noticing it more and more. i like to play retro video games but i don't actually do it that often. 5 years or so ago i got a SNES mini and a playstation classic and one of those anbernac handhelds in the span of a year or two, so I was spending a lot of time reading lists online of games people thought were notable, underrated, good games for genre newbies, etc.
i have been playing games again recently so i have again been looking up games and the difference in content you get now is astounding. five years ago if you searched something like "best nes RPGs" or "obscure ps1 games" you would find lovingly handcrafted lists and articles by people who were passionate about it and wanted to share, make readers laugh, or ignite interest in something. Now there's like 20 different sites that each have ai generated "best (genre) games for (system)" lists for every system and genre combination possible, with generic game descriptions, list orders likely cribbed from one of those ranking sites, and nonsensical filler copy ("every RPG enthusiast loves the N64" type words just mashed together)
photographs are also no fun to take or look at anymore, accelerated by new ai image generation but honestly ever since smartphone cameras started automatically editing the shot out of your picture before it even showed it to you.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author, glad i just got depressed and useless and never pursued it, considering what that space looks like today.
internet was a mistake
I like the rankings at snesrankings.com. I disagree to some extent or another with basically all of his takes, but I really appreciate that it's just one guy who actually played every last one of the things, and it's not like he's ever so far off that, if you started playing from #1 down, I'd ever be like "oh no don't play that play this other game."
Thank you for sharing that site. I disagree with the order of some of the rankings, but I won't argue that every single game in that top 25 is a masterpiece.
Except for Legend of the Mystical Ninja. What the hell? That game stinks.
I haven't actually played Legend Of The Mystical Ninja, but I have seen it appear near the top of many lists, where not a single one of those lists has done anything to convince me to actually try it.
I am 100% convinced that game is just a bit that's been going on for 30 years, and nobody has actually played it.
Now I'm thinking of Weird Video Games where the guy listed a whole lot of games in a joking Top 1000 list that ended with a sudden shouting of "RYYYYYGAAAAAAAR!"