince of Persia where you were borderline immortal, because challenge was archaic.

And half the games you list are games that I would deem "just okay" stuff like Resistance 2, Crysis, Halo 3, Mirrors edge, Fable 2 to name a few. Didn't really enjoy those, so the list grows small. Try remembering stuff you didn't list also. I did start enjoying the generation more when I got a Ds and a Wii to supplement my ps3. But those three combined is just yhe experience of owning either a Switch or a Ps4 these days in terms of variety.

[MrBaskerville]

Some ps3 highlights for me were Demons Souls, Armored Core 4-5, Dark Souls 1-2, MGS4 (though still the worst mgs), Resistance 1 (slightly better than 2, but not much), Persona 4 Arena, Monkey Island 1-2 rerelease, Catherine, Dragons Dogma, Skyrim, Fallout 3 (ish) GT 5-6, and now Im drawing blanks.

Ds was a goldmine, but didn't notice until long after. Wii was also nice, reminded me that I really liked platformers, Galaxy 2 might be my favourite game of the era alongside Demons Souls. Pc had good horror with Amnesia and Penumbra and loved Stalker when I finally managed to get a pc that could run it :p. It killed my first laptop.

Had I owned an xbox I would have been very satisfied with Lost odyssey and Blue Dragon. Alan Wake was ufortunately a bit of a letdown for me.

[0hMyGandhi]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply (didn't realize you had responded but that was because you had to reply to your own comment, which is one quirk about N4G that is utterly obnoxious).

I didn't mention Amnesia because Dark Descent came out in 2010, but Penumbra definitely is up there (and it came out in 2007, with Black Plague and Requiem coming out in 2008)

I get that Crysis and Halo 3 aren't your bag, but regardless of our opinion one way or the other, those were absolutely goliath AAA releases.

'07 in particular, with Bioshock, God of War 2, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and Uncharted alone make that year not only one of the best years in gaming, but a fundamentally transformative moment in game design and world-building. The cultural impact of those releases affect game development to this day.

"Ps1-2 era and 90s pc gaming was amazing"
Absolutely. I agree with this one thousand percent. Though I was a console gamer for most of the 90's, when I loaded up some good 'ol Quake 3: Arena or Unreal Tournament or No One Lives Forever, that's true gaming bliss. As for consoles, we may never get back to PS1/PS2 levels of output and that is an absolute tragedy. Much of the niche-genre experiments we could routinely pick up at Blockbuster on PS1-2 are relegated to STEAM or GOG, and put it out with as much polish as the (probably) tiny dev team could provide.

[moomoo319]

Facts. Playing Mass Effect legendary edition right now.

[IMissJimRyan]

I don't think so. When you think to remaster a game you pick just the best games from an era to do that. Obviously, we get a sensation that games were better because we remaster only the best games.

But in 10 or 15 years from now some company will remaster games like The Witcher 3, Mario Odyssey, Zelda BotW, God of War, Final Fantasy XVI or some other really good games from this era and people will say that the past was better.

It's just the selection thar remasters make that gives that impression. Each era has its gems and turds.

[CrimsonWing69]

You can't deny the variety/amount of releases and the quality.

Let me put it in this perspective:

We got 3 Final Fantasy games on the PS1 as well as gems like Parasite Eve 1 and 2, Xenogears, Vagrant Story, etc.

We got 3 Resident Evil games, 2 Dino Crisis games, and 2 Breath of Fire games from Capcom.

There's some amazing games now, but if you look at the amount and just the sheer variety for any genre you can think of, the older consoles delivered far faaaaar more.

I honestly consider the PS1 and PS2 to be the golden era of gaming.

[IMissJimRyan]

I don't think so. For me it's some kind of selective memory. There's a lot more genres and options nowadays and series that are as good as or even better than those.

See, we can argue that maybe the output from big studios have slowed down a lot and some of the greats from the past are not so great anymore. We have less and worse resident evil? Maybe yes. But we have amazing games like the witcher, Horizon or God of War.

If we consider the indie scene the amount of variety is orders of magnitude bigger.

For each great game from the past we can list 3 from the last decade from different studios or series.

The past was great, no deny on that, but the present is way bigger and better.

[MrBaskerville]

I feel like ps1 and 2 were strong, but we are at a point where you can play the old stuff and have a blast, but there's also new stuff like Octopath Traveller 2 and stuff thrown on top of everything. Feels like the best time to game because of availability, still could be even better, you still need emulators more than I would want, but there's just so much to play with the old and the new things combined.

There's also some major issues in AAA, but the worst offenders are easy to identify and avoid. There's always something new and cool to play in both AAA and the indie scene, unless your genre of preference is games with turret sequences.

[shinoff2183]

I take it a step further Crimson I'd add snes ps1 ps2 era. Snes had fantastic games then ps1 came along and kept the bar high , ps2 came and upped it really high. Then everything washed with ps3 360 way to many first person shooter and focus on online play.
Not to say there weren't good games on them(ps3 360) at all.

I feel gaming is in a good spot now to an extent. Indies are doing an incredible job making up for top companies not taking risk anymore. Ps4 and now ps5 are doing awesome and hopefully the Xbox finally brings it

[shinoff2183]

Loco

Far as the indie scene, it was pretty prevalent back during snes, ps1, and even ps2. Alot of games back then were probably indie they just weren't called indie. Term indie is something more recent.

[X-23]

Absolutely, this comes from Corporations trying to mimic the success of a handful of games that where doing something different or special instead at the time, instead of letting their dev teams develop titles they really wanted to.
Dark Soul's becomes popular, tons of games that want to be like it, Fortnite here comes the Battle Royales, Insert Live Service games, The Witcher 3 is what Assassin's Creed started wanting to be so bad, the list goes on honestly that's just a few examples, we used to have FPS games with interesting multiplayer mechanics, but because everyone was CoD crazy those other games weren't as lucrative those games died and CoD took what made them popular implemented them in their game for 1 or 2 games then moved on to something else and now look at where it's at.

[Demetrius]

Honestly more games back then felt complete, rarely seen glitches like that, I was playing crackdown 1 earlier on the 360 and saints row 1&2, games felt so accomplished back then, don't get me wrong we still have series that deliver, horizon, dying light series, spiderman 2018, but they are so scarce nowadays

[FinalFantasyFanatic]

I remember playing DOA2 on the PS2, all those fighters/costumes/unlockables. .. Modern DOA paywalls you a bit and you don't get anywhere near the same amount of unlockables or costumes abaked into the game at release.

[Demetrius]

Well dam lol

[FinalFantasyFanatic]

@Demetrius,
Yeah, we were really eating good back in the PS2 and before days, it was disappointing when we got to the PS3/360 onwards.