100% agree. AAA games continue to ape Oscar bait Hollywood films. Like, don’t you think it’s weird how all this time, there isn’t a genre of comedic games? Comedies are a massive film genre, but I bet you despite the thousands upon thousands of games developed per year, you probably couldn’t even name 100 comedic games. Not games that have funny one-liners or funny characters, but games developed from the ground up to be comedic like how a comedy is written and directed as a comedy. And perhaps the worst part of it is that due to its interactivity, games are actually well-suited for comedy, especially physical comedy. Ludonarrative dissonance can be better resolved through lampshading in a comedic game. But because physical comedy is considered low-brow, AAA games have to chase after “emotional moments” that frankly rarely deliver. This is either done through completely noninteractive cutscenes (ie a film within a game) or something like HL2 where all the gravitas of the scene is completely undermined by the player bunnyhopping and hitting NPCs with the crowbar.

Mods make it really obvious games have massive comedic potential and are at their best when there’s a degree of levity. Skyrim mods that turn swords into dildos and dragons into flying Thomas the Tank Engine far more embody the spirit of gaming than anything else.

This whole thing is a nothingburger with the right cheat codes, but because modern gaming^TM can’t have cheat codes for some reason, we’re stuck with these pointless arguments. It’s simple:

1. Make the game as hard or easy as you want.

2. Add a million cheat codes that gamers can use to customize how they want their personal game experience to be.

The main difference between god mode cheat code and a no-death option is that there’s an understanding that if you enter in cheat codes, the game might go off the rails with sequence breaking or even softlocking, which can be overcome be inputting even more cheat codes like level warping.

It is done. L’Alliance des États du Sahel is official:
https://xcancel.com/AAPRP/status/1809703829480587759

Today, a monumental step for Pan-Africanism has been taken again. The AES has formally been founded by Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. This will have ramifications on African politics for years to come. Regardless of the obstacles, Africans will continue to move forward.

Daily reminder this loser has been hate-lurking Hexbear for months now with alts like HexbearHatesJews and HexbearLovesFelons. They always pick thelemmy.club for some reason. Their alt is always Hexbearblahblahblah@thelemmy.club.

The real dividing line is between when games were arcade-dominant and when games were/are console-dominant, which also maps pretty well with when games started to be 3d. The only flaw in this conception is how to fit mobile gaming into this since mobile games are massively popular but are part of its own niche instead of replacing console games.

I don’t think we differ that much. I mostly consider 360/PS3/Wii to be modern gaming. It’s not even early modern gaming. It’s just modern gaming to me. It’s like comparing 19th century English vs 21st century English. 19th century English isn’t even Shakespearean English, which is considered early modern English by linguists. 19th century English is English with various archaisms that no one uses in 2024, but it’s still essentially just modern English.

I guess I see the N64 situated in a time when big changes were happening in gaming. Besides the obvious advent of 3d, this was around the time when gaming stopped becoming arcade-dominant and transitioned towards being console-dominant, which has huge implications (arcades existed in third places while consoles were privately owned). It’s for these two reasons that I wouldn’t call N64 retro (or lump N64 in a different historic period than the NES/SNES if we’re just using “retro” to mean “old”).

I think there’s a degree of millennial revisionism where the spotlight is shown on retro/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-particular-period-of-gaming console games when they weren’t even the dominant form of gaming during that time period. You’re not going to see video essays of The Simpsons arcade game or Alien vs Predator or Space Harrier anytime soon even though those were massively popular arcade games way back in the day. You can’t really compare arcade cabinet sales vs console game sales because obviously people weren’t individually buying cabinets to put in their garages but buying cabinets to put in a mall or a laundromat or a pizza place.

The dominant form of gaming was arcades. You can see this very clearly whenever movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s reference gaming. It’s almost always some kind of arcade game. The Simpsons’ first reference of a console game (Bonestorm) was a Season 7 episode that aired 9 months before the N64 dropped in NA and even that reference was largely a Mortal Kombat reference (Liu Kang knockoff getting owned by a tank, Goro mirror match in a bridge stage that every arcade Mortal Kombat game had). Everything else before that were parodies of arcade games. You have something like Terminator 2 where you saw John Connor briefly playing Afterburner 2 at a mall while being stalked by the T-1000.

I guess my point is that regardless of what particular label someone uses, the development of gaming can be split into various periods just like how the history of painting can be split into various periods. It’s just weird to have a floating label that basically means “old.” When I was a kid, “old games” were essentially just pre-1983 crash games while “modern games” were post-1983 crash games because gaming was only two decades old. But now, gaming is a little over half a century old at this point.

In the end, I think “retro” is used in gaming in the same way “classic” is used in film and movie. Casablanca and The Godfather are both classic films even though they have nothing in common outside of being old Hollywood films.

To me retro is not just about age but also how those particular games are historically situated within the development of gaming. Retro implies pre-3d (console) gaming, so N64/PS1 onwards isn’t retro no matter how old those consoles are relative to the present. Retro itself can be broadly divided between pre-1983 crash (Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout, Centipede) and post-1983 crash (Contra, Streets of Rage, Final Fantasy 1, Wolfenstein 3D). The early retro games people remember are all arcade games while the late retro games are where you start seeing franchises like Mario and Zelda.

Due to how janky early 3d is, the N64/PS1 generation is at this awkward period of time where it’s not really retro anymore but is not modern either. I mostly see it as a transitional period between late retro gaming (SNES) and early modern gaming (Gamecube, PS2).

I always miss the HexbearHateJews alts before they get banned smfh