The current state of video games

As you might be familiar with, Wind Waker HD was released a few days ago. Wind Waker is definitely one of my top five games of all time, but I was sceptical to this new version. As the years have passed I've made a promise to myself not to pay money for the same game twice, except for some very rare cases. I like Nintendo just as much as the next guy, but they do have a tendency to re-release their games ad infinitum.

To me Wind Waker is still today a very beautiful game with a unique cel-shaded look. The only thing that needs to be done to it is 1. Up the resolution (which Nintendo obviously has done) 2. Add slightly more polygons to some of the models (the rounded ones, which Nintendo HAS NOT done inexplicably). But that is still not something I would consider paying full price for. Adding a ton of bloom to the game, and some weird lighting effect which makes everything look like clay instead of the clean cel-shaded look is really uncalled for. Yes, WWHD has a higher resolution, but to me it certainly looks worse than the old game. And don't get me started on the heavy-handed attempt at introducing "social media" to the game via the bottles that people can send out and write messages in. I had enough of that crap in New Super Luigi U, where 99 percent of the messages were people understandably complaining that the game was too difficult. Which is true, thanks to the permanent ice physics.

Worst of all though is yet to come, I watched a video from one of those Youtube-celebrity accounts where the guy went through some changes that had been made to WWHD. Namely they had sped up a few things. This is just so sad to me, I don't even know where to begin. Let's Plays have been a thing for a while now, and I've read on a certain imageboard that people actually will watch a let's play instead of playing a game if they think it's too hard or takes too long to play through. It's bizarre, to be honest. This need for insta-gratification is what is responsible for the state of video games today. Why even play games if you feel like that? If you can't sit down and really immerse yourself into a game, why bother? I foresee a bleak future where you instead of playing games or watch movies, download the memory of having done so like in Total Recall, so you have time to do something else, I don't know what.

Some stuff:

servadacsgamedev.blogspot.com - my game development blog
http://backloggery.com/Servadac - my Backloggery account
@servadac42 - my twitter account