Inspired by the (excellent) Half Life 2 documentary on Youtube, I've been looking back at other gaming anniversaries. Turns out, I remember most of the stuff that's approaching its 20th anniversary like it was yesterday. The joys of getting old.
Next year is the 360's 20th year(!), so I figured we could use this thread to have an old-man reminisce in a few months. But for now, I can't believe it's been 20 years since:
Half Life 2
Burnout 3
MGS 3
Far Cry
San Andreas
Prince of Persia: The Edgelord Within
KOTOR 2
Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door
Jak 3
(What a great year for games, incidentally.) Got a favourite 2004 game? I still play through HL2 every couple of years.
Oh, and one more side ramble. The HL2 documentary showed just how much graphics tech has slowed down recently. There's 6 years between these 2 photos. That's the same time between Red Dead 2, and now.
HL2 and MGS3 came out within a day of each other according to the internet (real astronomy shit there, MPH…. 
) and obviously that one is my answer, if it's not FFXIV it's MGS3, as in my favourite game so it obviously walks best game of 2004 for me.
Half Life 2 is one of those games I wish I could erase from my mind and experience for the first time again. Mind you, it's been about 15 years since I last played, so lots of it might end up feeling new, anyway…
Yeah, Been thinking of retiring Half-Life 2 and it's probably been 15 years since I last played it too.
They've just updated it for the 20th anniversary, actually. Some very minor graphical tweaks, but also a new developer commentary. Might be worth another run-through just for that.
I've just gone down the list and 2004 gets even more ridiculous. Fable, Metroid Prime 2, Halo 2, World of Warcraft, Ninja Gaiden, Pikmin 2, Doom 3…
Just shows how much game development has slowed down.
Just shows how much game development has slowed down.
It's kind of inevitable, given the spiralling amount of stuff that needs to go into a modern AAA game. They've seemingly all got to be open-world, photorealistic, 60-hour epics – and that's assuming they don't also need to be live-serviced and season passed for years after. Hard to start on the next thing when you've got to support the last one for five years (assuming the studio isn't shuttered by the investors after three months).
I miss the classic Xbox, also they've just dead on given away HL2 on Steam recently, starting to wish that I played it for Halloween (gonna count Ravenholm) now.
It's a shame the original version of the Soc sank without trace when Miskie disappeared, 2004 is within living Society memory and I wonder what we all had to say at the time. There are some snapshots of the site on the Wayback Machine but I haven't managed to actually log in to read any of it.
Half-Life 2 was always a bit linear for me, I enjoyed it well enough and I can see why it was important but it's not a personal favourite. I think I spent most of 2004 playing Rome: Total War and Final Fantasy XI, as well as dicking about on the then-new Xbox Live (mostly PGR2 and then Halo 2).
What happened to Miskie? I remember I only found the site due to seeing the URL in GamesTM in ArrghhZombies column (think it was his?)
He just dropped us. He was a friend of Koffdrop's originally so I wonder if he agreed with K's assertion that punching Nazis is bad.
What happened to Miskie? I remember I only found the site due to seeing the URL in GamesTM in ArrghhZombies column (think it was his?)
Would of been his, yeah. Couldn't have been the other guy (Tim Rogers, the one who lived in Japan).
Good god some of this chat seems like a very long time ago.
I wish there were still good magazines to read though. Also that somehow they weren't reporting on stuff I saw on the internet three months ago.
Maybe I just need to start downloading websites to my kindle.
What happened to Miskie? I remember I only found the site due to seeing the URL in GamesTM in ArrghhZombies column (think it was his?)
Would of been his, yeah. Couldn't have been the other guy (Tim Rogers, the one who lived in Japan).
Would of? inhales sharply
Just shows how much game development has slowed down.
We've talked about this before, but in music, tech, art, games and a host of other areas, I think it's quite hard to pinpoint cultural eras after maybe 2010 onwards? Possibly even a bit sooner. From 1984 to 2004 in gaming and pretty much everything else we had enormous strides. It was fun to live through - I remember grabbing ACE magazine (or whatever) and just marvelling at the promise of future titles and what they might look like. Musical genres exploded on a yearly basis. FX leapt forward in films…
It's hard not to be a bit boomer and feel a little sad that for kids now (my eldest was born in 2003) that there has been something of a cultural uniformity through their entire lives. How do you rebel or stand out in a world where everything looks and sounds the same every year?
How do you rebel or stand out in a world where everything looks and sounds the same every year?
I hate to say it but you're sounding very old.
