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Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t bought any game released after 2004[0] – simply because in my opinion, gameplay has suffered a lot lately. I can recall spending years building stuff in Pharao when I was a kid and recently had a lot of fun (months!) playing Patrician II/III, bought from GOG. Where are these games nowadays?

[0] The latest game I bought on Steam was Counter Strike: Source, mostly because it was on sale and bundled up with some other stuff that actually works on my computer.

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Minecraft. Skyrim. Civilization IV/V. Avernum. Starcraft II. Crusader Kings II. Dungeons of Dredmor. Portal and Portal II. Torchlight. XCOM. The Witcher and The Witcher II. FTL.

That list is just off the top of my head, without looking at my Steam library; all of those games, XCOM and maybe Portal excluded if you don't dig the user content, can easily take up multiple months of gameplay. Deep, involving games are more easily available than they ever have been. Claims that they're not are good-old-days nostalgia.

Back in the day, everything was better, including the future!

Portal took me about a week – I haven’t played regular Portal II, but got through the multiplayer version with a friend in a couple of evenings. Reviews for Skyrim look somewhat promising, I will give it a try when I get a Windows machine again.

Civilization is also somewhere on the list, though the existence of FreeCiv doesn’t really help in persuading me to buy a very similar (for appropriate values thereof) game.

Maybe I should just go and invest some time into Dwarf Fortress :)

I don't know if I'd put Avernum on that list, since it is substantially the same game as Exile, which was made in 1995.

And I played it then, and I bought Avernum, and I bought the new Avernum remake too. Neither remake bears a lot of mechanical resemblance to Exile or each other and the newest one is absolutely fantastic.

Nethergate: Resurrection is worth a buy, too.

I'll add Bastion, King's Bounty, Binding of Isaac, Torchlight II, Realm of the Mad God, Trine 1 and 2, Atom Zombie Smasher, Eufloria, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Osmos, Recettear, Bioshock

Starcraft II, seriously? It's got the same gameplay as the original had in the 90s (which already felt old at the time).

Have you tried Minecraft? There are players racking up thousands of hours with it.

Me being one of them. :-)

Base minecraft isn't that great, though some people seem to like it. Add on a pack like Feed the Beast, though, and it gets really interesting - I'm working my way up the tech tree in Mindcrack at the moment.

Exactly. I'm a big Minecraft and FeedTheBeast(mod packs) fan. And the game keeps getting updated and mods get more and more complex.

I have to admit, no(, not yet). Probably mostly because I was happily mudding away when it first came out and caused this big hype with people playing it in lecture theatres etc. Judging from past experience, I will probably get to it around 2020 :\

I'm surprised to see this suggestion here. While minecraft has a lot going for it, I don't know if I would call any of it 'gameplay'. You wander/dig around and find shiny rocks, and while there are monsters the combat system is pretty awful and quickly abandoned. The fun is in building and in mods, rather than anything in the basic survival mode. Heck, it barely qualifies as a game by having any goals, and it didn't even have that for a year.

"What a terrible game! I actually have to use my imagination and make my own fun, what is this?"

Minecraft is a sandbox game. The zombies are just props. Just like any other good sandbox game it leaves a lot of the direction up to the player.

"sandbox game" really stretches the meaning of the term game. I'm not saying that minecraft is bad, I'm saying that what it has is not "gameplay".

What is gameplay?

So SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Euro Truck Simulator, The Sims, etc aren't games either? Since they too are sandbox games that let the player direct the experience.

Frankly I would love to know what your definition of the term "gameplay" is because it seems unique. To me any interactive medium contains gameplay mechanics, even point-and-click adventure games do, hell even some BluRay menus could be described as having "gameply."

I even think Google's easter egg "zerg rush" (google it!) is a game and has gameplay.

You can tell if you're doing well at simcity, rollercoaster tycoon, and the sims. (I don't know anything about euro truck simulator.) Zerg rush is all about how many zerglings you kill and how much of the page is still alive. In minecraft it's all about what you feel like building and there's no objectively doing well or badly. It's hard to make a thriving sim city, it's trivial to make a giant sculpture in minecraft.

I'll put it succinctly: The main source of fun in minecraft (without mods) is the same as the original creative mode. Creative mode is a pure building-blocks toy and not at all a game. The parts of minecraft that you can call a game are unimportant compared to what's actually fun.

You can tell whether you're doing well at Minecraft if you're still alive, creepers haven't exploded in your face, and you're not starving. :D

That said, you can always play Creative mode and/or Peaceful difficulty if that's your style.

