: What depresses me is that the same can be applied to software in general.
: OSes are tens of gigabytes (GIGAbytes!) large and even someting like a
: word-processing program (MS Word, for example) can take up significant
: portions of a modern, multi-gigahertz (again, GIGAhertz!) processor.
: Nothing is as efficient, because it doesn't "need" to be, in
: exchange for what sometimes makes something easier to use, sometimes
: harder, similarly hit-or-miss visual alterations, and of course, larger
: filesize.
: Sure, modern games have better graphics, more polygons, fancy
: shadow/lighting, and other graphics-intensive things that make the game
: more 'immersive'. To that I say phooey. Marathon does that just fine,
: right through the pointy walls and sprite-based aliens. Sure you can
: overpower a meh story and alright gameplay with a cool-looking
: environment, but do you really want to? (I don't)
I was really only thinking the gameplay, not the hardware demands (the speed the character runs, regenerating health and bulky, accurate enemies that forces most of the game to be bottlenecked with repeatedly ducking behind cover, Duke Nukem losing his breath after 10 seconds of jogging but being able to sit around and do benchpresses however long he likes (and make it frustrating for the player to complete a benchpress to boot), etc.).
And then there's the unskippable cutscenes and handholding tutorials. I'm around 2 hours into Ever Oasis and it felt like a neverending cutscene where the gameplay consisted of "press A for the next tutorial," and Navi the fairy mars most of the experience of Ocarina of Time 3D. She was already bad in the original, but now she yaps telling you where to go every 2 minutes after an NPC explicitly spelled it out for you already. The 3D kinda makes my eyes hurt, too, but I can slide it off at least. There doesn't seem to be a slider for turning off Navi. Even that new Bubsy game has a slider to shut him up.
