As do most live service publishing companies. That is the whole problem. They aren’t bothered by simply looking bad for not preserving them.

It was a service, but my point is less how much was paid, but that much of it is dead and gone. A completely free game that shuts down its servers and becomes unplayable is still a loss to our culture.

Maybe but it would also be immensely more time consuming. Why not use AI to accelerate the process?

It’s just as much game killing than any live service today. Satellaview relied on server connection, there’s no official lasting copies that anyone can own.

Media today might be less sexist but I think part of it is also that it became drastically more sex averse. Mortal Kombat is gorier than ever for anyone to see, but god forbid anything shows a nipple.

People used to bring up Kratos in these discussions but before these new games he seemed far more likely to bite someone’s face off than to kiss anyone. There’s a difference.

I think there is space for both sexualized and non-sexualized characters, as long as they are treated evenly. This is entertainment, they don’t need to be all business serious.

I dread that in trying to be perfectly respectable, the medium might err to the side of prudishness and sexual repression.

Yeah, but that is just another facet of marketing for men. Sexy dress-up vs tighty whities. Definitely not intended to get women interested.

Worth considering that if Alien was produced today, there would be a lot of criticism of it being “too woke”. Not only progress doesn’t just happen, but it’s also not granted to stick unless people are still pushing for it.

deleted by creator

It’s not about holding up, it’s about playing pretty much the same, while mostly just looking prettier.

While lines are never quite so clear cut, from SNES to N64/PS1 we unlocked a whole variety of 3D games, and by PS3/XB360 we added open-world games, immersive sims and console MMOs to our repertoire. But what new horizons were unlocked by technological advancements since? Only battle royales come to mind.

Surely today’s games are larger, more beautiful and have embraced QoL aspects that we discovered along the way. But today’s games don’t feel as markedly different as any previous leaps.

It doesn’t feel right to count that generation as retro, for reasons like GTA 5, which was initially released for those consoles, yet it’s still considered a current game, with no significant overhaul beyond graphical fidelity. It’s the greatest example of how games haven’t drastically evolved since then.

Compared to the jump from SNES to N64 and PS1, or from PS1 to PS3, we haven’t had any major breakthrough, just moderate incremental improvement.

Funny enough it was Link’s Awakening that led all the games after that being more story oriented. It also started the trope of the long trading quest

It’s reductionist, but it gets to the point that it’s not an abstract everlasting resource, it’s a system that’s not under your control, so it might not be always reliable. So people should be wary of service discontinuations, rules and price changes.

The point can be distilled even further, the cloud is someone else’s.

This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.