What were your favorite things about the 7th gen?

[YMB]

I fuckin love Mario Kart Wii. I like flicking the controller up to do wheelies on the motorcycle. I haven't checked since last year. But you could still play it online using Wiimfi. If you use the Wii's internet browser Opera and go to the Wiimfi site and put the disc in it will run a patch allowing you to play online again. This also works for other games like Smach Bros. Brawl. Usually there would be 200+ ppl online at any time. I remember checking in the middle of Covid lockdowns last year and there was like 500+ ppl playing Mari Kart Wii.

 

[Overcast]

I can't help but have a soft spot for the Wii. I enjoyed the aesthetic and vibe of the main menu, Wii Sports was pretty awesome and probably one of the very few games which made good use of the motion controls, and it still had stuff like Mario Galaxy, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, ect.

It certainly wasn't perfect, but I could at least appreciate what Nintendo tried to do with it.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Halo 3, Crackdown, and Fallout: New Vegas.

Overall, it was the last generation to have any real communal element to online gaming. Words weren't viewed as weapons except by overprotective parents and social studies majors. Gaming forums still had some dedicated focus and weren't extensions of Reddit entirely. More importantly, you could actually own games to their fullest and complete state, especially since GOTY editions were a thing still.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I think the thing that I liked about the 7th gen is that creators still had some degree of freedom while keeping generally good quality (As in not buggy), high budget games.
I mean, yeah, we got a lot of call of duties and shit like that but we also got shit that would never see the light of day today like metal gear rising revenge and Alice madness returns.

American McGee is working on a third Alice game, but who knows if it will be as big in scale as Madness Returns, it's crowd funded I believe, it's definitely wild to remember a time in which an Alice game could be treated as a big AAA title funded and published by EA (this being the short lived era where EA tried to not be shitty before falling flat on their faces with ME3), it's also ironic that the game came out right before there was a big push for "we want more female protagonists in games!", who knows, maybe if it had come out a year later it would have been a bigger hit.

But remember, all anyone did during the 7th gen was complain how creatively bankrupt games back then were (I distinctly remember David Wong writing circa 2011, the year Madness Returns came out, an article complaining about how creatively bankrupt games were), hindsight being 20/20 though we can see today that it wasn't that bad.

I can't help but have a soft spot for the Wii. I enjoyed the aesthetic and vibe of the main menu

I really dug all that as well, I was just never able to get into Wii games themselves much.

Halo 3, Crackdown, and Fallout: New Vegas.

To this day Crackdown is probably the most fun I've had climbing buildings in games, it wasn't instantaneous like an Assassin's Creed game, you had to think about what ledge to grab, making getting to top of a building a lot more satisfying.

 

[Pringles Can]

Xbox live. That shit was the greatest ever. The most toxic, racist, and autistic little kids were the kings of the lobby and it was amazing.

 

[The Last Stand]

I fuckin love Mario Kart Wii. I like flicking the controller up to do wheelies on the motorcycle. I haven't checked since last year. But you could still play it online using Wiimfi. If you use the Wii's internet browser Opera and go to the Wiimfi site and put the disc in it will run a patch allowing you to play online again. This also works for other games like Smach Bros. Brawl. Usually there would be 200+ ppl online at any time. I remember checking in the middle of Covid lockdowns last year and there was like 500+ ppl playing Mari Kart Wii.

I loved Mario Kart Wii. It was such a casual online experience to just jump in and play.

For a Wii game, it's ahead of the curve with its online features. Tracking, matchmaking, ranking, even latency. I do not recall a laggy experience. No voice chat did help with the pick up and play experience.

The menu music ... glorious.

 

[Jason Wynn]

It was the time I started to realize I didn’t care as much about video games as I used to. The Wii was a piece of shit with janky ass motion controls, a handful of decent games buried under a mountain of shovel ware. I had a 360 and a decent collection of games (really wish I hadn’t sold my copy of Lost Odyssey) but I never played it as much as I thought I would. Never had a PS3 so no comment there.

there were good games still coming out, but I dunno it just never grabbed me in the way past generations could. My excitement for video games died out around 6th gen.

 

[The Last Stand]

I had a 360 and a decent collection of games (really wish I hadn’t sold my copy of Lost Odyssey) but I never played it as much as I thought I would. Never had a PS3 so no comment there.

Why were Japanese games released exclusively on 360? So out of place.

 

[Pringles Can]

I loved Mario Kart Wii. It was such a casual online experience to just jump in and play.

For a Wii game, it's ahead of the curve with its online features. Tracking, matchmaking, ranking, even latency. I do not recall a laggy experience. No voice chat did help with the pick up and play experience.

The menu music ... glorious.

I had a wii for most of the 7th gen. Did not really get a 360 until like 2012. Mario kart Wii was my shit. It was one of the few games made by nintendo with a really good online mode. Shame smash bros brawl sucked hard with its online. I would have played that a ton more, but waiting like 10 seconds between moves and being kicked out of every match due to someone dropping from the game was not fun.

 

[4ZURE]

But remember, all anyone did during the 7th gen was complain how creatively bankrupt games back then were (I distinctly remember David Wong writing circa 2011, the year Madness Returns came out, an article complaining about how creatively bankrupt games were) , hindsight being 20/20 though we can see today that it wasn't that bad.

That was an issue?

