Today’s games have higher potential of being better than original Arcade/NES games, but there’s a few factors why they often aren’t

For brain cerebralness(aka fun of playing vs menu navigating):

#1: More than one primary button isn’t cerebral. You either want:

1a) One button for primary action like shoot or jump
1b) A primary button that’s the back beat ‘drummer'(rapid fire) and another button who’s primary.

Having a secondary button is not bad, a third for menus or something not bad.

Where we went off tangent was N64/Cube/Wii bop-it toy controllers, a button under the controller, analog controls, mice and keyboard. I say mice and keyboard are bad interfaces for brain cerebralness and I’ve been #1 world in games like Starcraft/Wacraft3/D2 HC etc etc.

The reason why a digital direction pad/stick + 1 primary button is good, is that you’re simulating the most basic of instincts, freedom to move and then act without thinking. When you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail is fun and chills you. The human fight or flight maps in 3d but you navigate directions + action. It’s cerebral. Adding too many decisions [buttons] gives analysis paralysis and these game console manufacturers force devs to use all buttons which leads to worse things like one being OP and breaking the game. Many decisions causes the brain stress instead of chillin it. When you’re already facing fast thought thinking on your feet, flight or fight responses kicking in, you don’t want to be dancing with analysis paralysis or you make a generation get anxiety issues.

#2We lost control of the player’s reflex twitch constraints in 3d.

The extra axis is hard enough to make a camera/controls… People basically never thought,’Um, is this reflexive/twitch play fun at all?’ They just threw power ups, stats and weird things in that were technically a video game, but not the ones we enjoyed. If you lived it/studied history, the first 10 years of 3d is basically a video game dead zone… Arcades died, and for every passable 3d game like Super Mario World or Quake, there were 500 suck. Even today you have waste of space on rails games like Drake Uncharted (fancy Dragons Lair). 3d is not as fun for truly intensive skill, it’s too forgiving, too sludgy of controls… I just don’t jam with it.

#3: Original games came out more often:

While original games were hard to code and keep in memory constraints, at least you knew when you were done making the game. You didn’t have a dev house work on a game for 4 years only to go,”Well this experiment failed.” You had games come out more often. You could pay 25 cents and just sample a game…That was more fun to have more titles to try before you buy. And big companies like Activision launching many games a year instead of one title every 5 years.

#4 I guilt trip myself into game devving more:

I’m like a top world game dev now… So I feel guilty not making games instead of playing.

I enjoy playing just as much as 1980. I have 150,000 hours in… But… man, stuff did change, and not all for the better.