You're wrong. It's not that current games suck overall; it's that the proportion of genres and styles has hugely changed to favour the lowest common denominator.
That lowest common denominator is: Sports; war; first-person shooter; music/singing/party (eg., Guitar Hero) games; fantasy RPGs; and various simplistic puzzle/physics games such as Bejeweled and Angry Birds. There is also a smattering of strategy such as Civilization and Starcraft II, but the golden age of real-time strategy (Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Homeworld) is over; the last semi-classic, Age of Empires III, came out 8 years ago.
I am an adventure game enthusiast. LucasArts, Sierra and so on are some of my favourite games. Believe me when I tell you there is a huge hole in the current games market. During the last decade, my single great game experience has been Machinarium. Before then, the last classical point and click game I really liked was, I think, Silver in 1999.
There have been a few blips. The Syberiad games were decent. The Book of Unwritten Tales, a German game, was quite decent. Not great, just decent. I hear Vampyre Story was OK. I liked Hector from Telltale Games; it had that kind of rowdy, satiric tone that Sierra was famous for. I honestly did not very much like Telltale's other recent point and clicks, such as Back to the Future and Sam & Max and the new Monkey Island episodes. Overall, some OK games, but nothing great.
Games like these -- slow, difficult, fairly literary, full of dialogue, patience-demanding -- just do not sell well enough anymore. It's not that they don't sell, obviously there is a fairly large market for adventure games. Machinarium sold well, I think, but counted in thousands, not millions, of copies. That's not the sort of sales figures the games business is interested in.
Sure, Portal, Braid, Fez and Limbo are fine games. But they are platform puzzles; comparing them to the types of games that LucasArts produced is apples and oranges. Ron Gilbert, an ex-LucasArts genius, recently released The Cave, which disappointingly turned out to be yet another plattform puzzle game, and a fairly boring one at that. And actually, they are few and far apart. There are years between each game that is as good as Braid. A tiny game like Limbo took six years to create.
That lowest common denominator is: Sports; war; first-person shooter; music/singing/party (eg., Guitar Hero) games; fantasy RPGs; and various simplistic puzzle/physics games such as Bejeweled and Angry Birds. There is also a smattering of strategy such as Civilization and Starcraft II, but the golden age of real-time strategy (Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Homeworld) is over; the last semi-classic, Age of Empires III, came out 8 years ago.
I am an adventure game enthusiast. LucasArts, Sierra and so on are some of my favourite games. Believe me when I tell you there is a huge hole in the current games market. During the last decade, my single great game experience has been Machinarium. Before then, the last classical point and click game I really liked was, I think, Silver in 1999.
There have been a few blips. The Syberiad games were decent. The Book of Unwritten Tales, a German game, was quite decent. Not great, just decent. I hear Vampyre Story was OK. I liked Hector from Telltale Games; it had that kind of rowdy, satiric tone that Sierra was famous for. I honestly did not very much like Telltale's other recent point and clicks, such as Back to the Future and Sam & Max and the new Monkey Island episodes. Overall, some OK games, but nothing great.
Games like these -- slow, difficult, fairly literary, full of dialogue, patience-demanding -- just do not sell well enough anymore. It's not that they don't sell, obviously there is a fairly large market for adventure games. Machinarium sold well, I think, but counted in thousands, not millions, of copies. That's not the sort of sales figures the games business is interested in.
Sure, Portal, Braid, Fez and Limbo are fine games. But they are platform puzzles; comparing them to the types of games that LucasArts produced is apples and oranges. Ron Gilbert, an ex-LucasArts genius, recently released The Cave, which disappointingly turned out to be yet another plattform puzzle game, and a fairly boring one at that. And actually, they are few and far apart. There are years between each game that is as good as Braid. A tiny game like Limbo took six years to create.