The rise of consoles + big entertainment corps barging their way onto the scene killed off the really cool creative, innovative, indie games scene of the late 80's / early 90's.

The scene that spawned truly original games that work *with* the medium like, elite, civilisation, simcity, populous, xcom, doom etc.

It sucked, we had a decade or two of shit hollywood-movie-like games.
Thankfully the indie scene is coming back now though thanks to anyone being able to publish games + free / cheap tools that allow tiny teams to make games.
Minecraft is a great example of this renaissance imo.

The indie game scene feels like it ended a few years ago. There was a glut of indie games driving the prices down to the point where the money dried up.

With the Switch, Nintendo has come up with a hardware concept that discourages emulation in a pretty clever way. You probably will be able to play Mario Odyssey on your gaming PC in a year or two, but you won't get the Switch's "portable console" aspect, or things like the transforming controller or the use of motion central to games like Arms. A lot of people won't care about losing these things. But the Switch's success after being marketed around the portability and motion gimmicks show that a lot of people care about these things, enough that even if they can easily emulate the whole library, many will choose to just buy the games so they can take them anywhere.

Weird! My BotW on Cemu was running pretty OK (20-25FPS) when everybody was stuck around that speed, but since the fixes, graphics packs and shader caches came along. Now all I get is a crash as soon as it starts loading the shadow cache. And it's not my PC since I tried out Tekken 7 and Dirt 4, both of which run smoothly at 80-100 FPS on ultra settings. I dunno, maybe someone will make a GTA5 mod of the game some time.

and yeah I can't think of the actual name of the "minecraft killer" that ostensibly broke indie games' back, but between that failed kickstarter, multiple respected game designers going "indie" and creating utter shit, and every 3rd indie game being a clone of every 3rd indie game, and the promising indie titles like Cuphead taking about as long as Duke Nukem did. It's Polyvinyl Records in the early '00s all over again and it sucks ass.

Infinite Zest, I think the "minecraft killer" with the Kickstarter blow-up you're talking about is probably No Man's Sky.

It was Yogventures I was thinking of, but yeah No Man's Sky also works. No Man's Sky did come out though, so that's something.

@infinitezest

There was the 'indepocalypse' A flood of too many indie game devs, and ones of questionable ability. That's still underway.

But thats fine imo. The indie scene actually got unnaturally big, it was a bubble.

Talented, dedicated devs are and will be able to keep going. Eg. Introversion, or Zachtronic industries. They've been churning out brilliant original games for years and they're now doing better than ever releasing stuff independently.

Well yeah, why buy a Switch when you can spend $1,100 on a gaming PC that doesn't improve the game in any way, shape, or form! PC MASTER RACE

*spends 12 hours digging through GameFAQS' message board trying to get it to run*

A lot of what people think are the 'greatest games ever' aren't necessarily so. Some systems - especially the NES - you really have to dig to get to the good stuff. You should take those 'best game' lists even less seriously than you do IMDB top 100 or whatever (ie less than negative a billion seriously). Videogame fans are pretty cluesless in general and *especially* clueless about videogame history. It's a rotten culture. Tbh tho, consoles probably don't hold that many treasures for people who think PC games are the be-all-end-all ... but you never know. I am probably the biggest videogame nerd on the site so maybe I can help. What are some PC games you really like? Of the console games you've discovered you enjoy, what are your favourites?

@Poorwil

Random list of some of my favourite games
rogue, civilization, privateer, simcity 3000, xcom (1994(the new firaxis one is a travesty!!)), minecraft, factorio, infinifactory, naissancee, frozen synapse, legend of grimrock.

The only game on consoles that really spoke to me so far has been 'Shadow of the Colossus'

supplementary crap:
I make games for a living.
Different mediums have different strengths. To make a great work you must choose the right medium and work with it rather than against it. I feel the same way about computer games as Dziga Vertoz felt about films. He didnt feel that the language of theatre and literature were a good fit for film. Film was new and needed its own new language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera#Vertov.2 7s_intentions

People have been similarly mistakenly trying to apply the language of film (and drama, literature) to games, whereas games have new different strengths, being those of interactivity, player choice, volition and authorship.

