Games got worse or nostalgia rules me?

Nostalgia isn't real so no it doesn't rule you. Modern AAA gaming is crap. I think Borderlands, StarCraft 2, and Bioshock are the only 3 good AAA titles from the last few years everything else that's been good has been from lesser known developers or indie stuff.

I think you just old and nostalgic... I'm into the Indie wagon and play most of them because they have a similar feeling that remind me my early videogame days...

we have loads of nice games with nice plot, nice gameplay and etc. but I think we are old and we are getting nostalgic about games.

I have this feeling

I call this Old Man Syndrome when I notice it within myself. I'm an 8-bit boy who still cringes at the thought of calling 32-bit oldschool, and I feel a little bit uncomfortable referring to 16-bit as oldschool as well.

For me, Neverwinter Nights was a pretender to the RPG throne at first. I saw it the same way you're seeing Skryim today. I grew up thinking that Baldur's Gate was what the D&D Gold Box collection was leading up to.

The remark that pretty graphics covers up bad gameplay was said about the Playstation and Nintendo 64 era. It was said again about the Playstation 2, the Wii, and the original XBox. And again with the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360. it will be said again of the next generation.

My mother became an adult before the first Pong systems came out. She never had an oldschool experience that develops in children and becomes nostalgia in adults. She still prefers NES Tetris, Tengen version. But she got into Fallout: New Vegas really hardcore.

Thanks to improved graphics and easily impressed children and media, you'll have to look more carefully to find the true gems. Look for reviews on youtube that are critical or praising of things that past gaming generations found irritating, such as control responsiveness and camera angles. Listen for any mention of 'reminds me of a game from my childhood' and such. Look into the games they compare new titles to, and see if you like that old game.

Your parents probably thought the same thing when they saw what was in arcades when you were a kid. I can't stand seeing a DDR machine at any shopping mall. My mom first sees the pinball machines and skeeball, and I first notice the shmups.

I got into modern 'all fluff without substance' games by ignoring any feeling of nostalgia I felt when I detected it. It's a natural feeling, and only stands to get in the way of new experiences.

You are right about the graphics point being said about every console, but games are getting less and less substance each generation in my opinion. I do already have a bad habit of looking into a games to much before i think about buying then. Gotta admit i am looking forward to the south park game coming from THQ this year, if it comes.
Me too as for the DDr machine. I nearly brought a newly referbed cocktail machine last week. Had a 66 in 1 drive with pac-man, donkey kong, nes tetris etc but i couldn't find a good enough reason to sink £450 on games i already own.

Everyone is WRONG. The games magically got worse.

You're suffering from a well known phenomenon called selection bias. You remember only the classics from the older games and forget the mediocre or bad games. This is fairly typical and is difficult to avoid. The ratio of amazing:good:decent:bad games has probably remained fairly consistent over time but when we think of games from the past we only think of the great ones wich makes it seem like games are getting worse.

You, sir, are an idiot. Think about it.

You're not old or nostalgic, you just managed to retain some taste which couldn't be said for 80% of gamers today. I play a lot, but maybe on 50-60 new games that i played last year i can only name one or two which were actually good

You're not wrong. There are just more games being released because companies like EA are monetizing them.

I just played through KotOR2 and its definitly better than everything that got released in 2012.

Agree with you. Nostalgia really got me recently, when I ressurected my PS2 and play old fighting games (I'm from 16-bit generation).

However, even if we think that old games are better than the new ones (something that everyone says at a point of the life: that in his time something was better than now), we cannot let this blind our eye for new gaming experience. I really liked Starcraft 2, Civilization IV and V, Team Fortress 2 and other games.

It's very simple, the current consoles are old.

By that I mean that there's only so much you can put in a game if it's going to be released on a console. Which means that almost every game out there these days is running on the same tired old engines, Unreal, CryEngine, Source, RAGE, etc.

And since most of those engines were built for shooters, that's what developers are throwing at us. Shooter after shooter after shooter. It's easy for them to do (especially if they've already done one, eg. Call of Duty) and hence the return on investment is high. But there's only so much you can do within a genre before it gets tired.

I think once the next generation of consoles is put out, we'll start to see a lot of that innovation we saw at the start of this generation. New IPs and fresh takes on old ones. A whole new set of actors on the stage. I can't wait.

There were far worse games and a ton more back in the day. People seem to forget the video game crash from 1983 to 1985. It mainly happened due to the over-saturation of ultra shitty games.

Both.

Original Ikari Warriors. Get to the last stage with two players only to have one get stuck... Still love that game.

My issue with MOST (not all) new games is even the high end hard mode is easy mode compared to many older games and the ease of saving a game makes even the worst oops fixable.

You want a truly unforgiving dungeon crawl, try the first three or so Wizardry games.

So yeah, I prefer the feeling of actually having done something and earning my way there to flashy graphics and instant false gratification.

I won't say it's nostalgia as much as staying with a fixed definition of what you like. Me, I find it hard to go back to many old games. The graphics suck, the controls are often clunky. Some people like 320x200 graphics, and I still see comments of "beautiful pixel art" on modern games which are made in "8-bit" or "16-bit" style, but for the life of me I can't understand that. It's some really bad form of nostalgia.

I'm not saying that there aren't good old games, games that I'd enjoy playing again, but for me their faults are magnified with time. I'm also not saying that modern games are great. But some of them are good, and I think the main problem for people who prefer old games is that the new games are different, and they don't want different. They want the same old thing they grew up with.

Edit: I never played on the old consoles. I grew up with "home computers" like the Commodore 64, transitioned to the Amiga and then to the PC. I'm sure this colours my perception just like people who grew up on consoles have their own way of seeing things.

Wouldn't surprise me if right answer would be both.

There are many things that got improved in games in all that time and it's not just graphics. But somewhere, especially with big AAA titles, "magic" was lost and it doesn't feel "by gamers, for gamers".

Unless you talk about shooters - those got worse for sure - from fast paced action packed into slow, positional, boring games (see enemy->duck behind cover->kill->regenerate->find another one) :)

I really wonder if game-devs actually play their games...

Nope, you're just old.

You found out that, according to metacritic, in 2012 average X360 score for games was 69,5%, while PS3 games averaged 70,3% (no PC scores). And remembering that in today review world we have 7-poor game, 8-medicore game, 9-good game, 10-great game, 11-real gem worth remembering, that's really poor averages...

I think it's nostalgia. I'm not saying games don't suck now, a lot of them definitely do suck, it's just that there were plenty of shitty titles back in the day too, we only tend to remember the ones worth remembering