In the fall of 2009, a game came out that received universal acclaim.
I didn’t know much about the series it was a part of, but as someone always looking for
a good game to play, I decided to buy it.
Instead of playing it myself though, I ended up going over to a friend’s house where
I let him try it out as I’d be able to play it on my own whenever I wanted, and for the
next 7 hours, I sat in complete awe as I watched him play Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
Everything about it blew my mind.
The story, the performances, the characters, the set pieces, the music, the bombastic and
constant action, the animations, the transitions from one scene to the next, the way it flowed
seamlessly in and out of gameplay.
I was enraptured; transfixed by this game I could hardly believe actually existed.
The hours melted away, and it wasn’t until 4am that I reluctantly went home to get some
sleep.
I rested for a few hours before catching up on my own to where my friend had left off,
and then I went back over to watch him finish the game.
As the credits rolled, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the best game I had
ever played.
Admittedly, at that point in my life, this kind of experience was somewhat common.
Every year I played a new game, sometimes multiple games, that for at least a brief
moment felt like the best one I had ever played.
In 2008 it was Littlebigplant.
In 2007 it was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
In 06 was Oblivion and Twilight Princess.
2005 was Resident Evil 4 and Psychonauts.
The year before that it was Fable, then the one before that was it Prince of Persia: Sands
of Time and I can keep going all the way down to Donkey Country 2 in 1995.
Some of these games fell out of favor for me somewhat quickly, but at the time of playing
them, each expanded my understanding of what games could do in a way that felt revolutionary.
They did things I hadn’t seen before, and their mere existence was evidence of how far
games would be able to go in the future.
When it came out, Uncharted 2 probably wasn’t the best game ever made; not only is it impossible
to truly determine that sort of thing, but also Shadow of the Colossus had come out 4
years earlier, I just hadn’t played it yet.
Regardless, in that moment, it felt like the best game ever made.
And even though I’ve played a lot of games since that I think are better, I still categorize
it as one of the greatest of all time.
And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
It often finds its way on Top 100 Games Ever lists, and whenever I’ve seen people rank
the games in the Uncharted series it almost always finds its way to the top of the list.
The interesting thing is that I think Uncharted 3, 4 and even Lost Legacy do pretty much everything
Uncharted 2 does but better.
Their setpieces are more fluid and complicated, their stories have stronger moments that are
supported by unbelievable performances, and their attention to detail in the animations
and environments are beyond impressive.
But none of those games made me feel anything close to what I felt when watching and then
playing Uncharted 2 for the first time.
I could recognize the improvements they made, and I enjoyed each of them a ton, but they
didn’t have that same sense of importance to them.
They didn’t feel revolutionary; they didn’t greatly expand my understanding of what games
could be; and none made me think about how for they’d go in the future.
I’ve noticed as time has gone on that I don’t walk away from games with that sense
of just having played the best thing ever nearly as often as I used to.
It does still happen; there’s a reason you all never hear me shut up about Breath of
the Wild and Outer Wilds, but what used to be a yearly occurrence has now maybe happened
3 times in the past decade, and I can’t help but wonder why that is.
Of course, there’s a bunch of reasons, many of which boil down to the ways games have
changed over the past few decades.
When comparing games from 1991 to ones from 2021, it’s easy to see improvements in terms
of how games look, how they run, and how they feel to play.
Hardware has accelerated at a rapid pace, giving developers more impressive tools to
create games with and giving players the machines capable of running them.
By and large, and I really don’t think this should be a controversial statement but I’ve
been yelled at for less, video games are better now than they’ve ever been.
Obviously, when it comes to things like design, gameplay, and art styles, everyone has different
preferences and modern games might not always line up with what you like the most.
But, in general, due to tech and lessons learned from previous generations, games have more
polish, grander scopes, and a better understanding of what the average player is looking for.
With all of that said, over the past 10 or so years, these improvements have started
to feel far more incremental than ones in the past.
Like yeah, there is a pretty big difference between the PS4 and the PS5, and once we get
further into the PS5’s life cycle, those improvements will be even more significant,
but when you compare it to the shift from the Super Nintendo to the N64, it doesn’t
feel nearly as notable.
The N64 added an entirely new axis, paving the way forward for 3D games, which revolutionized
everyone’s understanding of what video games could do.
It invented new genres and created a level of immersion that overwhelmed my 7 year-old
brain.
It changed everything.
Whereas I can still play almost every PS5 game on my PS4, which I need to because I
still can’t get a PS5, what the fu-
Super Mario 64 is and will always be remembered as one of the best games of all time; it became
the blueprint of not just how to make a 3D game, but of how to make a good 3D game.