A good example would be 'Grim Fandango' I love those lucasarts games, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but, would it have been better if it had been an animated film? It feels like it *wants* to be a film. Purely mechanistically the gameplay elements of it do really suck.

@ Poorwill,

Also thanks! I really appreciate this!

It might be changing with Namco's support of Tekken 7 for PC, since it's by far the best lookin' of the bunch if you've got the hardware, but the fighting genre's been all about the consoles. I remember some time ago Evilhomer was declaring war on WB Games for dropping multiplayer support for MKX within the first 6 months or so on PC. But then again an arcade emulator for AM2 or NAMCO will let you play a few games like Tekken 3 better than even on the Playstation.. but fighters and platformers are the bulk of what you missed.

But if I can preemptively add to Poorwill's list, I'd recommend Star Control 2 for 3DO, Goemon 64 for N64, Hogs of War and Herc's Adventures for Playstation, Zombies Ate My Neighbors for SNES or Genesis (that's the same people as Herc's Adventures) and Namco's nearly forgotten other mascot, Klonoa, is perhaps responsible for the best platformer on any console, including this or any other Mario game. And if the fighting angle doesn't interest you, there's Bushido Blade for Playstation, which is a much more "PC" kinda fighting game, with mechanics a little reminiscent of Treyarch's Die by the Sword.

Oh yeah and Katamari. Katamari forever for one hundred years. 200 seasons of katamari etc. etc.

(star control 2 and hogs of war are available for PC as well, but the console versions are actually better)

I remember Katamari Damacy in the press. It looked really cool. I bought a copy of it as a Christmas present for a friend who had a PS2, but it turned out to be the wrong region and it wouldnt work in it. wtf!?!?! feckin' consoles!!
Thanks IZ! I will check those out!

Yeah, Katamari Damacy is probably top of the list. That's the best 'ambassador' title I can think of really. Don't bother with the sequels though.

I gotta say, you are a tough nut to crack Mr Esquire. All of the console games that roughly fit into your favoured genres are generally inferior - but there are a few takes on the strategy mold that are pretty interesting and lesser-known like Knights in the Nightmare, which is one of the more confusing games you are ever likely to play.

I typed out a longer post with recommendations, but deleted it - I'm going to try to find an old notepad document I made with personal faves/hidden gems/forgotten landmarks and copy/paste that with notes and additions.

Beyond Katamari, another good ambassador title is Wario Ware.
Fun/weird homage/wrecking ball to videogames and the videogame industry. Wario Ware Twisted is even better.

I will say though (pointing to the stands with my bat) if your standards for the pc creativity that consoles killed are 'elite, civilisation, simcity, populous, xcom, doom etc.', this list is going to make your head explode like in Scanners. Doom though? Really?

Most alleged PC classics of the late 1980s and early 1990s are soulless twaddle and did video games as many favors as Rob Liefeld did for comics.

Xcom's OK, though.

Also, a lot of the most creative home computer games in the most creative period (the early-mid 80s on the C64) could reasonably be described as 'console style'. You say consoles killed them after that, I say they emigrated to consoles - where, of course, you completely missed out on them.

@Poorwill
Check out the doc 'From Bedrooms to Billions' about the computer game scene during that golden age you mention on the 1st home computers like C64, in England. Which is what I'm familiar with. (Its really good actually, very detailed)

I agree it was an amazing period of creativity. Though a lot of the games were whimsical silly things heavily inspired by arcade games. *Personally* I love the sort of ideas introduced by the likes of 'Elite' For me those sort of sim games really give my imagination fodder to take and run away with.

Also, that sort of silly whimsy is how I felt about the mario games. I played a bunch of them in my exploration of console games.

Eg. Mario galaxy.
I loved it at 1st and found it super fun and enjoyable, but it very quickly got old. Every stage seemed to introduce some new paper thin one-off mechanic merely for the sake of novelty. It really felt like it was aimed at small children (which it is)
I was kind of hoping that after introducing the really solid initial platforming mechanics, that the difficulty curve would start going up and there would be some satisfying challenges, but it never happened.

