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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1068 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

This is a point in favor of my thinking that video games are better now than ever. All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years. I got horribly addicted to Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (I think @TracingWoodgrains may have played all three of these? He had an AAQC on roguelikes on the subreddit), Escape from Tarkov, Mount and Blade Warband, and likely others that I don't remember right now. Maybe that's just my brain being different as an adult somehow, but "gaming crack" seems like it's alive and well. Plus, you can still play all the old stuff!

Civ dates back to the early 90s, and Dwarf Fortress to the early 2000s. For another example, people used to get in trouble playing Doom at work because the game was just that good. There were very addictive games being made 20-30 years ago too.

Civ dates back to the early 90s

It frustrates me occasionally that the first and second installments in the franchise have never been (legally) available digitally that I can tell. I played them as a kid but the CDs got lost over the years. I wouldn't mind trying the first one again.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time, I'm just trying to push back against "gaming's golden age ended decades ago" point. I like that there's good stuff in the 90s. I'm happy it mostly still exists for weirdos who want to play through the best stuff. I would be very sad to give up the more recent stuff in some hypothetical world where gaming was executed for writing crimes against humanity sometime in the mid 2010s, like I suspect some hardliners might want.

I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time

That is definitely what I understood you to be arguing when you said "All of the video game equivalents of crack cocaine have generally released within the last 15 years". If that's not the case, fair enough.

Either way I disagree with your broader point, lol. Gaming really is in a slump after the golden age of the 90s-00s imo. But I don't have any arguments you probably haven't seen before, so we can agree to disagree on that point.

I appear to have missed the words "video game equivalents of crack to me" in my statement. My bad!

My dad was a 90s computer gamer, so I probably have a more unique view on gaming than most. From my perspective, I discuss games from more recently more than I talk about old stuff. My favorites from the 90s were probably Fallout 1, Planescape: Torment, and Marathon, which had some pretty meaty things to talk about, and Fallout was totally oozing style. But more recently (and using the term "recently" loosely), there's stuff like Hotline Miami, Spec Ops: The Line, LISA: The Painful, OFF, Katana Zero, and Dark Souls that put together some very unique combination of mechanics and writing that are really fun to think about and interact with, basically all of them having honed their own unique style in a way that was impossible back then. Maybe it depends more on the genre you like? Like, CRPGs have definitely suffered, I think. But if you are writing off indie games, I think that's generally a bad idea, because those are a lot more true to the company culture that composed 90s gaming companies.

I don't care if I've heard it before, I like reading about things I'm interested in. Please, write more about video games, all the time, everywhere. If my examples seem dated, that's mostly because I'm cheap and only buy cheap old games.

Yep, CIV is especially dangerous in this regard.

Filthy addicts... :P

Was it a good campaign, at least? What civ did you play?

Maori on the classic Terra map. Got the whole continent to myself and got to play a nice relaxing dev game.

Sounds like Civ 6? I'm still on 5 (by choice). Skeptical towards 7 too.

Civ 7 looks so bad. It's not even Civ any more, just another game with Civ branding. Then on top of that you have the legion of bugs that it launched with, and... yeah it's not a good look for Firaxis. People try to defend the game by saying "oh the new Civ game is always controversial on release", but I was there for Civ 5 and 6. Neither was even close to being as negatively received as 7 has been.

And don't even get me started on the sheer level of "diversity hire" leader picks they sunk to. This problem was in 6 as well (looking at you, Catherine de Medici), but 7 takes it to the next level. It's ridiculous.

Are you trying to suggest that Harriet Tubman was not one of the great leaders and stateswomen of civilizations? Do better.

I'm trying to suggest that Ada Lovelace (much as I respect her) wasn't a leader of people by any stretch of the imagination. You can at least argue for Tubman in that she was a kind of leader. It's not a very good case, but you can make it. Lovelace? There's absolutely nothing there besides pure diversity quota thinking.

Yea civ 6. 5 is a lot better in some ways, but playing tall in civ is far better than wide, which makes the game not quite as fun as civ 6 where you can constantly be expanding.

To be fair wide is perfectly viable in Civ 5, I play that way myself. You will have a harder time in the early game (pro tip: settle cities on top of new luxuries so you get the happiness bonus immediately), but it's quite doable. Unless you're playing against humans, 4-city tradition is an optimization, not a necessity.

Civ 6 is currently free (including expansions and DLC) on Epic, for anyone who doesn't have it yet.

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