XD I woke up this morning with a head cold. Everything is going in slow motion right now.

Equip the gravity suit to slog though the mucus and then freeze it with the ice beam.

ah finally i'm not alone anymore

One that I can think of is the early 3D era. When 3D graphics started appearing, they were significantly worse than 2D graphics. One can see, for example, such early 3D graphics in games like Final Fantasy 7 (which even needed an assist feature that showed you your location and the current area's exits) and Super Mario 64 (where the camera can't move through walls, making it impossible to get a good camera angle in some areas, and where the graphics tend to mostly consist of polygons with simple textures).

It is also this era that the 2D platformer genre became endangered; everyone wanted to make their games 3D, with some games making the transition better than others. Some franchises died or became dormant as a result of this, while others (Mario and Zelda, for example) changed drastically.

This also happened to be the time when many developers really started to get overboard with story and non-interactive cutscenes. Some RPGs (FF7 being an example here, but also Legend of Dragoon) also started to include excessively long battle animations.

Or demos, as they used to be called. Surprisingly, Metal Gear was a wordy series from the start. The polygon ceiling is indeed such a topic for discussion, but the games that didn't make it though the ceiling, weren't that good to start with or suffered major decay in transition. Like King's Quest wasn't doing too hot when they transitioned, And Bubsy was utter garbage from the start.

I did not mean to blaspheme.

my backyard is filled with tombstones bearing such epitaph :)

more seriously: i indeed consider "the warrior within" as the most enjoyable from the trilogy... they managed to do many things "right" when they stepped backwards on many gameplay aspects in the following PoP titles afterwards

We can call the period the xbox 360 grew in popularity as the great mainstreaming of games to brodudes or screaming brats. We could also call it the great stagnation.

This period can be called the great spamfest with any half decent game buried under a heap of trash.

GoG did well selling retro games not only because of nostalgia but because a lot of these retro games were better than a lot of the trash coming out now.

Gaming should be in a better place but I liken it to the direction cinema has gone in.

Trying to hawk shoddy work with the help of the shilling media, because they have neither the skill nor inclination to make proper games is not what we call art.

Neither is taking flash games from the early 2000s and cashing in on suckers buying them for their mobiles a good thing.

Hmmm but it was 2D pre-render images FF7 can display the arrow on exits, and finger on played character.

Indeed, the first Tomb Raider was fantastic for the time... But the early 3D engines edgy + blockiness don't holp up aging.

Here's the thing: No other Final Fantasy game (or, for that matter, any JRPG) I have played has had a need for such a feature, except maybe SaGa Frontier (which came out around the same time, but lacked that feature). In SNES RPGs, especially earlier ones, it was very clear where you could and could not go (excluding things like intentionally hidden secret passages). Come the PS1 era, and that was no longer true for games like FF7.

As a side note, I could also point out that this is also the era where Square seemed to stop caring about balance. It started in FF6, in which Ultima was so powerful it broke the game (especially if you combine it with X-Magic and Quick, and the high MP cost is moot thanks to overpowered Osmose and a certain rare accessory), and even without it, the game doesn't feel balanced. Then you get FF7, where just one materia (Knights of the Round) is enough to destroy all challenge on its own (and again, even without it, the game doesn't feel balanced). Also, SaGa Frontier isn't known for its balance (easy to get a robot to deal over 5000 damage per round while taking single digit damage from most attacks), and humans can also get very powerful, but mystics and monsters are always weak offensively by comparison), and neither is FF8 (I haven't played it, but I have heard about being able to get overpowered early on thanks to the junction system, and that leveling up makes the game harder) or Final Fantasy Tactics (Orlandu + Math Skill; I think that's enough).

(Please don't ask for details since it's just a general 'feeling')

The transition from DOS 6.22 and (for gaming?) Win 3.1x to Win95 seems like a puberty moment, not just in the OSes but also in the games of the time as they tried - with varying success - to take advantage of this new operating system.

The late-90s and early-2000s, when online gaming was really starting to come into its own. Not the 4 player skirmish RTS, but the 64-player FPS and even more players in an MMOPRPG. Big changes then. And lots of this stuff worked on a 56k modem, surprisingly. I played Asheron's Call for a couple years on dial-up, and it didn't completely suck. The big updates did, but playing didn't.

Speaking of which, this was also when "high speed internet" became a thing. Sure, it was often a meager 1.5Mbps (better than what I have today, dammit!), but that was a revelation at the time. You mean I can play my game while the wife checks her email? Over the same connection? Without tying up the phone line?!? Holy crap!

The transition from DOS Based Windows to NT based Windows is another hiccup point.

Speaking of odd transitions, I learned recently that Mordor: The Depths of Denjol , was not actually a Windows 3.X program, but more of a really cleverly disguised DOS program, which explains why it breaks so hard in WINE.