Nintendo platformers are typically low-entry-barrier, high-skill-ceiling - with Mario 64 and Yoshi's Island being the apex of that form. To get an idea of what I mean, play them a bit and then watch a world record speedrun to see the possibilities of the mechanics. Yoshi's Island in particular is my fave - the egg pool shots awarding stars for hits made by two+ rebounds is pretty brilliant game design in my book - nice way for rookies to rescue themselves if they're short of 100% or for pros so they needn't slow down for every collectible.
I like the Galaxy games a lot, but I agree that they do feel a bit like a minigame collection or whatever sometimes. Getting 100% is the real meat of the game though (in saying that, some of the optional stars are just annoying). They're more about spectacle and variety than most of the games in the series.
The second one is the better game by a non-insignificant amount imo.
I so think balancing these games for everyone is practically an impossible task so I don't really hold it against them. They give advanced players the tools to peel through levels at a pretty impressive clip and have since the OG Super Mario Bros (that's what momentum brought to the genre, I think), so complaints about easiness always feel to me like the complainants are missing the depth there.
Super Metroid and Metroid Prime work very similarly.
All these are games you would've already played because they are kind of 'go-to' recommendations though, so I'll try to dig a little more.

Nintendo is used to having weak hardware. The SNES was created almost 2 years after the release of the Genesis, yet they decided not to include blast processing.
The only thing that keeps Nintendo afloat are man babies who will forever suckle on Nintendo's ever flowing tit of nostalgia.

Hell, I'll take nostalgia and good games over bickering between Microsoft and Sony fans over which console will run Destiny 2 prettier, spouting out a whole bunch of high numbers just to sound impressive, like half of the 4K shit is even going to matter in the next year or two.

1:20

Through the darkness of futures past,
the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds...
fire, a-walk with me."

I know, right? Ever since I heard about Link's Awakening it's been down the bunny hole with me.

I don't have any particular loyalty to Nintendo, but when most other developers are giving us the same SUPER-RELASITIC GRAPHICAL STYLE, powered by an interchangeable VERY SERIOUS JOYLESS STORYLINE, featuring TWO WHOLE COLORS, plus TEN MINUTES OF ACTUAL GAMEPLAY, you end up gravitating toward the N simply because it's possible to tell their games apart.

yep! e3 reactions read like digitalfoundry videos and the real question came down to "WHICH GAME INFINITE ZEST DOESN'T CARE ABOUT WILL RUN AT 4K 60FPS?" Like, specs are cool, and 4K gaming and 60FPS, sure. And while the easy answer is "invest in a PC because then you won't have to think about it", a flagship/GotY multiplat that runs better and prettier on one system WILL inevitably help push more of that system, but after all that techy jazz all I remember about either systems' exclusive titles is an ad for the forever-delayed Crackdown 3, which looks almost like a 360 game in terms of the competition.

Meanwhile Nintendo's flagship exclusive runs just fine backwards on the wii, Mario Kart 8 and Odyssey both look like 1080 remasters of their wii counterparts from years ago, and nobody cares, because something like this is nearly always the result. For all we might make fun of Nintendo and Sega for doing the same thing during the Nintendon't years, you can't deny that they didn't deliver on that promise, both in terms of hardware advancements and good games. Ya know, for a year or so before SuperFX vs. 32X anyway.

I'm of the belief that everybody should sit down with some Terrence McKenna and try Psilocybin at least one time. And then just choose a spot. I'd recommend Spring Green Wisconsin. :)

Your description of the Mario/Rabbids game made me look it up and holy shit, that is exactly what it looks like. Whatever Nintendo's on, I hope they keep taking it, because it seems to be making for some insane looking games

That song is still stuck in my brain and I'm not hating it.

No, but remember that if you want to have sex with all the moms, you have to buy both Oedipus Gold and Silver.