It went far beyond anything that had come before it and while I do think its formula
has been improved over the years by Nintendo and other developers, those steps forward
have never been as notable as the one Super Mario 64 took in the first place.
And I think this is where my disconnect stems from; the games that consistently blew my
mind in the past were often the first of its kind that I had played.
And many of them were seen, not just by me but audiences in general, as trailblazers.
They did it like no one had done before, or at least they did it with a more substantial
audience than those who actually did it first.
The improvements in tech, especially from the early 90s to mid 2000s created a landscape
rife with experimentation and risk-taking, leading to a lot of titles that set the groundwork
for games over the following 15-20 years.
Many of them don’t hold up all that well anymore, but their influence is still clear.
When looking at conversations about “The Best Games Ever” and thinking about my own
experiences, trailblazers are always at the center of the conversation.
On IGN’s most recent Top 100 Games of All Time list, while they made an effort to not
make their decisions just based on how influential a title was when it released, it definitely
did skew in that direction.
For instance, 13 entries in the top 20 all came out before 2005; a lot of them are games
that have invented genres and moved the industry forward.
Even today, they are referenced when talking about new titles.
They’re important, but I don’t know, do most people who have played both Hollow Knight
and Super Metroid really think Super Metroid is better?
Because I definitely don’t.
Honestly, I think there are tons of modern games that do what most of the titles on this
list do but better.
Like, I think A Link Between Worlds is better than a Link To The Past; Titanfall 2, and
I know I’m gonna get eviscerated for this one, is better than Half-Life 2; Celeste,
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Rayman Legends are all better than Super Mario World.
But the thing is, and what it always comes back to is that when I played Super Mario
World for the first time, it changed everything for me; it was revolutionary; it expanded
my understanding of video games, it made me think about how far games would go in the
future.
At that moment, I knew it was the best game I had ever played.
I can’t say that about the platformers I now think are better than Super Mario World
though because I simply didn’t have that feeling while playing them.
No matter how hard I try, I still can’t shake the games that shifted the landscape
most despite playing stuff that I enjoy more and think is better.
And this isn’t just because games are seemingly improving at a slower rate than they did in
the past; it’s also that back then, I didn’t have as many games to play, so I didn’t
have nearly as many comparison points.
Now though the video game market is much more saturated.
To be clear, that is largely a good thing as it means that there are so many more incredible
games to play, but it does make it harder for an individual title to stand out—to
change everything.
There certainly are still plenty of developers experimenting with what games can be, but
more recently the focus, especially of larger studios, seems to be centered on fine-tuning
what previous generations started instead of exploring entirely new realms of game design
most likely because a lot of what works has already been discovered.
So, we continue to get better games, but they are also more disposable and in turn, more
forgettable.
Taking ideas that have been proven to work and either twisting them to show them in a
slightly new light or refine what they originally laid out is very common practice.
One potential downside to it though is the homogenization of games.
As more studios look at an idea that works and try to build off it, eventually more and
more games come out that feel the same.
Take Ghost of Tsushima.
As far as action-adventure open-world games go, I think it is one of the best of its kind.
It has slick combat, solid exploration, a moving enough story, and it is stunningly
beautiful.
It feels like the perfect mix of design that Ubisoft, Rocksteady and obviously Sucker Punch
have been developing through their various games for years.
The issue is while I can recognize how polished of a title it is, I also found it quite boring
because it felt like I had already played it.
Yes, it elevated what the games before it had done, but not by enough for me to feel
connected to it.
Comparatively, when I played Assassin’s Creed II for the first time in 2010, I had
never experienced a 3rd person open-world game like it before.
My opinion going in wasn’t affected by it being like every other triple a game out there.
While I would expect every subsequent game in a series to feel similar to the last therefore
making it less notable, that isn’t an issue I would have expected with games that are
just a part of the same genre, but it is happening, and I think it has added to my issue with
not being able to connect to games as easily.
Of course, it isn’t fair for me to entirely pin the fact that I am not as impressed by
individual games as I was in the past all on how the industry has shifted throughout
my lifetime, because the fact of the matter is that a large part also stems from how I
have changed over the years.
When I played Uncharted 2 for the first time I was 18, and sure back then, I thought I
knew who I was and that I had good taste, but I can confidently tell you now that I
didn’t.
I was a kid, who finally was getting the chance to play Indiana Jones: The Video Game except
it was good unlike any of the actual Indiana Jones video games.
