Modern games are too long? Oh Christ, I'm clearly missing something.

Hell, even the small number that GOG have released so far would account for a reasonable chunk of those 10. LoG and Botanicula in particular being freshly baked stand out titles.

As for consoles, it's hard to be sure right now if the next generation of consoles will be better or worse for the PC. Seems to me that they're intent on making the closed platforms even more restrictive. Could have negative repercussions.

Hahaha... yeah, maybe on the PC side things were better, it's hard for me to remember exactly. I remember loving Half-Life and Diablo 2 at the time. I was way more casual on games though, I didn't play a lot of stuff.

Honestly I remember very little between then and Deus Ex, and then Morrowind. It's like those four games are all that existed during that time in my brain.

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How many times have we complained of "fillers" in modern games, or excessive grinding, or anything that is just repeating until X hours have passed? The long part is not about plot, but about running around doing practically nothing, but increasing the time spent ingame.

This ultimately leads back to "games are too short," though. Because the games are only long because of artificial padding or filler, or time-consuming fetch quests. The actual CONTENT of the games is smaller, even in the "larger" games. But I'm with Keevek on this one, the extremely short games seem to outnumber the long ones recently, padded or not.

Actual play time is hard to judge, though. Things like S/NES Mario games can be beaten in less than an hour, but you'd have to play them for weeks or months to get good enough to do a speedrun. Other things like Daggerfall or Skyrim have theoretically infinite playtimes, but only because you're repeating endlessly recycled randomly-generated quests, which is ultimately hollow and pointless even by gaming standards.

I could count like dozen games from 1999 solely that I believe were great. Let's try...

Half Life
Carmageddon 2
Settlers 3
Fallout 2
Fifa 99
Grim Fandango
Baldur's Gate
Thief
Gangsters
Myth 2
Alpha Centauri
Close Combat 3
Simcity 3000
Worms Armageddon
HOMM 3
X-Wing Alliance
Aliens vs. Predator
Jagged Alliance 2
Mechwarrior 3
Soul Reaver
Revenant
Age of Empries 2
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
NOX
Earth 2150

I could count more and more great games if I cared enough. And these are only PC games I rememer now from 1999. If I "went deeper" I would give you two times more games from 1999.

If I went through 1997 to 2001 , I would make a list of 100 titles :P GREAT titles, in my opinion

It depends of the games, but personally my biggest disappointment with today games is not whenever or not they are better than older ones but how I don't feel like they are actually "improvement" or evolution of older games but more that they took a totally different direction.

If think that, like jefequeso said, it's probably different design philosophy. It's like if you were a huge fan of in painting and that nowadays all that the painters were able to do was [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism]abstract expressionism because that's what sells; no matter how good the later might be you still would have preferred if more of the former was still made.

I personally would have love to have a modern Crusader but without the clunky controls, a Ultima 7 without the awfully-craptacular inventory system or a real and worthy sequel of System Shock 2... but it never happened and today I hope it never will because if such a thing was ever made it would be way too different from the original in a bad way.

For some times I thought that Deux Ex HR was maybe the exception... but then I realized that it was actually some sort of inverted nostalgia goggles, I wanted so much to have a worthy sequel of Deux Ex 1 that I ignored the game flaws during my first play-through.

After a second play-through I realized 90% of what I liked was actually what they kept from the original and 90% of what I didn't liked was the "new" things they added/changed. (Like the stupid takedowns, the lackluster upgrades,etc... )

It's still a good games and way better than IW but I am not as enthusiast about it than I originally was.

A good list and no mistake. I also like the fact that you included Earth 2150 which is a personal favourite of mine. But it still doesn't address two key points that are being made here:

1. There was a sea of shit titles during that early 3D era. Yes there were also some great titles. But in all honesty I think that they stood out more because of all the mediocrity.

2. A lot of great games have been released in the past few years as well. In fact if we opted for the middle ground, 2004, you'll easily find upwards of 30 titles released that year which are very good.

The point being that age doesn't determine the quality of the game. The only reason why the games market seems worse now is because the crap is in recent memory and with the 'good old days' you're just remembering the good titles.

