I really don’t think that the prude left is as un-prevalent as this comment wants to portray. They get what they want quite a bit in the UK and Australia (often by finding allies with the prude right tbf,) and even outside of that, they’re not particularly hard to find, and perception matters. And to someone with no strong political convictions, they could easily see a ton of leftists advocating censorship of some boobs in some game and take that at face value as “leftists are prudes.” I can’t even say it’s unjustified, Trump has tons of policies that I was told not to worry about because they were fringe. They’re more serious than boobs in video games, but the principle still applies.

And to be honest, I really do think a visible amount of people on the left really are uncomfortable with depictions of sexuality and even just romance appealing to straight men. It’s like, a sizeable amount of people on the left have this strong fear of anything giving men “unrealistic expectations.” And sometimes it’s not ecchi booby gags, sometimes it’s shit like “women having common interests with you,” as if not being heteropessimistic is now misogynistic.

I feel like people’s perception of what “open world” means has drifted. I see people claim that GTA isn’t open world because it has linear progression, or games where the world isn’t particularly big aren’t open world. Like, they think BOTW defines what “open world” means.

Do you have a seamless, interconnected world that is the primary place the game takes place? Open world.

I would bluntly state that Metroidvanias are open world, and also aren’t the only open world games that have been around since the NES.

Yes. I very much remember it being uncontroversial to call the N64 retro in 2010.

Graf Zahl has always been a bit of an ass, but did he just stop caring about the quality of his work?

As someone who isn’t necessarily big on the notion streamlining is “objectively” good game design… That more or less began to be disposed of the minute we had the technology, minus a few now-niche genres that rely on it. It was gradual, but mass market games as early as Zork in 1981, had save schemes.

I believe the only reason adult games aren’t as popular in Western countries as they are in Japan (and I think elsewhere in Asia?) is because there’s a stereotype that they’re low quality, which came about because of the ESRB (not sure about other countries’ rating systems) basically making it so there was no money in it in a pre-digital download world.

I like SMW better myself (actually not a single franchise entry on that list is my favorite in the series) but it doesn’t have the kind of unanimous praise SMB3 does.

I’m going to take this as “games that I never see anyone question their quality.” (I don’t even like all these games myself)

• Sonic 3 & Knuckles

• Kirby Planet Robobot

• Doom 2016

• Street Fighter III: Third Strike

• Pac-Man

• Balatro

• Steins;Gate

• The House in Fata Morgana

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

• Gran Turismo 4

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

• Mega Man X

• Mega Man X4

• Super Mario Bros. 3

• Hollow Knight

• Bloodborne

• Elden Ring

• Balder’s Gate 3

PSVR2 died because it’s not backwards compatible with PSVR1.

Half Life Alyx is like if we got Super Mario 64, and then four years later the games influenced by it just didn’t come.

The thing is, we know Nintendo does have in-house developed emulators that they used for Virtual Console and then NSO and the Classic Edition.

It’s fairly likely they didn’t take the effort to port those to PC for the museum, but still.

Minecraft is mostly popular with people who were 5 - 12 years old 10 years ago.

I think it’s most likely that more people are playing genres like platformers and fighting games that are designed for controllers on PC than before.

Michael Eisner once called himself “the last of the creative types in Hollywood” after he left Disney, and I can’t help but see what he meant when he said that when I look at the current American film and TV landscape. It’s like today’s Hollywood bigwigs don’t even understand why people watch TV and movies.

I kinda think this happened to Western video games too (yeah Sony is a Japanese company…but PlayStation has shown a pretty square focus on the Western market in the past 10 years.) From a consumer perspective I don’t think a new CEO is the answer. It wasn’t for Disney’s fans with Bob Chapek.

No, GameMaker Studio. That engine had it’s own controversy over moving to a subscription model, but nothing as egregious as Unity.