>you're still alive, creepers haven't exploded in your face, and you're not starving By that metric if I dig a hole three blocks down and cover up the top I'm doing well. Minecraft just isn't something with important objective progression. It's about doing what you want and having fun. The survival elements are mostly a thin veneer on what creative mode is. The important part of minecraft is not anything that you could call a 'game'.

You know there's a whole thing in Minecraft now where you can kill a dragon which triggers an "end screen", right? And to get to that point there is traditional game grind stuff, of collecting stuff to get equipment to get to the place where you get the stuff to get the other stuff? And there are even achievements? And that the player has health and armour?

I don't care that you don't like a game, but you're wrong and should feel bad. :p

I know that got added. In terms of time spent it's pretty much a side quest. The only thing you need to grind to get there is ender pearls, and you can easily collect them a minute or two into the game if endermen happen to spawn. You don't really need any equipment either. A wooden bow should suffice.

I do like minecraft, but the idea that the end screen represents any kind of progress wrt what you spend 95% of your time doing is ridiculous.

On SimCity and that, Will Wright tends to think of his creations as toys rather than games.

'hell even some BluRay menus could be described as having "gameply."'

Which should be a pretty sure sign that "can be described as having gameplay" isn't that meaningful.

(The problem with arguing semantics on the internet is that everyone starts obsessing about technicalities. Quake, SimCity, Minecraft and Blu-ray menus, all qualify as technically being games. And so technically qualifying as being a game is clearly irrelevant to anything interesting. It is obviously not what people usually mean by "is it a game?" and such.)

Using physical associations, think less of a "game w. rules/goals" and more of a "toy" - many great videogames actually function more like toys.

I'm sorry, but I hear this from a lot of people and it's just not true. My dad won't play games made after, say, '96 because that's when things stopped being interesting. I think it's just a matter of how emotionally open you are to investing time in playing new games. Games cut from the same mold as those in 2004 wouldn't sell well today, and there are some good reasons why. FPSs in 2004 had just gotten away from the stupid jumping puzzles ubiquitous in the previous decade, for example.

When I was young, I had poor taste in many things. I wouldn't waste time on most video games today, but I still remember liking everything when I was a kid.

We're also in the middle of an indie game explosion, with a renewed focus on solid gameplay. You won't see it if you only look at AAA titles.

In addition to the other games people have mentioned, I'd add FTL. I usually don't like roguelikes or space-combat games, but FTL is utterly absorbing and has near-infinite replay value for me. The game is only about 0.5-2hrs for a playthrough, depending on how well you do, but I managed to spend most of my weekend playing it anyway.

My opinion is that there are more great games nowadays, but they're harder to find because there's also a lot more crap, and different people disagree on what is and isn't crap. The best games are not necessarily being produced by the big studios. So you have to go to the effort of finding the studios you like, and finding people with similar tastes so you can trust their recommendations.

game quality is increasing, you're just getting older. same thing happens to me; i just can't play like i used to anymore.

when you're younger it's easier to lose yourself in the game, no matter how bad (and actually boring) it is.

But I’m still able to lose myself in, say, Patrician II or Pharao or FreeCiv. Maybe I don’t like modern graphics? :P

they're great games, you already know them and know that you like them and how they work.

and.

they're still triggering your dopamine release like when you were young. i remember reading an article about why every older person seems to hear the music from his youth. the reason for this is that when we're in our teens, the brain releases dopamines more readily and we're losing that ability when we grow older - except for the already ingrained pavlovian triggers.

i can't cite any sources right now. i think i ... uh, saw it on cracked (yeah, shame on me).

here it is:

#7: Your Brain Will Stop Getting Pleasure from New Music

http://www.cracked.com/article_19722_7-scientific-reasons-yo...

don't worry, it's natural.

Hm – I actually only started playing Patrician last summer, when I would consider myself as old as I am now. But then I mostly played sandbox strategy games when I was young, and Patrician is basically that, so you might have a point there.

/me goes off to feel old.

There are probably some indie games that come near to what you like.

Prison Architect (http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/) with a video Lets Play here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXiJHJ2_Hwg)

Towns (http://www.townsgame.com/) with a Lets Play here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5tbKITBT4)

and probably a bunch of others.

But then again, it's okay to not like games apart from the few you play. I love Total Annihilation, and haven't tried the various later 'versions'.

You haven't bought or you haven't played any new games since 2004 ?

I haven’t bought games released after 2004. I bought a few games on Steam and GOG, but they were all released before 2004. Plus some free games (MUDs, FreeCiv etc.).

Try the Total War series.

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