well... that equates to game length = game quality. what about very good, but not so long games? A game with lots of backtracking = a good game?

Not sure if serious or seriously trolling.
Games don't need to go through streamlining and simplification (canonization and glorification of "the truth" and "the one only correct opinion")?? They are already there. Everyone is copying the same features deemed successful and simplifying gameplay for a wider appeal.
They need to go to the opposite direction and fast. Only the recent resurgent of indie games is what's keeping a hope of actual innovation (actual as in the opposite of marketing crap we see ALL the time).

We got many different types of games ans genres, all of them are good. but someone will tell you that some games are more proper games than other.... this is what I am saying, and the streamlined AAA games has just as much value as retro classics or hipster Indies. Same features are copied because they work, but there are plenty of other games also. The good thing is that we do not al have to like the same games as Crosmode does, even though how much he would like us to do.

If you do not think that there is a pletoria of different types of games in all genres today, and there is a lot of innovation as well as variation, then we have been not playing the same games...

The hope would be that long and boring games do not get played that often. One only would be able to compare games of the same genre. But yes, a mediocre adventure that nevertheless people play through would seem better than a short, but superb adventure. That's not fair.

But I already have a new idea. One-to-one comparison. So people can compare two games (of similar genre) and say which one is better. From all these comparisons from all the people you then compute kind of a ranking or at least something like a top group (best 30%), average group (middle 40%) and bottom group (lowest 30%).

At least we can use this for classifying games as similar or not similar in many different aspects including quality.

I get what you are saying and partially agree. It's good to have variety, but most "AAA" (fucking hate that title) companies stick to the same thing over and over. Even worse every iteration of the same game is even more simplified and streamlined ("button-awesome", "less confusing" you've heard that before) than the previous in order to appeal to more people. This is bound to give an underwhelming experience to the ones already familiar with gaming.

A note here, I'm not saying everything old is good. Dune 2 controls are atrocious by todays standards and the inventory management in many older RPGs is very often a chore. At the same time this not very clearly quantifiable charm that makes these games played and sold even today is, many times, lost as well in the process. We get some, we lose some... The problem is, more often than not, we lose more than we gain. And I think that's Crosmando's point. Not that all should conform to his preferences.

Too bad for Gamespy, they were pretty good after they went PC only.

that's how it has been with all mainstream since the dawn of time. There is more at stake there so there is less room for experimentation. Most experimentations and innovations will happen at the fringes, and the most successful ones will be absorbed into the mainstream. Nothing new there, and as long as the amount of money are involved as it is, there is also really no problem. If the mainstream tried to experiment all the time, the companies would be folding constantly and the centre would be very unstable. Say what you will about the big companies, but the stability of them helps maintain the gaming industry. I think it works nicely like this.

Revolutions will happen at the fringes, in the mainstream there will be evolutions.

and speaking about the value of what we have lost and what we have gained, that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. In my opinion, (speaking as a gamer from the late 70's) we have gained a lot more then we have lost.... I can not really think about one single thing we have "lost" which I am missing.



Edit - A bit related article, focus on PS4 now, relevant extract to the above:
"A first-person shooter is a first-person shooter. A driving sim is a driving sim. FIFA is FIFA. There's nothing revolutionary about them, no more than there's anything revolutionary about a wacky family sitcom or an apocalyptic action flick. Sure, some new digital filmmaking technique or digital distribution mechanism might slightly alter our experience of such media, but the moment we focus on that purported innovation, we tend to become annoyed and distracted. Just think of Hollywood's recent experiments in technical innovations like 3D and 48 fps -- they leave audiences cold. All we really want are decent films that don't run so damned long.

David Cage's dreams of interactive cinema notwithstanding, big budget, high-gloss commercial videogames aren't appealing because there's some new zenith to reach, one only made possible by a controller with a "Share" button or a touch-pad or a streaming delivery system. They're appealing because they have reached their zenith, and their zenith is also their nadir. In some sense, we love big budget, high-gloss videogames because they are terrible, because they have to compromise to a lowest common denominator to justify their absurd budgets, and because we secretly know that our highest aspirations for them are actually quite low. We don't really want Cold War Berlin; we want big motherfucking guns.

This is an unpopular claim to make out in the open. Few will own up to the fact that they mostly want to shoot aliens and play Madden NFL on PlayStation, just like they mostly want to see explosions and watch football on TV. That's not to say that's all videogames can do, of course. Just as Downton Abbey or Storage Wars or Mad Men make different uses of the plasma TV, so some games disrupt videogames' crass pornography of playable action: Cage's quasi-interactive drama Heavy Rain or That Game Company's stylized environmental dreamscape Journey, or Jonathan Blow's dense world-puzzler The Witness, a game whose PS4 launch was even revealed at the Sony announcement. But to become figures, these works have to arise from the wide, stable base of videogames' ground. We need the tripe to make the Kobe sensical. After all, 50" TVs and surround sound home theaters weren't invented to make Lord Crawley appear more visually captivating or more aurally directional.

Such pragmatism may seem vulgar, but it's also weirdly bewitching. There's something earnest about embracing the dumb ugliness of stupid games, of wanting to play the latest, shiniest versions of Killzone and Gran Turismo not because they contain anything new or different, but just because we recognize our own propensity to produce endless desire for them."

Why you talking about PC classics only? Consoles make old-school games old-school before there was old-school?

With notable exceptions. For example I would say that Google and Amazon and Apple are mainstream now but still they produce a lot of revolutions. Sometimes even big comparnies have a culture of internal competition and use some of their resources for experimenting. It might not happen often, but revolutions are not limited to the fringes and can happen everywhere.

but that experimentation is still happening in the fringe of those large companies, and they are also large conglomerates with many pies in the oven. Each of their experimentations are a very small % of the budget. Compare this with a game developer where the next game can be everything from 10% to 100% of company funds.

edit - large game developers can also produce small experimental games, normally through sister companies and such.

PC Gamer is the only other one, though it's probably more mainstream than some GOG users would like, they still show any major indie games coming out.

There's nothing to be happy about here! IGN stays while some really good sites are gone }:-(
I've been following GameSpy since around 2001, and Dan Stapleton had done a fantastic job with it over the past year or so. It had an active and growing community, with little of the idiocy prevalent on IGN. I'd have been fine if they had shuttered it three years ago, but now... It's a damn shame :(

Who exactly ruined the games?

Gamespy, that provided the service, or the developers of those games that were too lazy to build their own infrastructure?

Gamespy has been great, PC gaming focused and honest website past two years or so.
Shame it got closed, and shame such an ignorant OP was posted here.

There's so much self centered elitism in this post masquerading as "fact", it's useless to even address it.

You, sir, seem to suffer from a classic case of not only PC elitism but "da old days were so much bettahz!" elitism.

Go ahead and cheer for a overall negative thing that you personally didn't like and pretend it's some kind of karmic justice if you want. I suspect I'm not the only one who thinks you're acting like an elitist-fill-in-the-blank on the subject.