Retro games are so much better than modern video games – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Xbox 360 – a simpler age (pic: Microsoft)

A reader explains why he thinks the Xbox 360 era was the pinnacle of gaming, and why he’s happy to play its games indefinitely.

Like everyone else I’ve not really known what to think the last few weeks, as the games industry goes into meltdown for what seems like no reason at all. Publishers clearly have no interest in explaining themselves and as far as I can see it’s just greedy business reasons for why they’re acting like this, which I imagine, like usual, will probably end up blowing up in their face.

At the very least it looks like it’s going to result in a decrease in the number of releases from major publishers and that a lot of what they do put out will be live service rubbish (that will probably flop). But I have a very simple solution to this: I just play old games instead.

I don’t really think of myself as an overly nostalgic person but for me the best era of gaming was the Xbox 360. Sony put out some good stuff last gen, and I love my Switch, but for me the Xbox 360 was the perfect mix between ambition, graphical power, and variety.

I don’t want to get into a big long list with this – you’ll know what games you’ll like from the era or not – but some of my favourites include Mass Effect, Skyrim/Oblivion, BioShock, Portal 2, Fallout 3, Gears Of War, Braid, Far Cry 3, Dishonored, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bayonetta, XCOM, Dark Souls, Limbo, Alien Isolation, Vanquish, and many more.

Many of these games are still being remastered and released today pretty much as they are, just with touched up textures and higher resolution. You can judge for yourself whether that means the games have held up well or the newer games haven’t made much of a leap but I don’t think any of the sequels to any of these games are better than what existed in the Xbox 360 era.

I also can’t think of any games from the current or previous generation that couldn’t have been done to at least a major degree on the Xbox 360. Maybe the open world wouldn’t have been quite as big, or the physics not quite as realistic, but I’m sure if they had just stuck with the Xbox 360 they could’ve got more and more out of it.

Just look at some of the magic that’s been performed on the Switch. Including ports of last gen games you never would’ve thought possible, like The Witcher 3.

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If the games industry has a crash or dips or gets obsessed with games I don’t like for a few years I don’t really care. I’ve got these older, better games to keep me satisfied. Especially if you include other older retro games and modern indie titles.

I just don’t really have much need for modern big budget games. They have to be so careful and try not to do anything too unusual, that might put off more casual players, that they all end up being really plain and boring, in my opinion.

I don’t want to seem indifferent to the job losses going on at the moment, I think that’s awful, but in terms of the publishers themselves, I don’t care what they do or what they try to push on us. Not when I can go back to a better time, when games had more personality and more ambition.

By reader Maxs

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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