site banner

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.

I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.

You need to carefully account for nostalgia tinting your perception.

I remember enjoying many video games immensely as a kid, constrained only by the number of hours my parents would let me play (and by my aging and decrepit pc).

As a teen, and then a young adult, I still enjoyed video games, to the detriment of my education.

These days, I go weeks without booting up my gaming laptop. I'm too tired to bother half the time, but there are also the constraints of not enjoying gaming with such a small screen and crammed keyboard, as well as the fact that the wifi coverage sucks ass.

Steam will helpfully tell me I have >3500 hours in Arma 3, probably over a thousand in Rimworld, several hundred in Total War Warhammer 3. I think I was past 1500 hours in Tarkov before I burned out on the grind and relentless wipes of progression without enough content to justify them.

And now that I'm moving to an apartment I expect to live in for a year or more, I'm rubbing my hands with glee at the idea of buying a gaming pc, all the bells and whistles.

Having a First World salary (even if paltry by US standards) means I can indulge my hobby. Now a high end GPU is only half a month's salary, as opposed to an upper mid range one being double back home.

Most of the games of my childhood were either pirated, or not on Steam, so I'm spared an exact tally on how long and often I played them. I loved Rome Total War on my anemic netbook. I love Total War Warhammer 3 on my (now relinquished) gaming pc and my laptop. I could play RTW, but I don't, because the new games are better by my taste, barring a few features. I'd have been all over Rimworld even as a kid.

So if you think that games aren't as fun as they used to be, it's more likely you're playing bad games, or that you simply don't have the time or energy to devote to them. I know the latter holds true for me, most of the time. Some genres have definitely died off or become relegated to indie titles, but that doesn't mean there aren't good games!

I relate with what you say a lot since you are not much older than me and saw a fairly similar place growing up. Gaming is still unaffordable for most Indians, the same way a normal healthy diet, peace or anything good is. My dad, due to being a young professor at a top engineering uni (he is a humanities prof) caught on to computers, so we always had a slightly underpowered PC at our house where I could play pirated games in.

Today, I have a turbulent life, I cannot bring myself to game since I am unable to do anything but be a vegetable after a productive game and want to git gud, get a job and migrate out before the year ends.

More than just the energy, gaming is not as popular in my circles as it once was. People go out to cafes or unsuccessfully try to woo girls far more than playing video games since sexual liberation, much more of a thing now, even for early teens, phones and Instagram make it much worse. My gaming itch died when my dad refused to update our PC when I was 16 since I wanted to play doom but he realised that I needed to do my exams better so killing the gamer inside me indirectly helped me do better with the JEE.