Nothing. They had nothing. All shine, no substance.
And all you need to do is look at Dead Space, Assassin’s Creed, or any other series that seems to come out with a new game every year to realize, gaming is in a far different state than it has ever been in before. Suddenly, if you are not a blockbuster game, you go bankrupt and your gaming studio closes. Trust me, you may not feel it now, but that will mark the end of cerebral, good gaming as we know it, mark my words.
But I also need to be realistic here when trying to assess why gaming feels so old and distant to me, compared to when I was a kid, and that in itself is the answer. I am no longer a kid. Not saying the medium is aimed at kids, because that is not the case, but the heart and excitement of an adult versus a child is very different. And it hit me. Something devastating. A realization and feeling I have yet to shake from my bones.
It’s not just the games that have changed. It’s me.
Holy shit, I’m getting old!
This is a feeling I first encountered when I played the recent, rage-inducing Dark Souls. That “Holy crap, I’m getting old” feeling, and boy does it suck. I swear, if I was still that little kid, full of piss and vinegar, I would have made Dark Souls my bitch. But now, I am kind of old, and I get mad very easily, and within ten minutes of starting this game I want to tear my hair out and fling my controller against the far wall like a child throwing a tantrum. For me, that is a terrifying feeling. It reminds me of being a kid, handing my NES controller to my Dad to let him try a game I was playing, then seeing him react with a slew of profanities, screaming something about how there were too many buttons and too much to do, and then saying he needed to go do something as he stormed out of the room.
The slow creeping realization that we do, indeed, become our parents, is a wholly unnerving yet inevitable one for all of us. And it is gaming that is making me face that right now.
So I think the proper realization is that it is, indeed, a mix of both. Games have lost much of their soul, and I am old and jaded. I am an old-schooler, raised on Nintendo and pixels, and just like any generation tends to condemn the generation that comes after them, it seems the older I get, the less this all makes sense to me. But in the same breath, the companies are not trying to make games that impress me. They are trying to make games that impress seventeen year old kids, and I guess gaming is just the first thing that really reminded me that I am just not one of those anymore.
Man, it sucks getting old.
