by raincole 2 hours ago
I resonate with what you said, but I kinda don't know what it has to do with the article
The article defines guilty displeasures as things you don't like but you hope you like. I don't think you hope yourself to like modern AAA games.
I despise smartphones (and related), but they're really incredible hardware and software, I SHOULD like them, a lot. Imagine being a nerd in the 90s and getting access to this tiny computer running on 3 volts of battery power that's 10x more powerful than your desktop. Holy crap.
I'm even somewhat resentful of modern games, I feel like they should be... more fun? More often then not I just kind of throw something old in an emulator and play that. My comment might have come across as the opposite but I think it can be interpreted either way.
"I should be enjoying this stuff, why does it suck so bad now?" Is probably the vibe we're trying to get at here.
Different person's POV here: I fully expect from my mind to enjoy video games.
Then I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets, and I'd like to have absolutely none of that please.
It's this cognitive dissonance maybe, that's the guilty displeasure. Because I do keep coming back, we all do.
In the grim darkness of the right now, with former gaming companies focusing on live services and loot boxes and advertising, core gamers' very conception of video games is simulacra, a copy without the original.
With time, this will fade; like when searching for Jesus, you don't really expect to physically find the dude hidden in the corner of the church. Expectations decay.
Maybe I will visit Steam on the Internet Archive and still browse, when everything is gone and dead, and the guilty displeasure feeling will have outlived the displeasure, and the guilt.
Sounds nice, but it doesn't fit. Games are awesome right now. There are so many and so many good ones. You can play the free ones Epic releases each week and have a good selection only by that. Baldur's Gate 3 was already mentioned and is not only indeed really good, it's only the tip of the iceberg: There was a resurgence of CRPGs the last years. Including some offsprings, like Disco Elysium. A game so awesome that all "games were better in the past" statements immediately get disproved. If that's not your genre no problem, all genres thrive currently.
Sure, there are games with repackaged Unity assets on Steam. But it's on you if you just open steam and browse the new releases. Go by proper game reviews or recommendations by friends with similar taste, which has always been the right way to go, even three decades ago.