Much anyway, they have changed from the days of pong to now the abundance of video games available for anyone to lose themselves to for hours on end. This is more about the argument heard whenever I try to talk to anyone who doesn’t play games and they only say how games nowadays only consist of “point and shoot”. Not only is this wrong but also hypocritical when they follow it up to say how they should go back to the classics such as Space Invaders or Pacman.
I remember spending my school Computing lessons playing Space Invaders and Snake on the games window my school stupidly gave us access to. Not that I’m complaining, spending my hour looking a wave after wave of 8bit aliens making their slow way down the screen was much more entertaining that Microsoft Excel. But this is where the first problem with the mentality of viewing the classics in such high regard while looking down on modern games for the same reasons.
We’ll talk about Doom first, any iteration of the title, from the first release to the ‘Brutal’ edition and then the most recent soft reboot with its sequel being announced at E3 this year. I’ve spoken to people who I have spent hours celebrating Space Invaders with, then when I turn the conversation to modern games they all have the same response, “just point and shoot”. Most people would have seen where I’m going with this already, but to complain about games being just point and shoot but then to say how great Space Invaders is when the whole point of that game is to point and shoot at aliens.
It’s not the only time either, people talking of the brilliance of Super Mario for its challenging platforming and then to put down the likes of Prince of Persia saying how its just jumping around from platform to platform. Or to say how the games don’t have boss battles like they used to but then have clearly never seen the hell in digital form that is Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls.
The lack of strategy in games that came from the likes of Snake in years passed when XCOM exists in the world make Snake’s strategy look like it was drawn on the back of a happy meal box in crayon. Or to commend Asteroids for its face paced gameplay but then to look at the likes of flying segments of any video game with an air of distain for no reason other than it’s now in 3D.
The only game to not be recreated in the modern day is Tetris, but even then there have been attempts at modern releases of the classic that just ends up being Tetris HD. Essentially the main aims of games have not changed over the years, the only real difference has been the editions of story, 3D graphics and sadly micro-transactions.
The Nerdy Bartender 