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Joined: Feb 01 2007 Posts: 31

OK. Right now I'm on my 26's and I've noticed that, for a while, I haven't played any videogames. The only thing I play nowadays is Street Fighter Collection (SF II Turbo) with my brothers and that's all.
The last two games I played were FF X and RE4 and that was 5 years ago. This wouldn't come as a shock to me if it wasn't for the fact that when I was younger, say from the age of 4 until the age of 17, I was a major videogamer. There where points when my whole life revolved around a particular game or console and I'd become obsessed and now I have absolutely no interest for playing any new games, sometimes I like to play Mario Bros or Mario Kart for nostalgia's sake, but the new game industry is not catching my attention. I'd like to think that it's because I've grown up and have other interests, but sadly, they remain the same, I mean, I check sydlexia.com on a daily, no grown up would do that. Also I like to blame the videogame industry because they're way too graphic driven, they don't put much thought into video games anymore and maybe I miss the simplicity of games from the past, but, for example, I really liked RE4 or FF X and those are games that are not totally simple, so maybe it's because the plot of nowadays games suck.

Any thoughts, anyone? Is anyone going through this? Am I the only one who thinks that videogames plot sucks these days?

Wizard Joined: Jun 12 2009 Posts: 4209

I don't think they suck, I'm just finding less and less time to be able to play. It's not fair. Crying

Posted: Aug 17 2010 08:36 pm

I'm in the same boat as Drew, to be honest. I keep really busy with online pbps and stuff so I usually don't have much time for video gaming anymore. I got a 360 last year but all me and the wife do is play zombie games on it. And when I'm not home, she plays Morrowind or KOTOR II

Posted: Aug 17 2010 09:08 pm

I'm like this with movies and television. Instead of finding time to watch series that everyone I know tells me I'll like, I rationalize and systematically find fault with it and even write reviews on how a show sucks while hoping no one notices I didn't watch it. Once I hear about a show, I decide how much I hate it based on its ratio of fans to haters. The greater this number, the more I choose to not like it. (Anything with haters and fans in equal numbers, such as Twilight and Justin Bieber, are not worth my attention.) I then do research on it, read a few prolific positive and negative reviews, make my own insights to it based on things I actually have seen, and end with a somewhat informed negative opinion of it, all without ever seeing a second of the show itself. After years of hating anything "epic" and "awesome", mostly shows that sell themselves on how they are so rather than its own merits, I have media discrimination down to a science. Does this make me a bad person?

Posted: Aug 17 2010 09:09 pm

Drew Linky wrote:

I don't think they suck, I'm just finding less and less time to be able to play. It's not fair. Crying

Ditto, my friend. Life's not fair, is it? Sad

Posted: Aug 17 2010 09:30 pm

The-Excel wrote:

I'm like this with movies and television. Instead of finding time to watch series that everyone I know tells me I'll like, I rationalize and systematically find fault with it and even write reviews on how a show sucks while hoping no one notices I didn't watch it. Once I hear about a show, I decide how much I hate it based on its ratio of fans to haters. The greater this number, the more I choose to not like it. (Anything with haters and fans in equal numbers, such as Twilight and Justin Bieber, are not worth my attention.) I then do research on it, read a few prolific positive and negative reviews, make my own insights to it based on things I actually have seen, and end with a somewhat informed negative opinion of it, all without ever seeing a second of the show itself. After years of hating anything "epic" and "awesome", mostly shows that sell themselves on how they are so rather than its own merits, I have media discrimination down to a science. Does this make me a bad person?

No, it just makes you a shitty reviewer. It'd be like if Ebert just listened to what other people said about movies and read their wiki stubs without actually seeing the movie and then did a review. Cinematography, pacing and expressiveness of actors can be a big part of a show or movie, and it seems like you're just robbing yourself of experiences. If you have enough time to do all this research and make insights, why not just watch the damn shows?

Posted: Aug 17 2010 10:27 pm

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

I have grown to severely dislike the Japanese Anime style that has corrupted so many RPGs. Still there are great games out there that are worth your time. Borderlands is my latest drug of choice.

Posted: Aug 17 2010 11:09 pm

We bought Borderlands back when we still had a 27 inch flatscreen and it was hard as fuck to play splitscreen with my wife, so we sold it back. Now that we've got a 46 inch one, we'll be picking it back up, because it was really fun, just so hard to see.

Posted: Aug 18 2010 12:57 am

aeonic wrote:

No, it just makes you a shitty reviewer. It'd be like if Ebert just listened to what other people said about movies and read their wiki stubs without actually seeing the movie and then did a review. Cinematography, pacing and expressiveness of actors can be a big part of a show or movie, and it seems like you're just robbing yourself of experiences. If you have enough time to do all this research and make insights, why not just watch the damn shows?

I just can't bring myself to and my way of watching things is a lot easier. I've seen enough shows to be able to guess how two shows about the same subject matter differ. Since my predictions have been accurate enough so far, why stop now? Plus, since I'm studying film, I have to limit what I watch so as to not accidentally rip something recent off.

Posted: Aug 18 2010 01:20 am

The-Excel wrote:

aeonic wrote:

No, it just makes you a shitty reviewer. It'd be like if Ebert just listened to what other people said about movies and read their wiki stubs without actually seeing the movie and then did a review. Cinematography, pacing and expressiveness of actors can be a big part of a show or movie, and it seems like you're just robbing yourself of experiences. If you have enough time to do all this research and make insights, why not just watch the damn shows?

I just can't bring myself to and my way of watching things is a lot easier. I've seen enough shows to be able to guess how two shows about the same subject matter differ. Since my predictions have been accurate enough so far, why stop now? Plus, since I'm studying film, I have to limit what I watch so as to not accidentally rip something recent off.

That last statement especially makes the least amount of sense out of everything that I've ever heard in the last couple of days. Unless by that statement you mean ripping them off unconsciously, one would think that you'd want to take in even more media to avoid such. Accurate enough is all well and good, but what if one of those shows you skipped is exactly what you end up copying? Especially considering you're looking for a job in one of those fields, presumably, since you're studying film, having a better knowledge about what stylistics are currently popular could help you, and knowing how a show is directed, catching the cinematography, would be invaluable to you. If it's your thing and it works for you, whatever, good for you, but it just doesn't seem right somehow. Just my take, bud.

Posted: Aug 18 2010 02:10 am

I'm not doing this for popularity; I'm doing it to be different. If you think I'm in this for the money, you are totally, totally wrong. I'm fully aware that it's impossible to be completely original, but at least I can legitimately claim that I didn't intentionally take any cues from obscure shows, useless as that is. These days, when I watch something, the most frequent comment I seem to make is, "That's not how I would have done it." When you're trying to be original, the last thing you need is too many cues. If I want to make sure what I'm doing hasn't yet been overdone, instead of watching a bunch of popular shows, I can just check TV Tropes just to be safe.

Posted: Aug 18 2010 02:17 am

See, one part of what you said is a little problematic for me. There's this idea floating around that being different and being fiscally successful or popular are things that are unrelated. Having a wealth of references to draw from isn't necessarily going to inhibit your ability to deviate from them, and again, it's my thought it could even help you. I wouldn't think you could have too many cues, considering you'd have a better reference point for what other people are already doing. This mostly comes from having lived with a film major during college who was an absolute cinemaphile. He's now doing rendering and stuff as he gets money together to do his own film.