If it's true, there are probably reasons for that. The way people consume music has changed enormously. New genres used to spring up partly because the principal purpose of record companies was to sell actual physical records. They had to keep coming up with new and exciting things to get people to go out and buy a single or an album. Music papers like NME hyped things that no-one had actually heard, in the hope they'd buy it sight unseen. Any self-respecting music fan would end up with loads of albums that they didn't actually like much, but listened to anyway, because they'd spent money on them and because you couldn't really get access to everything you wanted to hear. These days it's all Spotify and Apple Music and you've got access to the entire history of popular music right at the touch of a button, it's no surprise that slick, unchallenging pop gets the most listens and algorithms reinforce that to people constantly.
Films continue to evolve. Pacing and editing style on modern movies is very different to those of ten years ago, and special effects continue to improve albeit incrementally these days. If I show my son something from ten or fifteen years ago, he will know it immediately. Showing him something from the 90s is like unearthing a historical artefact.
TV shows are all going for the "prestige" effect at the moment, people expect their TV shows to look like movies now but it means you only get 8 or 10 episodes and you have to wait two years between series. Only a few years ago it was normal to get 20+ episodes of much cheaper content but you got them every year like clockwork. I'm honestly not sure what's better, but you have to admit it's at least different.
Games, well, fair enough, I think we've been in a rut really since about the middle of the PS4 era. The decision to make everything cross-gen for about four years has really hurt this generation. The Switch has held things back a bit too. We're starting to see stuff come through now that couldn't have been done on previous consoles - graphically at least. But mostly we are still in a "PS4 games at twice the framerate" kind of era I guess. And the reason we don't have more ambitious titles is that big games take enormous amounts of time and resources to create. I still think the most next-gen game I've played is Cyberpunk 2077/Phantom Liberty, just because of the sheer amount of detail - it feels like a proper world.
I'm not sure that's true - music and film were democratised by technology. We've spoke about that before - it's the bar for sampling to drop into the hands of everyone that made music essentially expand genres at an unprecedented speed. Vocal manipulation was probably the last area to be cracked by tech (T-Pain onwards) but music has stalled out for years now. When you can manipulate any sound to do anything at an entry bar that nearly anyone can afford then that's pretty much music done.
There aren't unlimited chords/keys/time signatures. There's only so hard you can Jacob Collier before you run out of those too. And with AI now basically autogenerating music, the human limitations of time to crank it out are gone too. Same with filming equipment. Indie movies from 2004, say Primer (made for a few thousand dollars) still stand up. Blair Witch etc. FX in the 90s (e.g. Jurassic Park/T2) looks shit. But then the Matrix happened (and it still looks good today). Like videogame graphics there are improvements, but the uncanny valley is spectacularly wide. I was watching "Plane" a terrible Gerard Butler film the other night. The CGI was technically better than anything you could do 20 years ago but it didn't look real in the slightest. I also disagree on pacing - yes, for movies in the 80s and 90s, but hyper kinetic movie pacing has been a thing for 20 years now. The Bourne films kicked off in 2002. There's more flash cuts in that than a Jake Paul video.
I don't think this is a boomer rant in the sense our parents thought the 50s and 60s were better compared to the 80s and 90s. Things have fundamentally changed - in games, music, film, everything there is cultural convergence through sheer volume, unlike anything ever seen in human history. This isn't a phase in art, there is simply nothing to rebel against any more because there's no progression. Who gives a flying fuck what people wear these days? Flares? No flares? Knock yourself out. Punk? Rocker? Mod? Nobody cares. Watch anything, wear anything, play anything.
It's interesting, for my kids, their passage of time isn't marked in cultural events (albums or films) it's more in a transition of memes/phrases and whatever the hive mind is into at any particular times. Minecraft. Battle royales. A particular creator on Youtube. Punctuated by the pandemic. I'm not even saying it's bad, there's some surprising shifts and I think it's a lot easier in a culturally amorphous pool to find likeminded people and groups because you're not so bound by location or time.
I kinda think you're both right, in a way. The reason there seem to be no defining "eras" in culture anymore is because of the democratisation of production methods – and, of course, THE ALGORITHM™.
Culture has been fractured into as many pieces as there are people, so we're not having the same shared experience as we would have been 20 years ago. (I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but I do think it's hurt media literacy and critical thinking, to have a curated media diet purely intended to maximise your Facebook engagement.)
The closest thing we've got nowadays to that monoculture event is the MCU, which is a pretty strong example of how the only cross-cultural breakthroughs we have left are the most tepid, bland and safe "IPs".
Part of that is just the way Hollywood has trained itself to be increasingly risk-averse - almost every film that hits major theatre chains now costs about a quarter of a billion dollars to make and has to make over a billion back at the box office; if the numbers don't look like they might work out that way, it'll never get past the pitching stage.
If something doesn't have a recognisable name on it - a franchise, IP, or (in increasingly rare cases) director or star that everyone's mum has heard of - then it's likely to just get shovelled onto Netflix at some festival so they can point at the big "WE HAVE X HOURS OF CONTENT" sign, if it gets anywhere at all.
