As you may know my interest is primarily in WW2 simulations, modding and film making, you name it and I probably have it somewhere in my collection. One might expect to have yesterday's games gathering dust on the shelves having been replaced by newer shinier offerings but my experience is the exact opposite.Looking at the games on my shelves it is the more recent titles that have failed to deliver any lasting appeal whilst previous incarnations still reside on my hard disks.
Things have certainly changed, the trend in recent years seems to be to produce more eye-candy at the expense of long-term appeal and worst still, historically inaccurate, unfinished "abandonware" type games. There was a time before the internet when everyone was a single-player, or in today's terminology, an offline player. The better games had dynamic campaigns, more atmospheric interfaces and, as a result, infinitely more immersion but things have changed. The modern assumption amongst game/simulation developers seems to be that there's no need to include anything other than a handful of, (sometimes poorly) scripted missions and state-of-the-art graphics which, once played, leave one with a hollow, dispassionate, detached feeling and, worse still, if one is interested in online gaming, they sometime fail to include an online option at all! .So in such cases one is expected to play it and throw it away unless one can find or develop mods to breath a bit of life back into it.
Maybe I'm just out of step with time and we all live in a "give me a bright and shiny throw away toy to play with for a week" society but I firmly believe that, especially within the single-player/offline WW2 gaming/simulations community, containing many of the same age-group as myself, there are many who share my view that newer isn't, in the vast majority of cases, better and that flashy graphics and online game play doesn't guarantee a more enjoyable gaming experience. Personally I have never really enjoyed online gaming, not to say that others don't enjoy it and that's fine and dandy. For me gaming is all about "escapism", "immersion" call it what you like, something to take one's mind off the mundane realities of life for a while and feeling a part of something and not a disjointed, disconnected, sterile and quite frankly, disappointing experience which seems to be my experience of the most recent generation of games.
With the above firmly in mind, maybe it is time that "I hung up my boots" so as to speak as my interest in the genre has diminished to such an extent that it has long since ceased to provide believable satisfying entertainment.
Regards
Aces
