Racketboy, I agree. I enjoy "simple" games. The simplest concepts can be the most fun, if executed well.
I enjoyed the reall old sports games, like on Atari. You just moved your character and tried to hit the ball. Nothing else to it. Now-a-days, you can't even get past the first 500 setup screens unless you know which rosters to pick and what plays to choose, etc. Same thing with racing games. You have to sit and pick your brake strength and spoiler angles and shock stiffness and windshield wiper fluid levels, etc. I just want to drive! Left, right, brake, and GAS! Don't need anything else. In fact, I usually don't even need the brake the way I play. The only enhancement that ever did anything for me was the chain whip.
Even 2-D shooters suffer the same problem. Old-skool 2D shooters had you weaving around patterns of bullets and shooting patterns of ships, and gaining power-ups to have bigger-sized bullets. But then came the wave of "arcade" shooters, where you can achieve full power-up level in 2 minutes, but there's so many bullets on the screen that you die every 5 seconds anyway so you have to keep chucking in the quarters. And then there's the new-gen graphically-intensive shooters that have so much going on the screen at once (50 levels of scrolling backgrounds, transparent clouds, engine flare, missile trails, super-sized explosions) that you can't tell what the heck is going on. You can't tell if you're running into other ships, bullets, or vapor, or see what you're hitting. A lot of these have non-existent or lame power-up systems. I can't believe the number of dreamcast shooters that don't even have power-ups. They're all about the graphics, or having 3-D backgrounds, even though the gameplay is still 2D.
And then there's the fighters. In the old-skool fighters, each button executed a kick or punch. Each button actually did something that you can immediately see and experience. Moving the D-pad moved your character immediately. With a lot of new fighters, and expecially all these WWF wrestling games my friend makes me play, the buttons don't actually do anything. I hit buttons all day and my character just stands there. They don't even move when you move the D-pad. You have to be in the right position first, and the opponent has to be in the right position, and then you need to press R2 + square plus left to begin some move. And then at some point you need to do L1 + circle + triangle to block something. And if you press X at a certain time it does one thing, and if you press X at another time, it does another thing. I just miss that instant responsiveness I got from old-skool fighters. Kick and be kicked.
I also wanted to note how much this parallels Anime. I feel the same way about old-skool anime vs. newer "computernime". Anime in the 80's and early 90's was hand-drawn which cells and used watercolor backgrounds and pleasent earthy tones. It was just very appealing to look at. There were a dozen or so well-known studios doing the anime, and each artist or studio had a specific style of drawing that was distinct from the rest. Original characters and plots and stories happened all the time. Anime had that "magic".
Since the late 90's, computer-animation has taken over, and commoditized anime. Now it's really easy to churn out anime at breakneck speeds. The quality bar is lowered because volume is so high. Most of the computernime has really bad animation and graphic quality and is just unpleasent to look at. And the anime that tries to mix 3D effects with 2D animatino just looks horrendous. All the plots are cookie-cutter, and all the stores are re-hashed from dozens of previous anime, and never live up to the originals. The characters are flat and boring. And all the characters in all the anime look alike now. They all just look like drawings out of the How To Draw Manga books. No more original art styles between developers. And the earth-tone color schemes and watercolors are gone in favor of brigher, more western solid colors.
As with games, there are of course still rare good anime amongst the garbage, and the old-skool anime had its share of garbage. But the ratio of good to bad was orders of magnitude higher before, and even the bad old-skool anime was still watchable because the nice cell graphics were much more pleasing to look at than the ugly computer-drawn anime.
And of course, kids today who grew up on computernime and mixed 2D/3D animation simply can't stomach old-skool animation with it's (sometimes) lower frame rate or lack of 3D effects.
Very much a parallel.
