Someone mentioned this in my Introduction thread, and I thought this would be a good topic I might do a blog for soon. Basically it is what the title says. How do you view video games?
I’ll start this off by how I view them. Every game I play is just another art form to me. No matter how good or bad the game is, I can still appreciate that someone spent countless hours, probably lost tons of sleep, and drank a tanker truck full of coffee to get the game done.
Now that doesn’t mean that I buy every game. I think that when it comes to buying games it’s a little more touchy, because I’m obviously not going to pay money for a game that looks like someone slung a cowpie on the computer screen and said “give me 60 bucks”. However the game has to be aesthetically pleasing, I’ve heard all the arguments that graphics don’t matter; but let’s be honest here…they do.
When I was kid playing the NES, SNES, Genisis, and all of them as they evolved, I would look at the blocky pictures and say “holy crap look how realistic it is!” Back then we didn’t think we cared as much, but as games have evolved, the graphics are getting better, and if the game looked awesome, we weren’t as mad that the graphics glitched because at least the player looked good doing it!
However, back in the day(god I feel old) the controllers were much simpler, so gameplay was only as hard as the controller could make it. There were many “clunky” games back then, but clunky back then, and clunky now are COMPLETELY different, I’ll explain.
For those of you who grew up in the N64 era, think of trying to go back and playing Goldeneye 007. That game was monumental for FPS games and we all know that we thought it looked amazing and loved it. But if you go back and look at Goldeneye now, the first thing you think of is nostalgia, and then get aggravated that the controls are so hard to work with. To me, I would consider Goldeneye a super clunky game control wise, but back then…holy crap it was amazing, because we had nothing else.
Basically to sum this up, I try and hold on to my original view of Video Games. I look at the art in them and appreciate that someone spent so many hours to give me this game world. To many people get mad that their F2P game sucks, and with the evolution of the internet we are all critics now. Sure, I can put in my suggestions to change it, now that we can patch and change games, but in the end, we all should try and hold on to that little feeling we used to get as kids when we got a new game and just appreciate that we were playing it.
Sorry this was so long, but I feel like this is an interesting topic I think all of us gamers can(or can’t) relate to.