I don’t remember anyone saying anything about creative bankruptcy outside of COD. I think the bigger issue of this generation was the “mature” argument. Gamer culture was relatively shit within the middle of the gen thanks to people wanting “hardcore” experiences. COD, Halo, Assassins Creed, and GTA became the poster boys of what “real” games are by the midpoint. This would slowly devolve into the story titles worship of The Last of Us. In general, there was this bizarre sentiment over games needing to be adult this gen and 8th gen, that lead to much of the woketard shit of today.

The obvious target of hate was Nintendo this generation. Mid-Wii-life, gamers turned the console into a mockery and nothing but child’s play. A lot of their franchises were just fodder for this increasing mentality that we are mature now and need to abandon the old. Other similar kids franchises would get treated much the same, hence why the 3D platformer mascots of gens 5 and 6 were barely present.

Even looking past the kids franchises, other big titles got hit with maturity arguments. David Jaffe’s titles were pretty big targets as the “intellectuals” saw God of War and Twisted Metal as nothing but immature gore fests. Plenty of RPGs and a Japanese titles also took a hit because fuck anime.

All of this maturity/ real games shit makes up the bulk of horrors in the gaming community today. Woke journalists are just parroting the adult/mature arguments of the era. You still have COD/EA Sports normies that hate and think lesser of other games. The Nintendo community is a cult of people who will not play anything else specifically because they were the counter-culture to recycled COD for 7th and 8th gens. Finally you have the retro hipsters who built themselves on the platform of being counter-culture to both Mature fags and Nintetards by saying all modern gaming bad, return to NES or GC. I love this generation for its products, but the communities surrounding them were the worst and are a big part of why gaming seemed so bland this era and next.

 

[Dom Cruise]

That was an issue?

I don’t remember anyone saying anything about creative bankruptcy outside of COD. I think the bigger issue of this generation was the “mature” argument. Gamer culture was relatively shit within the middle of the gen thanks to people wanting “hardcore” experiences. COD, Halo, Assassins Creed, and GTA became the poster boys of what “real” games are by the midpoint. This would slowly devolve into the story titles worship of The Last of Us. In general, there was this bizarre sentiment over games needing to be adult this gen and 8th gen, that lead to much of the woketard shit of today.

The obvious target of hate was Nintendo this generation. Mid-Wii-life, gamers turned the console into a mockery and nothing but child’s play. A lot of their franchises were just fodder for this increasing mentality that we are mature now and need to abandon the old. Other similar kids franchises would get treated much the same, hence why the 3D platformer mascots of gens 5 and 6 were barely present.

Even looking past the kids franchises, other big titles got hit with maturity arguments. David Jaffe’s titles were pretty big targets as the “intellectuals” saw God of War and Twisted Metal as nothing but immature gore fests. Plenty of RPGs and a Japanese titles also took a hit because fuck anime.

All of this maturity/ real games shit makes up the bulk of horrors in the gaming community today. Woke journalists are just parroting the adult/mature arguments of the era. You still have COD/EA Sports normies that hate and think lesser of other games. The Nintendo community is a cult of people who will not play anything else specifically because they were the counter-culture to recycled COD for 7th and 8th gens. Finally you have the retro hipsters who built themselves on the platform of being counter-culture to both Mature fags and Nintetards by saying all modern gaming bad, return to NES or GC. I love this generation for its products, but the communities surrounding them were the worst and are a big part of why gaming seemed so bland this era and next.

As soon as the PS3, 360 and Wii generation started there was a huge contingent of gamers that always said that gaming was not as good as it used to be and that attitude has never gone away.

People aren't entirely wrong, but I think a better way to put it is that it's not so much that gaming started to suck, it's that for a while there games only went on an upward trajectory, things only got better and better as time went on, until that leveled off and now it's been more peaks and valleys, basically picture a chart only going upwards and then going up and down after a point.

That's what people are really missing and yeah, it's a shame that trajectory couldn't have just kept going, but it was also probably inevitable that as technology got to an advanced enough point things would level off and you'd stop seeing those quantum leaps like Super Mario World to Super Mario 64 in just 5 years.

 

[4ZURE]

People aren't entirely wrong, but I think a better way to put it is that it's not so much that gaming started to suck, it's that for a while there games only went on an upward trajectory, things only got better and better as time went on, until that leveled off and now it's been more peaks and valleys, basically picture a chart only going upwards and then going up and down after a point.

This isn’t even true. Each generation had its clearly defined peaks and valleys. AVGN really shows the problems of the NES/SNES generations in that they had tons of buggy, very low effort material. The N64 very clearly had a lack of games. Finally, the generation prior was home to shovel ware up the wazoo, which could rival the Wii. The PS2 was more or less Wii beta as it got much of the same shitty low effort cash grabs.

I think the 7th gen and onwards is sort of looked at differently thanks to practices changing. Now instead of releasing 20 shovel ware titles, companies could sell an average game and cash in on loads of DLC. The power and audience awareness by the time of gen 7 killed off the practices of gen 6 such as licensed games, but brought about a new digital purchase era to replace it. The Wii also muddies the waters as it was a gen behind and more or less continued gen 6 practices that PS3 and 360 killed, meaning we had two worlds of different shady practices at once. In saying this though, these practices make the generation no worse than before as they are still consoles which have select quality releases that one must cipher through for gold.