It was a formative gaming experience during a time that I was most susceptible to having
it affect me.
I also got to experience it with a friend who I had been seeing less often because we
had just gone off to college and being able to share that game with him elevated the entire
experience.
Now though, I am older, and a little less bright-eyed.
Over the past three years, I have probably played more games than all the years before
combined.
This is my job now; I have the pleasure of breaking down what works and what doesn’t
work in video games for a living, and of course that has changed how I look at games.
Everything I’ve talked about in this video adds up.
It makes it a bit harder to play a game and see it as the best one ever.
I know more now, and unfortunately that’s made me a little more cynical now.
And, this goes beyond just video games.
I think as we get older and have more experiences there end up being fewer things to be blown
away by.
We know more, we understand more.
But as kids, there are so many things to discover, and those firsts will always stick out in
a unique way.
Maybe it was the first album you bought for yourself or the first trip you ever took with
friends or the first movie you went to on your own or your first experience with a specific
hobby or the first time you fell in love.
Maybe these firsts actually ended up being the best thing ever for you and maybe they
didn’t; what matters though is that for at least a small time, they were to you, and
that will always mean something.
As I said before, it’s not that getting the sense that something new is the best thing
ever never happens; it does; I’m just not a person who is as open to feeling that way
as I once was.
And, I think that is what growing up is?
I’ll let you know when I know for sure.
In fairness, in regards to video games, it has always taken the exact right combination
of factors, some of which don’t even have anything to do with the game itself but rather
where I was at emotionally when playing it.
It’s in that mixture of intriguing design that goes above and beyond any expectations
I had going in, and the ability to connect to the ideas of the game or even just the
experience of how I played it that something magical happens.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to the time when almost every new game I tried was the
best game I had ever played.
It helped inform my tastes in games and created so many incredible memories that I fondly
look back at.
It also marked a time in my life where I just played games to enjoy them and not examine
them, which isn’t necessarily a better way to consume them, but it definitely is a lot
easier.
There is something to be said for having fewer games that revolutionizes the way I look at
them.
It gives me something to really cherish and even champion in the hopes of sharing that
experience with others.
They also give me something to constantly look back at and reevaluate to try to determine
why it meant so much to me.
I like feeling so connected to the things I love, even if there are less of them out
there.
And I think that’s what growing up is?
I’ll let you know when I know for sure.
However, a part of me will always miss the days when it was simpler, when there was more
new and undiscovered ground for developers to explore, when it took less to transform
my perception of the gaming landscape, when Uncharted 2 was the best game ever made.
And with all this discussion of the best stuff ever, let me talk about Nebula.
Nebula is a streaming service made and owned by creators, me being one of them.
It gives us a place to post our work without having to worry about demonitization or the
algorithm, and it gives viewers a place to watch some of the best creators out there.
We get far higher returns per view than we ever would here and you get to watch it all
ad free.
In turn this allows us to experiment with the stuff we make whether that be exploring
more niche topics or having extended cuts of videos that talk about tangentially related
ideas.
For example, the Nebula version of this video ends with me trying to pick the best game
from each year since I was born instead of this ad.
And what’s even better is that we’ve partnered with this video’s sponsor, CuriosityStream
in order to get what is almost certainly the best deal on the internet.
If you sign up for CuriosityStream, you not only get access to the thousands of incredible
documentaries on their site, but you also get a free membership to Nebula for as long
as you’re signed up with CuriosityStream.
Currently you can get 26% off by clicking the link in the description, which comes out
to less than $15 for the YEAR.
That’s 365 days, which is a lot.
On its own, CuriosityStream rules.
Its library is ever expanding, and there are good documentaries on pretty much every topic
you could imagine.
In the spirit of Uncharted, I’ve been watching stuff about lost cities over there and came
across the show Big Picture Earth which essentially walks you through various remote locations
across the world with it’s beautiful cinematography and striking soundscape.
I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get lost for a little while.
Anyway, for less than $15 a year, you can get all the great stuff on CuriosityStream
as well as tons of extra content from awesome creators over on Nebula.
It is an incredible deal, that helps out me and all of the creators on Nebula a fair bit,
so give it a look.
Anyway, thanks to CuriosityStream for sponsoring this video.
For all of you still here.
Thanks!
I appreciate your support and viewership.
Also, his channel is made possible because of my patrons, so thank you to everyone who
supports over on patreon, it means the world.
And an extra thank you to Elfinrez for being an honorary bagbuten.
Yeah.
Have a good day and or night and I will see you in the next one.