Maybe it was the wrong game to chose for my statement. I just took TR1 as an example of how graphics can get ugly in about 8 to 10 years. I never really liked the original TR-series. I much more enjoyed the TR games beginning with "Legend". So I didn´t mean to say, that TR is bad game, since I just don´t like the gameplay...

But when I played it for the first time I was thinking "WOW!". And about 8 years later it was sold with PC-GAMES-Magazine. After I decided to give it another try, I installed it and was totally shocked about what I saw... I asked my self how I could ever refer to that as "WOW!".

I could have taken Kingpin, Unreal 1, etc. as well or almost any 3D-game from the early days. In my opinion most of them look terrible today.

For me old games are generally better for one big reason and that's multiplayer.
The games I usually play are Strategy and FPS games and those genres are suffering from a severe case of multiplayeritis and have been for a too long time.
It seems that every game in those genres, no matter how inappropriate it is for that particular game HAVE to be geared towards competitive multiplayer. For me all that leads to is a game balanced to utter boredom and a very stumped singleplayer experience.

I don't want to have to play on the net with or against some very annoying people that take delight in making others life a misery or having to play the game in ultra hard mode which online play usually is.

It's not just those genres I guess. This probably goes for other genres too to some extent.

No, that's wrong interpretation of the data. Or more precisely, ignoring their heavy bias. Contemporary movies never make it into these lists because they just do not have enough votes from a diverse enough population. They haven't been around long enough, and the reactions to them tend to be very polarising and extreme. The IMDB list doesn't just list the movies with the best score, the number of votes and their distribution has weight there as well. It's a deeply flawed methodology, really.

To rephrase: The Shawshank Redemption has been the number one film on that list for ages. Go ahead and find me someone who's going to name it the best film ever made. It's not a movie that would be universally loved, it's a movie that's pretty much impossible to hate. There's a difference. And it took a crazy amount of exposure on TV to shoot that film on top of that list.

Frankly, the argument that [insert aspect of culture] is getting much worse than it used to be is utter bullshit, as can be proven by the very simple fact that it has been applied to every period ever. Hell, I'm willing to bet it was first used for cave paintings.

Well there are periods when much of cultural output, or any sort of "idea" is generally composed of crap. This happens for the most part when something revolutionary new is introduced that people try to fit into something where it do not fit or when they're trying to ride on popularity.

Some examples are when cinema went from silent to sound movies. Pulp fiction, the books, got popular. Everything was going to be solved by nuclear power. Spandex pants.
And to be on topic the wave of truly horrendous games produced in the beginning of the 3D hysteria thats been mentioned here.

But I do agree that these are usually transition periods and overall it tend to get better.

No, that's true all the time. Look up Sturgeon's Law; it's actually true. It's a pattern in all of art, all of human activity, really. There's the top of the crop avantgarde, in more or less the literal meaning of the word, who are doing revolutionary stuff (and are very often misunderstood) and there's the grey mass of me-toos who are capable enough to emulate the avant-garde after they've finally recognised what makes it worthwhile (which takes a few years/decades, so they're lagging behind a lot), but are never good enough to break through on their own. And there's also a smaller group of people who are hopelessly terrible regardless what they do. That's just how stuff works. All boils down to the good old bell curve.

I have to +1 you. I'd plus you more if I could. The IMDB list could possibly be skewed by the exact type of nostalgia that skews peoples' perceptions in the first place. If we're told, (just as an example, this doesn't apply to everyone) that Casablanca is a "good" film, we'll be more amenable to think so. I like the movie personally, it's just an example.

It's psychological to a large extent. Like others have noted, we filter out the bad stuff in the past. It's natural and very common. There are bad trends in gaming for sure. Also, it's not as if we haven't changed--games and gaming have changed.

This entire concept goes beyond games and encapsulates almost the entire human experience.

I also am a grumpy gamer, by the way. I also don't typically play all the newest games out there. But when I try to be objective, it's important to not categorize everything by the year it came out.