GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Kosheh]

edit: ah shit wrote a wall of text

Sonic, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat have been on computers longer than many think, with the latter two released during the DOS era.

With MS-DOS. There's quite a few games that deserve more love and attention, due to being cult classics and obscure gems.
GOG.com sells some games from that era for decent prices. And unlike Steam, U-Play, and Origin, there's none of that DRM bullshit.

Not only that. Indie games were everywhere on Mac, Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and DOS. So yeah, not really a new thing.
Team 17, best known for Worms, is one of the oldest Independent game developers around and still going strong.


Though I agree we need more on the Eshop and third-party games. Then again. Everyone moved away from Nintendo once the Playstation and Saturn came out due to their original and silly censorship policy. Sega had the better Mortal Kombat 1, though.
Now their systems have, of all things, R rated games on the Wii U. Funnily enough, Australia's first R rated game happened to be the Wii U port of Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge. We haven't had much problems with censorship lately, which is good. MKX is pretty full on with its gore.

Games have been on PC for ages, sure, but how many members of the casual audience even operated DOS? How many Steam profiles are there? How many individuals even owned a PC pre-2000 when compared with post-2005? How many major third-party developers treated PCs with the same respect as consoles? For how many of them was the PC port even 1/4 as significant as the SNES and Gen ports?

Worms and indies: It's not really fair to point at franchises which originated on and have lived the majority of tneir existence on PC with developers who primarily focused on console ports shifting serious attention to the PC.

Pretty much this.
Indie games were also a thing around the dawn of console gaming because there wasn't any quality control - anyone with the brains to develop for it could make a game and release it, regardless or not whether it was polished. The Atari - third-party hobby programmers churned out games from the comfort of their basement and sold them for comparable prices to actual publishers' releases. It's pretty much what caused the console market to nosedive in the 80's (arguably though, it's because of AAA studios with unrealistic goals, but also because the market was so flooded with everyone else's games that why even bother with the hyped release of "AAA" titles that were going to be comparatively dog shit compared to the arcade releases of the same games etc.)  Nintendo's actually what kept its face in the dirt by requiring companies (not individuals, because they couldn't afford it!) to license their product with Nintendo, who would test the game and then publish it on cartridges. It essentially weeded out the "hobbyists" who couldn't independently publish their games on the console.

The thing is, "indie games" are moreso a celebrated thing in gaming culture now, because most of those child gamers that kept the console market going have grown up with dreams to be programmers (and with a lot of schools offering courses in game development) and now there's more developers than there are publishers that will accept them. Additionally, the "current" market trends at the time (AAA publishers who put out "theatrical experiences" of games at full price and expect a minimum of 4 million units to be sold per release) allowed a new system of "single programmer churns out an independently-published excursions at a fraction of the price" to actually work and take off, especially with Steam and its system of digital marketing. These smaller "excursions" are also decent experiments in games that most gamers want [that typically harken back to simpler days] but AAA publishers generally can't afford to gamble on.
You guys are bringing up Nintendo - yes, Nintendo's celebrating "Nindies" but they're celebrating the huge guaranteed indie releases of yesteryear, or the kickstarted ones with massive goals that had intentions of releasing on the Wii U in the first place. Nintendo's being Nintendo again with the typical facade of "check us out literally never performing at a loss hawking games that we know will sell due to their prestige ohoho"

However - and this is probably a conversation for another time that I don't want to engage in right now - the gaming scene has also grown SO FAST, SO QUICKLY that more avant-garde gaming experiences are coming out of the woodwork, with "artsy" developers who are quick to point out the flaws in other developers, both AAA and indie (for they're fairly easy targets) to get some press attention for their otherwise difficult-to-market games. Simultaneously they're getting shat on by gamers and publishers alike for their differing opinions and their unique way of life - which this is uh, another movement in gaming that...yeah, I'm not sure is worth bringing up here but half of you know the movement I'm referring to. ;P

Though Hotline Miami 2 has been banned so far due to the infamous rape scene. Absolutely disgusting! No one wants to see that!

This kind of "ewwies SEX VIOLENCE!! NOBODY WANTS TO SEE IT" is kinda what's allowing things to fester in gaming. As in like, the repulsed response is kind of what's driving developers to write uglier storylines just to see how many people they can make squirm, while (imo, kinda sleazily) making additional sales with that same controversy "Gee can Hotline Miami really be this -- OH MY GOD"

It's things like this that make me wonder what went on in the boardroom for the development for Hatred. :/

(oops I quoted Kriven but im not really sure what part of his post i tied into this. i just kinda ranted. WHOOPS)