Beamer wrote on Apr 17, 2011, 01:03:
This is why this board isn't fun anymore.


Few here, or rather likely the quiet majority, take any enjoyment out of gaming.
For the loudest of you the entertainment no longer comes from actually playing games but from bitching, moaning, whining and feeling like victims. It's not even fun discussing that topic anymore because it's beaten to death and some of you go further and further into some kind of loathing. It's hard to believe you still dedicate this much time to something you hate. Yeah, I know, "we want it to be what it once was!" but all your bitching and moaning isn't helping. Go away for a while. Get some bright air. Rather than complain that Valve is doing all this, or as someone in another thread claimed "wasting money on marketing" stop paying attention. Start being that guy that's happily surprised to walk into the video game section of Target and see a new game by your favorite developer that you hadn't been aware was on its way out.



What kills me most is how some of you fail to realize that you've changed as much as the industry has. On top of becoming bitter, jaded dicks you've just become more mature consumers, frankly, adults. There's an interestingish article in the newest KillScreen in which an author relates how he received the NES version of Dragon Warrior for free with a 2 year subscription to Nintendo Power (man, I remember getting my parents to sign me up for that deal, too.) He talks about how he was unable to play for 6 weeks after receiving the game, but he had the poster of all the enemies that NP included. He read the poster constantly. He memorized it. He worshipped it. It was religion to him and he knew every single tiny thing he could about the game without playing it. That game was his entire world and it completely captivated him. He was absorbed. Nothing could possibly matter more. I remember being the same way. For a long while nothing in my life mattered as much as video games. Games I played and games I didn't, honestly - I can think of a few games I was obsessed over based upon articles in Nintendo Power only to discover they totally blew, or games I obsessed over that I owned only to go back recently and discover that the game sucked and most of the joy was my own imagination running wild with the general theme of the game.
But the author will never, ever be into a game as much as he was into Dragon Warrior. I'll never be as into a game as I was Blaster Master or Doom or Duke Nukem or X-COM or Syndicate. We're not kids anymore. It's impossible for a game to captivate us like that. Games are far deeper with much more atmosphere than some of the ones I listed above but they won't hold on to me because there's so much in life that takes priority.

What kills me is how regularly I see comments here in which people blame the games for that. Some of you get irate that games don't make you feel the same way. You don't seem to realize that you changed more than games. Go up to a kid today and he feels the same way you once did.


Some of you a miserable, humorless, impossible to please and completely pointless. Verno, you always seem to think I'm talking to you and I'm not - you're fairly miserable at times and often humorless but irregularly for both of those and always thoughtful and worth reading. I'm surprised to see nin so bitter here as he usually is humorous in his hate and seems to enjoy gaming by and large. But there are some usual people here that never, ever say anything positive or interesting. Just a lot of one line comments like "suck my balls Valve" or "way to screw us over by trying not to go into the red" or "man, I haven't played an original video game since Space Wars, everything since is just you hitting a button and stuff happening just like that game!" Wait, not that last one - it contains too much content. People at least used to try - it used to be common to see the "popular threads" list have multiple triple-digit threads in which people debated the merits of various things. No longer even debate - just condemnation, industry ignorance and one line curses.