I'm more modern leaning myself. A lot of my favorite games these days simply don't exist on retro systems, things like Metro, STALKER, Fallout (Lots of Post Apocalyptic lol), so for me, there's plenty to enjoy with modern, but there's of course good retro stuff. For me, it's probably 75% Modern/25% Retro in terms of playing.
I suppose there's a few exceptions. But a video game hasn't truly impressed me in atleast 4 years. Back in the 90s a no name developer could release a game, and make profit without even getting the loyalities. Now most can't even afford to advertise there game let alone turn a profit. So what you get are a few big players left who have monoplised things for the most part selling the same crap what sells, not what drives creativity, and original video games. But there's a few still around that get through the cracks still.
It wasn't really any different back then either. Tons of bad sequels, tons of sequels that really didn't add a lot more to the original game, shitty, shitty, games made by developers who don't know any better, games just being made to see what would stick, there was A LOT of that back then. Nowadays it's just done at different budget levels with larger gaps between the big guys and small guys. I'm regularly finding amazing games every year or at least every other year. Some genres are doing better than others for sure, but I feel there's plenty of good in the modern market. It just needs to hurry up and sort out all the sketchy stuff that's cropped up in the past few years involving microtransactions, free to play, and rushed development times.
Exactly. People look on past generations with rose-colored glasses and forget all the bad stuff. This is even easier for younger generations that weren't around when these systems were big - I clearly remember rental store shelves being full of commercialized shovelware based on every mascot imaginable - the 7-Up Spot, Crash Test Dummies, the Noid - you name it. Every corporation had to have a game based on their brand/movie/whatever, and quality was not high on their list of priorities.
It's also easier to look at the horrible games and think "well everyone knows Deadly Towers and Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde suck" and not realize that when we were kids no one DID know that until they bought (for $50....) or rented them. I'd say the bad games of those generations are worse than the majority of the bad games on systems today - at least bad games today typically work, back then that wasn't even a guarantee. And no, this isn't a Nintendo vs Sega or whatever thing, it was the same across the board.
THEN you had the shoddy arcade ports that we settled for because that was the best you could get at the time. I bought my SNES for Street Fighter II - I had been a big C64 / Amiga gamer for a while, not owning a console since I sold my NES to buy my C64, and that game is what brought me back. And it was fun, but still a far cry from the arcade. Having an arcade perfect port at home was unheard of back then, and it was something I remember my friends and I constantly talking about in a "wouldn't that be AWESOME" kind of way. When I first played Soul Calibur on the DC then went & played the arcade version I was floored - the home version was vastly superior to the arcade. We had arrived.
So yeah, it's not that I haven't played the right games. I played anything I could get my hands on as a kid because my options were limited. It's more the fact that I've already lived through all of that and I don't have any desire to go back. Like kamikazekeeg said, a lot of my favorite games today were not even remotely possible on old systems. I remember being frustrated with point & click adventure games, because I couldn't pick up whatever I wanted and get by the situations however I imagined. Now we have the Elder Scrolls & Fallout games where you can pick up anything that isn't nailed down and think up creative solutions to problems. And it's only getting better.
If you haven't been impressed by a new game in the past 4 years, I'd say YOU were playing the wrong games.
But I still think it's mostly a matter of not being able to truly appreciate what we have now if you didn't live through what it was like then.
